Pass the Pigs - When the Universe Ends

I spent much of my formative years being bored and waiting for it to be time to go home. To go home so I could rest, read books, and pass the time easily, where I would be significantly less bored. I had no visit-enabled friends to speak of, so I was hardly going to another person's house to socialize or ever really have any fun. This will not count the place of peripheral friends of brothers with the Playstation room. As my parents have - for basically all of my conscious life - been divorced, having an actual friend whose house I actually went to frequently to carry the remaining weight would have really helped. Or if I actually recognized the social potential of the owners of the Playstation room. In fact I usually ended up being locked into long-hour waits at buildings lived in by some friend of an immediate family relative. Nobody can tell me I'd have had better spent time if we "just got a babysitter". Believe me, mum looked.

The worst ordeals by far were the times when I had to deal with some temporary but prolonged exposure to unwanted waiting hours because of my dad. Often I'd be driven away to some rural dustbowl with nothing of interest for kilometers around, where I'd stay for hours in whatever car or ute we arrived in and the only thing I could do to pass the time then was play terrible games on a pre-2007 cellphone. No Internet, no Nintendo DS, no money, and for most of the time not even dad. Just me and the most difficulty-twisted primitive phone games with wonkiest 4-bit controls or whatever ever.

If I was at a house instead of some insufferable motorcycle dirt track, often there was a good chance that I could play by myself with access to board games. Whether they were meant to be single-player before I make stuff up or not. That also sucked, and I don't want to go through that again, but there was one "board game" in memory that stayed with me.

Pass the Pigs was a weird game that I looked at for a while, even though I probably knew that in spite of being me, in my shocking situation, I wouldn't dream of playing it no matter if I had a second person to share it with or not. It was a small green box with what I imagine to be a minimal set of contents. It seemed like a pretty miserable thing, where the goal was to toss two tiny plastic pig figurines at the same time and then practically gain points each turn depending on what positions pure luck decided the pigs landed in. Positions being connected to - though possibly not exclusively so, given the old status of my memory - how the plastic pigs landed on each other.

Actually at the time of revision before final publication I suddenly realize that this could be wrong. Maybe that's a really rare position in that drawing, or they're just meant to land on two individual places on the ground. I suddenly discovered in myself that it was probably about what side of their own bodies two separate pigs landed on, like if one landed with its tail down or something. That being said, though I don't remember much of the rules, and I could be remembering something wrong, I still have a fuzzy picture of how the game "worked" in 2025. To this day I have never played it, or the cheap equivalent that apparently exists where you just throw normal dice.

But one rule I saw on the leaf from inside the box stood out, and this rule played its cards so that I would never forget it.

This wasn't just any ordinary rule. It wasn't a rule that you just "follow". It wasn't even a rule that happens. It seemed like more of a philosophical entertainment than something that your ordinary rule-maker would logically decide to take the extra 13 minutes to add, or the extra ink to print. Have a look at this picture and see if you think it happening during standard Pass the Pigs gameplay is likely.

If you would respond to that with "the pigs are never going to land like that when you throw them", then to the best of my long-term memory, you're on to something.

The game rules themselves don't just say that this is impossible. They also provide a ruling for what happens in your game if the pigs land this way, even though they clearly just stated a few seconds ago that it's impossible. It's a directive that you should do something - if you meet a condition that never happens. If we believe everything that the rules say, then they have a rule that can never come into effect. But if it somehow did come into effect, and your physics duped, the rule is as follows:

That's basically how I remember it.

There's something unsettling about this idea. That you do something impossible and then the game tells you that it wants you to stop playing it. They could have just said that this is impossible and told you not to worry about it. Because you don't need to worry about something when you know it objectively won't happen, right?

But they do worry about it. They took the time and the cost of a small amount per unit sold in ink to put that information on the rule sheet for some reason that honestly I still don't know. And I tried to do this entire post from memory without doing any web searches for Pass the Pigs other than to find out whether its title's "the" should be capitalized or not, which considering my plan to go into this without interference went slightly badly. 

Maybe Pass the Pigs publishers of all people were trying to save people from wasting their time and effort, like they're not already bored and should bother to try to get this landing combination. Though the rule does appear to accidentally bring something interesting out of the experience. This odd feeling of unsettling logic about the game and the world that houses it ending.

I believe that since finding this game, I might think about this concept more than once every two years. The Pass the Pigs rule that The Game Ends that comes into effect if you do something that you can't do.

I find it less haunting than some things, and more haunting than a lot of them. I find it more haunting than the 64 ring Tower of Hanoi game where having 64 discs in play mathematically adds up to so many translations that following the rules it would supposedly take more time than there is time left in our universe to complete. I used to boggle my own mind often by trying to imagine the ways of our reality having no universe at all, that is, if there was no reality. No reality being something really creepy to think about when you fully resonate your thought with the concept. I have a brother who apparently used to ponder and experience the same philosophical no-universe thing. But this would be the first time in memory that I ever got creeped out about something like this by a fucking board game...

Speaking of universes, would you have to screw with reality just to make this play in Pass the Pigs happen? Would it be worth it in order to proactively get yourself out of this weak point-keeping game before turn 2? Is the rule sheet even right when it says that this is impossible? What would it actually mean if you got the pigs to do the impossible stack? Does it even make sense to ask that question? Are any questions about this right?

One thing I do know, from the value of thought experiments, is what priorities you should have after doing something that required the laws of reality breaking to occur. Obviously if you did you should give something else your attention. You really shouldn't keep playing Pass the Pigs in pursuit of game score in that scenario. If you land two pigs in that position, and it's because the fundamental rules of reality broke down, you've got bigger problems.

Alert and Afraid, Halfway Through The Dire 20's

It is December, 2024. After doing some fairly simple math, I realized that at this point, by the average person definition where a decade starts when the last digit is "0", we are almost exactly half of the way through this terrible decade in human history called the 2020's.

For a while now, I have been solitarily referring to this decade as The Dire 20's. Because it's certainly dire as all get-out with all the geopolitical fuckery going on, but just in a way that some people don't see because it's insidious and spread out and moves very slowly. I don't think I need to remind anybody about the threats to democracy across the world or climate change, but here it is anyway. And now we have five years almost exactly until people start living in the 2030's.

I was surprised this month to find out that I have records of me coming up with "The Dire 20's" starting considerably earlier than I thought. The record is from August, 2019. Apparently at the time I was also getting a major kick out of exploring a "2020s" tag on social media, obviously to see what people were saying and speculating about the imminent decade of what was, at that point, the future.

Of course, people right now define the start of the 2020's as 2020 AD. Not 2021 AD. There seems to be a prevalent belief that it should be this way because it's "easier" and also that people who try to explain this change to 2021 being the beginning are "pedantic" and "buzz killers". I could object to that, as the lack of a year 0 and most mathematical nerves in my body and an ingrown hatred toward people being basic bitches are raging against this throng internally. I'm a programmer, and I believe in establishing logical systems, even when the system you're establishing is just pertaining to "something fun". But I see why on an instinctual and intuitive level the "2000" and "2020" marking - a zero at the end and all that - speaks to people.

The two digits at the end of "2020" start with 2. It was the first year since 2000 to do that. So people would be drawn to that. It's also a little weird sometimes to think about the "2010's" ending on a year that ends in "20". Also on a bigger scale, if 2001 (instead of 2000) was the start of the 3rd millennium, the 2K area would end around December 3,000, and that "3" on the end of the 3rd millennium would raise some questions, seeing as people were identifying it by THE NUMBER TWO. Plus when decades are defined in the popular way it only affects an inconsistent length of one decade: the first nine years of AD.

