Pitter Patter, Pitter Patter

I am surrounded by the soft pitter patter of falling ants.

Pitter patter, pitter patter

I didn't want to, you understand? I didn't want to do it. What person in their right mind would want to do this? But they left me no choice. I had no choice. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter

They say a man's home is his castle. If that's so, then what is his library, especially for a man like me? It is more than a home - it is an abode, a sanctuary. It is his heart. What else could I do, when I found them? I had no choice. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter

My eyes still water from the fumes of the Ridsect. Such a potent thing, that little can. It is a little can of death. The death of hundreds. I didn't want to do it - but what else could I do, when I found that seething mass of ants nestled behind my books? I had no choice, I tell you. No choice. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter

They fall to the earth like rain. It is as fascinating to watch as it is gruesome. the poison does not kill them instantly, of course - no, that would be too easy. First it drives them mad with pain. They scurry in panic, running without realizing that there is nowhere to run to - the death is already in them. Then whatever it is that powers their adhesive grip to the walls fail - and they fall. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter

There are many - so very many of them. I have begun the cleanup. My dustpan is filled with tiny black corpses. It is a sea of dead. And yet, they keep falling. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter

This will haunt my dreams, I know. Not the frenzy of the ants, running in panic as toxic death envelops them. Not the smell of insecticide that will hang over me for the rest of the day like a pall. Not even the vengeful bites of the ants that cling to life long enough to deliver what payback they can against the monster that has destroyed their world. No - it is the sound that will haunt me tonight. The gentle rain of black corpses hitting the floor. 

Pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter...

There Is No "I" In "Me"

"I think, therefore I am... I think."
Nordom, Planescape: Torment

When I was younger I was terrified by the thought that every night when I went to bed, I was killed in my sleep and replaced by a clone with identical memories. To go to sleep was to create a pause, a space, an interruption in the continuity of my consciousness: How could I know it was still me that took up where the previous me left off? I would wake in the morning, and lie in bed as I went over my memories, pondering: are these mine? Am I still me?

"All is flux; nothing stands still."

Heraclitus

Heraclitus said that no man can ever step in the same river twice, because he is never again the same man, and it is never again the same river. The passage of time is the passage of change. Even as I write and even as you read, change is happening. Our cells shrivel up and die and are replaced - the body that you had when you were born has by now been entirely replaced by food. The neural network that is our brain processes information and is forever altered by the information: neural paths are closed and new ones are created. We live second to second as if in an animation. The transitions seem to flow smoothly and naturally, but slow it down, freeze it frame by frame and you will see the minute differences; the tiny alterations of you. You are not the same person from one frame to the next.

Change is not an illusion, as Parmenides and Zeno argued - rather, it is the state of being which is the illusion. Permanence is a human lie - everything in this world is transient, temporary. Including the notion of you.

So it would seem my younger self's fears weren't entirely unfounded. When I wake up in the morning, I'm not the same person as who I was when I went to sleep the previous night. I have changed. Zahir A has vanished, and Zahir B has stepped in to take his place. If anything, my younger self was being entirely too naive. The change is happening not just when I sleep, but at all times, during my sleeping as well as my waking hours, all without me realizing it. An iteration of me is lost and replaced with each moment to the next. I die a million deaths every day.

"I yam what I yam and tha's all what I yam!"

Popeye the Sailor Man

Who is the "I" that lurks in the darkness behind our eyes? It has been documented that people who suffer massive brain damage can likewise experience massive changes in personality - the self and the physical form are not so easily separated as one would like to think. And yet if you were to take a human brain and disassemble it, piece by piece, you would not find a soul. You would not find an "I". All you would have left is a dissected brain. In searching for it, you have destroyed it. So what is it then? Some intangible value? Something beyond the senses?

