Wednesday, July 25, 2007

my computer is broken

my computer has an abit kv7 motherboard with a northbridge fan that does not spin at all. this problem arose after 2 power outages that happened last night. i am going to fix it. but for now, i cannot use my computer anymore, so i am using the family computer. now lately i have been driving myself insane with my unhealthy obsession/addiction with the church of the subgenius. as someone with asperger’s syndrome, i tend to form very strong interests in certain subjects and want to know all about them and become completely obsessed with them, and cannot stop talking about them. that is the problem i had with the church of the subgenius. i developed such a strong interest in it, it practically drove me insane. but here is a reality check: the church of the subgenius is not a real church or religion. it is a group that does satirical parody of religions and cults by pretending to be one. the whole thing is one big joke. and you might think there is some sort of serious message they are trying to get across. but guess what? either they do not have any serious message, or they totally fail to get it across to anybody, because all that people like me see is the comedy. anyway, long ago, it devolved from a parody of other groups to a self-parody, and this is most obvious by observing how they say the world will end on july 5, 1998, and keep insisting that that date is in the future, every year saying that this year is the real 1998 and the world will end july 5 of this year, and then when it doesn’t happen, saying they got the calendars wrong and it will happen next year. the purpose of the whole fake cult, originally, was for its founders to get laid and make some money. it is based on the principles of another fake religion, discordianism, which is much older, except there is no central discordian church and no way for anyone to make money off discordianism. so the church of the subgenius was designed as a for-profit enterprise, and a graven image of j.r. “bob” dobbs is worshipped, because worshipping a graven image is blasphemy against religions that prohibit this. the original image of j.r. “bob” dobbs came out of public domain clip art put out by at&t (at that time, the one and only phone company) for use in phone book advertisements. anyway, i first found out about this group a while back, in olden times so long ago i forget when it happened, when i stumbled upon the site subgenius.com randomly. i remember looking at the faq section and trying to figure out what this group is, and just finding the website confusing and stupid and a big mess that is impossible to navigate. parts of the newer-looking website link to webpages from an older-looking website straight out of the 1996-1998 era, back in the ancient times of the internet when all websites were quite primitive and stone age. the subgenius.com website is a mix of webpages from prehistoric times and modern times. and i found the whole thing rather silly and stupid and pointless, and i wondered, do these people really have nothing better to do than worship some stupid-looking monochrome clipart of a dude smoking a pipe? and although i read about the usenet newsgroup alt.slack i did not even think about actually looking at it, since i considered usenet newsgroups to be old, outdated internet technology. so i left that website and didn’t look at it again for a very long time, since i considered it utterly inane and stupid. anyway, a few years later, on some websites, namely bushflash.com and boingboing.net, i was really into looking at blogs, and i found on both of those sites that the blogs mentioned the case of one rachel bevilacqua, also known as rev. magdalen, who had a child custody case she lost because of pictures of her with little or no clothing appearing at annual subgenius retreats known as x-day, which happen in upstate new york, the same part of the country where i live. these blogs linked to rachel bevilacqua’s blog, where i read more about it, with great interest. as a horny young man who was single and wanted sex with hot women, i was incredibly interested in these x-day events and wanted to know more about them. i found out that this religion is all one big joke and everything, and there are hot naked women at x-day events, and everything is totally awesome and kicks ass. it all seemed too good to be true. so i went back to subgenius.com and looked at the website again, and eventually found the hour of slack weekly radio show to be the best source of slack. at this point, i was still somewhat skeptical of the group, and was still a little worried it might be a real cult or be dangerous, and not entirely sure it was safe or that it was really all just harmless comedy. after listening to a few episodes of the hour of slack, which i started doing around february of this year, i started to think that i had figured the whole thing out and it all made sense and i should join and it really was awesome and one big joke. i mean, i have kind of a sick sense of humor, and like to take jokes too far, and i like silly nonsense, and what especially appealed to me was how this religion promoted the idea that people who are abnormal are better than normal people. as someone who has always been somewhat of an outsider socially, who has always looked at myself as abnormal, i found it very comforting