Just A Statement Regarding Reliigion

I just thought I’d nail something to the door. For the heck of it. Since I've mentioned religion a few times.

I grew up with lukewarm Southern Baptists who didn’t force me to go to church but were happy when I did. I hated the clothes and preaching but enjoyed the singing. At one point I decided to lie about being born again just to see if I’d get struck by lightning or whether the adults would notice; following the results of this experiment I decided to stop going to church.

Then in my 20s I thought it was intellectually lazy to dismiss religion without doing a thorough investigation, so I started studying it, and that is what led me to being in a social circle adjacent to people like Helen Parsons Smith and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as a whole lot of non-droppable names who represent the people I actually hung out with rather than people I met a couple times who probably glanced at me and thought "that young woman certainly is inebriated, I hope she gets home okay." The fact I’m not originally from North America helped inspire me to learn about religions other than monotheism, and Dungeons and Dragons played a part too.

Eventually I resumed not going to church, but these days I describe myself as an agnostic, because “I dunno” is a better answer than “affirmatively yes, let’s fight!” or “affirmatively no, let’s fight!” in my opinion.

 A lot of people in my generation stopped going to church, but some went back. The singing is pretty awesome, and so is the opportunity to spend time with one’s family and community sharing good vibes and looking at art. To my mind, that’s the main draw behind religion: a place where people can socialize outside of work and school. Most of the time people do not socialize outside a narrow group consisting of co-workers and immediate family, and religion gives them a place to mix, as well as formal rules against fisticuffs or arguing over competing worldviews.

 These days I find myself mostly aligned with Pope Leo. Which is not where I expected to be in my senior years, but I also thought there would be universal healthcare, and more trains, and look what life handed us instead. There is a loophole in the Christian religion that allows for one to get away with a lifetime of sin as long as we sneak in a confession and a few rap performances prior to expiring, and that’s what I’ve been aiming for.

 I consider myself culturally Christian in that I’m familiar with the scriptures, the idioms like rich men passing through needle eyes, and not throwing stones, I know a handful of Christian hymns and can hum along with several others. I went to church when I was a kid. Lots of people would classify me as Christian based on that experience, regardless of what I currently believe (or claim to).

 Despite admittedly lying about being born again, the fact I was not struck by lightning and in fact went on to have a life that has been perfectly delectable in certain aspects although certainly not all of them, I don’t consider myself Christian in the evangelical sense; those people support too many liars and I refuse to stand next to them. At the same time, I lead kind of a modest humble life with a low carbon footprint that doesn’t include a lot of lust or gluttony or other deadly sins, like some kind of nun from an order that’s mostly about reading books with occasional treats of almond-sprinkled yogurt and J.S. Bach. 

 I have a lot of alignment with the current flavor of secular humanism which is popular with my political faction as an alternative to formal religion, but it’s not complete. I will separate my recyclables, and I am willing to switch to vat grown cruelty-free chicken nuggies as soon as they appear on the market, and also my carbon footprint is likely lower than yours because I don’t drive. Plus recycling’s kind of a scam, and so is shifting the burden of climate change onto individual consumers.

Sometimes my beliefs and opinions clash with the status quo. For instance, there are many types of feminism, and I’m down with the one about how people should have the same rights regardless of what’s between their navel and their knees, and whom they wish would touch it (which I do not wish to know details about).

There have been lots of flavors of feminism over the years, all basically agreeing it’s better if women have rights and are not oppressed. That thought could probably be extended to liberalism – it’s better for us all if we don’t enforce structural barriers related to things like race, class, gender.

I really can’t deal with a few variants, such as the extreme subjectivity kind though in which people are encouraged to shriek their idiosyncratic spin on truth at me. Screw that. I’m also not in favor of the “organics versus tech bro” conflict because I think there will soon be advertisements for robots with 100% organically-sourced fake skin (I will bet you cash that’ll happen by 2050 if not sooner). 

I’m a pedantic sourpuss raised by math nerds, trial lawyers, and godless heathens, and the quest for accuracy is part of my innate nature. If there’s an endeavor where my innate nature disqualifies me from participation, such as pro basketball, so be it. I owe no intersectional duty to beliefs which conflict with this drive. 

And that pedantic thing so far keeps me out of religions both traditional and secular, because there’s always a shaky belief or two that one is required to lip service or be flayed by one’s peers, and I seem to have a broken filter with regard to figuring out where those limits are, let alone how to code switch between crowds.

