Kinda late in the game

I’m going to be responding to a youtube video I saw recently, it’s from this guy called Monday (a pseudonym obviously) and I know I have always tried not to mention e-celebs and internet personalities by name but this video really helped me stay sane and I want to talk about it. I want to grasp onto it and not let go, I’m scared that if I forget this feeling that I’ll slip back into the dark pit I’ve been stuck in this last week. Now I’ve been watching his videos for a good four or five months now and some of them have been really helpful, or at least thought provoking, but I think this just found me at the right time. He has several channels, but one in particular where he specifically talks about what I guess he would call “the foreveralone phenomenon”, and the video I just saw was on that channel. Now this video, I saw it at the end of what has been a particularly difficult day for me. So I was kind of on the look out for anything that might help me feel better, and perhaps that means I’m finding meaning or a sense of hope that isn’t really there because I’m just desperate, but it feels a little bit real right now and I don’t have much else.. so I’m going to write about it.

Ok, so I’ve tried to explain what happened several times over and had to keep deleting it all so I’m just going to give the briefest summary possible of what happened today. I had a long discussion with my dad, almost seven hours, I told him all about the many ways in which I feel resentful towards him. I told him that I blamed him for me turning out to be so weak willed and spineless, that I blamed him for me losing most of my friends, and because of that I felt like he was also indirectly responsible for me slowly becoming completely isolated and cut off from the world. Now we talked about all of that and a whole lot more as well, and I just felt worse after the conversation was over. I only want one thing, I want him to leave. Now I know how that sounds without the proper context, but I have kind of explained my rather unusual living situation in this post, so maybe give that a read it’s very short. In fact it’s one of the worst posts I’ve ever uploaded, but it’s the only time I’ve talked about my living situation here so it’ll have to do.

I can’t leave, so if I want to be able to try and even start to build some kind of a life he has to be the one to go. Yet he never does, he promises month after month, year after year that he’s making plans to move out and let me have some independence and yet he’s still here. It’s horrible, and I feel bad because as much as I do have a lot of anger and bitterness towards him he is my own father and I’m not strong enough to force him to leave even though I could legally evict him. He has to choose to do it, and if not I’m going to be his age (55) before I can even start my life. That thought is soul destroying, and I don’t see a way out. I’m incredibly “far behind” my peers in terms of the standard set of accomplishments people are generally expected to be working on throughout their lives, and I can’t get started catching up (although I don’t ever see myself on the “standard” path, but just having some kind of life where I feel in control and have something to work towards/ a goal) as long as he’s still around. I mean I could, I could move out and find a place of my own but I’d literally be throwing away several hundred thousand pounds. Also like I said, every time I start to get desperate and say if he won’t leave I’ll just have to he promises again that he will actually leave soon and then I spend another six months to a year just in my room waiting for him to leave so I can fucking do something.

I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned this story on this blog yet, it might not have come up, but I told him for the first time in the conversation today about this incident which happened to me not too long after I got my job and I think it illustrates what I’m talking about perfectly so I’ll mention it here. I was working a sunday shift, and this Spanish girl came into the shop and asked if she could plug her phone charger into one of the sockets until her bus arrived. Now she was kind of looking at her phone most of the time but also kept stopping to talk to me and for whatever reason I found it surprisingly easy to talk to her. Usually I have a lot of trouble talking with people, women especially of course but it’s certainly with other males too. I can quite vividly remember this one moment where I corrected something she said, and she just gave me this incredibly warm smile while looking directly into my eyes from only a foot away. She was pretty too, not stunning by any means but I’m sure most guys would be perfectly happy with a girlfriend who looked like her.

Then just before she was leaving, she pulled out this big notebook and opened it out on the desk right in front of me and asked me to write down my phone number. So I was a little confused, and I was starting to explain to her that if she gets lost or something it would make more sense to actually call the british transport police rather than me… and then she started laughing. Only then did I actually realise she was asking me out, and she must have assumed I was joking but I really did completely misunderstand her at first. The idea of it was absurd, I actually remember laughing openly immediately after realising what she wanted because of how out of left field it was. Which was probably misinterpreted also, as me laughing at the “joke” she thought I had made.

See this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me regularly because I’m never around women, the idea of getting a girlfriend or even just losing my virginity is always distant, it could happen but it’s not going to be tomorrow, or next week or in half a year. Yes I meet the customers but I’m pretty sure an attractive female customer asking for my phone number is a one in a million event that won’t happen again. The reliable way that most guys find a gf is through a social circle, that’s also the way they find friends more generally speaking and frankly jobs and opportunities as well. Life stems from this nexus in almost every regard, and if you don’t somehow plug yourself into one and instead fall through the cracks it can be incredibly difficult to get by.

Anyway that incident in particular is unusual as I said, but it’s not the only time something similar has happened. I mean, some kind of interaction that has left me convinced that the female was interested. This isn’t me trying to brag, despite what r9k says you don’t need to be chad to attract women, by my age something like 96% of men have lost their virginity. I’m talking about this because it has a greater point, which is that it happens just frequently enough that I never change. It’s why I never fell into this total hopelessness about it that some people on r9k seem to have, because every time I’m getting close to accepting that I’ll just always be alone something like this happens to remind me that I could have had a chance if only something went differently.

Yet nothing ever actually works out, take this example in particular of the Spanish girl. She texted me later that evening, and wanted to meet. I said I couldn’t do the first suggestion because I was working that day, then I made a suggestion and that was “too long to wait”. She was apparently only here for a few weeks, so I don’t even know what her plan was but I kind of felt like my time had been wasted so I deleted her number and the conversation thread. I was also kind of developing oneitis for my co-worker, the one who had a boyfriend (although obviously at this point I wasn’t aware of that) of the two I talked about in my very first few posts. So perhaps that somehow affected how I acted in that situation, I can’t know but it’s a possibility.

Well I just think that it’s kind of an interesting parallel, nothing ever actually happens in my life and I’ve made no progress in any regard. Not just in finding a girlfriend, in any area. See most people are not “go getters” from the start, they have to realise that life isn’t going to come to them, but there are people in the world who don’t need to do anything and it’s easy to convince yourself that could be you. It takes a long period of things not going your way to motivate most people, at this point I’ve read countless stories from normies who claim to have been “robots themselves once” and they always talk about how they had to hit rock bottom first, and in my case especially I think my ability to get excited or motivated is diminished. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean the region of the brain that governs that sort of thing is somehow damaged, but I’m going to get into that later in this post when I talk about the video.

Now every time it gets really bad and I start to reach this breaking point that a lot of people need to get to, something happens to prolong my lethargy. A girl shows some kind of interest in me, which convinces me I don’t need to make any effort because eventually if this keeps happening I won’t spill my spaghetti or somehow fuck it up, and I never grow the spine to take matters into my own hands. Whether it be online dating, or trying to go back to study, or find some kind of career. I probably will end up alone and with no accomplishments. I’ve also got some other problems with online dating that I’ve talked about here, if you’re interested. So I consciously recognise this, but I don’t feel like it really is that way.

