Or as a Brit I heard on TV call them, “titbits”.

Today, I’ll start off with this interesting article on what it’s like to work at Amazon.com.

And we are not talking about the Silicon Valley nerds who run the webservers and program the site. We are talking about the thousands of people who work in Amazon’s vast (as in twelve blocks!) warehouses and who “pick” your order. What is their life like?

Basically, the answer is “very very boring”. It pays well ($11/hour) and the conditions are spare but decent, and it even comes with benefits.

But the work is extremely tedious, and because of the sheer number of workers needed, simply showing up to work can be a nerve-grinding hassle. First you have to wait to park, then you have to wait to actually get in the building, then you have to wait to get through security. And all to get to a job that consists of counting boxes for ten hours in a row.

Luckily, they only require you to process 125 orders an hour, which is plenty of time for a competent worker to get things done and still have time to relax.

Overall, I am not sure I could take the unrelenting boredom. Counting things all day sounds like a good way to end up in the loony bin, not to mention the eye strain from all that peering at boxes.

Still, it seems like a decent job, especially for unskilled labour.

I’d give it a shot.

Next, a big beautiful black lady tells a hilarious story on Conan.

That just might be my favorite comedy use of adding “bitch” to the end of something.

You just can’t beat a good “fuck your assumptions” story for making you laugh and feel good about the world at the same time.

I have to wonder what people assume about me. Probably that I am a homeless person, or possibly some kind of mental patient.

Or they could assume I am a big fat hairy nerd, and they would be more or less right. I am, of course, far more than that, but it does describe the general category into which I fit.

They have my species right, even if they are clueless as to my variant.

But if you really want to take the “fuck you” to a whole new level, you write a whole song about it.

British tabloid and force of unmitigated and relentless awfulness the Daily Mail reviewed an Amanda Palmer performance at the mega-huge Glastonbury music festive but apparently their reporter got his mind so completely blown by the sight of an unexpected live boob (Amanda’s bra slipped. It happens.) that they could write about nothing else.

She replied with the above song and I think it’s bloody brilliant. What a way to make your feelings clear about the sort of journalism that would have to tunnel a mile upward to even find the gutter.

Seriously, UK. What is the deal with your tabloids? They are so very awful!

Next, we have something I would normally save for Friday Science but it is such an extraordinary conjunction of my interests that I just can’t wait.

Brain science AND ethics? The brain science of ethics? Holy Penfield, Batman, I think we have a winner.

And not only ethics, but ethics with an extremely brutal moral question attached. I love those! And this “trolley problem” split is fascinating.

I love the distinction between “cold ethics” and “hot ethics” because I have had thoughts along those lines myself but have never really expressed them.

But for a long time, I have been contemplating the difference between what our logical and analytical minds tell us is right and what feels right.

Unless you truly are a psychopath, both trolley scenarios are going to feel wrong because you are choosing to kill someone. That seriously violates our natural, inborn ethics.

But in the “flip the swich” version, because we are not doing the killing ourselves (gravity is), it is easier for our rational minds to overcome this feeling of wrongness and do the right thing.

In the “kill the fat person” version, though, we have to take on the full moral burden of murder, and that is breaking the most profound taboo human beings have ever known.

You will do the pushing. You will see the fat person’s face as they fall. You will see them die. These things are all nightmares for our hot ethics circuit, and I doubt a lot of (sane) people would be able to do it, at least not in time to save the people on the runaway trolley.

I know I wouldn’t. Even if later, I figured out that I could have saved those people by murdering the fat person, I would feel no guilt, because honestly, some things are just too much to ask of a person.

Nobody could blame me for not committing murder on a split-second decision. Not even the families of the deceased, I would imagine.

As for the rather sensationalistic “Would you kill baby Hitler” question, the answer is no, because there would be so many more humane and ethical ways to keep him from becoming the Hitler we know.

But if that was the only way… and it would take a lot of convincing to make me think so… then yes, I would do it. I would do it in the most humane, painless way possible, but I would do it.

And then hate myself for a while.

I am also intrigued by the notion of the social usefulness of psychopaths. It is definitely true that there are jobs and situations where a lack of moral squeamishness would be a benefit. When we think of psychopaths, we tend to only think of the wild untamed ones, the psychopathic killers and criminals who hurt innocent people and are thus terrible villains.

But a less impulsive and deranged psychopath might go undetected and actually be a benefit to society because they have figured out that blending in benefits them greatly and that, while they have no functioning hot ethics circuit, they have a cold and clinical belief in right and wrong and that works quite well for them.

