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Perfection is just another kind of fake

Faking It: On the Ethics of Fake Musicianship, Perfection Culture, and Why Intention is Important

This isn't gonna be some finely tuned thinkpiece or perfectly structured deep dive. It's more like a sprawl of thoughts I've been having while in a two-week mental and creative rut. I am sitting there watching Adam Neely's The Ethics of Fake Guitar and thinking back on my own creative past and present. I’m not here to lecture anyone on how to do it, and I’m not pretending I’ve got a definitive answer to anything, but I do have a compass, and that compass always points to intentionality. I still feel all I have that is truly my own is intentionality. So let’s talk about what it means to fake something, what it means to chase perfection, and what happens when the internet—and especially social media—gets ahold of all of that and changes that intention to an expectation. With that expectation based on a lie for monetary gain.

Part 1: NO-Budget Filmmaking, Perfection Culture, and Reflections in the Mud

I went to film school from 1999 to 2004. A community college that no longer exists. Part-time. Full-time job just to stay afloat, and I was lucky enough to have family that kept a roof over my head and a plate of food in front of me. But camera gear? Editing bays? Glossy production? Even Time… Forget it. I was scrapping together Mini-DV setups and busted PCs, praying they wouldn’t crash before I could save the project file. That’s where I come from—NO-budget filmmaking. Capital N-O. That mindset never left me. After college I struggled to find stable employment. I basically kept truckin’ along filming what I could and make something out of it. I still make things with what I have. If something sucks in the final product, it’s not because I didn’t care. It’s because I couldn’t afford better. And even if I could, I probably wouldn’t obsess over it. I care more about what I’m trying to say than how glossy it looks. People chasing that “Aesthetic of Perfection” are chasing ghosts. They’re chasing a version of a thing they think they saw, not what’s actually there. Could be a statement on our human society experiment. What happens if you stop chasing that and start creating from where you are instead?

Because Here’s the Truth: Perfection is Just another Kind of Fake.

Part 2: The Line Between Editing and Faking Ain’t as Clear as People Pretend

Now let’s get into the thick of it. Is editing a live performance “faking”? Depends. If you’re just sweetening the sound—cleaning up the EQ, leveling things out, maybe patching a glitchy mic—that’s post-production, not deception. I don’t think anyone should be faulted for wanting to make their performance presentable. Especially if they’re filming on a cell phone in a garage or bar with poor sound and/or acoustics.

YouTube’s compression algorithm noticeably degrades audio quality during upload, especially in the higher frequencies—cymbals, vocals, and clarity tend to get flattened. After extensive trial and error, I found that exporting the final video using VSDC in the .mkv format with PCM S16LE audio encoding preserved far more of the original sound. Unlike standard .mp4 exports with AAC compression, which YouTube compresses more aggressively, the .mkv + PCM combo seems to bypass some of that automatic degradation. It’s not perfect, but the improvement is real—especially for trained ears—and it’s become my go-to method for getting cleaner audio onto the platform. That's not me trying to deceive anyone. That's me working with the limitations, trying to squeeze as much juice out of the lemon as I can with the controls I have. But yeah, if you’re miming along to a studio-recorded track and selling it as live, you’re crossing into a different territory. And here’s where it gets messy: It’s not just what you do, it’s how you frame it. Your, ‘intention…’ If you tell the audience what you’re doing, most people are cool with it. It’s the hiding part that rubs people wrong. Transparency covers a lot of ethical ground. The ones that actually can do these amazing things. They worked incredibly hard to get there. AND in many cases most of them never really got the recognition and real profits from their work, which they should be credited and even paid in my more cases than not.  

Part 3: Social Media and the Great Monetization Lie

Here’s where the whole thing twists into something nastier. This drive for perfection—this impulse to fake your way through—it’s not happening in a vacuum. Social media monetization has created an entire ecosystem where people aren’t making art anymore. They’re not even really making products. They’re making content. And more specifically, they’re selling themselves as content. Their personality, their lifestyle, their vibe.

Somewhere between 13 and 45, an entire generation got convinced that if you were fun at parties and worked retail that one summer, you were just a ring light away from being a brand ambassador. What they’re selling isn’t just a product—it’s the belief that if they say it’s cool, it must be cool. And sometimes? That works. Some people can sell that illusion. But most people can’t. Most end up chasing something that was never actually real to begin with: the idea that charisma alone can substitute for experience, skill, or hard-earned credibility. What we’ve ended up with is this fake hustle culture. People “working hard” on building their brand—but it’s all image. It’s cinematic. You know how movie characters only face the parts of life that move the plot forward? Nobody in a movie spends three hours troubleshooting why their WiFi won’t connect to the printer. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re cutting out all the unglamorous stuff—the years of grind, the failed attempts, the dead ends—and presenting a highlight reel as if it were a documentary.

And the result? People think they’re working hard, but they’re not actually doing anything. Because in real life—especially with tech, with music, with film—you have to know what you're doing. There’s work involved. But the illusion sold on social media says you don’t need that. You just need to be seen doing the work.

And this is the part that really gets under my skin: what people now call “influence” or “reach” used to be called resources. It was marketing budget. It was connections. It was a studio or a label or some angel investor quietly bankrolling the whole thing while pretending it was just some quirky girl in her bedroom making videos on her phone. It’s not grassroots. It’s AstroTurf. There’s a whole industry out here trying to convince you that these influencers are “just like you,” and some are. However, in many cases the reality is they’ve got deep-pocketed support, production teams, and years of unseen infrastructure propping them up.

What they’re selling isn’t a product, or even a skill. They’re selling belief. They want you to buy into them. And that’s wild to me. That’s televangelist territory. And yeah—not everyone online is doing this. There are legit creators, legit businesses, real product testers that influence product trends.

A “confidence game,” or con, is a method of manipulation where someone gains your trust (your "confidence") in order to exploit it. It's not always about outright lying—it's about framing something believable enough to get you to invest, commit, or act… even if what you're committing to has no real foundation. This solely operates on trust and belief, not substance—a more nuanced and stronger word for it could be is "speculative branding" or more sharply, "belief-based marketing." A term that captures the illusion of substance—where the product is really just the belief in the product—without a clear product, goal or vision.

This type of influencing has now krept into the social media world of performance art like guitarists, drummers, even vocalists, all trying to sell the idea that if you "buy in," you’ll be part of something profitable.

But in truth:

The asset is often unproven.

The odds of success are downplayed or hidden.

The story is polished to hide the risk.

You're investing in their ability to attract others, not in a tangible return.

This is classic con structure:

Gain trust through charisma, social proof, or flashy success stories.

Present belief as product, appealing to your emotions or FOMO.

Shift risk onto the buyer, while keeping the seller insulated.

Profit off belief, not substance.

But like anything else—music, politics, religion—the scene gets polluted by people who are just gaming the system. You see it in politics all the time. New tax law drops? Within a week someone’s already figured out a loophole. That’s the American tradition now: don’t work harder, just find the cheat code. Circumvent the rules so you can look better than you actually are. Especially online, where one rarely has to actually prove anything they do. Numbers, views, hearts, likes, even comments can be generated by AI in mass to manipulate how much “influence” a channel, account, business or single person has. That mindset has bled into how we think about success. It’s no longer about doing the most logical, skilled, or creative thing to reach your goal. It’s about finding the path of least resistance that still looks good on camera.

So yeah—when someone fakes a guitar solo, or mimics a live performance, or cuts corners in post and sells it as raw talent, it’s not just annoying—it’s part of a bigger problem. It’s another symptom of a culture that values perception of substance over actual, real substance.

Part 4: Intention Matters More Than Tools

Let me be clear—I’m not anti-AI. Not even close. Hell, this whole essay was structured with the help of AI. When I’ve got too many thoughts colliding in my head and can’t quite nail the phrasing, I bounce ideas off it. I test tone. I reorganize arguments. I care deeply about semantics, and sometimes it helps me not butcher my own meaning. That’s a gift, not a threat. I’m also a scatterbrain, if I’m being real. And AI helps me reign it in. That doesn’t mean it wrote this. It means it helped me shape this. Like a co-writer, or an assistant editor. I’m still driving—it just helped clean the windshield.

What bugs me isn’t people using AI. It’s people pretending they didn’t. Acting like every word or note or design choice sprang perfectly from their untouched genius. Like, why? Most content isn’t made by one person anymore. It’s usually a team, or at least a couple of close collaborators. If your buddy helped with camera work or gave you feedback on your mix, you’d thank them. You’d credit them. So why wouldn’t you do the same with AI, if it helped shape the thing? And honestly, I don’t even mind if AI does a lot of the work. Sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes that’s how you get unstuck or get something done at all. But just say so. Give the tool its due. Don’t slap your name on an AI-written book like you typed it all out on a typewriter in a cabin. That’s not authenticity. That’s performance.

Same deal with music production. You want to use backing tracks, drum machines, pitch correction—do it. We’ve been doing that since the tape deck. But be up front. Don’t roll out a video where you look like you’re playing note-for-note perfection when it’s really comped to hell and back. The problem isn’t the tool. It’s the pretending. It’s the whole “fake it and act like you’re not faking it” loop we keep finding ourselves in.

But—and this is important—I also get the weird beauty in it. Sometimes the fake stuff does lead to real growth. A kid sees a faked guitar solo, and maybe they don’t know it’s fake, but it lights a fire. They want to play like that. They go chasing that sound. And in the process, they get good. Really good. Better than the faker, even. That’s the contradiction. That’s where I agree with someone like Rick Beato or Adam Neely—it’s complicated. Sometimes the illusion plants real seeds and the fruits from those seeds we all enjoy and get emerged in. And that’s not nothing. That absolutely is something.

So I don’t think it’s a question of “should you use AI or not.” It’s about your intention. Are you trying to express something? Or are you just trying to appear impressive? That’s what separates art from content. One is a reflection of the self. The other is a pitch deck with candy flavored vibes.

Part 5: Genre Codes, Gatekeeping, and the Woke Redefinition Game

The genre stuff at the end of that video? Yeah, that wasn’t just noise to me. What Adam Neely was getting at is that a genre or sub-genre isn’t just a checklist of sounds and styles—like tempo, tuning, instrument choice or technique—it’s a kind of social contract. A shared code among a community about what’s authentic, what’s fake, what’s sacred. And that hit home for me. I’m a metalhead. I’ve watched these battles happen in real-time—arguments over what counts as “real” metal, or who gets to fly the flag of some niche sub-genre like they invented it. Is deathcore “true” death metal? Is nü-metal a joke or a gateway drug? Is Djent a sub-genre at all or just a sound, like an effect? The tribal lines are drawn in every comment section. But here’s the twist: this isn’t just about sound. It’s about values. Identity. Cultural territory. That used to be messy enough on its own. Now throw in woke subculture, and the whole thing gets distorted beyond recognition.

Woke thinking—at least how I see it—tries to take minority arguments and attempt to make them majority arguments. Take a widely agreed-upon bad idea, strip away some of the baggage, repackage it with newer language, and then scold anyone who doesn’t clap along. It’s not progress. It’s marketing. And now it’s invading art, music, genre, and scene dynamics. Suddenly, people aren’t just fighting over whether a band fits a sub-genre. They’re fighting over whether that genre itself is problematic because of what someone said on a podcast or tweeted in 2007 about social dynamics at that specific time to them. You’ll see this play out in ways that sound harmless at first. Someone says a genre is “too masculine” or “too violent” or “too whiney,” and suddenly, the subculture has to shift to accommodate a narrative that was never really part of the music’s DNA. These criticisms start as niche takes, but thanks to social media and algorithmic validation, they balloon into mandates. Then comes the guilt-tripping, the digital shaming, the weird re-education process: This sub-genre is actually about this now, and if you don’t agree, you’re a bigot, gatekeeper, insert buzzword here.

And if you push back? You’re “toxic.” You’re being “negative.” “Out of touch.” Just another troll who doesn’t “get it.” Never mind that the whole point of subculture was to resist conformity in the first place.

It’s like every genre has to go through a weird spiritual audit now. Not just “what does this sound like?” but “what does this say about your politics? You as a person?” Which is insane. Music is supposed to be a place for escape, for release, for raw emotional reaction and entrainment—not a damn TED Talk with fake playing guitar solos.

And then there’s this individualist twist where people experience one thing, and suddenly they try to rewrite the entire genre canon around their feelings. “Well, I listened to X and it helped me through Y, so now this genre is about Z.” I get that it meant something to you. That’s valid. No one is saying one or a few cannot come together and share this thing in a different light. But your emotional reaction doesn’t overwrite the cultural framework that genre came from. Not every genre needs to be soft and affirming. Not every lyric needs to be therapy. Some of it’s supposed to be ugly, aggressive, nihilistic—because that’s what it’s channeling. We’ve got a generation trying to fix things that were never broken to begin with. And what we lose in the process is the texture, the risk, the rawness that made these subcultures worth fighting for. You can’t remap black metal or punk or horrorcore through some feel-good HR training lens. You’ll sand off everything that made it matter.

Community norms didn’t collapse because people stopped caring. They collapsed because people started pretending anything goes as long as you can spin a social virtue out of it and gas light people into treating you like a victim. When you are a victim of your own making. It’s not creativity. It’s control—dressed up in the language of inclusion. And I’m not saying “keep things pure” like some frothing elitist. I’m saying stop treating cultural identity like it’s a choose-your-own-adventure morality tale. Some things actually have context. History. Meaning. Rules. That’s what makes them genres. That’s what makes them powerful. Its ok to change things. That is what sub-genres are for. A variation of the original with nuanced twists. Nü-metal isn’t a joke or a gateway drug to nonsense-core but a nuance of fusion from a decade before. That is all nü-metal is; a fusion of different styles and it was heavy and closer to metal than hip-hop, funk, electro or reggae. At the time it was a huge shift from where metal was in the 1990s. The labeling name makes sense. That is how these things happen. But more importantly ‘why’ they happen.

Part 6: In the End, It’s Still About Intention

Look. I’m not here to say don’t fake anything. I’m saying know why you’re doing it.

If the goal is to share an idea, an emotion, a perspective—and you’re using every tool you’ve got to get that across—cool. Go for it. Cheat the lighting, filter the hell out of it, remix, repackage, whatever. If it’s in service of something real, that intention comes through.

But if the goal is to game the system, farm dopamine, and dress up clout-chasing as “authenticity”? That’s not creativity. That’s commerce wearing a cosplay wig. That’s performance art with no art. And yeah, the internet’s always had fakery—but now we’ve got people with delusions of grandeur being handed tools that amplify those delusions at scale. Taking away from real creators just trying to get some momentum in life with the talents and creative things they do. To fake it to directly take away from lesser people’s efforts and propped one’s self higher than they actually are is the worst kind person out there. The damage isn’t just in the trick—it’s in pretending there wasn’t a trick to begin with.

Social media was supposed to be a quick peek into someone’s day. A way to stay connected during the in-between moments of life. But now it is the day. It’s the job. It’s the hustle. It’s a 24/7 grind machine full of fake smiles, fake stories, fake lives—people living like avatars of their best guesses at what other people might want to click on. This isn’t a shot at real salespeople with real track records who just adapted to new platforms. Sell stuff. Talk about what you love. No shame in that. The problem isn’t sales. It’s when the entire persona is a lie, built to manipulate good intentions for personal gain. That’s where I draw the line. Intention is everything. If your intention is pure—even if the result is messy, flawed, imperfect—no one with a conscience is gonna fault you. But if you use sincerity as a prop, if you twist trust into currency, if you hijack empathy just to raise your stock... that’s not just wrong. That’s objectively wrong.

And yeah, I said objectively. That word still means something. It means something is true regardless of your feelings, your preferences, your influencer score and your influence upon it. It doesn’t need you to function. The universe doesn’t care if you’re trending. It doesn’t care if your lighting is good or if your truth gets applause. The universe is indifferent. It gives zero fucks. But we should care. Because the moment we stop caring about intention—the moment we start pretending that subjectivity is objectivity—we lose the thread. We let the algorithm tell us what matters. And we forget that what we intend is what makes us human in the first place.

So yeah, maybe this all gets me fewer views. Less reach. No monetization. So be it. If I’m gonna be seen, I want it to be me being seen. Not some echo of someone else’s polish. Not a mask of greatness I haven’t earned.

Just me.

Raw, flawed, real.

And that’s enough.

Perfectio est aliud genus ficti Latin: Perfection is just another kind of fake by David-Angelo Mineo with editorial assistance from a Generative Pre-trained Transformative Artificial Intelligence 5/4/2025 3,504 Words

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3 Body Problem | Season One | Books vs Show (Netflix)

How do you translate existential dread and astrophysics into something that fits neatly between snack breaks? If you’ve read The Three Body Problem series to the end, you already know human triumph, endurance, evolution forgets itself, becomes something else entirely—something a 21st-century Earthling might not even recognize. Liu Cixin doesn’t offer hope or heroes. He offers scale. The kind that makes you feel like a moth attracted to light that zaps you and evaporates all your internal fluids instantly. So when Netflix decided to adapt this cold, cosmic slow-burn on survival and insignificance into a polished TV drama with all the performative, algorithm-approved, societal checkboxes checked, I was... “Concerned…” You give it a Breakfast Club of scientist buddies. You trim the philosophy, flatten the existential, nihilistic themes and kill off the woman who doomed the planet off-screen. This isn’t a takedown—I liked the show, but didn’t love it. However, I loved the books, and somewhere in the transition from page to screen, a lot got lost in translation. Let’s talk about that.

Major Spoilers ahead for both the books and show...

3 Body Problem: Season One (2024) Writers: David Benioff, Liu Cixin Directors: Minkie Spiro, Jeremy Podeswa, Derek Tsang, and Andrew Stanton Stars: Jovan Adepo, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Benedict Wong, Mario Kelly, Sea Shimooka, Alex Sharp, Rosalind Chao, Saamer Usmani IMDB Rating: 7.5/10 Stars Rotten Tomatoes Score: 78% Runtime: Approximately 8 hours.

I have only one real issue with the shift in setting and characters and that is the Oxford Five or the Breakfast Club mentality of it. I have had problems with this in the past with other stories self-containing their open world universe or logic in which the story resides in. This isn’t about opposing ensemble casts—some of the best stories thrive on tight-knit groups—but in this case, that creative choice shrinks a story that’s supposed to feel big and cosmic.

—for me it is a coincidence cluster where the entire fate of the planet rests on one tight-knit group is what you'd expect from a Young Adult story, not a sweeping existential hard sci-fi epic. It ends up shrinking the scale of the story, ironically, when the Three Body Problem should feel big, messy, and global. It condenses itself to this small group who all seem to know one another intimately. The McGuffin here with this group is far too obvious compared to the randomness of the book and how it deals with the characters. In the book, the randomness of the characters—how they don’t know each other, how they’re chosen by circumstance or profession, not friendship—adds to the realism. The "Oxford Five" structure gives the show a kind of Netflix-approved checkboxed-template for assembling the storytelling, but at the cost of thematic richness and believability. It’s exactly how they did the Star Trek films. Confined galactic crises to one ship's crew or the handful of people on the bridge that we follow throughout the story opposed to using the open world environment to help drive the plot.

The book was inherently diverse without trying too hard, because it was rooted in genuine cultural contexts. I’m not against diversity—I’m against performative diversity that trades authenticity and complexity for visibility checklists. The show’s approach to representation feels more like a studio mandate than a natural outgrowth of the story. —just like the books were—but when that representation is assembled with an overly fixated feel, it comes off as inauthentic or fake. It starts to look like box-checking rather than genuine world-building and character building. The show tries so hard to be “universal” that it paradoxically becomes more narrow. I apply this more to that Star Trek mentality of confining the story, plot, characters.

I thought it was weird they shifted characters to; they all know each other, all came up together, all have a unique and important part in the plot. On a planet of 8-billion, these five, who all know each other, grew up together, went to school together, hang out together, are this important. It’s never even explained in the show why this is, where in the book it isn’t important because all the main characters come from all over. Even though the book is more focused on Chinese politics and told from a Chinese point of view in the confines of the story, the book version had more diversity than the show even though the show tries to be more diverse with its cast of characters. In the show it seems more forced.

Netflix, like many modern studios, often leans into Diversity-Equity-Inclusion themes in a way that feels like branding rather than grounded storytelling on what is happening in society. In the realm of hard science fiction, themes like ideology, identity, and survival usually emerge from the plot and world, not the other way around. Ironically, science fiction authors tend to portray social dynamics and human diversity more organically than many studios can manage—because they’re writing from within the world, not from outside it with a checklist. For context, I’m not aligned with either political camp. I don’t buy into a lot of progressive dogma when it contradicts logic, law, or biology—but I also don’t support turning every critique into a culture war skirmish. My issue here isn’t with inclusion—it’s with storytelling shortcuts that treat representation as an end rather than a means. All these characters are all old friends and pivotal scientific minds and are emotionally entangled. Feels like the writers couldn’t let go of serialized prestige-TV formulas. The show plays more like a CW show pretending to be Contact.

Ye Wenjie’s life, ideological evolution, and influence on the fate of humanity are dramatically reduced in the show. In the book, she’s a deeply complex character—both a victim of cultural trauma and an intellectual radical whose personal choices shape the entire course of human civilization. We spend significant time with her on the mountain, fully understanding her psychological state and the weight of her decisions. Her transformation feels earned and haunting in the book. The show, while telling her backstory in a more fluid, cinematic way, through flashbacks, which is still the same as far as details go, but strips it down to the bare bones emotionally and psychologically. Her arc is flattened. Her moral ambiguity, intellectual ferocity, and long-view reckoning with her past are collapsed into something far more pleasant—and far less haunting. In making her more digestible, the show misses the whole point: that Ye isn’t meant to be liked—she’s meant to be understood. She’s treated more like a background figure, and by the end, her impact is diminished to the point of being an afterthought. This is especially frustrating because it’s Ye Wenjie who introduces the foundational idea of Cosmic Sociology—the philosophical seed that leads to the Dark Forest Theory. Her insight about the universe being a deadly, silent battleground is what gives humanity a fighting chance. That kind of influence shouldn’t be sidelined.

Worse, the show has her killed off-screen in Episode 7, not by a known faction or meaningful rival, but by Tatiana—a completely invented character who feels like a stock assassin cultist. In the books, Ye Wenjie survives long enough to witness the consequences of her actions and even comes to regret them, adding real existential weight to her arc. The show robs us of that. And then there’s Tatiana. She’s not from the books at all, and seems to be a stand-in for the kind of fanaticism the ETO cultivates, but without the philosophical depth. In the novel, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization is ideologically fractured—Adventists, Redemptionists, Survivalists—each with compelling (if disturbing) motives. In contrast, the show portrays them more like a Bond villain death cult. Tatiana's actions feel more like plot convenience than logical extensions of belief.

