How to Predict A Sports Champion With Gematria - Late 2026 Edition

I thought it was time to update the old classic, the introduction for a lot of people to the insanity of sports betting gematria.  Translation:  I’m kind of bored and I should be celebrating my upcoming 10 year anniversary and two millionth view.  And never earning a penny.  So enjoy the typos and bad grammar.

I’m going to do a quick overview that’s not entirely sports, conspiracy theory gematria.  They are for all practical purposes the same, although there are some that mostly or entirely skipped the sports part and went for the social culture war, political, and occult cliques without the usual financial hook.  Although whining for money constantly was always there.   There are a couple reasons to bother.  Qanon is making a minor comeback.  An extinction burst of attention with the relevancy having dropped off over the past several years.  Also, we’ve got AI overviews.

The first screenshot of a continuous overview summary:

Confirmation bias drives the practice.  It’s the sole reason conspiracy gematria is a “thing”.  Other than that some weirdos love attention so much they do it for free, it’s inevitable that you would bump into someone who preys upon others confirmation bias to make a quick buck.  The Attention Economy and Grifter Economy are inexorably twined.  And since people never get enough gambling it’s not going away.  The natural go to is American football.

1).  The Self Reinforcing Loop

People are naturally biased towards a particular.  A talented bullshitter can easily point the newcomer to the basics.  Either make a quick starter video with nothing but the basics or a 30 second or minute rundown as an introduction for the start of a “decode”.  The self reinforcing loop begins with personal favorites.  Eventually with enough playing around with the loose set of rules (which can be ignored all willy nilly) it is quite difficult for an amateur to not find a match.  And literally impossible for someone who knows what they are doing to not find a match.  For the four most common ciphers, ordinal, reverse, and their reductions LIONS = 69, 24, 66, 30.  Even without asking the self proclaimed expert, the Lions fan will start fucking around on their own, start to find matches with their beloved team and it’s off to Diamond City on the talking crazy train.

2)  Phraseshopping/Cherry Picking

But what do you do when you’re incarcerated in confirmation bias jail and your 69, 24, 66, 30 doesn’t work?  Change your wording.  LION, singular, is close enough.  DETROIT.  You betcha that’s close enough.  Feeling really frisky?  DETROIT LIONS.  Or even THE DETROIT LIONS.  New words, different numbers.  And ALL the misses can be ignored!  It’s fucking magic!  Then you can play around with anything related to the team, Ford Field, Jared Goff and other player names.  And don’t get me started on birthdays and the magic of finding things that aren’t even really gematria.  At least not yet.  If you can’t find a 69, 24, 66, or 30 with the side dishes, you simply aren’t very good at it.

The AI calls out “ominous” numbers for conspiracy gematria.  In football there are meme numbers that are mostly the favorites of your narrator.  33 Thursday, everyone knows to be looking out for 33s.  The neophyte is trained to look for specific numbers.  Some experts don’t  even bother to make betting picks.  You don’t earn a nickname like After the Fact Zach without gaining the disrespect of thousands for waiting to decode until after the game.  But before, or after, it doesn’t matter.  Pick a game, especially the Super Bowl

And pick both teams.  Works every time.  There’s always a sucker out there who falls for it.  Oh look, the league rigged the game so that both teams have a 30 narrative.  Then when he recaps and finds a couple 30s, you’ve forgotten that picking both teams is never a winning option for placing bets.

When you’re using gematria for sports bets, it’s really the same as a vibe or gut feeling or random chance.  There are people that have been taking the results for the last ten years+, and the results are legitimately not spectacular.  It’s the same results as non gematria gambling experts on YouTube.  Short of insider information on injury reports or spending lots of time analyzing actual data, the leagues aren’t rigged and you can’t get an edge.  If the leagues aren’t rigged it’s certainly not some missed 4th down by a player wearing jersey number 36 on his 36th birthday.

Yes, sports gematria isn’t terribly popular right now.  But who knows when it will make a comeback.  Maybe 50 years from now someone will stumble upon the golden era of grifting, find it, try it out on a couple of friends and start up a mini cult all over again.

And maybe someday there will be something else just as stupid as gematria.  And gematria is stupid.  By design.  Like the Xenu story in Scientology it’s a loyalty test.  You believe in this?  Hey, I’m going to the World Trade Center next month and I need gas money.  Or I’m buying a building.  Because if it’s not a Patreon gambling club there’s lots of other side hustles to go along with the main hustle.

Godzstalgia

It is my honor to be a pretentious douchebag and spoil Godzilla Minus Zero for you if you haven’t seen it.

Like many children growing up in the 60s and 70s I became fascinated with dinosaurs.  So Godzilla was a must watch.  Every weekend one of these.  And I didn’t know enough about real world crises to understand anything beyond the simplistic dichotomy.  Godzilla = good.  Other monster = bad.  Nuance wasn’t important, these were the family friendly Japanese films, a franchise intended for profit more than epic story telling.  And quite fun for a kid who wasn’t supposed to be exposed to the first two of this Showa era of Godzilla.

Way oversimplified it had a message.  You nuked us.  Ordinary, innocent civilians got nuked.  A very naughty topic subject to scrutiny of all governments trying to cope with Cold War fears.  Over the 20ish years of Showa era Godzilla, other than these first two, there was just one that went outside the kiddie comic books dichotomy.  Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster.  Pollution is the enemy.  So in addition to two gigantic monsters clomping around until an excuse is made for a big showdown, the naughty topic of pollution was brought up.  Naughty, because propaganda suggests burning up fossil fuels = always good because money = always good.  Extremely naughty topic because instead of a culture war Americans = nuclear villains = bad, Japan as a group of tiny little islands with way more people than natural resources can support has had, oh mercury in fish meat among other more mundane pollution problems.