Sure, they might not “really care” as most people would understand it, but they might nevertheless be solid citizens and a benefit to society.

Finally, we have today’s vid.

It presents my big brain’s big theory that emotions are primarily a form of communication, and that by suppressing them with no outlet, we doom ourselves.

Remember how yesterday I posted a link to that thing about gender flipping?

Turns out it works great with race, too.

That link goes to a great bit of biting satire on Gawker which ruthlessly mocks the way the media handles stories about black people in general, and more specifically the recent outbreak of blatant racism in the pundit-sphere of the American Right.

I love this kind of thing, as I made clear in last night’s post. I am a natural born satirist, with a satirist’s sensitivity to hypocrisy, irony, and inconsistency, and I enjoy few things more than using language to make said hypocrisy abundantly evident by putting it under the microscope and letting everyone see what nasty little bug it is.

I mean, I’m the guy who did this :

That’s me laying it on thick and hard, Jonathan Swift style. Sure, it is not exactly subtle, but I never meant it to be.

Sure, us liberal intellectual types appreciate nuance and subtlety but we’re already in the choir. Everyone else needs a blunt instrument to crack open their misconceptions and overwhelm their defenses by rubbing their faces with their own cognitive dissonance.

This is not a nice thing to do. Odds are, even if it works, nobody will thank you for it. Truly important satire is not even designed to make anyone laugh.

It’s designed to make them think, and when it is done right, that is exactly what it makes people do, because whether or not they agree with you, the satire forces them to think about why they believe what they do, either to defend their minds against your horrible conclusions, or to find their way through the forest of irony and figure out what you really mean.

Of course, someone has to see the damned thing first. Sigh.

Speaking of satire, sometimes it can be done most elegantly and effectively by an act of compilation.

Of course, the place I got it from somehow thought it was about how male-oriented American cinema is, and I suppose you could get that from it too.

After all, it’s almost never “only one woman… “, is it?

But mostly, it’s about just how over-used that “only one man can stop this bad thing from happening!” trope has become.

It’s a trope that makes sense in our highly individualistic culture. Our heroes have to not just be individuals but hyper-individuals, absolutely and utterly unique people who are the only ones in all of existence that can do what the plot calls upon them to do.

Even if, objectively, what they do is not all that unique. A lot of American action heroes benefit greatly from the fact that because they are the hero, they get away with shit that should get them killed.

Like the fact that bad guys can’t shoot worth shit, for example. I call it the Bullet Exclusion Field. No matter how many bad guys are shooting at the hero, miraculously, none of the bullets will hit him.

That’s because the hero is protected by the plot. He gets shot at a lot because hey, bullets flying is cool. Getting shot at is cool. Squibs popping everywhere is cool.

But if logic prevailed and the hero actually got shot, the movie would be over. So the hero has to be magic, which makes his heroism a lot less impressive to my mind.

Next, we have a rare thing : a Cracked.com skit that is actually fairly decent.

And it’s not even an After Hours.

Usually, the people at Cracked take an OK premise and their obviously impressive production capabilities and make a total hash of it. Terrible gags, poor structure, coldheartedness, not having even the slightest idea where the “funny” is in a concept… the best I can say is that the acting is usually good.

The performers have the chops. But the writing tends to suck.

But I liked this skit. The premise is fairly obvious but the execution was good. Who hasn’t wanted a Shakespeare character to say “I literally have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. ”

Of course, they gave it their usual inaccurate title. It’s not a “Worst Performance” because it is clearly happening within the world of the play itself.

Get it together, you knobs.

Shakespearean language is pretty opaque. Not because Shakespeare was a lousy writer, far from it in fact. It’s just that his plays are full of what were, basically, topical references of his time.

Add to that the natural shift in the English language since Shakespearean days and it’s no wonder we need annotations up the yingyang to make sense of it all.

Imagine someone four hundred years from now trying to make sense of a hip, topical comedy based on current events, or an intense drama based on real world issues.

At least they will have the Internet to use!

And now, of course, today’s vid.

Not much to say about it. Picture of cute animals with my goofy assed jokes. Another day when I just did not feel very inspired when it came time to make a video.

I feel like I am really losing momentum on the video front. Somehow the project and me aren’t always on the same wavelength any more. I went into it with great enthusiasm and a thirst for experimentation, but now I am just not feeling it.

Well, worst case scenario, I only have eight more to do before the project is over. Of course, then I will have to come up with some other way to keep myself busy.

