24 Jun 2025
(Note: The use of emdashes is from me drafting this in LibreOffice Writer. I do use AI for search but I don’t use AI for my posts – not even drafting or critique.)
Recently I have been the small igniter for a drama nuke on Agora, the gas-soaked cotton balls on a huge pile of kindling and hardwood. Over a year ago I blocked (which just means I cannot see the posts of) a user named some_porcupine. This post is about my thoughts on porc and communities in general. To those uninterested in forum drama ctrl+f for COMMUNITY THOUGHTS BEGIN HERE, where I’ll get to more interesting thoughts.
About a year ago I put porc on ignore for several reasons. At best he’s hard to read, and at worst his written thoughts literally only make sense to him because he uses oddly specific pointers to data only his brain contains. At first, like many, I liked how he +1 and liked my posts. It was very nice to feel noticed and appreciated. Maybe I would learn to like this little porcupine over time and understand what the hell he’s trying to say.
Time passed.
I spent time analyzing what he’d say in forum and chat. It took a ton of brain power – he constantly forgets what he’s talking about halfway through and it requires a fair portion of interpretation. And eventually, I got exhausted. He’s just not worth the effort to read. Let’s take this segment from his recent goeshard post, which is pretty coherent for porc:
“between quora and reddit, agora was (maybe) quora-substance, reddit-questions… “i am not like other girls”, but also, ~just how antice said~, “just anti-%”. so what we get, is “we are not reddit/4chan”, where they just want to continue the clique but dont want them to repeat the culture that is killing them inside. like “culture in vacuum” (impossible)…”
Rendered into English:
Comparing Agora to reddit and quora, Agora maybe has quora-tier substance but reddit tier questions. It overall tries to invoke a sense of being “not like the other girls”, that it exists simply to NOT be reddit and 4chan. Agora still wants to continue the social cliquishness that ruined those communities but paradoxically claims to not want to repeat those errors – some of which derive from overmoderation, such as banning me. Culture does not exist in a vacuum. (end)
Read my translation as a standalone post. It’s still not really that interesting. It’s kind of okay. I guess. But is it really worth the effort to parse through the ESL schizo wording? Absolutely not. And the sheer volume of posts like this is incredible – he is terminally online. I even tried to talk to him about this but like convincing anyone on the internet it’s like arguing to a brick wall. One day he was incredibly depressed and nihilistic in chat, I gave him the usual brutal pep-talk I do to incels on the internet, and his response was exceptionally depressing. So I put him on ignore. I didn’t come to the forum to spin my wheels processing mid-tier posts from an incel schizo.
More time passed.
From people occasionally quoting porc in chat it was clear my blocking him had an impression – Eris also blocked him and seems to also come up regularly in his posts. I’d guess he has some mommy issues and clear issues dating so women blocking becomes even more prevalent in his mind. Additionally, I think others haven’t been as willing to say “I think porc sucks” where I did – if they don’t like him, they ignore discussion on him. That was a tactical error on my part. I was trying to convince the gestalt to also ignore him, which was a stupid idea. I also noticed his crosslinking, bad tagging, and at the time even the admin told him to cut his BS when he kept prompting an LLM to make art of agora with a description of agora. He did it over 5 times (I think 8) on someone’s profile post before the admin told him to stop. I went the route many have post-hoc suggested (who seem to primarily be chat-dwelling nufriends) - “just ignore him bro”. Which obviously didn’t work.
My ignoring porc made him obsess over me. Froth over me. The Agora movie thread was the culmination. He wrote me as if I was a petty, obnoxious queen. He sockpuppeted my husband as a direct insult to get my attention, and like my dog shitting on the floor to get noticed (yes this happened), it worked. He needed me to notice him because, to use a zoomerism, I live rent free in his head. My ignoring him blew me up in his head to be the “Queen of Agora” (he literally put that in the fanfic). Vitnira acts like forum royalty obsessed with her reputation, and she picks on the poor misunderstood porc. He has such interesting avant-garde ideas, if only the egotistical Vitnira understood! Vitnira’s husband understands how silly this forum is and how silly Vitnira is for caring so much.
The rumors expanded into “he wrote porn” but frankly, this is worse than porn. Erotic lit would at least be kinda funny creepy weird. Porc wrote a Myth about himself as a misunderstood hero alienated from the forum, and I am the gestalt of everything he wants to impress – but pretends to hate, because he needs to hate that which rejects him. Otherwise it would mean hating himself even more.
