Cyclogematriasis

Although not at the levels found in 2016, the Center for Critical Thinking has identified a rise in cases of cyclogematriasis.  Known symptoms of cyclogematriasis include:

Frequent and sometimes explosive cases of verbal and written diarrhea.

Focus on “meme” numbers like Pi, 666, and 88.

Increased cyber bullying and scapegoating.

A sharp decrease in the desire to treat others with dignity and respect.

Sharp weight loss and fatigue due to late night decoding and doom scrolling instead of sleeping.

An early victim of the current outbreak who only gave our reporter the name Superedgelord227 said this from his hospital bed:

“I was decoding the Titan submersible implosion.  That made me think of the Titanic.  That made me think of icebergs.  That made me think of iceberg lettuce.  That made me think of how you don’t see lettuce much in the Planet of the Apes movies.  That made me think of Charlton Heston’s character Taylor, that made me think of Taylor Farms of Mexico, that made me think Mexico in the 2026 World Cup, that made me think of how you’re not supposed to drink the water in Mexico.…” And we finally interrupted him since we got the point.

The best course of action to combat cyclogematriasis is preventative measure.  No decoding at all is best, but if you must remain focused on happy thoughts like the love of Jesus and the Golden Rule.  If you can’t help but talk about political, economic, and social issues be prepared to talk about housing prices, finite resources and the difference between projection and reality.  If you find yourself thinking that Obama is the Antichrist or an urge to gamble call the help line at the Center for Critical Thinking immediately. Do not drive a car, operate heavy machinery or watch Fox News until cleared by a trained CCT expert.

The Imaginary Banker App

 Why settle for an imaginary friend when you can have so much more with an imaginary banker?

~ Herman Smith, Lorimor Iowa, April 1981

Hi there.  Bradley Smith here.  And I’m the founder and CEO of the greatest thing that ever happened to everyone - The Imaginary Banker App found at our website https://imaginarybanker.com.  This testimonial serves as verification that everything that follows is truthful and although it sounds too good to be true, believe me this app works wonders.

It all began with my Dad, Herman, and my Mom, Dolores back in April 1981.  My second loose tooth.  In retrospect the first loose tooth was pretty uneventful.  The second was life altering.  Mom was nervous about her side hustle as the Tooth Fairy that night, because as with the first loss of a baby tooth, Brad liked to sleep with a hand tucked underneath the pillow.  And sure enough, replacing that shiny quarter for the rough piece of calcium that night was problematic.  Yours truly awoke, catching Mom in the act and pretended to not have been fully awakened.  The small amount of sleep that followed for me that night was interspersed with the big question.

If Mom’s the Tooth Fairy, then what else are my parents and other people?  The Easter Bunny?  Santa Claus?  Jesus?  And what about that Oscar Wurther from this “bank” thing that had my parents so worried all the time?  Oscar used what I told were scary words I wasn’t to press about.  Words like mortgage, foreclosure, bankruptcy.  Surely since Oscar dealt with money he had some connection to this Tooth Fairy fable.

Dad was a kindly, moral soul and the wisest person this totally unbiased person ever knew.  Although Mom thought it was a bit too early for “the talk” Dad found a way to have it.  Gently easing me into the true nature of life by telling me about the Imaginary Banker.  And as I grew older with each passing day I found myself yearning for what other little tidbits of knowledge he would spoon-feed me.  Being perpetually in debt is scary, but when you embrace the Imaginary Banker it gets easier.  Much easier.

I was hooked on the first story.  I remember it like it happened just yesterday.  Proper care of teeth is important.  The Tooth Fairy stories are for gullible children.  I was now officially growing in to manhood.  I was hearing about the real driving forces behind proper dental care. 