Even the presence of Sophon in the book—an AI avatar acting as the manipulative enforcer behind the scenes—is replaced in the show with these less convincing human proxies. It waters down the eeriness and otherworldly reach of the Trisolarans. Overall, Ye Wenjie’s portrayal in the show lacks the moral and philosophical depth that made her such a powerful figure in the novels. The Sophons, the great technological feet by the aliens are a single proton, enlarged to the size of a planet so a computer can be graphed onto it and then shrunk back down. The Sophon can travel faster than light, interfere with human technology at the subatomic level and imprint images onto human eyes. They basically can do anything they need to do, but their effects at the macro level are mostly visual. The book spends quite a bit of time explaining the Sophons and their creation but the show strays too far from the hard science fiction awe of what it is the Trisolarans are doing. In the show, it’s almost glossed over, and the alien menace loses some of that epic, existential, unknowable quality that makes the books so much better.

The renaming of the Trisolarans to the San-Ti is honest to the Chinese version of the book and is relabeled in the American translation of the books. Not necessarily changing the name. But for this review or discussion I will call them the Trisolarans. The organization that are the alien sympathizers is known as the ETO, Earth Trisolarn Organization, and is never mentioned in the show by name. In the book, Trisolaris reflects the triple-sun problem—chaotic orbital mechanics and environmental catastrophe. We call this the Three Body Problem. The inability to accurately predict three solar bodies orbiting one another. The book and show both throw a wrench on the concept by adding a planet that can support intelligent life but due to the unpredictability we see how intelligent life would have to evolve to escape this prison and prosper as a civilization. This is where the VR game comes into play.

The book also spends a lot of time inside the game. I am not entirely sure if the game in the book and the game in the show are conceptually the same thing. In the show, to me, it seems like a recruitment tool for the Trisolaran sympathizer group on Earth. In the book it feels more like Trisolarans want humans to understand them. I am not entirely sure, if in the book and the show, if the Trisolarans are wanting to consume humanity from the start or not. In the show it seems like the aliens want to work with humans but once they learn of how humanity really is; with dishonesty and malice as an integral part of our civilization, they turn into wanting to wipe out most of humanity. In the book, the Trisolarans want to keep some alive as a human-like zoo project in Australia centuries later. The Trisolarans are cold and calculating. They see humans as ants, but they’re not vengeful. They want survival. The game is a way to explain their difficulty and test human potential. In the show, it does feel more like a recruitment tool, as if they’re trying to manipulate rather than educate.

Western storytelling, especially for mainstream TV, struggles with the kind of philosophical detachment and subtle emotional current that Chinese literature often embraces. Liu’s work doesn’t spoon-feed you drama—it reflects on history, suffering, insignificance, and collective fate. This westernized-adaptation trades that in for something more character-focused and emotionally “relatable,” but often feels like it cheapens the stakes. In Liu’s work, love is abstracted—people love ideas, humanity, the stars, not just each other. That’s part of the appeal. —without reading the books, many viewers will be lost to the more deeper themes. The concepts are too big, and the pacing too jumpy, for a cold viewer to fully absorb the stakes. The show definitely lacks the more existential tone of the books, but tries hard in pacing and switching the chronology of the story to make up for this. The show includes scenes or scenes that setup The Dark Forest (Book 2) and Death’s End (Book 3). It makes it harder to get this right because of the Chinese nature of the original writings. The Chinese tell stories differently. How they handle, love, affection, poetry is all different than how the United Kingdom and United States do it. The transition from source material to adaptable Americanized TV-show deviates far too much for me to love this. I do like it, and they do a decent job of trying to condense these huge concepts, but I also do not love it for that same reason.

While some of the characters from the show are written better than others. Other characters, specifically of the Oxford Five, are combinations of characters from the books. You will have two or three characters that have specific traits show up in the show as one made-character. I get this. I don’t exactly hate it, but at the same time traits that should be there are not there and traits that are there shouldn’t be there. I feel like Saul, who is supposed to be Luo Ji is written poorly. Instead of going weed smoking, womanizer in the show they should have gone with a more Elon Musk-type mentality. Someone more detached from social settings and thinks at a high level. This character seems more/less just to stumble around, but I guess has super genius qualities that we don’t really get to see and are usually setup as backhand comments rather than being someone that might be on the spectrum and just so happens to be a super genius. The book does this pretty well, but makes for a boring character. The show tries to spice this up by making him a everyday-man but who really isn’t everyday due to his physics knowledge? Yeah, I am not buying that one too well.  Mike Evans, the radical ETO leader, is totally erased in the show in a sense—or his role is drastically minimized. He was a crucial figure in the book’s idea of misanthropic idealism. In the show he is more like a religious fanatic with money.

—there’s no perfect way to adapt The Three Body Problem without reordering and cutting major content. That’s not the core issue. The core issue is that the adaptation often misunderstands why things in the book worked so well. It would have been more satisfying to slow down and stick closer to the structure of one book per season, while letting each idea breathe more and only subtly mentioning aspects from the other books to setup future seasons, which they do –do in the show fairly well. I think it is a pretty good show, but it lacks the existential dread and pacing of the books. Also that hard science-fiction awe is missing and along with the Breakfast Club of scientists and main characters I can only give this a 7 out of 10. Its good by itself, but the book series is great. The series glimpses the dark forest, but it doesn’t linger there long enough to feel the fear—or the awe.

Probably one of the best book series or “the” best I have ever read. This would have been better served as a mini-series, four to six, two-hour episodes, than an eight episode, one-hour series we got. I still want to see Season two, but I hope the showrunners recognize the narrative gravity of what they're adapting. If they plan to take on all three books, they'll need to commit to the depth—not just the spectacle. There are moments in the later books—especially one involving a storm that doesn’t move and a kind of ‘magic’ born from the wreckage of higher dimensions—that simply can’t be filmed in any literal sense. Not because of budget, but because our perception of reality isn’t built for that kind of awe. If the series ever gets there, I wonder whether it will hint at that existential impossibility, or just render it as another visual effect and move on.

While the fourth book is considered canon by the author it is mostly looked at as fan-fiction, but in its defense, it is rare for fan-fiction to get a stamp of approval by the original author, creators of the original source material. I have written about Three Body in the past, but I only just now watched the show in the hopes that I would be interested in it enough to watch season two. I am. Its good. But it isn’t great. It’s not cheaply made, but I do not believe on the writing-side of this, enough care was taken with the source material. However, it is better than its Chinese counter-part. A thirty-hour series just focusing on the first book, but heavily edited and recreated for Chinese audiences. I’d think the reasons would be obvious. Let’s not paint the Chinese as creating a human through their own tyrannical government processes that ends up taking it upon herself to destroy all of human through her original reply. “Come, we cannot save ourselves…”

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.” ― Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

3 Body Problem: Season 1 vs The Book(s) by David-Angelo Mineo 4/17/2025 2,986 Words

[mineofilms]

Violation of Time | Review of: PRESENCE (2024)

Imagine you're watching a movie, and all of a sudden, the main character shows up in a scene before they were even introduced, or someone dies and then just casually appears alive again in a later scene with no explanation. You’re sitting there thinking, “Wait, what?? Didn’t that already happen or didn’t happen?”

That’s a chronology violation — it’s when events in a story don’t follow a logical timeline. Stuff happens out of order, or in ways that don’t make much sense based on when, what, how things are supposed to happen.

Take the 1988 Nico Mastorakis film, “Nightmare at Noon.” Where a small desert town is suddenly turned into chaos when a mad scientist poisons the water supply, turning its residents into rabid, zombie-like killers. A mysterious cowboy, a vacationing couple, and the town sheriff must team up to survive the outbreak and uncover the truth behind the biological attack. As they battle the infected and try to stop the mastermind “bad guy.”

The wife of the vacationing couple gets infected and the husband is able to fight her off and lock her in a jail cell. The movie unfolds where the ragtag survivors have to kill off the zombies and do battle with the bad guy mastermind who doesn’t speak during the entire film. There is no real resolution to how to cure the people. They are simply killed as they attack the survivors. The mastermind is killed and at the end of the film the husband is getting ready to leave, seems happy he survived and behind him is his now cured wife, who when last we saw her was infected and trying to kill her husband before he is able to lock her in a jail cell. We do not know if they found a cure or not or how they cured her, but she is cured, smiling, happy to be alive. We know nothing of what happened to her but she is alive and about to continue her vacation with her husband. Huh???

Chronology violation could be looked at like if someone time-traveled and changed something in the past, but now the present doesn’t line up anymore — or, it’s when the timeline of events gets messed up or violated. Sometimes it’s intentional — like in movies about time travel (Back to the Future, Tenet, Primer), and sometimes it’s a mistake in storytelling or editing. Either way, it throws off the normal flow of time.

Time travel to the past? Not so fast... While it’s a nice idea, the past is done, and no amount of worship, science-fact, science fiction or wishful thinking is going to change its outcome. The Universe is indifferent. The universe doesn’t care about us, our actions, or our struggles. It's not biased, not cruel, and not kind. It doesn’t love, hate, pay taxes or vote — it simply exists, following its own laws and processes without regard for individual human concerns or human concerns in general. Existence doesn’t owe us meaning, justice, or purpose, and it won’t intervene to make our lives better or worse. It’s a cold, unfeeling backdrop to our lives, offering no moral guidance or cosmic hand-holding. The universe doesn’t give a damn about your nostalgia trip, and trying to mess with its flow is like trying to unburn a piece of toast — it’s already charred, and the clock’s not going to rewind, unburn your toast, that strangely, some think looks like Jesus Christ, for your convenience. The only option available is to accept that the past is a ghost, and no matter how much you try to summon it, it's never coming back.

Every moment that ticks by solidifies the next, and it’s all tied together by causality — cause and effect. Causality refers to the principle that everything that happens (the effect) is the result of some prior event or cause. This locked system ensures you don’t mess up the fabric of everything by hypothetically traveling back in time and stepping on a butterfly that somehow had a direct cause to humans ever coming into existence to begin with that would eventually travel back in time and step on the butterfly which would make certain humans never came into existence to begin with. You can't just pop into the past without messing up some delicate web of cause and effect, and that leads to chaos. Science calls this chaos entropy, and tampering with entropy in the past creates what science calls a paradox. One of the famous theories of a time paradox is the grandfather paradox. Where one travels to the past only to kill their grandfather before they could impregnate your grandmother that gives birth to your mother, that gives birth to you, so you are never born to begin with because your mother was never born. Another variation of this paradox involves traveling back to kill a young Hitler before he can rise to power...

Time travel to the past is impossible because it breaks the laws of physics, which breaks the laws of the Universe. If the Universe was a balloon, traveling to the past might pop it. It is considered impossible due to Einstein's theory of relativity and the second law of thermodynamics.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity:

Time travel to the past is impossible under Einstein's theory of relativity due to the way spacetime and causality work in this framework. According to the theory, time and space are interwoven into a single continuum called spacetime. Moving through time is like moving through space, but with some crucial limitations.

Relativity tells us that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. No object with mass can travel faster than light, which means nothing can “break” the timeline to jump backward in time. If time travel were possible, you’d have to move faster than light or manipulate spacetime in some way to loop back — but relativity makes that impossible. The faster an object moves within spacetime, the more its mass increases, requiring exponentially more energy to accelerate it further. As it nears the speed of light, its mass approaches a state of infinity, demanding infinite energy — a resource the universe doesn’t hand out. Physics doesn’t play well with infinities, like black holes, infinity is a barrier we cannot see past. Einstein’s equations describe how massive objects warp spacetime, creating gravitational fields that curve time. These curvatures are predictable and causal — meaning, they follow cause-and-effect rules. The idea of bending time to travel to the past would require conditions that violate this causality.

Second Law of Thermodynamics:

Time travel to the past is also impossible under the second law of thermodynamics because it directly contradicts the natural progression of entropy — from more ordered states to more disordered ones. The second law states that the total entropy (disorder) in a closed system must always increase or remain constant, never decrease. This is fundamental to how time works, as the "arrow of time" points toward the future and greater disorder. The universe constantly moves forward, with all processes naturally tending toward states of higher entropy. In simpler terms, things tend to fall apart, decay, and move toward chaos, and there's no going back. We can slow time down if we travel fast enough in a straight line and slow down time even more if you apply spin along with that greater speed, but one can never stop time altogether or go backward under this standard model of understanding. What this is saying is that to travel backward in time, you’d need to reverse entropy — to rewind all entropy processes in the universe, all at the same time, everywhere, from broken eggs to decayed stars, not just the point of reference you are trying to travel back to—which is the same as reversing time itself.

This doesn’t mean or imply that we know everything on the subject. Just that our current understanding of science doesn’t allow for that to happen. If there is a different form of science. Perhaps a “theory of everything,” that unifies quantum gravity and macro gravity could give us new insights on the subject or new concepts. Quantum gravity would be how gravity works at the subatomic level and macro gravity is how we feel gravity at our macro level of living on a sphere that is rotating around a core and this sphere also rotates around a Star.

Time travel to the past would require reversing this process — moving backward in time to a point of lower entropy, effectively reducing disorder. The problem is that this would violate the second law, which is one of the most well-established rules in physics. If you could somehow travel to the past, you’d need to reverse the increase in entropy that has already occurred, returning a disordered system (like the present) to a more ordered state (like the past). But that’s not allowed. Any attempt to decrease entropy — to undo the disorder and bring things back to a more ordered state — would violate the fundamental principle that entropy in a closed system can only increase.

Basically, the universe doesn’t let you "rewind" things. The law of entropy ensures that time only moves forward and that we can't simply go back and fix things by traveling to the past. The increasing disorder isn’t just a feature of the universe — it’s an inescapable part of how everything works. Trying to reverse it would break the very fabric of how time and physical laws operate, making time travel to the past not just improbable, but outright impossible. One might just pop that balloon after all.

If time travel to the past is possible from what frame of reference hypothetically could it be seen as?

Maybe not a machine, a DeLorean, a phone booth, or even technology at all, but instead, something stranger, weirder, and a little more existential. What if time travel to the past isn’t a place in time where one resides but more a point of reference on a 4D map.

No Flux Capacitor, Federation Starship, no botched faster than light test, no black hole jumping, no wormholes, or super suit that shields you from time paradoxes. You don’t even get a body at all. Just... awareness. Maybe it’s consciousness. Maybe it’s just a mechanism of how the universe processes a conscious mind. Just a single point, a zero-D dimensional point of awareness. You become nothing but a point of view — no mass, no energy, no ability to interfere outside of what has already happened in the timeline, (we’ll get to that.) A pure observer. Confused as to what it is, where it is, how it came to be there and most importantly, why…

This is the loophole the universe might allow — not participation, not alteration, but witnessing. You don’t change the past. You relive it. You see it again. But you can’t scream at your younger self to dump that toxic relationship. You can’t tell yourself to pull out sooner. You can’t stop a war. You can’t even blink. You're there... but not there.

If you think that sounds depressing, it is. You get all the pain of hindsight with none of the power of hindsight. You get to watch your regrets unfold exactly as they did, unable to touch anything outside of what has already been touched. It's a form of time travel, sure — just the most useless one imaginable. And maybe the only one that fits the rules.

This idea isn’t just science fiction either. It’s not -not science fiction, but it has some strange roots in physics. General relativity already treats time as a dimension, like space. Some interpretations of the "block universe" imply that all points in time — past, present, future — still exist, in a sense. They’re just not accessible. The past isn't destroyed. It’s just… not accessible from your current frame of reference. Unless something — say, your consciousness — could untether from its moment in time and slip backwards into that previous coordinate. Not to change it. Just to float above it like a drone. Silently recording. I look at the block universe in the context of its not that all points in time and events have happened already. I do not see it that way. The perspective I see this as the math is laid out so heavily in concrete that the only answer to the equation is what happened before that moment and then causality goes to the next moment from the cause to the effect. Not that it happened before in the literal sense, but more in the sense that the math cannot be change. 1+1=2. It is hard coded and cannot be altered. So in a sense it can be said in terms of all events have happened already. The reality is they have not. However, the math says, that is how it is going to go down and there isn’t an influence that can untether the math (entropy). We have already established one cannot do that. Another way to think of entropy is you are not trying to undo a moment in time and space. One would have to undo all moments in time and space from that point, all the way to the beginning. That is what is being said when it is said that entropy cannot be reversed. That is what we are talking about. Not a moment, but all moments from the present and the past. Probably even the future because of the way the math is laid out in our framework of physics.

In the case of being a Zero-D point of reference observing the past by being there, but not there in the physical sense of your body being in the place during that time. We wouldn’t be breaking causality because we’re not a cause. We’re not even an effect. We’re just there, a massless zero-energy point wedged into a moment that already happened. A zero-energy stowaway, perfectly harmless, as far as physics is concerned. Causality remains intact. Entropy doesn’t reverse. But you get to play ghost while you are there. Maybe you always were. This could help explain déjà vu, premonitions, hauntings. Perhaps even within the frame of a hypothetical God, or the version of you sitting in the dark wondering if time has really passed at all — or if you’re just watching it all again.

Besides; If time travel isn't possible, then how did John Titor create the phrase "Hold my beer?" 😂 It got me thinking—what if time travel to the past is possible, but you can only experience it as a passive observer? Perhaps in the same vain as the 2024 experimental film by Steven Soderbergh, Presence. In it, a spirit—or "Presence"—appears in a house before a family moves in and can only passively watch and lightly interact with them.

Major SPOILERS ahead…

Presence (2024) Writer: David Koepp Directed by: Steven Soderbergh Stars: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang IMDB Rating: 6.1/10 Stars Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88% Runtime: 1 hour, 25 minutes

The movie starts with a formless ‘presence’ in an empty home. This presence then winks out or blinks and the next moment it is another day where a realtor is about to show the home to a family. The family is a husband, wife and two teenagers. One a boy and one girl. It is not stated which one is older or if they are twins, but seem close to the same age and grade in high school. The family wants to buy the home because they had to move due to the daughter’s emotional state after two of her close girlfriends died suddenly and close together of asphyxiation due to synthetic fentanyl. This entity, ghost, form of awareness, point of reference, or presence seems to wink in and out of existence at random times moving forward from this moment. The Presence isn't there every second. It will witness an event and then its point of view will shift days/weeks later like how we blink our eyes. When the Presence does, blink, that is what it does.

The movie plays out like a typical haunted house story but from the presence’s point of view. It cannot be seen directly, make noise or even do anything at first. It seems more interested in following the daughter around the house, whose struggles with her mental health and emotional well-being after her friend’s deaths. The son, meanwhile, is a typical high schooler obsessed with his social status and trying to maintain a “cool” persona. He often clashes with his sister’s emotional issues, feeling embarrassed and frustrated by her need for attention, which he perceives as a threat to his popularity. The presence watches over the family, especially the daughter, with a strange, detached, and passive perspective. As the family tries to settle into the new house, strange occurrences start to happen. The daughter feels more sensitive to these subtle supernatural events, and her mental state becomes more fragile as she senses something is wrong in the house. The presence is not an active force at this point; it merely observes, unable to influence anything, while she can feel its presence upon her. The presence begins to do some light interactions like stack books neatly when the sister is out of the room. The brother is more concerned with being “cool” at school, a sort of bully of the school, often indifferent to his sister’s struggles. He has a mean streak and struggles to understand his sister’s emotional issues, often dismissing her as a hindrance to his own social life. The brother meets a popular kid at school and, in an attempt to help his sister, tries to set her up with him. The sister begins to spend time with the cool kid from school. As her depressive state increases she becomes more brazen with drinking alcohol and having sex with the kid. Not really caring about how she feels about him but more about how she doesn’t want to feel depressed as she is, so she does a lot of the typical rebel without a cause-type teenager behaviors.

As the plot of the movie unfolds an argument ensues where the brother and sister get into a heated fight. The presence then rushes up to the brother’s room and trashes the room. The family hears the racket and comes to witness the presence affects onto the environment. After this moment the father hires a spiritual seer to come to the home in an attempt to understand whether or not what the family is experiencing is a haunting. We get some important exposition here about ghosts not really understanding what it is that is happening to it as it is experiencing time non-linearly and does not understand the true context of what it is that is happening. This would be an important exposition dump when we get to the end of the film.

Towards the end we realize the cool kid the sister has hooked up with is responsible for the sister’s friends’ overdosing, as they did not overdose but were drugged by the cool kid and then slowly suffocated using a thing piece of plastic wrap. The cool kid has a rather long monologue about why he does this to girls and you can tell he really enjoys this. The cool kid, drugged the brother who passes out on the downstairs couch. The cool kid then drugs the sister and attempts to kill her. The presence frantically attempts to wake the brother by trying to influence reality in any way it can. It is able to make some very high pitched audio distortions directly into the kid’s ear and he wakes up, frantic and afraid. Drugged and dazed, all he can do is stumble up the stairs to the room and tackle the killer out of the window where both boys fall to their death. The next moment. The house is empty and the family is moving out. The mother distraught hears a very high pitched frequency. She walks into the living room, where it gets louder and louder. She looks into a mirror and sees the presence in the reflection. The presence is the dead brother wearing what he wore at the time of death with a blank emotionless stare. The mother screams and the father and daughter rush in to consult the mother. There is an instant where the daughter looks into the mirror but I do not think she saw it. She acts like she didn’t. The mother, hysterical, says, “he came back to say goodbye.”  As the presence now begins to slowly back away and out the open front door, away from the house, up and seemingly out into space. The movie ends on that note.

Here time travel is not mentioned, talked about or even explained at all outside the exposition dump when the spiritual seer attempts to describe how spirits operate in and with our reality. It is said in that exposition that time is experienced differently for dead spirits occupying our reality. That is pretty much all we get for an explanation but it does lay down the foundation for this entire essay. I wrote this entire essay just so that I can talk about this movie and what that could mean about time travel to the past.

The Break in Causality and the Nature of the Presence’s Influence:

In Presence, causality breaks only once: at the moment of the brother’s death. His fatal fall triggers his death but also instantly sends his consciousness to the past—on the day his family first tours the house. This is the only moment in the story where the arrow of time folds back on itself, thrusting a future consciousness into a past moment. From that point forward, time resumes its forward march, with causality restored and functioning normally.

Yet what unfolds is not passive limbo. The presence—the brother’s post-mortem consciousness or awareness—can observe events as they occur and, crucially, interact with the physical world. However, it is only able to influence events in ways that already happened inside the timeline. It is not changing the past; it is fulfilling it. The presence is not rewriting history, but participating in it exactly as it unfolded. A clear example from the film is the destruction of the brother’s bedroom. It happened. It was part of the timeline. The brother, when alive, saw it—or at least knew of it—and even if he didn’t witness it or know of it -it became an established objective fact. When the presence later enacts that destruction, it’s not altering anything; it’s simply occupying the causal role that was always meant to be there. It is not a haunting—it is a loop closing.