Yet we do sense it - don't we? You feel like you. You feel that there is a "you". Don't you? What does it mean to say, "I don't feel like myself today"? Is it simply that our behavior has diverged from some established mean? But human behavior itself is hardly consistent - we act differently in different environments. We can be animated and talkative among close friends, yet quiet and withdrawn among strangers. We can be kind and compassionate to our mothers, yet cold and distant to an acquaintance. If even daily behavior is so fluid, how can we lay claim to a concrete identity?
 
Perhaps it is so difficult to define identity because identity itself is something that is vague and indistinct - a haphazard collective of a person's thoughts and feelings and memories and beliefs? All of which are constantly changing. In one instance to the next, new memories are gained and older memories are lost or overwritten (are you absolutely certain you correctly remember everything that has happened to you? Barring an eidetic memory, I think not). Our beliefs and perceptions of the world are constantly challenged and changed by new experiences. If identity is memory and perception, then we change identities each time we learn something new or forget something we once knew or change our views about something that we once held as unshakeable truths. There is a reason why a change in one's opinion is called "changing one's mind".

Who, then, is this person who is sitting at his keyboard typing this right now? What is this thing that is thinking these thoughts right now? A person with a soul? An automaton that thinks it is thinking? The nth iteration of something that exists only within the frame of a second, erased by time and replaced by another iteration the very next moment? Is there really a me, or am I simply some random assortment of living cells, bound together in symbiosis and fooling itself into thinking it is a single entity?

Does identity have a meaning, or are we all simply figments of our own imaginations?

Antipocalypse

Antipocalypse: When the world fails to end as scheduled.

Stealth Blogging

I realize that I have been stealth blogging. I have told absolutely nobody that I have resumed blogging. I've even changed the title of my blog. From what I can ascertain absolutely nobody reads this blog. As far as I can tell, I'm blogging away in the darkness, ignored and unbeknownst by the denizens of the internet.

I suppose if I keep at it, I'll eventually level up into a Ninja Blogger, capable of sneaking into your home and editing your blog post while you are powerless to stop me, then slipping away unseen.

*looks over shoulder nervously*

Was that a... did that shadow move? Or am I imagining things? Did...

Oh, never mind. There are no such things as Ninja Bloggers! What a ludicrous postulation. Forget I ever mentioned it. Seriously, just forget it.

Or else...

A Piph About A Piph About A Piph

A PIPH is a mini-epiphany - a sudden, striking realization about something that isn't really all that important and certainly doesn't warrant its own blog post. Used within the context of this blog, it is also:

1. A convenient excuse for me to make a micro-blog post about some random thought that has spontaneously manifested in the chaotic morass that is my mind.
2. A blog post label that wil be used henceforth.
3. A means by which I can give myself the false assurance of my own productivity, not to mention artificially inflate my blog post count

A sudden piph whilst in the midst of this description of piphs: An e-piph would be a piph that is transmitted electronically. Or even, a piph that arises whilst in the midst of engaging in an online activity such as blogging. That's right, I just had a piph about a piph at the very moment I was epiphaning.

I really should stop before this turns into the Babblings of a Certified Loon.

I Am Madman, Hear Me Ramble

 Famous First Words:

It was supposed to be "Ramblings of a Madman"

Preramble: A Clever Play on Words, A Summation of What Happened the Last Time I Engaged in Blogging, and A Defiant Show of Rebellion

When I started this blog, more than - what, two years ago? - in my inaugural post I said that I wanted to name my blog "Ramblings of a Madman" because it fit me all to well, but I didn't because I had discovered other, numerous Madman Rambling blogs out there in the wild. Thus I dubbed my blog "The Observer Affection" and sallied forth into the blogosphere.

Eight posts later, my blogging got swallowed up by chronic procrastination ("yeah, I'll get to writing that... later") and I promptly fell off the face of the blogosphere for two whole years.

