In the Shadow of the Ears

In the depths of the void, there is darkness. The darkness roils, a shapeless, hungry mass.
It is waiting to take form.

The year is 1928. Walt Disney is the owner of a struggling cartoon studio, and has just lost the rights to his one successful cartoon series. Reeling from the treachery of his staff and the theft of his creation, Disney realizes he needs an entirely new character to keep his floundering company from going under. In desperation he reaches out for a muse... and it is the Mouse that answers.

A brush intrudes into the deep void of the ink bottle. It emerges, dripping with black ink, and hovers above a blank canvas...

Disney is not getting enough sleep. Memories of a long-dead mouse haunt his dreams - the scrabbling of tiny paws beneath the kitchen cabinet, glimpses of teeth and ears and whiskers. Disney believes he can banish the dreams by granting them shape and form - and grant a new lease on life for his collapsing studio as well. The mouse - a rodent, a vermin long associated with disease and evil and decay - is recast anew as a cartoon character. "Mortimer," Disney names it at first, a name that recalls morbidity and mortuaries, but the dreams do not diminish, until his wife Lillian, thrashing beside him in her sleep, suddenly awakens, eyes ablaze. "Mickey!" she gasps. "His name is Mickey!"

And so the Mouse is named.

An empty white canvas. A drop of darkest ink, teetering on the edge of a brush. The ink drop falls...

Ub Iwerks is Disney's most trusted animator - one of the few who stayed steadfast and loyal when Disney lost the rights to his cartoon - and it is to Iwerks that Disney entrusts the task of giving the Mouse physical shape and form.

Huddled together in the darkened animation studio, Disney and Iwerks labor over the alchemy of their creation. Iwerks puts pencil to paper, and the Mouse's anatomy emerges: the elongated snout, the buttoned trousers, the mischievious smile, the whip of a tail, the black dot eyes. It is less like drawing from the imagination, and more like uncovering a long-buried statue. It is an excavation; an unearthing.

Iwerks' sketch is complete. The Mouse is a still figure smiling impishly out of the canvas. Disney leans over the sketch, mouth moving wordlessly. Iwerks has designed the Mouse's form: it is Disney who animates it and brings it to life.




The blot of ink seeps into the white canvas. It stares out at you like the accusing eye of a mute beast. It is not complete. You know what you have to do.

Black and white is the Mouse, roguish and amorous as it cavorts silently on the screen - but its antics are not well received; it disturbs rather than amuses. Perhaps this should be the end of it: for the Mouse to briefly flit into existence from the mind of a haunted animator, and then to disappear just as quickly into obscurity. But Disney's distant muse intervenes once more.

In the silent stillness of the night, the Mouse's high-pitched squeak wrenches him out of his sweat-drenched sleep. And Disney knows what it is he must do.

It is November 1928. The first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack makes its highly acclaimed debut. "Steamboat Willie" - the suspiciously phallic title of the animated short - combines sound and animation to sublime effect, masking the Mouse's true nature beneath a glamor of music and merriment. It is hailed as a breakthrough, the passing of a hitherto unknown event horizon.

The Mouse is loosed upon the world.

Slowly, tentatively, two more dots join the dark sphere of the blot, their edges brushing against it. The blot swells, seeming to gather the smaller dots in its shadowy embrace. From three black circles upon the white canvas, a new shape emerges.

The visage of the Mouse.

In the years after the Mouse's debut, other creatures have since been born of Disney's fevered imagination. The Duck of Rage. The Halfwit Hound of Lunacy and Chaos. The Terrifying Tree Rodent Twins. The Twisted Princesses. But all of them are eclipsed by the silhouette of the Mouse That Must Not Be Mentioned.

Its symbol has been engraved upon our consciousness. Without warning, it could appear anywhere, at any time. It could be three coins, falling upon the ground in that ominous order. It could be a desk imprinted with coffee rings: the remnant stains of long-forgotten coffee cups, by questionable coincidence forming three overlapping circles. It could be an innocuous paragraph, the letter O and the number zero conspiring to shape that odious pattern.

How could we have been so blind? The mystics have long warned us to be wary of things that come in three, and we have always known that there is much power in the forming of a circle. What more power then, the elegant grace and might of those three circles? Wherever you see that sign, know that the Mouse has marked that space for its own. Do not gaze too long into the depths of that abyss, for before long it will turn its gaze upon you.