Godzilla Minus One lay cooking in fertile brains as Godzilla shuffled through more monster vs monster standard movie stuff.  Shit blows up.  Bad monster dies.  Catharsis achieved.  And despite scripts trying at times or not even bothering it’s hard to feel much concern for the idiot humans involved.  Even the children.  Brandon Tenold on YouTube calls them “Kennys.”  A very young child you’re *supposed* to care about, but is so annoying you wish Godzilla would accidentally stomp on him.  Fortunately the child Kennys would grow up into stupid sexy teens and get an harpoon in the chest in slasher films, but that’s for another day.  

Until Godzilla Minus One.  Actual character development.  Actual skill, craft, and effort into something that just so happens to have a giant monster in it.  Something to chew on.

So, people being people, when the sequel was announced it was speculation time.  Would there be a monster for Godzilla to fight?  If so, which one.  People *cared* about the big lizard and humans more than they had since Millie Bobby Brown didn’t gain her official Kenny (Kendra?) status.  And Hedorah was on the list.  People wanted it to be a possibility.  A relevant societal point with actual investment in a good story?

And then the announcements were teased out after much vague pre-teasing to add to the speculation that worked like a charm.  It was going to be King Ghidorah, the three headed dragon monster.  A worthy choice for Godzstalgia fans, but how would the societal relevance be achieved?

And now the spoilers.  They went back to the old classic, the atomic bomb.  It’s set in the 1940s, so yeah.  But here’s what they added in.  The way I took it.

Godzilla and Ghidorah through sci fi magic technology stuff are lured into close proximity.  Yeah!  A proxy war!  Because the U.S. military brass secretly wants the “how to control Godzilla” technology.  And they haven’t forgotten about the You Nuked Us! revenge stuff.  A dream sequence from the mad scientist who made the magic controlling Godzilla thing.  He’s pissed.  He survived Hiroshima, his family did not.  He yearns to lure Godzilla to New York City and give ‘em a taste of their own medicine.  Statue of Liberty destroyed.  New York in flames.  First R rating in Godzilla history achieved.

And it wasn’t censored, which you might expect in Trumpmerica.

Ultimately, the human pawns figure out they’re being used.  They go through with the basic create a monster vs. monster fight because - two things can be wrong at the same time.  A chance to stop one is better than both being a problem forever.  The key to the solution is foreshadowed.  To awaken Godzilla they track him down while he’s slumbering or watching  reruns of Kevin Sorbo in Hercules or whatever.  Instead of immediately doing more city destruction he swims off into the sea.  The force of nature angle, he really just wants to be left alone.  The only friends he needs are the sequel bait chummed into the 2 hour + run time.

A fully satisfying end to the monster side of things.  The human side, the lure King Ghidorah sci fi magic guy - he’s a good bloke.  So yeah, the smart and empathetic people have to make sacrifices, so he’s dead.  The Nuke New York guy grows a conscience literally overnight and decides to stick it to the U.S. military by plotting and succeeding in burning all his secret device blueprints.  The family from the first movie, Kendra is growing up too quick.  Her parents are accepting that after their crimes (from the U.S. military point of view) they are going to be fugitives forever.  They see Kendra who has a character name of Akiko one last time to say goodbye.  And we get the satisfaction of not wanting Godzilla to crush her.  The family in full motorbikes away into the sunset.

But one last go ahead and censor us you want message from the film.  It’s about revenge and is the solution worse than the problem.  A topic personal to me, since I’m really sick of being the one to say, “Fuck you, asshole” to people that are clearly assholes.  There’s no way the film went the direction it did with the U.S. midterm election slaughter in mind.  Steve Shives who I’ve recommended before had this to say about getting even:

https://youtu.be/2khN0mIpMwU?is=zd-ZKqbbYhi20k_L

If you allow yourself to get carried away, aren’t you just as bad or worse than the source of your anxiety?  Godzilla movies are saying to think about it - two things can be wrong at the same time.

Nathan Fielder Needs To Do This Next

Way oversimplified, the old days of Qanon low level conspiracy theories like gematria there was a formula.  Like a movie has a formula.  Good guy, basic premise, damsel to rescue, blah, blah, blah.  

For a blockbuster  movie the formula proves effective a gets attention by being ripped off and copied in various degrees of homage or shameless ripping off.  And it’s never quite the same.  The plot has more holes.  The lighting is bad because of the budget.  And sometimes the actors weren’t just substandard.  Sometimes they sucked.  And they suck so bad it has kind of a charm.  You can’t help at look and snicker.  And realizing some people adore it not just because it’s so bad that it’s funny, but they genuinely believe it’s better quality than the original masterpiece that is admired for its legitimate goodness.

So the basic bullshit conspiracy plot is this.  It could be Democrat good/Republican bad, but these weren’t popular enough.  All the violence, bigotry and hate, that propaganda is the other side.  That’s Republican good/Democrat bad.  And now it’s time for the actors, the influencers and podcasters, to show off their acting skill on an objectively bad plot.  Instead of Plan 9 from Outer Space with all its B grade actors, we’re supposed to believe that the objectively bad actor (liar) Alex Jones and his message.  Which really can be summarized as, “Parents are faking the death of their children in a school shooting, so the way to fix everything wrong in the world is to buy my vitamin supplements.”