As I say, something prevents me every time from hitting that point where I recognise this reality on a deeper level. Yes I know this doesn’t reflect well on me, a stronger person wouldn’t just keep up the inertia that is slowly destroying them, but obviously I’m not a stronger person. I’m like the frog that’s slowly being boiled alive, but every time I start to perhaps figure out the water is heating up the water is cooled down slightly. There’s a big difference between being able to consciously recognise what is happening and being able to actually reroute these damaging thought patterns. It literally is biological, there is something deeper. I’ve tried for half a decade to “think my way out” of this way of living and I can’t do it.

So in the discussion I had with my dad I brought that story up for a different reason, it’s only upon reflection after talking with him and both things being on my mind that I had this eureka moment where I realised there was this pattern in both areas of my life. There is a big difference as well, in the case of him constantly promising to leave he’s deliberately stringing me along rather than me perhaps stringing myself along you could say in other regards. On top of that, it is my own father doing this to me so there’s an added feeling of betrayal. Because we all understand that as a parent the one thing you should prioritise is the success and happiness of your offspring, I don’t think anyone would disagree.

Yet if I actually expect him to live up to this I’m called entitled, I’m blaming my parents for my own character faults, and I’m the kind of person on which that kind of line of thinking actually will work. I’m very self critical, I’m always trying to make sure that I’m not just “coping” or lying to myself. Yet when I really think about it, this kind of pattern started when I was in my early teens and he had taken over the role of main carer. I actually can accept that it’s kind of a “bad look” to blame your parents for all your troubles in life, but surely it’s even more pathetic and shitty to blame a young teen who is in your sole care for them failing on the most fundamental level.

The reason I mentioned the story with that girl when talking with him was because at one point he asked if I thought I’d find a girlfriend soon, the implication being that would perhaps make me happier, and I said I found it incredibly unlikely. Now maybe it’s because I just never talk about this sort of thing with him, the subject has come up maybe three or four times ever, but he seemed really surprised that I would say that. So he kept trying to move back to that subject, and I guess I thought that that story would better explain. It’s not that I don’t think I can find a gf, it’s that I don’t think I will. Again I mean I don’t rationally see it happening, of course in some sense I still feel otherwise but I’m somehow aware this is self delusion.

I don’t see myself changing certainly not while I’m still living with him. As I said I’ve become a very resentful person and I just get angry when I can even hear him in the other room. I’ve been getting violent intrusive thoughts more and more frequently over the last year or so. He said to me that in these trips away he takes a couple times a year I don’t seem to change, but I’m going to need to be away from his poison for longer than that to get better and in fact I actually am noticeably more productive and happy when I’m away from him for more than a week. Here’s an example, despite the whole situation that I was going through last time he went away right around the start of this blog I wrote almost twice as many posts in that month than most since. It took a while to return to normal as well, as I wrote quite a lot in the second month as well, and then after a few weeks of him getting home this depressive fog settled over me again.

Anyway, the conversation accomplished very little. My dad is more aware now of how bitter I am towards him and he says he’ll try to find a job and a place to live but I can’t help but feel like in a year’s time he’ll still be here leeching off of me and the government teat. I’ve just lost all respect I once had for him, and it’s really sad because there was a time when I was a small boy where I respected him more than anyone else in the world, and I remember what it was like. The only interesting turn the discussion took was just before I decided I couldn’t stand being in the same room as him anymore, we started talking about my lack of motivation. I mean generally speaking, and also how that coincided with the period of the last five years where I feel like I’ve been on this downward spiral into total isolation and apathy.

Now obviously my lack of motivation or desire to do anything is something I’ve struggled with trying to overcome for as long as I’ve experienced it, but I’ve never really spoken about it with a real person. Not in depth I mean, I’ve only really been able to vent about it and talk about how to perhaps overcome it with people online. Even with the girl I talked about in this post, I never really got to talk about it much despite the fact that I was quite concerned about it at the time having just dropped out of my A-level courses because of it. I mean we did, but not really, I’ve never been able to have a conversation with someone that was in depth. I’ve never been able to get someone else’s opinion on my specific version of this problem. Like I said though it wasn’t that helpful yesterday either, and I kind of gave up and just ended the talk but it did serve to remind me that this is the crux of it. This lack of drive, it’s what everything else kind of rests on.

Yes, I still do hold my dad’s poor parenting responsible for me losing my friends/ turning down the invites and attempts to pull me along with him that one friend in particular made. I think if I had a social circle I would have found it easier to just push through with my education and I would be working on something to this day even if there was this underlying lack of willpower. I suppose, the isolation basically intensified it quite drastically. If I’d had gone along to these social things, met up with this friend and all the new people he was trying to introduce me to I would have maybe even found a girlfriend by my late teens in the same organic way that most fucking people on the planet do. I’d have probably gone on to university after finishing my A-levels, and met more people there that I liked. I think I’m always going to feel like he took that away from me, but I am still young as people love to remind me and while I can’t go back and redo life the “normal way” I can try and solve the deeper issue. I can try and fix my brain, and this is the conclusion that I came to after watching this video I said I’d talk about.

See my dad’s perspective when I started going into detail about this problem I’ve faced for the last half decade was that there wasn’t really a problem. That I don’t need to have motivation, that I only think of the idea of working towards a goal as something I should have because of social conditioning or something like that. Basically he had the most typical cynical Gen Xer take on it you can imagine, the exact kind of toxic attitude that makes living with him so fucking unbearable. He also kept focusing on the university example I used, it’s like he’s incapable of abstract thought. He is not a very intelligent man, if that wasn’t already clear, and I hate saying that but it’s true. I was using that as an example of something that many people do aspire towards, getting a degree (something he actually did himself, a law degree, even though he did nothing with it) is a goal for many people. It could be travelling, or starting a business, or having a family. These are things that people live for, these are reasons they get up in the morning. That’s what I don’t have.

The problem is I’ve tried, I’ve thought about all of the standard things like those I’ve listed and some more unusual ones and they all just sound really shit. Every time I think I’ve found something that could be “my thing”, I start to instinctively pick it apart and think about how it would be pointless and unsatisfactory if I actually pursued it. The thing is, most people today in the western world have been raised as godless epistemic materialists. It’s incredibly rare to find someone who has a sense of true or objective meaning or purpose, now you’ll quite frequently be told to “find your own meaning”. And that right there is the difference, somehow most people are able to do that but I can’t. Ennui is the unfortunate side affect of prosperity, and you see that all around you, but it doesn’t make most people practically catatonic. It’s not normal, it’s actually very unhealthy and it’s destroying me as it has destroyed my dad. The difference is he isn’t consciously aware of it, he thinks that this living death is normal which is why he doesn’t care that it’s happening to me.

It’s the video that made me realise this, see in it this Monday guy talks about a conversation on his discord server between two men and they seem to end up talking about the same issue. One of the guys talking doesn’t know what he wants, just in life generally speaking, and the video explains how that is actually not just normal but incredibly concerning and unusual in a way that is better than I ever could so I really think you should watch it. Anyway like he said, if you’re 14 or 15 and you don’t know what you want to do with your life that’s one thing, but it’s in the years following that where you go on to find out. I’m 21 now, nearly 22, and I’ve made no progress. In fact I’ve regressed, because I had some kind of idea that I would try and pursue a STEM subject in my mind during my teens and now I have nothing.