But we are not the Mouse's true targets. It is too soon forgotten that the most ancient magic required the willing sacrifice of innocent blood. And what is it that we have done to appease the Mouse's demands? To what idol do we turn our young to, when the toil of caring for them becomes too much? Who is it that we have cast into that forbidding maw, to sate the Mouse's hunger?

It has tasted the blood of our young, and now its hunger grows. The process has already begun...

The Mouse will consume our children.

Away With Words

I like to think I have a way with words.

I like to bend them, fold them, crush them, squeeze them, and twist them out of shape. I like to tear them apart, letter by letter, and stitch the pieces back together. I like to force them into order, making them march in a sentence one after the other. I like to scatter them in scrawls across the page, abandoning them to chaos and confusion. I like to teach them to do tricks, to do things for me they wouldn't ordinarily do. I like to deform them and reform them, mutate them and mutilate them. I like to remake them and reshape them as I see fit.

Words are my playthings, and oh how I love them dearly.

But sometimes I wish they would go away. Sometimes I think there are too many words. They are all around me, floating in the air and pasted over surfaces and bouncing inside my brain. They are crowded together and imprisoned inside books, pouring into you when you crack open the covers and let them loose.

There is a word for everything, for every object and emotion, for every action and idea. There are words for other words, words for anatomies of words and arrangements of words. Every culture has its own set of words, and splinters of people form splinters of sets of their own.

Words can move faster than wind, now. Words can cross the ocean, float in the sky, be hurled into the upper atmosphere and flung back to the earth, all in the blink of an eye. They can spread faster than a virus, infect minds faster than any epidemic.

There are words in my head. They appear in my consciousness whenever I see something or recognize something or recall something. They rattle in my mind when I close my eyes, they haunt my dreams and my memories. Word spill out of me whenever I attempt to articulate my thoughts. They are flowing out of my fingers as I type this, flowing out onto the computer screen before my very eyes, and they will flow into you, resounding in your head as you read this.

Is there any escape from them? Words are transcribed on the fingers of the deaf, and those who speak to the deaf. We are born with words grafted to us, and words define us throughout life, within the printed prisons of resumes and application forms, profiles and testimonials. When we die, words are uttered and words will mark our grave. We frame our deepest thoughts and most profound philosophies in words. We make them and they make us. Words are the sum of us.

I like to think I could do away with words. To be free of them, to escape to a place where there are no words. Where I can watch a sunset or hear the buzz of a bee or smell the scent of a flower, all without having to describe them in my mind. Where I can communicate with another person through expression and gesture, without the need for words to convey our thoughts and feelings. Where silences and blank spaces are all the more profound, because there would be no words to depict the emptiness.

Where
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____________________________________________e

The Cute, the Tasty and the Extinct

Selection, Natural & Abominable

According to Darwin's concept of natural selection, species that have the traits best suited for thriving in its environment have the greatest chance of passing on those traits to the next generation. Thus, species are forced to adapt and evolve because of drastic changes to their environment - global drops in temperature, for example, or huge flaming rocks in the sky, or even (as Hollywood tells us) a numerically significant date in the calender.

But that's forgetting the biggest kahuna of 'drastic change to the environment'. That's right: if you want to know who's always roughing up Mother Nature, that would be none other than humanity itself. Humans have always had a massive impact on the evolutionary development of other creatures - how else could such an abominable creature as the Chihuahua (surely, a being that should be placed in the Bestiary right between Basilisk and Chimera) have come into existence, if not to fulfill the extremely narrow ecological niche of being the pet companion to little old ladies?

If Little Old Lady was a character class, then "Summon Pet Chihuahua" would be a level 1 ability.

A Selection of Slavery and Sauce: How Animals Sucked Up to Survive

When humans first appeared on the planet, there was much ruckus as the assorted species went, "Oh-oh, look who's here to wreck the place!" The smarter animals were of course the first to arrive at the adage that has served the minimum wage worker well for ages: If you can't beat 'em, work for 'em!

A brilliant adaptation to the human-dominated environment is to make yourself as useful to humans as possible, thus ensuring your survival. As evidenced by the following paleolithic cave painting, which painstakingly recreates the life of the prehistoric caveman, animals have availed themselves to human service since the Stone Age:

In addition to bad dental hygiene, the Stone Age also featured atrocious labor laws.

