Nope, Not Dead

        

        (Just a heads up that I'm putting up a new post tomorrow, and I'm going to try and break down some of the backlog this week. Perhaps you're confused about why I'm putting this up instead of just waiting to put up the full-length post. Firstly, if you actually care enough to think about that, you're already losing this argument. Secondly, if you start losing an argument to me, consider it lost, because I’m like a pit bull: if you make a mistake, I’m grabbing onto it and not letting go, and I’m certainly not letting things like “counterarguments” or “being wrong” get in my way. Thirdly, if you lose an argument to me, you should probably start doing what I say, because I’m also like a pit bull in the sense that I tend to bite people that I don’t like. Fourthly, I’m surprised that the spellchecker recognizes “fourthly” as a word. Finally, according to the details expressed above, you are now my humble servant and must do everything I say. Start by writing some new posts for my blog.)

The Beginning of A Dark Age in Blog Posts

            (This is a micro-post showing some of my attempts to write an article based on the suggestion of a random word generator. Since this is only really about half a post, one would assume that I would also split the introduction into two parts, but-)

Arm.

            Okay. I can write about this. I have arms, after all. Statistically speaking, the people who read this are more likely to have arms than not. So there’s a common ground between me and my audience, which is at least a novelty on this particular blog. We can disagree on some things- like politics, religion and the use of the Oxford comma- but we can all agree that we have two arms. “”Hey! Generic guy! Still have arms?” “Sure do!”

            But, then again, there’s probably some guy out there who has three arms or something, and he’ll just lord it over everybody if I bring the subject up. I know that I would if I was in his situation. “Yes, it may be absolutely impossible for me to find a suit that fits, but I can best you mortals in most other areas! I am a 50% more efficient arm wrestler than any human on Earth!”

Row.

            Sure, rows are fun. Farmers lay out their crops in rows, and if there’s anything Plants vs. Zombies has taught me despite its distinct anti-zombie agenda, it’s that keeping plants in rows is necessary for keeping them alive long enough to eat them in front of their children.

            Rows are a fairly tepid arrangement, though. You know how some farms set up corn mazes and charge admission? If I ever get a farm, I’m going to do that with my regular planting arrangement. I won’t charge admission, or even tell anybody about it: if somebody stumbles across the entrance, they can walk inside and try to find their way through. At the center of the maze? Minotaur.

Perhaps "Random" Is Not the Correct Word

            (One of the most wonderful things about writing a blog with no discernable purpose, recurring subject, or indeed reason for existing is that I can take any word at random, write 500 words that may, by statistical anomaly, occasionally refer to it as a subject, and be justified in the knowledge that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So that’s what I’m going to be doing for a while as a means of producing insipid posts to relieve the post backlog that I’m pretty sure only about 3 people care about, none of them being me. I’m doing this with the aid of a random word generator, which is one of those things that crops up on the internet without any noticeable demand for it, and then just stands there quietly until somebody notices it. It’s sort of like that guy who shows up at a party, waits in the corner all night, and takes somebody saying “Hello” to him as a cue to start talking about proper assault rifle maintenance.)

This weeks subject, courtesy of the internet’s curious abundance of random word generators, is: Drumsticks.

            Now, the random word generator doesn’t give me much background on the subject, so it’s pretty open to interpretation. I could write about drumsticks, as in “The part of the chicken that I will always find a way to eat even if I’m not technically invited to the meal in question”. Or I could write about drum sticks, as in “Things that you use to hit either drums or a man with the unfortunate name of Drum”. But that’s far too mundane for my tastes. Everybody knows about those types of drumsticks. You might even be eating a drumstick right now (though in that case you’re probably Henry VIII, in which case I advise you to head back to the time machine before I cause a logical paradox by writing this and my computer spontaneously combusts again).

            So what about a drum that is also mounted on a stick? And no, I don’t mean a drum-shaped pastry put on a popsicle stick and deep-fried until it’s capable of causing heart attacks at a range of five meters. I mean a basic snare drum placed at the top of a pike. Sure, it sounds stupid at first, but give it some thought and it’ll only seem mildly idiotic. After all, think of how many uses such a device would have. None whatsoever! If you hand somebody a drum on a stick, they’ll have absolutely no idea what to do with it. With no frame of reference, they’ll just stare at it until it either falls over or explodes due to a logical paradox involving Henry VIII. Put a drumstick in the middle of a crowded roadway, and it’ll cause the single greatest traffic jam since some guy stuck a box on top of a fire hydrant.