It’s not just these two men on his discord server though, and they were men, he specifies in the video that they were on the older side. This is the exact kind of behaviour you see on 4chan, I actually mentioned it in a post here recently I’m sure but I can’t be bothered to check which one, you go to 4chan to have any “big idea” be torn apart and revealed for the dumb gay stupid silly waste of thought it really is. People talk constantly about how it’s like the crabs in a bucket mentality, that people want to just bring others down to their level. Well I now think that’s not quite accurate, I think this is just how the kind of person who ends up on 4chan or at least on a board like r9k is all of the time. We are both the crab trying to escape, and the crab pulling him back down at the same time. This ability to shoot down ideas is just something people like us have got really good at, the neural pathway for it is particularly strong.

In fact in the video he goes on to talk about brain chemistry, that’s the real meat of it. He mentions an article, which I wish he’d been able to find and link to because I couldn’t find it based on what he says about it in the video, and it is about this woman who through brain damage lost her ability to experience emotion. I think that’s perhaps an exaggeration though, because it seems rather ridiculous to entirely lose the ability to feel emotion, but I’m pretty sure what he meant was that the region of the brain responsible for emotion (the limbic system) was the damaged area. Now what’s so interesting is that this led to her being unable to make decisions, she lost the ability to have preferences you could say. Now her case was extreme, she couldn’t make the simplest decisions we do in day to day life like what to have for dinner, but the point we can take from this is that the two things are inseparable. As he says in the video, without feelings we can’t make decisions.

So then the logical next step is that perhaps people who suffer from this lack of motivation also have damage in this region of the brain, and it is interesting that a lot of what he calls “FAs” and maybe I’d call incels or robots do seem to experience this. If you did a Venn diagram of both lack of motivation and “identifies as incel/ FA/ robot etc.” it’d probably look more like a simple circle. Now he talks about child abuse specifically, and the link between childhood abuse and FAs is something he’s talked about in quite a few videos, but I’ve never experienced that. It’s interesting, and worth talking about, but I haven’t experienced it and talking about it won’t help me which is what I was focused on at the time when watching the video. I did however have an experience which does parallel this phenomenon of “emotionally shutting down” that supposedly is very common for children growing up in abusive households. My mother’s suicide.

Now I’ve said before that I’ll probably write a whole long post about that situation, and I still probably will, but this isn’t that post. I’m just mentioning it because, as I said, there is a very interesting parallel. See immediately following the news I remember how I almost didn’t react to it. I don’t just mean externally, that I stayed calm while emotions were raging inside me, I mean I somehow suppressed almost all feeling. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was like the autopilot took over. I was going through the motions, there was a funeral to plan and the matter of where I was going to live and who would look after me and I basically didn’t experience any emotion at all for days. I remember going to see her in the chapel of rest, I think that was the first time I felt anything and it was difficult because at the same as this realisation that she really was dead and I’d never be able to speak to her again was hitting home I was also going through the horror of seeing a corpse for the first time.

Ever since then I’ve had long periods of very little emotion, which always culminate in a period of a few days to a week of rather intense depressive episodes I guess you could call them (although I must say, I am not diagnosed with anything) which are kind of like low tier panic attacks that are drawn out over a longer period of time. That’s what the last week has basically been for me, and why all these thoughts I decided I had to tell my dad about were dredged up. Now there is a slight difference, rather than slowly learning to suppress my emotion over a long period of time like many abused kids seem to do, it kind of happened in a flash for me. I do think that the ultimate effect seems to be similar though, after all I’m very similar to a lot of other FAs or incels I think.

So at the end of the video I went to check the comments and one of the comments someone left struck me, it said “I want to want something”. Now I know he was probably just trying to be poetic, but I got to thinking and actually that is a perfectly noble goal. If you really are somehow damaged, and the more and more I think about it the more it makes sense, then to want to fix yourself makes the most sense. It also might finally provide me with that goal I’ve been so desperate to find. In fact I think it already has, I think this is going to be “my thing” at last. My thing will be, the mission to restore my ability to identify my thing. Once it’s complete, it will of course naturally lead right into whatever burden I find for myself next.

I use the term burden, because that’s what I want, a load to bear. Yet if anything realising this has made me feel light in a way I haven’t in a while. I don’t want to go overboard now, I’m still the same person as when I started writing this post yesterday evening (I also wrote the vast majority of it last night too, I’m just trimming it and finishing it up tonight), I’m still just as bitter and resentful. I’m still stuck in this small bedroom as I have been for close to six years, I spent my entire day in here today other than to get food, but I do have a feeling of hope that I can do something here. In fact the specifics of my plan going forward are what I’ve been thinking about and reading about while in here today. It’s something I was actually already on the right path towards before I had a major setback, psychedelic drugs. As any long term readers will remember, I was growing a crop, or whatever the right term is, of psilocybin producing mushrooms a few months ago but it got infected with mold spores and the entire things was ruined. It went a bright yellow colour, and only some very tiny little caps seemed to have appeared on the surface of the mycelium mat.

There’s been a lot of fascinating research in recent years into the effects of these drugs and they really do seem to have long term affects. There have been studies where people who have been trying to give up cigarettes for decades are able to do so after a few psychedelic sessions. This means that they literally can rework your neural pathways, which is exactly what me and people like me need. It’s these trained habits we have, of picking apart every decision, that need to be unlearned. Now I have to be careful with the terminology here because I’m not a neurobiologist obviously, I’m a layman. I don’t think I’m saying anything that is untrue or misrepresentative of the results of these studies but I’m not able to accurately explain the minutia of it all. You should look this stuff up yourself if you’re interested, it’s not hard to find.

On top of the stuff about the reworking of your established mental patterns, there has also been a lot of research into the effect of both psychedelic drugs and MDMA and substances similar to it on depression. Now I don’t know if this suppression of emotion I experience is “depression”, it does seem to fit the description kind of but it’s maybe more like a particular strand or variation I’d guess. The point is these drugs, especially if taken in the right circumstances, can permanently alter your brain chemistry and shape. These aren’t just something you can take to feel differently for a while before going back to normal, like the idea seems to be in drug culture.

Speaking of drug culture, I know that a lot of robots will have a kneejerk resistance to what I’m saying because they have a lack of respect for people who take drugs and it’s completely fair because I do as well. Potheads, junkies, crack addicts, even just clubgoing normies who engage in recreational drug use are all people I have very little respect for. Nevertheless, if there’s something that will help me fix myself I’m going to take it, and you should as well. In fact I often rant about normalfags who go to r9k to give their shit tier advice, it’s like a pet peeve of mine, but I’ve always felt like the normies who advise we take psychedelics are the most sincere of the bunch.

I don’t know if this will work, as I said I did have this plan before and it didn’t go well. The difference is, last time my idea was something like “perhaps these substances will help me out somehow” and now it’s more that I’ve set this goal of fixing myself and these drugs seem to be the best means of achieving that. I’ll admit though that I’m kind of putting all my eggs in one basket, the problem with that expression though is what else can you do when you only have one basket available? Now I don’t ever get any comments, so it’s probably not worth me even bothering to say it, but if you have read this far and you think you have an alternative suggestion by all means please tell me about it.

