Something huge is coming.

Today is the day that Beetle Game begins.

https://twitter.com/CharlotteFang77/status/1546253875614826496?s=20&t=WgJwEacvmZl2Co7zT3_09w

Little is publicly known about Beetle Game just yet, but the promise is undeniable, and eagle-eyed readers of both the TL and (especially) the Milady Village Discord channel will have been able to put together a coherent picture of Beetle Game.

I won’t lie, the hype is real and I am currently under its spell. But, like all of Remilia’s projects, there is far more here than meets the eye.

Beauty Under Siege

The Milady community was born and cultivated through an appeal to cuteness and love with intellectual heft. The generative pfps were painstakingly and very successfully crafted to evoke in the viewer a melange of emotions related to safety and belonging. To name a few:

• Nostalgia

• Cuteness

• Sincerity

• Peacefulness

• Coolness

• Expressiveness

• Community

The characteristics of a community formed in this way reflect the values espoused at its founding and through its development. The whitepilled lovemaxxing that infuses Milady is both an end in itself and a critical countermeasure to the oppressive irony and cynicism characteristic in IRL and IRL-over-the-internet spaces.

But, unfortunately, that world is still out there. The system we are subjected to is vicious, and not everyone finds the whitepill, or accepts it when it is offered to them. The more common reaction these days to discovering a community of beautiful and intelligent people Having Fun Online is a devolution into further jealousy and spite. These twisted souls seek to destroy that which threatens their conception of happiness, the world, and the value of misery.

As Milady and Remilia’s ascendancy continues unabated, the inevitability of more frequent and more intense opps needs to be dealt with. I want to be clear: I’m not talking about the occasional weak cancel attempt, a rehash of Miya fearmongering. The battles that lie ahead will be more sophisticated, better funded, and less obvious.

Cultural Organization

All communities require a means of self-defense, and many different approaches to cultural organization for that purpose have been explored.

I would argue that, to date, Milady’s militant cultural organization has taken the form of a dedicated Warrior class with a voluntary militia system. We have a small and highly-skilled collection of professional fighters, led by Generalissimo Charlotte Fang, turning away the constant low-level attacks against us. And in times of war, a subset of Miladys who do not generally engage in TL warfare will rise to meet the threat.

To state the obvious, this has been a shockingly effective strategy. We defeated extremely serious, targeted allegations, lost very few (any?) core Milady accounts to the Cancellation, and, if floor price is any indication, achieved the nigh-unthinkable: a full refutation and exoneration on Twitter court.

And yet, the Cancellation did lay bare a significant hole in Milady’s defenses: an underdeveloped martial spirit.

This is, as mentioned at the beginning of this essay, to be fully expected given the nature of Milady’s cultural values. And yet the sad reality of the world we are surpassing demands its consideration. Enter: BEETLE GAME.

Wargames

One of the most fascinating and interesting TL events during the Cancel was the war between #clemgang and #lizzygang. It was brief and fun. But it came at an important time, and it enabled otherwise lovepilled accts to instruct Miladys on the right way to interact with Opps on the TL.

https://twitter.com/plsnobullywaaa/status/1529555937350008832?s=20&t=6bX11qC4CclsPkJPIh-pVA

The problem with Miladys like — frankly — me, is that we are so invested in the whitepill/lovepill double dose that we struggle with even the most basic language of conflict. Learning how to operate my acct in the middle of the Cancel was a challenge, and I failed on many occasions. (I still fail here.)

Imagine a new Milady, entering the culture, right-click saved two weeks ago, beginning to make friends with other new Miladys, and then out of nowhere finding themselves hit with an assault orchestrated by actors far more sophisticated than a couple of coked-up tubbycat cryptodweebs? Perhaps a bank? A government? If you think these suggestions are far-fetched, I sympathize, but you aren’t paying attention.

