The Mental Toolkit

I think in some ways, the lack of company compels me to talk to myself. I think talking to yourself only becomes a problem when the thoughts end up on a repeating loop. In there lies danger, beware of creating mental loops.

Jordan Peterson would explain that conversation is the way in which we order our thoughts and make sense of the world. 

I think these videos where I walk and talk are in some ways a combination of talking to myself and having a wider conversation, with the aim of ordering my own thoughts, which I can tell you are sometimes like a blizzard of hail. 

However, if you put the video on mute you can just wader with me silently, and in some ways vicariously see some of the things I see. There is no obligation to listen, it is a choice.

 

Memes The Dark Arts

Memes used to just be funny by and large. But over time the meme; a combination of precis coupled with pictures has become more than the sum of its parts. So, if a picture paints a thousand words … a picture with two dozen words actually paints a picture with ten thousand words. 

From the Atlas Society Page on Face 

This first one is a reference to both the pandemic that has savaged liberties and freedom as well as killing millions (though probably not as many millions as directly as the doom-mongers would like you to believe). For us in the northern hemisphere at least (the free west ... I think) it points to how quickly the Russian invasion of Ukraine swept the pandemic news away ... Abracadabra!

I guess it all falls back to the dark art of marketing, it’s not exactly a new discovery, but it is an adaption that is freely accessible to anyone who wants to make a particular point barbed for maximum penetration using very few words. And as we saw with the first set posted, you can take classic themes, character quotes from classic characters, real or imagined and recombine them to your own ends. Or as below just take the words already written and amplify them with a sub-definition.

The interesting part of the process is that when you take an imagined character’s attributes from a fictional narrative (Morpheus from the Matrix in the previous example), then the amplification of the message is exponential in effect. As the emperor clearly demonstrates below. Anyone who doesn't have a `penny drop' moment looking at the meme is likely to be clinically dead or lived in a cave on a desert island since the mid-1970's.

Beyond that is the diversity of uses that an image can be used for, but we will look at that another day … and probably on a lighter note.

Plants a Garden Centre Adventure.

As may have been mentioned elsewhere (I don't track what I write per see), I had a collection of plants at my last home. Of ninety-five plants in that collection (approximately sixty-five separate displays or creations), eighty or more were rehomed by my ex-partner who didn't want to look after them or care for them until I found somewhere to live.

She doorstepped me a few weeks back with a terrarium I made from a broken demijohn, that had (since I left my old home) been over-watered to the point that it was more water than soil, a prayer plant she bought me (it has nice leaves but I don’t feel for it), and a tray of mixed Christmas and Easter cacti I took from single leaf cuttings from my mother (who has just celebrated her eighty-seventh birthday). There are twelve in the tray and they flower periodically.

Yesterday, 12^th of March 2022, I took a trip to the garden centre and spent £36 on a few `tots’ tiny plants, mere infants in the grand scheme of things. I videoed the process, and appended below is the feature-length movie of that day's exploits 😊

Parody Inversion Point

Depressingly true. I reckon we could on the basis of this we could end up in Whoops Apocalypse moment sans hypnotised nuclear submarine captain. I reckon there is likely to be an equation/formula that would prove that this isn't actually a joke and more of a theory accidentally discovered by Dilberts creator while trying to reason on the observable ridiculousness of the world we are currently living in. He felt it, but hasn't done the maths ... but it's there sure as grass is green. The simple mass of collective geopolitical players collapsing in on itself thus imploding, creating a feedback loop, and boom.

Memes

I intend to start posting memes here. Funny ones, sarcastic ones, pointed truth ones, sardonic ones. I have curated quite a collection, and I think it's worth having these snapshots of time and relevance curated somewhere fixed. In years to come they may have lost all meaning, and just be pictures with words, but here they will have small contextual descriptions so they can be placed.

Diffusing the cultural war on meat with humour.

On the brink of potential nuclear war, we find dark humour.

When Covid stopped being a disease among people and became a political tool

When you wonder if you've been given blue and red pills

There are more.

I get the sense that the older I get the more libertarian I perceive myself to be, and yet I wouldn't label myself as such because I believe that well run social institutions do benefit us all and especially if we are all paying into them collectively, and that there is a place for the state. I just happen to think that for the last few years the states have become divorced from the people they should serve.

I also think we need to be mindful of our freedom to share our opinions and alternative facts, points of view, or news the mainstream doesn't report so widely. And I say this because, in the clamour of alternative voices, in the free for all, it's possible for the leviathans to hold the field, by dint of mass and or traditional outlets. It is still possible to be entirely correct, right and moral and still end up being cast as the outlaw.