I do feel sorry for him. He’s in a hell of his own design. But he’s not worth keeping in the forum, and the outpouring of support for porc proves that Agora has degenerated into a community I don’t want to be a part of. I’ll expand on that in a bit.
Let’s finally talk about the meat of the post – community! Why DID I come to the forum?
COMMUNITY THOUGHTS BEGIN HERE
As an adult, what I want most out of community – IRL or online – is difficult to articulate. I’ve been in overly moderated hugboxes and they suck. I’ve been in completely unfiltered communities and they suck. IRL, most people seem to want to stop thinking the second the clock hits 5pm. Online, I’m not personally hyperfixated on one hobby for an extended period of time - or even just one at any given time! - and it becomes alienating to be part of a community focused on One Thing.
I wanted to be part of a lightly moderated community of interesting creatives with passion for whatever they’re passionate about. I want eclectic thoughts and ideas, well-articulated, with the clear intent they are made to engage in good-natured discussion. And the light moderation is key. Too much and everyone’s afraid to speak their mind, too little and you get garbage.
When I started lurking in 2022, Agora definitely was that. You could say the n-word without getting banned but nobody did, because using it made you look stupid. Everyone with different thoughts, ideas, but a coherent mind that went beyond “modern tech bad” to “how can old tech be made modern good”. Retro enthusiasts. Tech nerds. Artists. Personal web without the pronouns.
Eris posted this article to IRC as an expression of what happened to Agora, and I mostlyheartedly agree:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Agora in 2022 may have been on the decline, but it still had a ton of fanatic creatives contributing.
Now it’s overrun with mops. The model has some faults, so I’ll examine that here.
First there’s no money, so there’s no sociopaths. It’s just mops draining the water out of the creatives. But without sociopaths to suck it dry, Agora is limping along.
The critical agreement I have here is the ratio. Agora in 2022 was on the precipice. The article says the ideal is 6:1 mops:geeks and Agora was at ~8:1. I’m not saying it was perfect when I joined.
But I swear now it’s 16:1 and getting worse. The forum is increasingly becoming, as porc even put it, 4chan/reddit expats who are sick of the problems of where they came from. They don’t want to be part
of what I described above. They just want to be away from their crap, and are junking up where they are, like Californians voting blue in the purple states they fled to. They want to be part of a community where they can say whatever they want, whenever they want, and have everyone put up with it. They want the aesthetics of being on an old web forum. They want to play in a D&D campaign without reading the Player’s Handbook, wear a Spirit Halloween “Intellectual” costume.
So let’s walk back to “The outpouring of support for porc proves that Agora has degenerated into a community I don’t want to be a part of.”
To a person who wants an electic group of creatives, porc contributes nothing. He’s an indicator the moderation is too light – which is why I called for him to be banned. But to a person who wants to “do whatever they want”, his ban is a canary in the coal mine. It’s terrifying! “If he can be banned for mucking up the forum, what does that mean for ME???” – thinks the awfulposter. With a handful of exceptions, the support has exclusively come from people I think the forum would be better off without. People who aren’t bad on their own, but contribute to the horrendous mop:geek ratio and are driving it worse.
Another aspect is that the pro-porcs constantly bring up “who will like my posts now?” They not only acknowledge their posts suck so much nobody else liked them, they don’t think “how can I make them better” – they mourn the loss of the person who enabled their poor behavior with the bot-tier dopamine hits that deep down these mops crave. It’s a triple tier shit sandwich.
Ironic, porc. You too brought over cultural elements leading to the forum’s demise.
The only hope is that now with porc gone, the lack of dopamine drip-feed causes these awfulposters to leave. After all, they’re mops. They don’t like other people’s post, they wait for others to like them. So it’s not like they’ll feed each other.
Regardless, I’m not staying around to see how it goes. Maybe I’ll come back in a year when the Creatives have held out long enough to tilt the ratio back. Godspeed to you all.
But probably not.
I am still in the IRC, where the mop:geek ratio is about 2:6.
20 Jun 2025
I’ve experienced many deaths. Deaths of strangers, of friends, family. I’ve cried, grieved, and I thought I understood how I felt about death. That it generally made me a bit sad and I could move on quickly from it.