Alas, this was not to last. As human civilization rapidly advanced, Stone Age technology became obsolete, and animals found themselves increasingly replaced by machines (even for sex - uh, so I'm told). Being 'useful' to humans would no longer suffice. Fortunately, some species found another, evolutionarily revolutionary tactic: to become tasty.

Now, being tasty has always been a backward adaptation in Darwin's world. You don't want to be tasty. You don't want to give big, nasty predators more incentive to hunt you down and eat you. You want them to take one taste of you and spit you out, then go blog about how bad you taste. But humans, the cow revolutionaries realized, are different. Humans are lazy. All that hunting and stuff? Too much work. Wouldn't it be easier if your food just hanged around all day and let you slaughter them without too much fuss?

And so the cows latched on this radical idea: by making themselves really easy prey to the humans, they ensured that humans would keep them around to be eaten! They have bargained away their milk and their meat, purchasing the future of their species in exchange for surrendering themselves to a gastronomical fate!

Survival of the Cutest

But the Bovine Bargain does not work for everybody. For some species, selling away the meat of their body, even if it means the future of the species, is too distasteful a path to take. For others... well, others are simply too distasteful, and no amount of seasoning will change that.

But evolution takes many twists and turns. Humans have many peculiarities, one among many being their proclivity towards cute animals. Cats, those evil, cunning & manipulative predators, quickly seized on this predilection, and ruthlessly exploited it by adopting cute mannerisms (cuteflaging, as opposed to camouflaging) when in the presence of humans. This tactic has been purringly successful, as we bear witness to those feline masterminds insinuating themselves into human households everywhere.

With the advent of cute animal crusaders (as in, crusaders for cute animals, not animal crusaders who are cute), we can expect more and more species to become cuter in order to survive. The logic is impeccable: Our presence on this planet ravages the environment and pushes many species to the brink of extinction. Humans (especially teenage girls) will go out of their way to rescue cute animals from extinction. Therefore, only animals deemed 'cute' by the average teenage girl will survive to pass on their cute-encoded genes to the next generation. The Darwinian process is thus ruthlessly adhered. In the future, we can expect all animals to be furrier, fluffier and much more adorable. It's a matter of survival.

And what of those animals that are useless to humans, are not tasty, and considered far too ugly for salvation? The sad fact is that ugly animals have no place in the human-dominated world. The next extinction event will most certainly be an ugly one.

Animals in danger of extinction due to excessive ugliness.

They've Already Won

Our Secret Overlords: Chapter One

Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps someone has already taken over the world? I mean, if I ever wanted to take over the world, the best way to ensure that my world reign remains unchallenged would be to ensure that nobody knew I was actually in charge. I would pull the strings of the world’s governments through proxies and intermediates, being sure to stay in the shadows, so that nobody would know who I am or where I operate, and thus no James Bond wannabe could ever be able to topple my world dominance.

Or perhaps, the smarter thing to do would be to operate out in the open – but in such a way that my global supremacy is unrecognizable and unnoticeable. It is there - but nobody actually notices it.

Imagine if there did exist, such a secret overlord. How would we be able to tell? If there were such a person who could rule the world and yet conceal himself or herself so effectively, we would be the helpless puppets of that overlord's strings, rendered even more helpless because of our ignorance. And if another secret overlord were to arise in this overlord-controlled world, someone who could, unknowingly, break free of the reigning secret overlord's grasp, to rise to power and seize the world's reins without anybody - not even the first overlord - noticing it, why then we would have two secret overlords, each unaware of the other.

And you know what? I think all of this has been done. It's happened many times before - and is happening even now. Our overlords are already here. They’ve already won, the world belongs to them – and we are barely cognizant of it. They have embedded their power so strongly upon us that we have accepted and surrendered and even welcomed their reign without even realizing what they’ve done.

Because James Bond can’t blow up a fashion trend. James Bond doesn’t know how to deal with short-selling, or Hollywood, or an expensive cup of coffee, or the purchasing power of teenage girls. Our secret overlords haven’t conquered us with their armies, or a diabolical, hyper-advanced superweapon, or even some clandestine conspiracy. They’ve conquered us with their wealth and influence, their savvy business plans, their sleek brands and logos, their aggressive marketing strategies. They are everywhere. They’re on television and radio, on billboards and bus stands, on blogs and ad banners. They bombard us with their musical jingles, their symbols, their celebrity representatives, their blockbuster movies. We give them our money and they make us happy, and entertained, and complacent. They tell us what to watch and what to eat and what to wear and what to think and what we know.