California dreamin’

Five years ago, on this day (if I can get it uploaded in time, two days to go), Elliot Rodger took to the streets of the small California town of Isla Vista with revenge on his mind. You might think that revenge is the wrong word, in Isla Vista he was targeting complete strangers (although people forget that earlier that morning he had also murdered his roommates) not people that had personally wronged him, but I have already explained this before here. The post you’re reading right now is going to be more specifically focused on Elliot Rodger, but building on that post. I also think most people don’t understand who Elliot Rodger was really, even those who obsess over and/ or celebrate him. So perhaps this post will provide a new perspective.

Elliot Rodger is almost the perfect example of what I was talking about in that post, in that everything that we actually get directly from him is part of this big performance. It’s fitting I suppose that his father was a filmmaker, although in Elliot’s case the performance isn’t entirely fabricated like a major Hollywood production that his dad would work on. No, he is performing but he’s performing the role of Elliot Rodger. There’s a very weird sense of derealisation to the whole Elliot Rodger experience when taken as a whole in fact. He expresses his true feelings but when on camera this is clearly not the person that most people he knew in real life ever met, he shares certain information in his manifesto but excludes other things that we’ve since found out about and are just as important, and of course during the shooting itself he was attacking representations of those he wanted revenge against rather than the various named individuals who bullied him or made him insecure or in some way were remembered negatively by him.

I’ve read his manifesto My Twisted World multiple times and I suppose what I (and everyone else) have always missed despite it staring you in the face is that it isn’t a manifesto, but neither is it an autobiography. Or at least it’s not merely an autobiography, there is something more to it. You might argue with this, after all he ends the document with a few pages on his supposed new political vision, that’s the definition of a manifesto. This vision is of a world that resembles the one from the Gor novels if they were run by Ramsay Snow. I’m talking about the Ramsay from the ASOIAF books, not the show adaption Game of Thrones who is quite a different character both superficially and in motivation/ desire. If you want to know how the book character looks, think of Advanced from the youtube documentary Shy Boys IRL. Now I don’t know if Elliot ever read any of the Gor novels but he was certainly a fan of ASOIAF and GoT, and he quite liked that character as well even using that name on some forums. In fact I’ve heard a rumour that he filmed a review of the most recent book in the series (A Dance With Dragons) but never uploaded it to his channel, or it was there but kept in private mode.

So was this absurd image of women kept in permanent servitude, chained up and used for breeding purposes alone, really something he seriously saw as a feasible future for humanity? Does anyone really think he actually believed he would pile up mountains of skulls and shed rivers of blood? I hope not, because it would be rather silly to take something so precisely written at face value like that. So on first reading (or watching, he provides us with a very similar hyper-violent vision in his last video from the night before the killings) I suppose it’s understandable to do so, he deliberately presents himself as delusional throughout the story, the most well known and memed example being of course when he talks about a period of time where he became obsessed with winning the lottery. Yet I must remind you that it is all deliberate, we know it’s deliberate because there was plenty of stuff he left out of the manifesto that has since been dug up by people. That is what I meant by saying it has been staring us in the face all this time, that My Twisted World is not just a manifesto and or an autobiography. See what is a manifesto, it’s an expression of intent. Before Elliot we didn’t think of mass killers when we heard the word we thought of political parties, in fact it’s funny how since Elliot included a manifesto as part of his whole project other shooters have started to do the same.

This is an aside but I’ve been writing up another post recently which talks about the old spaghetti westerns from the 60s and early 70s and while there were around 500 of them made there were only a few big trendsetters. Most famously of course the Sergio Leone films, but a few others, and what would happen is they would introduce a new kind of trope and then all the hundreds of copycats would try and include it. So in 1964 the world was introduced to Clint Eastwood’s infamous silent gunman Manco, and soon there were scores of stoic quick shooters in cinemas across the world. The second time The Man with No Name appeared he was working with a smartly dressed older gentleman played by Lee Van Cleef, and it wasn’t long before older mentors/ sidekicks were appearing all over the place, in many cases also played by Lee Van Cleef. If you take the mass shooting as a new performance tradition as I suggest it is in my other post on the subject, then the leaving of a manifesto is one of it’s tropes. There’s a lot of talk about how superhero/ comic book movies are the new spaghetti westerns, but I think that mass shootings have just as solid a claim to that legacy.

Now going back to the what I was talking about, My Twisted World isn’t a manifesto. No, the document is just another part of the performance art piece that is everything Elliot Rodger did publicly following the 20th July 2013. If you’ve read MTW before you’ll remember that as the night where he was beaten, robbed and humiliated. Now his youtube channel was also started after that date. Thanks to some helpful anons in a thread today I was able to confirm that his first video was uploaded on February 10th 2014, some time after he had finished healing from getting beaten up, and it was during that healing period where he started planning The Day of Retribution.

The Day of Retribution is not just a specific day though, and I know I’m beating a dead horse here, it is a grand art project with a deliberate message. That message is not merely “I’m angry about not getting laid!”, but rather that life for people like him is one that makes no sense. You’re given conflicting information, you’re told things you know are lies, and after long enough periods of isolation the whole world around you starts to seem a bit off or weird. I’ve actually been meaning to write a whole post about derealisation, and it was while thinking about the subject that I finally think I understood Elliot. A manifesto is a mission statement, it implies intent but it isn’t a vehicle of it, it doesn’t do anything itself. As I’m sure you’re aware though, I think that MTW does achieve something, and I think it was designed to.

Believe it or not it isn’t actually referred to as a manifesto within the actual document itself, there’s no subtitle or subheading where the word “manifesto” is used. No, only in the filename of the original PDF file he released is the word actually used. So here’s what I think, I believe that he kept that word in there as a reminder to himself. The filename is something he would see every time he went to open the document to keep writing on it, and as I’ve explained a manifesto is a mission statement. He was making sure that every time he went to keep writing he would be reminded that he was working towards something.

In his videos he’s clearly playing a character, all the ones where he’s standing in front of the camera anyway. He walks with a ridiculous swagger, he grabs his expensive designer shirt and accessories to wave them in your (figurative) face, he makes these silly smug and self satisfied facial expressions, he’s of course complimenting himself and talking about how great he is constantly, it’s like he’s trying his hardest to play the biggest “Chad”/ alpha male caricature he can think of. He’s going all in, and frankly while he was admittedly kind of short he was certainly rather handsome, enough that the character isn’t entirely unbelievable. If you didn’t know any better and weren’t paying attention to the subject and context of the video, you might very well just take this guy at face value. Yet it’s impossible to ignore what he’s talking about in these videos, that’s what makes it all so jarring. You have this overconfident Californian rich kid, who you’d assume has no trouble with girls whatsoever if you just saw him walking down the street, whinging and moaning about exactly that. It’s surreal, and I now see that this is deliberate.

MTW is full of contradictions, some passages are full of statements that imply a self loathing on his part and then the very next page he’s talking about fabulous and awesome he is, the supreme gentleman. He talks about his many insecurities, about how he hated being shorter than all the kids in his class, about how he always wanted blonde hair (and of course, we are all aware of his obsession with blonde haired women), about how all those “obnoxious brutes” were getting laid while it seemed like most people didn’t even acknowledge he existed. Then he goes on to talk about how perfect he is, how he’s got all these fancy items of clothing, a better car than anyone else at his university, or college as they call it in the US. He likes to mention that he’s descended from the aristocracy, and he was originally born here in England.