My personal preference would probably be to make 2020 the last year of The Dire 10's, as that pandemic was quite the finale and send-off to such a messed up time period. But from this point on in the post I will be using the average definition, the one where 2020 was the start of The Dire 20's.

2020 was actually a pretty good year for me. One of the best in my life, somehow. You might be surprised to read that. My mental health and social situation was just way better than it had been for most of years in all of my history. Things were rough already in The Dire 10's, but somehow an oasis of peace existed in 2020 from where I was situated. For quite some time the whole lockdown thing hardly affected me. But as the years after 2020 progressed, things got worse and worse. Not just in the world and ominous trends, but for me personally.

This post won't be the kind of article where I do heaps of research to provide strictly objective details, or even look many things up. This is simply going to be a long description of what I already know about the world and myself, and my opinions on it, based on what I've learned during my life leading up to this point. Both global happenings and personal experiences will make up this post.

Eight and a bit paragraphs in, let me be frank: this world we live in right now is a fucking nightmare. I want people living in the future who go on The Internet looking at posts both new and old, whether their world is good or not, to know that. I don't want them debating it or doubting it or trying to asterisk it saying "oh but maybe this thing will change your mind a little" - this world in 2024 is fucking scary, and the history of it needs to be told with brutal honesty. There are plenty of others like me. Lots of discontent about my world is to be found among people who live in it, and have seen either first-hand or second-hand what's been going down, especially in Internet memes. But sadly I wonder if history books in a few decades will actually take the time to represent these people, and how bloody important what they had to say was. I particularly like posts to the tune of "Bro wake up it's 2007". My 2007 saw me in a particularly annoying part of my life where I was in a toxic situation frequently and had little freedom or skill - on account of me being a child, which I can not go back to. But boy do I understand the sentiment behind it, in spite of my own personal 2007 life. That meme is a beautiful thing. There's also a nice image of a dog in a chair submerged partly in water that basically says "It's going to be OK, but it's going to be different."

Maybe your life if you read this in 2025 is fine, and you're happy, but that's not what the nightmare is about. It's about future threats that keep expanding until one day your life might not even stand a chance of thriving and being as free as it is today. Democracy is globally being worn down by corporations and corrupt people at the time of this writing, just not in a way that's explicitly obvious. But yes, for some people 2025 life will be tormented by immediate threats, not just things that are on the horizon. Some people in modern and wealthy parts of the world, in 2022 even, were having to deal with some messed up abuses of politics and capitalism. In just two years, I found it getting more scary and more in my face than ever.

Right now, after about two and a half decades of using personal home computers for recreation and productive ventures, I'm having to slowly and painful navigate through a personal exodus of all my files that I've ever kept up till now to a different operating system before everything is forcibly relegated to the cloud. I don't want to go into too many specifics, but I assure you that this has totally uprooted a huge part of my life. The things I have to do not just in the exodus but in the entire rest of the foreseeable future as I continue to use my new computers once I've saved them from hellish exploitations are a gigantic inconvenience.

I don't just use computers because they entertain me and I talk to people I know using The Internet, I use them because that's the only reasonable way I can distribute and make my video games and a lot of mediums' worth of art. Some of my greatest ever achievements exist only as software and data. Yet 2024 has seen me be the most scared of computers that I have ever been, and it's literally my own two computers. That belong to ME. I'm too scared to look videos about computers up, because they'll give me anxiety at this time, and I'm too scared even to look at some gameplay videos that have fun with random grungy graphics and deliberately retrospectively dated OS interface design. Because they'll make me think and worry about all the stuff that's going wrong. That could go wrong.

2023 was when something started to seem wrong with the operating systems to me, and 2023 was the same time that my thyroid just happened to absolutely flamethrower my psyche, making my mental health and fear of the uncertain doom hanging over me so much worse. (But I didn't exactly know I had to go on the hard drive exodus yet.) I used to describe some of my moments in 2023 as "being in my room and looking at the walls around me in sheer disbelief that it keeps going". Having a bad thyroid is nightmarish. I think I'd rather have a heart attack than have to go through that for several months again.

My thyroid is not nearly in the nightmare zone it was in back then, now that I'm most of the way through 2024 - and I have blood test results to prove it - but I will always remember 2023 as the terrifying year in which I felt devastated most of the time and turned for comfort to lots of Ren and Stimpy, of all things. And at this point, 2023 is a really long and undetailed blur. Some happy moments happened, and I could dig up some fond memories, but I can never be in a place like that again. Even if I found out I was remembering something pretty major about the time period wrong. I know how bad it was at its worst, and no month of 2023 was worth those parts of it.

I believe it was around 2021 that I started having my landmark epic dreams about climate change. These would be surreal dreams, and make stuff up, but they would speak to how scary climate change was - and still is - in their frequency and how haunting they were. Some pretty cloudy, fluffy stuff went on, but there was overall a lot of terrain destruction, familiar places being wrecked by high water, and downer endings. I particularly remember places in the North Island that looked highly like I recognized them being at a stage in time after years of sea level rise had destroyed them. Broken roads and ruined cityscapes, with the very water of the coastline being above parts of them. I have also dreamed about things like this in 2023, and last month.

These dreams can be fun to think about. One of the benefits of climate change is that - if you're safe from it - you get to witness some really epic and creepy scenes that have a very unique, apocalyptic atmosphere to them. It is quite a sight to behold. Though I don't particularly enjoy watching wildfires...

Climate change has been a major issue for a long time. Of course it didn't start in 2021, that's just where I found the earliest known record of me having that experience with my dreams and all that. It became obvious to the world I'd say about halfway through the Dire 10's, when natural disasters of an unexpected sort that were too extreme to ignore and good mainstream documentaries about this stuff came out.

Scientists already knew. Carl Sagan knew, and he died a few weeks after my first birthday.

Of course, 2019 and 2020 were particularly scary because at that time Australia had its worst wildfire ever. It turned places in Australia hellish and made the sky a terrifying shade of orange for hours in fucking NEW ZEALAND. Might I remind you, New Zealand and Australia are about three hours of plane ride apart. They're not close together.

It's Summer in my hemisphere right now, and every Winter I dread how much hotter the next Summer likely going to be than last year. I just know, logically, that the heat is going to be worse. Every time a yearly record of global temperatures comes out this decade, it sets the new world record for hot global temperatures.

I've always been a cold weather kind of guy. I hate the fascination with sunny weather and I've always been fond of overcast or "gloomy" weather. But above all I'd much rather the air around me be super cold than super hot.

Be honest about it: isn't it easier to make yourself warmer than it is to cool yourself down? And I don't want to hear about "going for a swim" or "taking your jacket off". You can cover yourself in as many layers of clothing as you want, but once you're naked, there's no removing insulation any more. You can't take your skin off. You can't just shave your body hair off just like that. At that point you have to start resorting to god-awful things like using electric fans if you don't have a heat pump. I have an easier time in Winter because piles of insulating bed and clothing material can increase without limit, especially when I'm trying to go to sleep, as bedtime lately has been a troublesome mess of taking blankets off and having to eventually put them back on. In the middle of this very December, I was struggling with stupid heat onsets at night that made me have to remove blankets and open my door. Other people I knew in my country were too. Even then it would normally be preferable to not open your door at night in Summer. I might decide the door should be open. The wildlife disagrees.

