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it's tomorrow in kazakhstan

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@ -16,6 +16,257 @@ ideas' witlessness;
ideas' witnesses; ideas' witnesses;
ideas- ideas-
2023-01-05
2021-07-07
Antero
A person woke up wrapped in satin sheets, head atop a comfortably
stuffed pillow. They remembered the two most important things: Take the pill.
Check the book.
The book. Where was the book. Their room came into view. A wallpaper of
lilacs on a cream background. Large windows, nearly floor to ceiling. The book
was to their left.
June 1, 21XX. Ah, the first of a new month. Funny how that happens.
They quickly flipped to the front. EDWARDS Eugene \ Class: Well-to-do. Ah.
Well-to-do. Well in-deed.
The last thing Eugene Edwards remembered was sitting in a pub in, oh,
what year is it now? 21XX. So 40 years prior; sitting in a pub, having a pint
of whatever happened to be on tap at that point. No televisions. No televisions
at the bar. There were people on phones though. Eugene watched them, thinking.
Kids on their phone. Is it a phone? Are they still phones nowadays? Fuck it.
Phones. Just about the same anyway.
The kids were on their phones scrolling through memetic imagery like a
hundred years prior back when lead and fluoride and Donald Trump and quantum
computers and oh god think of the children were on people's minds and when
those were the only just about the only things on people's minds no
cognitoviruses no hazards just green grass et cetera. A hundred years prior.
Eugene wasn't there, nor were Eugene's parents, nor grandparents. Eugene's
great grandparents were alive though. Given the plastic content in the
grandparents' bones, Eugene figured the times were not great. But maybe they
were okay. They could have been okay.
The concrete age.
Eugene was watching them on their phones. Whatever the fuck those
hipsters used. And Eugene watched the kid on the left, or the right - the one
farthest from the exit - Eugene watched them drop their phone, suddenly, and
tense up. Like getting electrically shocked. All their muscles tightened, their
face got red, their veins got big, like Rob Muscanis doing a dead-lift. Then
the kid passed out. Passed the fuck out. Then the same thing happened to
another kid and slowly as the kids checked what was on each others' phones it
rippled out.
Cognitohazard. That was what it was called. A memetic cognitohazard.
Sweeping the god damn planet. The Indians and the Koreans both denied it was
them immediately though they were under the closest scrutiny; India in
particular had been known for trying to manufacture cognitohazards for military
use. And all this investigation (in the wrong places) while it took kid after
kid. And killed them! A fucking memetic image.
That night was when Eugene learned about Antero.
Antero is an experimental (now not so much) drug aimed at preventing
the formation of new memories for 24 hours after ingestion. It's usually taken
in the morning; available to every class and every body free of charge from the
government not out of nefarious purpose (though that is questioned daily by a
number of folks more than suspicious of the UPK's leadership) but out of a
great need. Without Antero, fuck. Antero turns the permanent death of a
cognitovirus into a temporary absence from the brain of the user. Antero is the
penicillin of the twenty second century. Thank your local god for Antero, then
thank the drug company that came up with it, Gokko (pronounced "gohk koh")
Pharmaceutical. Then, of course, thank the Japanese.
Eugene took their first Antero the following morning, and by the looks
of Eugene's book of short term memories gone long term gone gone, Eugene had
taken Antero every morning since then, for the past forty years. Well,
thirty-six years technically, thirty six years, three months, and a day. Eugene
figured most people would be afraid to wake up forty years older (especially
given that Eugene was just about reaching UPK life expectancy of sixty-four).
However, Eugene did not have emotions; Eugene was technically a psychopath.
Though this word is antiquated now and will be far more antiquated by the time
this story occurs; psychopathy is not a real diagnosable medical condition,
rather a collection of common attributes, and the term is hampered by a very
strong connotation that psychopaths are violent and compulsively homicidal.
Eugene was neither.
Eugene's book was written in a somewhat different way from their usual
writing. At least that's what they figured at first look. On first glance, the
entries were scrawled quickly and looked dirtier than their usual work (or
their usual work of forty years' prior). Done so to save time, probably. And
the entries were bulleted and abbreviated. "I went out for dinner with Laura.