Again, if you take the “manifesto” at face value then sure he just comes off as deluded. Yet now I’ve gone through it a few times and really thought about this I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s meant to create a sense of derealisation as I said, it’s like in American Psycho where in some scenes Patrick Bateman is a narcissistic maniac who thinks he’s better than everyone and in other scenes his whole ego is at risk because he doesn’t have the best business card in the room. Now Patrick Bateman the character is deluded, it’s implied that he hallucinated all the murders, but the writer of the original novel and the director of the film aren’t.

See he says something that is incredibly revealing in his final video to us, “you always treated me like a mouse”. This line is deliberately there as a “character break” for those who would pay attention to show he was nothing like the Elliot from his videos that everyone knows him as, the bravado and bluster was a fiction. The line also further adds to the many disparities and contradictions which are used to create the sense of derealisation and disconnection from reality that runs throughout everything he released before the shooting. It wasn’t this line that really made me see this though, no it was actually some footage that he probably didn’t even know existed. I can’t find the video right now, only a shortened version, but there’s footage of him from the Hunger Games premiere (his dad had worked on the film), and there in the company of other people do you actually get to see the real Elliot Rodger.

He’s not a self confident, wealthy, west coast pretty boy. He’s a timid and, in the eyes of normalfags, weak and contemptible individual. He also reveals this side in the few videos on his channel where he interacts with other people, all of which have him behind the camera other than one very brief and unintended interruption from a car driving past. In fact, he actually very quickly tries to get out of shot as the car comes by, but those brief few seconds before he manages it are enough, you see his body language and demeanour change immediately. In those videos where he’s talking to other people, there’s one in particular where he returns to a park he has fond memories of visiting as a child, you can’t see him obviously but his tone of voice is completely different. All taken together, the videos on his channel, the candid footage of him, the remark about being treated “like a mouse” and the picture of what his day to day life was actually like if you pay close attention to My Twisted World and don’t just focus on the wacky highlights, a quite clear picture of who he really was comes to the fore.

Every time Elliot is brought up on r9k, every time there’s a thread about him, some fucking moron thinks he’s making an original statement by saying that he wasn’t like robots and that they shouldn’t relate to him. It’s been five years and they’re still ironically so self absorbed that they don’t consider that their basic fucking opinion might have already been considered before, but that’s not important. They say he was a narcissist, he was a dumb deluded rich kid who thought he was owed sex and affection. I don’t want to get into the many many stupid hot takes various normies have had about Elliot Rodger, but this one in particular does kind of relate to what I’m talking about. Because he did kind of play that character, so it’s at least understandable to think that is who he really was, at least if you’ve only seen a few videos or maybe just skimmed MTW once. If you’ve seen all this extra stuff, if you’ve read through some of his many forum posts and social media updates like I have, you should have a better understanding.

So why did he play this character, what was the point of it all? Well, I think it was in order to elicit that exact kind of criticism. That people would take this false persona, or at least this version of Elliot that was still in some sense the same person but also drastically different from who he was truly, and claim that it was his personality or character that was the reason he was lonely and miserable. The great irony being that of course if he actually had the balls to be the kind of person he was in his videos he would have never had any trouble whatsoever with women. If you’ve spent any amount of time thinking about these kinds of things, and if you’re a self identified robot (or incel, or foreveralone, etc.) then you have, you know this. Elliot really was just like you, and don’t let yourself be misled to believe otherwise.

I’ve talked before about normalfag “”””advice”””” and why it’s completely useless before on this blog, and I think Elliot came to a similar realisation. It’s not hard, I think most of us see through it that’s why phrases like “bee yourself” and “fake it ’til you make it” are memed so much. If it were so easy to fake it until you make it then Elliot from the videos would have been Elliot Rodger the real human bean, but as I’ve done my best to show in this post he wasn’t. So often will you hear people telling robots to be more confident, confidence is the key. PUAs and “manosphere” types are the most overt about this, they’ll literally tell you to act like a douchebag or a “asshole” as you say in the US, and it does actually seem to work out for them doesn’t it? It’s not just them though, even completely standard tier normies who live entirely within the overton window will tell you “confidence is the key”, “be assertive”, “be a man“. Even die hard radical feminists who rage and scream about how toxic gender roles need to be done away with find quiet/ creepy men repulsive.

There’s the thing though, they find you repulsive, and why on earth would someone want to help someone they see in that way? It makes you start to reconsider the supposed advice they’re giving you, if you don’t already see through it. So after the shooting happened suddenly that’s not the case at all, suddenly being overconfident and appearing to have a positive self image is actually the reason he was failing to get love and affection. As I said before all the contradictory statements and ways he presented himself were quite meticulously planned in order to create this sense of derealisation, like you can’t trust anything. Well he did it again, he got hundreds of thousands of people to start saying the exact opposite of what they had been saying before the shooting without batting an eye. Proving quite effectively I think that these people never wanted to help you, if anything they want to hurt and mislead you. I don’t want to hurt or mislead you, I love you. Happy retribution day!

The rise and fall and rise again of Anon

I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to talk about lately, and I’m also finding it hard to write the next part of the series going through my old books, but I do have something I’ve been thinking about maybe writing for a while. That is an update on what I’m trying to do here with this blog. See when I started I wasn’t quite sure what I had planned but whatever it was things have slightly changed. You can see for yourself the difference if you care to look through the posts from the first couple months. See in the beginning it was more autobiographical, I was talking about myself a lot more and even when I wasn’t I was still being more personal. So I would talk about what music I was listening to and the few actual things that were happening in my life, the kind of stuff you associate with the term “blog” funnily enough, but I stopped all of that because it felt kind of cringy and forced.

So when I first started I had a few entries that were basically just “my diary desu”, and they were all pretty awful other than the first one. I actually started off that post by saying that I was going to be using this blog as a diary, which is pretty embarrassing looking back. I’m not a 12 year old girl, I don’t need a diary, and the fact that I was so conceited as to presume anyone in the world would give a shit also makes me cringe a little. However in my defence, as you can tell if you’ve read that post I was clearly in a weakened state of mind at the time. Also that first entry, despite being a little self indulgent, was a pretty good one I think. It served it’s purpose, it was really helpful for me to get it all out, and I think I did a good job of finding the right balance between being impassioned and intelligible. I feel a bit weird wanking myself off so much about it, but people did seem to like that post so I think it’s fair to say it was a good one.

In fact if it hadn’t got such a good response from other anons for that initial main post I might have just ended it there (the blog I mean), but on the other hand because people did like it I perhaps tried to recreate it when I shouldn’t have. Like I said all the other entries like that were pretty bad, just as narcissistic but far less interesting and insightful. In fact I kind of had a feeling that would be the case before it happened, in the third post I wrote (which is a perfect example of one of the bad ones) pretty soon after that one linked above I was already planning to try and do something else with this blog, which is why I then went on to write that post about school shootings which was the fourth post and the one that has basically set the tone for this entire “project” from that point forward. However I still wrote quite a few more shitty “diary entry” style posts after that which were all bad and I’m only keeping them because I like being able to see how this thing has evolved.