And who are we to them? Do not fool yourself into thinking you are safe because you are beneath their notice. Oh no, oh no. They know who you are and what you do, and more importantly, what you purchase. You are important to them. Their reigns are dependent on our forbearance and accommodation, something that we give them freely. Unthinkingly.

It's their world that we live in. And why not? We gave it to them.

The List

Based on astonishingly meticulous research and staggeringly in-depth analysis (or, alternatively, arbitrarily selected on a whim), I have a compiled a list of the overlords who secretly control our lives - I'm watching you, secret overlord. I know who you are.

The list is too long to be put here, and I wouldn't be able to do it justice if I did. But do not fear. One by one, I will out these secret overlords, and reveal them as the earth-shattering global tyrants with terrifying powers that they are (doesn't that sound like a reaaaaally good idea?)!

We shall begin with that most insidious and nefarious of entities...




That's right! The evil of Blogspot is such that...

Hey! What the... How did you get in here? Who are you? What are y-
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And... we're back!

Sorry about that, folks. Where was I? Oh yes, this post, which in truth is nothing but a harmless, hilarious joke that has no connection whatsoever with reality. Let us laugh: Ha ha, ha ha! Any of the individuals, organizations and/or otherworldly malevolent beings that I have or have not implicated in this post are most definitely not our secret overlords, but rather our good, compassionate friends who seek to help and enrich our lives in any way they can, incurring only the smallest of cost from us! Rejoice, rejoice that we live in such a golden and glorious era of happiness and joyousness!

Please support them with your money. And time. And attention...

It Was Supposed To Be "Ramblings of a Madman"

Famous First Words:

I never intended to start writing a blog.






Bla, Bla, Blog: Wherein I Express My Dislike of Blogging, and the Abrupt Inclusion of a Disturbing Mental Image

Let's set this straight. I have nothing against bloggers. Some of my best friends are bloggers! However, I've always held a rather dim view of blogging itself (on my list, it hovers just above fanfic and right below pop culture studies).

Now that I've alienated the dedicated bloggers of my audience, allow me to explain. I've always held to the view that blogging is a severe form of cyber-narcissism. You write something, and you post it on an online site that is dedicated to the stuff that you write. I have nothing against writing - I love writing, it's at the very least therapeutic, and possibly holds numerous health benefits - but why post it on the world wide web if you don't expect other people to read it? And the stuff people blog about - dear God. Yes, yes, you lead an interesting life (don't we all?). What makes you think people will actually be interested in reading about every. single. minutiae of your life? Is it not the highest form of narcissism to write about yourself and then to put it somewhere EVERYONE can read it?

(As a digression, I give exception to celebrities and other such people who can blog and have every reason to expect that people will want to read it. The fact that descriptions of the minutiae of their lives will be read by their fans is a reflection of the emptiness of their fans' lives, not their own.)

But of course, people don't just blog about themselves. There are some cool blogs out there that give excellent book reviews (and the bloggers get advance reader copies, the lucky buggers). A cuz of mine has a blog in which he pretends to be a Scottish expatriate living in Malaysia (no, I am not kidding). Theoretically, you could blog about pretty much anything, and the world is a richly diverse enough place that any number of topics could be rewarding to explore. There are blogs out there - the few and far in between - in which some pretty cool and thoughtful people post their pretty cool thoughts on miscellaneous stuff, and those are fun to read and learn from.

In the end, though, you can't escape the essential me-ness nature of blogging.

It's this dual nature of blogging: of being personal, yet public at the same time, that's always put me off. The real issue, when you get right down to it, is that writing is an intensely private and personal experience for me. Terry Pratchett, that imminent scholar and sage (and sometime fantasy novelist), once said that writing is the most enjoyable thing a person can do by himself, and I tend to agree. I've always written for MYSELF, to be read by MYSELF. Writing is like cracking open my skull and allowing the thoughts bouncing around in there to spill across the page. Do you really want other people to know what you're thinking? The very thought of other people reading the stuff I write leads to paroxysms of nervousness, which explains why I've never been published (okay, I have, but research abstracts don't count, dammit).

And so I stand here before you, having written, and having blogged. I... I... I feel so naked!