I do have a hard time judging people by their religion, since I've known both good and bad people who subscribe to various religions (including secular worldviews that aren't technically religions but resemble them in certain aspects). That's what my investigation really brought me to: a place where I can't say "all the people in that religion are bad" and remain honest with myself. The person I was previously was a lot less tolerant. 

If there’s anyone around who embraces the religious-type belief structure that inspired me to do my whole Lucifer-like rebellion from religion, I just want to say that reading my words isn't sinful because I have had believers like you stand next to me and pray, and also I can say the Lord’s Prayer and go inside churches without bursting into flames or having ghosts spurt out of my eyeballs. So if I was ever possessed by demons, I got better. I realize I’ve listened to an awful lot of heavy metal with secret encoded devil messages in my time but I usually also play a lot of angel music like J.S. Bach which cancels it out by encouraging angels to come over and mosh with the devils so they can’t lead anyone into sin. And I think your worldview is a little basic but as long as you don’t go around bullying others over it I’m pretty tolerant.

 

Reaffirmation of Bounce

 I tried to do the nice thing by re-reading one of my bounced-off-of stories in a better frame of mind but it turns out it was still pretty grumpy, and I wrote a bad review more grounded in philosophy than literary merit. 

I ain't gonna fall for that twice. Both The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker (It's not bad, just not for me) and When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente (Maybe it'll surprise you) shall remain forever on my Mt. Tsundoku like those brightly-clad corpses on the ascent to Mt. Everest that have been lying there for years because the rich assholes paying a crapload of money to take a selfie at the summit don't have enough spare oxygen to remove the ones who didn't make it. Serving as a warning to me that I probably shouldn't sign up to be a Hugo reviewer again since I'm much too grumpy for this. Couldn't resist that tax-deductable trip to Disneyland though. 

I will wait and be patient about the voter packet, and hope it includes Martha Wells, and maybe even some of the YA novels as well as representative info dumps from the nominated websites. 

Review: The Girl My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed

I was having misgivings about bailing out of this category. Just to recap, I read the Kaiju story and pronounced it slightly amusing but intended for an audience 10-20 years older than me who remembers the Kennedy assassination and enjoys spotting political jokes in Bullwinkle. Then I read the No Vegetables one and got upset because it reminded me of yet another incident where someone did an angry emotional explosion at me for ephemeral reasons, which is something that happens to me a lot in this particular subculture and is high on my list of reasons for backing away from it. Probably has to do with religious differences (see below). 

Then I wondered if I’d be perceived as transphobic if I avoided reading stories with transpeople in them. I’ve been mentioning inclusion info in my brief synopses because it’s front and center these days, and I do agree representation is important, even though I'm not seeing a lot by categories that I'm adjacent to, like neurodivergents and Pacific Islanders. I applied to be a panelist at Worldcon, kind of half facetiously; I’ve done it before at other cons but I’m not even sure if I’m promoting anything at this point since the dino anthology isn’t out yet. Anyway, they make you fill out a questionnaire as to whether you have any marginalized identities.

I don’t, unless you count growing up in the South Pacific. A lot of younger people see that I’m from Hawai’i and assume I’m rich, since their entire experience with the place is from the recipient side of the tourist industry, but all those tourists have more dough than my dad, who was a beach bum from LA who liked the vibe in Hawai’i and managed a store that sold suntan lotion and chocolate bars to people like Georgia O’Keefe. We left when I was ten due to my dad’s poor financial choices and my mom’s longing to move back to the mainland, but until then I was one of a handful of white kids in schools where I was outnumbered by Asians. Which I actually kind of enjoy, because I appreciate Asian culture, and I still would rather live around lots of Asians. I like their music, food, sense of humor, and cartoon mascots (I have a strong preference for Labubu over Hello Kitty).

 And I like their feminism. In South Korea there is a flavor of feminism that includes female-centric things. Such as female-gaze entertainment (e.g. K-Pop Demon Hunters, where female characters are unapologetically central and free to do things like looking gluttonous or mean, or objectifying men) and a lot of the female bonding which occurs around things like K-Pop fandom. So my feminist expression these days leans toward the practice of encouraging women to socialize at events where men aren’t centered, so they can make friends and have fun. Crafting, collecting, listening to music, reading books, doing femme stuff. Other parts of this worldview involve not dating men or having children, but I’ve aged out of the ability to do those things voluntarily, so I’m trying to focus on the part about encouraging women to have a social/public/intellectual life that isn’t about dating, mate hunting, or accommodating men’s desires.