Now you might understand why climate change is slightly but particularly more annoying for somebody like me. Obviously I'm concerned about the whole planet's worth of human beings suffering and possibly dying in the not-very-far future - thousands of people have experienced far worse consequences than me that they are upset about, and they should be taken care of first - but as you can see it's that plus I hate having to deal with overly hot temperatures. So, kind of like an 8,000,000 + 100 scenario. It's coming to New Zealand, too. Even here, the mighty climate safe-zone, had some shocking floods actually quite near to me in 2023. And throughout my life I've dreamed (not literally) of coming into contact with domestic arrivals of snow, which in my whole life I've barely managed to experience once. While writing this, all of a sudden I wonder if I'll get to go to a place where it's snowing before it's too late. New Zealand doesn't have much snow, and in my lifetime it's always been like that. I don't travel easily, and the only other country I've ever been in is Australia. And non-literally it is a cool place...

I don't want to have to defend saying climate change is a real thing. Everybody knows that climate change is a "concept" now, lots of people don't believe it's real, and I'm sick of it. We are facing an existential and biodiversity threat to our whole planet, and people are dragging their feet or being manipulated by oil company cronies into thinking nothing's there because changing the transport and energy system is "too hard". If we were characters in just about any old-school fictional movie, we'd see that "the world is going to be destroyed" and we'd fucking fight it. We'd give a damn about saving people enough to actually fix it. It's beyond stupid. If climate change continues the way it has been from 2020 to 2024 with nothing to counter it, you are going to die. And no I don't mean of old age, I mean quite possibly - depending on your age - of heat exhaustion or starvation, or something worse. I think the future suffering and exposure involved scares me more than the extinction of humanity.

Of course, it's not just climate change. It's not just bad corporations, either, though they are a major driving force behind how screwed up everything is right now. There's also the rise of fascism and corruption in worldwide governments - even in France and fucking Germany, and weirder shit like nuclear threats, the suffering of the very Internet you're reading this on right now, pandemics - which science says we haven't seen the last of - and the horrific development of brain-interface technology. And I haven't even mentioned the multitude of issues with AI, which is a whole can of worms that I don't know if I want to get into here. Though you should know something about AI, regarding what I'll introduce to this article next.

 

This is a screenshot I took from a website run by an organization called Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Put simply, they keep track of world situations and describe them through use of an imaginary "Doomsday Clock" that is closer or further way from midnight depending on how close we are to losing our planet. It's not the kind of clock that keeps ticking perpetually forward, it's a symbol where the hands can somewhat unpredictably move. Or, it was unpredictable before this millennium, at least. "Two minutes" away from midnight means we're really close to everything being catastrophically destroyed. We were there before, in 1953. You know, that whole thing.

At the time, it was exceptionally dicey and the worst it had been. Now we've had 2018 and 2020 see it get worse. It's 90 seconds to midnight in 2024. 90 seconds to midnight is really bad. In fact it's the worst reading this symbolic clock has ever given us. And it just keeps being there, while - ironically - people seem to care much less about it than previous generations apparently did when the threat of nuclear war was upon us in the previous century. It just keeps going, too, like 90 seconds to midnight is just normal now. Also don't forget that mass surveillance and web user data collection is still happening in 2024 and a lot of people seem to think that this absurd breach of human rights is acceptable. It's quite a widespread narrative that an ad will play on some site with a ridiculously-timed relevance to something that the device user said near a microphone recently, making it obviously suspicious.

The article below where I took the screenshot is a "fun read". It describes a bunch of things that have been in effect this decade and says bangers like "ominous trends" and "danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation". It also mentions disruptive technologies, such as AI. That's what I was talking about. AI deserves a mention because it's in the fucking 90 seconds to midnight article by the Bulletin of fucking Atomic Scientists. If this link still works, you can read it yourself over here. If that link doesn't work at the time you read this, then we're probably in a lot of trouble because that link goes to The Internet Archive. I had to. There's currently no permalink. The Bulletin's article system on the official website is designed badly.

More advanced future AI that can become self-aware is scary, but there's also the more immediate and tangible threat of less-powerful generative AI being misused by us, which must be credible because the Atomic freaking Scientists were talking about it. We should trust scientists. It's a field that's not majorly motivated by greed or money like so many are, and to the best of my knowledge the leading driving motivation behind being a scientist is either curiosity or wanting to make the world a better place. Or both.

The Internet has been in trouble for a while now, even back in 2018, or earlier. Before generative AI actually became "good", people were already using some kind of much more inferior text model to mass-ruin web searches for just about anybody who wanted to look up information, with useless and suffocating fake websites written by non-humans.

A few years back there was also a disconnected string of badly-conceived government bills that aimed to "help" The Internet but really just would have destroyed it, if they had gone through. Remember SOPA?

Plus there's the way social media corporation tyrants are currently and have been wrecking what used to be open and well-designed places. I am absolutely disgusted at the amount of WebP images, walls put up around what should be free-to-read web articles, messages popping up to ask you about consenting to their cookies, difficulty getting basic fucking image links, and too many of the social media platforms increasingly telling you that you have to make an account just to view a page that was freely visible ten years ago. And don't even get me started on what happened to Twitter.

What's really messed up, however, is how this year The Internet Archive is in jeopardy. And in this time it has been attacked quite a lot.

On the 31st, as I type about it, the Archive is still online. But right now they're being sued for so much money that if they lose, the website will be burned out of existence. Seriously, we can not afford to lose The Internet Archive. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be. Even if somebody else backed up the Wayback Machine somehow - which hosts a treasure trove of functional history for web pages that are lost everywhere else - there are other important things on Archive.org, and it would still be an absolutely depressing loss. I know, The Internet Archive is "boring", but it's a very good, functional kind of boring. It's not ugly, for one thing, and stuff can be found there if it's something specific that you knew you wanted, and I think I should let researchers who use it speak for themselves. But I don't know how to do that, so I'll just let you know that a lot of people find The Internet Archive to be a critical useful resource for studying and researching for university papers and the like.

And now I'm tired, and would not like to burn through much more of the time I have left in the last day of 2024. The pacing of this article will come to an awkward end. There's bound to be much I missed, but I don't think I mind. I think the passion and the honesty is what counts. I'm no university graduate, and I've never been that good at documenting the world. But I know what's real. I know that Earth has been going through some really messed up shit in the third millennium. There's still hope in my day and age, but I don't know if good humanity will save the future. I'd like to think that climate action and sheer outrage can bring us back to the relative stability people had in the 90's, before I had a consciousness.

I've now seen almost all of the Dire 20's decade's first half, and soon I will start to witness the second half. One day I was at my computer and just kind of decided that I'd fight, and go into 2025 with two swords swinging.

Tonight I want to plant a time capsule.

If the world is totally oppressed and overly-controlling in 2124 AD, and art and being allowed to disagree is ruined, and a climate shockwave has wiped out much of what biodiversity I knew about in my time, and there's no place to live near the equator, and The Internet is just totally fucking ruined and impossible to find most information or history on, and nobody in the working class is allowed to make music, paint controversial art, make video games, play video games, swear, make adult-friendly content, get an income that can pay for essentials like water and cereal without being enslaved, imagine if somebody found this post.

If they, some rando in dystopian 2124, found this post, I want them to have a think about the world they grew up in, and be shocked. I want them to be pissed off, even. I also want them to suddenly become aware that some people in 2024 were a lot smarter than the reader a hundred years later expected or bargained for. You know, just some random Autistic adult, with thousands of others in the world a lot like him, and he reveals that people were surprisingly aware and knew what was up back then. There's a lot of us, even the neurotypical ones. If your Internet doesn't totally suck, you should be able to find a few of these posts. There are some amazing heroic speeches in some of my visited online places. People who saw the world slipping downward into disaster, and foresaw a ruination of the world.