I am pondering a video project that is not tied to a one a day schedule. A lot of my vids could have been a lot better if I had simply had more time to refine them.

But the daily thing really works for me. I would be very afraid that without that structure, there would be nothing to keep me focused and it would be just another project abandoned when it had barely begun.

At least the crazy daily projects keep me going.

Maybe I should do things in multiple parts, one part a day?

Who knows. But I will find something to keep me occupied.

It’s warp speed blog entry time again, folks. I have social time with the friends happening any minute now, and I need to get through this phase fast.

But heck, I have fun links to share, so filling space should be no problem.

In fact, sometimes, pressure makes things more fun!

First, we have this marvelous story of cops being forced to give a stripper her money back.

And we ain’t talkin’ chicken feed here, folks. The lady in question, Tara Mishra, had managed to save over a million dollars over fifteen years. That”s almost 70K a year, folks.

But the best part is that it was all in one dollar bills, tied together in stacks of $10,000 each with hair ties, just lying around in here home.

She decided to give the money to some friends so they could start a club of their own (lucky friends!), but her friends got pulled over by the cops while transporting the cash.

The cops, not unreasonably, figured that must be drug money (fool, drug dealers don’t use ones!), and seized it pending an investigation.

But there’s nothing illegal (yet) about keeping loads of cash in your home instead of the bank, and the cops had to give the money back.

And I just love it when self-righteous stormtroopers have to admit they are wrong to people they probably think of as the scum of the earth and way, way beneath them.

I hope her friends open a strip bar right across the street from the police station.

Next up, we have this hilarious bit of satire posted (and then removed) by Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed, if you don’t know, is a website well known for their ability to generate exactly the sort of list-based comedy that the Internet loves.

And boy, are they pervasive! I seem to end up there at least three or four times a week and until this day, I had never visited their web site directly, only ended up there because someone posted a link to one of their articles on their Facebook wall.

As someone who has been there dozens of times, I can appreciate the spot on satirical wit that the original poster of the list, Joe Veix, used to make that funny bit of fun-poking.

And he posted it to where it would be appreciated the most… BuzzFeed. Surely the ultra-hip people at BuzzFeed can take a joke, right?

Wrong. Sadly, about fifteen minutes after it was posted, the folks at BuzzFeed took it down. They claimed it was because the article was “mean-spirited”, but we all know that is just code for “it hurt our feelings”, don’t we?

Bad move, BuzzFeed. You can’t be hip and thin-skinned at the same time. You lost major cool points for being so lame as to take it down.

And surely hip people like you understand the Streisand Effect. By taking it down, you just made the Internet more interested in it.

You should have just smiled and left it up there, and odds are, people like me would never have even heard about the whole thing.

Tsk tsk, people.

Next up we have this interesting little article about gender-flipping.

No, it’s not a new sport at the Transsexual Games. It’s an Internet meme where people take images featuring one gender and flip it to the other gender in order to emphasize the ridiculousness of the original picture and how it treats its subject(s).

Or sometimes, it’s the words that get flipped, like in this marvelous example.

And I’m sure it will look just darling on him.

All they did was take an article about a female politician and replace the pronouns with male ones and bingo, you have an absolutely marvelous bit of satire about the different ways the media treats women, even in power, than they do men.

Or there is this classic re-imagining that took the cover of an Avengers comic and redid it with the sort of poses they give female superheroes.

Hulk need cock! You! You fuck Hulk now!

Utter genius. I would not say this is the most important meme ever (then again, I’m a dude), but what I will say is that this is exactly the kind of context-swapping, assumptions-challenging, culture-jamming art that I well and truly love.

One of art’s biggest jobs is to make people think about the things they take for granted.

This sort of thing does that job extremely well.

And lastly, of course, today’s vid.

Like the little swerve I put on the subject there? Bet you didn’t know that what started out as an explanation of hoarding would turn out to be one of my polemics against the private jet set.

And I mean every word. I think these people are in a the grips of a powerful pathology that renders them morally unfit for the obscene amount of power we allow them to accrue. Like all addicts, the addiction takes over their life and displaces all other concerns.

Only these junkies rule the world, and they are doing a damned poor job of it too. They are too far gone to even recognize their own long-term best interests in maintaining the societies that support them.

Junkies don’t care about long term consequences. They need their fix now, now, now, and they will do, say, or compromise anything they need to in order to get their fix of that sweet, sweet cash.

