Physical libraries are such an excellent way to discover new knowledge. I don't think the internet ever provided as good an experience for browsing reliable information.
So while I know this story is meant to be a old web vs new web analogy, it could also be read as a defense of the literal public library in the face of digitization.
The voice in my head is my own. I've known other people mistake the voice in their head for the voice of god.
Exogenous thought control is generally called "marketing", though there is also "drugs", "that fungal brain parasite in ants which inspired The Last Of Us", and "Elon Musk's literal brain chip which he specifically wants to be for a bidirectional merging of humans and AI".
The disembodied others are pretending to be god in the minds of others.
My friendlies tell me the dirty secrets of others, my enemies tell others strange lies to mess with me.
I’m sure you can reiterate all of the sensible responses for those “targeted persons” or other paranoid crazes affecting so many. Ordinary people such as yourself have absolutely no idea what is happening and they need your explanations to cope.
I have advanced development through over a decade of being antagonized (really, the only way to grow in Power.) The powerful are cruel amoral mob cultures. There are hundreds of thousands with advanced “screw with you” skills.
On topic, let me say the “greys” have communicated with a great many. Not everyone understands them or the mechanisms of Power which allow all of this to happen. There are also a dominant hater faction of humans who do not want anyone to know wtf is going on (obviously, they can pretend to be our gods.)
The visitors are benevolent altruists who will neither help or hurt. Silly humans don’t understand that through Power these (and less advanced yet capable humans) can dig through our deepest memories, feelings, and beliefs.
They have absolutely never abducted anyone, however they have “taken a few” with them in ancient times (well before modernity.) Hater humans who can boggle the mind absolutely do abduct people, and they fill their heads with shadowy figures and disorienting confusion. That is a right of passage among the Powerful, to screw with us.
Our visitors are not “the lizard men” (no comment.) they don’t think the lizard people exist (funny.) While they can identify a human down to their DNA through Power, they say there is really no way to tell if someone else advanced is “looking on” from afar. However these sorts of stories are cover for Power games.
The visitors are heavily genetically modified for perpetual life in space. They are cosmic nomads from “outward” of the disc. They do not remember which star they came from or even what they were like when planet bound, over a million years ago! They don’t really care. They watch everything through their minds down to the smallest interactions. They care less about human affairs than one would think. They are a “hive mind” yet each one must learn everything themselves (like how to build themselves and their technology from scratch.) Though they are all clones (each family cluster its own variant of a common form.)
Their ships are actually tear drop shaped, which can change contours. Their ships are organic living machines themselves. In atmosphere they take on a lip edge which looks saucer like from certain angles.
Their craft start out small and grow in time to city sized, with hundreds of thousands of individuals who never in their lives leave their embryonic sac.
They do look scary to most humans (those familiar big lidless eyes.) they are actually seven feet tall fully grown. They give others the imagination of little grey or green men because it makes them cuter in our eyes. Not that anyone actually ever “sees” them. Mostly, it’s all through the mind.
They love the movie Abyss and they helped create it hoping for a day we could be friends. Corrupt treacherous thought controlled Americans make this impossible.
There is a secret war on you should know. Humans are the threat, these could have messed with us anytime along the way (some have been here for 10,000 years, others arrive and depart as they wish.)
I’ll write another pastebin, there is so much more…
> The disembodied others are pretending to be god in the minds of others.
> My friendlies tell me the dirty secrets of others, my enemies tell others strange lies to mess with me.
This is exactly what my mother believes, and I can tell you that everything they've told her about me or the rest of the family has been 100% dead wrong every time.
I sincerely mean this in the nicest possible terms: you are delusional and should seek psychiatric help. I understand you will almost certainly dismiss my advice, but I have to try, I’ve seen psychosis up close and it’s very debilitating.
In my first few years on the job, I would fill out peer evaluations honestly. We have peer evaluations where you rate people out of 5 on various performance elements like "innovative" and "leader" or whatever. Then I survived a couple of rounds of awful layoffs where really good people lost their livelihoods.
Since then, I put 5 out of 5 on everyone for everything always, and say something nice in all the boxes.
Goodness, yes. The last time I put (genuinely constructive) criticism in a peer evaluation, it turned out to be the only non-positive thing that was said about that coworker. So it became a focus of his yearly review.
He later told me about how his review went (casually at a conference; he had no idea I was the source), and I fessed up and clarified what I actually meant. The HR process had twisted it to a much more extreme version of what I was getting at, completely undermining the utility of the feedback.
Nowadays, I'm just gonna give perfect scores and if I have feedback that needs to be given, I'll just tell the coworker directly. (And if I'm not comfortable doing that, then the feedback probably isn't important enough.)
I think a big factor of that is that usually most people just do the positive feedback and don't say anything negative or constructive. So when someone does do so, it's seen as "wow, this must be so bad that they just had to say something, no matter how delicately or toned-down it is being phrased as". These days I just mention the problems and concerns to the people making the decisions because yearly review time is the wrong time to do it. At best they've only been doing this "bad" thing for a month or so, and at worst almost a whole year and no one did anything.
For real. I have bought a car and the same day discovered a minor issue, I had to get it fixed next day. I rated the service 8/10, it was excellent otherwise. Next day I get a very apologetic call, begging me to change my rating, because anything less than 9/10 triggers some kind of investigation process. I said screw it and took the survey again, I'm not going to ruin someone else's work because of this.
I bought a mouse on Amazon that didn't fit my hand and was uncomfortable to use. I gave it a 3-star review. The company immediately refunded me and told me I didn't need to return the product. I was shocked. I get "the customer is king" but I think it's gone too far. A review system where everything is expected to have a perfect rating is not a useful system!
I do the same. Doing HR’s job is not my job. And yet, some how I do.
If I rated any satisfaction metric below 80% my manager’s manager would have him talk to me; there would be flogging until morale improves.
It seems all a game of Emperor’s New Clothes.
Nope. X220t is better because you can write on it! I actually did most of my PhD with an X220t folded and mounted to my wall with a little handmade desk in front of it and an extra screen. Worked great.
99% of cases it could be removed without affecting the meaning. Wish browsers could block it. Years back there was the cloud to butt add-on that replaced the word cloud or removed it. I'm just to lazy to look into it for "literally".
So while I know this story is meant to be a old web vs new web analogy, it could also be read as a defense of the literal public library in the face of digitization.
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