That’s where I’m coming from when I moan about all these trans stories exploring the deeper nature of one's inner duality, while I’m busy trying to help girls ignore men better. Swimming in different directions.

Anyway, The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For disappointed me in paragraph three: “People whose minds are put into enhanced bodies always say they feel the same as ever. But maybe they just don’t remember what it’s like to feel at all.”

I’ve written many grouchy words about my dislike for psionics and bodyswap and other science fiction themes that reinforce the idea that minds and bodies are as separate as turntables and vinyl. Bodyswap is a persistent human fantasy though, and tales of people getting transformed into different sorts of people, or animals, or mythic figures, are widespread.

Here’s a Hawaiian one for you that I used to hear as a kid in school. Sometimes the teachers would just have us all sit there cross-legged, outside, listening to local stories, and there was once this guy who could turn into a shark. It was pretty obvious since he had a shark mouth right on his back, but he always wore a cape over his back (made of feathers, which meant he was wealthy enough that people didn’t tend to challenge him to a fight, since apparently he’s got connections).

He lived in a small town with a good beach, and on nice days he would park himself on a trail leading to the beach, waiting for visitors from other parts of the island, where they didn’t know about him yet. He would say “hello, isn’t it a nice day, where are you headed?”

And if the visitors said “we’re going fishing” or “we’re going swimming,” the shark man would tell them to have a nice day, and then he would sneak around through a shortcut, jump into the waves, transform into a shark, go find those visitors, and eat them.

However, if the visitors said they were going to do land-bound things, like hunting pigs, or searching for plants, the shark man would get bored and wander off to take a nap. It wasn’t long before savvy visitors learned that one must lie to the shark man in order to get uninterrupted beach access. Which led to the very important local tradition that if some nosy rich asshole asks where you’re going, lie. Maybe he’s a predator. Better to be safe, yeah?

The shark man never did a full Jack L. Chalker style bodyswap though. He was always a were shark, and you’d know it right away if you saw him naked.

Maybe in some alternate universe there’s a world where all the science fiction I dislike is true. People are telepaths, who beam their thoughts at one another and sometimes spy on each other (because everyone has an inner dialogue and there are no neurodivergents in their world). They bodyswap every other Thursday (because your mind and personality are totally unrelated to the body you’re inhabiting -- yes, transfolk still do take hormones in this story's world but they're apparently super strong ones that can make you grow a uterus). And when they’re not doing that, they make clones, which are a magical sort of person existing in their own unique caste, in a world where human rights got bifurcated into Clone-Applicable Law and Non-Clone Applicable Law so that clones exist in a unique class with their own rules, like suddenly having to give up a kidney without asking why.

So yeah, clones as unique class and bodyswapping (and they don’t even have shark mouths on their back to give you a clue as to who is REALLY inside that body) are enough to get my no vote. However, I already bypassed one story in this subgroup for the ephemeral reason it reminded me of an argument I once had (in which I still feel a tad pissy, I tend to remember stuff like that forever), and I’m trying to be fair and give things a chance, so I pressed on.

 Then there’s a Boys From Brazil reference about how this corporation perpetually clones their CEO “and raises her in just the same way the Founder was raised” in order to theoretically assure conformity. And right here the science intrudes, and I feel like asking the jury if they know anybody who speaks with a different accent from their parents. I once knew a family who moved a lot; the dad sounded like Scotland, the mom like Boston, the kids like New Jersey, California, and Chicago. It was wild.

 But yeah, people in this Mythic Science Fictional Headspace where we have Clones As Unique Class and Minds Slotting Into Bodies tend to also have this view that 95% of us is directly inflicted by parenting, with trauma such as reading horror novels responsible for the rest. It’s almost a secular religion, if I can sneak in a reference to Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard again.

 I have this weird fundamentalist strain to my science fiction fandom (that likely relates to a lot of my friction with the crowd) in that I was so disappointed when psionics turned out to be a load of crap I developed this fetish for scientifically-accurate-science-fiction. Either that or science fiction that flat out admits it’s actually a magical fairy tale, like Star Wars.

