Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I was at Chapters today buying books. As I’ve said before, I really wish they’d get rid of the chairs. It really bugs me to watch people taking books off the shelves, and sitting there for a couple hours reading it cover to cover, often beating the book up so badly it’s at best a used book and at worst unsellable, stealing from the author, publisher, bookstore, or other customers depending on how you look at it. It’s not like if I download a graphic novel and read it. Ignoring the fact that when I do that, I buy the stuff I really like to support the content creators, I am at worst guilty of not adding an extra sale to their bottom line. However, the guy I watched today bending up and destroying the graphic novel he sat and read at chapters has not only “not added a sale”, but he has actually taken a physical product and damaged it to the point where actual paying customers will avoid it. He has actually stolen “for real”, unlike virtual data pirates. But he gets away with it. Maybe I’m being petty.

Oh, and one of the books I got was what looks like a charmingly hilarious choose-your-own-adventure type book called “You Are a Cat“ as a gift for Nefarious… but Caitlin just pointed out to me that on the inside cover the list of other books in the series is a little… odd..? Troubling even?

You Are Doing 20 to Life!
You Are Committing Suicide!
You Are a Cult Leader!
You Are Homeless!
You Are Jesus Christ!
You Are Old!
You Are a School Shooter!
You Are Obsessed with Johnny Depp!
…etc.

The descriptions of these other books are totally nuts, and while the life of the cat starts innocently enough, you quickly find yourself run over by a car or discovering the strange smelling stuff that the teenage son smokes at night, which looks a bit like catnip but does nothing for you. Turns out it’s a hilarious dark parody of those sorts of books for mature readers. Oops. Very lucky that Caitlin decided to take a look at the book first, because it probably would not have put me on any dad-of-the-year lists to send this to her. We do have an adult friend in mind though that this will be an absolutely perfect gift for, so all is not lost. On Caitlin’s brilliant suggestion, the gift has already been successfully redirected! And to balance things out, the graphic novel I got for myself should be a perfect read for Nefarious as well, so it all equals out nicely.

Oh, and speaking of stolen content, I’m always amazed at how many full-length movies are pirated on major mainstream sites like YouTube have — which reminds me, check out YouTube movies which has lots of full-length free movies to download (as well as paid stuff) including quite a few fascinating free documentaries that would be difficult to find in the pirate world. But YouTube is also one of the go-to places for movie pirates. I was reading an old “Top 10 Bizarre Afterlife Experiments” list and saw a reference to a past-life documentary featuring an Australian woman who started speaking French under hypnosis. Because The Reincarnation Experiments was filmed in 1983 I didn’t think I’d be able to find it on TPB, but luckily it was linked on YouTube and while I remain skeptical, I did enjoy watching it. Personally if I was the creator of this documentary, I would be very happy to see that it is preserved forever online instead of being forgotten like so many older creations, and since YouTube has allowed I’m guessing 25,000+ people to watch it in full over the last few years, I’m hoping they’re happy to quietly profit from it.

Watch it if you want (to find the others, visit the uploader’s page, and there are many related documtaries automatically suggested by YouTube’s AI sidebar). And of course the many sites that let you painlessly download YouTube to your computer make it easy to move it over to filesharing networks, and I am sure that there are dozens of venture informationists downloading these videos in bulk, ensuring that from the advent of the internet on, humanity will never forget its invetions. I hope.

Watching that documentary on past life regression, of course my first question was “what’s the con?” but let’s assume for a minute that the researchers and subjects are genuine and believe what they’re saying. Personally I do not believe that it give evidence for any sort of spiritual reincarnation. To me, it does however provide evidence for the proposition that we are living in a simulation. In fact, the idea that we are living in a simulation is the only way to logically explain memories of past lives without violating our understanding of a scientificly understandable world. It’s not hard to imagine that from time to time a software bug could result in some memories not being properly cleared, or data leaking from simulation to simulation.

That said, I have enough trouble being convinced by the paranormal, simply because it’s easier to explain the entire paranormal world away by a combination of “you’re lying” and “you’re mistaken”. That said, if the paranormal is real it definitely convinces me of artificial worlds before it convinces me of the literal paranormal! But I am far more convinced we are living in a simulation by some of the weirdness of this world — the fact that the world “renders” differently when you look at it at different resolutions, or even the phenomena of light behaving as a wave in some circumstances or as a particle in others. But I’m just as happy to say that this is simply proof that we live in a gloriously weird universe.