So speaking of that fourth post, that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about in the opening paragraph to this one in that I kind of feel like it’s crucially flawed because I felt the need to keep that personal/ friendly vibe even though it doesn’t really fit. In fact if anything it takes away from what I’m trying to get across. The joke at the end about the song I was listening to feels out of place, especially without the context of the other posts I’d made so far. As a standalone piece of writing it doesn’t work because of that sort of thing. I guess I thought that I was putting a bit more personality in there, and in the specific case of mentioning a song helping to explain the kind of mood/ vibe I was trying to get across. I worry sometimes that people might miss that, I talk about things that are serious bidniss but it’s funny too. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I’m funny, I’m saying I find things funny.

Now talking about myself or trying to be kind of tongue in cheek isn’t necessarily a bad thing in every case, but it has to be done right. I just don’t think I had found the right balance yet, maybe I still haven’t and I’ll feel the same about what I’m writing at the moment in half a year, but again I’ll keep all my posts up because I like seeing how this thing has evolved. Both in regard to the actual subjects I talk about, because of course I reference back to things in older posts a lot, and in terms of the structure and style of writing. I don’t know if I’m improving “objectively” because I don’t get any feedback, I’ve had two comments in my entire time writing, but I just feel like as time has gone on my posts have only become better examples of how I actually think and want to come across to people. Well not exactly, there was a slump for a few months where I kind of hit a wall and I was feeling like my best work was behind me, but I think since last January I’ve having a pretty good run.

Now I will almost certainly still talk about events in my life, both current and in the past, but only really as a means to talk about something more interesting I think. It’s nice to have the option to vent and just have someone in the world to hear (or read) what problems I’m going through, and so hypothetically there’ll be a post like that down the line, but I have a pretty fucking boring life so it’s not that likely. Speaking of using an experience as a jumping off point I have an idea for a post about a certain film that came out at the end of 2017 and I’d probably have to talk about my specific experience watching it (twice, and at the cinema alone one of those times) in that post. I know I said at the beginning of this that I didn’t have ideas, I started writing this yesterday and this idea came to me today.

Now looking back at my initial introductory post it seems like it still works just fine, but again it kind of has that kind forced friendliness/ jokiness and that just sets the wrong tone. I also notice looking back at it that I was maybe a bit too optimistic about the potential audience I could get for this. See I’ve already talked about this all before but I am a little disappointed that so few people want to stick around, and that I never get any comments. I mean it’s weird because most of what small audience I do have are people from r9k so it’s not like they don’t have opinions of their own on the things I tend to talk about. I was kind of hoping that there would be interesting discussions in the comments, that I could recreate a sort of microcosm of the few interesting and thoughtful threads that used to be more frequent years ago. Those threads used to feel like a good discussion between friends, and the experience with this blog instead of being like that as I hoped is more just like me sending a series of long e-mails about my opinions.

I know that people are hearing me, and I know that if they’re coming back they at least think my takes are interesting. The few times I’ve just openly shilled and tried to tell people about this elsewhere I’ve been given a positive response. In the thread I was talking about last time I not only got a really positive response in the thread itself, I also got the most views in a single day I’ve ever had. Maybe I should just shill more frequently, I’ve only actually done so maybe four or five times, and every time I get someone who sticks around for a while at least. It just feels a bit slimy and gross trying to advertise or openly beg people for attention. Because I do this for free, I don’t own the domain and so I cannot (and do not wish to) make money off of this, it doesn’t feel that bad but it’s still not something I feel comfortable doing.

In a way it’s kind of analogous to that thing normalfags always say about how “you don’t ever approach women, so why do you expect a relationship?”, I’ve noticed they really like to do this when Elliot Rodger is brought up. Well we all know how ridiculous that kind of point of view is if you look at the implication behind that statement, that all or most relationships start from a cold approach, of course they fucking don’t almost none do. So perhaps I’ve unconsciously recognised that parallel and that’s why I have this very prideful attitude regarding trying to “promote” or ask people to visit my blog. You’ve probably heard the expression “the cream rises to the top”, the idea being that things of value will just be recognised by people through some kind of force of nature. I guess I’m stupidly holding on to that, and because I’ve been here writing and have found so few who are interested in what I have to say maybe it really does mean what I’m doing isn’t very good.

I hope that’s not the case, there’s nothing more pathetic than someone with no talent or ability throwing themselves against a brick wall week after week deluding themselves that their brilliance is just unrecognised right now. I really never want to be that person, it’s why I can never really commit to anything. I really struggle to stick to anything without positive reinforcement and even then I usually doubt the nice words I receive. I’m surprised I’ve continued with this for so long, it’s quite fun I suppose and I have a lot of free time with nothing else to do. Nevertheless part of me does think that perhaps I am doing something valuable or at least interesting because as I said whenever I do ask people to check the blog out there are always some new people who think so. In fact I’ve only ever done so on 4chan, where almost everything gets shat on and torn apart and I’ve never actually had a single bad thing said about what I’m doing. Not even something mild like that it’s a waste of time, as I often fear myself. I’m not sure what to think.

The vanguard

I’m afraid I’ve been unable to make a coherent post about the subject of the thread I’m sure a few of you reading this recently found this blog in. I got quite far in, I had a good three or four paragraphs written at one point, but I just kept getting lost down these stupid tangents about the validity of surveys that claim to represent a greater population and stuff like that. I wasn’t able to actually look at that particular study, because you need to create an account on some site and I don’t want to, but I read the shitty Washington Post article the graphs were from and was unimpressed. You can look for it if you want, but I’m not going to put a link just so they can get a few more shekels and they’ve found a way around people putting their articles through archive.is as well. Anyway other people in the thread already pointed out a lot of the problems with the study.

So there’s this idea that there’s a rise in people not having sex, and in particular young men. What’s amusing is that it has only recently become something that is no longer fringe to talk about, as I said there was a Washington Post article talking about this. If you’d even suggested such a phenomenon existed a few years ago you’d be seen as a weirdo virgin or something. I mean the thread yesterday (probably not yesterday anymore by the time I finish writing this), minus the mainstream article (and study it talks about) linked, wouldn’t have seemed out of place in like 2014 or 2015. People say r9k has changed, but it really hasn’t, there’s another thread up right now again about the exact same thing. Now back in 2014 or 2015 I would have kind of just gone along with the same assumed reasons for this (and every problem) that are always posted several times in response to the OP. See it’s like a weird game we all play, redoing the same conversations over and over, like a pantomime. For whatever reason though, maybe because I’ve been away from r9k for a good few months and thinking about other things, I had a different take this time.

What I wanted to get around to saying, the point I planned to end on, is that I think a lot of people actually want this to be true and are therefore willing to accept the result of this survey without questioning it. Which gets into a deeper issue, in fact maybe doing this in reverse will help me explain myself better. By the way I just want to say I do believe there is an increase in people not getting laid or whatever, I’m just wary of going overboard. I think it’s probably less than people think, and I also want to make a distinction between some beta normie guy who doesn’t get laid very often and an actual khv or incel or whatever you want to call them. I care about the latter, they’re my guys, I don’t really care about the former. Yet both would be lumped in together by this study, and a lot of the incels who want to feel less alone in their plight will go along with this as I’ve said. The distinction is important because, even if you’re the opposite of me and you think incels are scum and want the other group to be happier, you’ll help neither if you try to help both.