Toothpaste doesn’t work correctly unless you had to borrow money to purchase it.  There was an embargo in the 1970’s when the top toothpaste exporting countries in the Middle Teeths were trying to leverage their stranglehold on the supply.  Through a process called dentatative easing, the U.S. government released millions of barrels of toothpaste from the strategic reserves.  Holding prices steady until a more favorable regime could be forcibly installed in the Middle Teeths.  The quarter Nom was giving me.  That was a refund.  Dad had used the Imaginary Banker to pay for more effective borrowed money toothpaste.  And like millions of other kids in the early 80’s that quarter was due to us in real money.  An actual solid piece of metal that was totally not representative of imaginary funding principles.

——————————————————————-

I used the Imaginary Banker frequently throughout the years.  My fried potatoes were more nutritious with borrowed imaginary money.  My shoes fit better and the sores from them being too tight weren’t as bad as they would have been because of Imaginary Banker money.  I was left fielder in Little League Baseball because imaginary borrowed money got me the best second hand glove money could buy.

And of course there’s my dear Betsy Koosman, my childhood sweetheart, first crush and now my wife.  Betsy actually chased after me.  My self confidence was at the top.  Funded by imaginary money and unlimited hopeful aspirations I was the perfect tutor for someone like Betsy.  Her parents never told her about the Imaginary Banker and I was more than happy to fill the gaps.  At first it was just mutual physical attraction.  Betsy’s natural auburn curls highlighted her flawless complexion.  My Little League career as the best left fielder Lorimor ever had accented my rugged good looks.  Our first kiss was under the bleachers after we won the county championship.  We lost our virginity together in 1995, protected by imaginary contraception funded by the Imaginary Banker’s contacts in the Imaginary Pharmaceutical Industry.

And our daughter, my cherished Noel, was born 282 days later with a glorious wedding a month before that.  Herman Smith repeated the quote at the top.  “Son, I’ve got the cost of the wedding covered.  You don’t need an Imaginary Friend when you have an Imaginary Banker.”  I cried tears of joy and terror for weeks.

——————————————————————-

The last decade has been tough on everyone.  Betsy, my Mom, Noel, my closest friends.  We’re all doing great.  (Dad passed away due to complications when Covid hit.  I’d like to think he’d be his old jovial self.). And I realized as the world bitches, pisses and moans around us is that we have a mental state that keeps us happy.  The never ending confidence that Imaginary Money supplied by the Imaginary Banker would get us through anything.

And doesn’t the rest of the worked need to share in that joy?

So that’s when I can up with the Imaginary Banker App.  And everything has gone off about as perfectly as could be hoped for.

The app is powered by AI.  Artificial Imagination.  Nobody can copyright imagination, so while it was training on data all across the internet there was no chance of a lawsuit ending our dreams.  Once we found all the gematria decodes from the most active years, the app became more or less self aware.  No solid math or language skills.  No copyright protection for the concept of gematria.  Just unbridled and unlimited imagination fueled by completely arbitrary discourse on the most arbitrary of subjective viewpoints.  And that was combined with unfettered access to unlimited imaginary funding - a gambling win rate of 50% is the ideal number for an imaginary banking system.

The IPO, Imaginary Price Offering, was a huge success.  Trillions of imaginary dollars flowed in and we can pretty much undertake whatever imaginary projects we want.  Some of the plans include EVs that you can imagine don’t blow up and imagine don’t drive into pedestrians when in self drive mode.  Imaginary trips to imagine terraforming Mars.  Imaginary Data Centers that only use imaginary electricity and cooled by only imaginary water.  And we’re especially proud of how much our imaginary reduction of imaginary CO2 in the imaginary atmosphere is advancing.

——————————————————————-

Let’s wrap up with some features already built in to the Imaginary Banker app.

- The cybersecurity system named after my daughter, Noel.  (She giggles like a schoolgirl hearing about how famous she is, now.)  The suite is loaded with imaginary strong password generation, imaginary two factor authentication, and physical security including but not limited to imaginary security cameras.  This is solid protection for any imaginary cyber threat.

- The best imaginary search engine.  The top results will find the information based off the word hoax IMMEDIATELY.

- Imaginary prediction markets.  Just like gematria you can imagine you’ll get rich quick.

- Access to the best imaginary 401k and pension funds available by the world’s top imaginary investment brokers.