I’ve met lots of different actors (liars) at the workplace.  Most give off just a subtle vibe.  The standouts are really obvious.  They act like humanity (mostly based on laser focus of $) is alien to them.  Now a real life workplace actor (liar) who is an actor (movie) playing an actor (liar), someone who acts like they’re schizophrenic and totally chaotic - That’s a challenge.  And separating the reality of the moment with someone who should be playing professional poker but they’re flipping burgers.  That actor is out of place.

Which is kind of the point of You Can See Everything.  These are professional liars squaring off against professional liars.  Nathan is so good at lying, like a magician telling you ahead of time it’s a trick, he can tell he’s lying and maybe he is or isn’t at any given moment.

I want to see Nathan face off against a low level liar.  And try to sell it like they are a good liar.  See if Nathan can keep a straight face during filming.  Just for my own selfish amusement.  Because even though the acting guild (legal system) has already determined Alex Jones is a terrible liar his response to the extent of the Democratic whomping Republican is

<GIGANTIC DRUMROLL>

Donald Trump has been a Democrat all along and is acting this way to discredit the noble and pure Republicans.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/ex-maga-firebrand-drops-craziest-210251380.html

Now that’s a conspiracy that to work out would literally take billions of people to be true.  Usually stupid conspiracy theories try to limit it to something a little more believable.  Higher math and some critical thinking required to sort out the improbability, sure.  Going whole hog and claiming THAT?!

Yowzers.

Not it fits in with the idea of the extinction burst phase we’re in.  MAGA influencers turning on each other.  Resignations.  Top Republicans, some who want to run for President turning on Trump because jail for fraud suddenly becomes a concern.  Stuff that’s beyond the pouty crybaby shit from a low level MAGA troll who has been driving a truck for two decades.  Alex’s extinction burst - an entirely new level.  Global problems engineered by Democrats, the oldest plot in the MAGA playbook.  A bad plot.  A dumb plot.  With a bad actor who got his SAG card removed in the lead.  Is that the Ed Wood of conspiracy theories and funnier than anything Fielder could make?

Could be.

I Know Why Conservatives Really Hate Art & Film

When I was growing up you could count on an abundance of crappy mad scientist and monster movies.  And because they were a product of the times, the excuse for the scientist playing god or the hokey giant insect was more than any other single reason:

RADIATION.  The destructive force of a real atomic bomb taking real human lives was now a very real danger.  I missed out on a lot of that fear.  I was just left with the aftertaste.  Mostly a human actor in a rather unconvincing rubber suit or maybe if you were lucky some stop motion animation.  The love/hate relationship between Washington D.C. and Hollywood was boiling away.  American culture made money = capitalism good.  “Naughty” diversified viewpoints was propagandized into a moral and satanic panic.  I’d like to think the witches, dinosaurs, demons, vampires and radioactive lizards stood their ground pretty well.

Now in 2025 and 2026, since it’s a sensitive subject for me, I’m seeing a new bogeyman in film.  Some of the most acclaimed recent movies have at least a degree of narcissism in the villains.  For example, Obsession, Backrooms, Buddy deal with narcissistic human and supernatural themes.  The “kill the rich” genre continues with movies like The Menu, They Will Kill You, Ready or Not that channel the same vibe as The Purge series. Heretic, Midsommar, Hereditary… movies with cults and sects dealing with toxic and manipulative abusers.

And juxtaposed with this are the real and pseudo documentaries.  Primetime, Musk, A Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything.  What scares you?  Real people who definitely don’t have your best interests in mind.  And for the crowd that wants to call Gordon Gecko a hero, I remind you - he’s the bad guy you morons.

I didn’t have any mentors to guide me.  Nobody in my mostly but not pushy religious family was like me.  My narcissism detector came about organically from watching movies.  A lot of movies.  Some were bad with atrocious acting.  Some had great acting.  People with natural talent and those that put in the time to get good.  And Tom Cruise.  And as I watched the whole spectrum I absorbed who was a good actor and who wasn’t on my own.

And that carried over in to real life.  And it really kind of sucked.

I remember the man whose name was Jack, the head of my confirmation class the last day.  He “conveniently” ran out of time.  Looked at his watch and proclaimed, “Oh, only five minutes left for the virgin birth.  We might as well just end now.”  Right before the awkward questions, he made a joke out of it.  Jack was an elder or deacon, I’m not sure which.  But more than just a casual church goer either way.  An earlier exercise had us recite what we were interested in.  He loved golf.  A lot.  Of course.

I don’t hate Jack, my parents who wanted me to go to the confirmation class and more or less (mostly less?) forced me to go, or any of the other people.  For me, church was just an awkward and boring school class.  The ordinary folk, those other kids approaching adulthood, some were fun to be around.  In retrospect, I’m not convinced Jack was a true believer.  Nor do I think he was a predator.  It was just what you did when you believed in Christian values and being a God fearing churchgoer was part of the package deal.

All of this just in time for Reagan era trickle down economics.  And that’s when the mild bullying started and people began to think being socially dominant was the cool thing.  Being confident in yourself, that’ll get you a good job.  Putting your summer internship at a church affiliated - that’s good for job prospects.  And some of the people, the most aggressive even without the extent of bullying - to me they seemed like just another bad actor.  The speech patterns between things they were passionate about and the ones that weren’t really in their nature changed.  Sometimes dramatically.  Sometimes suddenly.  Their facial expressions had the same liminal “there’s something not quite right here” aura.  Fight or flight?  Flight was so much easier.  Books, more movies, later computer and video games where I naturally proved to have really good pattern recognition skills.  (One of the Robotron arcade game champions in a big college town.  Suck it assholes,  more than once I ended my game with the maximum possible score before the points rolled over to 0).  I was a weird and creepy nerd and I didn’t care.