Hello. I hope your world isn't as bad as I'm suggesting it is.

Basic Simulation of an Active Volcano

In this article, I will be going over an illustrated (simplified) demonstration of how a volcano works - an active volcano - using knowledge and information I have gathered over the course of years of experience in my time. Using four easy-to-understand pictures, I will show how you can expect these active volcanoes to eventuate as time goes on. Here we go.

First, there's Year 1. The volcano is there, with a town carefully placed next to it. No visible signs of eruption are there, and the inhabitants of the area are completely safe and trusting in their places.

Time passes. As you can see, there's a town, and a volcano, and time has passed. The volcano shows no sign of beginning to threaten anybody by erupting.

It is now much later. The people of the town continue their daily goings, and the active volcano still shows no sign of bringing any change to the area.

Finally, at the end of our exhibition, the volcano stays the way it is and does not go into an eruption. The people of the town remain unaffected by the presence of this nearby volcano.

Using my expert, first-hand experience, it is ultimately clear that this is the true scientific event cycle of an active volcano. Trust me, I'm from New Zealand. I know about this stuff.

A Lost Memory Uncovered

On the 25th day of last month I discovered - quite by accident - the identity of an old animated TV show that for me was clouded in mystery for many years, one that left me with memories I had yearned to understand.

A long time ago, I gained an incomplete knowledge about this obscure TV show as I saw some amount of moments on it, while being just a kid. Naturally, the starting life amnesia set in hard, and I never registered the name of this thing in all of my life until 2024.

Everything I Knew - Or Thought I Knew - About The Show Back Then

Let's refer to the show as Rabbit T. In Rabbit T, the one character I remembered was an anthro rabbit character - with no known name - in white fur who wore a cyan or teal outfit that I basically remember but can't find in an image search and, if I can be trusted to redraw it properly, appeared to me to look kind of like this:

 

It seemed a little appealing in my memory. The outfit's not "cool", but it did have a strong aesthetic. One that I know I have absolutely failed at drawing the way it deserves to be shown. Naturally I could have also told somebody with questions that there were other protagonists alongside this rabbit. But I didn't remember their species or seeing how they looked. The memories were extremely incomplete. After that, you probably understand why finding this show again took so long.

I also knew that the setting was some kind of old time Victorian England - as best as I can guess with my very limited knowledge of what "Victorian" really was, and that there were villains - though like with every other character I didn't have any recollection of what their appearances were like - and something to do with a chase with the villains and the protagonists running away from them, and the rabbit at some point having a joyous face, maybe because he was so full on cleverly winning a victory over his pursuers when he got away, or because that was just the sort of person he was.

So why did I want to find the show so much again? Well, I think just about any average memory of unknown origin makes the brain that owns it demand an answer. That's one reason. However, there was one final thing I retained from back then - the freaking end credits screen.

It's common for me to feel swayed by pretty music that uses bells, and this is what the ending theme for Rabbit T allegedly had. It also had a still shot of the Victorian England city from above while the credit text cycled through. Text just disappeared and was replaced by other text that appeared. In other words, basically no moving parts.
I think I somehow ruined this for myself, but the problem with the credits is that at this point I don't know if a steam train in the still frame existed in my original memories or not. So let's throw a quantum steam train in there, and sort of pretend like maybe I was swayed by the train while watching the end credits as well but also maybe I didn't know it was there at all.

It's not like I actually liked Rabbit T in any meaningful way. Remember, I could barely recall anything about it. If I found the show again, I probably would still not bother to watch a full episode. But aside from the element of wanting to solve a long-held confounding mystery, it for some reason also had a kind of magical allure to me.

Probably because of the bells.

The First Serious Attempt To Find Rabbit T

In the 11th of June in 2021, I guess I thought about the show pretty hard again, because I reached a point where I really, really tried to find the identity of Rabbit T. Sometimes I'll know about something from my past that's really mysterious like this for a long time but then one day actually give it my attention for the first time since losing touch. Rabbit T came up at some point after several years of inactivity, as I said, where I somehow was not considering that I might actually want to try to find it. These don't always have to happen on the same day I actually go searching.

In that day of 2021 June I went searching all over the place online for everything I associated with the mysterious memory of Rabbit T - which wasn't a large collection - and trawled Wikipedia through a page that was called "List of fictional rabbits and hares". Which, I remind you, did not work. It wasn't 2024 yet. And that page does include anthropomorphic ones.

Strained and defeated, I finished the entire Wikipedia list and several web searches like "anthro rabbit in a green hat" and so forth without anything remotely like what I wanted appearing, and gave up. It must have been very obscure. The show was not going to be found.

An Amazing Encounter of Straight-Up Chance

In some places, you can find "complete" lists of television series cartoons that were made. One day, I was having a rough time that called for a specific kind of cartoon series to watch that I wasn't going to find on the main beaten path where all the usual shows I know about and watch are seen.

I scrolled down one of my frequent alphabetical list haunts, and the recognizable for reasons of no relation to anything name "Saban's" caught my eye.

 
This would be the day, August the 25th in 2024, that I discovered that the name of the cartoon I had unanswered questions about was called Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist. But I didn't know this, or that it was the show containing who this post calls Rabbit T, yet. In fact there was a moment where I didn't even suspect it. I clicked the thing out of curiosity.

I saw the image and was amazed. I didn't know the show I sought had anything to do with Oliver Twist, I don't know much about Oliver Twist, and a mere moment ago I was not expecting to suddenly discover the origin of something that was so deep-in puzzling to my life this day. Again, it's not like I liked the show, but I wanted to know what place I was getting unidentified mental fragments from, even if it didn't have some feeling of allure. It always did have a feeling of allure in the past. It still had some major draw during the next few moments of that reformative day, and I begun to check it out.

What I Know About the Show Now

Somehow, Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist felt a little disappointing, now that I understood what it was for a tangible, real thing at last. I wasn't so absorbed as in another time I may have imagined. I was still excited in the minutes that followed of checking random points in episodes - but not any wiki pages according to my browser, for some reason - but not very absorbed. I didn't take the time to watch a full episode either. It's not really for me. I am just kind of glad I have some critical information now.

The disappointing value of seeing the show in 2024 probably comes from a lack of powerful, exact recognition of things in the show. I couldn't say "seeing this scene took me way back" or "Oh, I remember this guy!" I think a lot of good-feeling memory exploration when you find something from your life during a period a long time ago is good because you see what's in it and you are amazed with how suddenly, overpoweringly familiar it is. I would have liked to have that feeling with Rabbit T but this year I simply did not. Because it was just too different, and I had to accept that the show my brain pictured just did not actually precisely exist.

The first revision I had to concede was the design of the white rabbit. We have a name now, he is called Artful Dodger. He's the one on the left. Yeah I don't recognize the other two upright animal characters even while seeing them now, too. As you can see he actually wears a completely different outfit than the one I drew for this post up there - making the real design wrong in my memory's terms. It's sort of a "shouldn't gripe" change when I think about it, as that suit from my discredited memory wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of looking-super-cool fashion. Not compared to a dark suit and buttoned shirt for his upper body and a top hat, either. He was very different though. His face was coloured wrong, with most of his fur being grey, and it's a bit insulting that the real Artful Dodger cartoon rabbit anthro looks fucking nothing like the Rabbit T namesake of my memories. The most important and only previously-seen character in this quest, unrecognizable.