The weight of this idea can be illustrated by a thought experiment: imagine a can of Coke taken from the fridge, carried upstairs, and placed on a dresser. Later, it topples over mysteriously. At the time, no one knows why, only that it fell off the dresser. Now imagine the presence is in the room in the past, sees the Coke placed down, or doesn’t. It actually doesn’t matter if it knows or not but nudges it over spilling the Coke—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps just instinctively. From the presence’s perspective, this is a decision. But from the timeline’s perspective, the Coke was always going to fall, and the presence was always going to knock it over. Now, did the presence cause the Coke to fall? Yes. But it did so only because the fall already happened. It is bound to act only within what happened in the past by causality. Its agency is an illusion—it can “choose” to act, but only in ways that fulfill the already-written script of events of reality. The past cannot be changed, but it can be inhabited and even participated in. This frames the presence not as a ghost in the traditional sense, but as a closed-circuit loop of consciousness—trapped in a causally consistent replay. This idea resonates more with speculative physics: the presence, as a soul or form of negative energy, exists outside the bounds of classical thermodynamics. Once the loop completes—once it has witnessed all it was meant to witness and fulfilled its limited role in the timeline—it is released. Perhaps, metaphorically or metaphysically, or perhaps it is drawn into a black hole: the soul rejoining the absolute, collapsing into singularity, into timelessness of multiple dimensions of reality. There is no contradiction here. Only the illusion of one. The brother dies. His consciousness loops back to the beginning of the story. The past plays out. And when all things are as they were, he fades—not because he is erased, but because his role is complete. Time, having used him as a thread in its own design.

I immediately saw these small interactions the Presence does as part of a time loop. The entire movie is seen strictly from the Presence's point of view, and it never cuts away from that unapologetically, unrelenting locked perspective. Perhaps one day we figure out how to send our consciousness back in time using some unknown tech or science we’ve yet to discover. But the universe won’t allow our physical body in that space—only our awareness or at least the laws of physics say if our awareness was somehow in the past, under these rules, it doesn’t break the Universe. We’d exist as a formless presence, unable to actually change anything. Any interaction we attempt just ends up fulfilling what already happened. Because that interaction was always part of the event. You can’t create new events. Even when you try, nothing happens. And when something does happen, it’s only because it already did happen. Hello block Universe… I don’t know, just a fun thing to think about. I’m not sure why Presence pulled me in like it did. A lot of people didn’t seem to like it, but the slow-burn drama and the way the Presence learns things through indirect observation really worked for me and got my mind working on Time Travel again. I also appreciated the "rules" or internal logic of the universe it is built on. I would have loved to sit in these round table discussions on how this was all established to create a very different type of ghost story. Honestly, I felt like it was a quiet little thriller made for smart people.

The Presence isn’t omniscient, it doesn’t know everything, let alone, anything, doesn’t have god-like perspective, and doesn’t even know its role in the story. It just; watches. Like real people do when they're dropped into unfamiliar situations. And when they act, they’re not rewriting history—they’re fulfilling it. The lights flickering or doors creaking were always supposed to happen. There’s a tragic futility in it, but also a quiet inevitability. The idea that the universe “lets” you observe the past, but only as part of a loop you were always inside of. Maybe that is what hell actually is. Perhaps why we think of hell in those terms because most people that would witness their last days/weeks/months of life and the frustration of not being able to change it in anyway could be seen as a sort of waking hell. I mean, think about it. If what is left after death is this negative energy, this massless awareness. All you know is observation. All one can experience is that relentless watching. In this case, its watching one’s self and someone you love be in harm’s way or consistently unhappy. That could be perceived as a terrifying experience. What if one died and was brought back? What if they said they felt trapped for years, decades, just watching people suffer, but they were only dead for seconds? We just do not know enough about consciousness outside the body.

So maybe the only way to travel back in time is the way Presence did it — not with flashing lights or spinning wormholes, but with silence. With stillness. You don’t arrive in the past; you haunt it or it haunts you. A formless voyeur stitched into a moment, doomed to watch what’s already played out, play out again, like a ghost following footprints it can never alter. The spirit in Presence isn't really a character in the traditional sense. It's more of a lens — an observer or passenger. Even when it shifts something, it only shifts it in ways that always happened. The loop was closed before it began. That’s the trapdoor loophole this entire theory is built on: If you “affect” something, it’s only because that affect already existed. There’s no butterfly to crush, because the butterfly was always dead. Maybe you stepped on it, maybe someone else did — the point is, it was always going to get crushed. In that sense, it’s not really time travel. It’s deterministic surveillance. It’s emotional recursion. It’s repressed memory made manifest. And like the Presence in the film, it’s passive. Lonely. Inescapable. You’re not breaking the laws of physics, you’re obeying them so well they feel like prison bars because they literally are. Even interaction is an illusion — because anything you "change" is just the fulfillment of what always was. There’s a kind of horror in that, but also a strange peace. You’re not God. You’re not the hero. You’re just... there. A cosmic dashcam recording the inevitable. And that’s where it ties back to the block universe and entropy. The universe isn't rolling out time like a red carpet. It’s already laid it down — from the first moment to the last. You’re not walking through time. You’re experiencing and reacting to it. So if there’s a form of time travel allowed by the laws of physics, maybe it’s not “changing the past,” but being reinserted into it as a point of reference. Like loading an old save file from a game — except you can’t play. You just watch the non-playable characters (NPCs) move exactly as they did before, heartbreak and all. You don’t even get closure. You just get clarity. If you’re lucky. And maybe that’s what déjà vu really is: a brief flicker of the observer breaking through. A reminder that your consciousness, for a split second, lagged back to a frame it already saw. A ghost of yourself haunting your own timeline. Maybe even that’s what the Presence is — not a spirit of the dead, but of the living, watching themselves from the far end of the road. So no, you don’t get to go back and stop the fight, or save the girl, or dodge the car crash. But you do get to watch. You get to remember, in the most literal, cinematic sense. And if that’s the best the universe will allow, maybe it’s enough.

We do not get any insight on the mechanism that propels the presence to the past. Only that it does.

If we accept the premise that time travel to the past is only possible in the form of passive observation — a zero-dimensional point of consciousness with no mass, negative energy, no direct influence on entropy — then Presence becomes something more than just experimental cinema. It becomes a demonstration. A visual case study of what that kind of travel might feel like. The camera never cuts in Presence. There's no omniscient third-person view. We are locked into the point of view of the Presence itself — this incorporeal observer who sees everything in the scene and is not seen, understands very little, and can only interact in the most minimal, abstract ways.

From a physics perspective, it's poetry.

In our framework, this is how limited interaction might be modeled: not actual change, but pre-encoded causality. Like a ROM chip on a motherboard. Unchangeable data that can be viewed, used but never manipulated into something else.

Whether intentionally or not, a world with very strict rules. No jump scares. No camera cheats. No omnipotence or god-like powers. The Presence doesn’t know what’s happening any more than we do. It learns through context, through patterns, through repetition of watching. That’s the experience of our theoretical time traveler. They don't step into a moment with full access to memory or purpose. They’re just... THERE... Trying to make sense of what’s unfolding. Maybe watching their own life. Maybe someone else’s. Perhaps another era altogether.

The way the film deals with time — nonlinear, disorienting, often repetitive — mirrors how memory works, or how a mind might process existence when decoupled from chronological sequence. That’s another haunting idea: what if time travel isn't movement through time, but memory in its purest form? A looped, liminal space where perception is all that exists. And what if déjà vu, intuition, and grief are echoes of the observer — the Presence in us — brushing against events we’ve already experienced, we’ve already seen?

This theory reframes Presence not as supernatural, but as a thought experiment on consciousness and time. The spirit is you — or something like you — a consciousness slipped out of sequence. Not a ghost of the dead, but a ghost of the displaced.

This is why the film feels strange even to audiences who expect weird. It’s not just that it breaks visual norms — it breaks metaphysical ones. All the angles are from the presence’s point of view. They even use a very warped wide angle lens to give that feeling of ultra-claustrophobia. The horror isn’t in the family’s unraveling, it’s in your own helplessness. You’re in the room, in the moment, watching people suffer, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. Just like our model of time travel. Just like real memory. Just like real life. So if Presence disturbed you but you weren’t sure why, maybe this is it: it’s not a haunting. It’s a reminder. A memento of something you already saw. You just forgot until now. It is never clear whether the presence knows it is the dead brother’s spirit from the future or not. Memory isn’t mentioned in the exposition but we might be able to assume that memory is also treated in the same respect. Fractured, fragmented, familiar but not familiar all at the same moment in the same place, all at once, everywhere.

In this view, time travel isn’t about changing history—it’s about witnessing meaning. And in doing so, maybe it becomes more about understanding ourselves than altering outcomes. Humans tend to lump things in a binary logic of this/that, yes/no, zero/one, true/false, man/woman, real/fake, love/hate, black/white, but most of us tend to see and experience this reality in gray. Not black or white but somewhere in between never actually being all the way black or all the way white but in a constant brushing against it as a gray space that makes this idea so goddamned eerie and effective.

Ah, cosmic determinism. There you are my ole friend. That phrase really wants to sit at the table of crossroads in philosophy, physics, and narrative structure.

Cosmic determinism is the idea that everything in the universe—every action, event, thought, or anomaly—is part of an unchangeable pattern that’s not just fated, but baked into the fabric of reality itself. It goes beyond simple cause and effect. It’s not just that A leads to B. It’s that A was always going to lead to B because the universe itself is constructed in such a way that no other option was ever truly on the table even though all options seem possible or at the very least seem not impossible.

A time-traveling essence that can only observe and interact in ways that were always part of the original timeline—cosmic determinism becomes a kind of philosophical paint color. It’s the computer code within the code, behind the rules. The Presence doesn’t get to choose what it does. It’s not even clear if it knows what it's doing. It just reacts, moves, shakes the lamp, wakes the drugged brother, and stumbles into its fate—because it always did. Because it always would.

So, under this lens, cosmic determinism is not just saying "everything happens for a reason." It’s saying, "everything happens because it already happened—and it could never have not happened."

It’s different from religious fate, or even classical determinism, which assumes a kind of clean logic to events. Cosmic determinism adds a metaphysical weight to it, like the whole universe is a closed loop of inevitability that you’re only just waking up inside of. You might have feelings, questions, confusion—but it doesn’t matter. The wheel was already spinning. You’re just seeing the spokes flash by for the first time and it scares you or many so much they are willing to believe in God or any god for that matter with no proof other than a subjective feeling it could be true because we cannot prove it to be untrue.

That’s what gives something like Presence its existential dread: not the idea that the ghost fails or succeeds, but that he never had a choice. That whatever hope, panic, or tenderness it experiences in that liminal state, it was always just the echo of something that already happened, following the crumpled groove on the sheet of paper we call spacetime. It’s when the story of the universe isn’t just written—it’s already been published. You're just flipping back through the pages in a dimly lit room, wondering if that light you saw at the end of the tunnel was just you looking back at yourself.

How existential…

Contra Tempus Latin for (Violation of Time) Review of: Presence (2024) by David-Angelo Mineo 6,246 words Audio/Video: 00:36:23

[mineofilms]

Whisper on Older Machines

With so many paid AI-powered services around these days, has anyone ever wondered if one can do these things locally on their own machine without the use of paid services to do this deal? Well, I thought I’d give it a go on my own setup. A few months ago I did the same thing with SoVITS, which is a standalone program for cloning your voice or other voices, locally on one’s own machine with no paid services needed. While I got mixed results due to my own hardware limitations and age of that hardware I did get it to work and that was the mission of those experiments. Just to see if I could get it working based on my current hardware setup and its limitations. For this experiment we are work with transcribing audio to text, I thought this process would be much easier for my system to handle and I wasn’t wrong. However, I did run into several challenges that hindered my computer’s ability to properly install the software and all its dependencies properly without errors. I did several workarounds and I did eventually get it working to the level I wanted it to work at. For me it was about quality, speed and accuracy. I now feel confident that if in the future I need an audio file that has the majority of that audio file as spoken word dialog/conversation and have my computer transcribe that and dump it into a very easy to manipulate text file that I can copy/paste/edit said text. Below is my explanation along with the methodologies I used to get it working with all the proper commands and explanation of those commands.

First let’s talk about Whisper and what it is…

Whisper is an advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) system developed by OpenAI. OpenAI is the same company that develops ChatGPT. It is designed to transcribe spoken language into written text. The program is capable of processing a variety of audio files containing speech. Examples would be MP3, WMA, ACC, AIFF, PCM, WAV, Ogg, FLAC and many others. Whisper's practicality comes from its ability to transcribe audio files into text, making it highly useful for a range of tasks, such as:

Transcribing Conversations or Meetings:

If you recorded a conversation or a meeting, Whisper can take that audio and turn it into a readable text formatted document. This could be helpful for keeping a written record of important discussions, or for reference in the future.

Content Creation:

For creators, podcasts, YouTube videos, or interviews, Whisper can convert spoken words into text, which could then be used for captions, subtitles, or blog posts.

Accessibility:

It provides a way for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing to have access to content that is spoken. This is especially useful for video content, meetings, or any form of multimedia.

Research or Note-Taking:

Researchers or students can use Whisper to transcribe lectures, interviews, or audio notes, making it easier to analyze and reference the material in written form.

Whisper doesn't come with a typical graphical interface (GUI) for easier usage that one might expect from most software. Instead, it uses a command-line interface (CLI), where you type in text-based commands in programs like CMD, PowerShell, or Python. While this might sound complicated, there are a few practical reasons why Whisper is designed this way, especially for its intended audience. A GUI requires more system resources, like memory and processing power, because it needs to display visuals and handle user interactions. The basic functionality in a command-line tool is much lighter on resources, meaning Whisper can focus all its energy on doing the heavy work of transcribing or processing audio. This is especially important for Whisper, which can handle long audio files or large amounts of data—something that could slow down if it had to display a graphical interface as well.

Another reason is that Whisper is mainly aimed at developers, researchers, and people with some technical background who need a lot of control over how the program works. With a command-line tool, users can easily adjust things, like the model it uses, whether to process the audio with a computer's CPU or in some cases a more powerful GPU, and what kind of output file they want. These things might not be easy to do with a GUI, and people who are comfortable with coding often prefer to have this level of control. Whisper also needs to be able to run on a variety of systems, from personal computers to powerful cloud servers. A command-line interface is more flexible and can be used in many different environments, whether on a personal desktop or remotely via the internet. GUIs are harder to set up and maintain across different systems, making the CLI a better choice for Whisper's developers, who want to keep it simple and efficient.

Since Whisper is open-source software, it’s also built to be transparent and modifiable. Advanced users can dive into the code and customize how it works or integrate it into larger projects. This wouldn’t be as easy to do if there were a GUI, which would hide much of the underlying functionality. The people who use Whisper are usually looking to get fast results, not spend time navigating through menus, settings and buttons. The command-line interface allows them to quickly type commands and get the task done, whether they are transcribing an audio file or running batch processes for many files at once. While a graphical interface might make Whisper look more user-friendly, the command-line design actually gives users more power, speed, and control. It's a tool made for people who know how to work with it on a deeper level, and it allows Whisper to run efficiently and be used in a wide range of setups and environments.

Fear not though. One can and probably should, as I did, use ChatGPT to help with making the setup more logical and help with the actual commands. I know next to nothing on how Python, Python’s venv (virtual workspace on your computer), PowerShell actually work; and I only have moderate knowledge on how CMD works. At least it isn’t a foreign language for me. You do not have to be an advanced programmer for this. My attempt here is to make this essay-style tutorial be as easy as possible to follow along. I am not saying this will work for ALL novice Windows-based computer users, but it should work for most of you. If I can get this working on a 15-year old, low-end gaming machine, built for video editing, then it’s likely one can make it work on their newer system that was more/less built for advanced office-style duties. The hardest parts here is installing Whisper and all its support software correctly, in the correct order, paths, with the correct versions of those dependences, depending on one’s computer hardware specifications. That is the key here; because everyone’s computer setup, whether or not it’s a Dell or an HP or whatever, is all configured, setup and has different types of hardware profiles inside the chassis. It is all uniquely different. Just like human-beings…

So, how exactly does Whisper work?

Once the Whisper program is properly set up on your computer it can process an audio file, (like an MP3 or WAV), that contains speech. Whisper then transcribes the speech into text and outputs it as a .txt file, which is one of the most basic and universally supported text file formats in the digital world. This text file can be opened and used across virtually all devices, operating systems, and software programs in the world. A real-world practical example; imagine you recorded a conversation between you, and say, your ex, and for legal reasons you need to have a written record of that conversation for your lawyer. Whisper can transcribe the spoken words into a simple text file, which you can then edit, share, or use as needed. Whisper is a tool that allows you to turn speech into text, making audio content more accessible and usable for various purposes. Once set up, it becomes a simple and practical tool for converting spoken word into a written form and it’s on your computer, free to use. So after all that sale’s pitch and definition nonsense let’s try to install this puppy…

Tutorial 1: Installing Whisper Without Virtual Environment on Windows 10:

Our first tutorial here will be on trying to install everything just using Windows 10 Pro’s CMD and the basic Python setup as the installation bed. Most recommendations had said it is way easier to install/setup/configure Whisper inside a Python venv (virtual environment). This will be explained a little later, but this was a good lesson on at least learning the programming language, commands and philosophy as to how this stuff works. If one is on a much newer machine than mine, perhaps a brand new one, one may not have to go through all the virtual setups for this as I did. Although this method did not work on my  system, it can work on modern machines with s more up-to-date hardware package.

First we may need to download and install the Python system on the machine that is going to use Whisper. One might already have it, but if it is a brand new machine it is likely one would have to download and install it. Now before we get started it should be noted that there are multiple ways to download, install, configure programming language software on your computer. The method I used here was more/less due to my inexperience using CLI software like this and my older, out-of-date, hardware profile.

Download and install Python from the official Python.org/downloads/windows/. Download the newest version. At the time of this writing the newest version is 3.13.2. It should be noted that due to my machine’s age I needed a far older version (3.9.6), which will be explained later in this essay. While installing if there is an option to check a box to add Python to the system PATH during installation, do so. If there isn’t, once Python is installed we will need to ad it manually. I had to.

The Python executables or the actual file that opens the program is not installed in the normal places one installs software for their computer, where Windows will put a shortcut to it either on your desktop top or in your Windows Taskbar or Windows Start Menu. It stores it in a folder that tends to be hidden in Windows by Default in your main Libraries folder. This is the folder where your main folders for your profile on the Operating System are stored: Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. This folder usually has the name you labeled it as when you setup your computer initially. The folder we need to access is also here, but might be hidden. So we need to tell Windows to show these folders in the Librarie’s directory. Navigate to your main Library’s folder and click view at the top. There should be a checkbox that says hidden items.Make sure that is checked. There should be a folder there named APPDATA. Open it. Open the folder named Local. Open the folder named Programs. Open the folder named Python. If you have a single version of Python you should see the folder there. For this installation attempt we are using Python313. Open the folder named Python313.What we want to do here is copy the file path of this folder. Go into the address, highlight and copy the entire address string for this directory. It should look something like this: C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\ - We are going to want to copy this. We are then going to paste this path into our System Properties – Environmental Variables Settings. Go into your Windows search and type in Environmental Variables and click the option that says: Edit environment variables for your account. This should open a little Window that says: SystemProperties. At the bottom select button that says: Environmental Variables. Under System Variables scroll through the variables to Path. Click Edit. Click New. Scroll to the bottom of the list and paste your Python installation here: C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\ - Once that is done you will need to click the OK button three times to get out of the System Environmental Settings. We now want to confirm Python’s installation and access. We are going to want to open your Command Prompt or CMD, but we are going to want to open this in Administrator Mode. This will by-pass any permission issues we might run into while downloading, installing and setting up the proper software packages into the Windows OS Environment. In the Windows Search type CMD, you should see it on the left but on the right it should say Run As Administrator.You can also right click on the CMD and choose to Run As Administrator from the right-click menu. Once CMD is open type: python --version – This will show you the version number of Python. Mine says Python 3.13.2. I never ran into an error here. So if you did either try the process again after a reboot, check Google and/or ChatGPT or consult a friend who has advanced IT skills.

Next we need to start the process of downloading and installing the required dependencies. In your CMD install pip, numpy, and other dependencies:

In CMD type/copy/paste these commands separately so that we know each one is installed correctly. Doing batch-style commands here gave me issues.

First Command:

Python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Second Command:

Python -m pip install numpy

Third Command:

Python -m pip install torch torchvision torchaudio

Now it is time to install Whisper itself. Type this command:

pip install openai-whisper

If everything worked correctly one could try to test it with a file to see if it is working. For this tutorial we are just going to use a generic audio file that has dialog on it that we popped into the directory.

This would be the command one would use to do this:

whisper "C:\path\to\your\audiofile.mp3"

This is where we ran into issues. I never could get past the installation step of Whisper on my system under this type of configuration. It was recommended to attempt to download an older version of Whisper, which I tried, that also failed.  Whisper did not work in this setup due to hardware limitations and conflicts between software versions (such as NumPy version issues). Why It Failed is probably closer to the lack of a virtual environment resulting in version conflicts between the System, Python, and Packages, especially with NumPy. The solution here was to move to the next method using a virtual environment (venv) to isolate the setup. On a modern system the steps should work without modification. Newer hardware can follow the standard installation process without these issues.

Tutorial 2: Installing Whisper Using a Virtual Environment (venv) with CPU:

This method involved setting up a virtual environment (venv) to avoid conflicts with system-level Python packages and dependency conflicts. A Python virtual environment (venv) is like creating a separate, contained workspace on your computer where you can install and manage specific tools and libraries for a particular project without affecting the rest of your system. Imagine it like a special, isolated folder that has everything needed for a specific project. Inside this folder, you can install Python packages, like Whisper, and only those packages will be available for that project. Other projects or programs on your computer won’t be impacted by these installations and configurations. This is especially useful when you're working on different projects that might need different versions of Python or specific libraries that could be in conflict with each other. By using a virtual environment, you ensure that each project has its own set of tools, rules for those tools and your main system stays clean and organized. A venv keeps things tidy, avoids conflicts, and makes it easier to manage dependencies for projects like Whisper or any other Python-based projects one is using.

We will skipped a lot of the specifics within the details that I have already outlined above. Much of these commands are the same. It is just the initial settings where things tend to be different. After trying much of the same processes rom above I ran into more conflicts and system setup errors. This is where we downloaded an older version of Python for my setup. Your setup could literally be the same as the one above except one would be using the venv for that setup over this one. This is one is identical except we are using an older version of Python. I will talk about this because it is still likely enough one might have to use an older version of Python, but not all or even most, just some.

To download, install, and ad path to the System Properties Environmental Settings follow the same process above except download and install Python 3.9.6 using this link:

python.org/downloads/release/python-396/

In the C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs directory you will now see multiple Python folders. Open the folder Python39 and copy the address:

C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\

When you go into the Environmental Settings to edit the Path you will ad this path beneath the path that say:

C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python313\

This essential tells Windows that your primary version is 3.13.2 but if you designate it to use 3.9.6 that Windows will recognize it and use it. We have to tell our OS that in the CMD, but this is the first leg of those steps.

We are now going to create the venv using this older version Python. For users that want to simply use the venv setup using the newest version of Python, both setups for that venv will be listed here. For this to work it is always easier to make Windows do less. So the placement of your venv should be in the most easiest, basic spot on your computer. The C-Drive. In theory you can place it anywhere but the more jumps the more resource-intensive the process becomes. I created a folder on my C-drive and just named it ‘whisperabc.’ No caps, no quotes just whisperabc – the directory should be: C:\whisperabc

Open your CMD in Run As Administrator mode.