Narcissists now when you’re on to them.  They still suffer the same physiological problems of any liar .  Nervousness, increased heart rate.  Even if you can’t dismiss them based on stupid content (Flat Earth?  Really?)  They aren’t machines.  They aren’t stupid.  Not usually anyway.  The ego is driving them.  Always to that one thing that symbolizes intelligence that has nothing to do with actual critical thinking skills.  The money.

And as the top of the list gets heavier and heavier and there’s no real alternative.  Well, the narcissists these days kind of suck at it.  Now it’s a bullseye instead of a pedestal.  The narcissistic supply trained to admire the wealthy businessmen and the evangelical pastor with ill intentions, that’s not an easy gig anymore.

Now there are YouTubers talking about atheism, and not in a manner that attacks the product.  It attacks the bad faith chests who don’t respect the good parts of religion.  There are YouTubers that teach about logic and who to debate against the fake debaters like Peterson and Kirk.  There are YouTube channels that give practical advice about finances.  Hosted by kids and aimed at how to survive when rich assholes are ruining everything.  No wonder people are funding movies that this age bracket is interested in.  It’s their actual lives.  Nobody can put their watch away with a flimsy excuse to end the session with all the shit that’s going on now.

It’s not too difficult a concept.  Vietnam created PTSD vets - Rambo.  Nuclear weapons fear - giant insects.  People not admiring rich assholes like they used to - welcome to the mid 2020s, grab a seat and a bag of popcorn and we can all watch this late stage version of mutant capitalism drag us into something that nobody wants, at least for the next two years.

The Mountain Lyin’

In a small Pennsylvania town, not quite suburban and not quite rural, there is the legend of The Mountain Lyin’.

Based on its suburban/rural niche, there are the modern amenities.  Electricity.  Wi-Fi.  Sewer, water, gas connections.  But there is still an abundance of wildlife.  You’ve got your squirrels, rabbits, foxes, snakes, deer, bears.  You know, the standard forest critter stuff.  What they don’t have is mountain lions.

Or do they?

One day a local who has some cows (not a dairy farmer, but not just a hobby) finds a cow brutally murdered.  He’s been around animals enough to know this is not a normal event.  It wasn’t kids playing a prank.  It sure doesn’t look like the work of a bear or coyote.  Something about the wounds suggests it’s something not native to this area.  So he calls the Department of Agriculture and talks to a representative who suggests exactly what he’s already discarded.  Deny the evidence of your own eyes.  You are wrong.  We’re the experts.  We’ve forgotten more about the critters in the area than you will ever learn.

A few days later there is a ruckus in the cow pens.  And of course the mountain lion he’s told didn’t exist is going for murder victim #2.  There’s no time for a “I told you so” check with local government.  Already armed with his gun and suspicions he’s prepared to deal with the mountain lion himself.  He kills it and stores the lion carcass in a shed.

And before he can do his planned, “I told you so” moment, the one with proof that is indeed a mountain lion, the local government official, the same one who specifically not a mountain lion, comes calling.

“Where’s the lion’s body.  We know you have it.”

“Whadda fuck?!  How?!?”

“There was an electronic tracker.  It was released to thin out the deer herd.  We didn’t want to tell anyone about the cow murdering lion to avoid a panic.”

The legend of the Mountain Lyin’ became famous.  It’s like the local version of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Fielder and Oppenheim’s Now You See Everything.  When retold it gets spun differently every time.  Further and further from actual truth as only a handful of people experienced what actually happened.  The mountain lion became a Mountain of Lyin’.

Some people think the cow owner made it up for attention.

Some people think it really happened, but it was a bear.

Some people think it was part of some cover up the local government and cow owner are in on together.

Some people just don’t care.  And they’ll say anything to avoid conversation about the mountain lying just to end an awkward conversation.

And more variations.  Lots more.  Variations of variations of variations.

Me, I like telling tall tales.  And lots of other folks do, too.  My over the top story is that a rogue, ordinary mountain lion made its way to this town.  Was prowling around the trash and ate the remains of a discarded radioactive tuna fish sandwich.  Having grown 40 feet long something had to be done.  Because the local tuna hatchery was going to be economically devastated.

Don’t let your mountain lion grow into a mountain of lion.  A 40 foot lion doesn’t care if it was released because the normal process of issuing hunting licenses to maintain the deer herd size wasn’t working.  It stands to reason a 40 foot lion with a mind poisoned by radiation sickness will eat your kid when the tuna isn’t available.

The Intersection Of The AI Bubble And Now You See Everything

As one of the few people that followed the different gematria cliques regularly I got to see one clique that didn’t seem to fit in one the others.  And now it looks like it’s the most important.  Gematria decodes of investments.  Bitcoin, mostly.  <sarcasm font> Just what an unstable world needs.</sarcasm font>

Remember the 2008 financial crisis aftermath?  The part about the banks getting caught being naughty and getting a slap on the wrist, told they were bad little monkeys and still got to pay out executive bonuses?  That’s where we are headed with AI.  It doesn’t have to be laser shooting robots, it just has to be a system of control to pacify people long enough for the cult to form.  Because the “tech” industry is not a business.  It’s a religion masked as economics.