- An imaginary coupon for unlimited imaginary coffee.

——————————————————————

Imagine your way to a better life today.  Herman Smith never said that, but I’d like to think that it’s the kind of thing my Dad would have said.  But he’s in a better place now, an imaginary place where the imaginary bankers are his real friends instead of just his imaginary friends.  A happier place where imaginary politicians no longer clamor for his imaginary donations.  Won’t you sign up for the Imaginary Banker App today and make him proud?

Chuds In Horror Movies

I do have to kind of chuckle with how my life has come full circle.  I learned a lot about life from books and movies, especially other people’s reactions to the same material I absorbed independently.  And I’m old enough to have rented and watched the original C.H.U.D. movie, not having to suffer through someone explaining to me that in that movie a CHUD is a Cannabilistic Humanoid Underground Dweller.

And not an insufferable prick like it means in today’s lingo.

Books and movies are a sort of safe zone for self exploration.  A good writer will guide you to an intended view without spoiling it and making it too obvious.  At least not too early.  A complex villain with some nuance is far more interesting than an underground dweller that by name we know solely exists to eat human flesh.  And psychological horror has really hit its stride here in the 2020s.

In Cabin In The Woods, Drew Goddard not only has the standard horror movie characters, they are an integral part of a complex ritual to appease the Lovecraftian elder gods and return them to slumber until the next timeline the ritual needs to be performed.  You’ve got your stoned out fool, the jock, the brainy nerd, the ditzy hot girl.  And the final girl who is the pure virgin.  In old horror slasher, the tropes were pretty simple.  Establish that the jock is a self centered prick and prime the audience pump for his upcoming death.  He’s an asshole.  It’s not just OK to want him to be a victim.  It’s often a goal to get the audience hopes up that his death should be excessively gory, painful, and humiliating.

The Cabin in the Woods jock does fit in the in movie narrative of the ritual sacrifice jock.  And being Chris Hemsworth aside, you do get some character development that shows a good side.  His sole existence isn’t stuffing nerds in the school gym locker and pinching cheerleaders butts.  He reads philosophy and is willing to make sacrifices.  There’s nuance and complexity that gives you hope that is dashed when he meets his end.  The final girl along with the rest of the planet doesn’t exactly succeed.  Score another writing win for Goddard and a reason it’s no surprise that the Project Hail Mary script was so solid.

Now, an exceptionally annoying aspect of modern intent discourse is the walking on eggshells being forced down your throat.  This, like patriotism has been projected upon us by those who require the good guy and bad guy to be obvious.  I said Superman is a bad movie because the Lex Luthor chud supreme character is a badly written character.  I said it first, therefore I must be right.  And since I only talk with my friends about chuds being misunderstood I have no desire to actually think about things for myself.  And in the meantime I’m fine with thinking true patriotism is neo-nazis disrupting pride parades and drag queen book readings.  (Etc…)  What they’re really messaging - oh shit, I might be a chud.  And this movie threatens my feewings and since Fox News told me to hate it, that’s so much simpler to just ape out a movie is bad.  Often even sight unseen.

That’s far too much background for the movie of the day to discuss.  Obsession has proven to have remarkable staying power and does not have the oversimplified Character A good, character B bad plot boredom.  In Obsession a lonely young man has a crush on a girl most consider way out of his league.  Nikki has friend zoned him and he wants more.  Given the opportunity to make a wish that changes her into becoming obsessed with him he unleashes a curse.  She’s no longer just the pretty girl he was obsessed with.  She’s a chaotic force of destruction that ends up making his life miserable in a matter of about an hour of the movie’s run time.  The goods are delivered for required horror movie mayhem, but there’s a central question about the morality of the main character Bear.  Is he a good man that got carried away or is he a disgusting chud?

Both characters are obsessed with each other, hence the movie title.  One is willfully obsessed based on presumed nature and socialization.  The other is forced into it, and I’m even going to admit to use some loaded language here - what appears to be some sort of supernatural rape.  My own bias aside and having flagged which team I’m on, if you watched the movie , what message did you get?

