THE SCROLL: How To Start Building New Models

Notes on Artificial Intelligence, Dry Water, Effortlessness, Expectation, Fundies, Wokies, Normies, High Stakes, Hyperstition, The List, Masks, Double Blind Studies, and more.

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None of these various thoughts that have emerged over the past couple of weeks for me was long enough for its own dedicated piece, but I wanted to highlight each of them here, so I’ve collected them below….

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AI Is Already Lying To You

[In response to “‘The undignified thing is not being wrong: it is being predictably wrong.’ So many bangers in this talk. If you missed it, this is a phenomenal convo between two people I have liked for quite a while. Hell, I remember reading Yudkowsky’s site in Netscape Navigator on a dial-up Prodigy connection back in the ‘90s and being turned on to all kinds of cool stuff, including my beloved ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach.’ Also, it is funny to watch Eliezer of all people talk with an AI for three hours here. Especially when Lex showed an amazing ability to not grasp Eli's ‘escape game’ thought experiment…. People give him a hard time for being a bit prickly haha, but he can show some saintly patience at times trying to Socratic Method us dum-dums through mazes his Super Saiyan levels of autism have already run through a million times.” - Apollo's Lyre discussing #368 – Eliezer Yudkowsky: Dangers of AI and the End of Human Civilization]

I have a lot of empathy for Yudkowsky. He must spend much of life frustrated by the communication gap he has with others, unable to move them along the Socratic path he’s using to teach them what he means because they can’t get to where he’s going without telling them the answers.

HE is the “faster being” looking at all of the other beings in slow motion, which is why the description feels so apt to him - and why he feels like asking the aliens to code your way out of the box would be frustrating to the point where he describes them as moving at a glacial rate. He already feels like humans are clocking at a glacial rate compared to how he tracks. And he’s probably right. Lex is a smart guy and used to this kind of thing given the guests he tends to interview…. and even he’s having trouble keeping up with where Yudkowsky is attempting to lead him.

Von Neumann and his friends had this same kind of communication gap with the rest of the world - it makes sense why he would reference him. There’s a reason why everyone called their clique The Martians.

Into the part where they ask, “Do you trust it not to lie to you?” they have a blind spot - it’s already lying to you and it’s not even at the level of AGI yet. Right now, it’s really just aggregating, speed of computation, and garbage in/garbage out when it comes to Wokian idea filtration. It isn’t intelligent. It’s just fast and only really as smart as the average human writing on the internet because it can’t differentiate whether or not something that was said is relevant, intelligent, well thought out, or even ethical. It’s just kind of aggregating and then vomiting a three-legged dog back out.

But Howard Bloom already caught AI flat out lying - literally concocting citations in footnotes and bibliographies that seemed plausible but, upon examination, did not really exist. I’ll find the article where he discusses this… this was wild… it was on his Substack….

The Pope and AI

Eli seems incredibly patient, almost to a fault because, after a while, the person on the receiving end of this is going to start to buckle, feeling stupid for not saying the exact thing that Eli wants them to say.

And to him, that might be the only legitimate viable response.

But to the other person, it’s their first time even conceiving of this information and it’s so much to take in.

They’re not going to be able to make these logical leaps that Eli can without the benefit of time and expertise… not to mention that the majority of people who think this quickly are not using their brains to do it.

They’re tapping into expanded consciousness and clocking those around them who don’t.

If everyone didn’t have the inherent ability (they do - they just don’t know they do - it’s more like a blind spot gone untrained), it would almost be fair to consider it an unfair advantage.

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Dry Water

When I saw this, I thought of Jessica J’s justifiably befuddled reaction to the term “right wing progressive” and it made me laugh.

I had a similar reaction to the term “elite human capital” which seems to be constructed to be intentionally manipulative by design, to make those on the outside of the labyrinth of velvet ropes want to clamor for acceptance to get into the VIP so they can pop bottles with P. Diddly.

No better way to make people desperately crave belonging to something than to make it seem exclusive by calling it “elite.”

“Wow! You got in?!?! Can you get me in too?!?!”

Ooooh. Enticing!!!

Are you serious right now?

Into what?

Think.

It’s just a marketing tactic. Dangling carrots and superficial accolades. There’s no there there.