The statistical argument is the most common “proof” that we are “living in a video game”, and I think it’s simultaneously the most meaningless and the most convincing. I’ll quickly and shortly repeat it here for those who don’t know it. Basically it says that if we assume that simulated worlds are technologically possible in the first place, that there is one “real world” and billions of “virtual worlds”. Therefore, the odds that we are living in the real world are extremely, extremely slim, and we can say with a high degree of certaintly that we are in a simulation. We just have to accept the assumption — and depending on your analysis of the potential of techology it may or may not be a big assumption — that simulating a world is possible in the first place. Of course, it’s one of those things you can never really prove, so in the end it amounts to little more than the various logical “proofs” for the existance of god — very convincing to those that have faith to begin with, and patently silly mental masturbation for everyone else.

So how do you prove you’re in a simulation? Accidentally consume a mega-dose of DMT and watch the software crash? Personally I found that very convincing! That said, I’m am not at all sure what it convinced me of.

But I was very convinced.

A few days ago my trusty Dremel 400XPR did what I’ve now read is quite common for that flawed model — burst into a dramatic but short-lived fireball (thankfully I use a flex shaft and don’t hold the engine in hand) and then life-ending puff of smoke. So I headed up to the hardware store to get a replacement, and afterwards headed over to Canadian Tire to get a hotdog from the vendor out front. I figured I’d be able to park near the store since it was a mini-blizzard today and I hoped that the old folks that hang out at Canadian Tire and always fill up the handicapped spots would stay home. But instead when I got there I got to see an old fool backing out of a spot and then apparently smash on the gas instead of the brake… He went flying across the lot and smashed into a couple parked cars, destroying each of them as he pushed them into the next spot over. The old guy was about to turn it into a hit and run and started to flee when the hot dog vendor ran out and wrote down his license plate. Seeing this common sense caught up with him and he decided not to become a fugitive over the asinine behavior that is all-too-common for his generation.

“Never a dull day at the hot dog stand,” swore the chef.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about re-testing senior citizens, and then counter claims of ageism. I think when you hit a certain age you have to get your eyes retested, but that’s it. It got me thinking that what we really need at an absolute minimum — for all ages, and as a part of regular license renewal — is reflex testing. I’d like to see every granny (and every stoner dimwit that’s not also compensating with video games) lose their license when they can’t react to stimuli within a reasonable timeframe. Hell, with how realistic the physics of driving games/simulators are these days, I don’t see why we don’t do virtual driving tests. Right now we basically just make people take a glorified drive around the block and make sure they understand the basic rules of the road. This is not why accidents happen. There’s no reason why we couldn’t use virtual testing to actually test people in evasive driving and the sort of real life situations that often lead to accidents. But barring that, reflex tests. I’m sure it has the potential to eliminate a third of the accidents if we take the morons and the decrepit off the road.

Other than that I’m watching Inception for the first time since seeing it in the theatre and enjoying it a great deal. As you know dreams have been on my mind lately, and always have been. Repeating myself, when I was a kid, I had only a very small handful of dreams that repeated over and over and over until now, in my adulthood, they coalesced into a single large dreamworld that exists in parallel to my waking life. I don’t know if it’s brain damage from oxygen deprivation resulting from my condition, or if it’s just stress, but I feel like the dream world and the real world are combining, blending and blurring into each other. I find myself walking down the street and I recognize someone and I wonder, where do I know them from, and I realize that they are characters from the dream world. I’m sure the psychiatric explanation as to how I could meet someone that I previously dreamed about is somewhat akin to the neurological basis for deja vu (which is quite interesting), but understanding that logically does not make it any less disquieting.

So I have been drawing it and painting it.

I know that Occam’s Razor says it’s just a silly story, and most of the time I do believe that, but sometimes I am convinced that these are the side effects of living in a simulation. I am quite solidly atheist, but my love of science fiction makes me very vulnerable to the proofs that this is one of a trillion virtual worlds. Perhaps having my mortality so pushed in my face lately I’m even more vulnerable to the hope that one day I will wake up and get to “play again”. It seems more possible when I read about the fact that time an matter are quantized or “pixellated” and all the other weirdness of quantum science, but I feel like quantum science is like the Bible — if you don’t really understand it, you can use it to prove just about any crazy idea. And that we are living in a dream is definitely a crazy idea!