Team Bear is a chud - glad he got what was coming to him.

Team Curse is the villain.  Making supernatural wishes never goes well and everyone’s a victim.

Team let me watch the movie again when it comes to streaming and talk to my friends and see what they think about it subjectively.  Which could end up being messy if someone gets insistent that they are 100% right.  Claiming objectivity over something that needs to be examined more closely than people may want to.

I’d like to be on Team watch it again except I already have in a way.  You can search YouTube for reaction videos.  Something like “Obsession Explained”.  I’ve already seen some commentary indicating the video author encourages you to leave a comment with what you think about the movie and why.  I find myself pretty solidly still in the Bear is a chud camp.  That’s the message I got when I first watched it.  I didn’t see anything else that changed my mind.  But I sat my ass down and actually put effort into thinking about other people’s perspectives.

And that’s probably why it’s a good movie.  You can think about it beyond a knee jerk reaction.  One answer is not necessarily right or wrong.  And if you don’t try to force your opinion on me as fact, I don’t really care what you think in regards to changing my mind.  I in turn can respect your opinion.

It’s a movie, and not a culture war life and death struggle in reality.  Conspiracy gematria narratives a decade ago absolutely were a culture war reality life and death struggle.  The screenwriters were terrible.  Everything was doom and gloom end of the world unless you pay me gibberish.  And people fell for it.  They didn’t want to be challenged.  They wanted to hear that Freemasons were ruining their lives by occult ritual because they could at least have someone lower on the social ladder to complain about.  You can’t get much lower than a fictional scapegoat to blame your problems on.  These people didn’t want a solution.  They didn’t want to listen about how housing prices and unaffordable health care were ruining lives.  They just wanted to not be the victim of the chud.  And nothing said I’m not a chud like kicking the school nerd before stuffing him in the locker and BEING the chud.  And they found their obsession.  A magical gambling solution to the financial woes.  Gambling on sports AND being an intellectual badass.  Now that Nikki has woken up from her cursed hell, she has to deal with the aftermath of the world you left behind.

Option #4 - Team shitty gematria narratives never solved anything.  

Schtormenfreude

Weather Channel After Storm reporting

Kind of an odd sort of poetic justice that severe thunderstorms helped ruin the 250th birthday of a country grappling with one of the worst world leaders in history sham his way through running that country?

I’ve put in a conscious effort over the more recent decade to not gloat about bad decisions leading to death and destruction brought on by climate change.  Even in 2026 it’s still more common to listen to people around me downplaying something as unnatural as the July 2026 severe thunderstorms and heat sweeping across the 250th birthday celebrations.  It’s really uncool to openly mock those who have believed that insane weather patterns are “not that bad” or even those clinging to the outdated “climate change is a hoax” ideas.  Especially when there’s been actual death, costly financial results, and enormous inconvenience to the about half a million people without power.

In real life, I don’t gloat.  My existence as someone with high immunity to gaslighting and not buying into confirmation bias based misinformation is punishment.  Being an asshole on the internet, that’s an entirely different story.  And I’d like to think I wouldn’t be blogging this now if it weren’t for this nugget of bullshit conspiracy nonsense I heard a couple of days ago:

There’s a bit more AI gave me about how it was meteorologists saying it was natural summer heat domes.  I dismiss that since my initial search DID bring up that it was climate change related, but a simple rephrasing allowed it to alter the results to a more friendly “this happens all the time” theme.  That immunity to gaslighting thing.  It IS hotter all the time.  It IS windier all the time.  My personal experience adds to scientific reality based on actual experts.  And if the best you have is a ridiculous and fictional weather warfare narrative that magically only affects Republicans and/or the overheated Pacific Ocean super El Niño is now “natural”?  Fuck off.