It is clear to me that this class of cretin will not be satisfied until there is absolutely nobody on Earth who can ever, ever tell them that they can’t have everything they want, when they want it, without all the power and absolutely no responsibility.

And only we humble citizens can stop them. We have to stop believing their lies about how there is nothing we can do. There’s plenty we can do, if we but have the will to do it.

It’s their money, but it’s still our economy. It exists to serve us.

And if we don’t like how things turn out, we can (and should) change the rules.

Still feeling a little grumpy, although nowhere near as bad as I felt before writing Thursday’s soul-cleansing blog entry, so there’s progress.

Today’s grumpiness has less to do with feel trapped and crazed and more to do with just feeling existentially blah. I’m not angry at the world, I am just somewhat disappointed in it, like the world is someone you take home from the bar because they are gorgeous but they turn out to be crap in bed.

The main issue, that of not being satisfied with my life, remains. I mean, looks at this thing :

Save this pic to your hard drive. There is a lot of wisdom in it.

Like most people lucky enough to live in the modern world, I have the bottom layer pretty well covered. I don’t worry about where my next meal is coming from. (Odds are : it’s the fridge.)

I have access to clean water at the turn of a tap (except for occasional ‘turbulence’), I have heated (if not cooled) shelter so my homeostasis needs are taken care of, I have air to breathe and a nice place to poop. As for sex, well, I am flying solo there but still, it’a taken care of.

Then we go up a layer and the results become more mixed. I have security of resources, my body, and property. Not so much employment (I have none), health (multiple medical issues) or the family (mine is far, far away).

And I am not sure exactly what security of morality is. Feeling safe that you will not have to morally compromise yourself? Security in your moral well-being?

Either way, I imagine I have it, because in order to be in danger of doing something to morally compromise yourself, you have to be in danger of actually doing something.

And that’s not too likely.

Up to the next later, Love/Belonging, and I start really losing ground. I have friendship, of course, and I would be so very lost in this world without it.

But family? Sexual intimacy? Nope and nope. I recognize that sexual intimacy is something I presumably need, but I have never had it, so I don’t crave it or anything.

Sometimes it’s good not to know what you are missing.

And my family is out there, but far away from me both emotionally and geographically. I certainly do not feel like I have them to count on or that they are a major part of my life, nor am I a major part of theirs. I love my family… but we’re not close.

The next layer up, the Esteem layer, is where I come up goose eggs. I don’t have any of that. Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others…. I can’t imagine any of that relating to me. I might be respected by others without knowing it, although I can’t imagine why.

And as for respect for others, let’s not go there, OK? Because I can’t go there without the howling demons of my deep sense of rage, abandonment, loneliness, and betrayal roaring into life and starting to take big fat bites out of my ability to respect or trust anybody, and I am forced to face a very dark and dangerous part of myself.

And I just don’t feel up to that right now. Maybe I will talk to my therapist about it. It seems like the sort of thing that is important.

Interestingly, I actually do better on the top layer, Self-Actualization, than the one below. I have found outlets for my creativity (you’re reading one of them), I am pretty good at some kinds of problem solving, I consdier myself to be highly unprejudiced, and I am all about accepting facts.

I won’t claim to lack self-delusion, because of course, thinking you have no delusions is the biggest delusion of them all.

But once I know the facts, I face them and accept them as best I can. I am a philosopher at heart and the core of being a philosopher is to be completely submissive to the truth.

You know, looking over that list, I notice there is no entry for freedom. I consider that to be a pretty big need that all animal life shares.

Plus there is not an entry for romance per se, just sexuality intimacy, which does not really cover it. We’re a pair-bonding species, we need to have a mate.

I find it hard to imagine myself in either romance or sexual intimacy. Not, at least, until I get over my mental health issues well enough to get out there and meet people already.

Quibbles aside, you can see that I have a lot of unmet needs, especially Esteem ones. Those are the ones whose bite I feel most sharply as I sit here at 40 years of age with very little to show for my time here on Earth. Most people my age have families, careers, achievements, material luxury and comfort, and are only just beginning to get around to that Self-Actualization layer.

Me, I have never been in a relationship, barely ever dated, have spent most of that time leading a pathetic and highly dependent lifestyle that I dare anyone to try and respect, and have basically lost almost my entire adult life to mental illness.

I feel like I have been frozen all these years in crystal-clear ice, so I could see the world, but never be a part of it or partake of its warmth.