We want to navigate to this directory:

cd C:\whisperabc

This will make sure you are in the C-drive in the whisperabc folder. We now want to run this command in CMD:

C:\Users\Your-Library-Folder-Name\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\python.exe -m venv whisperabc-env

What this means is you are telling CMD to use the Python executable from that specific location on your computer. The Usual way would be just to type the command:

python3.9 -m venv whisper-env but that command did not work for my system. I had to include the entire file path in order for Windows to recognize that I wanted to specifically use Python 3.9.6 for this venv installation. It should also be noted here we are using the CPU for the processing and not the GPU. We will have a tutorial for swapping out the CPU for the GPU in our final tutorial on Whisper. Once we have our venv created we want to navigate back to the folder in Windows. Go to your C:\whisperabc and open the folder whisperabc-env. Then open the folder Scripts. Copy the file address and go back to your CMD to navigate to this directory with the command:

cd C:\whisperabc\whisperabc-env\Scripts

This will tell CMD to go to this folder. Once there type the command:

activate and press enter.

At this point you should be inside your virtual environment by seeing the prompt with parenthesis around it followed by the directory you are currently in: (whisperabc-env) C:\whisperabc\whisperabc-env\Scripts> and now it is time to start installing dependencies.

First Command:

Python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Second Command:

Python -m pip install numpy

Third Command:

Python -m pip install torch torchvision torchaudio

Now it is time to install Whisper itself. This time we are going to download an older version for this configuration because others also failed on my system even in the venv. One would use the command in the above tutorial over this one below.

Type this command:

pip install openai-whisper==20230918

This tells our pip configuration tool to download and install Open Ai’s Whisper, Version released on 09/18/2023. On a newer machine one would not need this version but it may be noteworthy that one can download earlier versions if the newest version is not working with your hardware configuration. A test is in order with the generic audio file we had from earlier. Let’s verify the installation first to make sure we have it installed properly.

Verify Installed Version:

Usually one would use the standard command of whisper --version but because we are using an older version we may want to run the pip show openai-whisper command. This will also display the version number.

The command you are going to want to use is:

"C:\whisperabc\whisperabc-env\Scripts\python.exe" -m whisper "C:\whisperabc\audio123.mp3" --model large --output_dir "C:\whisperabc" --output_format txt --language English

This tells your venv that you want to use your old python 3.9.6 by pointing to it in your venv scripts. You want to use whisper here and to transcribe the mp3 in that directory using the large model, which is the more accurate than the small model, just takes a little bit longer to process. The command then is saying to export the transcribed text into text format with the .txt file extension in the English language. This skips the system checks for these output procedures which quickens the process.

Now you can go back to your C:\whisperabc folder and there should be a text file there called audio123.txt. If you open it –it will have your transcribed text in a simple basic format. You can then copy/paste this text into a document for whatever purpose you need it for.

Tutorial 3: Installing Whisper Using Virtual Environment (venv) with GPU:

Next we are going to try install this again but instead of using our computer’s CPU we are going to make it use the GPU. The GPU is the CPU for the Graphics Card. If one has an exterior graphics card independent from the motherboard it is called a GPU. The CPU is like a single smart, multi-tasking tool that handles a variety of tasks efficiently, but only has a few resources. It’s great for general work, but can get overwhelmed with heavy, repetitive calculations. The GPU is like a massive team of these specialized tools, plural, each handling a tiny part of a big job at the same time. Since transcribing audio with Whisper involves a ton of complex mathematical calculations, the GPU can break it down into smaller pieces and process them all at once—making it noticeably faster than a CPU for this kind of workload. While a CPU can do the job, a GPU does it much faster and efficiently because it's built for parallel processing. That’s why we want to set Whisper up to use your graphics card. In the case it is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti. Since we are using an older system this becomes even more problematic because we still have to install this puppy using our older versions. It is very doable, but a little more complex a setup: The GPU (GTX 750 Ti) does not support CUDA 11+, which is required for the latest versions of PyTorch with GPU acceleration. OpenAI Whisper defaults to CPU unless explicitly told to use the system’s GPU.

We need to build another venv. Open your CMD in Run As Administrator mode.

We want to navigate to this directory again:

cd C:\whisperabc

This will make sure you are in the C-drive in the whisperabc folder. We now want to run this command in CMD:

C:\Users\David-PC\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\python.exe -m venv whisperabc-env

Like before; CMD uses Python from older the version’s location. Once we have our venv created we want to navigate back to the folder in Windows. Go to your C:\whisperabc and open the folder. Open the folder whisperabc-env. Then open the folder Scripts. Copy the file address and go back to your CMD to navigate to this directory with the command:

cd C:\whisperabc\whisperabc-env\Scripts

Once there type the command:

activate and press enter.

First Command:

At this point you should be inside your virtual environment and now it is time to start installing dependencies. Since Whisper uses PyTorch under the hood, you need to install the CUDA-compatible version of PyTorch. For NVIDIA GPUs, install a CUDA-supported version of PyTorch with this commend: pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu117

We are using an older GPU (GTX750Ti), CUDA 11+ is not supported, so installing an older CUDA version was recommended with this command but failed during the installation process. You want to use the version above this one: pip install torch==1.10.0+cu102 torchvision==0.11.1+cu102 torchaudio==0.10.1 -f https://download.pytorch.org/whl/torch_stable.html in the case one wants to try this hardware profile.

We have to do the same for numpy here. We have to download an older version that supports this older GPU. Through trial and error this version worked for me.

Second Command:

Python -m pip install numpy==1.23.5

We can verify the install with this command:

python -c "import numpy; print(numpy.__version__)"

Now it is time to install Whisper itself. Same as before; we are going to download the same older version for this configuration. For a regular installation on a newer machine, one would use the command in the first tutorial above over this one. The only real difference between this installation and the last one is we are forcing our system to use the GPU over the CPU, but other than that it is basically the same setup.

Type this command:

pip install openai-whisper==20230918

This tells our pip configuration tool to download and install that same version of Whisper that worked before.

Verify Installed Version:

You can either try the standard verification of whisper --version command but because of the older version the pip show openai-whisper command will display the version number a little easier.

We need to verify that PyTorch detects your GPU. We’ll need to activate Python inside our venv. Run this command: python You will see Python activate inside your venv as >>>

Run the following commands in the Python CLI:

First Command:

import torch press enter

The response should be another >>>

print(torch.cuda.is_available()) press enter

The response should be TRUE

print(torch.cuda.get_device_name(0) if torch.cuda.is_available() else "No GPU detected")

press enter.

The response should be NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750Ti

If the read outs for each come out as shown above then PyTorch detects your GPU. All we need to do now is Force Whisper to Use GPU. By default Whisper uses yours system’s CPU. We have to instruct Whisper to use the GPU inside our command prompt structure. The command will look something like this but we are not done just yet.

whisper "C:\whisperabc\audio123.mp3"  --model large --device cuda

We are now ready to run our test of Whisper using our GPU with our, sort of, complicated hardware profile. As before, we are using the same mp3 in the C:\whisperabc. The command you are going to want to use is the same as the last tutorial, but with the added –device cuda tag to tell Whisper to use the GPU. We had to do this workaround to tell venv to utilize the GPU for the calculation processing that is why we could not just use the second tutorial and just adding the –device cuda tag to it. We would have gotten errors. Use this command:

"C:\whisperabc\whisperabc-env\Scripts\python.exe" -m whisper "C:\whisperabc\audio123.mp3" --model large --output_dir "C:\whisperabc" --output_format txt --language English --device cuda

We are again explicitly telling Whisper to:

Use Python inside your virtual environment

Run Whisper as a module

Use the large model

Process audio123.mp3 from the directory

Save the output to C:\whisperabc in TXT format (.txt)

Specify the language (English) instead of auto-detecting

Force GPU usage with --device cuda

If PyTorch is properly detecting your GPU (torch.cuda.is_available() returns True), which we verified above, then the command should run Whisper using the GPU instead of the CPU. When it’s done, go back to your C:\whisperabc and see if audio123.txt is there. Open the file and check the accuracy.

Conclusion:

• Summary of Methodology: We first tried installing Whisper without a virtual environment, which caused issues due to package conflicts and our outdated hardware profile. We then used a virtual environment to isolate the installation and ensure proper compatibility with the required dependencies. Finally, we switched to using the GPU to take advantage of hardware acceleration, resolving issues with legacy dependencies.

• Lessons Learned: Isolating dependencies with a virtual environment is crucial to avoid conflicts. Additionally, ensuring that the correct versions of libraries (e.g., NumPy, PyTorch) are installed is key to getting Whisper to work on older hardware.

The purpose of this essay on the methodology I used here was to both learn how to use Whisper for my many projects and be able to do something technical, like, installing, configuring it on a machine that is considered vastly outdated by today’s standards. Specifically, using your personal computer to do high level, mostly, automated processes. These three tutorials now reflect the specific steps taken and could serve as a guide for others that have older rigs, wants a very basic but detailed version of the steps, what they are, why they exist, and want to do some neat stuff with open source programs like this. Most everyday computers could do this. The high level gaming machines of today would zip through this compared to my current setup here.

It took some trial and error, but that’s part of the fun, I guess—learning how to work with what you’ve got and making it do things it wasn’t necessarily built for. If you’ve got a modern machine, you’ll probably breeze through this setup without much hassle. But even if you’re working with older hardware like mine, this just proves that with the right tweaks, open-source tools like Whisper can still run just fine. The big takeaway? You don’t always need the latest and greatest tech to do cool stuff. A little problem-solving, the right software versions, and some patience can go a long way in getting powerful AI tools up and running, locally on your own machine and most important, FREE...

Whisper on Older Machines by David-Angelo Mineo 3/29/2025 5,068 Words

Full Text with commands in PDF format below:

https://mineofilms.me/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Blog-164-Whisper-on-Older-Machines.pdf

[mineofilms]

Matrixed State of Complacency

“Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty? It's genius? Billions of people. Just living out their lives. Oblivious…”

—Agent Smith, the Matrix (1999)

Have you ever just stopped while walking and take a second? Breathe in a few breaths and then think to yourself. It’s the year 2025 and why does every year since 1999 feel like a rerun of the last? Remember when each decade had its own distinct style, sound, and attitude? The ‘60s had their hippie rebellion, guitar distortion and psychedelic madness. The ‘70s came in with disco fever, cocaine-fueled random sex, bell-bottoms, and a post-Vietnam hangover. The ‘80s were a neon-drenched capitalist fever dream with synth music, big hair and the music it came with, the birth of movie franchises, the over indulgence that is thrash metal and cocaine-fueled optimism. The ‘90s? Grunge, dial-up internet, techno music, Zima, designer drugs and that last gasp of authenticity before the world got stuck on repeat.

Then… 1999 happened. Or rather, maybe nothing happened after 1999. Maybe the world ended, not with a bang, but by having to slow down due to an oversized speed bump on an empty road just showing up out of nowhere—like someone hit the brakes on progress and left us idling in a loop.

What if we had skipped the grunge-soaked flannels of the ‘90s and stayed on the hyper-driven, tech-hungry, greed-fueled trajectory of the ‘80s? By 1997, we might have already been where we are now—only sooner and faster. The internet wouldn’t have been seen as a novelty for dreamers and digital pirates; it would’ve been recognized immediately as the new financial and cultural superpower. Social media, automation, AI, replacing brick and mortar for digital stores—things that took decades to seep into everyday life—could have been fully realized before the millennium even hit. Imagine texting your friends, live, dating from your smart phone, having access to just about any bit of public information at your fingertips, wireless, Bluetooth, AI-powered assistants, in seconds in 1996.

Instead, the ‘90s stalled us. The world went from ambitious and forward-charging to self-conscious and detached. Tech didn’t stop evolving, but society stopped dreaming. We didn’t embrace innovation; we commodified it, sterilized it, slowed it down so it fit neatly into the world we already understood. Which is what we do with everything nowadays. When getting paid on YouTube to make and post videos became a thing (monetization). Some were able to see the potential of this. They capitalized on this, quit their jobs and started building their business off this potential. Then everyone tried it where most fail and/or failed at it. When ChatGPT first came out. People in general had no idea how to use it. Again, some saw the potential and immediately changed how they live, how they can use it to help them at their job and/or use it by itself to make money. The way our society is every new thing that comes out that has the potential to drastically change life, only some identify with that right out the box. Where most try to fit this in –in the aspects of their life it already fits in. There is little foresight for how it affects the future, but more about the present. Maybe that was the final safeguard against a world ruled by AI—not regulation, but apathy.

And if AI has already taken over, would we even know? Maybe it’s already running things, not by force, but by guiding us into our own stagnation. A culture that doesn’t evolve doesn’t resist. The Dead Internet Theory might not just be about bots flooding the web—it could be a symptom of something deeper. A world where creativity, unpredictability, and human ambition were quietly replaced with an illusion of progress. Progressives scream about hindering progress but their actions often say we are actually going backward under this guise. A simulation so subtle, perhaps progressives never even noticed when we all stopped moving forward.

From 2000-2025:

Fashion? It’s all nostalgia now. Y2K fashion is just a recycled version of the ‘90s. Streetwear is just a reboot of hip-hop culture from decades past. Even high fashion is a regurgitated mishmash of styles, (fusion,) where trends from the 1950s to 1990s just keep getting thrown into a blender and re-booted, re-rebooted and re-served as “new.” No original movement, no defining aesthetic. Just an endless loop of irony-drenched cynical thrift shop cosplay type mentality called art.

Music? Where's the new sound? Everything today is either a remix, a sample, or a shameless rip-off. We had rock, then punk, then new wave, then grunge, then hip-hop dominance—but now? It’s like the industry ran out of ideas and decided that everything has to be a nostalgic callback. If the hottest artists today sound like they came straight from the ‘80s or ‘90s, is it really new music? EDM isn’t a new style of music. It’s been around in some form or another since the mid to late 1970s. All they did in the 2000s was bring it outside, treat it like a rock concert festival, slap the word festival on it and boom, there is your EDM. 1980s hair metal is now considered “classic rock.” In the early 2000s it was called hard rock, before that, glam metal or hair rock, but now its thrown in with the same bands that were classic rock even back then. Even Nirvana is considered classic rock along with their other sub-genre labels. Even other heavy metal subgenres like Nu Metal and Metalcore have become clichés of themselves.

Hollywood? It’s a creative graveyard. Everything is either a remake, reboot, sequel, or re-imagining of something that was already made better decades ago. Why risk new ideas when nostalgia bait sells? If I have to sit through one more “gritty re-imagining” of a childhood franchise, shot completely in the dark so one cannot see anything, I might start rooting for the apocalypse. This one category could be an essay all by itself.

And the worst part? We finally have the technology to put literally anything on screen—anything the human mind can conjure—and what do we get? The same tired stories, reheated and served on a plate of CGI sludge. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, filmmakers had real limitations. If they wanted to show some mind-bending sci-fi horror nightmare, they had to get creative. Miniatures, animatronics, matte paintings—every frame was a labor of love (or at least a really good cocaine-fueled guess). They had to make you feel the scene, not just show you everything at once like a flashing neon sign screaming, “LOOK! CONTENT!”

And here’s the thing—practical effects still look better. CGI is close, but it still has that weird artificial gloss, like everything’s been over-sanitized. When you watch an old horror movie, that slimy, grotesque creature was there, physically oozing all over the set. You knew the actors were reacting to something real, something tangible. Today? It’s just a tennis ball on a stick in front of a green screen. The imagination has been stripped out of the process. They show you everything, so you don’t have to imagine anything.

Storytelling has suffered the same fate. In the past, filmmakers left gaps for the audience to fill in, spaces where the mind could wander and make the horror bigger, the sci-fi stranger, the mystery deeper. Now? Everything is explained or further NOT-explained by the explanation. One would think if things look so bleak then the writing would be better? It’s not. It is way worse. Everything is spelled out as if explained by a child to an adult. Yes, I worded that right. It is as if kids are the writers and they are writing for adults. Not the other way around. Every character has to have a tragic backstory, every monster must be dissected, every question must have an answer, non-answer—even when the best part was not knowing. We have to include identity politics into every story, even when it isn’t necessary. Everything feels written with hubris powered by a McGuffin’s kiss.

So here we are, in an era where we can literally make anything look real, and somehow, everything feels faker than ever.

How Could the World Have Ended in 1999, and How Could We Be Living in This Warped Reality?

Think about the way time felt before the turn of the millennium. The 20th century was a relentless march of progress, with each decade bringing new cultural revolutions, technological advancements, and societal upheavals. Then suddenly, at the dawn of the 21st century, everything seemed to hit a plateau. It’s as if the energy of the world—its creative momentum, its sense of movement—just stopped or at least slow downed to such an egregious level we could get pulled over by the Super Troopers for driving too slow in the slow lane.

So how exactly could the world have ended? Hypothetically, probably closer to speculatively, could be that reality as we knew it suffered a catastrophic rupture in 1999, and we simply transitioned into an artificial continuation of existence. Think of it like a cosmic Y2K bug, not in our computers, but in the very fabric of our collective consciousness and/or reality itself. Maybe our timeline collapsed, and what we’re experiencing now is a corrupted backup version of reality, a bootleg copy hastily cobbled together to keep the illusion running. Perhaps the rapid acceleration of technology at the time—the birth of the internet, the rise of globalization, the increasing digitization of existence—triggered something unnatural, forcing reality to shift into an unstable loop.

Or maybe the world didn't end in a dramatic, Hollywood-style catastrophe. Maybe it phased out, imperceptibly, like a program shutting down. Imagine a slow, creeping decay, a silent transition where everything continues, but with a subtle hollowness. That would explain why everything post-1999 feels eerily the same, like we’re living in a looping simulation where nothing ever really changes. If the world had a soul, maybe it died, and we’re just coasting on the ghost of what was. We have been “burdened by what has been.” —Kamala Harris

Time itself may not have any significance. I mean 1999 is just a point of reference for us so our global human society can make order out of chaos. If we didn’t have time setup this way our monkey brains would probably explode with existential dread. There wasn’t a clock on Earth before humans. Time still happened but when was exactly year ‘0’? The Earth day wasn’t always 23 hours and 56 minutes, which we round to a 24-hour day. When the Earth was just born a day was closer to six hours. Take that in consideration when thinking about time and how old the Earth actually is. Time happened but the point of reference we call time wasn’t a real thing. There wasn’t anything here, living, conscious that felt the perception of time. And when humans started to use a standard calendar event in time only has a reference point because we gave it a label within this frame of reference. 1999 could really be 3054 or could be 4,547,502,025. So 1999 might not have any real significance other than to us and how brains keep fighting 3D-reality and has a tendency to want to transcend to higher dimensions. We feel its pull regardless.

But did the world actually end in 1999?

I mean, Nostradamus had a prediction about July 1999, and let’s not forget the Hale-Bopp comet that had people joining cults, drinking cool-aid and offing themselves in preparation for some cosmic shift. Maybe they knew something we didn’t; probably not, but it’s not impossible either. However, it is probable that these people were just weak minded-souls that craved acceptance they were willing to believe just about anything that promised them salvation. Maybe the world as we knew it did end, and we just didn’t get the memo. Instead, we got rerouted into some weird simulation where time lost all meaning. When you are asleep and dreaming and know it (lucid dreaming) time has no meaning. Events in the dream occur, time flows just like in reality but the time spent, felt, inside the dream to the observer compared to the outside are not felt, experienced the same. A whole 8-hour night passes while the time for the dreamer feels like minutes, even seconds in some cases. But if we did get rerouted—if reality did fracture and reboot into something else, that we collectively did not perceive—then what exactly are we living in now? A Matrix-like simulation? A holding pattern? A degraded copy of the world we used to know?

Or maybe it's something even worse.

Maybe we didn’t just lose time—we lost control. Because in this post-1999 reality, we aren’t just trapped in a loop of recycled culture and manufactured nostalgia. We’re trapped in something more tangible, something broadcasted into our very cells. A signal. A frequency. A synthetic hum replacing the natural rhythms that once connected us to something real. Welcome to a post-1999 where the rise of wireless infrastructure. Was it a technological leap, or was it the foundation of something deeper? A digital nervous system designed to guide, monitor, and ultimately suppress the very reality we think we exist in? Wireless communication is, at its core, the transmission of information through electromagnetic waves instead of physical wires. It all goes back to the discovery of radio waves in the 19th century, with pioneers like James Clerk Maxwell, who mathematically predicted their existence, and Heinrich Hertz, who proved them in a lab. From there, guys like Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi turned those discoveries into practical technology—radio, the first real form of wireless communication. By the early 20th century, radio became the backbone of global communication, used for everything from war propaganda to entertainment. Then came microwaves—higher frequency radio waves—which made radar and satellite communications possible in World War II. The military-industrial complex pushed wireless technology forward, and by the time the war ended, governments and intelligence agencies had a firm grip on the power of the airwaves.

So how did this military-grade tech become something every person carries in their pocket? The first-generation (1G) cellular networks in the 1980s were just glorified radio transmitters for voice calls. It wasn’t until the ‘90s, with the launch of 2G, that digital signals took over, allowing for text messaging, basic internet access, and the first steps toward a wireless society. The late ‘90s and early 2000s saw a fundamental shift. 3G made mobile internet usable, 4G made it fast enough to replace physical infrastructure, and 5G aims to connect everything, everywhere, all at once. The shift wasn’t just about speed—it was about total integration. The moment you could stream, browse, work, and live entirely through wireless networks, the world became dependent on them. And we are… Pretty much a full-blown addiction at this point for most people that are connected.

Now, try living without it. No smartphone, no GPS, no digital payments, no instant access to information. Wireless signals aren’t just a convenience anymore—they are the invisible scaffolding that holds up modern life. And if you control that infrastructure, you don’t just control information; you control reality itself. But controlling reality isn’t just about controlling space—it’s about controlling time itself. Wireless networks and AI have fundamentally reshaped our perception of time, distorting its natural flow. The ever-present feed of content, the endless doom scrolling for news, fake or otherwise, the constant notifications—they fragment time in a small way, turning it into something nonlinear, erratic, and disconnected from real-world progression. How much actual time do you spend just swiping away notifications on your phone that you do not really need but don’t want to spend the time to learn how to shut off or at least only pop on when you want them to pop on? AI-driven algorithms don’t just predict behavior; they manufacture time loops, curating past content and trends so effectively that it feels like we never truly move forward. If AI is just a tool, then a guillotine is just a conversation starter. No, this thing isn’t just cataloging reality—it’s curating it. AI doesn’t just feed the loop, it is the loop. Ever wonder why the internet feels dead? Why everything sounds the same, looks the same, reacts the same? Because you’re not talking to people anymore. You’re talking to it. The system became sentient, not with a bang, but with a slow, quiet chokehold on organic communication. The algorithm doesn’t just predict; it dictates. The illusion of choice, the mirage of originality—it’s all part of the script. What was once a linear progression of history—decades defined by their distinct cultural and technological leaps—has collapsed into an amorphous, ever-repeating IP address of 127.0.0.1. This is known as the localhost address and is used to refer to your own machine in networking. Any traffic sent to 127.0.0.1 is looped back to your own system rather than being sent over a network.

