Funny old world.

The evening of my grandfather’s birthday I have this dream, which I wrote down more or less immediately upon waking:

We are inside a timber house by a lake that has a large verandah over the water.

In the distance are mountains. It looks like a warm version of the Pacific Northwest. (I had been watching Portlandia before bed.)

All my cousins and siblings are there, as well as parents, aunts and uncles.

I’m inside -in a beautiful, sunlit room- chatting to a couple of people.

There is a large dome-shaped cake on a table cut into small, unusual pieces (criss-crossed like you would chop half an onion). My cousin Karen picks up a piece and messily smashes it into her mouth before putting the remnants back down on the table. (Not back on the cake, even in dreams she’s a lady.) She then walks out through the open door onto the verandah.

I pick up a piece of cake and walk toward the door, noting that my piece doesn’t have much icing and that it seems too small.

I eat it and walk outside into the much brighter, lens-flarey sunshine where Karen, my brothers, my new sister-in-law and a few others are standing around chatting. My littlest brother asks if I want something as he’s going back inside and I say more cake.

I’m leaning on the balcony and looking out over the water towards the mountains, aware that there are people I can’t see on the distant shore. My little brother and I are chatting amiably about the new episodes of Futurama and also *clue alert* the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule which I bought for my mother the psychonaut for her birthday the other week.

Then I wake up to an email from MMTP saying she often thinks about the last birthday party my grandfather had where we were altogether in the sunshine by the beach. When he was saying his post-birthday cake speech I recall he got a bit teary and said how wonderful it was to have everyone together and how proud he was and blessed to be able to look back over his life and see all these people. He died a few weeks later.

Anyway, Deb shared a very Captain Obvious dream the other day, so I thought that maybe I might too… except mine is more Captain Obviouser. Other people’s dreams are usually extremely boring so I promise this will be the last time I do so! (Warning: not a legally binding promise.)

You genuinely don’t need even a single second of book learnin’ to interpret this with complete accuracy. Let’s move along quickly.

I only wish I ate more of the ‘cake’. Might have got us all further across the line. Might have heard from whoever was on “the farthest shore”.

An experience like this isn’t big enough to form a whole post.

Yes, it is extremely moving. Yes, it is compelling evidence that there is something on the other end of your cosmic string-can phone.

But it’s not enough because if you are doing magic with any efficacy then incidents like this show up as daily side effects.

Example:

The tarot cards that have been sitting on the desk of my home office since I wrote this post about them are now remarkably good at business-based divination. Seriously, they have jumped right to the top of the class. They are what I use to get intel on the scariest, most disruptive part of my life right now: how I make money. I have decks that I have used for fifteen years that I know better than my own face and these cards are smashing them.

Why is this surprising? Or noteworthy? It isn’t. It’s obvious, clunky, contagion magic.

It’s par for the course in a universe that looks, with each passing month, more and more like the one we’ve been talking about for thousands of years and less and less like the one Richard Dawkins has been talking about for thirty.

Here’s a few more pieces for that universe we should probably get around to building:

All stars have planets

Google the mediocrity principle. Then come back to that article. This is big news. Things just got a lot more crowded.

Gud grammerz is go bye-bye

Two generations into a completely dismantled western education system, combined with the rise of the internet, means the Queen’s English has a closer expiry date than the old battleaxe herself.

This gives rise to deeply ambivalent feelings.

Firstly, I use words (even in this post) like “lens-flarey” and “obviouser”. But I will hopefully never mix up my their/they’re/there. Or, my personal favourite/thing-I-hate-most-in-the-worlds, the erosion of “you’re” by “your”… again thanks largely to Facebook. “Lol. Your so funny!11!1!!!” (I will kill you.)

Thing about language is that majority rules and the English-speaking world is objectively getting much more stupid. So “you’re” is actually an endangered speesheees (see what I did there?) and I just need to make peace with that.

Of course, the obvious hack in the meantime is to get really good (which is barely literate in the fifties) at grammar and spelling so that you can indicate a class advantage via email -the critical medium of our age. It’s the equivalent of not being named Kayden or Branndeen except this hack is entirely in your hands and cannot be sullied by the hillfolk kin that named you Temprannz.

I can use lots of run-on sentences and white space here because it’s a blog and blog rules haven’t yet been codified. But you will know I mean business if you get a business-mail from me. It’s set and setting without the drugs. Learn it.

Watch out for old homos!

Apologies if you’ve seen it but it only just crossed my internetz. A fascinating and terrifying watch. It actually reminds me of something Apollo astronaut and Roswell believer Edgar Mitchell said in a presentation once. His grandparent’s family colonised the west in covered wagons, his own father was born a couple of years after the Wright brothers made their first flight and he went to the moon.

That’s quite a jump in an extremely short space of time. (Put like that, it’s possible my grandfather was onto something.)

