amuchmoreexotic

I would never have been gangbanged by the sentient dinosaurs if it hadn't been for my lust for a normal human man, a mammalian man of my own species; I mean a Homo sapiens sapiens hominin of the type that evolved in my home universe, which is designated by us locals as "5-brane Aleph".

(I apologise if that seems ambiguous to you. Writing erotica for a multispecies, cross-universe audience is surprisingly difficult. See Appendix A for characteristic cytochrome oxidase I "genetic barcode" data.)

A hominin who smelled faintly of cinnamon (oils produced by various species of the genus Cinnamomum - see Appendix B), with dark grey eyes that sometimes flashed green in the right light, due - I speculate - to a novel mutation in TYRP1 or some other gene involved in the melanin pathway. A sexy, sexy hominin.

And my lust for that man would never have been so intense if it weren't for the terrible representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics careers.

I am getting increasingly pissed off with the intolerant attitudes of certain people to my relationship situation. Yes, technically, I am dating my biological daughter. But I don't see why my decision as a 19-year-old to donate semen to help out my future mother-in-law (and, yes, to earn cash for the summer) should be held against me.

So-called friends have told me that pursuing my best shot of happiness, with a beautiful young woman - who is more than a year over the age of consent, by the way - is "disgusting" and "wrong". How intolerant can you get?

That callow 19-year-old, pathetically glad to find a way to monetise one of his major leisure activities, was no kind of father. He just masturbated into a vial while looking at a mediocre two-girl pictorial in a dog-eared copy of Asian Babes magazine. In what way - apart from in the narrowest, most pedantic biodeterminist sense - can you honestly say that he "fathered" my girlfriend?

And I feel he was a totally different person to who I am now. Every cell in my body (apart from certain parts of my eyes) is composed of different atoms to the ones that he was built from. Just because I happen to share his DNA and eye lenses, am I supposed to avoid a girl he had a minor role in helping bring into the world? Is it "incest" if a midwife dates a man she helped deliver? If Susie had been fathered by someone who I just happened to share a lot of the same genes with by coincidence and had also donated some eye lens tissue to (maybe because we had compatible immune systems), would you say I was "weird" or "unnatural"?

Exactly. Fucking unbelievable, you guys. Thanks for standing by me - NOT.

Does anyone know any good LJ support communities for people in cis-related relationships? Must be non-judgemental.

Hello, reality-based friends. I recently saw a comprehensive demolition of the Kalam Cosmological Argument posted somewhere. I was pretty sure it was on LJ, but I can't find it by scrolling painfully back through the Putin-controlled Javascript soup of my timeline*. Can anyone suggest what article I might have seen?

I thought it might have been posted by pw201 or squid314, but apparently not. Any suggestions? I should really use some kind of bookmarking service to keep handy debunkings of common bullshit.

*I wonder why LJ is dying.

by harrytrumansfimbriae

I hadn't been on Tottenham Court Road for ages, until this afternoon. There have been many radical changes: Mr Topper the £8 haircut frog is now being undercut by Mr Leo, the £6 haircut dachshund. You'd think Mr Leo would be a lion, but no. That's the confusing, fast-changing nature of modern culture - even stereotypical animal names aren't immune to revisionist reboots. There were some other radical changes which are too radical and unsettling for me to even bother to think of at the moment.

But a constant presence on TCR is the Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre, a slick machine which uses an ever-revolving cast of troubled souls with poor critical thinking skills to recruit other troubled souls who will, in their turn, be expected to work there for a pittance and sleep in a cupboard.

As I went past, I was handed this ticket:



I've always been interested in the philosophy of consciousness, so I thought I would go in with an open mind. <- That's what I pretended I was thinking on Twitter, because of my lurking paranoid fear that the sinister Scientology cult would be monitoring everything I was tweeting in real time. My real motivation was to go in and sneer at unfortunate cult victims and what I anticipated would be their crudely-produced cult propaganda.

Also, one of the Scieno recruiters was quite beautiful, with that pale, long-legged, big-nosed, previously-unknown-species-of-forest-deer-caught-by-automatically-triggered-camera-placed-by-zoologists quality.

I approached her about redeeming my free ticket while she was talking to another cultist. When she saw that a member of the public was actually starting a conversation with her, she broke off with a startled "Oh!". I asked when the next screening of the film was, and she told me that I could see it right away. She led me confidently right into the heart of the Centre, a space I'd only previously explored by taking photographs into it during an Anonymous meat-troll event.

As she guided me up the stairs in the back, she made mechanical chit-chat like a hairdresser or prostitute would. "Are you working today?" she asked. It was about 3pm in the afternoon. "I'm actually looking for a job," I said, and she seemed disappointed, almost as if she had been hoping to sign me up for a load of expensive mumbo-jumbo courses. I fantasised that when the film was over, I'd tell her she was in a cult, de-program her and then take her home and bang her.