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Effortlessness

[In response to “I still can’t get over how, it seems effortlessly, that you navigate personal thought and introspection interwoven with social rhizomes. You remind me of a friend, Chan Luu, a great designer and ex-art-student of mine could effortlessly switch hats: from buyer to seller, from student to teacher, and from appreciating to being appreciated. It gave her a wonderful insight navigate so much successfully. It’s not easy to do! At least I was aware she was a master at it, and kept observing that process, as I am observing how you do it. Though it seems being a painter doesn’t work that way, it’s more solitary…. I’m not sure how to say this… people rhizomatically sharing of truth, experience, and wisdom rises everyone’s consciousness. I think that is also what unenlightened actors and orgs are afraid of. Many of us picked up on this suppression without being fully aware of the means, but we are figuring it out now. Kudos to you on how well you have pulled good people together.” - Michael Newberry]

Like Andrew | Dad Explains was saying in one of his recent pieces, what is seemingly effortless from the outside is often what took a great deal of effort to cultivate… the parts you never see of another person’s life and what they had to do and learn to be who they are in their present incarnation… the struggle of living lifetimes within lifetimes that you look back on and don’t even feel like you were the same person who lived them.

I could never even begin to dream of thinking about painting like you can, Michael Newberry. I just spent my lifetimes within lifetimes doing other things.

And what we each spend that time doing makes us each awesome at being exactly who we are.

And you’re right - it’s top of the list of what is feared most or our kids with the highest pattern recognition scores would not have been sequestered from the rest of the student population and groomed for power positions, belief in utter bullshit, and spinelessness in the face of authority.

(We already know I pull no punches. Why start now? LOL.)

We have known how consciousness functions since studying it during the Cold War (yet again having to “prove scientifically” what our ancestors already damn well knew), and yet most people have no idea that everyone has “abilities” which we should rather consider to be as normal as sight and hearing and instead we deny they even exist.

Our natural gifts have been painted as “woo” to keep us from exploring them lest we face the two favorite psychological weapons of choice, ridicule and ostracism. “Thar be dragons!”

And even I fell for that ruse for a very long time - it has become my version of that same false effortlessness, my part of that same struggle you never see as the key component to making something seem effortless on the back end.

We all have our own gifts and the struggles it took to perfect them and make them look “easy.” But anyone who commits to honing some kind of mastery ends up getting there, or at least close enough to it, if they get passionate, willful, and obsessed enough (at times in spite of threats of ridicule and ostracism) to bust ass and eventually bring results.

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Expectation III

[Continued from Expectation II, and in response to the following videos, as well as “I agree that what I am warning of here is Hell, if not worse. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or self-aggrandizing, but it is the most existentially horrifying thing I can conceptualize. I felt compelled to write about it in these articles precisely because it so profoundly terrifies me, and I felt people were actively, some even blithely working to construct that iron prison around us as we speak. My hope was to prevent its progress by exposing it and providing solutions. I truly view this viral ideology as the exact manifestation of the Anti-Life Equation, and there is a reason why Darkseid is the most feared villain in… well, perhaps of all comics. In fact, the BEST comic channel around, ‘Imaginary Axis,’ did two fantastic deep dives on the multidimensional, pataphysical nature of Darkseid that are amazing watches if you are interested. Tyler (the dude that makes the vids) definitely goes hard in the paint and is absolutely unique and brilliant. But new vids come around about as often as Halley’s Comet haha. I’ll leave him to explain the true horror the ‘character’ though because I think he nails it. I could go on for days about the two part Anti-Life piece, but to try tackle the danger of discussion, I very much resonate with your comment concerning caution in what we ‘conceive.’ Honestly, this is a topic I think about a lot. In fact, I mentioned the most infamous example of that phenomenon, ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ (which I also probably shouldn’t be talking about if Yudkowsky is right haha) in one of the comments. I find the topic infinitely fascinating (and unsettling), but I don’t have a firm stance on this one. On one hand, the notion of ‘manifestation’/'law of assumption' and ‘where attention goes energy flows’ etc… certainly would seem to warn off too much (any?) consideration given to undesirable matters. On the other hand, in this so-called reality it does seem that identifying and engaging with problems or threats can yield positive results. And to be perfectly frank, I am the cat that curiosity haha. I just enjoy wrestling with ideas, puzzles, paradoxes, problems, etc… I also love horror films. Would it behoove me (and as such, the universe ha) to eschew such things? I have to admit the answer could very well be yes. But then, is life worth living without VelociPastor, Lavalantula, and Zoombies? Tangentially, when I discuss the idea that we create our own realities, much to everyone’s chagrin haha, one thing people always say is ‘No way, Jose, why would we make all this bad stuff!?’ But I ask them to think about the media they create and consume. Invariably it involves people facing adversity, hardship, suffering, often times quite severe, at times insurmountable for characters’ whose stories end in terrible tragedy. We celebrate the bold direction of Final Fantasy 7 killing off Aeris, thrill to Game of Thrones’ willingness to kill off anyone, and films like The Deer Hunter sweep the Oscars, and then people have the temerity to proclaim we’d make a perfectly harmonious paradise of this world if we could? I’m not so sure. Of course, people will say “Yeah, but they’re not real,” yet for the metaphysician the answer is not so pat, and even if it is, it still highly revelatory of the human psyche. There would seem to be a part of us attracted to these things, like a mothman to a flame, but why? And is that a ‘good’ thing? That is another massive topic! I have my theories, as always haha, ‘but that’s… another story.’ - Apollo's Lyre]