And A Blogger Am I: In Which I Make Really Weak Justifications

So why am I blogging now? The truth of the matter is... I miss writing. I used to write helluva lot, especially during my matriculation & undergraduate days, when I was going through a rough patch in my life. The writing helped me, back then (or perhaps the adolescent angst helped the writing, you can never be sure). For whatever reason, I've fallen out of the habit. And I miss it. There is this certain... buzz that you get from writing, a particular mental state that you go to, when your fingers are flying across the keyboard and the ideas are sizzling in your brain and the words are flowing like water (but not the editing; never the editing - oh God I hate the editing). It's like a high. It's like falling in love, and flying.

So why not keep a personal journal, you ask? Because I am horribly undisciplined. I have attempted to keep personal journals before. They inevitably collapse into incoherent single sentence stream of consciousness ramblings. They make me lazy, indolent and self-indulgent. A blog, methinks, would discipline me. The guilty thought of disappointing those (completely non-existent) hordes of eager readers would hopefully keep me posting on a regular basis, and the shame of publicly using horrid grammar or exposing my blandly insipid thoughts would hopefully ensure I maintain a modicum of quality in my writing.

And there is, too, the fact that I recently deleted my Friendster profile out of chronic disinterest, and no longer have an outlet for self-expression on the internet. Yes, yes, I know, there's that thing called Facebook. To be frank, the very idea of getting involved in another online social networking site fills me with lethargic dread (as in: dread that makes me lethargic, not dread that is itself lethargic). Plus, Facebook seems to be the "hip" and "in" thing now, and that tends to turn me off. Blogging has been around for so long that it's on the cusp of being old-fashioned...

And the very instant I publish this post, it will be. Ta-dah!




Ultimately, though, I really am a narcissistic asshole, and the thought of inflicting my deranged thoughts upon the unsuspecting blogosphere fills me with sadistic glee (or maybe I'm a masochist, and the thought of nobody noticing and nobody caring fills me with sadistic glee as well).

The Process of Naming, or; What's In A Name?, or; How This Blog Came to be Named, or; I Have No Idea What To Call This Damn Thing


I initially wanted to call my blog "Ramblings of a Madman". No, let me be more precise: even before I've even wanted to start a blog, I've wanted to name my hitherto unconceived blog "Ramblings of a Madman". It just fits me too well. I like to ramble. The aim of my blog would be to ramble. I am mad, and, despite refutations to the contrary, a man (I can prove it! With science!). As a madman, I would ramble, and my ramblings would unmistakably be that of a madman.

Unfortunately I sorely underestimated the number of rambling madmen blogs out there. I discovered, to my strangely uplifting humility, that I was not alone. I am, as the saying goes, unique, just like everybody else. There are scores of "Ramblings of a Madman" blogs out there! My dreams were dashed. That name, that beautiful name, could not belong to me.

I considered others. "A Stranger and A Wayfarer" encapsulated so much about me and my position in life, but it seemed too weighty and serious. Besides, I couldn't rightly say it was "mine". I briefly considered "Decoherence", which would be apt considering the subject matter, but it seemed too quantum physicky, and not being a quantum physicist I felt I could not do it justice. Plus, the damn thing was taken.

Finally I settled on this. The Observer Affection. Firstly, being an "observer" is an excellent way to describe myself: throughout my life I have felt that I am nothing but an observer. Not a participant or a member, but a watcher, on the outside looking in. Secondly, it is a play on the observer effect (a phenomenon in both social and hard sciences wherein the act of observation changes what is being observed), to reflect that the act of observation also changes the observer (yes, yes, Terry Pratchett said it first, but he didn't coin the phrase!). Affection, I believe, works very well because it carries a multitude of meanings. It has the literal sense of affecting the observer. It can also refer to fond attachment or devotion - the fondness of the observer, perhaps. It can even mean a particular propensity: the disposition to observe; or perhaps even an affliction: the affliction of the observer.

I am reminded of the time back in high school, when I accidentally coined the term "sitoflow" to describe the movement of organelles in a cell's cytoplasm. I instantly seized upon the term and used it for my e-mail. Yes, it's a dumb term. It's essentially meaningless gibberish and has no value to anyone but me. But it's mine, you see. I came up with it.

Ultimately, that's why I'm sticking to the name of this blog. It's mine. It's corny and weird and dumb and not catchy in the least, but it's mine.

The End of the Beginning, but the Beginning of the Beginning

So that's it. The rather long-winded story of how this blog came to be. Thank you for taking the time to actually read through the damn thing, invisible audience, and welcome, one and all, to the launch of my very own blog!

*crickets*

Hello? Anyone out there? Anybody? Hello?



*sigh...*