The reason I could see the film right away was that I had the whole screening room (only a little smaller than the titchiest screens you get in a modern multiplex) to myself. I took a seat right in the front row and the sexy deer closed the doors on me and said "Enjoy!" almost sincerely.

I was alone in a dark room in a cult centre, live-Tweeting. Did they have night-vision CCTV to monitor me in the dark? I imagined being hauled out of the room and ejected into the street, but then I realised I would be fine with that, so I kept tweeting.

What was the film like in terms of production? I was hoping for an inept trainwreck along the lines of The Room (2003), Birdemic (2010) or Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), but the production values are actually pretty impressive for a 40-minute propaganda film. Like all the most effective propaganda, it harks back to a lost golden age, in this case 1950s America. (The production company responsible is actually called "Golden Era Productions".) The cinematography, sets/locations and the choice of character actors all work together to create an all-American bubble-gum-ad feeling.

You'll probably never bother to go and see this film (which, as I'll explain later, is a huge mistake on your part), so I'm going to indulge in the ultimate film criticism sin and just summarise the plot.

We open on a caption assuring us that this film is based on an ACTUAL CASE that's ONE OF MANY SIMILAR OCCURRENCES. We see a man in idealised 50s suburbia giving his boy a present of an American Football, wrapped in pretty ribbons but no wrapping paper. Cut to: the boy, now a man, playing American Football in a lovely stadium, still seemingly in the 1950s weirdly enough (that's not a plot point; they're not in a period simulation like in The 13th Floor (1999)).

The man has an American Football accident and is taken off on a stretcher. He awakes in a hospital bed (an establishing shot shows a sign saying "Westside Mercy Hospital" or something equally generic, which makes one wonder about the verifiability of this ACTUAL CASE). A couple of doctors discuss him like arseholes even though he's right there and conclude it's "too bad" that "he'll never walk again".

The man's blonde 1950s fiancee shows up and starts talking about their wedding and their future together. The man reminds her that he can't feel anything from the waist down, and suggests she should leave him for someone "more romantic" (which I think is code for someone who can still fuck her via pennis).

The man is cared for in the hospital until one day a nurse with a German accent turns up and injects him with something and assures him "we're doing everything we can". This is his introduction to the sinister world of psychotherapy/psychology/psychiatry (the film can never quite make up its mind which). A psychologist comes in, holding a textbook of psychotherapy, and tells the man that he has to adapt to his paralysed situation and what is holding him back from doing that is the fact that that psychologist reminds him of his father. He cusses out the paralysed man for not being "co-operative" when he raises objections, then says "very good" in a sinister way.

An even more sinister psychotherapist (?) is introduced. He has facial scarring and a goatee, spouts some Freudian psychobabble that is probably a pretty accurate pastiche of Freudianism, then tells the man that it's too late for him to be cured, and anyway, besides, curing people is against professional psychological ethics, because Freud said psychotherapy is an "interminable" process.

Then the man is taken for a brain X-ray. Off-screen nurse: "The doctor's just going to take a picture inside your head". The psycho-guys say there's no spinal cord damage, and explain the man's paralysis as a hysterical reaction. One of them is eating a sandwich as they do this, to convey his disdain for true science.

The doctors agree that the best answer is to use psychosurgery to "tinker inside his head". We see a scary surgical scene where the doctors get ready to probe the brain of the fully conscious patient - but it's all a dream.

The man's sexually-frustrated fiancee shows up again and gives him a copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, which she says was recommended by a friend. The man then spends an interminable couple of minutes of screen time reading the book aloud to the audience (ie me). He learns that problems are caused by "engrams", which are suppressed memories that aren't accessible to the conscious mind. It turns out that when he was knocked unconscious in the American Football, the coach or somebody said "Look at his legs! He'll never walk again!", which seems like a dick move, because we saw in the earlier scenes that his legs were physically fine.

He has some flashbacks to the accident, then twitches his big toe, then stands up, then jumps over a chair and dances. He leaves the hospital defiantly, against the orders of the assembled psychopomps. The one with the goatee says "This book is dangerous. It could put us out of business!!!"

The man gambols out of the hospital and into TEN YEARS LATER when it is the 60s but he has a 70s watch and a 10 year old son and his fiancee is his wife now. They play American Football together, as if the father has forgotten everything he learned about the attendant risk of spinal/engram injury. They lie together on the grass, smiling, and a caption comes up which says something like:

THE PROCESSES OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND ENSLAVE YOU. ONLY WE OFFER TRUE FREEDOM.

Just as you hope that the film is going to get really mental and descend into William Burroughs/Thomas Ligotti territory, that's it.