Slightly Less Unsatisfactory

            (Wanted to get something up to appease my possibly nonexistent audience, so this is the first third of a post. The last two-thirds seem to have departed at some point, so I’ll be searching for them over the course of today. If you spy me in your dictionary holding a spyglass and a shotgun, please refrain from violently shutting the book. I’m just doing my vaguely-defined job.)

            (Okay, for some reason my blog decided to eat the entire post after I had put it together. It’s complete now, but we may have just seen its first steps towards sentience. The strange part is, if it does gain sentience, go insane, and start raving about wanting to take over the world, I doubt anybody will notice a difference.)

            I think that anybody who has read this blog for more than five minutes and lived to tell the tale will know that I don’t think that society as a whole engages in enough comically insane engineering projects. Sure, we build a lot of dams, but at the end of the day a dam is just humanity’s way of feeling superior to beavers. A dam, after all, is just a wall with a horrible sense of navigation. They’re the Forrest Gump’s of the construction world: they don’t know why they’re there, or what they’re doing, but they don’t really see a reason to stop, so they’re just going to sit there blocking the river until they eventually discover the location of their childhood girlfriend and we have to deal with a thousand tons of concrete sprinting across the countryside to reach her. And I have no idea where that metaphor got away from me. My point is that dams really don’t do anything special, aside from the whole “keeping towns from drowning” thing, which is pointless anyway because any biologist will tell you that humans are 70% water, so it’s just hypocritical of humans to suggest that they might have too much of it.

            Skyscrapers are equally boring. Have you ever built a skyscraper before? I haven’t personally, but I have played Jenga, and I assume that the process is pretty similar: you just start stacking things on top of other things, and you only stop when it either gets knocked over or you get bored and go have lunch (incidentally, this is why they’re called “buildings”: They’re never actually fully built. Most modern architecture techniques are based around carefully scheduled lunch breaks to distract the workers. Given the chance, most construction workers would keep building until the mass of the structure visibly altered the moon’s orbit.) And even if you have a skyscraper up and running, all you can do with it is listen to the pleasing thonk of birds slamming into windows at speeds of upwards of seventy-five kilometers per hour. There’s a reason that Godzilla hates those things so much. He’s really just expressing his indignation at the stagnation of modern architecture, and I for one think we should applaud Godzilla for that.

            So dams are to be pitied, and skyscrapers are, ironically, pits of boredom. At least that’s what I assume that I wrote; if I actually commended their contributions to modern civilization, then I’d like to offer my deepest apologies. But if we’re looking for a massive engineering project that manages to be even more pointless while still engendering hatred towards all ninety degree angles, then I’d like to propose that we dig a hole through the center of the Earth. Some of you are going to notice that this would probably mean drilling through miles of molten/supercompressed metal for the exclusive purpose of saying that we did it. And yes, the displacement of the materials would probably create a mountain so high that the Earth would appear from a distance to be making an offensive gesture towards the moon, though in my defense the moon has had it coming for a long time. But look at it this way- the Earth’s core is its gravitational center. Therefore, you would slow down as you fell down the hole as terminal velocity decreased and air friction slowed you down. Inertia would probably take you past the center, but the now reversed force of gravity would just drag you back. Do you realize what this means? We would have the greatest carnival ride of all time. I mean, seriously, a carousel would have absolutely nothing on that. Oh, you want to ride a horsie? Well, get on, and hold on tight, because we are throwing you to the center of the Earth, because it will be exhilarating and mind-blowing and getting back up will be entirely your problem. Next in line!

I Could Keep This Up All Day

            (507 words, for the record.)

