Matthew Moulton (@Onideus)

Okay, let's do a SCARY story! D: Let's get a nice vibe goin in my emotional cortex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5fN65oNls *takes a long toke at reality* What if our reality is being invaded by "flat earthers". Think about it... they could be from a dimension of literally ENDLESS resources... where... you can travel out and find oceans... lakes... rivers... land... every biome you can ever imagine... forever! Not simply "flat earth" but "multidimensional earth". That's what it would be, effectively... a "flat earth" would be every dimension of earth existing all at the same time... endless earth... effectively the immediate inside of the outside of the entirety of the universe would make up its land mass... meaning it can always become larger than it is... not just infinite... but infinitely growing! Build one town right next to another... and in 100 years the two towns will be 100 miles apart! Those people... they may have used their infinite resources to do something horrendously stupid. What I'm getting at is... their reality might still exist... we, that is, the ENTIRETY of our universe... may actually exist as a ~region~ of the effective "flat earth". Perhaps those "flat earthers" attempted a stupid experiment to see just how "deep" the "flat earth" really was... they may have detonated the Big Bang itself. That is, our entire universe is just one HOLE in the true "flat earth"... it's THAT deep! I wasn't kidding when I said INFINITE resources! As in... you can dig down effectively forever! Our entire universe is probably not even anything more than an effective pebble stepped into the mud! Sucks for us, cause... infinite resources... at infinite arms length. But if everything that can possibly ever exist... does so... then what would be the point? You might as well just explore your own imagination, it wouldn't be any different than exploring random access infinity... except, you'd be the one in control of it. But then, if you could control everything... would anything be real at all? I do this fun thing sometimes, like right now I'm playing Hogwarts Legacy, but... I like to imagine that the game is life itself in some manner of speaking. Sort of like an anime Isekai adventure, except I pretend I'm reincarnated as the only real sentience in a FAKE world... and I have to like... find a way to live in that FAKE world with all the FAKE people... and I like to think to myself... is this a world I could sustain in? The answer I've found... is a trick. You see, I enjoy playing games with CODES as a means of speeding up the game play... which is fun! Mostly because you can play MORE games instead of just... the SAME game. Because the truth is, yes, you really could play a game like Hogwarts Legacy... for months... potentially even YEARS on end... at normal game play speed, playing the game without any codes or shortcuts or even any online guides... the game would be nearly as challenging as real life is. You see, the insidious thing is... the games are fun... but the games can be used to enslave you, to create digital chains that tie you to an artificial version of reality... enough so that you won't realize the inhuman conditions you're already living under. I'm talking about your actual physical reality, sorry, not just the games. Your life is just a precursor to something much greater... but only if you have the capacity to comprehend something greater than just yourself. So, like when I speed run these games with my little thought experiments... I take the time to study the artistry and ingenuity that went into making the artificial reality itself. In doing so I can see glimpses into the creators imagination and emotions as they translated them into an artificial reality. I do the same thing with real, physical reality. I try to see glimpses of the light of creation itself, between the cracks of society's alluring temporal thrall. This is the basis of perceptual speed running... data forecasting... to try and think ahead of yourself, by knowing what you are, what you're made of, what you want, etc, etc. Situational awareness taken to situational control. I don't simply "play" video games... I make the game into whatever I want by playing it the way that I want. Because I respect the artistry, enough that I don't simply want to subscribe to it so much as seek to understand it using my own reasoned autonomy. That's the joy of creation... not as a means of control seeking, but as a means of inspiring further creation, with the intent of evolving the only thing that truly matters... our minds.