The gematria clowns that headed the crypto cliques still suffer the same fate as the more notable cliques - sports betting, rapture, and synchronicity.  Conspiracy gematria is a news report of what has already happened.  Waiting until events have already transpired to make a big deal out of the most trivial things.  Instead of the Dodgers winning 5-3 in 11 innings it’s bitcoin price for a minute or two starting with 111.  And the appropriate bullshit gematria pseudo spiritual lingo combined with investment jargon,  like “esoteric core competence” and “leveraged synchronicity”.  (Don’t quote me, I don’t really remember those specifically.  Just get the vibe.)  If you are aware of what’s going on it’s really fucking painful to listen to.

Just like Bitcoin gematria didn’t have a real product or service to sell, tech “visionaries” like Elizabeth Holmes have no real product.  Sure something might actually work, but it’s purely incidental.  It’s all just advertising, shameless self promotion for the next big scheme.  Theranos 1.0 didn’t work?  Who cares?  The Producers have Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder making more money from a flop than from a successful movie.  Theranos 2.0 is on the way.  And more knock offs if we let them.  None of them need to work.  Because the visionary is always looking ahead and you are too stupid to see that like the rapture still hasn’t happened for that clique the breakthrough is always, “just around the corner”.  It will be just around the corner tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now, five years from now.

Holmes is more religious zealot than most realize.  Like Scientology, instead of a couple Patreon subscriptions it’s deliberately aimed at a higher income target audience for the top of the pyramid.  The pyramid getting bigger and bigger, morphing into the bubble shape we know is just aching to burst.  Like 2008 in basic structure, but with the sheeple trained to accept that “rich assholes just gonna be rich assholes.”  The more appropriate name might be the narcissist bubble, since everyone’s talking about them.  Narcissists make better liars.  And the common folk might just be screaming out the obvious.  What is wrong with you people?  And they do not care.  Tomorrow will bring a new scam.  (I’m waiting for the 3D water printer!)  Which will be stupid.  (3D oil printer!)  Expensive (3D uranium printer!)  and have no accountability for the perpetrators just like 2008.

The zealots are very convincing.  Either psychopathic liar or narcissistic true believers, the marketing skill is more important than results and human lives.

Psychronicity

 

This struck me as amusing.  Another case of how narcissism and the manipulation involved are the cool topic right now.  Eight years ago I would have worked up a gematria decode, probably making it something silly just to prove that gematria can be used by manipulators to mean anything.

I kid you not.  Valerie and I are in the same ballpark.  And I swear she was one of my earliest celebrity crushes.  I didn’t even like One Day At A Time that much.  Just watched it with the rest of the family because she was so adorable.  And here she is on BlueSky, talking about narcissism.  To me, that makes her even more adorable.

Sounds like she’s talking about personal relationships.  But I’m still calling this synchronicity.  My experiences have been mixed with both personal relationship narcissists and workplace narcissists.  But most of what I’ve been yakking away about has been motivated by the assholes at work who make life miserable for everyone else.

Or instead of magical synchronicity.  Let me catch up on Valerie.  My duties as a creepy stalker type have been pretty lax.  I kind of totally forget I was semi-obsessed with her.  Or maybe it’s the great parents that instilled me with a functional moral compass.

Google time.  Married to Eddie Van Halen.  Divorced, long before Eddie passed away.  Knew that.  But then married a financial planner which lasted about a decade until a divorce in 2022.  Tom Vitale.  Knowing what I know, I could jump the gun and take the educated guess.  But know privacy is non existent and I can just tweak my search - Why did Valerie Bertinelli and Tom Vitale divorce.

And the answer is irreconcilable differences; betrayed trust with Valerie specifically mentioning narcissism.

<sigh>

Of course.  Finance and narcissist are almost becoming synonymous.  Poor Val has suffered enough, I sure hope she finds someone to hang with who isn’t a problem, or the solace of distance if that gives her peace.

I suppose this would be a terrible time for me to beg for an autographed photo.

Thanks to Theranosification…

 

Yep.  Because of Theranosification, which sounds like something I would make up but I heard in a YouTube podcast, we have an intriguing film.  An offbeat film.  A film about the dangers of narcissism

YOU CAN SEE…

Buddy on YouTube.  

See what I did?  You thought I was going to mention the Elizabeth Holmes documentary and I was deceiving you.  One of the prime elements of Theranosification, unabashed bold faced lying.

But seriously, there’s more similarities than you might think.  

The psychology content on Youtube, especially in horror film is through the roof. 

 And maybe that’s because my algorithm knows I like that, but it keeps popping up.  Obsession —> Narcissm.  Backrooms —> Narcissism and a shrink for a character.   So although now you can see me is shining with its exploration of the Silly Con Valley mindset, that’s a little too heavy for kids.  A little much, and maybe the same way Coyote vs. Acme is a kiddie lean in to corporate greed, and just like gematria was a light version of conspiracy, kids could use a fun romp about narcissism.

Buddy is a horror comedy.  It openly admits that it is a parody of kids shows like Barney.  Buddy is a unicorn (and so much more), who has a heart symbol on his tummy.  And literally requires children to say that they love him.  

Feet, and Everything Else, of Clay

 

Another day, another movie for me.  And another spoiler filled review.  I just saw Clayface and as is usual for me I can’t just sit back and just enjoy things 100% without thinking of things based on the lens of my personal experience.

So getting the plot points out of the way.  It’s an origin story of a Batman villain.  I’m familiar with the character from the animated Batman series.  Like Supergirl it’s an introduction, and unlike Supergirl it’s a full origin story.  You don’t even need to be familiar with Batman, he’s not mentioned in the entire run time.  The closest you get is it’s set in Gotham City which is referenced frequently providing name recognition- that’s the city that everyone knows that Batman resides in.

