If You're Like Me...

My Fiction

I love to read, hence the name, but over the last half-decade or so I’ve been writing a lot more than I read. My favorite genre is one I only recently discovered: New Weird. Not everything I write falls under this heading, but any genre that includes The Sandman, Gravity Falls and Sorry To Bother You is a number I want to be in when the saints come marching in.

Much of my short fiction output can be found as part of @bogleech’s yearly Creepypasta Cookoff, and I’m proud to say I’m now a multiple award winner as of this latest contest! Here’s my solo work you can find there:

The Game Of Mush: Contest winner! This one started with the challenge, can I write a creepypasta in the format of an instruction booklet? It’s become one of my most popular stories, even being featured on the Chico-area public access show, Deep Cuts!

The Nut And The Bolt: What if everybody had a “Dale”? This was going to be a comic originally but I bumped up the creepy for this text edition.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN HUMANITY AND THE GREAT MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: Contest winner! This started as an exercise to figure out why the villains in another story think the way they do. The novel this ties into is still unfinished; hopefully this doesn’t spoil too much.

Here’s some other things that weren’t part of the creepypasta contest but tend to be spook flavored:

Tale of Petard Rabbit: Would you believe this is the backstory for a One Piece fan character? This Beatrix Potter-inspired short may be one of the darkest things I’ve ever written.

The Whale World: This too has an “age of sail” theme, but it’s a whole new world of its own. I’m weighing how to expand this into a full novel.

Born Again: A more traditional creepypasta, this is a transcription of one of those Sunday morning religious shows, with a very different doctor of divinity.

And finally, please do not overlook the novel.

Joy Traveler

Not just a creepypasta: a towering science fiction epic. Meet Bea, a game streamer with a small but loyal fanbase of friends, and follow their adventure with the Joy Traveler 1*67, a tiny plug-in game console with over 100 weird and often frightening games. Is it a mystery for them to solve, a dire warning to heed, or does it just want a friend?

Joy Traveler represents three and a half years of me and @mmmskulljuice’s lives. It’s a long read (longer than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by word count), and a slow burn, but it builds and builds and builds. Everyone who reads it becomes a hardcore fan, though, so I hope you’ll give us a few hours of your time to fall in love with Bea and her friends too!

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Obviously it doesn't cover 100% of intolerant people, but I think it explains a decent chunk tbh.

PUZZLE TIME!

These nine unrelated images, put together, become puns on a certain theme! The challenge is to name all nine of them, and fill in the blanks on the ‘answer’ at the bottom. Once you’ve figured out a couple of them, it’ll be easier to figure out the theme!

@analog-delight, @sapphireh3art, and @puppiesthoughtsgobrrrr, in the span of a few minutes.

They aren't even hiding it this time, they claimed no reason for the termination. "For any reason, or none at all."

I've been told that all followers of a now terminated blogs were banned, so it's safe to assume that someone on staff just went down the list of a tgirl's blog and banned all of them.

Staff banned all followers of a transfem's account, staff is mass banning transfems without reason

Wield the power. Be Jim Davis. You can download it here and mount it in modern Windows by opening it. It still works!

Tips: you don't need to install it - just open '=Comic Book Maker.exe'. You can use Microsoft Print to PDF to save it; from there, zoom in, press Prt Sc or similar on your keyboard to copy it, paste it in Paint, and save it or edit it first.