That's what a lot of things about this show now that I was seeing the real thing are. Unrecognizable. Seeing that, the question might arise of "how am I so sure I found the right show?"

It's quite simple, really. I don't feel very drawn to that conclusion out of feeling - again, it didn't hit me with familiarity the same way memory jackpots usually do - but through logic it's impossible to deny. Because it would take some ridiculous coincidence, so freaking contrived, some serious screwing around for there to be a second show out there that's that similar to Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist and is a more exact match with what I remember. I just don't think our plane of existence would do that, even after some of the stupid things it's done before. There would have to be some ridiculous level of screwing around with unnecessary show production and fictional material management to mislead me that hard. A key word here could be "specific". I simply have no reason not to conclude that my memories have a far range of possibility for being inaccurate and that the reason it's different in 2024 is simply that. My past has to just be adorned with memories that are wrong. As a side note, I don't know how much sway missing episodes could have had in all of this.

There's also much more solid proof that I have the right show in the recognizable nature of the ending screen.

The ending music in the credits was quite a thing of recognition, but past the first run of bells, there wasn't much memory of the show from my childhood left to recognize. The second and only other revision that comes to mind after all this time is that the music in my brain - beautiful though it was - used more bells and had the wrong melody. I swoon over good use of music bells, and before recent weeks the vision of this ending screen and its music was such a feeling...

I know there's some ensemble of villainous characters, and humans are in the show, but it's still vague. Again, I do not care enough to actually watch an episode of the show to find out more. I'm simply glad I no longer have to wonder what went on in my life to create such an odd place.

I also now have a strong indication that Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist was not just based on Oliver Twist, but is actually quite different to the original Oliver Twist, with lots of elements and writing being changed to create a different version of the idea. It'd have to be too if it has "Adventures of" in its freaking title.

As of the day of this writing, I know that the show actually has a large portion of lost media. Episodes 1-29 can be quite easily found, but the show apparently is supposed to have a total of 52 episodes. The information is so lost, probably all we have of the last 23 episodes anywhere is their titles. Entire boxes of episode descriptions, empty and collapsed into a line. We don't even know when the entire list of all episodes - even with the ones that aren't lost - appeared on people's cathode ray tubes. The "Air Date" column of the episode list on Wikipedia says TBA for all of them.

Also, did you know that the list of fictional rabbits and hares on Wikipedia from the 2021 part earlier still doesn't list Artful Dodger from Saban's Oliver Twist cartoon? Yet the list of episodes in the boxes of the SAOOT article containing some amount of not-lost data have episode plot summaries that are quite lengthy. Actually I think the fictional rabbits list may be quite under-detailed against what I expect the great swathe of fiction in the world to contain for rabbit characters.

Finally, an interesting point I have now gained in my knowledge of the show is when it apparently aired. Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist broadcasts went from February 1996 to February 1997. Even though I live in New Zealand and therefore at a young age likely got different shows than English-speakers of this planet's west half at different times, I was born in 1995. 1995, readers.

That's a revelation. When I gained my witnessing moment of this show, how fucking young was I? It's like no wonder my memories of the show got this broken up.

If I Could Win Like This Again

Those of you who have been with this blog since 2022, when it basically began, will remember another mystery that I wanted dearly to solve, as described in the first Figment Area post. The huge destructive red and black being, Wawoo.

I hope I didn't let such readers down by showing them a title that says "A Lost Memory Uncovered" and get their hopes up for a spooky Wakawuwu revelation, only to ease them into a story about a mystery that - compared to the sheer cool creepiness of Wawoo's origin - is practically worthless. Even though Wawoo and the cartoon from this post were both seen in "real cartoons" that contain lost media, I still don't know who Wawoo is, and I don't think I ever will.

But there are other mysteries of old unexplained memories in my life. I'd like to have this kind of victory again. To find the explanation for more of the weird unknown occurrences of my early life. Similar searches and successful answers have happened before, but the successes that come to mind right now have not much wow-factor compared to many of my expectations.

If I could win like this again, could one of the victories feel as incredible as I always imagined? Will all of them die down as a flame in damp branches would like Rabbit T, or will I one day truly have a powerful and lasting moment of amazing recollection? Are there any future answers to my remaining mysteries at all?

I'd like to see the cartoon that created the Wakawuwu mystery again some day, but a good place to start would be the aisles of shelves decorated with pretty dark and light canisters of carbonated liquid flowing upward around central towers of crystal.

(Playing Card Game Rules) How to play Castle Walls

In this post, I will detail how Castle Walls, a playing card game invented by myself, is meant to be played. The idea for this game has been lying around unattended for years, and during and before that time the game's rules have been cemented and uncemented and cemented again. This was done mostly by actually playing the game with friends and family. The rules are about to be set in stone.

The Game

Castle Walls is a card game - similar to certain anime card games, which you've probably played before - where you battle with your opponent to make them run out of Life Cards, at which point you've won.

The game is kind of basic, and relies on luck, but also gets quite nuanced and advanced, starting to be about reading your opponent more than mere luckiness. Even card-counting has a bit of a strategy to it in this game. If you can count cards, don't be afraid to do it in Castle Walls, especially if it's being played competitively.

At the time of this writing, Castle Walls is only designed to be played between 2 players, 1 VS 1.

How to Set Up Castle Walls

To play Castle Walls, you will need a standard deck of playing cards. The ones that have four suits and a bunch of numbers. You know what playing cards are, I will spare you the explanation. That makes this game cost only about $6 to play.

All playing cards - other than weird spares that aren't even a part of playing cards - will be used. All 54 of them. You do not remove either one of The Jokers. The Joker is actually part of a major situational strategic play, which can potentially happen during a playthrough.

Dealing the Cards

This may sound like Captain Obvious, but you need to shuffle the deck first. Believe me, not every game I ever make is necessarily going to do shuffling at the start. Hindbodes will find a way.

There are two places per player where cards go when the dealer is dealing. One is the player's stack of Life Cards, and the other is the player's hand.

First, the dealer puts one card face down in the opponent's life card pile. Then, the dealer does the same for their own life card pile. This repeats until both piles have exactly 6 cards each. Nobody is meant to see which cards they are while the dealing is done. The Life Cards are to be placed in neat stacks.

One of the most important points about the life card pile - and something that everybody eventually notices - is that it effectively removes cards from the playthrough, selecting which cards you don't play with randomly and secretly. In this effect, you don't know how many Jokers are in the game of Castle Walls that you're playing until well into the game. Unless you luckily draw both of them on turn one. Such draws are rare, but they can happen. All face-down life cards remain a secret to both players until they are taken off the stack by combat.

Second, the hands are dealt. Pretty simple, really. The first card goes to the hand of the person who is not the dealer. Like the previous stage, each player gets one card for their hand in turns. So the other player gets one card, then the dealer gets one card, then the cycle repeats. Once both players have three cards for their hand, the rest of the deck is placed face down to the middle-left or middle-right of the playing field, and the game is nearly ready.

When The Game is About to Start

Before the game begins, the players must decide who has their turn first. This can be done with either a round of Paper Scissors Rock, a coin flip, or simply what both players agree on. Then, the game begins.

The Hierarchy of Cards

The level of a card in Castle Walls is very important. Put basically, from highest to lowest, the cards in a list of power levels are:

• Ace
• King
• Queen
• Jack
• 10
• 9
• 8
• 7
• 6
• 5
• 4
• 3
• 2

The Anatomy of The Game's First Turn

Castle Walls is about using cards on the field to "attack" your opponent's field cards, and ultimately your opponent's Life Cards. However, on the first turn of Castle Walls, you can not attack.