Matt Hagen is an up and coming actor and seems like a pretty decent guy.  While partying at an expensive night club he hooks up with a girl he doesn’t know.  Animal attraction and the drugs she slips him at the club take over and they end up sleeping together.  Despite warnings from his friend she’s “the property” of a notorious crime boss.

Waking up there’s more than just the girl in the room.  The crime boss and some flunkies are there and they’re gonna teach him a lesson.  Killing isn’t good enough, it’s far more brutal to take switchblades and ruin his pretty face so he can live with the consequences of messing with the wrong guy.  This leads Matt to lose his money, social status and pretty much everything - the face is scarred too much for being seen as an abomination regardless of how his past might have shown signs he had any good qualities.

Except there is a chance.  An experimental nanobot procedure that can rebuild his face.  And naturally as events play out things go wrong.  A temporary burst of rage disturbs the nanobots, he revisits the doctor and you get the sense she can fix it, but instead of waiting for the painkillers the doctor trots off to get for him his pain and desperation drive him to overdose on the nanobot serum.

Which works.  Temporarily.  The rage problem still makes him change into an ugly clay faced abomination, but he gradually learns to control it.  And he really starts to like the feeling of power.  And it’s time for revenge which he successfully metes out on the crime syndicate.  But the rage doesn’t go away and he only has one person remaining that cares about him.  The attractive female doctor that treated his scarred face he’s now obsessed with.  So obsessed he murders her husband and tries to convince her that she should be devoted to him.  He’s the cool guy with these superpowers she gave him.  Never mind the dead fiancé thing.

Great movie.  Much better than the new Supergirl at portraying damaged mental state and motivation.

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A great companion for the philosophy and discussion we can have from Now You See Everything which I whined about yesterday.  Indeed, it’s quite an interesting time where content about the Epstein class is openly being offered.  The Social Reckoning, Musk, Now You See Everything.  The contradiction of being forced to admire the most terrible people who continue to verify that things aren’t working out yet we are magically supposed to assume that they’re “just misunderstood good guys.”  The relentless psychological projection that they are strong when their open overconfidence is a sign they are terribly insecure and fearful.  We’ve seen this movie before, it’s just playing out on a global scale now.  Complex problems require complex solutions, not decoding gematria as black and white only.  Not unilaterally assigning tariffs because you had a bad day and never learned that historically it’s kind of dumb.  Serious flaws that are masked as strength and increasingly butting heads with reality and losing.

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And now it’s personal.  Because in many ways I am Clayface.  Nothing really left to lose.  Society decided I wasn’t worthy not because I don’t care but because I care too much.  And it’s terrifying to me how petty and vindictive I can be when I’m pushed too far.  How counterproductive it can be in the long term.  Selfishly, I don’t like the idea that I’m bound to be judged as a greedy white man just because I’m superficially a Boomer age white man.  Thanks oligarchs.  Appreciate that.

Now You See…Lot’s Of Stuff, But Certainly Not Everything

This continues to be a remarkable year in film for me.  Earlier I saw my now favorite movie ever, Project Hail Mary, marking the first time I’ve ever seen a movie in the theater more than twice.  (It’s sexy to be smart and worry about climate change at the same time.). In general, films that will be remembered for the era they were made and reviewers will acknowledge the growing anti-MAGA sentiment as the subtle and not so subtle nods are peppering the cinema screens.

And now we have Now You See Everything, which like many others apparently I did not even know about until this week.  The first time I’ve ever seen a documentary in the theater.  I have no intention of being spoiler free.  So you can check it out first before reading more here.

It’s really good.  It’s definitely a smart movie.  It’s too long, but not long enough for an intermission.  Some of the content is unsettling, and that makes it thought provoking because as a doc it’s ostensibly based on real conversations.  But is it “real”?  A common theme others have latched on to - what happens when several master manipulators are interacting with each other?

So spoiling the end for you right off the bat.  Actress Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed Elizabeth Holmes in the film The Dropout, as herself instead of a reenactment (the doc has a lot of those) tells us this:

It’s complicated.

With this level of money and attention at stake, a strong but shallow personality can’t operate at a high level forever.  Once I realized that toxic narcissism was involved I was hooked, long before the word narcissist was mentioned.  And the narcissist in question, Liz’s partner Billy, has invited a documentary film crew into the house to get some things off their chest.

The dynamic is perfect, since Nathan Fielder has a particular style and previously had a TV show, The Curse.  That’s about people running a housing scam.  A “What were you thinking” moment.  Can Liz and Billy be truly genuine for such a long time with cameras running?  Can Fielder be truly genuine when the documentarians have control of editing?  Really complicated stuff.

It would be dishonest of me to claim that I was unbiased.  My negative view of Elizabeth Holmes is established and my own views on toxic narcissism - I’m sure I know more than the average person and sure I know far less than I think I do.  And that brings us to key scene number one.  As a defense mechanism our brains trend towards thinking we are smarter than we really are.  I’m better equipped than most to take a step back and reevaluate.  I’m certainly better than Holmes who admits on camera she NEVER LIES.  Not rarely.  Not even a little white lie.  When pressed she admits that she will do the little white lie.  But as for the serious stuff and the multibillion fraud, oh no way.  This ties in to later conversation and one can pick up the sense she is actually incredibly naive.  The perfect target for a toxic narcissist.

