#timecube

In the span of like two weeks, Tats has gone from “Vaccines bad” to “Vaccines Poison” to “Vaccines literally roboticize you like in Sonic” to unironic “5G Towers are mind control”.

We’re starting to drift out of 4chan and into Timecube

I wish there was a story to tell about Time Cube.  I discovered the website in the mid-1990s, and was fascinated by Gene Ray’s incoherent theory of everything.  For decades I’ve meant to write up my take on the whole thing, but I never got around to it.  I suppose that’s because there really isn’t a point to all of it, much like Ray’s concept of how the universe works.

In retrospect, there isn’t anything particularly special about Ray posting a crank manifesto on the web.  Twenty-five years ago, though, I didn’t know that.  The world wide web was young and so was I.  I was only beginning to discover that people could have the means to access the internet and nevertheless be inarticulate, or incompetent, or irrational.  I approached Ray’s oddly hostile demands for people to prove him wrong in good faith, figuring that reason could unravel any sort of nonsense.  I had a lot to learn.

It’s tempting, at first glance, to interpret Time Cube as an argument that everything exists in one of four states, and that anything moving to another state implies that three equivalent things must make correlating movements.  That’s kind of weird, but it at least resembles a falsifiable premise, which lures you into trying to make sense of the rest of it, the better to debunk it on its own terms.  But there isn’t a “rest of it” to make sense of.  Ray never actually applied this “four corners” premise to any meaningful conclusion, except that academia and organized religion have conspired to suppress his brilliant discovery.

A newcomer to Time Cube might realize that right around the time they started noticing all the odd references to the Clintons, or Jews, or cannibalism, or various things that are supposedly “queer.”  The only ideas Ray truly articulates are his contempt for anyone who can’t understand his ideas, and his certainty that no one but himself can understand.

Over the years I’d occasionally remember Time Cube was a thing, and poke around to see if anything new had developed.  Usually there was nothing new.  Now and then Ray would be contacted for an interview or invited to “lecture” for the amusement of some college kids.  Surviving footage of these events suggests Ray had a far more gentle demeanor in person than you’d think from reading “You Word-Murder Your Children“ on his site.