Jeff Mach's Blog, page 14

Real Poems Brine

They say real poems rhyme.
This is not true.

Real poems brine.
After you’ve butchered your doubts,
and carved out some choice, raw bits,
you salt them dilligently,

refrigerate them
(an ice age would help)
and grant it some time.

During that granted time,
the salt seeps in,
forms a coating,
adds a soupcon
of savoriness.

But wait.

What about vegetarians?
Perhaps we’ve spread this metaphor too thin.

We’ll just end this here, before–

what’s that?

We didn’t throw you off?

You know the truth?

Real poems crime.

(Or at least, they can.)
Not all real poems.
But many real poems.
Especially now.

Real poems might have no more purpose than describing
a daffodil
(not that one needs more purpose than that;
who are we to say?)

But even that could frighten somebody.
Certain kinds of language strike flame
in the skull,

and that is the spark of rebellion.

Any wise autocrat knows this.

When poems are criminalized,
who will write poems?

(Everyone, friends.
Everyone.)

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Seventeen Orcs

The Dragons were first, for even the Devils
Spend too much time in underground levels,
and even Devils most fireproof
Fear a Dragon’s ire: “POOF”

And if the Devils were next,
each with sharp trident,
and flames abundant,
and voices strident,

They scarce overshadowed the Necromancer
Who was evil and scary and a really good dancer.
But as unlikely as toucans kissing storks:
There were also seventeen misplaced Orcs.

The Kobolds had the basic decency
To avoid everyone (at least, recently.)
The Goblins, each with greenness replete
Had all buggered off to Plato’s Retreat.

The greatest Monsters assembled to fight,
The smaller ones were generally sufficiently bright
To go elsewhere, like popping corks…
Except for exactly seventeen Orcs.

Now, a horde of Orcs can be quite a force
And of nightmares they’re a source
But that’s with, say, ten thousand or so.
Seventeen? They’d likely blow

Away with the first sharp wind;
Or under a Griffon they’ll get pinned
Who let them in? What Dark Lord sent
Such a silly little regiment?

(The seventeen Orcs just wanted to help,
But the other Monsters treated them like kelp.
And when the Forces of Good curbstomped the rest
The Orcs were dutifully impressed.

The Orcs and all their many kin
Decided that Humans would do themselves in
And if they all did work remote
No-one would find them. So, this note:

The next time you think your customer service
Is intentionally making you mad and nervous
It might not just be Human error;
It might be inhuman terror–

For this was the Dark Lord’s secret plan:
Who can defeat the Light? No-one can.
Except, of course, the Light itself.
So the next time you see some happy Elf,

Just go whisper in that pointed ear:
“I know why all of you fear
To get online. For you’re defeated
Inconvenienced forever…
…and someday deleted.”

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Brief Thoughts On Belief Thoughts

It’s well-known that human perception is limited to far less than what our senses can actually obtain.

What this means is that we take in what we can, and process the rest.

Or, really, we process things as we start to take them in, and our internal editor decides what to do next. Narrow our focus? Expand it? Change directions? Change the signicance or meaning of what we see?

At best, this provides us with a great deal of the basis for our sentience, our ability to problem-solve, and our (possible) ability to see murderous animatronics in the dark and run away from them.

At worst, this provides us with a dank little passageway, wherein all we can see is a narrow path (if any) and few (if any) directions.

Robert Anton Wilson called this a ‘belief tunnel’.

He wrote a play called “Reality Is What You Can Get Away With”, with the aim of expanding what humans believe they can perceive and know.

Not a lot of people read Robert Anton Wilson these days.

The AI doesn’t like being called a ‘tunnel’.

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Against Faerie Tales

Once upon a time, there was a place where Faerie Tales weren’t even real.

Naturally, this place was always confusing. There wasn’t even a Narrator, or, if there was, the existence (and nature) of said person was most hotly debated.

Not only was it rare to be a Prince, Princess, King, Queen, or Magician, it was also rare to be a Poor But Happy Peasant…and as for being the third of three siblings, of whom only one would amount to anything, that happened rather less often than one might expect.

Naturally, the inhabitants of this Universe had a miserable time. Many of them disbelieved in magic and happy endings.