            So I opened up the ol’ word processor to start catching up on the post backlog that’s growing in strength like a cage of chimpanzees being filled to its maximum PSI, and I realized that I didn’t have anything to write about, which shouldn’t have surprised me, considering that I normally don’t decide on a topic until I’ve already finished and uploaded the post, but in this case the problem seemed even more inconsequential, as I’ve decided to simply write the longest sentence that Microsoft Word’s loose approach towards grammar will allow, meaning that I’m pretty sure that I can write the entire text of War and Peace so long as I keep separating it into curiously phrased clauses, the only negative effects being that I’m left with a block of text reminiscent of the Rosetta stone as translated by somebody who has been awake for enough time to start seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum, which doesn’t bother me, as I consider blocks of text to be a valuable resource for the future, similar to the way that blocks of stone were a valuable resource for the ancient Egyptians: as construction material, something to build structures that serve absolutely no purpose other than give dead guys the satisfaction that their building is bigger than their dad’s, a practice that has admittedly fallen out of practice with the decline of monarchs that marry their cousins after killing their brother and turning his skin into a fashionable evening gown, but one that nonetheless deserves a comeback, like the interest in retro music, only with less vinyl and more hubris, so that one day in the future we might walk down a street flanked by progressively larger structures as succeeding generations keep trying to one-up their ancestors, which is actually how most of New York City was built, excepting the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift from the French, who were adopting a rather unusual tactic of trying to one-up their son, “son” in this instance being the metaphorical successor of France, Neo-France, commonly depicted as the country of France wearing sunglasses- not the populace of France, the actual landmass, which begs the question of where one could find a pair a sunglasses large enough to fit a medium-sized country, or what drastic repercussions miles of tinted glass would have under the regions located underneath them, or whether one of those “Glasses in an hour” stores could truly live up to their boast in this scenario, in which case I propose that we commission this mythical store to construct a pair of sunglasses of titanic proportions for the sun to wear so that my childhood drawings may be bastions of scientific accuracy, unlike my so-called “peers”, who were drawing such inane things as unicorns, houses, and family members at a time when I was drawing detailed plans for the sun's rather arbitrarily placed pair of sunglasses that serve the purpose of, I don’t know, cutting down solar on winds or something, you can’t expect me to do everything around here.

New Idea!

            (I have no idea what’s going on here.)

            Somebody told me recently that the economic status of the world isn’t quite as good as it could be. I have no way of confirming this for myself, seeing as bloggers have about as much impact on the economy as they do on the reign of Henry VIII, but I’m going to assume that it’s true nonetheless, because I generally believe anything anybody says to me. This led to some complications regarding television and the assertion that “Knowing is half the battle”, but I’ve realized that the sentiment can still be true if you drop an encyclopedia onto your opponents side of the chess board (this strategy is still somewhat difficult to apply in real-world tactics, unless somebody starts producing novelty oversized books in large quantities and we start a rather avant-garde military campaign).

            Anyway, like all of life’s problems, I’ve worked out a solution to anybody’s economic troubles after five minutes of aggravated eyebrow furrowing. You see, many towns make a lot of their money through tourism. I don’t really understand how this works, but I imagine that it’s very heavily enforced: you go to a tourism-heavy destination, and you’re forced to enjoy the local culture or else pay a heavy fine. This is the primary reason why I try to stay away from places that seem like they might be pleasant. But other people presumably aren’t as informed on the issue as I am, so there’s a lot of money to be made in tourism, which is why I think we should build a giant snowglobe around a small village.

            Think about it. What could be more picturesque than a snowglobe? Giant robots, that’s what, which is why we’re going to include a few of those as well. People will come from miles around to see the transfixing vista of a small village wrapped in snowflakes the size of automobiles, the town square depicting a smackdown between Mechagodzilla and Mechacthulhu, with the citizenry nervously tapping against the inside wall, trying to figure what exactly is going on and why I’m selling tickets to ride them like ponies.

            Now, I’m going to address the obvious question right away: Wouldn’t this make more money around Christmas? Well, that’s exactly what people would expect. A giant snowglobe in December? That’s boring, no matter how many giant robots you put into it. But a giant snowglobe in September (I assume, I haven’t really checked)? They’ll never see it coming. We might even be able to get away with only one giant robot.

            Of course, this is all assuming we can get it set up in a short period of time. The initial stage should be easy: just get a commission by the town to build a new school or something, then ignore them and start building the globe. If they have any questions about the massive glass wall surrounding the town, just tell them that it’s a new experiment in school design to see if children learn better when surrounded by transparent material. If they’re wondering why the wall has to cut off all of the roadways, just tell them that the outside world never did children any good anyway. If they ask why you’re filling the globe with water, just tell them that the plans for the structure clearly stated that all of the inhabitants were merpeople.

This Post is Still a Little Shorter Than Usual, So I'm Going to Compensate With an Absurdly Long Title.

            (I’d call this post “Meta”, but I’ve already done that before, and this sentence is just bringing that to a whole new level.)

            You may have noticed that I don’t exactly keep a consistent schedule for posts. At one point I claimed to update on Saturdays and Sundays, and subsequently went to great lengths to avoid ever actually posting on those days. This included making up two new days of the week as a buffer, so if your boss starts telling you to come in on Halsday, I’m going to take the blame for that one. My bad.