Of course it would explain why I can remember very little beyond the past twelve hours…

I’m sure by now most of you have heard about the local Kitchener, Ontario man who was briefly tossed in jail and had his house turned upside down because his daughter drew a picture of him holding a gun at school. When the teacher asked the child what the drawing was she said, “that’s my dad and his gun that he uses to shoot monsters and bad guys!”

What four year old doesn’t have a dad that kills monsters and bad guys? By the way, I should add that the school knows the father and has up until this point had a good relationship with him. To put everything in the open so no one is saying “I’ll bet there’s more to the story” in a smarmy voice, five years prior he had an assault and burglary conviction, but since then he’s turned his life around and is now a life coach and certified PSW (personal support worker — sort of like a home nurse). Again, the school knows all this, and last year they even offered him a job as a counselor.

Anyway, instead of talking to the child, having a parent teacher conference, or doing the reasonable thing and realizing this is a happy child with a decent parent known to the school and IGNORING IT, the teacher freaked out and called the authorities, telling them in very clear terms that this child was in danger because of guns in the home. The police never heard about it simply being a child’s drawing — they just heard “child with access to unregistered guns”.

So when the guy went to pick up his three children after school like every day, he was instead met by three police and he was handcuffed and told he was being charged with possession of a firearm. They ignored his tearful and terrified claims that they were making a mistake and took him and the children to the police station where he was strip searched and dumped in a cell. I’ve spent time in a jail cell for something I didn’t do, strip-searched, and I have had my home invaded by child services on false charges, and even though it “all turned out fine” and in the end the police and children’s aid both apologized for wasting my time (which I assure you does not make it any better), it was still incredibly stressful to go through for me and something I’d never wish on anyone, and even more so for my daughter. Anyway, they went to this poor guy’s home and brought his wife and baby (he has a lot of kids!) to the station where they were interviewed by Family and Children’s Services. While this was going on they were searching his house top to bottom — I am sure it’s ripped to shreds. In their search the totality of what they found was a clear plastic toy gun, which wa later identified as the gun in the drawing. No weapons, no drugs, no nothing. A typical baseless witch hunt.

The police released him with no charges and “an apology”, although he now has an additional arrest record which will stay on his record for the next three years making it difficult for him to travel and potentially get jobs. The school and child welfare and police all stand by their actions and are not only clear that everything was done correctly and that they’d do it the same way again, but the school has been very clear that they are completely unwilling to even review their actions for the possibility of other ways of handling such a situation. Scum. Scum. Scum.

Ignoring the fact that there is nothing more dangerous than subjectively investigating people for thought-crimes, this shows a disturbing level of incompetence on the part of the teacher in being able to identify problems at home. Teachers are the first line of defense against child abuse. They need to be able to tell when a child is in danger and when a child is not. To identify the problem signs. The system failed to a comical degree here. In this case it failed with a false positive. That’s terrible. But I have to wonder with such ignorant people, how many times have they failed with a false negative? Because that’s even worse. I haven’t even talked about the collateral damage here — how is this family ever supposed to trust this school again? How can they continue to have a reasonable relationship with them? They’re going to have to move. And how are these kids ever supposed to trust teachers — let alone police — again? The whole thing is sickening on so many levels.

By the way, here’s a drawing that Nefarious did. I don’t even want to think what could have happened if she had gone to this school (which is not very far from where we live):

Christmas is ruined!

Thankfully my daughter went to a wonderful school where they were willing to foster children’s creativity rather than try and destroy their family if they moved even slightly outside the boundaries of acceptable prole behavior as determined by the lowest of the low level “politically correct” bureaucrat.

Nefarious by the way has had automatic knives of her own since she was five. She has been shooting air guns — with my guidance and safety instruction — since she was three. Her school was aware of this as well. Heck, on one of their school trips to the park the kids were showing each other how to make bows and arrows out of sticks and found objects. There is nothing wrong with responsible use of such things. In fact, learning how to responsibly handle danger is a very, very important part of growing up, and one that I worry many children miss out on in these politically correct danger-averse modern times.

News links on this story: Man shocked by arrest after daughter draws picture of gun at school, Kitchener officials sticking to their guns, Possession of a dangerous crayon , etc. — the victim’s name is “Jessie Sansone” for those wanting to search for updates.