No, I’m not gloating about the death and destruction.  Or even the ruined Independence Day celebration in D.C.  That was already dead.  Nobody around my area was in a celebratory mood.  Too hot.  Too many weirdos clinging to being a cult member instead of admitting Trump is a failure.  Not enough money for proper celebrations even if the mood would have been better.  But I’ve got a personal experience and receipts to prove I was prepared for the worst.  Call it one of my greatest hits regarding my predictive capabilities.  Prediction based on critical thinking skills and certainly not a gematria decode or any insanity about anthropomorphic climate change being a hoax.

I had my tree trimmed in late June.  A little more than a week before the storms which put where I live right at ground zero for some of the worst of it.

Part of my bitterness about not feeling comfortable adopting a pet is things like the tree.  I’ve been here long enough and it’s been trimmed several times before.  It’s always real expensive, and a huge pain in the ass to get multiple bids to make sure I’m getting a competitive price.  I’ve considered having it chopped down, but maybe the tree trimmers are right.  There is a lot of shade I’d lose.  And trying to live with leaving the thermostat at higher temperatures than I previously lived with, maybe it’s for the best it stays.

The tree is perpetually overgrown.  It was overgrown when I bought the house.  It’s no fun.  I can’t take it for a walk, or teach it tricks.  All our conversations have been completely one sided.  When the flyer was slipped in my door, an advertisement for tree trimming services in our area, I thought about how I’d been putting it off for too long.  Maybe I really need to bite the bullet here and get it done.

And what elevates this to near impossible prediction status is the way I talked about the tree prior to the actual trimming.  My favorite phrase was:

“It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

This is a prime example of why my mere presence is annoying.  The OhNoMyInVeStMeNtS! crowd is busy filing insurance claims and not having their favorite breakfast nook open for business even days later.  All the many, many leaves strewn across the back yard are from other trees.  There are two modest branches in my back yard that need to be disposed of.  One of them isn’t even from my tree.

The entire crew that did the job was Hispanic.  <GASP!>

Well, we will never know how bad it could have been.  Accident waiting to happen was avoided by doing something common sense and the occasional elimination of my tendency to procrastinate.  In theory, my stupid tree could have wind grabbing on to least branches and be the tree that ruined the power lines for my entire neighborhood.  My power was out for about two minutes.

Yeah!  No ruined food in the freezer!  No struggles to sleep in a hot, stagnant oven called a home!  No emergency hotel room stay!  No angry neighbors because my tree fell on their roof!  It’s lovely when you get to take credit for things that might not ever have happened.  I should probably take up a new hobby like…conspiracy theories?

Conspiracy Gematria Is a Shitty LLM

That may seem to be an irrelevant statement these days considering the overall lack of irrelevance that conspiracy gematria has to the world at this time.  But it’s more about AI and LLMs at this point.  And although there’s a decent amount of content addressing the problems with generative AI, “good” information is available if your research techniques are up to the challenge, I thought it would be fun to <corporate speak font>circle back</corporate speak font> to the mid 2010’s gematria explosion.  You know that time, when Alex Jones style bullshit was all the rage.

If you didn’t already know, AI chatbots are not some avatar of omniscience that scours the internet and compiles the sum of all human knowledge to form the correct answer.  It’s merely a text prediction device based on what’s out there.

Wow it’s really raining hard.  You could say it’s raining cats and _____.  Where even autocomplete suggests you might be looking for the word dogs.  The Supergirl movie is _____.  Really good?  Too woke?  Mediocre?  Total trash?  That’s a lot trickier, and depending on which echo chamber, if any, you spend most of your time at may affect the outcome of the prediction.  Not because the LLM is bad, per se.  But because like a bad lawyer trying to get away with leading the witness you can subtly alter the wording of your question to trick the LLM into giving the answer you *want* to hear.  Innocent enough if you’ve already decided completely subjectively that you love or hate the Supergirl movie.  Not so fun for society at large if you think that the global problems with climate change we’re experiencing now aren’t a problem.  Or if you didn’t understand how vaccines worked back in 2020.