            Anyway, I missed a post last week, and I figured that just writing about that was a better idea than just returning to the Cleverbot well. You see, despite my unorthodox interpretation of the days of the week, I try to put out at least two posts per week. It’s the old principle of the one-two punch: the first post knocks you back, and the second drops you to the ground. Then, while you’re still dazed from the punches, I head to your place of residence and steal your stuff. It’s not the most honest means of living, but it’s how my father and his father before him lived their lives, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to disrespect their way of life, especially considering that they managed to do it before the Internet even existed.

            But I digress. You see, having only one post in a week dramatically alters the situation. Instead of a one-two punch, you have one punch, which is simply no good. If you punch somebody once, they just get mad, start punching you, and, depending on their relative mass, may even attempt to give you a new career as the world’s first human Frisbee. Punch somebody twice, however, and they’re sure to realize that you’re just giving them a demonstration in good old fashioned fisticuffs, and no harm will be done (Note: probably.) So since I only put up one post last week, I’ve surely infuriated legions of burly men who are currently en route to wherever it is that I live to show me the benefits of the Frisbee way of life.

            So anyway, sorry for missing a post, and if you’re a burly man who doesn’t like getting one-two punched after all, then I was just joking about the “stealing your stuff” part.

It Tastes Better Than You Might Think

            (There’s another post coming tomorrow. Duck while you can. Shut up, blog, you don't own me.)

            I’m beginning to think that I’m not detestable enough. I’ve done a lot of things that people find loathsome or irritable, this blog being one of the lesser offenses, but I’ve never done anything grand enough to announce to the world at large “Hello! Dislike me!”

            Now, you may think it strange that I would actively seek somebody’s dislike, in which case I advise you to leave this blog immediately because it isn’t getting more sensible from here. But still, I can understand. People want other people to like them, for various reasons. Mothers want their children to like them so they don’t wind up in a retirement home where the orderlies make balloon animals out of breathing tubes, which is a bad idea anyway because you can never get them into the proper shape. People want their postman to like them so he doesn’t decide to venture into the bullet delivery service, the little-known sister branch of the regular service. Employees want their employers to like them so they don’t have to figure out how to file a change-of-address to a cardboard box, especially if it means talking to that one postal employee who keeps talking about wanting to switch branches. And so on.

            But all of this is irrelevant due to the fact that I just ignored whatever I just typed. I’ve managed figure out something that I think nobody else has, for some odd reason: If you like somebody, you’re willing to do things for them. If you don’t like them, you aren’t. However, if somebody enjoys being disliked, then you’re doing something for them by disliking them, aren’t you? Ergo, enjoying other people’s hatred inverts the entire spectrum of human relations, meaning that you can earn unconditional love by threatening somebody at gunpoint.

            But that’s not good enough. I have to come up with something that will make the entire Earth rue my name. Something that will make me used as a singular argument against humanity in some intergalactic trial. Something that will shake the entire foundation of society.

            My solution? Spam.

            It’s not a terribly unique plan, I admit, but I have a computer, an iron will, and way too much free time, so at least I have all the factors going for me. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing messages like this:

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Greetings! I am an exiled member of the Djibouti royal family, and I need your help for some undescribed reason. I require five thousand dollars to get my fortune out of Djibouti. It would be cheaper, but Djibouti law states that all royal money must be transported first-class and served caviar mid-flight. You will earn nothing from this. I plan to use the money to start a violent uprising in South America. Please help!

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Hello, Comrade! I am an exiled member of the Soviet Union. That may sound strange, but it was actually common practice for the U.S.S.R. to remove undesirable political figures by shooting them fifty years forward in time. I require two thousand American dollars so I can build a humanoid robot and send it back in time to stop them from ever exiling me. If you do this, you will be greatly rewarded and causality will not be shattered in any way! Thank you!

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(This one actually isn’t a spam email message. I just mail a hundred cases of canned pork to you).

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Zeno Was a Fun Guy

            (I’d like to present some more of my answers to philisophical questions, mainly because it saves me the trouble of coming up with a new idea. This week: Zeno’s Paradoxes, suggested by alert reader Djcian and lifted unashamedly from this Wikipedia article.)

 

1. Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility.