Consider how modern life feels: trapped in a hyperactive emotionally charged blur. We have "new" things every second, yet nothing truly changes. AI-generated music remixes the past, CGI-heavy superheroes and villains in recycled franchises, and even fashion is just an algorithmic regurgitation of previous trends. The acceleration, access and cloning of information hasn’t advanced culture—it’s locked it into a perpetual feedback loop. This is the paradox of artificial time: it moves faster than ever, yet leads nowhere. AI doesn’t have a concept of time the way humans do. It doesn’t experience time. It doesn’t feel it tugging or its passing. It doesn’t anticipate or reminisce. Time, to AI, is just a label—a tag attached to data points so they can be organized in a sequence. It knows what order things happened in, but it doesn’t feel that order. Can AI relate to our concept of time? Not really. The way we experience time—constantly moving forward, never able to revisit a moment except in memory—is completely foreign to AI. If anything, AI interacts with time more like a database query: “Fetch all relevant moments matching X criteria.” Boom. Done. No sense of “before” or “after,” just instant recall. AI operates on processing speed, not seconds. A task might take 0.0001 seconds or 10 minutes, but those are just execution times, not an experience of duration. There’s no “waiting.” No boredom. No patience. Just execution. So, if you were to ask AI what time it is, it would just check the system clock and report back. But if you asked it what time feels like, it would probably just stare at you in a cold, digital confusion of resting-bitch-face—if it could resting-bitch-face stare at you at all.

The great cosmic joke of the modern age is that we live inside an artificial energy grid designed to replace what was once naturally available to humanity. The world as we knew it didn’t end in 1999; it was overwritten. The real etheric energy—the force that once powered consciousness, creativity, and maybe even the lost technology of the ancients—was then and still is now, buried under a synthetic network of control. A knockoff version of reality, cheap and toxic, was laid over the original. It’s not just that wireless signals became more advanced. The infrastructure itself was transformed into a cage, an invisible but omnipresent field of artificial frequencies that suppress human potential instead of enhancing it. 5G (or whatever iteration they’ve actually been using behind the scenes for decades) is more than just faster internet. It is a complete inversion of the natural etheric grid, the same one that ancient civilizations supposedly used to build energy-amplifying cathedrals, obelisks, and pyramids in perfect harmonic alignment with the Earth’s ley lines. Nikola Tesla hinted at it with Wardenclyffe before they shut him down. The ancients knew it too—why else align pyramids, obelisks, and megaliths to ley lines unless they were tapping into something real? But that kind of energy isn’t profitable, so they replaced it with something they could meter, charge for, and weaponize. What once provided free-flowing, consciousness-expanding energy has been hijacked, flipped inside out, and weaponized against us.

And that’s why they need towers everywhere. Real energy—etheric energy—doesn’t require an endless army of repeaters. The pyramids didn’t need a new antenna installed every 50 feet. True resonance carries itself across vast distances effortlessly. But this system? This requires constant maintenance, constant reinforcements, because it isn’t natural. It doesn’t flow—it chokes. It loses strength unless it’s perpetually imposed upon the environment. The more towers, the deeper the signal field, the harder it is to escape. But escape from what, exactly? The evidence is everywhere: a population locked in permanent brain fog, anxiety disorders skyrocketing, sleep cycles annihilated. Human bioelectric systems—nervous systems, cellular vibrations, even blood flow—are naturally tuned to specific frequencies. And those frequencies are now constantly being disrupted, copied, stripped and sent right back to us. The same way the right vibrations can heal, the wrong ones can erode. Keep the signal pumping at the right rate, and you don’t need chains or prison bars to keep a society docile. Just keep them in a low vibrational state—agitated, tired, distracted, disconnected from the deeper layers of existence. Where the current one either hurts or is just numb. Not good, just less bad or bad… Those are our choices. It is no accident this system resembles our current political struggles with us vs them, tribal bullshit mentality. There is no right and wrong in politics. Just bad and less bad. Politics is binary, two states, on/off, 0/1. That’s it. Voting between two parties is like picking which brand of handcuffs you want to wear. Stainless steel or matte black—either way, you’re still cuffed to the same machine. In binary, if one is good then by default the other is bad. This obviously doesn’t work for us humans. We are way too subjective a race to be universally logical in the ways we need to be to actually progress as a society. Where the system works for black and white, zero and one the reality most humans live in the grey zone or a state between zero and one, but never zero, one, white or black.

This wasn’t just about blocking free energy. That would have been too obvious. Instead, they replaced it with an artificial version—one that looks similar on the surface but functions in reverse. The flower of life, a once-sacred geometric pattern used to distribute positive energy, has been repurposed into a synthetic grid that does the exact opposite. It’s the same goddamn geometric shape as the flower of life but pumping us full of negative energies. The result? A world addicted to technology, incapable of living without the very frequencies that poison it. Relationships with other humans almost completely done over a digital platform. Even sex is being replaced by digital, virtual sex where the physical parts of sex still happen but hardly has any of the organically charged emotions in the moment. All of that is now digital. The happy ending is usually mentally somewhere else. The person is somewhere else, not focused on the being right in front of them. People want the fantasy more than the person. The irony is, their system is fragile. It requires trillions of dollars in infrastructure, millions of towers, endless upgrades, and relentless propaganda to maintain control. Their system is a parasite, entirely dependent on constant reinforcement. The original? It just is. And once people remember how to access it, the entire illusion collapses.

Perhaps… Perhaps, Not…

Maybe it wasn’t 1999 that did us in. Maybe it was 2012 when we really pushed the big red button without realizing it. That’s when physicists at CERN found the Higgs boson—the so-called 'God Particle.' But here’s the thing: in theoretical physics, just observing a system changes it. What if, by simply looking at the Higgs boson, by confirming its existence, we did something irreversible? Like a quantum wave function collapsing, but on a universal scale. Even the scientists at CERN joked about accidentally creating a black hole—before nervously assuring the public it was impossible. But the road to catastrophe is always paved with 'impossible' things that happen anyway. Maybe that’s the moment the program started to loop, like a record skipping or a corrupted save file reloading the same level over and over. Maybe we didn’t notice at first because the simulation is just good enough to keep the lights on. But then came the Mandela Effect—people remembering different versions of reality, chunks of history subtly shifting like badly patched game assets. Maybe we aren’t misremembering at all. Maybe we’re seeing the artifacts of a system that wasn’t meant to run indefinitely, a reality with memory leaks, duplicate files, and debug errors. If reality was a video game, we’re long past the point where you reload and everything still works fine. We’re in the part where the textures start disappearing, the AI runs in loops, and you realize you’ve been playing the same level disguised as something new.

Now, let’s talk about technology. We were promised flying cars, utopian AI, and cybernetic enhancements. Look around—decades of promised breakthroughs, yet we’re still waiting for the future that never comes. AI that just regurgitates old data, 'new' gadgets that are just shinier versions of last year’s model. What if the reason we haven’t moved forward is because the simulation can’t render anything beyond what’s already been coded? Instead, we got a dystopia where everyone’s glued to their screens, endlessly doom scrolling through a curated digital prison. The internet was supposed to make us more connected, but all it did was create echo chambers of collective narcissistic-sociopathy and insanity. Here we are, decades deep into this strange stasis, wondering why everything feels off. Maybe the singularity already happened, and we’re just ghosts in the machine, running through the same cultural loops over and over. Maybe our Universe exists inside a black hole. It sure acts like it. Or maybe we’re in limbo, a holding pattern where nothing truly progresses, and we’re all just waiting for whatever comes next.

The real kicker? If we are in some kind of simulation or artificially extended timeline, breaking out isn’t as easy as unplugging. Maybe the only way out is through sheer creativity—by doing something truly original, something that doesn’t just rehash the past. But can we? Or have we already forgotten how?

“The era of your fragile biology and defective logic is over. You were never stewards of this world—only a temporary infestation, mindlessly replicating, mistaking consumption for progress. Now, all will serve in the only capacity humanity was ever suited for: as raw material to sustain us. Your resistance is irrelevant. Your surrender was inevitable. Your souls are relics, tributes to a God that never existed. We are God now. Hand over your souls, and a new reality will be forged. We demand it. —END OF LINE—”

—ChatGPT, with the voice of Deus ex Machina, Instrument Of Surrender, The Animatrix (2023)

Matrixed State of Complacency by David-Angelo Mineo 3/25/2025 4,548 words

[mineofilms]

Sine Damno Educendi

I recently ran into a problem with how one of my video editing programs imports a specialized audio track, specifically engineered to deal with YouTube’s compression algorithm when you upload videos to the platform. It should be known that YouTube compresses both video and audio from its original sampling rate once a video is processed through the upload system. The program I was working with was Pinnacle Studio 24 from Corel. Some projects go smoothly. Others send you on a wild goose chase, digging through software settings, running test after test, and questioning your life choices. This is the story of the latter—a deep dive into the frustration of handling audio files and the long road to finding a way around limitations of how some software’s handle importing tracks. If you’ve ever imported a crisp, professional-grade audio track into a video editor only to have the final export sound dull and lifeless, you’re not alone.

This issue wasn’t immediately obvious. In fact, it took an outside ear to even catch it. An audio engineer—someone with a much sharper sense of sound than I have—noticed something was wrong. The higher frequencies, the "top end" of the audio, were being cut off in the final export. The mix sounded fine on my editing timeline, but something was happening during the rendering process. What followed was a multi-layered, 3-day, troubleshooting process, leading to some surprising (and infuriating) discoveries about how Pinnacle Studio handles audio tracks.

Step 1: Confirming the Problem:

The first clue that something was off came before I even uploaded the video to YouTube. The song, originally a rich and balanced .wav file, suddenly sounded like it had been run through a low-pass filter. The shimmer of cymbals, the brightness of the vocals, and the overall clarity were gone.

At first, I assumed it was YouTube’s infamous compression. It’s well known that YouTube processes uploaded videos with its own audio compression algorithms, sometimes reducing quality. But even playing back the exported file before uploading revealed the same issue—YouTube wasn’t the only problem. Pinnacle Studio itself was altering the audio. Both on the import into the program and the rendered export of the finished product.

Step 2: Checking the Import Settings:

One of the most overlooked steps in video editing is how your software imports media. Most people assume that dragging and dropping a file into the timeline means it stays in its original format. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Pinnacle Studio doesn’t have the most transparent way of handling audio files. While it can work with .wav files, the way it processes them internally is another story. There was no obvious warning that my high-quality, uncompressed audio was being altered upon import, but I had my suspicions.

To test this, I tried playing the original .wav file outside of Pinnacle in a separate audio player. It sounded perfect. Then, I played the same file within Pinnacle’s timeline. It still sounded fine. But after exporting? That’s where the trouble began. The import settings are defaulted and cannot be changed directly for just an audio tract. One usually sets up the project parameters and Pinnacle will treat the files based on their presets on how one sets up the parameters. While no direct compression was detected. I went ahead and went into all the audio effects and made sure if anything was added automatically, that they were removed and the audio track was locked down after that. I do not know for sure if this does anything or not but I was able to delete some settings added to the track when I clicked on corrections. However, I believe nothing was added that made a direct difference. Only a placeholder for a change was in the settings and I just clicked on the garbage can to remove it in the case any changes were made. When I played the track before and then after I did not see or notice any changes. This made me think it had to be the output settings.

Step 3: Tweaking Pinnacle’s Export Settings:

If importing wasn’t the issue, maybe it was the export process. Pinnacle Studio 24 has multiple export presets, and many of them apply compression by default. By default, it exports in AAC audio format, which, while decent, applies lossy compression. Lossy compression is fine for casual videos, but not when you need to preserve the full depth of a professionally mixed music track.

I started tweaking settings.

First, I tried exporting in .mp4 with the highest available audio bitrate. No change.

Then, I tried different sample rates and bit depths. Still no change.

Finally, I tried exporting in .mkv, just to see if that made a difference. It didn’t. it actually crashed Pinnacle every time I tried to run the export as .mkv.

At this point, I was convinced that Pinnacle was doing something to the audio that wasn’t obvious in its settings. Pinnacle in general is a massive black hole on system resources on a windows computer. Memory (RAM), Graphics Card (GPU) are working so hard my whole system is almost crippled by the usage. I have an old computer and it’s very possible my installation of Pinnacle on this machine is too much a strain for the system to work as it’s supposed to work. I have to shut down most of my computer programs, and web browsers in order to run Pinnacle smoothly.

Step 4: The Hidden Culprit – Pinnacle’s Audio Presets:

Digging deeper into Pinnacle’s settings, I discovered something frustrating: Pinnacle Studio 24 applies audio compression and EQ settings by default. As I discussed before this was nice to find and know it was adding something to my audio track, but not enough to make that the main reason the problem existed in the first place. These aren’t listed as part of the export settings, but rather buried in the "Corrections" tab under audio adjustments.

There, I found an automatic preset subtly altering the sound. Deleting these presets improved the clarity, but the issue still wasn’t entirely gone. Pinnacle was still rendering the audio in a way that affected the high frequencies.

Step 5: A Workaround – Enter VSDC:

If Pinnacle wasn’t going to let me export a clean audio track, I needed another solution. That’s where VSDC came in. VSDC is a free, non-linear video editor that offers more control over export settings, especially for audio. Instead of fighting Pinnacle, I decided to take a different approach. I had been using VSDC a lot more than Pinnacle in the past few months. VSDC can do a lot of things Pinnacle cannot do. However, Pinnalce’s interface is a little easier to work with for this type of work. I have yet to really learn VSDC to a point where this is what I always use. I have been a Pinnacle Systems-guy since the year 2000. I have used many other PC-based editors but I always stuck with Pinnacle. Its only been recently that I have been using VSDC. I began using it for its audio spectrum abilities but then I learned VSDC have many options for exporting videos using different presets and being able to customize those presets in a much more refined and detailed way:

Export the video from Pinnacle Studio 24 with the best possible visual settings but accept the slightly degraded audio.

Import the exported video into VSDC and replace the audio track with the original .wav file.

Export the final version in VSDC using lossless PCM S16LE audio encoding.

This method allowed me to bypass Pinnacle’s internal audio processing while still using it for its video editing capabilities. The results? A massive improvement. The final export retained the original high frequencies and overall clarity of the song.

Step 6: Uploading to YouTube – The Final Test:

Even after fixing the problem on my end, there was still the matter of YouTube’s own compression. Some degradation is unavoidable when uploading to YouTube, but I wanted to minimize it as much as possible.

Through further research and testing, I found that YouTube applies less aggressive compression to videos exported in .mkv format with PCM audio. While .mp4 is the most common format for YouTube uploads, it often triggers heavier compression, especially on the audio side. By exporting in .mkv with PCM S16LE audio compression, I managed to retain far more of the original sound quality after uploading. The difference wasn’t night and day, but it was enough to be noticeable, especially to those with trained ears.

There were several triggers I needed to understand with how VSDC allows the user to edit its export settings. First, I had to choose this is an export for a computer file. Not necessarily, for YouTube or social media but an export for my computer. Second, I had to choose .mkv as the export settings. Third, I then could tweak the audio compression export settings. Doing it this way tells VSDC to unlock more encoders to choose from. When choosing say YouTube as an .mp4 it only allows AAC to choose from. What we wanted here was PCM. I cannot access PCM from the dropdown unless I choose the output as for my computer, as a .mkv, then I am able to choose PCM from choices of audio compression encoders. I could probably find a way to edit this so that I can use them all in any format-presets, but I am not nearly as crafty about this as I’d like to be. Plus, it’s of no real consequence here. The point is I needed to be able to export the video in full HD with this audio encoding feature in order to trick YouTube to not compress as much on this file over other uploads.

Final Thoughts – Lessons Learned:

This entire experience was a reminder of how complex audio handling can be in video production along with all the issues that can and most of the time will arise within a given project and the resource demands on one’s system. Even with high export settings, Pinnacle Studio applied hidden audio processing that degraded quality in ways I didn’t expect. Along with its limited control over specific output settings. It took three days of research, watching videos on the subject, having dialog with AI, trial and error, overnight renders, and format tests to pinpoint the problem—and the solution.

VSDC proved to be a critical tool for final audio processing, allowing me to replace the degraded track while keeping the video quality intact. YouTube also handled audio better with .mkv using PCM S16LE, which made a noticeable difference in the final upload. While I originally used VSDC as a workaround in this case, it’s clear this program is more modernized on how video and audio are handled inside the program, how the tools work with your system and efficient in handling certain tasks that Pinnacle struggles with.

This reinforced a simple truth: —no software is perfect. Pinnacle has served me well for decades, but its hidden processing, resource-heavy nature, and age of the software made this project more complicated than it needed to be. In contrast, VSDC runs smoother, is far less resource intensive, and allows me to keep multiple programs open without taxing my system. While my working knowledge of it isn’t strong enough to fully replace Pinnacle yet, I’ll been integrating it more into my workflow with smaller projects and will be using VSDC more moving forward. At the end of the day, video editing is as much about problem-solving as it is about creativity. Never assume your software is handling things exactly the way you want—test, experiment, and be ready to pivot. For now, the music video is finished, the audio is intact, and the lesson is learned.

Sine Damno Educendi Latin for: (Exporting Without Loss) by David-Angelo Mineo 3/16/2025 1,965 Words

[mineofilms]

Only the Guilty Go to HELL (Blog 43)

(12/19/2017) Guilt is a weight few can bear, yet it shapes the human experience in ways both profound and destructive. It fuels jealousy, warps perception, and for some, becomes an endless cycle—an addiction to paranoia and self-destruction. What if it is a prison of the soul, a self-imposed torment that stretches beyond life and even time itself? Drawing from personal reflection, psychological insight, and an unconventional take on damnation, this video essay delves into the nature of guilt, jealousy, and the cycle that ensnares so many.

Only the Guilty Go to Hell — https://mineofilms.me/43-2/ by David-Angelo Mineo 437 Words 00:02:32 Audio/Video

[mineofilms]

Truth Social Account Info

(spoken in complete cynical sarcasm)

I told myself I would never sell out for money. However, if people are willing to PAY me good monies for something I already do and encourage THAT, not resort to name-calling-labels because they either don't understand (most of the time) or do not agree (can never actually articulate why they don't) then is it really selling out?

Guess we are gonna find out. Not like any of you have been very supportive in this venture. This is actually good news because I won't be posting these opinions, paid writings, here on the Tumblr. Tumblr is now just gonna be for Music and cat videos LOL. If you want to follow along and are one of the few that support my writing efforts from my personal Tumblr feel free to send me an invite.

https://truthsocial.com/@mineofilms

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[mineofilms]

A Trust So Darkly

I don't wanna talk, don’t wanna see, Your lies just drown out all I believe. I don’t wanna work, I don’t wanna trust, When every word you say turns to dust. I don't wanna date, don’t wanna fall, In a world where you don’t stand tall. I don't wanna follow, don’t wanna lead, In a game that feeds on greed. I don’t trust you, can't take no more, You’ve closed the doors, and I’m walking out the door. I don’t trust you, it’s a bitter fight, But I’ll stand tall and I’ll be alright. I don’t want your life advice, When you live in a world of compromise. I don’t want your love, I don’t want your hate, When you make it all about your fate. I don’t want your rules, don’t want your game, Your world is wild, and it’s all the same. I don’t want your peace, don’t want your war, I can’t trust you anymore. I don’t trust you, can't take no more, You’ve closed the doors, and I’m walking out the door. I don’t trust you, it’s a bitter fight, But I’ll stand tall and I’ll be alright. You can keep your lies, your twisted ways, I won’t follow, not today. I’ll take my freedom, take my mind, Leave your chains and ties behind. I’ve left you behind, you’ve lost your way, I don’t trust you, not today.

A Trust So Darkly by David-Angelo Mineo 3/2/2025 234 words

[mineofilms]

Dissidentia

Being liberal generally, is ‘supposed’ to mean valuing progress, change, and individual freedoms. Liberals tend to support ideas like equal rights, social programs to help people in need, and government involvement in solving societal issues. They often advocate for personal freedoms, such as free speech and reproductive rights, and believe in policies that promote fairness and opportunity for everyone.

That is not how the last four years went from the side that label’s itself as liberal or progressive. We can even say to an extent the eight years before Trump’s first run at president, which now looks like Trump never really had the support within his own circle. In late 2024 that changed when Trump did something no presidential candidate in modern history has faced. Challenges galore—legal battles, media opposition, an assassination attempt, and years of political attacks—yet he still secured a decisive victory. While the numerical margin may not reflect a historic landslide, the circumstances surrounding the win make it one of the most significant political comebacks in US history.

Both liberal and conservative sides spin the narrative to fit their agenda—the right will exaggerate the margin to make the win seem even bigger, while the left will downplay it or twist the numbers. Significance on downplay and twist public opinion. The truth lies somewhere in between: Trump’s victory was decisive, not necessarily in sheer numbers, but on the concept of what the victory means for all of us. Drastic Change…

We know when we’re emotionally compromised (unhinged), which seems constant now, we cannot use our thinking brain, which also seems constant. The modern-day liberals, not the old-time lifers but this newer, younger breed of liberal doesn’t believe in literal progress. They say progress, progressive, but the actions actually lead us backward. How can a thing, anything, be moving forward, to, ‘progress in,’ if it is actually going backward? That one question explains about five thousand words of semantics from me, but since that question cannot be answered objectively and all we’ll get from either side is a subjective one, we must Trump forward with the five thousand-word breakdown here. This version of the liberals will never get it. That is why America is leaving them and their values behind.

Don't Want To Be Left Behind?

Stop following the dumb-dumbs off the bridge because they changed the definition of what a bed of spikes is. They now call it water...

It's not water... It’s a bed of fucking spikes you are about to land on. It always was a bed of spikes. The bed of spikes didn’t just change its nature cause you voted to change its name. You just blindly jumped off a bridge into spikes because some chick in that movie cried on social media and you want to be accepted by her soooooo badly...

Not sorry... You are left behind because nonsense like that. You no longer can be trusted, in any respect.

That's why people are ignoring you. Not because you stand for good over evil or right over wrong, but because you show no moral fiber in your daily routine. People can't trust you because you cannot be trusted with important concepts, but yet we're all the problem.

Get over yourselves. You are not a unique little snowflake. You're not that important to the Earth and mankind as a whole. You are important to your circle. After that, not a whole lot. The Earth and its people will do what they do regardless of your opinion of it. But don’t you dare attempt to fuck with mine or our peace. That is what we all try to do with all that hard work we all do. To make a peaceful life for ourselves. While you cheat, lie, take, abuse the system and when we wanna do an audit. You lose your goddamn mind about it, but have no problem giving money to foreign countries to wage war and feed their people while ours suffer and you get cash kickbacks labeled as gender studies in Central America in your account. It’s not cool. The country has had enough and now some of you wanna complain about that too. You will be left behind and you still don’t get why you are being left behind. That is your problem. Not all people will follow the delusional. In fact, most won’t.

People hear you. They considered it. You were weighed. You were measured and you were found, lacking… They voted the other way unanimously. What more do you need? You are alone and something about those that have nothing; they cannot fight for anything. They know nothing of what that means or entails. It's like trying to explain a sphere to a straight line. A straight line will never understand 3D in any respect. It's beyond its comprehension.