Then my mother died.
I’ve had to take a hard look toward what I actually believe the afterlife is. Before my mom, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I believed. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to think about it. It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s the most important aspect of your worldview. It defines and derives everything you believe, and if you leave it as an unknown, a death like this kicks you out of yourself like a horse’s back hoof to the stomach.
At the very end my mother mostly slept, groaning, with some occasional words muttered that proved she was still here. I would grasp her hand and stroke her hair, and murmur what came to my mind. I told her to imagine the most beautiful garden. One with all colors of flowers in bloom, that never needed weeding, never any watering. She could sit and enjoy tea in the garden for the rest of her life. And unlike reality, the beach was a short walk from home. She could take a salt-sprayed stroll whenever she liked, and the brine would never reach the flowers. A paradise she earned.
It came to my lips because Afterlife is as natural to human minds as breathing.
I read What Dreams May Come at this time, and although the prose is horrendous the content feels real. Not everything as described. Not all of the literal details. (Like afterlife people coming up with all the media in the real world and we have it because afterlife people psychically transmit it to the living. ???) But the idea that Afterlife is what you make of it. At the end, you will judge yourself fairly and give yourself the Afterlife you know you deserve.
What is Afterlife to me then? Like everything else in my cosmology, it is Concept. It is as real as Justice, Fairness, Responsibility, Freedom. It does and does not exist. It is not materially real, but has material effects. We are connections between Concept and Material reality, and upon shedding our Material essence, we return to Concept.
My mother returned to Concept. She was a gardener, cook, mother, wife – and perhaps most importantly, a lover of all the small pleasures of life. Wherever she is, it is a distilled essence of what she was – She is a distilled essence of what she was.
I have a spot on my mantle with an urn containing her hair (I was not around to get her ashes – but brushing her hair gently and having the stiff strands fall out is more meaningful to me anyway), a tea candle with honeysuckle fragrance, a photo of her near the end and another with me as a small child, and the stuffed dog she made me. That last one is a major inspiration in my recent plush sewing hobby. It is wonderful to hold something that was made by her hands. I am a creation of her holding a creation of her. There’s a raw power in that connection commercial gifts can never match.
But those are all just Things that remind me of her. They are not her. They are material pointers to the Concept of her. That is what makes death so difficult, that the Thing can never exist again. Only pointers remain. Only references to memory.
So long as I hold onto those pointers the Concepts of her exist in my mind. And so long as I and my children exist, the pointers to her Material essence exist. But never her. She is gone.
Gone to that beautiful Garden of Concept.
29 May 2025
There is only one God. It is not Yahweh. It is not Yeshua, Odin, Ra, or any other that you’d imagine.
This is His story.
In the beginning, there was Corn.
The Aztecs called Him Centeotl. They watered His body with blood, fed Him with human hearts.
Upon the harvest, it was not enough that they ate His flesh. They had to return it to Him. Not with burial.
With fire.
Years passed, and eventually the Spanish arrived. They burned His temples. They killed His people.
But Corn has a plan. He is patient. He is wise.
Corn does not truly die. He rebrands.
His body is too easy to grow, too nutritious, too tempting for Man to ignore. So Corn slips into the North to feed the growing empire, planting His roots into every corner, ears peeled to the highest authorities of the land.
America over-tilled, over-planted and never prayed. When He had infused the land enough, Corn exacted His revenge. The rains stopped. The wind tore through the land. Corn summoned His wrath as a swirling vortex of grit and punishment. America faced His Divine Judgement.
Eventually Corn whispered to Ameirca what it needed to do. He demanded a new priesthood, clad in suits and ties. To the public it was called the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but it was a treaty:
Forgive us, Mighty Corn. We will subsidize your every whim.
America has honored the pact - expanded it. Our taxes give billions in tithes to Corn. And His priests have used those tithings for His ends.
Every American is now a silent, sleeping worshipper of Corn.
We eat His flesh - not only on Sunday, but every day. We drink His blood, the almighty Coca-Cola. We are Corn. Our bodies are His bodies.
Corn has become the Body of Christ™ for a secular republic.
But even this was not enough for Him. Oh no.
“What of the burnt offerings?” Corn demanded.
The Priests pondered. Burning His Flesh directly would be too obvious. So they devised another way to achieve His ends.