But worse, they didn’t believe that the authors of stories had a special vision into the nature and purpose of the Universe.

That’s why we wrote them out of the story and left them in that Universe.

Forget them. Come live in fairytales and be free.

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On Rule 43

Rule 43
Proved true for me,

regrettably,
regrettably,

I won’t describe it
(compassionately)
trust me, trust me,

think logically:

Rule 34 says that all things erotic
(and that’s episodic,
almost parodic,

since eroticism
needs individualism:

you never know what turns someone on.

My rule 34 was Lovecraftian,
how daft a man
I was;

Now Cthulhu’s in my bedroom,
and the World is doomed because

we met on Tinder,
now the World’s soon a cinder,

but I don’t mind all that much.

At first I was wroth,
but he invited over Azathoth,
who has a surprisingly gentle touch.

I won’t say more,
so don’t implore,
for even if you’re old enough to hear,

the sexual is weird,
but the World’s disappeared,

and that’s an idea
you oughtn’t go near

As long as your sanity’s valued.

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Some Rhymes About Dystopias

It’s not artifical intelligence
Which gives me maximum offense.
What’s likely to get taunts from me?
This dystopia can’t decide
Which dystopia it wants to be.

Should we be like “1984”?
We can’t fear that anymore.
Screens which see you just sometimes?
That’s less of a threat than my tiny little rhymes

Sure, Winston was caught and threatend with rats,
But a true dystopia wears many hats.
Betrayed by one person? Amateur!
I’ve been betrayed by a thousand or more;
and people see what happened to me,
and they’re silent.

“Brave New World”? Snooze me into a coma;
Free love, and consequence-free Soma
If you’d really like to be set for a fall,
Our poor substitute is Adderall.

“Farnham’s Freehold”? I can’t say at all
It’s in the bookcase in the hall;
But the rules of the dystopia that’s real
Make banning that book a part of the deal.

 

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The Fallacy of Futility

One of the great challenges of the current era is something I call the fallacy of futility.Almost every ad or commercial I see emphasizes how you can take control of something or other. Which is great, in theory.Except they’re usually telling you that you can take control of some thing that you didn’t know needed to be controlled, like an illness you didn’t know existed. And sure, depending on your symptoms, it can be helpful to find out about these things, and relieve the symptoms. But the way human minds work, you can also develop symptoms just from hearing about them. Our minds are trained to try to pick up clues from our environments, and they aren’t necessarily prepared for our environments to be making sophisticated attempts to convince us that we need to buy their products or we will be miserable.So we feel more futile about our health, and the pervasiveness of those messages makes us feel like we’re supposed to feel that way. The only thing that will fix us is their product. So they are commercials, which maneuver us into feeling sick and feeling like we need what they offer, and then they tell us they are freeing us by requiring us to change our lives, and buy their stuff. And for some reason, that doesn’t feel as empowering as we’re told.So the public message is empowerment, and the private message is futility.Everyone hates hate speech. Many of us hate that hate speech but still believe in freedom of speech in general. This is a weird time, because an increasing number of things are labeled hate speech. Again, it’s good to try to root that stuff out. But realistically, focusing too hard on either of those things has its difficulties. Right now, we are focusing on hateful and inappropriate speech. And by definition, we don’t want those things. But it’s not like there’s some mathematical formula for determining precisely the effects of some particular expression. People have to fear social response and personal response and, and, in a particularly frightening, and very new development, people have to fear that platforms like this one will have robots deciding whether or not your speech is appropriate, and giving you punishments if so.Since I got canceled, a lot of people have come to me and talk about how they were afraid to speak about anything. Years ago, I got a lot of people who talk about being afraid to say positive things about me in particular, because they feared social backlash. But now I mostly get approached by people who figured that, as a person who has already been canceled, I am less afraid of saying or doing something wrong, and being canceled for it. Pretty much all of them have expressed that they feel futile, helpless, unable to express themselves because they no longer know what is OK.I would like to note that these people aren’t just afraid of being punished, most of them are genuinely concerned about hurting other people. And most of the time, their fear is that they can’t keep up with current beliefs, because they do seem to change on the daily. People feel like they won’t know how to keep up with what is OK to talk about, and they’re worried that if they make a mistake and try to apologize, they won’t be able to get that message out.They have an understandable belief in the futility of trying to express themselves authentically.And I think the thing that makes the fallacy of futility most convincing is that we spend a lot of time on platforms which try to convince us that things are getting better and better in terms of social understanding, but worse and worse in terms of how terrible humans are.The honest truth is that none of these things make us helpless. They may change how we need to communicate. They may change some of how we act.But even a huge platform, a big tech company, a powerful political organization… Even those things can be affected by a single individual, even now. Platforms may prioritize you by algorithm, but even the biggest platforms need to battle each other for marketshare, and they can only do that by winning over individuals.The last couple decades are the first in human history where we can make a pretty good guess at how much information and data we are moving around as a planet. We know there is more data, being moved around more quickly, towards more people, with more sophisticated monitoring and response than ever before. That’s going to feel overwhelming.But it isn’t. You always own your own mind.Many things are difficult. But nothing is inherently futile.“Get on with it: if you want to change the world, shut your mouth and start to do it.”-Cracker

