The Normal Times

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  • I started serializing on Royal Road last week. I’d heard the name for years but had never looked into it. After getting invited to the flop that was Kindle Vella, I learned that I enjoy releasing bits and pieces periodically. I don’t know what it is I’m writing but it’s leaning most to dystopian fantasy.

    I’m optimistic about Royal Road even though I have no reason to be. Something about the money making aspect of Amazon seems to have clogged the waters. I haven’t had a bad time on Kindle, except for the Vella dud, but I look at the field and feel like I’m about to face a deadly molasses spill.

    Whatever, we’ll see.

  • A finance firm finds an obesity crisis. 

    Established and Prestige

    Come along and spit in her note. 

    Change my contact through the sham of a civilized society.

    Stretch an image to zoom in browser. 

    The Limit is one long blast to happen every year. 

    Figuratively, of course. 

    Blink is boss. 

    Passing it on. 

  • Is it all just bots?

    I’ve only made a few posts here, so I should say, there’s only so much tinfoil on my walls. Enough for me not to engrave a political party onto my core identity, enough to doubt the official reasons for every war that has ever occurred. Enough to side-eye my phone. Not enough bug-out to the woods (yet), not enough cry over the loss of Tartaria.

    Who owns these pinch point sites though? Who keeps them up, corrupted to gibberish and devoid of their old function. Are these the blighted neighborhoods of the internet? A fluke in the evolution of some old Angelfire server? I hate how little I can do with these.

    Then I wondered if I could turn them into poetry. Some silly thing to fiddle with when I’m toasted. Here is the first go:

    Infrastructure opens
to the Icon's name.

All people,
should we debate gun control?
Send off a thorn, with a three pad protective shirt?
What is the Wonderful point of everything?

Experience romance in the past. 
Any adult brother, or any muscle spasm
a cause of poisoning for children
without demanding instant perfection?
Or without aura?
Various colors available. 

Fair dealing as fair and accurate to you?
Girl and boy are very happy. 
Diagrammatic section,
the police attitude is perplexing. 
The morphology of boar spermatoza. 
The reprise version is out. 
The least fishy tasting fish?
Sorry, it was just poor audio quality. 

Permit filter is best? Is it?
Weed should not act as your glasses.
You did overlook the role, for instance. 
Motivation at this position tonight!
Halloween came early! 
All is counter clockwise.

    That was fun. I think I’ll call it Saipan Sucks. Til next time…

  • Wonderful point of everything?

    Excerpt from a possible AI demon blog.

    I work in a field governed by strict NDAs. That being stated, the easiest way to describe my daily work without detail is that it concerns AI training. The bulk of my workload is auditing the performance of a given AI system. The work is often times more tiresome than it is cyberpunk spooky.

    The creepy outliers themselves are usually typical. Things like outrageous clickbait sites with all caps headlines, self-maiming forums, lame cults. Things that somehow gate-crashed into the New Clean Internet. The image above is a cutting from a screen shot I recently took. There were tons of these in a result page that should have yielded a pile of shopping links and consumerist articles for a vacuum cleaner.

    For some reason they captivated me. They’re all the same, nothing but texts walls. Text that is palpably not human, but is patched together by a motley collection of human parts. Frankenpages. The work of electric ghouls.

    The phone number shown in the machine stuttering above is from the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. This is an unincorporated territory belonging to the United States that consists of 14 islands in the Mariana Archipelago. It has the population of a dying town, logging less than 50,000 in the 2020 Census. Most of the population stays on the islands of Saipan, Tinian and Rota. The northernmost islands are sparsely populated. One in particular used to have residents numbering in the thousands, but apparently no longer does for “various reasons”. This is the island called Pagan. Mild Spooky.

    I always wonder if there’s some dirty doings happening in these U.S. Territories with their states, not states politics. In a state of stoned intrigue, I decided to dig for the fool’s gold of conspiracy gossip from these islands. I found only a ghost. An old website titled, SaipanSucks.com. Rad stuff, but all gone. I could only find a Wikipedia bit about its pseudonymous creator:

    Nice.

    Saipan Sucks was written by a person or persons going by the pseudonym “Forgetabilia”. Reported investigations carried out by the CNMI government in July 2001 led to an alleged belief about a real identity behind this persona. Later, on November 16, 2006, a CNMI daily alleged that Saipan Sucks was written by a former CNMI Assistant Attorney General, who the daily reported as having “disliked his position” in the CNMI. The same day, a regional publication denied the claim, reiterating that the author or authors remain anonymous. Saipan Sucks closes by stating, “As for the authors of this essay, our days in Micronesia have ended … In all likelihood we shall remain happily for the rest of our days ensconced in anonymous Longnesia, suffering, with a little luck, from a selective am-nesia. Hence our name – Forgetabilia.”

    As of September 10, 2014, the website was no longer available. However, it has been reposted at saipansucks.weebly.com.

    Wikipedia entry for SaipanSucks.com

    The website, while it lasted, was said to present allegations of corruption, racism, nepotism, jury-rigging, worker exploitation, employment discrimination, and mismanagement of the CNMI tourism industry by local CNMI officials, and sought to warn U.S. mainlanders about moving to the islands to accept employment offers.