 The aspect of science fiction that is more like a secular religion absorbed things like psionics back when they were potential science. The subject was interpreted by numerous science fiction authors, some of them quite brilliant, to the extent where psionics are sciencefictional [sfnal] canon while not being established science. An element people expect in a certain kind of science fiction that’s more about extrapolation in this spiritual tradition than bouncing off current science.

 It's sort of like people still writing about the dangers of miasmas because some Victorian wrote a miasma fic that was so awesome it rocked everyone’s pre-existing philosophy precisely thirty-seven degrees, and now you can go to SF cons and attend panels on The Current State of Miasma Fic even though everyone knows miasmas are bullshit. So much great miasma writing though! (And now you understand how I feel about religion.)

 So anyway, here I am, three pages into this review, ranting about how I’m reviewing science fiction because I hate science fiction, which is pretty weird, so I’ll get back to the business of reviewing a fable from a religion I don’t follow for its other qualities.

 Our main character is having a surrogate pregnancy of the Founder’s latest clone, and she also gets the honor of being the Founder’s wife and raising her latest clone to age eighteen, after which she gets to fake her own death and fade into the background. But she has trouble conceiving, so a new girl with simiar hair/eye color is found (Colleen) and she and the narrator fall in love. And come up with an escape plan to keep the baby from having the old vampire Founder mindswapped in.

 At this point I felt like I could see the ending coming, and I cruised through some Return to Oz kind of stuff where people shop for objectified bodies. I sort of thought there would be an epilogue where the baby, the first of her line raised by parents who are Truly In Love, turns out to save the world just like Harry Potter, but no, it ends with Colleen in her third trimester and the narrator burbling “We’ll have to learn to see her for who she is, not who she looks like or what her genes want her to be.”

If I was reading this in hard copy it would be flying right about now, since this tract from a religion I do not follow is winding up with an earnest summation of its philosophy, about how there’s an authentic you as well as a false you that your DNA wants you to be. Like the author sat down to write a story about clones in which DNA is the villain. And I’m not buying it. I couldn’t find much to like about this story but it seems like the kind of thing Hollywood likes -- smoothly written, discernable characters, plot involving chase scenes -- so maybe it’ll end up being a movie. Sorry Cameron. You're probably an awesome person and I'm sure lots of other people will love your story a lot. Maybe one day you'll write one that I like better. 

Here, go see for yourself.

 

Overthinking and Overviews: Fanzine, Semiprozine, and Someone Else’s Review (Writing About SF in Related Works) (and the YA entries, that too)

 I cruised through the nominees for Best Fanzine and Semiprozine, and couldn’t really engage sufficiently to form an opinion. It felt like I’d have to read a whole lot of the fiction on these sites to get a good grasp of what they do, and how well. And I’m already feeling overwhelmed by the idea of reading two regular novels and multiple YAs so I can render a vote. Possibly the longer fiction too although I’m not feeling particularly enticed.

I did find a review for one of the other Related Works that I thought I would link here; I didn’t go as far as to read the book about writing about writing science fiction, but I did go through the review. 

It made me (over)think about this category people call science fiction, and my reluctance to count myself as part of it. There are times when my answer is an enthusiastic yes, like when I was reading my favorite short story entry this year, or when I’m reading older stuff that resonates, like Octavia Butler, or Robert Sheckley. 

And then there are times when science fiction feels like this closed fortress where people have interminable discussions about some TV show I’ve never seen. I’ve been thinking of that while enjoying the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, imagining some straw interminable science fictional person (of undetermined gender but they are wearing a lumpy oatmeal-colored sweater and Birkenstocks) sneering at me if I were to try writing something that blatantly fun. Or, more likely, somehow parsing my more innocuous behaviors in an attempt to find a core of subconscious evil political affiliations (left version) or satanic cult involvement (right version) (they both smell similar).  

Probably lots of us are examining our beliefs lately, about lots of things. I’m a solid, dull, healthcare-and-trains liberal. Never liked postmodernism, blame it for lubing the ascent of fascism. 

Although I have a gender, and pronouns, I've never really done' much self-reflection about them other than "I'm female so this thing I'm doing/wearing/liking can't be exclusively male." 

Sometimes it’s the culture. For example, where I grew up, women can play musical instruments. A lot of people from North America have a really difficult time with that idea unless it’s parodied or sexualized, and even then it should only be about supporting her singing rather than shredding on solos. In many countries women musicians are everywhere, but we had to invent the concept of “blind audition” before women could work as symphony musicians, while other musical genres were doing things like ignoring Rosetta Tharpe. So as far as I was concerned, playing a guitar the way nature intended was not so much an expression of longing to engage in a gender-coded expression as much as a repudiation of gender codes. And I’m really glad to see lots more young women picking up instruments these days. 

