the paranoid android

In the PJ Masks narrator voice saying "Night, in the city!": Dawn, in the kitchen!

Everything is quiet. Everyone else is still in bed. Meemaw is tippy toeing and gently opening and closing doors and cupboards, making coffee, getting the stove ready to make breakfast. She thinks tater tots would make a nice side to scrambled eggs mixed with crumbled bacon and topped with cheese, opens the freezer door, leans in to reach to the back for the tater tots, and suddenly the soft quiet is sharply broken with an abrupt D SAYS DUH. D SAYS DUH. EVERY LETTER MAKES A SOUND. D SAYS DUH.

That was almost to the tune of Farmer in the Dell, if you need audio context.

People who invent loud fridge magnet toys for kids- STOP THAT.

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A friend of mine let me know some weeks ago that HHGTTG had only been seen in cinema form, not read in novel form. I mentioned that I hated the Marvin incarnations in cinema, which was difficult to explain to someone who missed the books, so here we go, this is why.

If you read this wikipedia entry you will see in the novelization that "Suddenly, he is kidnapped by a squad of Krikkit war robots, who are after his leg, a fragment of the key that will reopen their imprisoned world and restart the genocidal Krikkit War. Thinking that Marvin's intelligence will be an asset, they wire his brain into the interfaces of their intelligent war computer. This is a mistake. The once formidable Krikkit robots find themselves overcome with crippling sorrow and depression, and rather than focusing on their mission of extermination, instead sulk in corners doing quadratic equations. It is also due to Marvin's influence that Zaphod and the others' lives are spared by the Krikkit robots. Marvin is (presumably) rescued by his friends, who bring him back to the Heart of Gold." In fact, Marvin's LEG is a part of the intergalactic Krikkit Wars, and on our earth the game of Cricket is a long forgotten tribute to that war.

The way Marvin shows up in cinema form totally screws this humongously important bit of TRIVIA. So, I loathe watching Marvin in movies. Any true fan creating and recreating that story for film would have gotten that bit right.

Also, from here, "Krikkit also managed to leave other marks besides the destruction of numerous worlds: due to racial memories, the Earth sport of cricket and the pan-dimensional sport of Brockian Ultra-Cricket were based on the Krikkit Wars. Slartibartfast enjoys the game of cricket, but he notes that most sensible citizens of the galaxy find the sport to be in rather bad taste."

My Janika Banks tagline is from this HHGTTG series. I'm a devout Douglas Adams fan, and so much of his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series involves intricately woven historical details around robots that if you really and truly want to understand the foundation of the Pinky Robot concept, you need to go read that series. There are 6 books. Not being paid to link these.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy(1979) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe(1980) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Life, the Universe and Everything(1982) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish(1984) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
Mostly Harmless(1992) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle
And Another Thing...(2009) Hardcover  Paperback  Kindle

Anyway, Marvin is a major player throughout the entire series and drastically undercut in film, which sends me into a seething corner in my mind. Don't get me wrong, I love the 2005 movie and all the actors in it, especially the whole Magrathea scene. Just... big fail on Marvin. He's supposed to be more than cute and funny.

You can read up on Krikkit and other planets of interest in HHGTTG here.

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We are all wildly brain scattered this weekend, so I can't keep my focus on anything else in particular. I think this is about as close as it gets to our heads right now. 'Scuze me while we run into town to look for a new tie.

rebel conformists politely saying maybe not

I joked a few months ago about betting @bonenado I could make it to 100,000 by this next Pinkyblogversary and then promptly slid out of the fast track. On purpose. But I'm still doing ok. Last year I was at 22,300 on my one year anniversary. As of writing this sentence I'm spot on 61,600 just under a month till my 2nd anniversary, so I've not only doubled, but nearly tripled. I'm sure I could have done better, but I'm not going to kick myself. I've watched a lot of people playing the blog game over the last ten years, and I'll stick by what I've always said- this dedicated blog property is officially declared bounce rate efficient by google analytics and heavily controlled for bots and spam. Numbers are just numbers until you lay the autopsy out on the table.