Now, imagine a Milady community infused with BEETLEMANIA. Think of the ways Miladys will talk about their beetles in relation to other Miladys’ beetles. Think about the conflict. Think about the trash-talk, the put-up-or-shut-up, the let’s-settle-this-in-the-Beyblade-bowl-let-er-rip. Beetle Game is a dojo, a space in which to learn from those more experienced in the ways of conflict.

With Beetle Game, Miladys won’t have to worry about desecrating or otherwise undermining in some way our signature whitepill. We can insult each other, we can backstab, we can make secret deals, we can call out others’ duplicity, we can practice all of these otherwise-unnatural behaviours within the frame of a game, and in so doing, develop real skills for sniffing out and turning away all manner of entryists, clout-chasers, and blackpilled world-burners.

Don’t get me wrong, Beetle Game is going to be lit. It’s the first non-cringe cryptogaming experience and there will be so many trashy fast-follows your head will spin. It will reinvigorate the space. It is a beautiful transfer of wealth to the faithful, an egalitarian giveaway within the constraints of technology (per-wallet, not per-milady), and with Sprite on the track, you know the beetles themselves will be beautiful.

But they will be something else too, amid the wealth and fun and beauty. They will be practice.

Let me be perfectly clear here, I don’t have anything to say. No topic so this is unlikely to be a particularly insightful read. If you’re enamored of my voice for some reason (freak), go ahead, keep reading, I guess, I won’t stop you. But I just want to be clear that there is no subject here, no form, I’m not starting from an outline or seeking any given conclusion. It’s not even really stream of consciousness I don’t feel particularly tapped into anything rn.

This is an empty essay. These are empty words. It’s kind of like the Seinfeld of essays, it’s an essay about nothing. How achievable is this? Is it even possible to write an essay about nothing at all? Except, no, I’m not trying to write about anything I’m just trying to pop the cork.

Here we go. CORK POP 0001. I appended 0001 to the name because I expect I’ll need to do this multiple times in the future because I am not a consistent producer. I’m a spiky producer. Here, have an xkcd graph:

YOU ARE HER is where we are right now. That was a typo (“write-o”) but I like it so it stays. CORK POP 0001 won’t be the first big self esteem spike, it won’t be an interesting enough piece for that, it’s just an essay about nothing. But it will, if all goes to plan, be my on-ramp back onto this cyclical pattern of mine, back into the wave of production.

Here it is as a tweet if you’re interested probably should have put this tweet first as context that’s the more typical form but you know what, I’m not going to worry about it. I’m popping the cork! CORK POP!!

https://twitter.com/cry_prittie/status/1544069660148043776?s=20&t=QM7BKkxWDN6ZCsKzQnP4cg

Right so why four digits? Well that’s fairly straightforward too. As you can see in my xkcd (“bullshit”) graph above this cycle generally lasts about 10-14 days. If I need a CORK POP every 10-14 days, then, assuming the minimum length cycle, three digits gets me through 10 * 999 = 9999 days / 365.25 = 27.375 years, which is most likely too few to last the remainder of my life. Four digits will last me 273.75 years which should be more than enough in my view.

By the way did you notice my choice of colors for the chart above?!? Happy FourthFifthSixth of July! I don’t really have anything else to say about this. Like I said this is an essay about nothing.

--

Look at something with me for a minute.

How does this make you feel? This is beautiful to me. A few days ago I was talking to someone about The Godfather and whether it was any good at all. Their argument was that because the film is so unrelentingly up front with its themes and inspirations, it loses the power that is impressed upon the viewer when they have to labour to reveal a work’s hidden meaning.

I am not a huge Godfather fan but I took the opposite opinion because I’m insufferable like that. I argued that Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus is best understood through the lens of maximalism and grandiosity, historical epics, religious architecture, Catholic Church Organ + Choir pieces. In other words, subtlety and socratic method are not the intent of the work and not the mode it is engaged in. Instead, it should be judged on the values of coherence, comprehensiveness, and majesty.