It took me most of my life to commit to finishing a novel. Even then I refused to submit it to a publisher, preferring instead to test drive the life of a self-pubbed science fictionizer before jumping in the deep end. I wasn’t really happy that it came out science fiction in the first place since I had always thought I’d end up writing fantasy. 

A lot of this commitment phobia had to do with imagining myself being a part of the crowd. hen I first began to engage with science fiction, it was full of sexism, including positive pedo energy, and I  felt like an outlier as I shuffled through stories like A Boy And His Dog. Then I watched the next generation balance the creepy old predator energy with newfangled inclusivity, and a determined effort to make things less of a boys’ club, but this went along with the overthinky discussions about gender, and culture, and I felt the same kind of alienated Goldilocks feeling. So I concluded it was me, and I lean toward the ambiguous and nuanced take. 

I stepped far back and that seems to be my old reliable avoidance pattern, and that’s likely why I’m commitment phobic with regard to cultural areas. People are always trying to get me to declare for Team Righteousness or Team Evil, when I’m on Team There Should Be More Trains, And Free Ibuprofen Too. 

And also free reading material, goshdarnit. I am awaiting the Hugo Voters’ Packet in hopes it will contain some, because I am seeing BTS three times next month and have therefore put myself on financial probation: no new books aside from DC Carl 8 (pre-ordered) and the Tchaikovsky novel if it’s not included (I already have Nnedi’s). There was a Martha Wells story in the category where I snubbed most of the entries and I didn’t want to pay for it, but I’ll read it and maybe even vote for it if it’s free. I like Wells and her Murderbot character a lot. 

Meanwhile, here are the YA entries with brief synopsisesses that I found on Amazon and Goodreads and Reddit and places.  

Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman (Random House Books for Young Readers)
Fantasy; a transkid avoids dragons, etc. 

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee (Feiwel & Friends)
Sapphic portal romance. 

Holy Terrors by Margaret Owen (Henry Holt; Hodderscape UK)
Book 3 in a series about a thief with theme of whether people can change. 

Oathbound by Tracy Deonn (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Also book 3 and one reviewer mentioned “Southern Black Girl magic”.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
Latest in the Hunger Games series; I already own it but haven’t read it yet.

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran (Bloomsbury US; Bloomsbury UK)
Body horror set in Vietnamese shrimper community with gender identity themes 

I'm willing to read any/all of them that show up in the voter's packet. Typically I prefer books about teenagers murdering each other (Hunger Games, Outsiders, et al.) than doing their awkward teenage romances. Romeo and Juliet is a tough act to imitate. 

More Non-Reviews -- I Bounced Off These Novelettes But You Might Like Them

 First one: “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed. Another clone romance story, with lots of domesticity and a trans POV character. I just couldn't engage. Your mileage may vary. 

Next, The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker. I recall bouncing off of a story by her about cowpersons hunting escaped hippos in I believe the late 1800s, and this is also a period piece, with Victorian magicians, so I'm   starting to mentally file her away as that person who writes adventuresome Victorian-era stories with gender exploration. This one has a girl dressing as a boy for a magic act, and I thought the character was cool but then the narrative turned mostly infodump about magic acts and my engagement checked out. It's not bad, just not for me.

And finally, “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente. I read the first couple paragraphs, instantly thought "is she riffing on _____?" Started skimming and at approximately 1/3 of the way in, there it was. Yup, saw that coming. Okay dad, nice job, I'm gonna wander back to Carl for a while. Maybe it'll surprise you. 

This leaves only the Martha Wells story, which costs money (as if!!) so I will wait for the voter packet before finishing with the novelette category. 

Not Really A Review So Much As A Reason I'm Not Reviewing: Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak

I am going to recuse myself from reviewing or voting for this story because it touches on a sensitive memory, where I was working on some collaborative work with someone I won’t identify.

And I came up with a plot point where the people on this one planet, which is a hostile dangerous planet, were in the habit of reproducing in batches. Young women would select young men to provide DNA (physical contact optional) in time for her reserved appointment with the birthing center, and nine months later they’d hatch, and robots would help mama tend them all and raise them to school age, at which point they’d be sent off to live with their fathers’ people, or boarding school if they had early aptitude. This was done to maximize their survival as well as minimize stress on the mother’s body, on a planet full of vicious animals and environmental hazards where you needed to be strong to survive. 