Another sure to be fan favorite scene is (allegedly) Liz’s first exposure to the famous Abbott and Costello Who’s On First? skit.  The finale of that is that we are to believe Liz genuinely doesn’t get the joke.  And the same way her brain is wired to not understand that the point is someone’s name is actually Who or What - that’s the same brain that misinterpreted a key part of the real life fraud case.  My testing machine can test for anything.  As long as the particular thing I’m testing for isn’t a set up correctly ahead of time.  I’ll try to explain this with the self created analogy while in the theater.  You can brag that your dog can do any trick.  You’ll eventually get challenged, because it’s framed as an absolute black vs. white instead of complex situation.  Then if your defense is, “Well, only if I train him” you are exposed for not being clear on “My dog knows how to sit, shake and lie down now.  I know I can teach him to do any other ones later.”

And within that scene we get a glimpse into Liz’s partner Billy.  He gets The Who’s On First? joke.  And somehow we are supposed to believe after all this time and money spent on legal fees he’s never explained it to his soulmate?  Really?  Really???

We are given a glimpse at Theranos 2.0.  The never say quit stick to it entrepreneur fire.  Where the actually mechanics of the first Theranos are pretty much scrapped to let AI take care of the processing.  Because sure.  Getting bitten once by the first (alleged) scam needs to latch on to the trendy AI (alleged) scams.  More fundraising.  More dubious and vague promises of future value.  More of the (alleged) toxic narcissist who handled and will handle the business end pulling the strings and having meetings to just say that with a little more money this will work the next time.  My own bias instantly latched on to the gematria sports predictor’s wild claims of spectacular success rates and constantly being shown to be right about 50% of the time.  Or being right 0% of the time for the end of the world Jesus is coming rapture crowd.

One of the reasons for the length of the doc is the extensive Amanda Seyfried material.  For the role in The Dropout she watched a lot of deposition tapes and interviews.  She nailed Liz’s mannerisms - the patented bobbing the head up and down and wide eyed unblinking stare.  When discussing narcissism it is important to remember that you can’t just wildly claim it after limited exposure.  But a true pattern over months and years.  That’s starting into dark and dangerous territory.  Where the narcissist spoon feeds tiny bits of positive reinforcement while the supply just keeps them happy long enough to get what they want.  Even a three hour documentary isn’t enough to make a completely informed opinion.  I’m assuming that legally Seyfried and the makers of The Dropout knew what they were getting into.  But I wasn’t privy to those talks so who knows.

And that’s a lead in to a discussion of film interpretation and analysis.  Movies are a great thing for narcissists who want to dominate a social setting.  Purely subjective material can always be framed as “my opinion is right, yours sucks.”  Calling a film ruined by being too woke has always seemed shallow and dishonest to me.  The low quality evidence (it’s a take my word for it thing) is the mention of Charlie Kirk.  The audience has already been through two hours with a couple of audible chuckles at Liz’s less than stellar showcase of herself being spontaneous.  Fielder asks Billy what Liz thinks of Charlie Kirk.  No big deal.  Then he asks Billy who brightens and admits he’s a Kirk fan.  That prompted quite a negative reaction from the group at my theater.  They were not fans.  Kirk is one of those polarizing figures in recent history, and my tribe for the afternoon reacted the same way - recognition that Kirk was a for profit manipulator who likely didn’t even believe in what he was saying.

Ultimately it’s kind of a dark and sad movie that is hard to come away with clean answers.  It should be safe from MAGA trolling at the theater.  YouTube psychologists are going to have a field day discussing manipulation, Stockholm Syndrome, and NPD.  It’s hardly my favorite documentary ever or even that close, but if you’re genuinely on the upper edge of the IQ scale I’d recommend it.  Like The Odyssey it’s worthy of genuine conversation instead of the everything is black and white approach.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Werewolf Vs. Vampire Conflict

Most of the people I hang out with are on Team Werewolf.  It’s been far easier to dismiss the push for extremism coming from the Team Vampire side.  Vampires are non stop, “Me!  Me!  Me!  Me!”  Up there on the mountain in their ancient castle with the gold plated coffins and their buxom and vacuous vampire Zacharia’s brides that they really don’t care about that much.  Other than the symbolism.  The, “Do you know who I am?” attitude that gets them out of every speeding ticket.  Most constables aren’t aware that a carriage could even move that fast without the wheels of the carriage falling off.

Werewolves, on the other paw, are much more human except for those couple of days with a full moon.  Often horrified of their insatiable hunger and downright repentant about the feeding frenzy and chewing up the sofa cushions.  No amount of chastisement with the labels of, “Bad wolf!  Bad, naughty, stupid wolf!  What’s your problem you stupid woke mongrel!” while ‘human’ can retrain them to avoid being a self indulgent pup when the hair and fangs come out.  No amount of trying to act like a suave and sexy vampire master with a really cool eastern European accent can really change them.

But deep down, they are the same.  It’s not that they are monsters.  It’s not that they are inhuman monsters.

They don’t have a fucking clue about math.

So let’s create a fictitious example with a head vampire that we’ll randomly <cough><cough> call Donald.  The first vampire ever and directly responsible for creation of a whole generation of vampires.  In turn, they created more vampires.  Who created more vampires.  An endless cycle of creation of vampires that left unchecked will (checking math…carry the 2…divide by Pi squared…multiply by log x…) leave zero villagers.  The magical solution is that once Donald is dealt with all the other vampires, now at 100% of the population are either redeemed and return to human or dust depending on what silly story you believe.

But not everything is fun and games for those vampires before the magical solution.  The earliest ones to buy into the supernatural Ponzi scheme had it good for a long time.  They genuinely believe they are protecting the investment towards global vampire dominance.  As more and more vampires arrive on the scene it starts to get tricky.  Why does Donald get Kate Beckinsale quality brides while I get Darla the Starbucks barista with the bad teeth?  Fuck this shit.  How am I supposed to continue the vampire lineage and have my personal army to change my vampire colostomy bag in my old vampire age?  She doesn’t even have all her incisors.  AND WHERE IS MY FUCKING SEXY EUROPEAN ACCENT?!?!!!