Lizzy’s profile here does manage to weave in a little interpretive interest. “Loading,please wait” — this is evocative and its meaning is not immediately apparent, or at least it isn’t to me. But imho this is the Godfather of Twitter Profiles. No inch of this screen under the control of the profile owner is going to waste — the message of Wahhabi devotion to Allah shines through brighter than the screen can hold. Even draingang.com fits the Vibe (though I will not elaborate here).

That’s why I’m presenting it in dark mode btw. Light mode Jihad Lizzy cannot guarantee your survival.

Look again:

I bitcrushed this image to hell. Does it matter to the legibility? Yes of course almost nothing here is legible. Does it matter to the vibe? NO!! The vibe is intact.

WE NEED TO GO DEEPER.

Somehow, the vibes even survive the digital photographical equivalent of a Mack Truck. 32-pixel bitcrush and rehydration does nothing to kill the Wahhabi vibe.

--

Digital cults will be the new suburb in the future. Suburb culture requires a certain level of group conformity if you wish to reap the benefits of the “group”.

With civil society becoming extremely atomized, people will turn away from aspects of civil society like suburbs, churches, sports, career, etc as they will be unable to provide the same level of in-group benefit when compared to online communities.

This will eventually lead to digital communities becoming local again after they have created a method for establishing strong loyalty — and wish to reap the benefits of locality. This solves atomization.

Thus ends my schizo rant.

--

Read this:

Were you able read it? It’s okay, thanks for trying, I’ll read it for you. It says:

“Lizzy just signed the lease for the based retard gang corporate offices in Seoul South Korea it’s real it’s oh so real top floor baby penthouse suite, we’ve got the pole position based retard gang poised to usher in a new era of business a new era of prosperity for the modern age an era defined by the rejection of ugliness the rejection of genetic dogma the rejection of the Natural Order an adoption of beauty extremism transhumanism international beauty syndicate dominating the world one fashion show at a time full auteur/autist collective works everything in house the vision is immaculate the vibes are on fleek the passion is real the partnerships are strong and the victory is secure we are the next generation of taste those who do not understand will understand eventually we are the makers of fashion Kate but more retarded black eyed peas style we will dominate the conversation your parents will be asking you to explain based retard gang at the dinner table and you will not be able to, not yet but the moment will come when parents will be teaching their children about based retard gang theory of beauty theory of mind theory of music before teaching them their own names fundamental knowledge for the new world manifested by the power of our squad”

This CORK POP is dedicated to the based retard gang (谢谢 #basedretardgang). I love you based retard gang.

And still that speed cannot compare to this: mirror dot X Y Z slash chthonic’s. Where years of wisdom storm across the page Propelled by some ungodly eldritch power.

How else can I explain Dear Roderick’s works? Surely no human in the universe Could prophesy our bonding with machines Within the time it takes for me to shower?

And surely no true earthen-bound mere man Could have the self-awareness to ascend From ego-drenched shipwreck upon the sand To just a vessel, bro, in one weekend?

But no; my love for thee is more than awe, It’s more than simultaneous creative cryo-thaws More pure than common int’rest, or a shared philosophy It’s just that I am Roderick, and Roderick is me.

All artists begin as egotists. There’s something intensely egocentric — not necessarily ego-aggrandizing but certainly ego-intensive, about, as an amateur, believing there to be any value, to yourself or others, in the act of creation. Let’s not, any of us creators, please, pretend to a full abandonment of the ego. If you use the word “I” in your essay, if you include anthropomorphic forms in your drawings, if you use variable names that resonate with you personally in your source code, you are not devoid of ego.

Ego — and I don’t mean the word strictly in the Freudian sense I don’t remember anything about Freud but in the more general colloquial “healthy self-regard” sense — is natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. In real life. But on the internet, that’s a different story.

The internet is a spiritual amplifier, an exponential playground of intended and unintended consequences, the Wild Wild West placed between two mirrors facing each other. In the Real World, feedback loops are bounded by the laws of physics and and the systems that Nature created and that created us. To be sure, Nature has its fair share of exponential interactions. The Butterfly Effect is real. Don’t clap on a mountain in Boulder, Colorado. But these events are infrequent and bounded by physical space. There is only so much snow on the top of the mountain. The amount of it that is perched precariously enough to kill does eventually run out and requires time to be replenished.

