11 Jul 2025
This is part of a series of articles that serve to describe some of my Theory of Mind of the world. They will be exactly as long as they need to be to convey the concept, so will vary from nearly tweet-sized to extended essays.
From observing people over years, we all seem to think that we are completely unique individuals and all of our thoughts and ideas core to our being are uniquely self-discovered – we chose who we are! Upon cursory examination however, most of our memes were clearly randomly rammed into and mostly pushed by commercial interests. I call this pseudorandom accrual the “Memetic Katamari Ball”, and more casually I will say something akin to “he just got katamari’d at the right time”. Here (and everywhere on the blog unless otherwise stated) I use “meme” in the Richard Dawkins sense as a “living thoughtform”.
Katamari Damacy is a game where you start with a small ball and run into stuff, and the stuff sticks to your ball if it’s an appropriate size to your ball. I admit now that I have never actually played it except for an hour or two at a friend’s house where she got mad I sucked at it and took the controller away to “show me how to play it” and then just ended up playing the game in front of me until I got bored (this happened with many PS1/2 games and is why most of the Sony game collection are not in my personal Katamari Ball). Anyway, the ball keeps getting bigger based on what you run into. My obvious allegory is that the memes that make us up as humans are just like a Katamari ball and our environment is the level map that provides the particular random elements we drive our ball towards to make it bigger.
A toddler who saw Death Note on TV is not going to add that to their Katamari Ball, but a teenager likely will. The analogy admtitedly quickly falls apart - A teenager who sees Teletubbies is not going to add that to their memetic katamari ball even though it’s a smaller size. On top of that, a jock is unlikely to see Death Note on TV and relate to it – Death Note appeals to outsiders, nerds, and weirdos. You need to have the appropriate memes on your Katamari ball before certain other ones can stick to it.
The key point here is that your ‘level’ is going to be based around when you were born, where you grew up, and what opportunities you had access to. If someone had put “playing tennis” in my path at the right time I would likely enjoy playing tennis. I’ve never had the opportunity, so I don’t care about tennis at all. My Katamari ball is specialized around computer use and “geeky” interests and now it would be quite challenging to add “playing tennis” to my personal ball unless someone made it quite worth my time to do so.
I’ll reinforce this with specific examples about me. I like Pokemon. I like it because the TV show was cool and I watched it after preschool every day because it was on after preschool every day and my parents let me watch TV then. I like Pokemon because my mom would walk me to Burger King and one day they had Pokemon keychains, and the Sandslash keychain I got was not a complete piece of crap like other kids meal toys (I still have it). When I joined Gaia Online because a friend I made at school was into Gaia Online and I looked up to her (how did she get into it? Who knows!), I gravitated toward the Pokemon Thread because I like Pokemon. I got into competitive Pokemon Gen 4 battling because I was on the Gaia Online Pokemon Thread. One of the users who I really liked was into Gundam and always framed her posts with Zero from SD Gundam Force so I watched SD Gundam Force, and then later in life when a friend showed me 00 Gundam (long before the dub came out) I really liked it, so I got into watching fansubbed anime released online.
I like Pokemon and Gundam. It’s not like I personally sought either of them out, though. They were put in my path and they stuck. There are items that didn’t stick – some examples from the Pokemon thread include one person I liked who liked weed and another who got into lolita dress. Neither of those stuck and I frown on weed use. I do have an innate love of the mechanical/technological and that contributes to why Gundam stuck on easily. Why do I have an innate love of “tech”? My dad is a huge car nut. So you can either chalk it up to my being around a car nut, or being the biological child of someone who already found mechanical things interesting. His father was also into tech – my grandfather worked for Western Electric on phone lines and never had any interest in cars - so I lean toward the biological justification for myself.
Life is a complex interplay between genetics and environment even deeper than what high school biology told us. I’ve been very affected by Sapolsky’s lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology that you can find here on YouTube (for now).
If the playlist goes down, I’ll link the first video so that you can find the rest.
Environment activates genetics which cause behavioral changes in environment. Fascinating stuff.
30 Jun 2025
I’m starting up a worldbuilding project. These won’t appear in the RSS feed because most people find other peoples worldbuilding boring. I will add onto posts when I’ve updated the pages, though.
Find the first one here!
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.