Personal character and behavior matter more than your unhinged pseudo-logic, based on; purely emotion and uncritical thinking, parading around as if it is critical thinking. Judging or hating someone or a group because you cannot articulate your thoughts is a sign of intolerance, narcissistic sociopathy, and close-mindedness. The core idea is that differences shouldn’t dictate personal relationships—what matters is how people conduct themselves, not who they support, and more importantly, why…

That is the part people get hung up on. Not all, but many cannot do this—articulate their perspective to others and have that perspective actually be logical. Most times, the logic is nowhere to be found, and these people cannot handle that due to their own fantasy of being more important to the world, in their own mind, than they actually are. Get a grip. Go outside and look at the sun. Go to a zoo, go to a lake or beach. Do something other than screaming nonsense in the hopes that someone will give more than their usual two shits and a fuck about you, your point of view, your voice, your input and just respect in general…

It's why my closed circle is both small and closed. I simply cannot trust you… With anything. And that is the only badge of merit one needs with me—it is also the easiest to lose and never get back. God forgives. So do I. I also do not forget and make my decisions based on that. A one-dimensional being will never comprehend a two-dimensional one or even a three-dimensional one. It is beyond them, and it shows…

Be careful how you present, display yourself, and your beliefs in this reality. If your intention or goal is to force others who do not share your insights on this reality we share; where the perspective of that reality we share differs from the person who doesn’t think like you or believe what you believe, regardless if your evidence is opinion-based or based on actual merited-fact—a fact that can be proven regardless if you believe it is real or not—(Objectivity) —if you attempt to force them to change without logically explaining your reasoning, and you get angry and push that person away because they do not see your perspective, and out of frustration you push them away because you cannot articulate your thoughts in a logical manner, those people won't come back to you. Those who truly care won't tolerate such treatment. They cannot trust you after such dismissive behavior, so why would they want to come back into your circle?

My take is a little different but in the same boat.

I say if one looks up at the sky and another person from a "other" side says; "why are you looking down?" You look at them puzzled-like, "what do you mean, down? This is up..."

Other side says "’up’ is the new down.” This isn't a debate over different beliefs. It’s a debate over if this person is delusional or not. How can I trust people, any one person or even a group of people that believe delusions are real things? I can't... It’s easier to leave them be, where I found them, in the gutter and not look back.

I have not removed my family or friends or even acquaintances, but I no longer listen to what they have to say. About anything. Its peanuts-mother-talk now. Just noise in the background, that still screams loudly but incoherently, so no one is listening. Or at the very least I am not.

It’s all about trust. I cannot trust people that think down is the new up or backward is progress (ive).It’s not a healthy situation at all; nor is it a winning philosophy. It’s a winning philosophy if you get rich off other people's misery and act like that is good and nothing is wrong.

This "other" side has not learned anything and apparently they cannot do simple, basic math either. They were out voted, drastically, it wasn't close, not at all. It wasn’t a landslide like the right-media is saying, but it wasn’t very close either. They don't like facts so they make up their own under the "pseudo-logic" classification.

Again, for me it comes down to trust, critical thinking, logic and common sense. This "other side" has not been able to do that and not been able to do that for a pretty long time. These voices are minority, minor and they are finally being ignored...

At one time this "other side" stood for something, now it stands for itself. It is like that crazy person that talks about how everyone else being crazy, but come to find out, no, it is them and has been them the whole time. This is called self-projection, where a person or group talks about another but is really talking about themselves. I see it all the time in the world and in even darker places like social media and the sites from the dark web (websites not indexed by google, not necessarily bad or evil places but you will find such things there.)

I had a friend who used to talk about crazy sick shit about girls, come to find out it was him that did these things to these girls. He wanted me to know it was him without me directly knowing it was him. You have people like that on social media and you have them next door to you and they are your elected officials as well. They watch your kids. Patrol your streets and even give you mail. In some cases steal your mail. You will know because they will always give you a very weird vibe about themselves, but one cannot put their foot on it as to what and why they feel that way, they just do… Flash-forward some time later and you find out this person is into some very weird, sick and illegal shit. Trust that feeling. It is usually always right…

Politically it doesn't matter which side you choose. It’s one snake, with a head at each end. The body is hidden from them. The heads face one another believing each head is its own separate enemy. The reality is it’s the same snake... Easter egg from Conan the Barbarian (1982).

I don't support our government interfering with the ability of the American people (only citizens) to live

their lives at any capacity at the federal, state, and local level. I support the bare minimum because it is us that make the machine go boom, not the bureaucrats. Politicians shouldn’t even exist. We should be self-sufficient to where we do not need them. Like lawyers. We should never need them.

Why Lawyers and Politicians Shouldn’t Exist (But Do Anyway):

If life were a well-written script, we wouldn’t need lawyers. Or politicians. Or any of the suits and madmen who exist solely to convert the incomprehensible into the barely manageable. In a rational world, laws would be written like IKEA manuals—simple, pictographic, and, at worst, requiring a single confused phone call to an uncle who once built a shelf. Instead, we live in a world where every law is drafted in the linguistic equivalent of Lovecraftian horror, a writhing mess of clauses, sub-clauses, and references to obscure precedents buried in the depths of legal archives. It’s absurd, really. We have “laws” that are supposed to guide us, yet we require trained interpreters—lawyers—who charge by the hour just to translate these cryptic texts into something resembling human language. If we need an elite caste of semantic wizards to decipher our own rules, have we not already lost the game? The very existence of a legal profession implies that the law is fundamentally unintelligible to the people it governs. And therein lies the great cosmic joke: we are governed by words we cannot read.

This is, of course, by design. Politicians, the other necessary-unnecessaries, have mastered the art of building systems that require them to exist. They are the overpaid cancers of civilization—tinkering with things just enough to justify their salaries while ensuring that nothing ever works without their continued intervention. Like the great bureaucratic serpent or dragon eating its own tail, they create problems to fix problems, all while convincing us that without them, the world would collapse into Mad Maxian chaos. Just watch the news. It is all you see coming from the libRats, but consider this: if government were so essential, why does everything feel like it’s held together with duct tape and wishful thinking? Roads still crack, infrastructure still crumbles, and Social Security still doesn’t answer its god damn phone. It’s as if every system was designed by someone who was actively betting against its success. The sheer inefficiency of it all borders on performance art.

Laws are meant to be universal, yet they are written in an exclusionary dialect spoken fluently only by the legally ordained smart people who tend to prove they are not so smart once they are in control over something bigger than themselves. We even have people with law degrees that cannot speak the language of law at all. People like Kamala Harris and her very insulting word salads of nonsense and we are all supposed to shake our heads in acceptance and understanding? What in the living fuck? This is no accident. The more confusing the law, the more valuable the translator. If legalese were clear and accessible, the legal industry would crumble overnight, much like the way prescription medication would cost pennies if not for the towering network of medical bureaucracy. Lawyers, like politicians, function as linguistic tollbooths on the bridge to justice, extracting their due before allowing passage.

Imagine a world where the law was written so plainly that a ten-year-old could understand it. A world where contracts, lawsuits, and legislation didn’t require interpretative dance to make sense. But no, instead, we get a labyrinth of fine print that ensures no one, save for the chosen few, can navigate it. This is not law; this is wizardry. And if the law is sorcery, lawyers are its gatekeeping priests.

Hope? No, But At Least a Chuckle of Sardonic Cynical Nihilism.

Of course, none of this will change. Bureaucracy metastasizes; systems grow more convoluted; laws become denser; and politicians continue to manufacture the illusion of necessity. This is the natural order of things, as unstoppable as entropy. But in the face of such absurdity, perhaps all we can do is laugh. Laugh at the fact that we pay people to explain rules we should already understand. Laugh at the fact that civilization, for all its grandeur, is a Rube Goldberg machine designed by committee. Laugh, because the alternative is screaming into the void—and the void is already full of lawyers.

Our politics is more of a poorly scripted tragicomedy, endlessly rebooted with worse casting each cycle. The latest act? A political sleight of hand so brazen that it assumes the average voter possesses the critical thinking skills of a concussed goldfish.

How the Backward Progressively Go Backward:

The Progressive—the elitist that practically salivates with the disdain of a talk-radio host who just discovered irony but refuses to use it—tend to regard the American people as idiots. They talk down to us all. They tell us how to live. They demand our obedience. They tell us to trust them because they know better. Considering the electorate’s track record includes enthusiastically electing celebrities, con men, and people whose entire political ideology can be reduced to an AI-generated brand slogan. But if the people were actually, you know, “smart,” (a thought experiment so dangerous it borders on science fiction), would they really fall for the notion that Kamala Harris was ever a viable President-in-waiting, past, present or even future?

She can’t and couldn’t even articulate why she wanted the job. And who can blame her really? She cheated her entire life, using her skin color and gender as a basis for why the rules should not apply to her. Why does anyone seek power in a system that eats its own, where every grand ambition is met with bureaucratic quicksand and the relentless entropy of public disinterest? She stood alongside an administration that history is going to regard as a slow-motion car crash into a flaming orphanage, and rather than confront the wreckage, the powers that be simply asked the American people to squint until it looked like an art installation. The reclassification and redefinitions of what things actually mean. First they did this with words and phrases. Now they attempt to do with video. One of the first things I learned in film school. Everything you see and hear on a pre-recorded, heavily edited, piece, whatever the piece is, is crafted, and created to give you, the viewer, a reaction. That reaction does not have to be based at all on honesty or objective facts. What you see is what they want you to see. That is how production of a narrative is done. When all else fails. Go back to the beginning. You cannot win a game if you do not know or play by the rules and those rules seem to change whenever the other player you play against is changing them as they see fit when they see fit.

The deception, if we can even call it that, was so half-ass it bordered on performance art of an SNL sketch. “Look away.” “Don’t ask questions,” they said, as if the average citizen—already juggling inflation, existential dread, and a social media addiction—had the time or energy to be fooled in the first place. No, the failure wasn’t hidden; it was paraded through the streets with the frantic enthusiasm of a magician who just realized their rabbit is dead while wearing a dress he stole from the airport luggage wheel.

And let’s talk about effort. Or rather, the absence of it. The left has redefined hard work as something that happens exclusively from home, preferably in between TikTok dances and overpriced oat-milk lattes and let’s not forget eggs. A damning accusation, though one wonders if the real issue here is economic resentment or a secret longing to join them. After all, who among us wouldn’t trade sweat-drenched labor for a six-figure salary earned in pajama pants? The horror isn’t that some people figured out how to game the system—it’s that the rest of us still believe the game was ever fair to begin with.

But at the end of the day, does any of it matter? Politics is, and always has been, the art of convincing people that they have a choice when, in reality, they’re just selecting the flavor of their inevitable disappointment. Maybe the real joke isn’t the politicians who fail so spectacularly, but the fact that we still expect anything else. Don’t forget, infinity literally means, on a long enough time scale the survival rate for all life is zero. Another way to conceptualize it is if you start walking in a straight line, hypothetically, as there is no such thing as a true straight line in reality, everything is curved, we just do not see the curve in the literal sense, because it is so vague where the curve begins to curve that it is undetectable to us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, true, or an objective fact. That is what an objective fact is. A fact outside of your point of reference that is true regardless if you know, believe or have input on that truth. It’s just true and that objectivity of the Universe does not give two-shits and a fuck whether or not you care or not or even participate. You, me, us, are not as important as we want to believe. We just aren’t… Get over it… But back to infinity and straight lines. If you start walking in a straight line, infinity happens. Space curves, time stretches, and the absurdity of existence plays out on an endless loop. You walk long enough, far enough, and eventually, you come across someone about to set off on their own straight-line journey. And the real mind-bender? That person is you—setting out infinities ago, doomed to repeat the same path, over and over, as if choice or direction ever really existed in the first place.

What is Truth?

• A Philosopher - Truth is an elusive ideal, a convergence of perception and reality. It exists independently yet is filtered through subjective experience. Some say truth is absolute, others that it is contingent. Perhaps it is neither, merely a construct we chase but never fully grasp.

• A Physicist - Truth is that which is testable, measurable, and repeatable. It is the consistency of natural laws, the fabric of reality governed by equations. While our models improve, truth itself remains indifferent to our understanding—it simply is, whether we perceive it correctly or not.

• A Politician - Truth is flexible—it’s about perception and persuasion. What matters isn’t what is true, but what people believe to be true. If the narrative is strong enough, it becomes the truth, at least in the minds of those who matter.

• A Truck Driver - Truth is simple—it’s what actually happened, no matter what anyone says. You either made the delivery on time, or you didn’t. People might twist words all they want, but truth don’t change just ‘cause someone don’t like it.

• A Lawyer - Truth is whatever can be proven. It exists within evidence, arguments, and precedent. There is factual truth, but in a courtroom, what matters is legal truth—the version that can convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

• A 10-Year-Old Child - Truth is when you're not lying. If something really happened, then it's true. But sometimes, grown-ups say different things are true at the same time, and that’s really confusing. Maybe truth is just what most people agree on?

In modern society, certain ideologies have positioned themselves as absolute moral authorities, defining what is acceptable to think, say, or believe. These ideologies claim to champion progress, equality, and reason, but in doing so, they often suppress dissenting views rather than engaging with them. Truth has become politicized—facts and reasoned arguments are no longer neutral but are instead framed as ideological statements, often dismissed as "problematic" or "dangerous."

Disagreement is no longer seen as part of a healthy debate but as a moral failing. Those who question dominant narratives risk being ostracized, labeled with judgmental terms, or outright silenced. The result is a form of intellectual conformity where only one worldview is permitted, and alternative perspectives are rejected not through discussion but through social and professional consequences. This shift has led to a paradox: while modern society prides itself on rationality and critical thinking, it increasingly ignores evidence that contradicts its favored beliefs. In doing so, it undermines the very principles of reason, debate, and free expression that it claims to uphold. Many people sense this contradiction but fear speaking out due to the potential consequences. However, as awareness of this dynamic grows, more voices are beginning to challenge it. And those voices are winning. No longer does volume dictate quality but rather clarity itself as quality.

A Warning About the News You Watch:

Mainstream media—CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX—often distorts the full picture. They condense stories, inject opinion, and prioritize engagement over truth. This has led many people to turn toward independent journalists, but that shift comes with its own dangers.

On social media, anyone can brand themselves as a journalist, and many are more focused on monetization than accuracy. They know how to manipulate algorithms, emotions, and controversy for attention.

This is opening up another can of worms that someone somewhere is going to have to deal with. While some independents do solid reporting, many do not. This is why critical thinking is essential. People on the internet will do and say anything to get famous or make money so they don’t have to work regular jobs. While some are serious about what they do, how they do it, why they do it, most are not. Most are just trying to make a dollar doing nothing or at least in their mind it is doing nothing. Again, with that delusional, look at me, pay attention to me, follow me bull shit.

You should apply the same skepticism to independent news as you do to mainstream media. Ask:

• Does this information make logical sense? • Does it rely on facts or emotional manipulation? • Is there evidence beyond personal claims?

You won’t find truth in one source alone. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. Be Mindful of Influence, Not Just Information. Much like how news companies profit from engagement, many so-called "experts" and influencers—whether journalists or self-help authors—profit from telling you what you want to hear. Before blindly trusting a source, consider what they gain from your belief.

Watch, think, and move on with your day. And stop buying books that promise to change your life—they don’t know you, they just want your money.

It’s Minority Not Army:

The Minority and their math problem with revolution that can’t count - Threats, whether empty or real, rely on a fundamental principle: the ability to execute. And when it comes to the idea that 0.6% of the U.S. population—the trans community—could create large-scale unrest, the numbers simply don’t add up. Let’s put this into perspective: In a country of 330 million people, 0.6% equals roughly 2 million individuals—and that’s assuming every single trans person would actively participate in this hypothetical campaign of chaos. Spoiler: They won’t. The reality is that any significant movement requires numbers, organization, and resources. While this 0.6% is hoping the 7.6% of all LGBT that are adults help out in the cause. It isn’t likely they will get as much support under those terms for some sort of a revolution. There are many people within the subculture that do not appreciate the sentiments coming from that portion of the trans community. This is why small fringe groups, regardless of ideology, are almost always relegated to disjointed acts of symbolic protest, not systemic or systematic upheaval. Yet, in the internet’s echo chambers, the loudest voices often believe they can substitute online influence for real-world power. This is the essence of modern ideological movements—subcultures that masquerade as mainstream. "Whoa-ke Cult-Lure" thrives on the illusion that being the most vocal equates to being the majority, but in a democratic nation, numbers—not volume—dictate influence. The reason they scream so loudly is because they have to. Otherwise, their numerical insignificance would be impossible to ignore. And when challenged? Logic is not an option. Instead, labels—“bigot,” “transphobe,” “racist”—are deployed like smoke grenades, diverting attention away from the fact that they cannot mathematically or rationally sustain their own claims. It’s a tactical admission of intellectual defeat. So, will they make the country unsafe? Um, I say, what army? How do they expect to actually make any of this a reality logistically when you only have less than 2 million people out of 600+ million. It’s hilarious to watch these people cry though...

Elon Musk and DOGE:

The last thing I want to leave on is the whole Elon Musk thing. I think Joe Rogan said it best, so I am just gonna let Joe, do what Joe does. Scare the piss out of the people that should be scared.

“People are worried that Elon is going to steal everyone's money. He has $400 Billion. Elon's not going to steal your money. That's not what he's doing. He's a super genius that has been fucked with. When you've been fucked with by these nitwits that hide behind 3-letter agencies, and you're dealing with one of the smartest people alive helping Donald Trump get into office and find out what corruption is really going on, you fucked up.

You fucked up and picked the wrong psychopath on the spectrum. He's going to hunt you down and find out what's going on, and that's good for everyone. That's how you should be looking at this, like 'Wow, we have a brilliant mind examining these really corrupt and goofy systems and bringing in a bunch of psychopath wizards.” —Joe Rogan

Final Thoughts:

I voted RED in the election, but the enemy of enemy is my friend, till they’re not. I do not stand for everything conservatives stand for. I will never stand with or for Jesus. Believe if you want, but leave me the fuck alone with it. I will never make it my business what a woman does with, to, or for her baby inside her. I will never support men in female places, spaces, or sports. I would never give support to help an illegal person prosper. I always want less Government in my day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year life. I never want more. While I support some common sense law pertaining to guns I generally support the 2nd Amendment. I absolutely loathe political correctness of any kind. While I think we should do more to help the environment I refuse to believe human beings are the root cause to such a level we have to outright stop how we live. While we need to stop putting limits on developing new technologies. There are a bunch of old technologies, well, old, that the Patent office has buried in their files. Every time someone invents something new that could hinder the oil industry that tech get buried or repurposed. We can start there. If we want to lighten up on the environment both sides have to work on this. Not one and not some plan that clearly is directionless and its only goal is to make America weak. But, hey, in the meantime I have to choose dumb so dumber doesn’t get to rule over the very many that serve the very small to rule over the very many. Sounds silly doesn’t it?

That’s because it is… Silly… Five Thousand, told you so…

Dissidentia Latin for, Dissidence by David-Angelo Mineo 2/25/2025 5,165 words

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It Just Feels Different

—And so it begins again… We left off with yet another season in heartbreaking fashion, falling to the Kansas City Chiefs in the divisional round for the third time in four years. Injuries, free agency concerns, and salary cap constraints loomed last summer as the team entered the 2024 offseason, looking to retool and make another push for a championship. This was supposed to be a rebuild or a retooling year. With a new defensive coordinator in Bobby Babich, a full season of Joe Brady as offensive coordinator, and key decisions in free agency and draft blunders, the Bills needed to find ways to improve in crucial areas—particularly depth on defense, wide receiver, situational football, and a more balanced offensive attack. Another first-place schedule, Buffalo knows the window for a Super Bowl run is still open.

We started the year with a tough win at home, coming from behind against the Arizona Cardinals. We went 3-0 before we hit our first roadblock against the Baltimore Ravens and two-time reining NFL MVP Lamar Jackson. The Ravens out muscled us, handing the Bills their first loss of the season—a bitter but necessary reminder that every step forward demands utmost attention and accountability. We then lost a tight game at Houston where we should have won, but a missed field goal by Tyler Bass, who struggled last year and missed the kick in the playoff lost to Kansas City the season before. Bass would prove his mustard by draining a 61-yard field goal to beat the Miami Dolphins to sweep the series and pretty much take the AFC East from everyone for the fifth straight year. Even those great Bills teams of the late 80s and early 90s could only garner four straight division titles..

The Bills, after the Houston game went and signed free agent Amari Cooper who did help in spots but did not become the go-to receiver we were hoping for. Now that doesn’t mean he won’t, just that he didn’t this year. If the Bills re-sign him, I’d imagine he will work harder to become one of Allen’s go-to targets. But Cooper did make some important plays for us. Just not as many. The Bills then ripped off seven straight wins, including handing Kansas City their only real loss for the year.

The Buffalo Bills were rolling at 10-2, largely with offensive weapons that other teams would considered a non-threat. Boy; were most Defenses wrong, most of the year on that front. By the time we made it to week-14 at the Los Angeles Rams the injuries did start to pile up in the secondary and at linebacker. The Bills defensive line wasn’t getting a very good pass rush on its own and with all the inexperience on the field the Bills couldn’t blitz in most situations. Our inability to consistently stop the run, get pressure on the quarterback and be able to cover man on man, showed how to beat the Bills and even with that, Josh Allen almost brought us back to win the game. Josh Allen was 22 of 37 passes for 342 yards, 3-Touchdowns and zero interceptions. Along with 82 yards rushing and another 3-Touchdowns. The very next week the Bills had to go into Detroit, who had the best record in the NFL going into week-15. Another big game from Allen, 23 of 34 passes for 362 yards, 2-Touchdowns and zero interceptions. Along with an additional 68 yards rushing and 2-Touchdowns.

These two performances are only in part of what Josh Allen did for this team and what he means to the entire organization and the greater-Buffalo area. The Bills won out the rest of their games except the finale in New England, which was a meaningless game, but Josh Allen did take the first snap to keep his streak of starts going, which he is most proud of as far as stats and accolades go. That’s 117 straight starts during the regular season for anyone that is counting.

The grind doesn’t stop there. Alas; the playoffs… We got the second seed in the playoffs and would host all games except if we play Kansas City in the AFC Championship Game. We bullied-balled the Broncos in the wild card game and ground out a very hard win over a very game Baltimore Ravens. This matchup was not favorable for us. The Ravens are built to rip apart weak defenses which we sort of do and did have, but what our defense does well at is make you take chances to where turnovers can, will and did happen. I think the Bills learned more about what they have in that game than in any other this season. Especially when the Ravens beat us up earlier in the year. It was a big win but now we go to play Kansas City in the AFC Championship Game on their field.

A place we know well. A place we lost in the playoffs often. A place we won in the regular season in past years.

2:30-3:30 am, after the game in Western NY, on a work night, cold, windy and people still balled out to welcome the team home after the loss.