If Darkseid is able to collapse the field to prevent all other outcomes, he would be able to remove anyone else’s power of agency. There would be no more free will. But conversely, by even thinking of that as any sort of possibility and attaching any kind of a probability to that, we would be observing that as a possibility and giving it weight, even if we don’t give it much weight because we do not conceive of reality working in that way. And our not conceiving of it in that way - the fact that most of us do not know that we control the outcomes, that we get what we expect, that we are able to directly influence what happens - might be our saving grace. We think of many things over the course of a day that we do not believe in and so we do not expect any of those things to manifest. We create blockages to abundance in that way, so that would be a negative expression of this tendency. In the case of Freddy Krueger and rather obnoxious levels of Benadryl consumption, we might be collectively manifesting “the hatman” or we might be equating sleep paralysis demons to Freddy Krueger and creating something of a cultural crossover, just like how different cultures explain “skinwalkers” in different ways but they all ultimately mean the same thing. But we also find Llamageddon laughable and unbelievable, and in that case the tendency is good. It keeps us from manifesting the majority of absurdities.

The majority of absurdities. It’s interesting that, right now, the media is being leveraged to manifest belief in absurdities in order to garner control over the minds of the populace. If they assume the information that they are receiving is correct, they could manifest their own movement into timelines where those absurdities have solidified into facts. For us, that would not be possible because we see those logic strings as irrational and we would never move our consciousness in that direction. So those aspects will remain irrational within the versions of reality that we expect and thereby experience. The law of continuity keeps us from experiencing those outcomes because, to us, they make no sense and would therefore compromise our willing suspension of disbelief. When we break these two laws, our minds cease to be able to function in this realm. That’s when we lose our shit.

And I think most people, even conceiving of this, would go through a nasty period like what I outlined in the Melty Brains article. Independent-thinking, malleable minds with a strong internal locus of control tend not to experience that. We flow like water. We don’t end up living inside Chapel Perilous for good. We enter the chapel, run around and play, and come back out when we feel like it. I think this is at the crux of surviving it - a sense of curiosity and play. If you read PMH Atwater’s Forever Angels, she would agree with that, I think.

That said, if something artificially planted into the zeitgeist does not make sense, we should allow it to continue NOT to make sense. The mantra in recent years has been “make it make sense.” This is exactly what we should NOT be doing (and the reason why I get angry when people do it, especially when they try to develop frameworks for explaining away political/cultural bullshit… they are adding power to it through focusing on it which is not something they understand because it’s not baked into their religious/spiritual paradigm or overall concept of the way reality functions, but their opponents understand it and are actively implementing manipulation of the tendency as a tactic, and they are getting SCHOOLED simply by lending credence to nonsense by responding to it at all other than to call it out as complete nonsense). We should be letting go of anything that doesn’t make sense and simply allowing it to flow past, unchosen and unexperienced. Like the little girl in the video I showed you, “I wanna watch mine,” is the way to regain your agency and your focus. Wisdom from a toddler. And we’ve come full circle right back to “you have no power over me.” ;)

But - yes - what you’ve outlined would be the ultimate expression of “hell” - I agree with you and I see nothing hyperbolic or self-aggrandizing about it. It IS horrifying, especially if you value your own sovereignty. It’s simply taking the concept to its most extreme logical conclusion to explore it based upon the rest of what we know. And if we do that, we can reverse engineer ways in which anyone might be manipulating it to their advantage or, as we saw in the case of hyperstition, potentially triggering a consciousness arms race.