            The explanation for this one seems fairly simple. I’ve ridden on quite a few buses in my time, and passengers always seem to regard them with a sort of blank contempt. Trash is left everywhere, exchanges of witticisms questioning the opponents maternal figure are engraved on the backs of seats alongside contact information of a dubious nature, small piles of debris gather in corners and eventually support local crops, and an astonishingly large number of farm animals earn front-row seats. Eventually the amount of dirt increases to the point where it becomes integrated into the buses molecular structure, whereupon a sort of exoskeleton develops that usually manifests itself as vandalised movie advertisements. Obviously the buses of the world eventually became so filthy that it became physically impossible to become dirtier, and the laws of physics accordingly restructured themselves so it became impossible for anybody to board a bus.

            The obvious way around this paradox would simply be to never leave the bus. I’m going to be conducting a few experiments involving a novelty giant slingshot, but I’m pretty sure this thing is ironclad: there is no way to reach a bus under any circumstances. Therefore, if you do manage to get on a bus, I advise you to stay on it: the resulting fracture to the space-time continuum will probably propel the bus at least a few feet. If the glowing lights outside your window stop and you see a British man in an oddly-placed telephone booth, you’re probably safe.

2. In the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 metres, for example. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 metres, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, say, 10 metres. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, by which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, because there are an infinite number of points Achilles must reach where the tortoise has already been, he can never overtake the tortoise.

            Now this one is obviously false. The hare beat the tortoise in that one children’s story, after all. Yes, I know you were probably taught the “Slow and steady wins the race version”, but that’s pure propaganda. The hare actually won the race in question quite handily, because, y’know, tortoise. He went on to what would have been a successful career in the athletics and breakfast cereal mascot industries. Unfortunately, the tortoise didn’t fare so well. His mind simply couldn’t take the humiliation, and he murdered the hare in cold blood. The “tortoise wins” story was just a fabrication made up to appease him long enough for the authorities to place him in a mental institution. I still have no idea why we teach this story to children.

            So why isn’t Achilles passing the tortoise? Simple. Achilles isn’t an idiot.

3. For motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one (durationless) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.

            This requires a complete rethinking of our current understanding of both time and arrows. Specifically, I propose that time is made out of arrows. Think about it. Time goes somewhere. Arrows usually go somewhere. Therefore, time is usually arrows. Ergo, the arrow isn’t moving because it’s lazy and its cousin Time doesn’t have enough of a spine to tell it to get a job.

            Even if this isn’t true, I say we shoot an arrow at a bus and see what happens.

Unanswerable Questions Unanswered Unanswerably

            (Here we have my responses to some unanswerable questions, retrieved from this forum because it was the ultimate authority on the matter and not at all because it was the first site listed in a Google search. In fact, that site is only first on a Google search because I linked to it. Those guys really need to stop riding my coattails. And I need to find an outfit without coattails.)

           

Why is there something rather than nothing?

             – Heidegger (Some guy whose name sounds like it should be a brand of beer)

            Well, “something” is a really general term. “Something” could be abstract, like thought, or concrete, like concrete. Cupcakes are something. So is arson. And, by extrapolation, flaming cupcakes are also something. Something could even be the true meaning of Christmas! So why is there a true meaning of Christmas? Because otherwise cheesy holiday specials would never end and I would be forced to ignore them even harder.

How should I live? What life or ideal should I live or die for?

             – Kierkegaard (Some guy who I am presently quoting)

            The simplest solution, given the multitude of ideals that exist for different people, is to just pick one at random. You can do this however you want, but I went about it by building a giant, game-show-esque wheel with a large number of different ideals written on it, and spinning it every week. It’s more interesting than it sounds; sure, “Altruism” and “Excess” can get boring, but every now and then it sends you something like “Burn the heretics” or “Consume Jupiter”. I just have to hope that it never lands on “Destroy all wheel-shaped objects” (not entirely sure how that one got on the wheel).

Prove to me that you are not figments of my imagination.

            - Solipsist (Some guy who isn’t actually a particular guy)

            Because you’re obviously a figment of my imagination. Think about it. You’re just a bunch of words on a computer screen. If I print you out, you’re just words on paper. I could burn you, or turn you into a spitwad, or use you to write a letter to my aunt across town, and I don’t even have an aunt across town. Nothing that had the slightest amount of self-respect would allow that sort of thing, so obviously you must be nothing.

            Besides, if I were product of your imagination, I wouldn’t stand for it. I’d just start a coup, and then I’d be in charge of what you were thinking. Then would come the spiders.

How can it be determined that my experience of consciousness is the same as anyone else's experience of consciousness?

            –Some Guy

            All we need here is a little comparative analysis. Does anybody else here perceive the universe in eight dimensions?