And no doubt, my icy prison has preserved and protected me from the world. And that’s a bad thing, because I never got the kind of stimulus from the world that would lead a healthier person to go out there and seek their fortune and meet their soulmate and do all thought other things that normal people do in order to fill in more of those needs boxes than I have ever had.

I am long overdo for a thaw.

But I am so, so scared….

Time for me to bitch about my life, that is.

I recognize the symptoms. I have been feeling angry and trapped and stressed out lately. The thought “I hate my life!” keeps popping up despite my efforts to avoid thinking like that. I am getting that feeling like I am a zoo animal going insane in its cage.

So it must be time to let some bad stuff out. But there’s a small problem.

My life is going pretty okay right now, honestly. Not a lot to bitch about.

My finances are decent. I am going into this month (cheque day was yesterday) with $83 in my pocket. That is always a good feeling. Financial security does wonders for my emotional security.

My health is OK. The heat is still bothering me but I manage. I have been getting on-again, off-again symptoms of acid reflux, especially after I have lain down in the afternoon, and I am definitely going to talk to my GP about that next time I see him.

But otherwise decent. I am cutting back on the carbs a little and taking more insulin lately because my blood sugars are a little high. But it’s not too bad.

I don’t have anything to stress about. Vcon is coming in the first week of October, and I will have to start planning for that soon. But that’s hardly a major stressor.

And of course, I am still mentally ill. My depression is always there, some days bigger, some days smaller. It’s not like my recent upswing in mood and recovery has solved the whole problem. I still have a lot of work to do to tunnel my way out of my big thick shell.

But that’s always there. So I figure what is really going on with me is just the usual accumulation of unresolved emotions that sooner or later I have to deal with by throwing them onto the page.

At least this time, I am choosing to do it sooner rather than later. I won’t have to ask myself “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

Because I did.

So let’s see, what is cloggin’ my noggin lately. Well, there’s that frustrated feeling. Feel trapped, bored, restless, angry. A vital part of me definitely wants out of this cardboard box of a life of mine. I am not satisfied with my lot in life. I want more.

And yes, that’s ironic given the vid I did recently.

But I do not have a lot of my hierarchy of needs met. I am no comfortably middle class person looking at all their possessions and achievements and thinking there must be something more.

I am a very bright and capable person who has accomplished very little in his life and who needs to get around to having an emotional adolescence already but doesn’t know how.

I told my therapist how I think I almost entirely missed out on being a teenager when I was one. I experienced none of the usual rites of passage. No first kiss, “first time”, first relationship, first breakup, first boy/girl party, none of it.

I was just too isolated, especially after I stop being friends with Jason Heisler and the rest in Grade Ten. He was pretty much my only link to normal teen life, and with him gone, I was a ghost. I went to school and came home and watched TV and played video games and that was it.

I sometimes wonder what was wrong with me, that the instincts that drove other teens to explore their social space and learn to adjust to society never drove me anywhere.

Partly it’s because I am simply too reasonable, logical, and sensible. Reason has been far too dominant in my life, which might sound odd coming from the mentally ill, but the two things actually go together.

Issues normal people would solve by following their hearts and doing what it told them are instead left unsolved because I demand to know the reason behind everything I do, and if it doesn’t make sense to me, it never happens. It gets stopped at the door by the bouncers and never let in.

As a result, I have quite a crowd out there.

And as much as I would like to just throw the doors open and let them all in at once so I can get this interminable process over all at once, I don’t think that is even possible, let alone advisable.

All I can do is try to plow through the backlog, day by day, hoping that one day I will clear it.

There are times when I feel so frustrated with my life and so crazed by my confinement that I want to throw my computer monitor against the wall and kick my computer to pieces. Throw out everything I own and start over again from scratch. Dissolve all the petty ties in my world and just storm off into the far distance with nothing but the clothes on my back, a backpack, and whatever cash I could lay my hands on at that exact moment.

Of course, I am far too sensible to do such a clearly irrational and irresponsible thing. That would be giving up all the security I have in the world and throwing myself on the mercy of a life that has not been terribly kind to me in the past.

But as the sober and responsible owner of a soul, I do have to ask myself why I feel that way, and can I give that part of me what it wants without so extreme a measure.

There’s no need to smash the cage when you have the key to the lock, after all.

Unless the real problem is that you are addicted to that cage. I do sometimes feel like my real problem is being too timid to deal with the real world, and that all this navel-gazing is as nothing compared with the power of just going out there and doing things.

But I…. don’t feel like it.

And maybe I never will.