I tend to let thoughts percolate for months before I finally put a finger on whatever, and I've decided lately that the narcissism jabs I see in other places should be using a different term instead of lumping something they don't like about someone else into a disorder, because that really does undermine the actual disorder and people getting real help. How about we just call it like we see it, ok? I think "attention hog" would be a better term. And I think some of the people who point are just as deserving of that term as the people they very publicly pretend not to point to.

Attention hogs butt into convos, draw comments away from the originator, collect 'friends' like trading cards, turn awareness about #allthethings other people deal with into a competition over their own growing stash of compassion, and parasite off others in order to feed themselves. It's your basic bad manners thing.

This is probably the last time I'll bring that up. I'm so done with 'friends' whining about each other and the tiffs and tussles and hurt feelings. I'm not understanding why people who've known each other for several years online can't let go of each other if a whole year is slipping by and the same hurt feelings keep coming up over and over. In one case, I feel like I'm watching a married couple pouting, but they live on different continents, so it's just weird. I mean, even if I lurk only once a month, I see the same thing over and over. Do you guys not notice how redundant you are? *wow* I'd like to think we've evolved beyond monkeys flinging poop and acting surprised if someone flings back. Just because we do it digitally and virtually now doesn't mean we've risen above exactly that.

But maybe you're not supposed to notice. The whole point to social media is brain training the masses.

I don't care about either side of the argument in this vid, I could care less who is right or wrong, because I've been saying all this has been part of human history for so long anyway that it's already who we are. What this youtuber missed, though, is how smooth doublethink is. Every bit of this is about embracing 2 conflicting ideas at the same time. It's not about awareness and beliefs and truth, it's about being so slick that you don't realize you just agreed with something you disagree with, and now you'll go around reinforcing it because you don't realize there is a double meaning. I'm not talking about the Illuminati or the alchemy blurt or Stefani's confessions or hidden meanings, I'm talking about the researcher himself making it through this entire discussion without once realizing the doublethink was already planted. He thought he caught the alchemy, big deal neal. He didn't catch the concept that speaking to preformed society about freedom to choose is a controlled guide through a cattle chute. There is no freedom. If there were true freedom, we wouldn't even have the need to bring up freedom to choose being an option.


There is fear out there that Stefani will be murdered like other big stars for spilling the beans and rising up against the fame machine that made her. I see her still playing the game here. She didn't once cross the line. All good players know what lines not to step over. She is speaking to an audience who have been playing the game since birth. I mean, look at the college they're in. And I don't believe for one second that Mark Z. wasn't pressured on all sides and had the choice to say no.

This is not new stuff. My dad was saying all this stuff back in the 70s. It's all over the webs now. There is no excuse not to know this stuff. And frankly, I don't think it's dire. It simply just is.
Dire Warnings From Past U.S. Presidents and Other High-Profile Leaders About an “Invisible Government” That Runs the U.S. With “No Allegiance To the People”

All the moaning and fussing and flinging going on out there, all the emotions sparking- you guys are being brain trained to react certain ways on purpose. The more something or someone on social media (or talk radio, or whatever) affects you emotionally, the easier it is to create doublethink in your head. Pictures of animal abuse and political hate scroll by. "I hate people."  A kitten or ducklings are saved on a highway. "Faith in humanity restored." Do you not see them doing this to you... Srsly, that is so ridiculous it's all I can do to stay on social media at all sometimes, but dang it, I'm on a mission.


As long as we snark out things like 'narcissist' when someone doesn't respond to us the way we want and then turn around and share loving all the beautiful things memes, we don't see that we are literally being split in half. We become part of the big machine, jerking each other around in rhythm, all because social media brain trains us to step up and play the game and shit on those who don't, even if they are polite about saying 'no', the way Lady Gaga was modeling for us.

She knew going into this that the industry training was a one-way ticket, and she still pays the price. There are so many people out there caught in the giant web of pretense and allegory, and now it's shedding down to us at the street level, and we're all caught between this pressure to perform and the belief that we are free to choose not to.