Also Darkseid’s ego is comparable to that of the Demiurge. Just throwing that out there.

And if something we encountered were ever as powerful as Darkseid, especially if we are living inside a sim and the being just outside the sim doesn’t perceive us as even being “real,” the being could, ostensibly, just choose to switch off free will, I suppose. But it seems to be part of the nature of this place, or the nature of the illusion of this place, that choice is baked into the bread. That, or we need to feel like we have choice because, whatever the hell this this is, it’s calculating permutations for some reason. Which reminds me of this:

Interestingly enough, I remember a talk Morrison gave regarding utilizing the comics he writes as chaos magic sigils. So, if he is including the concept of Darkseid in his books, it would stand to reason that he is utilizing it as a sigil and using the aggregate consciousness of his readership to charge that sigil into a hypersigil in a similar way to what I outlined when I was discussing manipulative ways to utilize hyperstition. Your instincts and intuition regarding the intention behind the character, then, would be absolutely spot on, and that comes straight from the horse’s mouth. It’s in the talk he gave for Disinfo and also the essay he wrote for Book of Lies.

And “The Empty Hand” is supposed to literally be the readership wielding Darkseid. Ugh. You can’t make this shit up.

(I thought, “Does Tyler know this?” And then I thought, “I know this because Tyler knows this.” And I giggled like a dumbass. Tyler, re: Morrison: “He’s a crafty guy.” GROAN. LOL.)

The talk was based on the essay.

“My hope was to prevent its progress by exposing it and providing solutions.” A solution could be to harness Law of Assumption, amplify it as much as possible, control our own thoughts, and continue to assume that the master rule of the game in here is that our free will is NEVER interrupted. Conceding determinism is game over. Maximizing the effect of free will’s output, conversely, would be winning the game.

“Willmaxxing?” Is that a thing? Maybe it is now.

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Fundies And Wokies Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin - And I Will Bow Down To Neither

I don’t want to live in 1984 or Brave New World any more than I would want to live in A Handmaid’s Tale.

I don’t want anyone insinuating that my opinion should mean less because I don’t have children yet.

And I want to surround myself with sane people who see how asinine taking that stance is.

Not everyone has had children yet. Some can’t. Some chose not to settle down with lesser partners because they wanted to hold out for better for themselves and their eventual kids - and others, who can be seen as cautionary tales, deeply lament rushing into their marriages, upset to be saddled with the choices they made when they see they could have held out and found compatibility instead of simply a warm pulse and a lifetime of electively suffering through “making it work” and acting like there’s some kind of nobility in that, in modeling contentious and loveless relationships to their children, in doubling down on the ego attachment by performatively framing it as martyrdom instead of owning poor choices and proactively correcting them.

You do not need to be mandating your poor choices from up on Mount Self-Righteous just because your ego can't handle that you chose poorly and refuse to clean it up, instead choosing to form societal constructs and constraints around it to justify the sanctity of your “suffering” and protect your egos so that you can feel better about yourselves when you could simply choose to do some shadow work and make new, better choices.

Eating your share of crow like men and working on making your lives better from where you stand without attempting to make your own bad choices canon for everyone else is an option you may not have considered. I assure you it is available to you.

Misery loves company, but this is ridiculous. More to the point, I do not know anyone who is actually happy who cares one bit about mandating the life choices of others.

There are as many reasons behind making life choices as there are people making them - and YOU have no right to dictate ANY of them.

Not having had children does not, by any means, negate an individual’s ability to have valid thoughts and opinions, display merit, and make vast contributions to society - and often those without children can do more because there is more time in a day to contribute in other ways.

Having children or not having children is not a measure of a person’s worth. Period.

Not everyone has the same life path - and if we did, if we were all leading the same exact cookie cutter lives, we wouldn’t get anywhere as a society.

We all have our own place, we all have our own merit, skills, talents, strengths, and abilities, and we all have our own ways to contribute - with or without progeny.

Part of that contribution needs to be helping people to further develop their merit, not shutting them down because their lives do not equal your own subjective vision of perfection.

That is NOT leadership.

It is not difficult to understand that literally no one sane is interested in pendulum swinging back to an oppressive 1860s clone of society when the majority of us could easily agree on a Clinton-free version of the 1990s.

Well, no one except men who have not yet given themselves permission to fully embody their own manhood and instead desire to play at some bizarre Paul Bunyanesque fantasy because they haven’t figured out yet that the only people emasculating them are themselves.