The lure of the werewolves hangs heavy.  Instead of the pretending that everyone likes you when they really hate you that the vampire lifestyle brings, you do get the chance to be human for most of the month.  That’s a CHANCE to be human.  Whether you take advantage of it or not, well that’s an open question.  A werewolf is far more likely to settle on running down a deer than actively searching for villagers.  But there’s a non zero chance that unless you’re super careful with the locks and heavy sedation that an accident will happen.

Just for fun let’s create a top werewolf named Gavin.  When the shit started to hit the fan with vampires overrunning the population he was a super powerful ally to have for the moonlight period.  The fangs and claws came out at the right time.  Push back on the vampire agenda, that in all seriousness should have happened a long time ago.  Maybe it’s because he had his now vampire wife Kimberly to share some of the more interesting moments of not being a werewolf.  Or maybe he really believes that a solid werewolf pack is the answer - an army of wolves that are rough and tumble ready to go when the war starts.

And maybe he’s just fucking wrong, too because THE MATH STILL DOESN’T WORK.  It just takes longer.  More werewolves create more werewolves and left unchecked will reach 100% and no more villagers remain.

And the culmination of the simple math is the villagers always lose out in the end.  The poor saps having to negotiate the constant pressure of existing in not just binary of either/or vampire or werewolf, but the constant pressure of being pushed to choose one or the other.  Your darling children are sprouting fangs one way or the other.  Just hope you get about 18 years of love before the propaganda starts.

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A functional multi racial democracy and fascism don’t really play well together.  Thanks to the internet, instead of an isolated village your sweet child is easily exposed to “the wrong side”.  As my stupid story here attempted to illustrate, America is having a political moment here.  A choice between investing in vampirism with a 100% failure rate assured.  Believing in the conflation of a single werewolf being correctly pointed out as being not the greatest 100% of the time.  Or you could roll the dice, take the chance on humanity winning out and realizing that 39 days of a year being a monster is better than 365.25 days of the year of being a monster.  And as soon as the wolf brings the claws out during a time when the moon isn’t full.  Call him out as the monster he truly is.

Extinction Burst - Grasping at Straws

 

The good news - when cults start to implode it’s a one way train ride. Sometimes the head honcho does us a favor by exiting the mortal plane like L. Ron Hubbard or gematria using Negative 48.  Other times the leader is still kicking’, but the behavior that separated them that was fueled by Cluster B personality disorders gets increasingly erratic. Cluster B personality disorders and related brain decline are not a good mix.

The bad news is - the fascist element in play.  The narcissistic supply.  People mentally capable of recognizing the shit has hit the fan but because of the paycheck involved still can’t bring themselves to set boundaries and say, “No.  That’s a line I won’t cross.”  At a time when a significant number are having second thoughts, there is still a wait and see attitude.  If I survive Hurricane Trump and get to pretend I was against him all along I escape with my money and my values (or lack thereof) intact.  Just like Hurricane Caligula.  Just like Hurricane Hitler.  Terrible excuses for a leader drag the quality of those that surround them down to their level.  This time is different, they say.  This time the cause is going to work out.  Then, this time as history rhymes with the Cluster B disorder traits it changes to, “I was just following orders.  The real problem people are anyone else but me.  Thank God there’s not something like an internet to catch me doing something stupid during the height of Hurricane Trump.”

For me, the most interesting development in recent  history is the unforced error that Eric Schmitt made.  There’s no doubt in my mind the Orange One is having an extinction burst moment everyday.  It’s impossible to appease a Cluster B disorder.  Everything is anger.  For far too long the anger was successfully outsourced to the scapegoat of the day.  But, ordinary people have woken up.  Not the fake conspiracy theory waking up the sheeple, but actually waking up to the lack of a final solution being provided by an angry toddler.

The gematria clowns did the exit strategy right.  The writing was on the wall and the content is far from the hyper aggressive early days when everything was a hoax.  Schmitt didn’t get the memo.  He rolled the dice on a gotcha that required a fumble on the part of the target.  A fumble that was not meant to be.  I guess I’ll have to pretend there are those that don’t know yet, so here’s one of the many clips available on the fateful moment.

 https://youtu.be/bW6kVAddSVM?is=3s9ZLsmqsDUfMTOj

A fun moment for those of us that hate the gotcha game.  Trying to trick someone smarter than you are…doesn’t always work.  Sure we might trip up on something like the wrong Constitutional amendment number for something obscure.  Have your two minutes of enjoyment for something inconsequential.  But now Schmitt is on record coming a gematria level of evidence blunder.  Hawks sounds like Hawkeyes.  It’s something that could have easily been avoided if you believed in actual fact checking.  But the rules of the gotcha game are clear on fact checking.  Money is more important than being right.  Calling someone a dirtbag and a perjurer is more important than being honest and correct.

As the ultimate leader calling the shots on what filters down the line, loyalists with shit for brains are the norm when you have shit for brains.  The best guess on Schmitt’s blunder includes wonder if he thought this moment would get him a shot as VP candidate on a JD Vance 2028 ticket.  That’s what happens on lower levels of the pyramid.  When the leader is obviously faltering, somewhere down the line the wheels start spinning and guesses are made on what to do and how to take advantage of the extinction burst.  And the cleanup time after the hurricane damage is always longer than you think, even if you still have a home to go back to.