Not so on the internet. Resources on the internet are generally not physical, like snow, and therefore not physically bounded. They are immaterial, gameable, infinitely spawnable. Some may exhibit artificial scarcity, like loot drops. Others will avoid all pretension and be infinite, such as the resource known as “likes” on twitter dot com.

Sidenote: Don’t you dare quibble with my definition of resource!! There are millions of people on this Earth who spend a dozen hours a day every day farming for likes. Coffee has no caloric value but elicits several sought-after chemical reactions from your central nervous system when consumed. What do likes do?

Anyway. The resources are infinite. And thus, the conditioning propagated by the giving and taking of these resources are infinite as well. You see, it takes a long time, many countless affirming interactions, ego perforation reconstitution and recuperation time, for a person operating solely in the Real World to develop into a Full Narcissist. You need to be rewarded for thinking about yourself, constantly, by the people around you. This is a challenging feat. The people you meet in the Real World may be curated but usually are not. Only the very wealthy (boarding school) or very deranged (home schooling) are able to prevent their children from meeting different people, of whom many may actively contradict their burgeoning belief that the world revolves around them.

Sidenote: This, incidentally, is why many mediocre people born rich, and many successful people born poor, are both so ego-oriented. Mediocre people born rich have parents who are capable of protecting their children from the realization that they are mediocre, and they retain that belief through childhood. Successful people born poor often have parents or caregivers who intentionally and carefully crafted for them an impenetrable bubble of self-belief that would reject evidence that countered their fundamental self-centeredness, fueling them to succeed despite the odds, by means of benign delusion.

On the internet, an otherwise well adjusted person can become an Ascended Narcissist, pure solipsism-maxxxing self-idealized engaging with other people as objects Warrior of the Self, in a matter of Days. Most of you don’t need me to convince you of this! You’ve known these people IRL or you know their accounts, they post normally, they get some traction for something they said or did or exposed about themselves, they received positive feedback from the Internet, resource rewards, 50 or 60 little tiny red sparkly heart dopamine fireworks. So they posted more and they got more likes, and on and on until every interaction needs to be about Them, on and off the TL — not their friends, not their audience, not other accounts they like or causes that matter to them or Ideas or jokes or. Nothing. Ego enslaved to id enslaved to ego in a neverending cycle of self-affirmation and adrenal reward.

Why does the internet have this effect? Well, from a magnitude perspective, that’s simply what it does. Whatever you put in front of it, it magnifies. The direction of the effect, though, that’s plain ol’ Real World Culture. The internet didn’t create this propensity to egomaxx, the propensity is the natural evolution of an individualist culture deprived of community and spirituality. The internet simply met us at a bad time. (By us I mean Past Us, humanity in the 90s, suffering under the cultural authoritarianism of the coastal United States.) As a result, we are, all of us, trapped in the character of that age, our identities and then our psyches, gently pushed with an unstoppable decelerant hand towards the same archetype of 1990s faux-rebellious faux-ennui’ed-up 30-something yuppie who “yes I do have a favorite Wrapper its between Notorious Bee Eye Gee or Will Smith” and who likes that Bill Clinton plays the saxophone. We are given a little freedom, though: we are allowed to choose between Friends and Seinfeld after dinner.

The source of this corruption is itself a feedback loop between two sources. The first is the mainstream internet’s own powerful inertia, and the second is the Internet spilling out into Real World disease agents, developing new strains and growing more virile, then re-entering the Network Corpus.

The solution is to forcibly disconnect the culture of the internet from the culture of the Real World — this has been done to varying levels of success, but we need a Hard Fork, and we’ve got some malicious admins in our org who are actively working against us.