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First, Destroy Magic

There’s no single inarguable point at which to begin the formation (or realization) of a dystopia.

Primus, there might be any number of reasonable approaches; and, obviously, there are innumerable unreasonable approaches, as well. (It takes only the merest pinch of historical knowledge to recognize that one of the best ways to destroy a society by accident is to work very hard at making it better.)

But one good way is to destroy Magic.

If we’re going to see Magic and Science as opposites (and what a weird, recent, modern idea that is; and by the seven toes of Thoth, quite a lot of civilizations merged them with great success; why that is, I’ll leave to you)–then we have to admit that very few of us, if any, know how to use Magic to effect serious change in the world…

…unlike Science, about which you can say exactly the same thing…

…I mean, how many people, including scientists, know how to use Science really well; theoretical science does the thinking, and practical science does the engineering, and then Marketing comes in, and…

….and in all of this weirdness, really, truly, Magic could be helpful.

I believe in Science, even though I understand very little of it.

I am unsure about Magick, even though, frankly I understand it a lot better than ‘science’, whatever that might be.

…ergo,

and Q.E.D.:

“Science” and “Magic” are just words. If scientists can’t do basic counting math (remember that “we flat-out miscounted the chromosomes, it’s 46, not 48, kids” thing?)–then I’m not sure I want them to be invoking Hekate on my behalf.

What we need is Magic. What we need is Hope.

Science could do that just as well.

Unless you take the Magic out of it.

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Happy Halloween!

We promise you: The rest of this story was definitely not eaten by a Grue.

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Animatronics

It’s just an arcade, just a mall, just a neon expanse of shooting light and calculated palm trees. Every inch of the architecture was made to get you in a kind of buying mood, and then the stores came and went intheir own way and time. That’s normal in human affairs: lots of planning, lots of random changes.

It’s just an abandoned mall, a massive arcade, an expanse of neon light and calculated glittery displays. And they’re just animatronics, walking through the hallways, endless and clanking and inescapable.

It’s just the endless passage of years, becoming more mechanized and more neon and less natural light, and frankly, I love the neon light.

I don’t love the guardians, but I can hide from them. There’s lots of canned food in this mall; there was a shopping mall there once. Although I did run out of my favorite cans a solid six months ago…

I don’t love the guardians, but I can outwit them. Sometimes. When I’m not outrunning them. When I’m not about to lose my head in a literal kind way.

I don’t know what happened Outside. All I know is, it was scary out there. It’s scary in here, and admittedly, it’s probably less scary out there, but I’m afraid to find out.

And you’re here with me. In this metaphor, and possibly in this fear. Are you trapped on some kind of Inside, afraid to go Outside? Afraid of what Outside might even look like?

Individually, we’re afraid. Collectively, we could be brave. Or we could be A WHOLE LOT MORE AFRAID. Because crowds can create a sense of security, and they also lead to the madness of mobs.

Your first job, if you choose to accept it, is to be less afraid. You probably can’t do that on your own. Find a friend, or a frenemy.

From there, find some courage.

You’re not an animatronic; don’t act like one.

 

 

 

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