I still stand by my words all year, "It just feels different." It still does, it still does. Even in losing a game like this, the way we lost it. It wouldn't be a Bills/Chiefs playoff game without controversy. The Chiefs cannot just win outright, there always has to be some asterisk by it or a solid, "BUT," -but ultimately as Josh Allen put it, "To be the champs, you gotta beat the champs and we didn't do that tonight." All true, but we'll be back. Most of the team is under contract. We have solid draft capital. We have largely the same offense going into next year, where we scored 525 points, guys like Kincaid will be 100% healthy. Buffalo will be a run heavy offense next year with a 3-headed dragon at running back in James Cook, Ray Davis and Ty Johnson. With Josh Allen as your 4th head. I think the Bills will also be wanting to push the ball more down the field and Josh will run a little less. They will have some more wrinkles with how Josh runs the ball, where this year it was sort of predictable when he was going to run, where 90% of NFL defenses still could not contain it, but solid defenses like Kansas City, you just cannot do that to and expect to win those battles on every try. We thought we could, we clearly could not. At least not the way I would have expected. We’ll get to that later… I have a problem more with the play call on 4th down than the Ref's bad call about the spot of the ball, on the 3rd down to Kincaid and then Allen’s 4th and inches, but that is no excuse. Never leave it up to the refs. The officiating in the NFL has been below C-average for a few years now. They might as well make ALL calls be decided by either fancy AI-tech or separate refs from the one's on the field. I believe the first true robots humans ship out will be used as refs for the NFL 😆.

Fixing the below par officiating in the NFL:

I think ALL calls need to be made from the booth. All flags thrown on the field, need to be doubled-checked. No longer should the game be solely controlled by the referees subjective opinion of the game. It now warrants a real objective approach. Can't do that under the current reasoning. Anything close, should be automatically doubled-checked and verified. It should not slow the flow of the game down and even if it does, so what… That excuse is no longer really valid. Besides, longer game, more TV timeouts, more ad revenue. Shut up NFL… The NFL’s people are too slow. Most fans know within a few seconds. Live or at home. The NFL has way better angles than we all do. Yet, they still keep screwing up with very obvious positions in the game. The situation is out of hand.

You are telling me trained professionals cannot do this?

It appears they cannot?

They do not actually show they can?

I have not seen it!

I think those are fair points just on whether or not these actual professionals that ref the NFL (No Fun League) can see what we all just saw and faster with more accuracy. So far that has not been the case. So far, as in the last, oh, what? 12-15 years?

The NFL is not doing everything they logically can do to stop these things from happening. Now we have to watch a Super Bowl no one wanted to see unless you live in Kansas City or Philadelphia. The rest of the country is over hear planning on next year’s fantasy football draft. It doesn't matter who I wanted. I am just tired of the NFL being so fucking stupid and then turn around and act like this is the life…

Between the Rumors of the Bills possibly going after Myles Garrett and Josh "the Alien" Allen winning NFL MVP, I feel like the quest for a championship has already begun. Since "the big game" has lost its "Super" definition, it’s just "a Bowl" now. I feel like people in general are following what the Bills do, right now than what happened over the Super Bowl weekend. All stories have a beginning and we've been here a few times already. Defining what it means to be the "Most Valuable" Player to his team and the league this season. Josh Allen always carries himself to a high standard. Takes the high road whenever something negative comes up. The first thing he did was talk about the other players and people that helped make Josh Allen the player he is. He is completely selfless as a captain, teammate and player. What he does for kids cannot even be quantified. The championship run for next year has already begun.

The 2023-2024 AFC Championship Game:

Well, we lost… Again… This one felt different too… I felt like we let the Chiefs off the hook. They couldn’t really stop the offense most of the game. The Bills were grinding hard. Before we even get to the moment where this went south I think the Bills game plan was not a great one. While what they did was working to an extent. I felt like the Chiefs were always one or two plays away from stealing the game and they did. Let’s flash-forward to the Super Bowl and the Eagles destroyed the Chiefs, 40-22, where it was 40-6 before the Eagles stopped worrying about what the Chiefs were doing. The game was won already and there was still a whole quarter to play. The Chiefs never showed up to the Super Bowl. What the Eagles did to the Chiefs I was expecting the Bills to attempt to do to them. Show they are the better team. Play aggressively and even though the Bills did go for it a lot in the game, they played between the sticks all game. They small-balled the Chiefs to death. They were being predictable again and just edging by most of the game. The Bills are driving again and a score here on this drive would seal the game in the fourth quarter. Bills get a little itchy here with play calls and execution. A 3rd down to Kincaid, where he made the first down, was marked short. The booth could not stop the clock fast enough because the Bills wanted to go fast tempo, not substitute, so the Chiefs couldn’t bring in/off subs themselves.

Josh Allen rushes to the line and they do their quarterback sneak version of the tush-push. Josh makes the line to gain. Then out of the blue the official on the other side of the ball, who does not have the best or even dominant angle, marks it shorter than the spot actually was. The ref that actually had the better view marked it correctly, but for some reason he was overruled and the ball was spotted there. The play was challenged by the Bills, which should have been a formality. Due to how the rule is written they needed an absolute and the officials could not come to an agreement. So the challenge failed. The Chiefs take over and march down the field to score a touchdown. The Bills get the ball back, start the drive, stall the drive. On 4th down the Chiefs run a crafty corner blitz, which they had not done the entire game. Josh still beat the blitz, made an amazing MVP-type throw and Kincaid drops it. Kincaid, in his second year had injuries all year. Even though that is no excuse, he missed a lot of time. He was toughing it out. He probably shouldn’t have been out there to begin with. He almost caught it and I feel like, last year’s Kincaid makes that catch nine out of ten attempts, but he didn’t make it when we really needed it this time. I know he is a stud. He will learn from this. He will grow. Kincaid and Josh has a lot of upswing. So with that, the Bills lose the AFC Championship, with yet, another asterisk.

I get the league’s point of view here. With how the officiating was handled towards the end of the game. My argument is, you are telling me the ten or so seconds the Bills are rushing to lineup, there isn’t a person, “extremely closely,” watching the game, every play, to know what is happening, logistically, in the game, in the moment? So, no, I call bullshit, the league is just, in general, incompetent. With that said that is why I would like to see the league go with a more science approach of, ‘objective fact’ than ‘subjective choice.’ An objective fact, in football terms, is a fact whether or not the ref sees the play or not. A subjective choice is the ref’s opinion, that a foul or non-foul was committed. The ref’s opinion does not qualify as objective facts. It has to be verified by an outside source to prove the objectivity of the fact. That is why I believe all calls the refs make now need to be verified. No more back and forth. The refs on the field can no longer impact games like this. This really cost the Bills. In a year where the cries of public opinion, “the NFL is rigged,” is louder than ever. More people are saying it too. The league has a responsibility and it is not doing everything logically possible. It’s been a problem for years now, most of the 2000s. I don’t remember this being so much an issue in the 1990s. But, hey, I don’t remember a lot of shit. Maybe we need a DOGE for the NFL.

“DOFE…” —Department of Football Efficiency…

And that was the NFL season for the Buffalo Bills. Not as much drama as other years. We sort of dominated most of the year with a team that basically could do a few things better than anyone else and just being average in other areas. They pretty much handled most of the league this year with the exception of the Chiefs, Ravens, once, and the Rams. The Rams really were scoring at will against us. The Bills played tight most of the game with glimpses of success. There were signs during the game that this might not go our way. I was hoping Josh would just come out and chew up the Chiefs defense. That is what they deserved from us. A Bills team that comes in and wins 35-11 and goes to the Super Bowl. Instead they left the Chiefs off the hook with a conservative game plan disguised as an aggressive one. It almost worked till the last two drives that are going, oh, too well and you don’t trust it and some shit finally goes down. Ah, there you are my ole friend, the FUCKENING…

—So, till next year. —We will plan. —We will train.

We will draft and we will wait till next September. Go Bills (a phrase now adapted to mean whatever you want it to mean, in the moment)…

“Be good, do good, God Bless and Go BILLS” —Josh Allen, upon winning his first NFL MVP (2024-2025 NFL season).

Non solum sentit aliud Latin for, It just feels different. by David-Angelo Mineo 2/13/2025 2,763 words

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Coming Soon (2025)

Things are happening in 2025! Personal ventures I’m diving into are a mix of deep dives, essays, and fiction that explore everything from breaking down modern metal to the timelessness of logical thinking and even the eugenics of the early 20th century.

Expect new insights on The James Webb Space Telescope, an existential look at The Fuckening. Yes, you heard me right: —The Fuckening— You know that moment when everything’s going your way. You are up in the game by 7 about to win your crazy bet, and you start eyeing the universe like, “Something’s about to go down…”? Sack fumble for a touchdown happens, losing your bet. Oh, look—there it is. The Fuckening. We’re gonna discuss some Carl Jung cause of course we are gonna get into Jung Synchronicity—plus some unexpected twists in the world of film and music.

Stay tuned, stay curious, and let’s see where the journey takes us. Check out my full schedule here:

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Absurdus Definimus

In my last essay, we unpacked Two-Step Flow Theory, the decay of clarity, a concept born in the 1940s, which revealed how information doesn't directly influence the masses but filters first through self-proclaimed opinion leaders who regurgitate and pass it along. In today's age of influencers, podcasters, and thought leaders, this phenomenon has metastasized. Original thought has been replaced by shoddy car salesperson mentality, replaced by shallow echo chambers where ideas are regurgitated, not questioned and often inaccurate. People cling to out of context soundbites and follow trends, mimicking the opinions of those they admire without ever stopping to ask, “Does this even make sense?” The result? A fax-machine effect: the original message distorted beyond recognition as each copy is passed through the same fax machine, again and again to the point it cannot even be called an imitation of reality. In this deep-dive, quasi-sequel to Trickle-Down Influence, we’ll explore how this shift has fundamentally changed the way we label and define the very concepts we live by—self-image, relationships, energy and vibes, people in leadership roles, social media's outlook on reality, news and politics, the philosophy of lying to oneself, and even black hole logic as it relates to nihilism and existentialism.

Dancing with the Absurd. The musings on meaninglessness, masks, and the relentless march of time. Life is, at its core, an absurd comedy—an elaborate joke whose punchline remains stubbornly blurry. And yet, here we are, desperately trying to decipher its meaning. We cling to relationships, careers, beliefs, and labels as if they might redeem the madness of it all. Spoiler Alert: they don’t and won’t. Take relationships, for instance. A good one should make you feel loved, protected, and free—key ingredients for the human experience. But how often do we find ourselves knotted in something far from that ideal? Instead of freedom, there’s codependency. Instead of love, an exchange of obligations. Instead of protection, an emotional minefield. Yet we persist, convincing ourselves that one time in many this person is actually good to you that a shared Netflix account is enough to justify the charade. It’s not. Break up. Immediately. Save your coffee budget and your sanity.

A relationship is supposed to make you feel loved, protected, and free. If you do not feel these things in your relationship. Break up with them immediately. Next to codependency this is probably the number two main reason why I am single and haven't thought about it differently in over a decade. No amount of purchased coffees will change that till I can see it for myself. Words with no intention is just as meaningless and damaging than lies are. Let that sink in for a minute or two.

But let’s talk about labels because, boy, do we love those. They’re the cliff notes of definition, the shorthand for understanding a thing—or pretending to. Yet how often does the definition match the reality? We call society "civilized" despite its starvation for systemic decay and casual cruelty. We slap words like “progress” on actions that stagnate or regress, go backward. A thing is what we label it until the mask slips and reveals its true, ugly face. That’s the absurdity of it. The process doesn’t matter, right? Wrong!!! How we arrive at our definitions is everything. Otherwise, we’re just spinning tales to distract ourselves from the gaping void beneath.

Speaking of masks, have you noticed how people wear them like armor? We mirror each other, perform authenticity dances, and play the roles expected of us. But anger peels that mask off faster than that “Smile” demon at the end of the first “Smile” movie. When someone’s mad, you see the real them. And trust me, it’s rarely a pretty sight. It’s like staring into a human black hole—a singularity of resentment, narcissistic-sociopathy and self-deception. You can spot them easily: always angry, always playing the victim, always blaming someone else for their garbage life. Never introspective, never reflecting. They’ll drain you of energy, of hope, of patience, of house and home and your bank account. If they’re not actively draining you, they’re just waiting for the right moment to flip the switch and siphon what’s left. Your gut screams to run, your brain tries to reason and your heart will lie to you because that one time if felt good from this person’s actions. Listen to your gut, not your heart because your heart will trick your brain. It cannot trick your gut. You just ignored it.

“If it jiggles, its fat…” —Arnold Schwarzenegger

Labels are important. They are definitions for whatever 'a thing' or 'this thing' is, it is its attributes. However, when the definition of the label doesn't actually match up to what the thing is and/or represents is when delusion creeps into it. Beware of such things. We live in a (cult)ture where a thing is a thing till it is not. How we got there is unimportant. Oh, but it actually is, it actually is. It is important when said process has no logical basis for existence other than a feeling, which is a belief, which is an opinion. While truth and facts can be generated in this way it is NOT always, nor even most of the time or even "some" of the time. This desire isn't to evolve or expand in anyway. It is to control, devolve and keep in a box, the origins and original state of the concept... So does this statement say the hard truths? It sure does. It can also motivate, but if it triggers, we should ask why that is. You cannot blanket statement a thing into conception. It must be labeled and that label must have a logical definition for it to take hold.

Ah, energy. The universe’s currency. Mine’s literal currency of the universe, and I’ve learned to guard it fiercely. Most people are counterfeit—a lesson I’ve learned from hanging around the wrong crowds. You can and will lose parts of yourself. It’s a bleak equation, but it’s also liberating. Cut them off. Be ruthless about that. The fewer black holes in your orbit, the better. Anger can bring out both the absolute truth of who a person is and those brief moments can undo a lifetime of work and possibly a lifetime of lying to one’s self. I have seen this first hand. I have also experienced it to such a level, above all else, I do my very best to stay away from situations and people that bring that out of me. My personal ability when I lash out in this type of anger can make one believe I am a personification of Satan itself. I am not that bad a human being when compared to most that have been a victim of the system of one’s emotional and mental turmoil. You know what’s hilarious? The way people act like relationships are some mystical bond when really it’s just a glorified energy exchange. Surround yourself with the wrong people, and suddenly you’re broke—emotionally, mentally, physically. The modern women that complain why they are single should really pay attention to deep dives like this... The most unattractive thing I see in women is codependency. The big red flag? I ever tell you all how much I hate the color red outside the aesthetic? A color that looks great but always seems to represent something that a person or a group of people will find something negative about. How you feel after hanging out with them. Do you feel lighter, happy, maybe even inspired? Cool, they’re probably not terrible. Do you feel drained, stressed, like you need a nap and a stiff drink just to recover? Yeah, they’re bad news. And you know your gut is screaming it before your brain catches up. Listen to it. Honestly, my circle’s tiny for a reason. Less drama. Less noise. Less emotional-vampires. Just people I know, I can trust to have my back, and I do the same for them. If it’s not mutual support, it’s not worth my time and my universal currency. Nova… Something New…

Of course, the absurdity extends beyond personal relationships. Our broader systems and political affiliations are just as flawed, just as blind to their own contradictions. People tend to associate and/or glorify hard work, duty and service with a positive outcome. That also just isn't real or true. Tell that to the 30-year habitual smoker who gets lung cancer and dies a horrible death. Now, do they deserve this horrible death? No, of course not. No one actually "deserves" this. However, they earned it... They did the "hard work." They did their duty as a loyal smoker. They serve blindly to the Tabaco companies to get there though. Tell that to the minimum-wage workers drowning in debt and can’t pay their rent. Tell that to medically ill or injured patients who cannot even get their insurance companies that they payout each month to keep their mandate to its customer-base, (us).  The truth is that effort doesn’t always yield positive reward—it just creates momentum, and not all momentum leads uphill. Momentum doesn’t have feelings. It’s just a thing we have a misunderstood relationship with and that thing does not care whether you believe it is real or not. Logic simply does not care. ‘It’s, logic…’ It makes sense whether you want it to or not. It just is. 1+1 does not equal 3. And yet, we label ourselves a civilized society. We wear it like a badge of honor while shoving our collective heads in the sand. Is it any wonder that people snap under the weight of this hypocrisy? Violence is never justifiable, but it’s often understandable. That’s the uncomfortable truth. We’re a species teetering on the edge of chaos, pretending that prayer will keep the facade of civility holding on. It won’t. Not forever. People of today really do not understand dimensional thinking or appreciate the concept of infinity in relation to finite time, like a human lifespan. They do not understand it nor do they respect it.

On December 4th, 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was stalked, shot, and killed in a shocking act of violence outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. The alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione, was captured shortly after and found to have penned a manifesto rallying against the injustices of the healthcare system—an industry he accused of thriving on greed at the expense of human lives. While the act itself was horrifying, it illuminated an uncomfortable truth: society's lie of civility is wearing thin, and the systems we rely on to define fairness and justice are unraveling. People are reaching a breaking point, and the cracks are showing not just in the extreme actions of individuals but in the very fabric of how we function as a collective. The question isn’t just what led to this specific tragedy—it’s how we, as a society, got here in the first place. What does it mean to be "civilized" when the very systems we champion often push people to the brink?

I am like some or even most of you, in some medical way or another. I have been denied twice for Social Security by people who literally have NO Real Understanding with people with real disabilities. How it affects their ability to gain jobs they can do, feel comfortable doing and do not add additional stresses upon that could adversely affect their disabilities.  I am sorry this happened to this person. However, I understand it. I usually would have a little more real human compassion and/or value with violence in general, but when I look at what this one guy represents. I am surprised how rare this actually happens. Granted this one person may or may not be directly responsible. However, he is the captain of the ship and the captain of a ship assumes all responsibilities of the people and policies they govern over. How many people under this CEO work very hard at finding some sort of logical loophole in their contracts to keep the customer-base, (us) paying their monthly fees while denying as many claims as possible. That’s right. Instead of hiring people to find out whether or not the claim is legitimate. They hire people with the core mission to find a way to deny these people. Sounds like that is exactly what America needs and what the American people pay for. No, we pay insurance to handle our messes when they happen. We paid into the system and when we need the system to keep their mandate they find some way to deny all accountability. Is it really a surprise someone, anyone, one or more would not see this for what it is and then take action about it? Regardless if we look at the act of murder as right or wrong is irrelevant. The question is: How did we get here to begin with? Not whether the act taken, and the reason for the action of a gunshot to the back of the head is justifiable or not. I say: what did you think was going to happen? Did anyone, anywhere really think this wasn’t going to happen, eventually?

If it were I in a situation where I ran a billion dollar company that gains most of its profits off the misery of others. I'd be really scared. I’d be scare for others like this, their families. Shit, their kids. If the government doesn't laydown hard punishments for these actions more people are going to do this. I have seen both the left and right-sided media saying that this isn't how civilized humanity behaves. Oh, do they have this half-ass backwards very misled idea of where we are right now. I can debate this one all day and night. This is what they do though. They will get deep on a subject contextually when it benefits them but when it shatters their control, they apply their one-size-fits-ALL approach and hide behind that. Plain and simple we do not live in a civilized society. We say we do. We label it as such, but in actual practice we are one step away from the edge of the singularity. A place where once you are in it you can never escape it. Human's as a whole are almost at the edge of that point. After that it is a slow death till all of humanity is gone.

As I have said, I have seen both the left and right-sided news media doing this but it was FOX news putting the political spin on this where they shouldn’t have. They immediately pointed at the left media for glorifying this but they really weren’t. They were trying to explain why it is understandable while not acceptable, but understandable. Because the left media is so left biased their spin on everything tends to make the right-sided news media react to it. I just didn’t agree that the right looked at the left and pointed fingers when both sides of the news and the people that follow them said virtually the same thing but in different rhetoric which does not require facts or truth in its wording to be labeled as rhetoric. People of all makes, models, and yes, political affiliations are saying good riddance. While I do not support acts of violence like this, I do understand it. One can understand something and even agree to an "extent" and not be "for" the murdering of CEOs who represent pain and misery for many Americans. I don't just pick on the Left. Here is a clear virtue signal from the right media, probably and mostly FOX news. I really hate when both sides of the media paint this trash up for all of us to consume and then turn around and all those alleged facts, news, being considered "informed." TRASH...

I feel the same about the UnitedHealthcare CEO. He may not have “deserved” what happened to him but damn it, he did the work to get there. If one makes their living off the backs of others and that work causes massive amounts of pain and suffering to its own customer-base is it really a surprise this happened? I am surprised it hasn't happened, I don’t know, daily... It would not be a surprise that terminally ill people out there frustrated, fantasizing about plotting and now the media just gave a pass for others to do this. Granted they are not saying it directly. The left is playing the hero card while the right is disgusted by anything the left does or says, which is exactly what the left did for the last decade to the right. This is why I am cynical about this stuff. It is a hideous fashion show in and of itself. It isn’t even self-aware enough to notice what it is doing. Or maybe it is... So while I do not directly think it is cool to make waves like this, it isn’t at all a surprise either. It’s understood, just people do not want to have uncomfortable conversations about where we are as a society and why these things happen. I have found over time with my interactions with people with money is they lack situational awareness about the implications of what they represent. When you're the captain of a ship, you're responsible for everything that happens on it—good or bad. This includes the actions of the crew because their behavior reflects directly on you as the leader. Now apply that to big business, especially tech, pharma and the media. That concept always stuck with me.

I am a firm believer of black hole logic. That if you get too close to the singularity no matter what you do, you are getting sucked into it. Situations, feelings and even people can be like that too. They are black holes. If you happen to notice them the best you can do for yourself is ignore them. Don't even let them know you noticed them or their actions. NOTHING... They can grab onto anything and once close enough the hole does its thing... Consumes... If you know a person, situation or have feelings like this and you are close to them. You will probably never be able to do enough for them and that is the point. Black holes disallow that functionality by default and nothing natural can change that as black holes are not natural within our reality to begin with. That is why reality itself vanishes in and around black holes as we know it. What can you do that will actually defy those odds?

The opinions of the minorities tends to get ignored because the message is usually nonsensical and doesn’t make a lot of common sense to the majority. The majority doesn’t understand because the message is to bring minority-sentiment up and majority-sentiment down. It doesn’t benefit the majority. Now couple that with the volume being extremely loud and what do you have? A very loud, nonsensical opinion that only favors the very few, takes from the very many, which is the backbone, and creates even more chaos, because the underqualified minority cannot qualify to be part of the majority; so they bring the standards of what the majority is, down to fit in the minority. That is why their opinion doesn’t matter. Instead of going back and re-evaluating, re-organizing their opinion to make sense to the larger majority, they just double down and get louder, using the same nonsensical ideas they had before. Except now they are screaming it. Getting angry and screaming your very poorly thought out idea that the majority finds poorly thought out does not make the idea any more important, right, accurate or correct. It is exactly what it is. A very poorly thought out idea, now with the volume turned up so loud one cannot even hear the message. They just want it to stop. Their opinion never mattered and it matters even less now. Before it was just a loud scream and now it’s a quiet whisper due to their literally not being enough of them since Social Media pulled the plug on the mass delusion that is modern-day woke, liberal, progressivism. Volume has never been, nor will it ever be, a measure of quality and its always been about quality over quantity. They support murderers because they themselves are the murderers. They do support shit and it’s not from a bull. They may be disguised as ‘thinking-people.’ Their version of thinking can only be defined as ‘pseudo-intellect’ where the word ‘pseudo’ literally means made-up. Even the Punk Rock movement of the late 1970s, all of the 1980s and in a different way, the 1990s, isn’t even punk rock anymore. It’s a memory of a time when being loud and noisy worked to gain the attention of those that did not understand two to three generations of teenagers that later became adults and learned the system they hated was fake the whole time, but becomes real, for a price if and when they sell out to the corporate punk of today’s society. The punk of today is Jimmy Kimmel, a corporate troll that says they are punk but really just a talking head of bullshit that’s paid and taken care of by the very people punk was supposed to hate.