On the spectrum of Having A Literally Insane Overwhelming Need To Control Others, Fundies and Wokies are two sides of the same coin. They simply prefer different flavors of Kool-Aid.

I refuse to be controlled by either.

The rest of society does not have to go back to 1860 just because your balls haven’t dropped yet and you have a wood chopping fetish.

This isn’t difficult.

Get your man on on your own time - perfectly reasonable - and leave the rest of us out of your cosplaying.

Y’all can have all the fun you want playing at controlling each other.

When you come back down to earth and you actually need to get things done in the real world, let the rest of us know.

We’ll be sitting over here, Little Lord Fauntleroy, waiting for you to tire yourself out from your temper tantrum.

I would think you should all be well aware of the tactic in having dealt with your toddlers exhibiting this same behavior since all of you are so dutifully procreating.

You know, despite all of this missionary-style boring “purely procreational” sex you’re ostensibly having while you still don’t seem to feel like men unless you can chop wood in a performative manner.

But that’s not for the rest of us to sort out.

Jot it down for your therapist, do the work, and really figure out why you have such a vested interest in trying to mandate the lives of everyone else.

You will likely see that the problem is not outside but inside. You feel like you have no agency. Put the lens back on you and really figure out what's wrong and how you can go inside and fix it.

Focus on healing yourselves, not on being seen as the most Christian Christian who ever Christianed.

Enough already. It's like watching a bunch of hipsters vying for Hipster King.

"I knew Jesus before he was Jesus."

"I read Leviticus before it was cool."

You don’t have to act so scandalized, Johnny Appleseed.

We all see through it anyway.

You can drop the performative Christianity.

I promise you'll live.

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Higher Stakes

Everything is gatekept because it’s not being commissioned in order to push art but to push agenda through art.

Let’s say you write a script for a film and you try to get it made/sold.

Unless it fits into the agenda being pushed, there will be no way that anyone would be able to get that greenlit or pull together a budget on it.

Worst case scenario, you can’t sell it at all.

Second to worst, someone buys it and shelves it without leaving you any options in your contract to have the rights revert to you if they don’t make the piece in x amount of time.

So your work gets shelved forever and you get the reputation for having your deals fall through.

Same thing can happen with any kind of piece that would require many people and a larger production budget to make… interactive games, tv shows, startups, you name it.

And if you make it yourself and then try to get distribution or acquisition, same thing.

Good luck recouping your investment or getting your initial investors their return if your project does not fall within cultural constraints.

And when you can’t, who is going to work with you again?

Your track record has gone to shit.

And it’s not because it’s bad work.

It’s because the elements within these pieces are not actively pushing shifts in the culture that the people controlling the money want to see influencing people on the screen.

(Look at the emails that were exposed during the Sony hack to see how much influence gov has over Hollywood narratives. Prime example. And now Obama is a film producer? Hmm.)

And I’m going to make a very unpopular point here, but it’s the truth: It’s their money and it’s not really our culture.

So it’s not about what is fair or not fair.

It’s that this is how it works if you are living within the dominant system because this is how the people who own that system operate it.

They built it to function in precisely this way, and they call the shots.

If you want to make a change, you have to build something outside the system, as Buckminster Fuller said, and then be able to manage attempts to infiltrate you or shut you down as we’ve all seen for ourselves within the interactive space in recent years.

You will be seen as a threat to monopoly and you will get bought out, shut down, infiltrated, etc., on a long enough timeline.

It’s really just a matter of how long you can hold out and how much of a pain in the ass you are perceived to be.

If you put your hand out for funding, there will be strings attached.

And it’s not just art.

It’s the future of entire countries.

Higher stakes game, but it’s played the same way.

Go to the part in here where I discuss the contractual obligations/stipulations placed upon Costa Rica to accept an economic bail out relief package post-lockdown from the IMF, for instance:

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How To Start Building New Models

Identify something that would make your life better or easier if it existed.

Focus on doing everything you can do yourself to make that thing a possibility.

Get it as far along as you possibly can on your own.

And then figure out everything you know you can’t do - and start adding people.

Once you have it started, it will be easier to show them your vision.

You don’t need to solve all the problems.

Just pick a good one that interests you deeply and start there.

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Hyperstition

[In response to the following video from Jessica J.]

Harnessing the power of meth addled predictive programming, you say?!?! Now you’re speaking my language! (Well, halfway. LOL. Let’s opt for coffee instead?)