You know why so many people are critically anxious and depressed? Because from the very start, we've lived this dichotomy and don't know how to reconcile it. Fortunately, aspienado is like the Electric Monk and has no problem believing many mutually exclusive yet coexisting ideas without frying circuits. You know, like knowing when a meme is just a meme, not a trigger.

I really wish the youtuber doing the narrative about his research (and pushing his book sales, don't forget that) had done something with the 'digital matrix' phrase of the facebook part of the discussion. How long have I been saying one day we'll be using brain chips to tweak brain waves to control depression and anxiety?

Some of you are going oh thank god this wasn't minecraft, the rest of you are grumbling go back to minecraft. Or something.

I dug my bitch music out today for the road into town. Got more thinking done.

the Question

I think I've figured out that the flash drive thing bothering me so much was because I went through actual fail for several years. One of the reasons I started hoarding info on tech was because the brain crash was unbelievably sucky and tech became an extention of my brain, holding elusive thoughts and glitchy memories in place for me. And here I am on the other side now apparently almost traumatized by the shock of having gone through it. I don't think I could really see the overall emotional impact until that flash drive fail happened.

It's one thing to cut off feelings (all my life) or even memories here or there (blocking is a survival tactic), but it's another to have systems fail because of viral infection hitting an already faulty nervous system and being left with glitchy old strings of Christmas tree lights. I spent years rebuilding and reconnecting through a haze of meds and seemingly neverending illness, and about the time I've finally started feeling like I'm patched back up and clearing the debris field, I go through a very symbolic memory crash with that flash drive. Thank goodness it was only a stick and not my brain this time. All the same, I've been reeling through several days of flash backs and emotions, and even though I'm actually quite up for the most part, I'm realizing I've never really talked about what it was like back then. The closest I came to being really honest in public was blinking in the light on my spaz blog. Up to that point, not a soul in internet land and all the fandoms I'd been in ever had a clue. No one who met me after 2004 ever met the me before brain fail.

As I've recovered my cognitive function, I've also recovered some memories and reconstructed more out of a pile of rubble covered in brain fog. This last year has been marvelous and thrilling like I haven't felt in 11 years. Anybody read Flowers for Algernon? That. That was me. Only I started off with this brilliant IQness and a nearly perfect ACT score and plummeted to the black depths of not being able to count a little bit of cash buying a burger. I asked bank tellers and cashiers to count my money for me for several years. I couldn't dial a phone number without help. Nope, not one sign of any kind of brain damage, or blood vessel problem, or cancer, or anything else, just function loss and some outlying trigeminal nerve damage. And even now, every time I get a simple cold virus or even just too tired teetering on the edge of flare up, I go all glitchy again.

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I've gotten to wake up for awhile and everything has changed, and I've gotta get all over the program before I fall out of step again, because surely this can't last. I feel like I'm racing the sad, and the more I can look back and see it now, the harder I run. And I don't think this is an irrational fear. I've already got four really big strikes against me and was barely into my 40's when the brain crash happened. I can still hardly believe sometimes it's all coming back on again.

Lupus and the Brain
Diabetes and Memory Loss
Lyme Disease and Cognitive Impairements
Fibro Fog and Dyscognition

Memory glitch, loss, fail, whatever you want to call it is such an incredibly sad and lonely thing to go through. It's bad enough living with prosopagnosia and not remembering faces, but to not remember times and events and which holiday is coming up next is like feeling lost all the time. And how do you say this to anyone? How do you tell people in the wake of your impact that you're flying blind in a ship that lost its core memory? Big nod of thanks to Douglas Adams for providing frames of reference via Grebulons and Hactar the Krikkit war computer. The whole Janika Banks tagline thing is about surviving epic fail. "I asploded. I'm ok. Like the Central Intelligence Core of the Krikkit War Computer, I'm everywhere, in the mists all around you." Because that's what it's been like since 2004, leaving people in the aspienado wake of my brain fail impact. You guys realize it's the mice's faults for building Deep Thought in the first place, right? (I'm also epstein-barr positive from an actual mouse bite. How ironic is that.)

I feel like I've got to say all the things before I can't again.
(Lyrics- Anni B Sweet)