She seemed happy and has just gotten engaged to the kind-hearted and hearty
mutual friend of ours Brian." becomes simply "dined with laura. now eng. w/
brian"; "laura" and "brian" both hyperlinks to the relevant written profiles
within Eugene's book (mentioned entry dated January 8 and both profiles updated
automatically with this information at the same time).
So, what to do today. 21XX-07-01. Go to work at Rogo Corporation. Job
is to supervise the automatic production of electric machetes and rapidly debug
errors. At nine hundred hours, attend meeting determining scope and cause of
formula errors in accounting department, and consequences. Okay. Eugene got out
of bed, went to the bathroom, brushed their teeth, and did other usual
activities similar to one does in the bathroom. Then they put on a
tight-fitting black collared t-shirt, light and thin dark blue jacket, and
black jeans, and walked downstairs to hail a cab to the tallest skyscraper in
their city.
"Memes", viral thoughts, have existed for millennia. As the time taken
for a thought to circumnavigate the world decreased, the sheer amount of memes
increased. The printing press, telegraph, telephone, television, all
accelerated the travel of memes. However, the mass popularization of the use of
the Internet mainly through the world wide web in the early twenty-first
century predictably spawned an unprecedented environment in which memes could
form, pass through the minds of millions of people, and die, in the span of
hours. This was the perfect petri dish in which cognitoviruses could evolve.
Cognitoviruses, or memetic cognitohazards, are self-propagating mind
worms that often interfere with the capability of the subject's brain to
accomplish tasks necessary in order to think. The first cognitoviruses were
temporarily distracting and rather harmless; for example, a game where,
whenever one thinks of it, they lose, which is in turn unwinnable unless the
subject never knew of the game in the first place, but of which the subject is
compelled to tell others, is a very classic example (and one that was popular
on the Internet through the mid 2010s). As research into the phenomenon of
cognitohazardous materials and the memetic transmission of cognitohazards
evolved, cognitoviruses were developed and published that began to circulate
through popular communicative Internet services, and soon became a "meme"
themselves.
It was in the late twenty-first century that a cognitovirus was
developed that was, more or less, lethal, and theorized to be the work of a
state military though the true origin is uncertain. And Antero sat as a
published paper and niche-market drug, usually applied in the treatments of
mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. In the
week following the release of the first lethal cognitovirus the usage of
communicative Internet services plummeted, meanwhile Gokko Pharma's valuation
increased fifty-fold. And so the world kept spinning.
Antero. Eugene needed to take the pill. They were halfway down the
stairs from their rented living space before they remembered and had to walk
back up. On the other side of the bed from where their book was. A blue bottle
with white cap; inside, a dozen or so green pills. Eugene dry-swallowed one and
went back down the stairs to the street to find a driver.
This is not nearly my best writing. I thought 七月 was June, the
description of Eugene is so bland yet so pseudo-edgy. I like that Eugene uses
gender-neutral pronouns but that was because of my misunderstanding of gender
in which I thought such a thing was ridiculous and everybody should be neutral.
I like the idea of memes as weapons and still think about it - I used to do
stuff like that (and that's all I can say about that). But I think this style
of narration sucks and the world described was excessively bland - intended to
be British but without much subtle charm that colors the otherwise gray world
of England in media. It's nice that my writing's improved so much in 18 months
- or maybe I'm just not divorced far enough by time from what I write in this
blah to see the glaring flaws.
I'm gonna have to put pipes at the start of the next one's lines
because it's reliant on the structure of the text - I can't just indent each
paragraph and shove it together to indicate relation between segments like I
can when I put random snippets of writing in here.
2021-08-12
|Anonym's journey to the center of the universe
|
| began on 31 september 2021 in the town of little rock maine. anonym
| went to a big franchised or whatever drugstore to buy a coca cola. then they
| went to check out but they noticed no registers were open. yet the store was
| still open, and there was a worker there striding around the registers
|
| "hi, I'd like to check out please" anonym
| Worker: "Yes, that's for what I'm here."
| "well, ah, where should i pay for my cola?" anonym
| Worker: "Please use the self-checkouts."
| "i don't really understand how to use the automatons" anonym
| Worker: "Yes, that's for what I'm here
| I'm here to show you how to use the self-checkouts."
| "alright" anonym
|
| anonym learned to use the automatons to complete transactions
|
| "so, what do you think of coca cola? what sodas do you like?" anonym
| Worker: "I don't know. I drink any beverage."
| "you don't have a preference? even something you like more than others?" anonym
| Worker: "No."
|
| anonym left the store and continued their journey to the center of the
| universe
That one was basically just a transcript of an interaction I had at my
local CVS. I hate my local CVS.