Tech companies, are a business.  And operating as a business requires profit and growth above and beyond everything else, apparently including oxygen and clean drinking water.  There’s an arbitrary dividing line between reputable companies with employee integrity and fascist operations that require exploitation to the maximum while the narcissist in chief rakes in millions with little addition to the operation of keeping large numbers of people content.  Naturally, far right wing messaging has the appeal to the “wealth defense industry”.  That’s a euphemism I heard recently for white collar crime.  Once someone learns the math of starting with 10 million dollars earning a safe couple percent interest versus starting with $1 at a safe couple of percent interest there’s no turning back for some.  Far right messaging wields the political power to get votes from the clueless while simultaneously making the wealthy boomer get excited about nothing else other than the performance of the stock portfolio.  A recipe for making employment for survival of the working class a tedious and eternal conflict of balancing basic necessities and pretending to care about the most boastful and arrogant narcissistic, sociopathic bosses, which makes a career more of a position in a global Ponzi scheme.

Cults, propaganda, scams.  The bastion of confirmation bias based misinformation.  Nothing says you don’t care about facts like falling for any of these traps.  Now that we’re officially in a global society where people would have money than be right, isn’t it nice to know that at least before AI started predicting what we wanted to hear that at least we got to do some really cool gematria decodes, first?

The education system dried up.  After a period of let’s pretend a degree means stability and home ownership, too many people got exposed to other peoples perspectives.  They started getting naught thoughts about equality, dignity, basic human rights, and morality.  You can’t have that in the Ponzi scheme.  But if smartphones are cheap enough and the right propaganda is targeted at the vulnerable, you don’t need an education and critical thinking.  You can have Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to supplement your Fox News.  A device with easy access to stay in line with what the cool people are saying about bad ideas regarding long term sustainability.  Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance conspiracy gematria would have stayed a simple sports gambling grift.  But I doubt it.  The stories always gave away that they were edging ever further towards the violent, racist, and misogynist content.  Social media didn’t care.  Just like Coca Cola trots out a message occasionally about caring about pollution the higher ups would occasionally do some social media damage control.  See, we banned this account!  We do care about the children!  See, they created two new accounts the next day!  We care about free speech!  See, we care about massive amounts of training data for our upcoming LLMs!  Let’s watch the conspiracy theorists outstupid each other in the goal to be an influencer level voice on the pyramid scheme!

And gematria was perfect.  Absolutely perfect for that.  As soon as a two or three digit number was mentioned you knew EXACTLY what was coming up.  113 meant lying.  56 meant Jesuits ruining the world.  227 and 314 meant Pi and therefore real math was backing up the other story and other numbers being told.  More than a full generation of people starved for actual education found a voice.  A voice that was cemented into leadership with the narcissistic attitude of “Fuck you, got mine” with the fascist, “Well, at least I’m not a woman, immigrant, nonbinary, or the wrong religion” more ordinary level of income folk.  And boy did it show that it was working on the voter suppression front.  If you dared to mention that Fauci got a raw deal trying to work through Covid while being stymied at every turn by incompetent executive power.  Nothing beats cover for incompetence and corruption like a good scapegoat.

Smart people make good scapegoats, too.  Because mocking people with tiny, statistically insignificant numbers is really not very bright the family dynamic has been…interesting for the past decade.  People that instantly recognized that “47” doesn’t make much sense without context have to deal with family members, co-workers and fellow shoppers who have been given an excuse to open up about how smart they are when the reality is they have fallen for the cultish Attaboy!^TM.   A one way street to political donations, gambling while others have the insider information you don’t, eternal justification of people hypocritically contradicting themselves openly.

Later today, in a better alternate universe, I would be at a barbecue, laughing and having a good time.  I’d come home, take my dog for a walk and watch a movie for pure escapist entertainment.  But noooooooo.  I’m the bad guy because I’d rather not have to deal with 100 degree, global recession react to the fires that have been lit raging around me.  And the gematria crowd that was on cloud nine a decade ago.  They join me in my discontent.  The consolidation at the top of the food chain abandoned them long ago.  And we can all not go to a protest on America’s 250th birthday because it’s going to be way hotter than a hoax dictates it should be.