Other than the inability to attack, the first turn is very much identical to all other turns. So I will go over the anatomy of all following turns now.

The Anatomy of The Game's Second and All Following Turns

Every turn of Castle Walls, you must draw one card from the deck in the middle, exactly at the start of your turn. If the deck has run out, simply flip the entire graveyard and use that as the new deck. You do not shuffle the deck when you do this. Meta strategies - based on card counting - could certainly emerge from this mechanic. As the creator, I welcome that.

After you draw a card, you may choose to play a card face-up, or face-down. If you already have a card face down, you can place one face-up card on top of it, maximum. There are three places on the field, side-by-side, where you are allowed to place a card. You may not go any further than the three slot limit, meaning at the absolute most your field card count is a total of six (three cards face-down, and one face-up card sitting on top of each face-down card), and having six cards on the field this way is extremely unlikely during regular play.

You are not required to play anything or attack on your turn, you are only required to draw a card and discard any excess cards as ruled by the End Phase.

You are not allowed to place The Joker on the field like the other cards. The Joker is a rare card that has special innate abilities in this game. The nature of that play will be covered later in this article.

On your turn, after you draw a card, you are in what is called the Main Phase. You can only enter the Main Phase once per turn, and only after the instant that you've drawn your card.

In the Main Phase, there are things you can do, and things you can't do.

Things you can do in the Main Phase:

• Play one face-up card OR play one face-down card.
• Use the special straight discard (will be detailed later).
• Use The Joker, if appropriate (will be detailed later).
• Flip one or more of your face-down cards face-up, if there is no card above it. A face-down card can't be flipped if it was put face-down during this same turn.
  

During the Main Phase, you can not attack with a card.

When you want to attack with a card, you may enter the Battle Phase.

In the Battle Phase, you can attack with as many of your face-up cards as you choose, but each of them can only attack once per turn. Once you are in the Battle Phase, you can not return to the Main Phase until you've drawn a card on your next turn. Naturally, face-down cards are not able to attack. Any face-down cards you want to attack with must be flipped face-up first, during the Main Phase. This means you can not flip a card face-up right after attacking.

When your turn is ending, and you've already had your Draw Phase, Main Phase and/or Battle Phase, you observe an End Phase. The only purpose of the End Phase is to siphon off any excess cards that the turn player has. If you have more than six cards in your hand during the End Phase, all you have to do during the End Phase is remove cards from your hand and put them in the graveyard until you have exactly six cards in your hand.

 

Attacking Basics

When you attack with a card, you "nudge" it in the direction of your opponent if the opponent has no cards on the field, or pick it up and point it at the targeted card on the field they do have.

An attack can resolve in many different ways. In this section, we will be focusing on attacks to opposing Life Cards and on what happens when a card attacks another face-up card. All cards that attack are, naturally, face-up. The game would be impossible to balance well otherwise. However, cards that receive an attack may or may not be face down. Face-down cards act as Walls or Traps. See the respective sections for more info on them.

If you attack when your opponent has no cards on the field, it will make your opponent's number of Life Cards decrease by 1. Multiple attacks (logical maximum of 3) can do this in a turn, as long as there are enough offending and unspent cards with which to launch said attacks. For example, if your opponent has no cards on the field when your turn starts and you have three cards on the field at the end of the Main Phase, you have the ability to attack your opponent's Life Cards up to three times.

When a life card is attacked, it is removed from the original pile and placed face-up on a newer, face-up pile. This shows how close your opponent is to losing, and it additionally and importantly reveals which cards were removed from play when the game started. As the game goes on, it gradually becomes more and more clear what sort of cards were absent. Sometimes you will find one or both of the Jokers in the Life Card piles before the game is over.

However, if the opponent has cards on the field, the attack becomes more complex in nature, and has more rules to adhere to. For this section, it will only be face-up cards in a battle that I cover.

One: if a card attacks a face-up card of equal or lower power value, the attacked card is destroyed, and sent to a face-up pile called The Graveyard. The Graveyard is located beside the main deck.

Two: A card can not attack a face-up card that has a higher power value on it.

Attacking Walls

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Trap.

A Wall happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power equal to or greater than that of the card that attacked it.

When a card on the field attacks a wall, neither card is sent to the graveyard. The turn of whoever attacked will automatically end.

An Ace is the most powerful attacker in the game, and the only thing that can wall an Ace in Castle Walls is another, face-down Ace. This can lead to some scary aggressive strategies. A face-down ace that gets attacked can ultimately, on the next turn, strike back at anything that hits it. If you attack a face-down Ace with your own Ace, you can expect to lose your Ace next turn.

Cards of the power 2 are special because no matter what they attack, if it's face-down it will wall the attacking player. This ends the turn of whoever attacked using the power 2 card, but this play can directly lead to a strategic advantage.

Attacking Traps

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Wall.

A Trap happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power lower than that of the card that attacked it.

When a trap is flipped, the suit of the card determines where your turn goes next in a fork in the road. The difference here is whether your card attacked a red suit (Diamonds or Hearts) or a black suit (Clubs or Spades). Traps intend to destroy one card on the opposing side of the field, once attacked by that opposing side.

If a trap is activated and it is a red suit, it will immediately and automatically go to the graveyard, while the card that attacked it goes to the graveyard immediately after it.

If a Trap is activated and it is a black suit, the owner of the trap must choose one opposing card on the field that is not the attacker, if there is one, and send that to the graveyard right after sending the Trap to the graveyard.

Special Technique #1: Discarding a Four Straight

During your Main Phase, if you have a consecutive straight in your hand of four cards, you can send all of them to the graveyard to target and destroy one card on your opponent's side of the field, unless it is one of those face-down cards that has a face-up card above it. Any one face-up card can still be sent to the graveyard by this technique. When your straight goes to the graveyard, your straight goes first - before the card it's targeting, in order from highest to lowest power.

Special Technique #2: Discarding The Joker

During your Main Phase, if you have more Life Cards removed from your life card pile than your opponent does, you can discard one Joker from your hand to the graveyard. After this, you must take every single one of your opponent's field cards and add them to your own hand. Then your turn continues as normal.

Final Thoughts

That is pretty much the entirety of the rules for Castle Walls. It is a simple game compared to say, 500 or what-have-you, but it can take a while to explain and has as-of-yet uncharted potential depths. I took a lot of inspiration from a trading card game, but I also did everything I could to make it something of my own creation. No plagiarism is to be found here, unless of course somebody tries to plagiarize me again. Lots of people like to plagiarize me, it's a historic feature of being Hindbodes.

(Hallways) Cockroach Communication Antennae

Late in the cycle of light, standing opposed to gravity on the wall, a cockroach unit named Lepia twiddles the antennae. They are equipped to receive broadcasts. Lepia stands, scanning, listening, hoping. Lepia waits for the signals.

It's out there. The truth is out there. The world will understand what happened, and this cockroach will be the hero they sorely needed. One day they will be surprised that Lepia did what always needed to be done, finally.

Lepia will find it. Until then, it's wait, wait, wait...

Things You Can't Say At An Airport

Airports are impossible to separate from the style that civilization as we know it is presented by. Or at least, they are for the time being. With the struggles that society currently faces, who knows how much longer we can afford to run international planes? But everybody alive today either knows what an airport is, or has been isolated from universal knowledge somehow.

But did you know that there are a lot of real, common phrases that you do not have the freedom to say in an airport? Join Figment Area as we go through this list of Things You Can't Say At An Airport.