My collaborator went ballistic on me. What a horrible anti-feminist idea. According to the Vorkosigan saga, machine birth is evil, and every science fiction writer ought to know this, and incubating this idea in my brain made me a terrible misogynistic person. The collab was dead. Plus I'm a vile dirty fascist.

And I went down to the pier to get a cheeseburger, but I didn't have much appetite, so I threw most of it to the seagulls. I didn’t realize it was the first of many such outbursts I’d be receiving as I continued on this path, but they in fact kept coming – accusations of ideological turpitude could come at any moment, from any person inclined to suddenly raise their voice and get dramatic. Because I disagreed with some pop star that a three-hour show is too long. Because I fact-checked someone’s internet meme. Because I should’ve known there was a huge discussion (that I never learned about) in the SF community about incubating humans.

And I could accept this if I in fact were transgressing, but most of the time it was about people pitching a fit and framing it within the context of political criticism because that’s the accepted social excuse in some communities for when you feel like raising your voice at someone without repercussions, and the accepted response is to sit there and take it while agreeing with the person crashing out until they finally run out of steam.

And I realized it was just how these people keep the gate, how they interact, how they determine who's in their clique. It’s not so much about an actual rule set that one must follow because they make that up on the fly, it’s about how some people are doms, and frequently feel the need to establish that, and they are the ones who get to crash out and fling accusations, but if you stick around long enough there’ll be a fresh stream of noobs for you to vent upon. Sort of like how a lot of religions operate. It was the same back in the days when Marion Zimmer Bradley was running around, and that was why I wandered away for a few decades, to see if things would get better. 

I don't have the amount of “sit there and take it” energy it would cost to stay in their good graces. Especially when the daytime world rewards me for being a nitpicking pedant who points things out. That’s kind of what I’m going to Worldcon to investigate, and why I’m jumping back into Hugo reviewer mode after a long break. I'm too old to keep checking in and going "is this place cool yet?" It's more like wondering if there's any reason a person with an extremely casual interest in SF should stick around. 

So here I am, looking at a human-incubator story getting nominated for a Hugo and thinking about those fat fucking seagulls who got way more cheeseburger than they needed that one day. Not voting for or against this one – which is otherwise quite well-written – or reviewing it in detail. Some people are allowed to discuss this subject in this crowd but I'm not among them. 

But you can read it if you want, it’s over here. 

Not Interested In Conspiracy Theorists

I realized they would get riled up over the post where I went on about Jack Parsons, et al., but I’m not giving any of that a platform, don't want to see any comments with links or wordfloods about vaccines, save it for your therapist.

The reason I went through a phase where I was interested in occultism, fringe religions, conspiracies, the paranormal, et al., was because I have a lifelong obsession with bullshit detection and I didn’t want some conspiracy creep trying to one-up me with their alleged hidden knowledge. As a result I know a lot more about mystery cults, Masonic initiations, etc. than a lot of other people. But it wasn't an ongoing thing. 

It led me toward an obsession with law, and with the kind of evidence that stands up in court. Some of my friends from back then went to the dark side and are making their own conspiracy videos, and probably making bank ripping people off. There are plenty of gullible customers in the sea. That’s not where I went; I was more like “a lot of money would change hands if these conspiracies were true so why isn’t that happening?” 

And then I got old and boring, and decided actually learning about evidence and proof was more interesting than obsessing about other people having parties that I’m not invited to, and … I just sort of dropped out of the Mysterious Knowledge circuit. I had the answers I needed and all that X-Files type drama just got stale and cringey as new generations mutated it, and then the internet was invented, making fact-checking much easier for those who seek it. Most people don’t. 

In fact, I’m getting cynical enough to believe that most people would rather stab their best friend over an unconformed rumor than confirm it, but maybe that’s just the people I’ve been around. Conspiracy theorists are the kind of people who do lots of uncompensated PR legwork for unconfirmed rumor.  Hoping maybe then the popular kids will like them. 

I’m not going to platform that junk, or respond to it, or “debate” it, because you can’t debate with people who live in their own little postmodern bubble where they get to make up all their own facts and decide what they feel “truth” is, all you can do is smile and wave goodbye as they head off to their next adventure.