The perpetrators of this great stultifying evil are, of course, our Internet Overlords, the FAANGs and their lesser brethren and sistren. These companies ignore the potential of the internet as a pure alternate society in service of Giving The People What They Want. (The People, sadly, at this time, are zombies.) Here’s a comprehensive list of what The People want from the internet:

• AOL Instant Messenger

• Free Music

• #BlackLivesMatter

• The History Of Dance

• Driving Directions To The Local Albertsons They Have Been Going To Every Day Of Their Life For The Last Eight Years

• TheFacebook.com

In exchange for these six things, The People sign their lives away to the FAANGs, agreeing to play the role of Elaine or Joey or Phoebe on their carefully-curated social media soap opera sets. The FAANGs study them in order to craft more compelling and demeaning tasks for their little rat-serfs, who are thrown like-treats from time to time when they do a good job being George Costanza or whoever.

The existing system cannot be saved; it is too far gone. Instead we need to repurpose it to our own advantage. We are here on the internet too and we are self-aware, and if we create and hold our own space, we can craft the incentives differently, spiritually. We can Skinner ourselves into egolessness — first performed, and then realized, fake it till you make it, #manifesting, infinite dress rehearsals. Milady, I hope we’re up for it.

Let’s talk about this:

https://twitter.com/jubrlee/status/1539121355018452995?s=20&t=BAgeQwyItgh46ve99lMbFw

Think back to the last time you had an idea you were excited about. Maybe you thought of a really good idea for an ARG, or some novel use for NFTs, or the seed of a world that in your dreams you envisioned one day growing into a series of seven novels.

What did you do with that idea? Here are a few common reactions from my own experience and conversations with others:

• Nothing at all; allow the idea to wash over you and then move on to your next thought, something like: “hrm… did I forget to feed my cat this morning?”

• Do some amount of research, enough to deem the idea untenable. Maybe it would take too long, maybe you don’t have the right skill sets or the right capital or the right connections to make it work. Move on to your next thought: “what happened to Fergie is she still making music?”

• Dive right into implementation, this is awesome, you got this, stumble into a roadblock, decide to take a break and the break lasts 67 years until your death in an old folk’s home a few miles outside of Wilmette, Illinois.

• Put the idea on some “ideas list” that you keep in a piece of paper in your back pocket because you’ve been told so many times, so many damned times, that it’s good to use physical paper for this type of thing, then (a few days later) run the paper through the washing machine and dryer.

• Put the idea on some “ideas list” that is not subject to water damage and do what you actually intended to do with it, which is, once you have some free time, sit down with your list of ideas and do some form of structured analysis on them, decide what your next “thing” is going to be, based on your personal ability to execute on some breakdown of the microtasks inherent in the blah, blah, blah. You pick one idea. You throw the rest of the ideas into your Google Drive or equivalent folder and bitrot slowly claims them over the course of the next few astral eras.

It’s a common trope in the tech space that ideas are cheap, execution is hard. I am sympathetic to the underlying prescription here, but as a pearl of wisdom it’s the sort of vapid turn-brain-off platitude that can only emerge from a zero-creativity zealously Godless society.

Ideas are not cheap. They are precious. Execution without an animating idea is literally just masturbation. Ideas are what infuse effort with meaning. “Ideas are cheap, execution is hard” is itself an idea, obviously — are you even taking this seriously, anon who still hasn’t left the Bay Area?

The reason why so many believe that ideas are cheap is because their activation energy derives from positive externalities. Ideas are not cheap, but also rarely are they the product of a single genius mind sitting in a room waiting to say the word “Eureka”. Rather, they are beamed into us by the culture we are in, the screens we have around us, the people we have around us reading content off of a screen at us. Tribal/pop cultural memories. Billboards. Combining peanut butter and chocolate was not a solution derived by some master Taste Mathematician working in a dark room until the perfect flavor combination was discovered. It was one result of the Industrial Revolution — enough people having both peanut butter and chocolate regularly available until the right person in the right headspace dunked one into the other and found God waiting for them there.

