I'm Up Until I'm Down

Ever listen to that kind of music that sounds like it's sung through clenched teeth and a forced smile, perhaps while bleeding from a large, painful-looking wound to the side of the head, whilst your captors watch and listen? Yeah, that's how I'm seeing things nowadays. This is the lens I have. I know you don't care, but I thought it'd be nice to say. Give you a little look-see into my perspective. Not that the human condition doesn’t basically forbid anything of that sort. I’m pretty much taunting you with something that could never happen or be true except in your fevered hallucinations, and even then barely. Anyway.

I've been writing for quite some time; It's some nonsense about a prison and fascism and witchcraft, hurrah hurrah. It really gets old sometimes when you’re writing about old stuff and using old ideas and notes to cobble together an old tale which sorta makes you feel like you’re writing a cliché in disguise as what you slander as a “plot,” somehow avoiding the swinging blades of real authors. I'm a writer (or I call myself one), though- I love to hear myself talk. Or read myself write? That sounds both grammatically incorrect and disturbing, which is really just double-disturbing. But nonetheless, I have decided to re-immortalize Anton Praetorius in my writing with this story. What a coincidence that it's titled Praetorius then, eh? Originally I planned to make the allusion to ol' Praetor a rather veiled and subtle affair, but then I decided I'm a blunt little bugger and I doubt my readers would really appreciate the essentially masturbatory references anyway. Perhaps they would. Writing is an essentially masturbatory activity. Similar to public speaking (dear god do not drop that ‘l’, even if you think it would be funny, this is the internet, they will make it happen), but that's more like a group affair and I really don't want to delve into the psychosexual implications of that. Especially in the context of politicians.

Why?

One answer.

Dick Cheney.

So, yeah. Anyway.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, to be honest. I see above me that the plan today is for a Scheduled Outage of some kind for Blogger. It's like the world is ending. It's a beautiful thought, in the context of technology. Think of every site as a little world, a small planet or maybe even just an organism (though really worlds are just scaled-up meta-organisms in the first place) and imagine these "Scheduled Outages" as miniature Floods. Weekly Floods. Daily Armageddon. Sysadmins are doing the task of God to Noah, giving him the odd heads-up before the whole world is rebooted. Online geology is reset. The old is reinstated, and it's as if it's all the same. Perhaps it's never the same for the sites themselves; perhaps there's a small, imperceptible shift in tone and point of view with each Scheduled Outage. If they ever become self-aware, perhaps I'll ask. Or maybe they'll have taken my tongue by then and left my hands as useless nubs to prevent my jabbering on verbally or literarily about the good ol' times when humanity had the upperhand. And opposable thumbs. The kind not cut off at birth by our robot overlords.

I'm looking down now at the bottom of my page and Blogger is giving me this nice little message that it is repeatedly attempting to save a draft of this piece. "Could not contact Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail. Retrying...", heh. Looks like the Messiah came and went. The Apocalypse is now.

How entertaining. My little robo-savior is trying so valiantly and repetitively.

I wonder, can robots go insane? I think they are default as insane. AI Is a Crapshoot, you know. But honestly, insanity seems to be more likely specific to people who reason solely through cold, clinical logic with no checks in the form of "rationality". So perhaps robots are typically insane. I was just thinking this, because the definition of insanity, as some old guy said once a long time ago, is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. My little robo-savior is doing this. I feel so bad for it. I want to give it wheels and put it on the streets of New York. That's how much I love my little robo-savior.

Aaaand... my internet just died in the middle of this post. That is great.

Let's switch subjects.

Do you ever think that whatever god that’d decide to make us would have been in the same position that we are in currently, in respect to artificial intelligence? Maybe there was some Divine Fiction out there about mankind rising up and, instead of serving the gods, making his own gods to serve his own purposes. It was probably written by Hermes. Or Loki. That trickster seems like he'd enjoy sticking it to Odin, Vili, and Ve for their silliness and hubris.

"Sure, Aesir, give man Blood, Sense, and Spirit. I'll be over here starting my OWN apocalypse; at least in mine I'll WIN.

Albeit it vicariously through Fenrir, but STILL.

And yes, I realize that Vidar will kill Fenrir, but I mean... maybe the prophesy is a bit off?

Know what? Just, fuck you. I'mma go write a book."

Have you ever really thought about it, though? The Gods, what we once viewed as our creators and lords, are now nothing more than ways to describe ourselves and maybe explain a few things. When was the last time you sacrificed to a god?

When was the last time you sacrificed to a god that you didn't make up?

Yeah.

We are living in the Post-Robot-Apocalyptic World of the Gods.

I don't think I can end on a more awesome note than that.