(For those who care, in the interim I got a baby and finished my Masters, which is evidence for an interesting negative correlation between blogging and real-world productivity - but I'll leave that aside for the nonce)

And now I'm back. And you know what? The first thing I'm doing is changing the name of the blog. I was never comfortable with "The Observer Affection". It was like one of those brand-new shoes that you buy that your feet don't feel entirely comfortable in, but you think, I'll get used to them eventually after they've been worn in, and they'll feel just like the old shoes I'm wearing right now, but they never do and you shamefully leave them to gather dust in the shoe cabinet while you resume wearing your old worn-out shoes. Well, I wore the title of this blog for about half a year (yes, I'm well aware this speaks ill of my blog stamina) and it never felt quite right.

But "Ramblings of a Madman" still fits. It fits, dammit, I don't care that other people have been using it and are using it still! I want it, it fits me, it fits me, I'm using it, and nobody can stop me! Do you hear that, Blogspot?

You. Can't. Stop. Me!

Just Write: Justifications for a Most Malign Malady

You might be wondering what I'm doing back. I mean, clearly, the blog experiment was a failure. There are a couple stuff I wrote in there that I'm actually kind of proud of writing, but ultimately my blog stamina ran out and the writing screeched to a halt. So why come back to it?

The simple reason is that I miss writing. It's been far too long since I've sat down and purposely wrote something that wasn't for work or study purposes. It's been far too long since I've dedicated myself to writing something just for the fun of writing, and I miss that.

Looking back at my blog posts, I notice now that towards the end, before I lost interest completely, I was writing blog posts simply for the sake of writing blog posts. I now realize that was my mistake, that this was the real reason why I stopped writing. The blog had ceased being a means to an end, it had become the goal itself. And this is just wrong. The reason to write should be so that I can have written. Writing should be its own end. The blog should simply be the (perhaps unfortunate) byproduct of the process of writing.

And the fundamental truth is... I can't stop writing. I don't think I could stop if I tried. I've been writing since I've known how to write, and before that, I was writing stuff in my head. When I was four or five, I wrote a "novel" involving Autobots and Decepticons and a heart-wrenching tale of loyalty and betrayal, all told in four pulse-pounding pages. In primary school, I was inventing superheroes in my head and writing about them (accompanied by horrifically amateurish pictures) in the classroom until one of my stricter teachers found the notebook, shamed me in front of the class, then threw it out. In high school I wrote and "published" (as in, printed out at home and then sent for binding at the mamak shop across the road) a series of sci-fi/fantasy "novels" for subsequent distribution among my friends (that stuff is still lying around the house somewhere, I know I should burn them but I just don't have the heart). I wrote during Matriculation, during university lectures, and in the office when I was supposed to be doing work.

Now do you understand? Writing is a need, an itch, an addiction, an unstoppable inevitability.

I. Can't. Stop. Writing.

A Study in Stupidity

Well, Duh

Stupidity is an inherent characteristic of the human race. It is not just that humans are stupid: stupidity permeates every facet of the human experience. Human society is full of stupid, as is human history, human politics, human economics and human anything else.

This study does not seek to question whether or not humanity is stupid: this is a given, something that is instantly obvious to all but the... er, dumbest of us. What this study aims to do is to challenge the basic, underlying assumptions of stupidity, to analyze and categorize the many forms of stupidity, and to ask the most paramount questions: why are we so damned stupid, and where will our stupidity ultimately take us?

The Stupid Gene

Scientists have thus far been unsuccessful in isolating the genes responsible for stupidity (though their efforts have been moderately more successful than attempts at isolating intelligence genes). However, the history of monarchy offers tantalizing hints that stupidity is inherited. Taking into account the ubiquitous manifestation of stupidity at all levels of humanity, the prevailing theory argues that multiple discrete stupidity genes make frequent, sporadic appearances in random generations of all human genetic lineages. These stupidity genes release stupidity hormones that suppress native intelligence. It has been suggested that even the most intelligent of people have stupidity genes, expressed in reaction to certain stimuli. Known stimuli include falling in love, entering a reality television competition, or talking to strangers online.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is rarely inherited: the chances of an intelligent parent having a similarly intelligent offspring is lower than the mean of low probabilities arbitrarily assigned by random people pontificating on their blogs.