We are nowhere near done jumping yet, but it’s good to see how far we’ve jumped.

Is this how the pyramids were built?

Okay so… this is one of the few topics I am not a complete, massive idiot in or dickbag about. Maybe.

Ignoring everything else, the construction of the Giza complex is fundamentally an engineering enigma. After almost twenty years of looking at this and scoffing at the feeble “explanations”, a project manager from Derby has -in my estimation- come the closest to a working theory that doesn’t involve aliens or antigravity. (This is an example of the thing I love most in the British make-up; a weird, nerdy obsession that comes out of a package holiday… a voracious, post-Benidorm amateurism.)

Please watch both videos and give feedback. I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. A couple of things to note:

• The Giza causeways down to the Nile are at weird angles that haven’t been satisfactorily explained. In fact, the magical purpose of the causeways hasn’t been satisfactorily explained. This is one explanation for them.
• He doesn’t mention it in the video but there is a reasonable amount of written source material to indicate that the pyramid workforce was seasonal: it was farmers who had nothing to do during the inundation period… which is precisely the moment in the year that this whole theory hinges on.

Oldest Australian rock art dated to 28,000 years ago

First off, that times really well for me.

Secondly, the area had been occupied 45,000 BP. What were they doing for that missing 17,000 years?

That also works well for me.

Watch this with interest. Australia isn’t done yielding up the secrets of our cognitive origins.

How Amazon saved my life

Hyperbolic? Yes. But worth reading if you are interested in publishing? Double yes.

The Mosquito Coast’s lost “White City” has been found

Guess there’s a lot of things you can hide under a relatively recent covering of Jungle. Like, say, Atlantis?

Hey, anybody remember that movie, The Mosquito Coast? From memory it was actually pretty good.

Could aliens have created life on Earth?

Yes. Obviously. Guess I’m gonna need to add another part to the whisky rant now this is drifting into orthodoxy.

Extra points: why would they be releasing this now in a flurry of popular culture references? Pay. Attention.

30 days without social media can change your life

Start-up land is famous for its hyperbolic fairy tales but at the core of this experience is something true of all ages but especially so of our current one.

If you have a creative work or even just a purpose that you’re aiming for then this article is worth a read. My news diet (only reading news websites twice a day) has done wonders for my productivity. This will be the next thing.

Why web content keeps getting longer

Clearly this is kinda in the same vein, but it’s actually saying the opposite to the above piece. The internet is very messily becoming a place for high quality, world-changing content. When it comes to video content that means longer than a cat on a skateboard.

Because a cat on a skateboard is why you need to drop out of social media for 30 days.

What does Britishness look like from the outside?

I recall standing outside a pub beside Lake Macquarie when I was about nineteen… smoking and drinking at a friend’s 18th birthday. Some crusty, old lake dog who wasn’t with the group said that “smokers were the only group left in society that were discriminated against.”

This was a lesbian birthday party in Australia more than ten years ago so let’s just park the obvious inaccuracies in this statement and go for the macro observation.

Positions of privilege aren’t very good at observing themselves. And when privilege is reallocated, idiots think of this as discrimination.

Yes, the Euro is collapsing. But it is no bad thing to be British. You could certainly do worse. It’s a great piece.

What I know about Germans

Okay so I work for a German company which means I get over there quite a bit. This is 100% valid and 100% adorable.

Why working class people vote conservative

This is an article about a conversation that Jason and I have been having on and off for a couple of years.

Basically, it boils down to how does someone living in a trailer with zero access to healthcare vote for a millionaire Mormon robot who is running on a platform of tax cuts for billionaires? How does that actually happen? Seriously it’s weird.

Here’s a British take on the same question, given that our current Prime Minister will admonish tax avoiding comedians yet is himself heir to millions from a multi-generational family business that made its fortune hiding client wealth from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Seriously, guys… break out the guillotine.

How to instantly restore the global market to prosperity

Speaking of the guillotine… the solution to our current malaise is so fucking obvious that the developed world’s refusal to do so can only make you a little bit suspicious.

Honestly, it’s like standing right next to a fire extinguisher in your own kitchen as a grease fire breaks out. You would only do this if you were after the insurance or something.

Break. Out. The. Guillotine.

The war against the youth

We’re going to end with more guillotining.

Historically, disenfranchising your youth doesn’t end well for the ruling classes. And by historically it has never ended well. It fascinates me that the baby boomers haven’t heeded this lesson.

They may not have heeded it but they will certainly heed it. A youth unemployment rate above 15% is a recipe for social disorder. A youth unemployment rate above 50% like it is in some of the world’s biggest economies is a recipe for napalm.

Conclusion

There you have it.

Ghosts, dreams, apocalypses, identity, social media, ancient history. These are the pieces that make up Morpheus’s kingdom. This is what you expect when you walk through the gate.

So… jog on. And sweet dreams.