and reassuring to be told i was better than everyone else. and, strange as it may seem, in my darkest moments when i felt bad, i could think about “bob” and slack and it would make me feel better and cheer up, the same way a christian can think about jesus and heaven and cheer up when they are feeling lousy. even though i didn’t believe in this fake religion, it could still have the same emotional effect on me that a real religion has on other people! people can have genuine religious experiences even in self-proclaimed false joke religions. it really seemed like this subgenius thing could make me feel happier and everything. but that blissful period did not last longer than a month or two. my emotions started to feel worse again and thinking about “bob” did not seem to help at all. i ended up having more panic attacks and during one of them i convinced myself i was suicidal and told my parents i wanted to die. so i ended up committing myself to the psychiatric ward of the nearest hospital that has one, back at the end of april 2007. that had nothing to do with “bob”... i was feeling suicidal for entirely unrelated reasons, namely dissatisfaction with my life and feeling that nothing was ever going to get better, frustration with how things were going, et cetera. i was depressed about being stuck in a dead-end low-paying job, still never having had even 1 girlfriend except for that stupid thing with a girl who lived far away that was arranged over the internet and all turned out wrong, and still being stuck living at home with my parents. anyway, it turns out “bob” is just a distraction from reality that makes you feel better for a little while before you think about reality again. so i ended up coming out of the psychiatric ward with a slightly different set of medications, having gone through a lot of group therapy and feeling better about things. since then, i was gradually improving until i got sucked into an almost complete obsession with the church of the subgenius, which started around the beginning of june. for the last month and a half, i have had a bizarre obsession with this group, unable to cure myself of it, unable to figure out why i have it, unable to get rid of it. it is my asperger’s syndrome that makes me have bizarre obsessions with things. most subgenii are much better at dealing with the church of the subgenius psychologically than i am, because it does not consume their thoughts night and day and keep them from thinking about anything else. luckily, i think i am starting to recover from this obsession. now i do not think the church of the subgenius is to blame for my psychological problems; they were just something for me to latch onto as a distraction from real life that i could obsess myself with in order to keep from thinking about reality, and blissfully live in a fantasy world. but lately i have started to recover from this madness, from this helpless struggle to avoid dealing with reality by latching onto anything ridiculous and pretending to believe in it instead of dealing with reality. i still like the church of the subgenius though, and still consider myself a subgenius. i just got a little carried away, thinking about it too much inside my own head, to the point where there was hardly any room to think about anything else. but i think i will be better now. there was an x-day celebration earlier this month on july 5th in western new york and i did not go. i have never actually met a subgenius but i have interacted with them online. actually i did manage to recruit some local kid into becoming a subgenius, but that was because he was eager to join any cult at all and thought cults were awesome, and when i told him all about subgenii, he was all over it. i think it will probably do a lot less harm than a real cult would, and he probably would have joined any cult that tried to recruit him. i hope it does not drive him insane like it did to me. but in a way, i never really was all that sane to begin with. i have always been pretty crazy, in a way. but at least now i am trying to be less crazy. the church of the subgenius is not a religion. subgenii have other belief systems as their actual belief systems. some are atheists or agnostics and some actually believe in other religions, such as christianity for instance. they just happen to have a sense of humor, and not feel insulted when they see blasphemy, that’s all. my problem was that i forgot that i was not supposed to take any of this stuff seriously, when the whole thing is clearly just one big joke. anyway, back out here in the real world, i need to fix my computer, and find out why the northbridge fan does not spin. i might have to replace my entire motherboard. hopefully it is just the fan that is shot, and the electricity to the fan is still there. if the fan is fine but its electrical supply is cut off, that means the motherboard is shot. anyway, i am trying to regain my sanity but it is always just barely out of reach. i suppose that is just how things work, and people can never be 100% sane no matter how hard they try. lately my insanity has been putting up a good fight against my sanity, but i am going to fix that problem. just you wait and see.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you want to meet SubGeniuses online without leaving home, just go to their IRC channel!

http://www.modemac.com/irc