Furthermore, genetic inheritance analysis indicates that the chances of stupid genes proliferating in the human gene pool are much higher than that of intelligence genes. The reasoning is simple. Intelligent people are often far more interested in intellectual pursuits such as the arts, literature, playing RPGs and so forth than they are in having sex. Stupid people, on the other hand, are less distracted by these things and hence are more likely to engage in sex. Ceteris paribus, stupid people will always outbreed intelligent people.

Survival of the Stupidest

Contrary to common belief, stupidity is in fact a positive selective mechanism for advancement in human society.

The Dunning-Kruger effect demonstrates that stupid people are far more confident of their own abilities than intelligent people are. In general, the dumber you get, the more confident you are of your competence. Thus, in fields where self-confidence is more important than actual ability - such as politics, motivational speaking and management - stupid people will get to the top every time.

Evidence strongly suggests that you will almost always inevitably end up working for someone stupider than you.

The Future of Stupidity

In terms of intelligence, humans are the opposite of social insects: as individuals we can be clever and sensible, but when we amass, we create a hivemind of Collective Stupidity. According to the Pratchett formula of mass idiocy, the intelligence of any given crowd is equal to the IQ of the dumbest person in the crowd divided by the number of people in that crowd.

Einstein has said that human stupidity is unlimited. However, before the development of mass communication technology, our collective stupidity was bounded by geographical limitations, only reaching brief peaks of stupidity during select moments such as national elections. Now, with the advent of the internet, human stupidity can finally soar to new, unimaginably idiotic heights. The internet enables the instantaneous, simultaneous communication of millions of stupid people across the world, creating a global overmind of unlimited idiocy. Everyone gets dumber online, communicating in truncated, grammatically mutilating grunts and gestures. The few shiny points of intelligence in this sea of stupidity - the poignant blogs, the thoughtful forum discussions - are drowned out by the chorus of idiotic comments, stupid flamewars and mindless trolling.

We are now hurtling into an era of hitherto unknown dimensions of stupidity. Already, programmers are working hard on the creation of artificial stupidity, and our astronomers are searching the skies for possible signs of extraterrestrial stupidity. Soon, humanity will attain the ultimate apex of idiocy, as our minds merge into a single, moronic consciousness. At long last, the Singularity of Stupid will be upon us.

The Anti-News

I have just returned from a week-plus jaunt to Merrie Olde England and I am most disconcerted to report that the airport officials utterly failed to accost me at the security checkpoints.

In fact, I was not in any way subjected to a painful and embarrassing rectal/anal examination. The security officers did not apply racial profiling, and absolutely nobody accused me of being a terrorist. I was not singled out, and my bags were not checked any more thoroughly than anybody else's.

(Although I suspect that, human stigma being subject to current conditions as it is, I'd have been immediately detained if I had checked in as a cloud of volcanic ash)

But it wasn't just the airports that were disappointing. Throughout my entire stay in Southampton, Portsmouth, Cambridge and London, not a single racial slur was hurled at me or my family. No crude threats or insults were uttered in our direction. Nobody beat us up at any of the train or bus stations. Nobody attempted to swindle us, cheat us, steal our money or even pick our pockets! Can you imagine - clueless tourists in a foreign country, and not a single attempt was made to take advantage of us!

On the contrary, everywhere people were unfailingly polite, gracious, kind and helpful.

It was extremely disheartening to say the least. I was hoping for at least one opportunity - just one! - to play the aggrieved victim and rail against the sorry state of humanity today. But no - it was courtesy and consideration at every turn.

It is things like this that wounds the grumbling grouch within me and makes me question my hardened cynicism. What has happened to all the xenophobic post-9/11 paranoia that the news assures me is rampant in the world today? Is my dark pessimism about human nature and the dystopian future of our race completely unfounded?