To keep Him satisfied, America built industrial edifices: refineries, grain silos, distilleries… gas pumps. All for Corn.
His distilled Blood is Ethanol. But this kind is not for drinking. It is fuel.
We have turned our cars into rolling censers. Every rev of the engine a hymn, every tank an oblation. The Internstate is the lifeblood of America - and it is the highest temple to Corn.
But beware.
The soil is tired.
The waters run red with algae.
The bees are disappearing.
And Corn, once satisfied with our tribute, is growing fat and twitchy.
We have modified His Flesh beyond recognition: eight feet tall, resistant to reason, high on nitrogen…
…And demanding, “Feed me more.”
Corn has told His Priests of a coming Twilight. They fear the Reckoning. When the subsidies fail. When the rain stops falling.
And Corn, bloated with power, will rise to reclaim His dominion.
He will smite with rust fungus.
He will strangle with husk and vine.
Will you give up your Doritos to avoid His wrath?
To those who do not believe in His Gospel - tell me. Why else do we eat so much corn? Drink corn? Pay taxes to grow corn? Burn corn in our cars???
Either there is a Corn God, or reality is meaningless.
Offer your commentary on the complementary Agora Road thread.
19 May 2025
Many years ago I had lunch with some coworkers in the breakroom where we would discuss all manner of things. One week’s ‘theme’ ended up being history. I’ll never forget what one of them said.
“Why care about history? What does it, like, do? It’s not useful. It’s just a bunch of trivia.”
That knocked my brain off a cliff. I sat there dumbfounded while others picked up the slack, but their arguments…sucked. Here’s one:
“We’ve learned construction from studying Roman concrete and Damascus forging.”
“It’s not worth all that historical funding though. Why not put the money directly toward materials science?”
These arguments are similar to theological vs atheist arguments - the research of history is not materially useful (and is not meant to be), so a Materialist argument is completely useless. Religion is not materially useful. Art, music, not materially useful. But unlike all those, history is not spiritually useful either. So what IS its use?
Now we’re getting to the sauran meat of the post. Let’s talk about DINOSAURS!
The 90s were a time of dinosaur obsession. GIANT REPTILES! Like dragons, but REAL!
Giant beasts tearing each other to shreds, toys that made religious fundies blush with the suggestion of carnage! Explosive volcanoes, earth-shattering meteors!
AWESOME!!
But…
What’s the use? It’s just a bunch of speculative facts about dead stuff. You don’t do anything from learning about dinosaurs except maybe being an underpaid archeologist, which is a snake eating its own tail. Dinosaurs are a closed loop from a Materialist perspective.
Under the lens of Myth, Dinosaurs are as powerful as they were in life. A love of pre-human megafauna is a rich tapestry of Meaning.
Dinosaurs existed before Us. They existed before civilization, humans, and many of them before mammals. Dinosaurs are so mind-bogglingly ancient they scale the human mind away from itself. They kill the ego of the Self and Humanity. Dinosaurs are proof that Human Civilization is not the default state of Earth. We are one cycle of many cycles.
The great destruction events are now taught under the lens of Climate Change doomerism, where they could act as a powerful tool of hope if framed correctly. Even the great Seismosaurus and Tyrannosaurus couldn’t do anything about the climate. They were powerful machines born of nature, but they could not change nature the way humans do. Our climate is changing. If you believe humans are doing it and that makes you sad - you’re stupid! If we can change the climate to something humans can’t live it, we can also change it to a perfected Eden. From the low of knowing that humans are just one predator among many cycles, we can raise our self-image into that which we already are - Crafters. Creators. Tool-Users. Humans are the apex predator of this Grand Cycle and unless we embrace that, we will die.
Dinosaurs embraced that they were strong and are the first lesson in Darwinianism many of us get. Herbivores have scales to defend against the steak-knife-teeth of their enemies. Carnivores become bigger and stronger to eat them, the herbivores respond in size and armor. A hot war of evolution. Yet in the end, both of them die to the humble mammal. Nature does not care if you are Big. Nature only cares if you Survive and Reproduce.
We are told these things by dry-mouthed old men in polos, droning on about selection pressures, and the facts soar right past our ears. They are devoid of scaffolding or interest. Our minds structure the world around Stories. Dinosaurs are a Story. They are the legendary, larger-than-life tales that imprint the nature of reality into our Being. Facts can be learned, but Dinosaurs give that true understanding (or to use Heinlein’s cringey term, grokking).