Here's the real misstep the Scientologists made: the door was not opened by the lovely forest deer, but by her scouse geezerbird friend. "WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT, THEN?" she asked. I said that I liked the 50s Americana feel, but I thought Scientology headquarters could have provided a localised version with English Football. "I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN, MATE," she mirrored me skilfully, "I'M SO ENGLISH, ME, I'M LIKE, WHY IS IT AMERICAN?"

Then she showed me a two-minute film set in the modern day, emphasising that my problems come from when I was beaten by my Dad, scraped my knee as a little girl, and when my mum bumped into a kitchen drawer when I was in the womb. She asked me what I thought of it, and I told her that it seemed just as kooky as Freudianism, and left.

3 stars out of 5.

It's not the train-wreck I'd hoped, but it's free entertainment, and by going to see it, you consume the resources of an evil cult. You should see it. The staff are constantly changing, so you can go and see it again and again without them realising what's up. It could be your new The Room. Why not learn the lines and shout out the worst ones? "THE DOCTOR'S JUST GOING TO TAKE A PICTURE INSIDE YOUR HEAD!". Why not dress up as your favourite character, or throw copies of Dianetics at the screen? Anyone up for a mass visit on Saturday?

A couple of days ago, everybody was linking to this recipe from vintage_ads:



It's easy just to retweet that kind of thing. I actually cooked it.



Here's a Storify of my live-tweeting.

Now let's never speak of this again.

So my local church had an open day where you could go in the belfry
and see them ring the bells.

I was interested in the mechanics of how the bells work, so I went to
have a look. Look at the notation they use to record patterns:




The column on the right looks kind of like DNA replicating, or chromosomes crossing over during meiosis, albeit a fucked-up four-stranded version of a type that is probably going on all the time inside Sarah Palin.

Right at the apex of their temple to their undead god, they are almost stumbling over the *true* meaning of life.

When aggressive secular humanism finally disestablishes the Church and seizes its property, and this particular church is reconsecrated to Darwin, I think we should keep ringing the bells. They'll serve as a reminder that we are all here because of the mindless variation of repetitive patterns in the four DNA bases.

That's after we've used the two biggest bells' ropes to hang the last priest and the last king (it turns out human entrails aren't strong enough to strangle someone with - your colon is about as strong as damp cardboard, which is why you should never put anything up past your rectum).

I can hear them now, still ringing away. Little do they suspect. The Christ-loving idiots.

Community was good this week.

In evolutionary terms, this is pretty much the worst case scenario for being raped:



There's paternity uncertainty between your rapist and your pair-bonded mate, so you can't just leave the baby on a hillside. (In fact, the article reveals that she was raped by three men, so it's not just a matter of subconsciously assessing the relative genetic quality of a single rapist versus her boyfriend).

Your mate might suspect you were trying for some sneaky extra-pair copulation and then pretending you were forced, and consequently leave you or exercise tighter control over you, limiting your opportunity for extra-pair copulations with males you might actually want to cheat with. Perhaps to limit the impact of that, the rapee in the article instinctively blames her boyfriend for not protecting her, trying to cast him as an inadequate beta male:



Note that she says "even as I said it, I knew I didn't mean it" - her instinctive response to protect her genetic future overrode her capacity for reason.

Throughout most of human evolutionary history, this situation would be a disaster for the girl's inclusive fitness. Impregnated by a mate of dubious genetic quality, at risk of losing the parental investment of her pair-bonded mate and perhaps of being shunned by her community as a potential catalyst of destabilising intermale competition - it's not a good situation to be in. The mental adaptation we label "post-traumatic stress disorder" is very likely to kick in in an attempt to prevent any repeat of the situation, forcing the poor girl to reflect on the events leading up to the rape again and again. Of course, the rape wasn't her fault, but to the cruel and impersonal forces of evolution, fear and self-blaming is adaptive if it reduces your chances of being raped even a little bit. Perhaps your anguish also convincingly signals to your community that you weren't deliberately cheating.

But this story has a happy ending, thanks to science:



For the first time in history, women are empowered to find out the father of the child and abort it selectively, denying the rapist his evolutionary legacy.

In a modern environment with access to safe, selective abortion, what purpose does the PTSD mechanism serve? It's a pointless relic that can only cause anguish.

Now while Western society doesn't invest enough in helping rape survivors, luckily it does excel in ambitious military research. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is already looking for ways to eliminate PTSD - with a pill - or even a vaccine - to prevent or interrupt the stress response. Obviously, DARPA's agenda is to keep soldiers who've seen and done horrible things fighting their dismal colonial wars, but if they succeed in the project, we can use the resulting pharmacological know-how to drastically reduce the pain of rape survivors; at the very least, the trauma of rape could be reduced to that of an ordinary assault.

But even if the technical challenges can be overcome, I predict the main obstacle to making this happen is that certain outrage junkies might object to reducing the suffering of rape survivors, because it would interfere with their ability to wallow in righteous anger at the suffering of rape survivors.