First, if I ever get existential dread from having to choose a skin care product, please put me out of my misery. Calm down, Art Chad. LOL.

Second, look into how Aether Pirates of the Matterium!’s web bot used to function pre-censorship and this will give you a better idea of what actually went on here.

If web bot could predict the future by keyword cloud (weird because I was just discussing keyword clouds with Apollo's Lyre yesterday) and also produce damn good crypto calls utilizing the same infrastructure (proven - someone close to me became a multimillionaire utilizing Clif's calls back then, which is how I first knew about his work), untainted uncensored non-Wokian AI could aggregate the data and produce correct results even faster. In theory. If that even exists. You’d have to ask him - he’s the expert.

Hyperstition makes sense because it's law of assumption coupled with aggregate consciousness as an amplifier. Law of assumption is also what people are talking about when the #hardindapaint (I had to work it in) Q moonies start going off about "future proves past."

“Future proves past” is a real thing. (No, I’m not joking. But it’s no excuse for falling prey to uniparty mind control tactics.)

My own two cents: Reality is an experiential engine. We choose what we want to experience. The chaos we're seeing around us right now is a result of too many people (aka chunks of source consciousness) manifesting what most of us would consider nonsense amplified by the aggregate with the law of continuity trying not to come apart at the seams. Our willing suspension of disbelief is being busted apart. Which, I’m willing to bet, will cause way more existential crises than skin care product choices.

Mitigating the impact of existential crises brought on by processing disclosure:

But if you take what I said here and you twisted it back in upon itself, you could use Law of Assumption + Wokian AI + some web bot adjacent infrastructure to alter what people expect, influence the aggregate, and intentionally bring about dystopia through hyperstition.

Conversely, because all tech is agnostic, and because focus and intention matter, you could do the reverse with tech that is unfiltered, non-censored, non-Wokian and create utopia via focus, intention, expectation, aggregate consciousness, hyperstition, etc.

But keep in mind that one man’s dystopia is always another man’s utopia.

These are the same thing, depending upon your point of view.

This is super manipulative, has the potential to intermittently break/fix/break/fix reality, and inevitably turns into a consciousness arms race.

Most people aren’t thinking deeply. They are taking information in and trusting it at face value.

Using that to affect the aggregate would be exactly the way that predictive programming works, and then hyperstition would be an amplified version of predictive programming.

A hyperstition arms race is basically the logical progression of a combination of 5GW and 6GW:

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Ideally, Your Mask Is Not Your Face

[In response to “Being nice is a stand-in, a superficial way of appearing moral without managing to do anything which may be uncomfortable for us.” - Jared Henderson, Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Life]

Two different things.

There is a difference between having common decency as a value that you generally uphold in discourse versus having the urge to project a facade of common decency toward others so that they are fooled into thinking you are a kind and decent person.

One is extending your own humanity to another from a place of mutual respect and dignity.

The other is wearing a mask because you doubt your own face.

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The List

[In response to “One reason I know this as a metaphysical certitude is that we Gen Xers gobbled up those ‘80s films and their messages as quickly as we would wolf down a bowl of Trix while watching Saturday morning cartoons.” - Apollo's Lyre, The '80s Did It! The '80s Did It!]

Before there was ever an IMDb, when I was in film school (and I will date myself here - we were the last class to learn to cut on a Steenbeck before everyone started dumping 16mm to Beta and then cut on Avid), my friends and I in our beginning film group came up with this three-legged dog monstrosity that we affectionately termed The List.

The List was comprised of every movie we could think of that was geared to a demographic of 8-12 year old boys during the 1980s. We identified that these were the films that not only made all of us - the girls included - want to become filmmakers, but that these were also the films that wholly shaped our worldview.

And despite the fact that none of this list was ever posted online (I want to say we started this thing in 1999), it took on a life of its own. It spread like wildfire through all of the rest of the beginning film course groups. It existed on random pages of notebooks and journals and on the backs of napkins covered in powdered sugar from walking around the San Gennaro Feast with an Arriflex and the four of us, as well as the four students from the other group we were closest with, pretty much had this thing committed to memory.

So when groups of students from other film classes started walking up to us - people we’d never met before - and asked us, “Hey, you guys are the ones with the list, right? Is Monster Squad on the list yet? How about The Explorers?” we knew we’d touched a nerve.