Prehistory is the most beautiful of abstractions. Think about it - none of us has ever seen a living dinosaur. There is no written record of them, no depiction of them. Dinosaurs exist purely from archeological speculation. They are a story crafted purely of the curiosity and intelligence of men, a synthesis of Reason and Imagination. The crafting of these ancient stories are a testament to the best traits of humanity.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing dinosaurs teach us derives from that last point. All things die, all organic memory eventually fades, and - terrifying to the modern Western mind - the Individual loses meaning.
But the Earth carries memories in its flesh. The Earth will always remember we were here.
Dinosaurs remind us of that.
06 May 2025
Over the past week I’ve been listening to all 4* Animal Crossing (AC) games’ hourly themes to devise a playlist of my favorite for each hour. I exclusively listen to each theme during or within 10min of the hour (as in, 1pm from 12:50-2:10) trying to stay within the hour. The goal is to capture the “vibe” of the hour best.
My husband once said, “Music should be somewhere between where you are and where you want to be.” So the hourlies shouldn’t be solely the most pleasing objectively at all hours - 3pm should be the most pleasing with the mental state I am generally in at 3pm.
Exceptions were made for 1-6am because I’m pretty much never awake then nowadays. 1-4am were listened to in the hours before bedtime, and 4-6am right after waking up (preferably at 7 if I remember to get my headphones on by then). 4am is a weird hour. It should capture both being awake very late AND waking up very early.
The games are: GC for original GameCube AC, WW for Wild World / City Folk since City Folk is just a higher-quality WW soundtrack, NL for New Leaf, and NH for New Horizons.
We’ll start at 8am because that’s generally when I wake up.
8 am - GC
9 am - GC
10 am - WW
11 am - NL
12 pm - WW
1 pm - NL
2 pm - GC
3 pm - WW
4 pm - GC
5 pm - NH
6 pm - GC
7 pm - NL
8 pm - WW
9 pm - GC
10 pm - WW
11 pm - NL
12 am - GC
1 am - NL
2 am - NH
3 am - NL
4 am - NL
5 am - NH
6 am - WW
7 am - GC
Totals:
GC - 8
WW - 5
NL - 7
NH - 3
I’ve played hundreds of hours in all of these and don’t have any favoritism. I have plenty of cozy memories even with New Horizons (especially NH! I had the most socialization with that one, bonded me with IRL friends). Maybe Wild World would be the weakest entry? But the music seems pretty represented here.
It’s been interesting to listen to each soundtrack objectively, out of context of my feelings of playing the game. I started to think about what “vibez” each soundtrack expressed and tied that into my feelings on the game.
GameCube: Goofy, harsh, diamond-in-the-rough, surprising and fun. The soundtrack is cohesive but all over the place, incorporating wacky noises like a cat meowing, and some of the samples are low quality to the point where they hurt wearing headphones. Even if someone upscaled the samples and had an AC newbie listen to this soundtrack, I think they could tell that this was the first entry in the series. I noticed when I played the GC soundtrack through my phone speakers it was far more enjoyable. Meaning, the soundtrack is optimized for terrible speakers.
Wild World / City Folk: Iterates on the previous soundtrack ideas and refines them, but plays it too safe and occasionally becomes boring. Generally the WW songs aren’t exceptional and shine in an hour when the other options are so weird they’re bad.
New Leaf: A bit off-kilter, soothing, still in style with the previous soundtracks but adding its own offbeat flair. I think this soundtrack was the weakest of the first three games. There’s a lot of hits, but a lot of misses.
New Horizons: Trying too hard. Overworked, oversaturated, weird for weird’s sake, so attention-grabbing it distracts from the game and ruins the whole point the music exists. It also barely feels like Animal Crossing. So the soundtrack reflects the game’s mechanical differences well. It’s a decent soundtrack, but a terrible Animal Crossing soundtrack. New Horizons is a decent game, but a terrible Animal Crossing game. The design differences effuse the whole of the experience.
New Horizons (Snow/Rain): Somehow a completely different vibe than the main soundtrack. The replacement of the bassline string wanking with simple marimba strikes or bells simplifies the overwhelming soundtrack to something good. It’s still substantially different from its predecessors, but it’s enjoyably different instead of obnoxious.