2021-03-05
The Journey
Kenan Gleick woke up on a Tuesday morning, in a town neither you nor I
have heard of, Michigan, to a soft roar emanating from outside the room in
which was the bed in which he'd apparently slept. He recognized neither the
bed, nor the room, nor the view outside the window, nor, upon putting on the
clothes in the mahogany bureau next to the bed (business-casual khakis, a pair
of sneakers, and a black "Thanks for the toast!" tee shirt) and looking up at
the mirror above the bureau, himself.
He pocketed a cheap multitool on top of the bureau. He knew who he had
once been - a cashier at a local supermarket - but it didn't seem relevant to
who he was now. His palms had worn since he'd last seen them. He crossed the
hardwood flooring and opened the white door before entering a hall, painted a
diseased maroon, to find what appeared to be a handyman or some other sort of
contract laborer grinding through the drywall with a rotary saw. The man turned
off the blade and stared at Kenan. "That room was just empty."
"Sorry." Kenan quickly walked into what was marked as a stairwell and
treaded down the stairs until he came to the sign indicating the ground floor,
where he broke into a jog and quickly made it outside the hotel before anyone
could ask any questions.
I remember thinking about this one but I don't know what it was gonna
be about. This is also probably the earliest piece of writing I have saved on
my computer. There are really old ones that maybe I'll dig out at some point
but I've already pasted three here for today and I can only bear so much
embarrassment at the writing of my 17 year old self.
The trinity.moe/blah chronological cut must be so confusing to watch!
I found an ancient blog of mine from when I was a kid.
2016-04-09
Today we didn't have school because it's Saturday. I went to one of my
friend's birthday parties, [...]'s, to be exact, and I got him a Nerf Elite
Dual-Strike. It was a Nerf party, by the way, and it's no mystery of whether
Han or Greedo shot first. I did. I also met up with my (old) friend, [...], and
shot him. It was kinda boring today altogether though.
2016-04-11
School was nothing special today. I've been trying to think of a
YouTube video to make. I've been getting vlogger's block. It's weird. Also, I
heard of something I think everybody should check out - a petition asking
Blizzard to stop trying to sue Nostalrius. Sign it! Please!
2016-04-16
I didn't post anything for the week, since I was so busy with school,
but now it's April vacation so I can blog all I want. My favorite Minecraft
server, play.prxcraft.net, is shutting down on the 20th.
2016-05-24
I've been busy this month. It's just too much, especially with
volunteering and all the other crap our school makes us do. Meh. Another day,
another blog. Another Weebly site to watch is AnimeFreak. Weebly's doing
something stupid so that entire sentence was linked. Enjoy.
EDIT: I linked the word now. Just the word. DEAL WITH IT.
Somewhere along the way, probably inspired by Paul Graham's blog, I
learned it's less interesting to write about what you /do/ (unless what you do
is absolutely fascinating, which most of the time it is not) and more
interesting to write about what you're /thinking/.
About a month after these I started on a webcomic which had the writing
quality of CtrlAltDel and a slightly better art quality than Arson Comics. It
had various unfunny jokes about virtual reality (which I had not yet tried),
self driving cars (which did not yet exist), arcade machines that could play
every video game ever made (which I didn't know existed), and the usual
violence-as-a-punchline, a hallmark of 00s and 10s webcomics.
My favorite webcomics were xkcd (which I discovered at the time Vodka
was published - 2015-05-22, I guess) and MegaTokyo (which I discovered on
xkcd's site footer). MegaTokyo taught me leetspeek and a ton of weaboo culture,
and I still love the common fantasy of being stranded in a metropolitan area
and being forced to just Figure It Out. Later I also read TwoKinds, Savestate,
Junior Scientist Power Hour, and others.
I would be thoroughly shocked if I found anything older than 2014 that
I could paste onto here. My life only really began when I turned 18, anyway.
2023-01-04 2023-01-04
Karl and Will watched Captain James Cook sit in his recliner, seeming Karl and Will watched Captain James Cook sit in his recliner, seeming