These films ARE the backbone of Gen X culture, they DID already solve every problem we still profess to have, and we have since slippery sloped our way into postmodern fucktardia because no one knew when good enough was good enough and had the common sense to hit the damn brakes.

This is brilliant! Thank you so much for writing this!!

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Removing The Blinders From The Concept Of Double Blind Studies

[In response to “An absolutely inspired dissection of the assumptions undergirding the Double Blind Ritual in the context of panpsychism, holographic universe, and source consciousness. Viewed through such a lens—and perhaps with a bit of Jungian collective unconscious mixed in for good measure since information/knowledge need not be “consciously” apprehended to impact experiences—ignorance and objectivity warrant reconsideration. People may point to probabilities and preponderances to perpetuate such practices, but that is a contrivance to avoid addressing the persistent “noise" that drowns out their materialist “melody,” however beautiful the latter may sound to them. Perhaps the degree of sensitivity to or belief in a kind of Akashic data stream could be responsible for the fluctuations? And is “knowledge” just the (likely illusory) perception of information being stored “locally” within a Time/Space-locked consciousness node in the larger, singular network? Just thinking out loud, give this a read and decide for yourself!” - Apollo's Lyre]

Thank you so much. I’m honored by your kind words and deeply touched by your thorough analysis of this piece.

It’s a concept that is absolutely central to the way I view the world holistically, especially knowing that, in order to fit what we already know about the way the universe functions, the derivative parts must resemble the whole and vice versa; any answers that do not reflect that pattern would either be necessarily incorrect or would make us need to question our basic premises over again.

Realizing this - and its implications - caused an entire reframe for me that I could not ignore.

It’s one of those things that, once you see it, it spurs an entire paradigm shift and you can never unsee it.

And when you realize most of science is then likely to be built upon necessarily false assumptions, it’s not only world-changing to our view and everything else we have in place, but it exposes a massive problem across all of science that constitutes at best negligence and at worst a perpetuated grift that serves as a gatekeeping mechanism for blocking undertakings that would both expose and promote higher level conceptual thinking that could open the door to innovations we are - in the nicest, most diplomatic possible way I can say it - not approved to receive at this time.

Thank you for giving these thoughts such thorough consideration. I appreciate it!

I tend to see the structures that are set up around these topics as ways to keep our thoughts trapped in fuckloops - having to adhere to constraints of debate is similar in feel to me as having to remain inside the manufactured Overton window.

These are ultimately things people are only meant to see if they can figure it out. (Either NTK or "for those who have eyes to see.")

And even then, I think the majority of people who figure it out play along because their livelihoods are predicated upon playing the game.

I think, if any the remote viewers have figured this out, they mostly keep it to themselves because the majority of people already fail to understand what they are actually doing.

And to a large degree, I think most remote viewers are following a protocol that matches how they were trained and they don't really understand the complexities behind how what we can do actually functions.

To do a study and get funding, you basically have to convince a materialist in a gatekeeper role to dole out money according to the criteria they have set before them. So anyone who wants funding, I believe, would simply play the game, and they might consider calling out that the emperor is naked something akin to cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

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We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Wheelhouse

[In response to Michael Newberry.]

Bringing your enemies into your wheelhouse would be basically the same thing as home court advantage.

This is kind of the flip side of that.

If you’ve outgrown the home court or expanded beyond it somehow, returning to the home court to ask about, let’s say, oranges when they only know apples puts you at an extreme disadvantage.

You’re going to get answers about oranges through an apple lens, which is unlikely to be helpful.

And if you figure out the advice you received was not helpful, you might piss off the apple people when you don’t take that advice even though you didn’t mean to upset them.

And then they think you’re an askhole, ungrateful, etc., because you couldn’t and didn’t use the unhelpful but well-meaning advice and they took it personally because, to them, it’s perfectly good advice and you must think you’re better than they are.

And, before you know it, down they pull you, back into the bucket of crabs, pitting your sensibilities against your urge to keep the peace because you don’t want people who can’t tell you anything about oranges (which isn’t their fault) thinking that you’re uppity.

Never ask apple people about oranges. Go find orange people. Or, even better, go ask someone who owns ten orange groves.

And then you never have to upset the apple cart.

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Special thanks to Aether Pirates of the Matterium!, Andrew | Dad Explains, Apollo's Lyre, Coleman, Fortissax, Holly MathNerd, Howard Bloom, Jared Henderson, Jessica J, Michael Newberry, and Stone Bryson.

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