 

This Movie Is Going To Bomb

Imagine this: you're in an airport waiting for your friend to arrive back home, you're on your phone, and you're watching the trailer for the upcoming live-action adaptation of Frogger (1981). It's directed by somebody nobody's heard of, the plot focuses on the titular frog setting up a beauty cosmetics company, and the script resembles the one from Spy Kids. Then suddenly you turn to your idiot friend who's genuinely convinced that this movie is fundamentally a good idea, and you say to him "Mate, this movie is going to bomb."

Believe it or not, this moment can get you into a lot of trouble! Airport security will be asking you a lot of questions and otherwise bearing down on you at this point, and it's not a good way to go.

If you find yourself in this situation, try using phrases like these instead:

- This movie is going to squash!

- This movie looks like a dumper down!

- This movie eh? No way, hosé!

- I think the trailer says it's going to be a failer!

 

 

That's A Real Bombshell

 

Sometimes when you're at an airport, a family member says something to you that's truly serious. But if this ever happens to you, you must be careful to not make this one mistake. Hundreds of people a year are detained by security guards for saying "That's a real bombshell" after their mother in-law says that her Flemish Giant rabbits died.

 

Be aware of yourself and your surroundings when your exo-family says something about Flemish Giant rabbits dying, or you will run serious risk of airport guards acting on the thought that there is a REAL BOMBSHELL in your bag. Airport guards are extremely hostile in the face of Unexploded Bombs coming into their domain, so be careful when the rabbits are deadful.

I'm going to inject all of your fucking babies with needles full of nitroglycerine and use my explosives to blow this whole place to smitheroons.

 

(I hope my friend Miss T doesn't read this one. It would not be pleasant for her.) Imagine it. You're at an airport, and you have a lot of hypodermic needles full of liquid nitroglycerine, and you've just generally had a really bad day. 1 in 17.5 people report that they or somebody they know has been in such a situation and not gone very well with handling it, proceeding to threaten the other airport customers with an accidental outburst or twenty-five. If you find yourself in such a situation, with any amount of nitroglycerine needles, try to imagine that the airport is inside a cube. This might help to save your life.

People Keep Zero-Bombing My Posts

 

In the modern days of the web, digital built-in button features to criticize content are at an all-time low. But surprisingly, in some places it is still possible to be critical of media that comes out without being forced to leave a comment. Oh no! We can't have accountability for poorly-done shovelware going on!

At this point, there are still some places where you can post a piece of entertainment online, and have it be rated zero stars, which is known in some places as "Zero-Bombing".

If you are online in such a place and happen to suddenly realize that there is a colossal infrastructure of airport walls and people around you, be wary of what you might say when your media is judged by the click of buttons. This can get airport security to accuse you of carrying entire weaponized historic World War planes on your person!

Some day the right to criticize posts will be helpfully removed, and people will be able to post any legal content with absolutely zero quality safeguards for putting it under scrutiny, leaving the average Joe at an airport to enjoy a much safer time.

I'm going to cut the person who runs this airport open.

 

About 60% of people believe that the phrase above is very justified, and that we should be allowed to say it in airports. However, in this world, it is not yet a safe place to do so when you're in an airport.

 

 

 

Fuck you all! It's time for the cleansing fire of all wretched civilization!

 

Don't say that at an airport.

 

 

 

Bombs Away!

 

Don't say that at an airport. I don't care how big the swimming pool is.

 

 

I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, I REALLY LOVE YOU SO LET'S DIE TOGETHER. I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, LET'S JUMP ON A PLANE FUCKIN' [censored]!

 

To end on and wrap this article up in a neat little bow, we have our final point in the list. The phrase that this article refers to is the phrase that is above our paragraph here.

It is a profound and cerebral smash hit 2019 song by three friends in a room in a humble town of Australia one night, a state in a country where plane disasters are historically a serious issue. Putting their brains together, they made a song that would change the entire world.

As beautiful as it may seem to reference and honour this song in an airport by singing it out loud, that is not something that you want to do. There are other spaces where it can be better discussed with more safety and care, and less intrusions from airport guards.

 

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Thank you for reading this important announcement from the Figment Area public service.

(Complaints) Go Live in a Dried Up and Disgusting Boot, Wordpress - I Am Done With Your Pathetic Ways

Those of you who paradoxically were early enough in Figment Area's run to see my blog on Wordpress - or just those of you who looked deeper in the archive - are probably wondering why I moved from Wordpress to Blogspot after only two posts.

Yeah I could tell you. Oh, you want to know? You'd like to know why? Great! I'll tell you!

Well, you see, basically it's... well yeah, Wordpress is a fucking piece of cow shit! There you go buddy. I didn't talk like this in the title only because I've never been quite certain about the safeness of swearing in your Internet creation titles. Believe me, I wanted to make a title that was harder on the place.

I'll go into more detail, but first, a bit of backstory would help us out, here.

In 2011, whenabouts, I was using Blogspot. It was my only choice and only choice I even considered, and then I stopped using it because I wasn't into what my old blog was doing, as a series of writing pieces, just in terms of what the content could be. It was called The Alternate and Crappier Science, and it was fundamentally a bit hamstrung by its own core concept, which I guess is sort of why I gave up on it.

 

That's fine. The problem was, later on I somehow got into my head the idea that Blogspot was bugged out, not well designed, and able to screw me over. Formatting automatically getting tangled and confusing because of What-You-See-Is-Blah-Blah editing was certainly an issue at one point, even if just in my head. But I honestly think it would be too hard for me to explain to you what the origin of that assumption was, and that I'd only be giving theories. Theories that are too hard for me to articulate.

So in the 2020's, or The Dire 20's as I like to call it, when I got to the point of wanting to make Figment Area, I changed my current writing home to Wordpress, as I'd spent years anticipating.

Oh boy, was I tragically fucking wrong in doing that.

I thought Blogspot would glitch out, be hard to format, and make writing hard. Choosing Wordpress was ridiculously ironic, because that's exactly what Blogspot seems to hardly be doing at all right now, and what Wordpress did to me instead.

Writing the Tom and Jerry post on Wordpress was a fucking nightmare. I don't remember how hard the Wawoo one was, but the Tom and Jerry one definitely must have been a fucked up experience. Instead of going over that, I'll try to describe what happens when you - as a hypothetical thought experiment subject - try to write a blog post on Wordpress, and you try to make it designed your way.

After finding the new post button in a long, gross, annoyingly-animated sidebar with buttons hidden inside buttons, you get a fucking piece of shit interface where the amazing present-day team has thrown out those archaic, old fashioned boxes that "indicate where stuff's boundaries are and where you're supposed to click" and give us this new, modern, slick piece of shit that I'll redraw for you here.



Now, just in case you have some concerns about me, and how I decided to draw all that because I don't know how to take a screenshot, you should know that this thought is not true. I deliberately opted for drawing the picture instead of just copying a screenshot over because I thought it was a good idea. I'm not Wordpress, I'm actually pretty smart.

So that right there is a pretty big red flag. A red flag I don't know how I ignored when I was starting out with it. Not only are the boundaries you can use to have a frame of reference imaginary and the graphic design obviously full of itself, but apparently the text writing interface is made of "block oriented writing". That's the name I've given it.

You have to make a new block when you want to add content to the writing. Every time. Whether it's a paragraph, an image, or "a quote". Can I explain to you what this means? No. Is it fucking annoying to use by design and breaking all the time, possibly not by design? Hell yes it is.

And I still hadn't quite yet realized how bad of a place I was in.