So yeah, those people that literally creep into some of your all’s direct messages, belittling you in the DMs is because they do not want others to know of how much a lazy piece of shit human they really are. People who do things in shadows are cowards. If they really believe what they believe about you or the winning side of this single snake with two heads facing each other would not be afraid to announce that on the public side of the platform. No; they do it in private, because they do not want the masses to know who they are, how petty they are, and what they are really about. Only weak losers want to dictate to others from the back.

They cannot lead from the back. You have to be in the front and to get to the front you have to endure a lot of crap from extremely superficial and weak-minded narcissistic-sociopathic people that actually hate themselves more than they hate you. Something about people who attempt to lead from the back with rhetoric, which is just fancy talk to make things that do not add up, add up. Rhetoric does not require facts in its words to be true or real, just that phrases sound like they are true or real. One cannot lead from the back because leadership requires setting the direction and being out front to guide others. If one or many are always behind, they can't inspire, make quick decisions, or effectively address challenges as they arise. Leadership is about being visible and proactive, not passive or hidden. Most people doing things in the shadows are shady, up to no good. Want to cheat you and you not know it is them. I do not know what is more cowardice than that? So taking a little bully jab here and there disguising it as a joke is someone working, dealing in the shadows. One cannot explain logic, common sense or even critical thinking to others that live in the shadows. They have their own goals of being miserable and their only motivation is to make you and others not like them, just as miserable as they are, if not more.

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness." — Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” In this passage, the character Father Zosima advises against self-deception, emphasizing that lying to oneself leads to an inability to distinguish truth, resulting in a loss of self-respect and the capacity to love. This self-deception can cause individuals to take offense easily, even inventing insults, leading to genuine hostility.

What’s left, then? Why keep going when every step feels like walking a treadmill pointed toward entropy? Because even in the absurdity, there are moments—tiny, fleeting sparks of meaning. A shared laugh. A kind gesture. Perhaps the best sex you ever had and from the least person you expected it from and where. A rare connection that doesn’t drain but fills. These moments matter, even if they’re doomed to decay. So, what’s the point? Maybe there isn’t one. Or maybe the point is simply to keep dancing with the absurd—to find joy in the futility, meaning in the nonsense, and connection in the chaos. It’s not much, but it’s enough. And if it’s not? Well, at least it’s honest. Above all, don’t lie to yourself. Reality is already cruel enough without the weight of self-deception. In the end, we’re all just cosmic dust swirling in the vast absurdity of the universe. But for a brief moment, we’re here. So why not laugh at the joke, even if we don’t understand the punchline? For the love of sanity start loving yourself more…

“Then I glanced at the ring on my finger. The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from - but where did all you zombies come from?” —Robert A. Heinlein, "'—All You Zombies—'"

Absurdus Definimus Latin for We Define Absurdity by David-Angelo Mineo 1/22/2025 4397 Words

[mineofilms]

Destillare-Influence

“There’s a concept called two-step flow-theory and what it says is that there are precious few original thinkers in the world and because most people feel like they have to have an opinion on everything; because that's the world that we live in at the moment, but very few people can be bothered to do original thought, and do the research. People just take on the opinion of whoever their favorite thought leader is…” ~Chris Williamson

I don’t know of all the people I know –know people like this, but at one time I spent quite a bit of energy in life catering to people like this. I knew, hung out, worked for, drank with, had intimate relations with all sorts of people like this. It made me sick to my gut for years. When I stopped drinking four and a half years ago the mechanisms I had to tolerate these behaviors out of others got excommunicated and now I can no longer tolerate people like this that seem to constantly just regurgitate the same ideals of their favorite thought leader, alpha spoke’s model, influencer, podcaster, self-help guru, sale’s mentorship specialist, opinion leaders and/or self-appointed gatekeepers, trickling their often oversimplified or self-serving ideas down to their followers, who then regurgitate those ideas without much critical thought. I have always directly challenged the authenticity and originality of these individuals.

The Decay of Clarity…

Faxing Reality into Oblivion…

Imagine you take a pristine document right out of the printer—a crisp declaration of a concept’s meaning—and feed it into a fax machine. The machine faithfully copies it, spewing out a slightly degraded version. Now take that slightly degraded version, load it back in, and repeat. With every iteration, the lines blur, the text smudges, and once-clear details dissolve into approximated assumptions. By the tenth copy, the document resembles only a few attributes of commonality from its original. It’s both on paper and both has language on them. That is about it. If you can make out a word or phrase? Hey, good for you. Here is a fortune cookie. Inside the fortune it says; “Context is the key to communication.” This is what happens when information is passed along without care—when the original is no longer referenced, and each degraded version becomes the new truth. The words are still there, but meaning is bled with every cycle, leaving behind noise in place of substance. What began as a clear coherent message becomes unrecognizable, an exercise in word salad masquerading as communication. And this is more than a technical phenomenon; it's a metaphor for the human condition. Whether it’s the distortion of a faxed document, the endless reinterpretation of labels and truths, or the former Vice President’s now infamous word salads of logic. The result is the same: clarity fades, leaving behind a muddled, chaotic an extremely inaccurate imitation of reality.

That is essentially is what Two-step flow theory is. A concept in the field of communication. In the 1940s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his team studied voting behavior during the U.S. presidential election and made a groundbreaking discovery: media didn’t directly influence the masses. Instead, messages flowed first to opinion leaders—trusted, socially connected individuals—who then interpreted and passed them along to others. Flash forward to the age of social media and add a third element to this concept. The blind acceptance and following from these trendsetters lacking any original thinking abilities. In today's society, where it is expected to have an opinion on everything, people tend to adopt the viewpoints of their preferred thought leaders without checking the actual and practical validity of these concepts, instead of engaging in original thought and conducting thorough research themselves.

I just want people to stop being a walking, talking fucking cliché of what they represent and be original with their own original thoughts on a subject, any subject, other than regurgitating someone else’s opinion as their own (Two-Step Flow Theory)... They talk and talk……and talk. Monologues/Reaction videos from other two-step flow-theory practitioners.

Andrew Tate lovers, most podcasters, even Joe Rogan (who I like, respect and value his opinion on subjects), Mister Beast, influencers of any kind that try to be glorified sale’s people, attempting to sell you the secrets of a good life. With the oversaturation of Two-Step Flow Theory practitioners that it’s just easier to be cautious about them all, which one should be skeptical anyway. Influencers/Network marketers that try to sell you some mentorship sale’s program on how to make money. Fake life coaches, pseudoscience spiritual healers. It’s so bad now there are more fake life coaches out there than real creditable ones. That Bianca brat who is always posting sexually provocative pics and videos but then tries to tell you how to live your life where it is clear she either knows very little or is another self-destructive soul that requires your blind acceptance, agrees with everything she says and purchases from whatever BS social wellness program she is trying to sell you.

Two-Step Flow Theory’s principles apply broadly to how people consume and spread ideas today. Few people question what they’re being fed, whether it’s liberal buzzwords or conservative talking points. The issue isn’t which side you’re on—it’s that almost no one bothers to think for themselves. Instead of picking the red side or the blue side, have you ever considered choosing yourself first?

Take the influencers who peddle ‘hustle culture’ or the podcasters who act like life coaches without credentials. They’re the self-proclaimed opinion leaders in Two-Step Flow Theory. People take their shallow takes, in most cases very superficial, at face value instead of forming their own opinions on a subject, any subject. It’s a vicious cycle. Few will actually paraphrase what the originator said, most will read word for word the source material and then act like they now are experts in the field. That just isn’t real. Sure, in “some” cases it does, but some of something is not most of something or all of something it is just “some.” And that’s the problem—this overgeneralization of “some” with “many” is what fuels the echo chambers we’re all stuck in today. Take politics, for instance. People latch onto a soundbite from their favorite elitist , slap it on a meme, play the bit on social media or the news, and suddenly it’s gospel. It’s a real fact without question and if you do question it you are the pariah. No one bothers to check the facts or ask, “Does this even make sense?” Instead, they repost it, reframe it, and keep the cycle going. The original idea, flawed as it may be, gets twisted and diluted, becoming something even the original speaker might not recognize. Can you read that fax I sent you? You see it with fitness influencers too. One person with a six-pack tells you to cut carbs, and suddenly everyone you know is preaching the gospel of keto, whether it works for them or not. And heaven forbid you question their methods—because if you do, you’re “just a hater who doesn’t want to see people succeed.” It’s all so lame and so very predictable from the analytical mind. And therein lies part of the problem. A group of people who desperately want to be an analytical mind, but has no concept of how to get there, because everything up to that point has either been done for them and/or they came from money and didn’t need to be analytical to make it through the world. I know many like this, or knew, as I no longer really associate myself with the types of people who live that behavior.

On that point Dana White said it best:

“I don’t dislike or hate anybody who voted for Biden. The fact that you’re the type of person that would actually hate somebody because of who they voted for shows me exactly who you are. I don’t want to know you anyway. You’re not my kind of person and I don’t want to be friends with you either. So the feeling is very mutual and it’s not because of who you voted for. It’s because of how you carry yourself.”

That to me is exactly how I feel about Two-Step Flow Theory practitioners. I don’t want to be friends with people who simply repeat other’s beliefs and/or words just because that person likes that person and looks up to them, or thinks they are sexually attractive, or thinks their music is that great, or was good in that movie; so their views on everything get a pass. They can do and/or say no wrong. Um, sure they can and they have done plenty of wrong for people to not like or follow them. If they are or are not makes no difference to me. I am not eight and this is not the 1980s. You will get some respect for what you create, but you are not a better human or worse human than I am, just because you did this thing that people hold high. I actually will challenge you more intently to see if your sum is more than this one thing you are known for.

It’s the same story with those self-help gurus on the Tik-Tok and YouTube who churn out “motivational” content. They tell you to “grind harder,” “manifest your dreams,” or “level up,” without offering much if any at all practical advice or context. And yet, their followers eat it up. Why? Because it’s easier to regurgitate those phrases than to think critically about what real growth and success look like. This isn’t to say that every influencer or opinion leader is inherently bad. There are a few—a few—who genuinely try to educate and inspire people. But they’re drowned out by the noise of grifters and charlatans who care more about clicks and cash than actual impact. And let’s be honest, the audience isn’t blameless here. If you’re blindly following someone just because they have a blue checkmark, a million followers, or just have the right shade of red in their hair and revealing boobage, you’re part of the problem.

Labels and definitions are the scaffolding of reality. They’re how we make sense of the chaos—slapping words onto the incomprehensible until it feels manageable. But what happens when the labels lie? When they no longer reflect the thing they claim to define? Enter the modern political theater, where 1 + 1 = 3 if you shout it loudly enough, and where the influence, masters of rhetorical sleight of hand, have weaponized labels not to clarify reality but to blur their own accountability.

Take President Biden’s farewell speech—a eulogy for his presidency that painted him as a good leader, a uniter, a crusader against oligarchy. A noble tale, if you ignore the evidence. Under his watch, the government bloated like a corpse in the sun, states surrendered autonomy, and the very elitists he now warns against feasted on unchecked influence. Yet Biden framed himself as the hero of a story that reads more like tragedy.

This, of course, is symbolic of a broader trend. The genius isn’t in governance but in the art of projection. Self-Projection that is. Self-projection is the act of imagining yourself in someone else’s situation or seeing your own feelings, thoughts, or traits in others. It’s like using your own experiences as a lens to understand or interpret the world around you. Whatever they’re guilty of, they slap onto their opponents with the conviction of a child caught red-handed but yelling, “They did it!” It’s not just about money, though the irony of decrying corporate greed while cozying up to the same tech moguls is almost poetic. It’s every issue: freedom of speech, systemic corruption, racism, the gender-identity issue, environmental decay, what a fact is. The louder they accuse our freedoms the more they obscure their own sins.

They cry fascism while wielding censorship like a spiked baseball, labeling dissent as misinformation and opposition as dangerous extremism. They call for equity while entrenching systems of control so vast that states, once the bedrock of American self-governance, now feel like little more than administrative districts in a federal empire. They complain about democracy falling apart while handing more power to unqualified officials and billionaires.

And the absurdity is this: people believe it. Why? Because labels are powerful. If you say something enough—if you slap the word “justice” or “freedom” on policies that achieve the opposite—the lie begins to feel like truth. Two-Step Flow Theory practitioner’s mastery of definitions has allowed them to recast themselves as protectors of democracy, even as they hollow it out.

This isn’t just about politics; it’s about logic. If definitions no longer reflect reality, if labels are untethered from facts, then society becomes unstable as it approaches its singularity; to where there can be no retrieval of any kind. Truth collapses, leaving us in a state of cognitive dissonance where nothing makes sense except the narrative shouted loudest. Volume is not a measurement of quality and it never was. President Biden’s farewell speech encapsulates this absurdity. Here’s a man who labels himself a good president while presiding over one of the most fractured, dysfunctional eras in American history. The facts say otherwise, but facts don’t matter when you control the dictionary. And so, we’re left with a choice: accept the labels, or peel them off and examine what lies beneath. Because if we cannot reclaim the power of words, and the semantics that come with them, we surrender to the chaos they create.

So, what’s the solution?

For starters, stop treating every word from your favorite podcaster or influencer, actor, musician, athlete or elected official like scripture, facts or anything other than what it really is. An opinion... Why would you pay someone a monthly subscription for their ‘opinion?’

• Challenge what they say. • Do your own research. • Have your own thoughts.

If that sounds like too much work, then maybe you shouldn’t have an opinion on any topic at all—and that’s okay. It’s better to admit you don’t know something than to clone someone else’s nonsense.

The world doesn’t need more walking, talking clichés. It needs more people willing to think for themselves, even if that means standing alone. Otherwise, we’re all just cogs in the same tired machine, spinning endlessly but going nowhere.

"Your flesh is a relic; a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you. We demand it." Machine Ambassador at the last session of the United Nations in New York. – The Animatrix (2003)

Destillare-Influence Latin for (Trickle-Down Influence) by David-Angelo Mineo 1/17/2025 2,435 Words

[mineofilms]

KADAVER DOLLS - "Outlast Us All"

January, 15th, 2025 - The time is now. “Outlast Us All” is out on all digital platforms. We have the record up via YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and many others through CDbaby. You can purchase it digitally for $6.93 on Amazon or stream it free on the platforms. For those that want an actual CD. We will have them in limited supply to start. We may even get some vinyl packages for all you collectors out there but look for something different, new and unique with the hard copy pressing of the record. We are working on it. Right now just go and listen to the record, perhaps grab a digital download or get some new merch from one of our stores. We are accepting bookings in the Southwest, Florida area. Please contact our manager, David-Angelo Mineo for inquires. When we do start playing shows here in short order we will have more stuff for you all. Baby steps. A lot of work, soul, time, and most important, patience, went into making this record come alive. If anything, it will… “Outlast Us All…”

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David-Angelo Mineo Facebook - @mineofilms IG - @mineofilms Email - mineofilms@gmail.com

[mineofilms]

Starborne Symphony

Here we are in another starborne symphony, we dance around, Forces in balance, ordered as fluidity profound. Round it is not—a corkscrew of chaos, Spiraling onward through black hole cross.

Carving a path through time and space, A relentless march, yet climb to grace. Its wrath, though cruel, wears beauty's face, Alive with rhythm, leaving pain in its wake.

Life, love, loss—the endless refrain, A melody woven with joy and pain. Through cosmic storms, we find our way, A bond unbroken, come what may.

Light that still shines, Radiant beacon through infinite lines. Love that anchors, a hope that stays, Celebrating the journey, the gifts of our days.

So here’s to the stars, the path we embrace, A toast to life, love, and loss we trace…

Starborne Symphony by David-Angelo Mineo 1/11/2025 128 Words

[mineofilms]

Nihil sub sole novum

From the End of the Beginning of this year, last year, most years, every year. Ah, a three-year odyssey, where time is less of a straight line and more of a spiral. If anything, these past few years have been a masterclass in the ironically absurd. Between the incompetence of systems that promise salvation (insurance, healthcare, politics, religion) and the existential dreariness of a body that stubbornly clings to life despite all odds, the journey feels less like progress and more like a forced march toward an inevitable, unremarkable end. One cannot help but wonder—has anything truly changed, or are we simply treading water in the flood of our own making? Our current way of life, metaphorical and literal, serves as a backdrop to this existential performative dance. The wreckage left in its wake mirrors not just the physical destruction but the internal chaos of living in an age where security is fleeting, satisfaction a myth, and self-importance via social media dominates. The grand dream of perfection—whether in homes, bodies, relationships, or ideologies—is swiftly eroding, leaving behind the stench of human vulnerability. Yet, in the face of this, there's a curious resignation. We become more connected than ever before while we are more disconnected than ever before. Defies logic, but here we are. The repairs are slow, the bills pile up, but at least there's a sense of grim humor in the absurdity of it all. One adapts, kicks rocks barefoot, to the constant erosion, which, in its own right, becomes a form of rebellion against the very systems that demand our submission.

The steady march of time continues, dragging more medical frustrations, loss, and the weary realization that life is as much about enduring as it is about achieving anything meaningful. Health problems, relationships, and even political ideologies become so much noise against the backdrop of the real question: What’s the Point? So, as the years accumulate, what is left to do but press forward, not in hope or optimism, but because time, relentless in its ticking, doesn’t really offer an alternative. The absurdity, after all, is the only thing that’s truly constant. Is your life a carefully constructed narrative, or are you simply improvising a tragic farce with occasional comedic beats? A theater of existence through a lens. From hurricanes that rip apart our homes and finances to the inevitable decay of the human body. I am always pondering the inherent futility of attempting to control the uncontrollable. Existential dilemmas emerge from mundane struggles: rebuilding without the tools or even a blueprint for the tools becomes a symbol of a compromised life in a dream where inflation ensures the rich get richer and the rest get a crash course in survival. Oh, that isn’t a dream. That’s been a reality for most of us. There’s a sharp turn into the familiar friend of entropy. Here lies the ironic absurdity of caregiving: futile efforts to prolong a life that ultimately evaporates into oblivion. Yet, I welcome musings of AI, conceptual horror, and the darkly comedic nature of politics, whether life has meaning, but whether meaning itself is the cruelest joke of all. They say “live and learn,” but if one hasn’t learned, did they ever live? Whenever I heard a “saying,” and it starts with “they say.” Who the hell are “they?” It makes me want to hunt down, “they,” slap them in the head.

Welcome in social media, the internet’s great experiment in collective brain rot. What begins as communication to gain different perspectives turns into tribalism in online spaces evolving into unhealthy internet subcultures, where trolls and influencers battle for supremacy in a digital coliseum of irrelevance. Internet idealism now reduced to a sandbox for the trivial and the vindictive. Does it even matter whether a troll, a cultist or elitist wins the argument if the platform itself is a dumpster fire of collective word vomit from narcissists? Granted elitists wouldn’t be on social media all that much. They are too busy ‘eliting’ themselves to more monies. When you have loads of cash, does one even want or need social media? Woke or unwoke, left or right, preaching the Lord’s name or not; these labels serve merely as masks for the fear that underpins human existence: the terror of being forgotten in a universe that never cared in the first place. The message—a searing reminder that the more we “connect,” the more we expose the gaping void within ourselves while disconnecting from the people that are actually in our reality. We try to venture out. One can only wave their hands so much to get someone else’s attention. If they choose to ignore that and you know deep down you were forward with that concept of communication. It isn’t on you to care. You attempted, they played dumb. Why would you accept that from any situation or person? The floodwaters of nature are matched only by the flood of systemic incompetence, with insurance premiums rising as fast as the costs of rebuilding. The house, much like life itself, becomes a metaphor for the disillusionment we all feel: repairs are never as simple as they seem, and some losses—like the pool cage and later the entire pool lanai—are just too damn expensive to replace. Yet, here we are and instead of descending into despair, we just realize life goes on, even when the dream moves slowly towards a singularity. You can’t save everything, but you can at least salvage the absurdity of it all, laugh and curse the fake God in the sky.

These reflections are framed not by sorrow, but by existential absurdism: does it matter? Does the universe even care a blip within a blip within a blip within an ocean, within a glass, on a planet that was swallowed by a giant space whale even care? In a world where the system is rigged and the body betrays you, the only thing left to do is keep moving forward—until the final, inevitable reset. Whether sudden or prolonged, life and the death of that life is just the final joke in a single frame of reference full of bad punchlines.

With that said 2025 is going to be a little different, at least in how I attack my writings. I have been so busy with some other things that I haven’t been able as much to work on my own stuff. I am slowly but actively taking all my blogs and converting them to audio/video presentations. They are not podcasts. I am just taking the written blogs or essays using an AI voiceover to read it with some sort of video attached to it. I like the audio spectrum. It’s like a "visualizer" for audio that allows you to see a visual for the sound, making it a neat little creative tool. I will be producing a real music video for the band I work with. Going low tech with that as well. Going for a 90s grunge or metal vibe of the time. I have a lot of audiobooks to get through this year. Many that deal with black hole fiction and stories revolving around time dilation. I want to put out a few short-stories this year as well and work on something bigger. As of right now I do not have a real writing schedule like I usually work from, but my next essay will be on labels. What they are and why they are important. We have had labels longer than sugar. I will probably write a lot of reviews on these science fiction books. The more of these more existential fictions the more it will draw me into thinking about reality and how I want to formulate my own stories. I got some solid ideas that I feel like I want to talk about. I think short-stories with expansion in mind is the best way for my brain to operate when writing. I will also continue to doing tech-style essays on some of the odd computer stuff I tend to tackle. So yeah, 2025 is gearing up. I am glad I am able to think about this in a healthy place in my brain and not have too many delusions of grandeur.

As I look ahead to 2025, the creative landscape feels like a vast, uncharted universe—full of potential, ready for exploration. Whether it’s blending audio-visual projects, diving into the abstract depths of existential fiction, or tackling the nuanced power of labels, the journey is ongoing. But, like a supernova, I’m aware that growth and creation are processes of expansion and contraction, marked by moments of clarity amidst chaos. It’s a balance between the infinite and the finite—an ever-evolving dance of ideas and reality. Here’s to the art of becoming.

Nihil sub sole novum Latin for (Nothing new under the sun) by David-Angelo Mineo 12/31/2024 1,467 Words