    “Nepotism rules on the islands. Fueled by money paid by American taxpayers and diverted to the far-off territory, politicians run for office primarily for the sake of being in a position to appoint their relatives to high-paying sinecures.”

    Forgetabilia, writing on SaipanSucks.

    So close I could almost smell it. At the same time, this is the sort of thing I expected. Island corruption seems to the only way these U.S. Territories ever go. What I could find very little on was the U.S. military activity on the islands. There’s some history logged in connection to the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and general statements of there being military bases on the islands somewherabouts. But mostly everything points you over to Guam and the subject moves on.

    Is it spooky? Have I caught a single straw in my grasping?

    So these screenshots. I didn’t read all of them. I screenshot them, somehow thinking they would make sense later or something. I wanted to write a series about these, and about a certain theory I’ve been hearing the last year or two. I had heard of dead internet theory before, but only recently did I read something that really fleshed it out. Did the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana and the censored SaipanSucks bring me any closer to deciphering these or evidencing the dead internet theory that I so far only naively understand?

    I don’t know yet. I doubt it, but I’m having a good time.

  • I wanted my first post to be nice and all loaded with whimsy. I can’t stand Firsts, the anxiety and nit-picking feels like I’m walking through tar. I’ll leave my gripes up here if I can.

    For months I’ve wondered what happened to World’s Fairs. I’ve not bothered with any research on it, instead letting it indulgently mytholigize in my head. This was the World’s Fair held in 1984 in Louisiana. I love the fake grandeur of World’s Fair buildings. I’d been wondering about these fairs and where they went for almost a year. It was kicked off by a passing comment about the Paris fair in 1900 being mentioned in some boring book I was reading.

    Then one recent and quiet night I was perusing through the conspiracy theory sites. I learned about Tartaria, and its architectural conspiracy theory. It’s, essentially, an alternative history theory. The overall premise is an alternative history. A vast, technologically advanced “Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia or thereabouts, either influenced or built vast cities and infrastructure all over the world. (Tartaria, or Tartary, though never a coherent empire, was indeed a general term for north-central Asia.) Either via a sudden cataclysm or a steady antagonistic decline — and perhaps as recently as 100 years ago — Tartaria fell. Its great buildings were buried, and its history was erased. After this “great reset,” the few surviving examples of Tartarian architecture were falsely recast as the work of contemporary builders who could never have executed buildings of such grace and beauty, and subjected them to clumsy alterations.

    A popular Tartarian claim: Panama–Pacific International Exposition
    Feb 20, 1915 – Dec 4, 1915, San Francisco, California

    The buildings that tend to get picked as evidence of Tartarian greatness have a few basic style qualities in common. Any building that’s particularly ornate and pre-modern, encompassing many Western styles: Classical, Beaux-Arts, Second Empire. In other words, the very pretty ones that don’t get made anymore. There’s another point that the Great Wall of China was built by Tartaria to keep the Chinese from invading.

    The new world tends to be the general setting of the bulk of these theories, which is odd since Tartaria is supposed to be dead center in Eurasia. American cities of the 19th century are often rich with Tartarian appropriation, especially the young settlements of the West, when grand public structures seemed to emerge from the wilderness, surrounded by wood hovels and muddy streets. State capitol buildings and city halls are frequently fingered as palaces of ancient Tartaria rather than Gilded Age municipal buildings.

    The Tartarian milieu is an intensely visual medium, occupied with riffing on photos and maps, as well as picking out apparent inconsistencies. The theory is light on reasoning as to why and how the greatest cover-up in history was undertaken, but it does offer a few options for how Tartaria was erased and the great reset propagated. Many say that an apocalyptic mud flood buried its great buildings; some suggest the use of high-tech weaponry to tactically remove Tartarian infrastructure. A consistent theme is that warfare is an often-used pretext to wipe away surviving traces of Tartarian civilization, with the two world wars of the 20th century finishing work that may have begun with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.  Fascinating.

    Another Tartarian claim: The Chicago Federal building.

    It will soon become clear, if I keep this bloggery up, that I rather like conspiracy theories. I recently saw someone, in an attempt to be snarky, say that conspiracy theorists are people who should have been writers but they’re not creative enough. I don’t share that exact opinion, but it had something to it. Conspiracy theories have a kind of open source information system a lot of the times, a kind of community centers around each one. I’m of the opinion that many conspiracy theories are created as a mental coping mechanism. That something is wrong, a tear is found in the cosmic reality, and some personalities must draw it out and name it something, or their anxiety will drown them. So I wonder, about this lovely Tartaria, if this is a cope for the ugly modern world. The strange prominence of American locations in this theory makes me think this all the more. American cities may have some decorative and grand buildings downtown, shouldered among the steel and glass towers. Towns may have quaint central squares. Much of the country bears the curse of the strip mall, or the ghosts of former Pizza Huts and shopping malls. Given your location, one may spend the majority of their time in an environment so drab that it’s almost impossible to romanticize your place in it. Pragmatic, post-war houses and commercial zones. Dollar Store, Denny’s, Citgo, Waffle House, Wal-Mart, Amoco. Towns with names like Smithville and Springfield. The world got more comfortable, and that was paid for with the loss of aesthetics.

    But what do I know?

    Supposed map from 1754 portraying Tartaria.

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