Wordpress' interface here is one of those annoying editors where the actual formatting buttons - like, if you want some of your text to be bigger, italicized, bold, aligned to the right, etc. - are not constantly visible. They are hidden until you're writing something and have... highlighted it or something. It was irrelevant and a waste of time on Tumblr, and it's like that on Wordpress. And it's way worse on Wordpress. Thank you, Blogger, for not being this way, which is a grace I thankfully experience the very minutes I write this angry open hate letter. Seeing those buttons stay up there at the top of my post editor feels like a blessing.

It's going to get worse, if you're not convinced. This post will go further and show more horrendous problems. Earlier on in this post's development, I followed that previous sentence with "That are more horrendous." I no longer, in 2023 (this post took ages to be finished and published) believe that is the case. The post editor is the worst part of Wordpress, though yes there are other issues with using the website that haven't been reached by the expected line of reading yet.

 

I will still be talking about the post editor for a while, but it goes beyond that. I pity your soul if you thought I was going to rip into the editor for posts and that was it. The crap virus on Wordpress runs very deep, from how your website's appearance unexpectedly and uncontrollably turns out all the way down to navigating the dashboard menus.

 

Back to the awful block oriented writing, let's assume for a minute that you want to have more of a theme going on with the formatting of your writing. Maybe you want to make it the right size because it doesn't start off at the right size. Now let's imagine this crazy idea that you want the sizes to be the same as each other, or as a critic would call it, consistent. Good fucking luck, buddy. Block oriented writing is a bitch when you can't rely on the other mechanics to let you control everything at once, or even decide on the default for what formatting you get every time you make a new block. And these blocks? To the reader they're just paragraphs. Paragraphs as in "<p>" and "</p>" if you know about markdown. You can't make a line break without risking making a new one. Paragraphs that can't be moved around or merged back together easily. Paragraphs that have a rigid border that makes itself both unnecessarily important and hardly visible and difficult to find.

 

It's absolute bullshit.

 

I'm sick of talking about the editor now, so let's move on to what's outside the editor.

One of the most audacious examples of bullshit about Wordpress is what happens when you're trying to get an archive system that links to all of your older and newer posts in a convenient and logical way working. Wordpress has "Next" and Previous" buttons at the bottom of its posts - obviously meaning they only let you skip ahead or backward by one unit at a time, and apparently they think this is enough. Let's have a look at the archive that I manually - yes, manually - put together on the Wordpress version of this blog.

I'm going to break down why this thing is so fucked up over the course of two or three paragraphs. First, the more noticeable thing to a casual reader is probably the big rectangle next to "EARLIEST", unnecessarily low-reaching and asymmetrical with its counterpart on the right, beside "LATEST". I couldn't do anything about that, even though this is a technical custom extra page, not a main section regular old blog post. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure that's a compromise I did by sacrificing a vertical line character that is found on nearly any normal keyboard, which the site then automatically enlarged because it's trying to do that thing that happens at the start of some books, not an actual HTML rectangle div. Wow, so fancy! I looked up the name of this keyboard  character for the first time in my life while writing this very paragraph, and according to Wikipedia it's only been uncreatively named "vertical bar" this whole time. I dislike that and know a lot of stuff about programming, so let's just call this one "Char124". If not for the fact that I was forced to sacrifice a Char124 to the fanciness goblin, this manually-maintained nightmare page might actually look good.

Now, about those Earliest/Latest buttons... I typed out those words and hyperlinked them manually. The dates next to the post titles are filled in manually. The post titles are typed and hyperlinked manually. If I kept using Wordpress today, and had more and more posts coming out on it, I would have to be going back to this page and manually updating the list once and the hyperlinks twice every time a new post came out. I don't imagine that the editor on this would be particularly co-operative either.

For some reason, right now I have a manual index of articles on the Blogspot version of this site too, but it looks better, isn't necessarily required, as there's already an automatic post list on every post page, and at least it'll actually edit properly if I keep it around.

This is a minor point in my mind at this stage, probably just because I've forgotten just how far this thing went, but the wideness and emptiness of a standard Wordpress page is uncomfortable. There's just kind of a distressing and anxious broadness to everything that makes me feel lost. I got a bit paranoid and checked, but nope - the site design on my Blogger one isn't as bad as that. It's always been nicer to look at and doesn't feel like walking on a plank high above a perilous pit void while wind is blowing at you, even if maybe the Blogspot version I made still looks a little weird.

As well as all that, it's too hard to find CSS options and other options when designing your site, according to older records. I don't want to try testing it again now. I don't remember what going through these hoops was like, but I trust my past self on this one, who started writing the Wordpress hate into a Blogspot post during a time that may now be about two years ago. That's the other point, it's been really long, I want to wrap this up now and not suffer Wordpress experiences much longer.

Finally, getting posted previews for your Wordpress links when you post one in something like MeWe or Discord to play nice is way too hard. The first times I checked, it just brought out these white rectangles of nothing, with support giving no real solution to people after I looked it up, I am damn sure of it. Well, it was like that at the time - I just tested it on Jan 7 2023 now, with no obvious error still showing - which I guess was a bug they fixed, but Wordpress had its chance even way more months before I was having problems with that, so it's way too late for redemption now. I don't want this company trying to make me feel crazy just because I remember something that doesn't happen now, either.

So that's Wordpress, a shitty blogging website that I hope I never use again. What messes with me most about this whole thing is that other people actually use Wordpress somehow. People can write on Wordpress and say "Yeah, this works! I'll keep using this for my blog!" In fact, two of the people in this situation are people I know, people from my family.

But I don't envy these people. I'm just a bit disgusted with them. As in nausea, not something like actually believing in someone being reprehensible. Now, I would be disgusted in that sense if certain people tried to actually convert me.

 

With the people I know who use Wordpress, or anybody really, I don't know what they did to tolerate Wordpress, but I don't want to try to tolerate it ever, and I get the feeling that potentially I'll be hearing things like "Oh, you can fix that" or "there's a way to turn that off". No. Just no. I don't care. It would have taken me months to figure those things out on my own. I severely doubt the intentions and lasting quality of a service that hides the good answers so well and would make me go through heaps of hoops just to get a good experience because terrible decisions are the default experience. I don't give a fuck. I don't give a fuck if Wordpress bans me, either, that's like being banned from using a horrible public toilet complex that you don't need and absolutely hate. Naturally, this makes it blatantly obvious that I won't be taking kindly to suggestions that I can pay for a better version of Wordpress, either. At this point, even if Wordpress gets improved massively one day and all my problems with it have technically been fixed, I will not forgive it. It put me through too much.

 

Use your shit website if you want, but don't try to convince me to come sauntering back in to that hellhole. I won't try to sell you on switching to Blogspot, but for everybody's sake and the nature of supporting the best competitor in a competitive market where it's easy for a bad place to become the next Tyrannitar, I hope you would use Blogspot in the extreme hypothetical case that Wordpress is your best other option. Otherwise, I don't really feel fond of the idea of saying "This place sucks, but I can recommend this other place that blah-!" Who knows how well that would age, or if I'd be the one being annoying? It's easy to imagine such a recommendation being annoying. For the time being, Blogspot is a decent place for me to call my current vein of written content's home. In this new age where it's all Figment Area and no TAACS, so far it's given me minor trouble at worst.

 

All I can say is, don't use Wordpress. I don't want people to suffer through it or support it. Wordpress is a garbage titan that does evil and gets more reward than it deserves, on par with Facebook, Quora, and YouTube. Wordpress, you can suck on an expired eggplant.