Is it real or is it Memex

Going on a tangent about that piece of art which gave rise to some sentences you don't often see, I wound up on the Dimensions blog, reading:

The internet age has elevated the non-event, the fantastic, to the status of the real. Not surprisingly, performance art has thrived in this environment. Shvarts' formal ingenuity speaks for itself.

And then just the next day on the (unrelated) Wordie Errata blog:

Slice is told through two fake intertwined blogs. I'm so up to my eyeballs in what I think are real blogs that this just seemed like more of the same; I couldn't really tell the difference between it and the tripe you come across on LiveJournal et. al. every day.

What I think are real blogs.

Given this, what can I do other than declare this blog decidedly not real? This is not my beautiful blog! I am not keeping it real in any shape or form! I have been faking it from the very first post! Turn off your computer now!

Journey to the center of the blogosfear

There had been of late an increase, in the messages passing by on the pneumatic tube, of canisters marked Attn: 8 random facts about myself. Clearly some sort of chain-letter; harmless as long as it didn't exceed message-handling capacity.

An exemplar that had dumped into my tray for lack of a recipient piqued my curiosity. I succumbed to the temptation to trace it to its source—this was an easy task, I told myself, especially because the chain-letter, potentially duplicating eight ways at each recipient, must obey the principle of Octo-Logarithmycks: even if there were, say, as many as thirty thousand of these things, it shouldn't take more than ten "generations" or so to reach the source. Its path, I knew, could be traced by scent with the application of specially prepared rodents, of which I happened to possess a pair.

Peeling back the onion-like layers of these pen-pal "communities" revealed striking and astute connexions: from atheists to Christians to erotic novels, from bookworms to Sufism, from admonishments to buy more Victory Gin to Shia knitting.

Then the trail went cold, somewhen in early March. I appeared to be going in circles. Had this "mi-meme" been born of a Mœbius-loop time anomaly? Was this creature an abomination of causality, never meant to cross the threshold into our world?

My palms sweating, I turned to the archaic tome known to some as Altavista advanced search. It only confirmed my gravest fears: the Thing had slithered out of the deep abyss whose name is whispered only in the most purple of prose.

rathish Said,
October 12, 2006 @ 7:22 pm

alexis chetta.. shall i tag you…????
I wanted your permission before tagging you.
If you dont want to repeat a tag again in your blog…u can always
postpone this tag.And if dont wanna do this..it is also okiie…
The tag is 8 random facts about you.

It was MySpace, and I had exposed myself to its progeny.

Still I pressed on, back into the deepest recesses of the Thing's past, where primordial soup sloshed against the shores while the names of elder monstrosities were tossed about with abandon — when suddenly, all was quiet but for faint, ululating pipes in the distance. Then:

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ok, I was tagged by Robbie to list 8 random facts about me....they are probably not so interesting...but here goes....

1. Thursday I was in line at Wal-Mart with 2 more items to be scanned when the electricity went out....45 minutes later I finally got to leave!!

2. I am watching the Disney Channel....with my sister!

3. I am cooking a roast for the first time!

4. I like to paint although I am not that good at it!

5. My markers have to be arranged, ROYGBIV, or it bothers me terribly!!

6. I miss playing the piano...we do not have a piano here so I only get to play when I go home...

7. I graduate May 13, 2006!! Only a year late!! Not too bad!

8. I love bite-sized Cherry Twislers!

Ok, so maybe it is not so interesting, but that is my list...now I tag:

Allyson, Scott, and Nash!!

I see it, ph'nglui an even greater horror than MySpace— who would know but for wgah'nagl the drums cheezburger fthaghn mglw'nafh lolthulhu roflmao Chínhđi unàycùngv Shub-internet.ims.disa.mil ïarpanet [the rest of the note is illegible]

[Technorati Victory gin chainletter cheezburger fthagn dodgy Gothic failed sanity check isometric logarithmycks lolthulu memetrace plastic rodent purple prose untitled.gif]

Enough to make you think. Twice.

When I have the flu I seem to gravitate towards Something Awful, as I did this winter. The fever was bad enough that I found myself reading Something Awful articles about Second Life. Second Life, you may know, is the more famous of online 3D environments that are less like games and more, well, just environments really — what we used to call a "MUD" back in the day. (If you don't know what Something Awful is, you're probably happier not knowing, trust me.)

From there I heard about this person, who apparently holds three degrees but spends most of her time going on about how Second Life, which is run by a private company on centrally-controlled servers, fails to be all things to all punters and provide utopian cyber-democracy, or something. (The company running SL is called Linden Labs, hence the numerous statements directed at whichever Linden.)

I have some sort of point here, I promise. Now, from this post:

What I mean, for practical purposes in arranging a society by "belief in God" isn't even some specific god or God or some specific major religious system or set of karmas running over dogmas. Not at all.

It's much more basic: it means a higher, organizing, unifying principle. A Higher Power. If you don't have some belief in something higher than yourself (a higher power, a pattern of a higher intelligence, something larger than yourself, anyway), then all you are left with is your own ego, your pals' ego, and they're certain to reinforce your ego, and you, theirs. [...]

As Dostoyevsky put it, in my translation, "Without God, anything goes" [...]

Ah, Dostoyevsky. Did he really put it that way?

The rest of the post exhibits the sort of rambling that reveals why it's a bad idea to follow links from Something Awful when feverish. But still, the extensive misquote of Dostoyevsky undeniably indicates that the statement has a certain kind of resonance.

That resonance would perhaps be with people who like to invoke the Absolute to reinforce their own ego, and only their own ego, without even the need to consult any pals. I know it's so, because God told me.

On second thought. To what extent do people use "God" to mean common societal standards?

Yes I am feeling better now, thanks for asking.