For me to explain why I need to first talk about what it is that defines this plight or experience of inceldom. So oftentimes there’s this joke that is made, how can incels exist when prostitutes exist? HAHA GET IT? Now none of the people it’s aimed at take that seriously, but I don’t even think that most of the people who make those kind of jokes do either. Some do however, you do get people trying to make the same point not as a joke, but they’re a small minority of people. You know the type, the kind to say something like “dude sex is just putting a penis in a vagina lole how can you care so much about it?” thinking they’re making some kind of clever point.

Sure you might say that using a term like “incel” kind of does make it more about sex, and can you blame people for assuming therefore that’s the point of the term, but I think the success of that name over others is more for gatekeeping purposes. I did intend to write a whole post about that but I never got around to it. The thing is those things were being said before when these online groups were using names that left them more open to infiltration like “foreveralone”, “TFL” (which is a bit before my time) or “robot”. Even on r9k which was kind of adjacent to those spaces, though people will deny it because it wasn’t always that way, the term robot did after a while (around 2013 or 2014) kind of become another synonym for this kind of person. Now “robot” as a term certainly doesn’t mention sex and yet this point came up even there.

No the thing that makes an incel isn’t the fact that they’re not getting laid, it’s the things that result from and the reasons for them not getting laid. That’s what they talk about, that’s what they bond over, that’s what matters. It’s not really the lack of sex itself, defining themselves by that is sort of a way of them filtering out people who aren’t going through the same things. Because the problems that they have, like I said, are either leading to them being unable to find sex and companionship or are a result of that. See before when using other terms you always got infiltrators and by putting this filter up you can kind of take away the ability for those people to infest and destroy another place to talk and bond.

After all, what is sex about really? To me it doesn’t seem to be about the act itself, frankly I think that’s something you can take or leave, although I will admit I do seem to have a rather low libido. I fell for the nofap meme for a while, and while all the posts and videos I’ve seen about it talk about how it’s incredibly difficult and you get all these urges, I had no difficulty at all. I could easily never do it again, maybe it’s because I’m depressed? I’ve also just figured it out from hearing people talk about how much more desirous they are both in real life growing up and online, maybe there’s something wrong with me I don’t know. Multiple friends back in school told me that I seemed kind of asexual, which isn’t true it’s not like I don’t want to, I just don’t need to.

So I’m not saying that incels or robots or whatever new term may come into use don’t care about sex, I’m kind of an unusual case. My experience is of r9k, I’ve only actually visited incels.me a couple times to lurk and the same for any other forum or imageboard of the same variety like wizchan, and yes there are always a lot of threads about sexual frustration but I’m convinced that that’s not what most of these people are preoccupied with. It’s a secondary concern, but if you spend hours every day in this place you’ll end up talking about secondary and tertiary concerns after a while. These sites are where people go to let off steam, they talk about all kinds of things.

No, to have not had sex means that in some abstract way (because of contraception and birth control and so on) that you have been deemed unworthy of existence. Because it is ultimately just the means of reproduction and while most sex being had in the western world today isn’t for that purpose it still is recognised in that way in a figurative sense. People have not evolved to conceive of sex differently than they have for the last couple hundred thousand years in a few decades, they can only recognise consciously that “safe sex” isn’t the same thing. Not that this stuff is even something most kids give any thought to when they’re first starting to get into relationships anyway. We all unconsciously recognise that you’ve essentially been deemed unworthy of passing your genes on, that who you are in the most fundamental sense shouldn’t be a part of the greater human project going forward. Yes, nowadays more in a metaphorical sense but that doesn’t really matter.

I mean why is there such a huge obsession with the word “virgin”, generally speaking here. I’m talking about society as a whole. It’s an incredibly common schoolyard insult, it’s almost an inevitability that someone gets called it in any internet argument (quite fitting that it’s recently been systematised you could jokingly say by the “have sex” meme), it’s something no one wants to be called. Do I really need to explain this to anyone? That losing your virginity has become the rite of passage for the modern age. Which is also why it’s only really an insult used against men, because having sex is only an actual challenge for men. Not that it was always this way, the word virgin used to be used only for women, think of the 72 virgins that are promised to muslims in paradise, and yet that has gradually become reversed and now the word is almost masculine gendered you could say. Isn’t that interesting? I’m sure I could go on a whole long tangent about it.

See, “I want to lose my virginity” is a phrase that is very common among teenage boys. It’s not “I want to have sex, I want to experience what it’s like” although I’m sure they all do. No, of primary importance is “losing your virginity”, because that is ultimately what makes you a man in today’s world and the respect you earn is what matters more so than the act. A lot of robots refer to themselves as the bottom of the barrel, or something similar, omega males, the dregs of humanity, the bottom 1%, and so on. Now you get men who are uglier, who are mentally and physically weaker, who are more awkward, who are more cowardly, more bitter etc. than a lot of them, but they are men. Those men are the ones who are getting laid less often, they’re the growing demographic.

The percentage of young men not having sex may have gone up (although I will say again, even that is being exaggerated I believe) in the US and seemingly across the rest of the occident, but the number of male virgins isn’t really. I can’t find the exact stats, frankly it’s impossible to find a study with both a large sample size that also has an accurate demographic representation. At least, for a layman like me with no academic qualifications or access I can’t find anything that I really think is that trustworthy. Yet, all the smaller studies and things I find and have seen posted over the years do pretty much universally say that over the age of 25 something like less than 1% of men are still virgins. So just because similar numbers are so universal across all of these surveys and polls and such I think we can say that is close to accurate. I think we can say that to be a male virgin past your early 20s is incredibly unusual.

Now I’ve talked about school shootings and similar kinds of violence a few times, and I think I have a unique take. Now I never endorsed it but I will be honest I wouldn’t do anything to prevent it either if I somehow could. Yet I’ve been thinking, maybe some people actually do understand these acts in the same way I do. Now this is a bit “out there”, and I’m not even sure I believe this myself but it’s something to consider. The term incel only really became a mainstream thing around last spring/ summer, but it had been in use for many years before that, in fact I’m pretty sure Elliot used it. This sudden change is of course because of Alek Minassian, who openly referred to himself that way. So after that there was a big scare and it was funny for all of us to see the cable news boomers trying to make sense of chan lingo as always, but I think this time was different. The hacker known as 4chan has been getting segments on news channels for a decade, but this actually took off among real people. Incels, a group that no one seems to be able to define, were apparently a terrorist group now.

So there was some buzz about that for a while, you can say it was a trending topic… ugh, but then it died down a bit. Now a little time has passed and you start to notice mainstream publications like The Washington Post (but there are others, I remember a Daily Mail one specifically) all coming out with articles about this supposed decline in sex rates and specifically among the young male demographic. It’s almost like an attempt to pacify this small group of incels by leading them to believe they’re part of a larger group all suffering from a specific modern phenomenon rather than just the same tiny subsection of the population they always have been. No, such a phenomenon may exist but the incel situation is something separate. The only change for them is the fact that thanks to the internet they can now get together and form communities of a sort and that may lead to some kind of intellectual evolution regarding how they see themselves and society, which as you’re all aware we do live in.