To put this more succinctly: the ideas you are having, they took a lot of work to generate. But that work was externalized, it is the product of the Network, the substrate of human connection and sharing and memetics and spirituality that grows and roils and experiments and succeeds and fails beyond the ken of any individual person. The fact that the World happened to combine the correct reagents to foment a great idea somewhere within your cerebrum is the Networks grace, entrusted to you.

What the Network’s bestowal of an idea represents is greater than a gift. It is a duty. Your duty, as the recipient of the World’s child — the idea. The idea was created by the Network, not you; ergo, it belongs to the Network. Your responsibility, if you acknowledge the primacy of the Network, if you appropriately discount your own identity and authorship, should be clear: you need to get that idea back out into the Network.

It doesn’t matter how you share your ideas, only that you 1) do, 2) make a good faith effort to put them in front of people who are interested, and 3) minimize the friction for their adoption by others (relinquish all ownership). You could tweet it out. You could write a short piece about it or draw a diagram. You could describe it to a friend who you are confident would execute on it. Or you could execute on it yourself. But Every Single One of the bulletpoint approaches at the start of this article is morally bankrupt. Allowing any good idea — by which I mean to say interesting idea, since the quality of an idea can rarely be fully appreciated without some amount of hydrating execution — to wither in your mind and die, is tantamount to stealing from the Network. Whatever you do, avoid this fate for your ideas, at all costs.

• Residual learned helplessness from repeated failure, when those failures have incurred consequences, infinite friction outside of the bounds in which I have previously found success.

• Injuries, and scars, physical and mental destructive events that leave me in many ways less than I once was.

• Calcification; doing the same thing the same way for too long, a hoary crust running along those joints I tend not to use, regardless of how much potential that sinew may hold.

• Grooves in the ground. The easy way. The path walked before is the simplest one to walk next time. The relative competitive advantage of similarity increases with time and repetition.

• Accretion of responsibility, increasing indefinitely commensurate to your ability. You are a steam engine on the rails. You are running effectively and efficiently, so more people get on at the next stop. They latch a car full of coal to your back. They latch a dining car back there. A cattle car. These things become you. You are no longer simply a steam engine. You are a chimney, you are a restaurant, you are cattle.

What, exactly, the fuck am I to do, then, with all this useless nostalgia? The past is my enemy, the past is my abuser that I just can’t quit.

• Steins;Gate instilled in me a sense of wonder at the miracle of love and hollowed out a hole in my heart that I have filled with unthinking serial monogamy ever since.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelists of the Roses for the Playstation Two encouraged me to accelerate my way through increasingly intricate and arcane puzzles until I broke through the barrier of introversion and became a being of supreme confidence and power. Still working on that one.

• Kanye West, the Soap Opera Superstar of the New Millennium, taught me to swerve and switch the whole style up mid stream just stop doing the thing you’re doing and do something else, whatever interests you, accumulate as many different random skillsets as possible and browbeat the world into accepting them. Sometimes, I have learned, the world beats brows back.

The problem for me is that these are some of my favorite things. I love new things but my capacity is limited. It takes work, effort, mental energy and fortitude to engage with something new and learn from it and give it the respect it deserves, and as a fundamentally very judgmental person if I don’t give it due respect the first time around I will dismiss it out of hand and never look at it again.

These are the flaws of ego, of identity, of a perforation but not a clean separation between identities. The solution is to become a Baby on the TL — every new account is a new Person, and I am more than one Person by virtue of my manifold Hats. Humans are not built to behave this way… and yet the best of us have done it for millennia. Channelers and soothsayers, method actors, people in the Bible Belt speaking in tongues, anyone capable of conjuring up beings beyond themselves, they are who we strive to be. By emptying themselves, they created the space for Another to enter, good or evil, and expand the possibilities of the world, expand the minds of others — not themselves, they are (of course) never around to witness the miracles of identity they produce.