My faith in the hopelessness of humanity has been well and truly shattered. Perhaps I should switch to the news channel, or read the newspapers, in order to renew it...

Adrift in an Ocean of Possibilities

Before you were born, you were a Schrodinger's Box in the womb.

Before you were born you could have been anything. You could have been a boy or a girl or something in between. You could have been Asian or Caucasian or an implanted alien fetus. You could have been black haired or blond haired, blue eyed or black eyed, ten-fingered or eleven-fingered or twelve. You could have been strong and fit, or weak and malnourished, or dead.

And even after you were born, and deemed alive, and your parents or doctor or nurses or whomever discovered you had noted the color of your hair, and the shape of your face, and the number of your digits, and the shade of your skin - even then, even then a million million other possibilities remained to you.

You could have grown up to be a doctor, who goes on to treat a thousand patients, or kills a patient on the operating table and has your medical license suspended only to retire to a house in Adelaide or Puerto Rico or Miami, or goes to work at the hospital day after day steadily becoming more bitter and more cynical about your job and blowing your brains out when you come home one evening. You might have become a comedian, a wildly popular one with a hit show and ratings through the roof but secretly you hate your jokes or your audience or yourself, or one who's struggling with your career and starving and trying to meet your rent and you smile and laugh through it all but secretly you hate your jokes or your audience or yourself. You could be the next president of America or a small floundering company or a banana republic or the world, who takes over the country or a meaningless organization or entire nations with your smile or with your guns or with your ideas or with your lies or with your money, and you rule with ruthless cunning or visionary wisdom or well-meaning incompetence.

You could end up becoming a dentist who dies of diabetes. You could be a prize-winning journalist with a dark secret. You could become a lawyer with a secret double life as a blogger. You could be an astronaut who makes first contact with an alien civilization. You could train to be a soldier only to die of a heart attack in boot camp. You could change the world, you could be a part of the world, you could fight the world and ultimately fail.

You could have been anyone, done anything. But because of who you chose to be and what happened to you and what you've done, right now you are none of the things you could have been, except who you are right now.




There are so many variables that make up our lives and our world. There are so many possible outcomes, so many places that we can go from here. And each of our actions - or inactions - moves us towards one outcome and away from another. We move in a shifting stream of potential fates, and every decision that we make plucks a fate out of potentia and makes it that much more real, and erases other destinies from the spectrum of possibility.

And as you grow older, as you make choices and choices are forced upon you, as your life moves upon its track, taking this turn and that turn, this branching future instead of that branching future, the ocean of possibilities shrinks and you begin to see the shore. The freedom of youth is the freedom of having your entire life before you, unlived. The curse of the aged is that distant shore looming nearer and nearer, as possibilities vanish and your life is laid down in a fixed path behind you.

Some uncertainty principle of alternate fates governs our knowledge of the choices we take: once we've gone down one road, we will never know what waited for us on all the others. It is impossible to chart the movement of our lives through the phase space of possible futures. All we can do is choose, and then look back upon the choices we have made and see where it has lead us.

The closest that we can get to perceiving those branching tracks of divergent futures is in that one, particular instant before the point of resolution: that moment just before the box is opened, before the shilling falls, before you turn the page to discover who the murderer is. You feel it when you sit before an empty screen, fingers poised as you begin to type. It is in that infinite space of a second that exists after you've asked the question, and she opens her mouth to answer. It is in that instant, that you feel the possibilities blossoming, the air become thick with potential, the multitude of probable futures stretching out before you. This is the moment when anything could happen.

And then you open the box, you type the first word, she gives her reply. And the manifold futures collapse into a singularity, the alternate realities vanish, and all you have left is what happened.

Opening Schrodinger's box is always disappointing, because now inside it is only one thing, when before that it could have been anything.

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
___there

______________would

___________________________onl y

_________________________________________b

____________________________________________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...*