There doesn’t really seem to be any kind of incel ideology despite what a lot of clickbaity youtube videos and news headlines might imply. At most you could maybe say that a lot of self identified incels, which aren’t necessarily all of them, believe in some idea of the blackpill. There’s also the whole lookism thing which I think is very interesting, and certainly no one else is talking about it, but maybe it’s seen as more of a big deal among that community than it really is. Or a better way of putting it would be to say that a lot of incels gravitate to it as the single explanation for their predicament and I just think that’s not the case. There’s rarely one single explanation for any phenomenon in life.

Now it’s pretty far fetched to suggest that there’s actually a deliberate conspiracy going on, I don’t honestly think that’s the case. It’s weird that this is suddenly a more mainstream topic, but if there was a real agenda you’d think they’d put a bit more effort in. I mean I’m just a dumb wageslave writing these extended effortposts in my free time and I was able to write something more substantive on the subject. No, there’s probably not any conspiracy for you to find here. It’s just funny that there could be, and going through it illustrates something. That the incels are likely to be more docile if they don’t realise how tiny and despised they really are.

Books: Part 3

Travels in Nihilon is a book I bought recently, and wrote a whole post about as well a few months ago, so I don’t have much more to say about it. Embarrassingly I’ve only noticed that insert/ edit link feature just now, brainlet moment… Anyway I’m hesitant to throw it away because it’s such a recent purchase, but I also think it’s likely I will read it again some day. It’s a short novel, and I found it quite charming. It has a very early 70s british science fiction feel to it, if that makes sense. Even though it’s not really a science fiction novel, I mean it could be described that way kinda, if you’re reaching. It reminds me of the first coloured episodes of doctor who (the few that I’ve seen) and it also very much reminds me of another book that I’ll talk about, Rebecca’s World by Terry Nation. Sometimes the best way to describe a feeling is with colour, so think mauve and burgundy.

Quickly though, I’m going to take the opportunity to say something about that other post linked above. One of the main things I talked about in it was this idea I’ve been kind of arrogantly putting forth as my own, of the “cultural” or “consensual” definition. It’s not a complicated idea really, I’ve just always noticed that many words are used slightly differently than how the dictionary says they should be. Or at least they evolve and take on a different meaning in some cases. It goes back to a discussion I had with my friend when we were about 14 or so. We walked past this bakery and I saw a pretzel, and I called it a “giant pretzel”. See, nowadays here where I live anyway “pretzel” is associated with these tiny things you can buy in packets. The big baked bread thing I saw had the same shape, so I called it a giant one. Now my friend told me that the original thing that was named pretzel in Germany whenever it was initially created looked a lot more like the “giant” one than these mass produced little things you can buy.

I didn’t think much about that discussion for years, until starting this blog actually. One of my first posts was about school shootings and the difference between the colloquial use of the term and the official definition and how that’s used to mislead people. Or at least that was one of the things I talked about. I still think what I have said was worth saying, but I regret implying or suggesting that this observation is particularly unique. I do think I came to it independently, I just don’t think that it’s terribly impressive. I imagine it’s something that’s just apparent to most people, and not something they consider as worth commenting on. I could be wrong though, maybe this is just my self doubt talking.

Rebecca’s World is really quite strange, and it’s funny that I also mentioned the early Doctor Who episodes (which are nothing like the show that exists today, assuming it’s still running I haven’t watched it in a few years) because the writer Terry Nation was apparently also involved in that show, and was the mind behind the daleks which I would imagine are the most famous monsters from the show. Now I used to love this book, it was a gift from my uncle’s partner (they’ve lived together for over a decade and have children but never actually got married) and she’d had it since her own childhood and I remember reading it and rereading it many times over. It’s essentially just an adventure story, think something like Alice In Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. A little girl gets lost in a strange world, and with the help of some new and unusual friends manages to eventually get home safely. What I liked about it so much was how surreal and colourful the world was, and the many illustrations that accompany the words are fantastic. In fact I’ve taken a few pictures to use throughout this post, because I couldn’t find any of the illustrations online anywhere, and they remind me quite a lot of some of the work of one of my favourite artists Moebius. I’ve used one or two of his works for header images here before as well.

Now as I don’t remember the book very well I don’t have much to say about it, nor do I even have a tangent I could go off on inspired by it. Sticking to the main point of these posts though, this is the first book in the pile that I’m quite conflicted about. On the one hand, it is just a children’s book and I doubt I’m going to get much use from it. In fact the only real reason I can think to hold on to it is because perhaps one day there’ll be someone I want to give it to. If that’s the case though, I could probably find another copy on Amazon or whatever equivalent there is in the future. I know that this specific copy would be more meaningful, after all it was a gift to me and I’d be passing it along further, however even if I give it to a charity shop I’d still be passing it along. It is a little damaged, so there is a chance they’d just throw it away, but I wouldn’t ever find out. I’m just thinking how likely it is that that would actually happen, that there will ever be a child for me to pass it along to. Honestly if this book is going to send me down that rather upsetting train of thought than perhaps that alone is good reason to get rid of it. Not that I do look at it often, the last time I read through it was over a decade ago. I think the right decision is to let it go, even if it’s a difficult one. Here’s one last picture from it.

Speaking of the surreal I also have a copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs that I never did manage to finish. In fact I didn’t even get through the second chapter, supposedly they can be read in any order but I started at the beginning. I just found it unbearable, same with The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon which I also only managed to finish one chapter of. On first glance both books seem rather similar, although I’m sure that there’s someone who could explain why they’re not. After all Thomas Pynchon is celebrated as a literary genius and The Crying of Lot 49 is considered a masterpiece of postmodern fiction whatever that is meant to mean, filled with subtle cultural and philosophical references. Whereas William S. Burroughs and Naked Lunch in particular doesn’t seem so widely appreciated, there’s more of a cult following there although Naked Lunch is seen as something that broke new ground.

They seem rather similar to me, both books have a plot that comes secondary to the various asides the authors go down. You must have heard the expression “read between the lines” which suggests that if you pay close attention you’ll realise that there’s more to a text than what is immediately apparent. In the case of a novel or short story, perhaps that would mean there are certain themes and ideas that underlie the plot. In the case of these books it’s like those things have been dredged up and brought to the forefront, while the plot sinks below the surface. Anyway I tried with both, but I couldn’t make any progress. Some part of me doesn’t want to get rid of them, because they’re both kind of respected and held up as something you should read. I imagine they’re in a lot of lists of books “you should read before you die”, you see those all over the place. I also don’t like throwing away gifts and The Crying of Lot 49 was one, and recently too my uncle gave it to me for my birthday I think last summer, but I just don’t actually think I’ll ever read it. I think they both can go.

I know this is quite a short entry, and at the rate I’m going this could drag out to another three parts, but I’ve just been working a lot this week and also doing a lot of very early morning shifts so by the time I get home I don’t have the energy to write. It’s been over a week since the last upload though and if I don’t just upload something today it could just be there as a draft until Friday. Maybe next post will be about something else, and then I’ll come back to finish going through these books later down the line.

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 4