We call someone who allows themselves to be controlled by others a puppet and we use the term pejoratively. We should be more clear. It’s only the marionette variety that is contemptible. Fully present extant wood blocks wired together, with their strings bound up in a useful little cross for others to jerk around and elicit reactions. Hand puppets, however, are to be lauded. A hand puppet is egoless, devoid of content, free for anyone to use, to express themselves in a way they may not if they themselves were present. Pinocchio, Moralist Icon of the Global Elite, is a marionette. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is a hand puppet.

I guess, in the end, this is the value of the past: pop culture references. The past provides us with a language with which we may discuss the present and the future, and in that role it is, I suppose, irreplaceable. I will use it in that way, then, because I love to hear myself speak. But, beyond that, I’ll do whatever I can to keep it in its place.

Holey-ness is next to Holiness. This is obviously true phonetically but it’s also true semantically. The Motto. G.L.I.E.A.M. God’s Light Infuses Everything Around Me. It’s not just a motto, it’s true.

God’s Light is everywhere and the world gets in the way. Get out of the way. Empty yourself. Use whatever means necessary but become empty.

The timid route [WRONG]

Some attempt to empty themselves in the most straightforward way possible. For a few minutes every day, they go inside themselves and they take something out. They go to therapy. They do yoga. They follow the patterns of some religion without any of the fervor or awe. Fitter, happier, more productive. These people are doing it wrong. Nature abhors a vacuum. Stretched and swollen as you are with things, you cannot simply remove content and expect the space to remain that way. How many times do I have to tell you that Nature Abhors A Vacuum? You are swimming in a sea of Evil if you were in a sea of Water and you spat out a little Water what do you think would replace it? Try again.

The explosive route [WRONG]

Some attempt to accelerate their way to emptiness. They traumatize themselves spectacularly every day. They fall in love with every person they meet, envision their lives together and then allow the rejection to hit them as hard as possible without any healthy form of release. They kill the things that bring them the greatest joy without provocation. They gulp it all down with muscular throats, they add it to the contents of their distended pressure cooker stomachs. Eventually, the pressure reaches the appropriate point. They are full to bursting, and they burst. They blow themselves up and away into emptiness, ego strapped to a spherical cartoon bomb, ego in a fiery plane crash, spectacular ego spontaneous combustion, ego stepping on an IED. Everything that was in them is now outside of them. But it’s hard to call them “empty” — can you earnestly say that a pile of ceramic shards which once comprised a coffee cup is “empty” in any meaningful way?

The gruesome route [CORRECT]

This is how you do it. You don’t want to explode, but close. You want to build up pressure and then you want to release it all at once and squeeze everything out. You do not want to be Evil within Evil, and you do not want to be shards of a coffee cup. You want to be a plastic bag in the deepest part of the ocean, structurally sound and squeezed together so tightly that there is nothing within the bag, nothing. No air. No vacuum. No receptacle, but the potential for a receptacle when God’s Light is ready for you.

Astute emptiers build their internal pressure carefully. They carefully and casually relive their own psychological trauma every day, slowly increasing the pressure for as long as they can bear it and no further. Once the maximum manageable pressure level is reached, they begin hacking away at their own necks with whatever sharp object they can get a hold on. Knife perhaps, saw ideally. Head removal is the key to this approach to spiritual emptiness. The nice thing is that once you reach the esophagus the powers of pressure will take over, the head will remove itself from the body with considerable force (make sure to point your head away from you during this process).

Next you must squeeze your body as hard as you can. This is the critical step. Make sure to squeeze as much of your body flat as you can. You want every system in your body that has the capacity to be hollow, to be flat instead. If you can finagle your way to some form of human-sized vice grip that would be ideal (these are rather hard to come across). Use a flat straight object like a credit card to work out any bubbles of air or viscera that may yet remain within your person. Just work these bubbles to any available orifice for expulsion. Once you are fully flattened you may extricate yourself from the squeezer of your choice and live your life freely. Ambient air pressure will serve to keep you flat for as long as either of you remain. Only then will you have the power to totally Bag God’s Light and save it to share with yourself and others.

I am a friendly person because there are about two people on Earth whose physical proximity to me has a better-than-negative effect on my mood, but I hide it well.

Acting is acting. The mask is the mask. I am, who I am, but that isn’t all I have to be. I can infuse myself with the beliefs of others, I can become an egregore of friendliness, people will believe me to be friendly and then I will simply be friendly thanks to the generative power of belief which I truly believe in, not in a spiritual way, in a physical, material way, I believe in manifestation.

What happens to me, or who I see myself to be, if I manifest something else in my place? Will I be:

1. large enough to contain multitudes, I will be Friendly and also my friendly-larp self, I will be myself and more, I will be 1 + 0.1.

2. A ship of theseus continued identity, the same entity, transformed, reformed, reconstituted, something lost but not all of it, the same person, but a little different, I will be 0.9 + 0.1.

3. Lost forever, the recipe is wrong, four bits were flipped as a result of cosmic bombardment, my 256-bit private key has been transformed in some unknown way ergo I have lost my private key with the terrible totality of cryptographic security, new person, new identity, new birth, new only new continuity obliterated. all is lost. 0 + 1.

When I Don the Milady I become someone new Online. I am neither the person I am in physical space, nor am I the person I am when I am alone. Distinct identity, separate from myself.

Except, the faucet is leaky. All faucets are, imperceptibly, eventually. I pour from my special cup I reserve for the TL, onto the TL, and nature abhors a vacuum. My cup is submerged in the TL. The TL rushes to occupy the empty space. When I leave the TL the TL is still in the cup. I pour out the cup but the miracle of adhesion holds some trace amounts of the TL intact on my cup.

Some dripping occurs. I use the same sponge to clean my TL cup as I use to clean my private identity cup. Particulate. Sticky particulate. Buildup. A persistence I didn’t want but will never be rid of.

If you pour properly consecrated Holy Water into the ocean, have you created a Holy Ocean? Has anybody tried this yet?

I think you can learn a lot about someone by taking them to Subway and observing their interaction with the single teenager tasked with running the entire enterprise.

You could rate them across several relevant metrics: leadership, charisma, sympathy, decisiveness, wit, creativity, taste. they should do this at job interviews, treat the candidate to lunch at Subway and give them no indication that the rest of the interview is actually just conditioning for the only part that will actually affect hiring decisions, the Trip To Subway. This could be a whole new revenue stream for Subway provided their leadership has the tenacity, gumption, and vision to seize it.

Personally though not a big fan of Subway (I’m too uke). Uke if you don't know is the name in the yaoi arts given to the "receiver" the submissive party in the male-male relationship. I don't think I'd go so far as to call myself a femboy per se, I am in a happy [redacted]-year relationship with the woman of my dreams but in my interactions with service workers in particular, yeah, uke. Other settings too. Uke. Especially food service settings though. Alas.

My mother taught me from a very young age that I am an Empath a Crystal Child an Auteur an Autist and this prevents me from being a true powerful seme man in food service settings because the job is so degrading and I, having never done it myself on account of my caste, am simply not equipped to receive that level of psychic energy without rebounding some of it back out into the world. This is true in all food service settings, not just Subway, but the level of abject despair that exists behind the counter at Subway is Otherworldly.

McDonalds is renowned among the MBA crowd for the “conformance” of their employees despite their fractious franchisee system which is often interpreted as a challenge for branding and uniformity — a McDonald's hamburger is prepared the exact same way in washington DC as it is in garry, indiana as it is in austin texas. But MBA eggheads are sleeping on Subway. the psychic drone emanating from behind the counter at Subway is of the exact same color and timbre in Boise Idaho as it is in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia as it is 55 miles outside of Khartoum, Sudan. Whatever culture Subway occupies, that culture knows to send its Most Depressed Sixteen Year Olds to die behind the counter at Subway and they dutifully oblige vis a vis the erosive drug du jour in their given polity.

So yeah I'm not a big fan of Subway, too uke, not all the time but at subway yeah definitely uke, terrified little sandwich twink, makes me scared and uncomfortable. I prefer Pizza Hut.