'What do religion, psychology and "ancient alien theory" have in common? -- For Jung, the collective unconscious is a vast repository of human knowlege, instinct, memory and experience accumulated since the birth of the species and genetically and psychologically passed down from generation to generation. Therefore, the archaic collective unconscious is an invaluable and wisdom-filled source of information unconsciously linking us all together, much like the World Wide Web, the Internet, links us together and has become an integral part of our interconnected collective consciousness. ...many of the phenomena frequently cited by ancient alien theorists are more convincingly evidence of the existence of the collective unconscious than of early extraterrestrial influences. Whether or not extraterrestrial life exists and has visited this planet in UFO's, past or present, is still an open question. But it seems clear that deep in our collective unconscious resides the archetypal idea and imagery of these alien entities, just as the archetypal idea of God and the Devil live within us.' -- She's baaack. Mommy looms large over you laying in your crib. Nice, nasty, or indifferent? God, Devil, neither or both?

'Porn intensely focuses our mental and physical attention, uncovering specific emotions eroticized much earlier in life. Through our sexual fantasies, we attempt to master feelings of powerlessness, shame, guilt, fear and loneliness that have followed us into adulthood. Suppose our parents, teachers, or clergy used excessive shame or guilt to teach or control us. To deal with our resultant anger, we encode the shame in our fantasies, becoming aroused when thinking of ourselves as naughty or engaging in secret or forbidden sexual acts. We feel excited, for example, when punished or disciplined for supposed misbehavior, by being tied up and forced to have sex. Forced to surrender sexually to a dominant aggressor, we allow ourselves to enjoy the sex while escaping from the guilt that has haunted us through life. On the other hand, some of us respond to underlying guilt and shame by sexualizing the idea of becoming the aggressor, perhaps delving into themes of incest or other extreme sexual behaviors to attach pleasure to unthinkable acts. Eroticizing feelings of inadequacy lead to fantasies with themes involving submission, humiliation, verbal abuse or extreme adoration of a partner. We are aroused by being treated as if we are useless, unworthy or weak. Yet, by inviting our own humiliation, we become in charge of it and through the sexual pleasure we receive weaken the impact of childhood pain. Some of us on the the other hand, counteract feelings of inadequacy with ideas of grandiosity in which we imagine ourselves as important, powerful or irresistibly sexy. We invent fantasies in which we are admired, adored, paid for sex, recreating ourselves as competent, powerful and attainable.'

'We find them everywhere in fantasy fiction: the "orphaned heroes," young men and women whose parents are dead, absent, or unknown, who turn out to be the heirs to the kingdom, the destined pullers of swords from stones, the keys to the riddles, the prophesies' answers, the bearers of powerful magic. For young readers, there is a distinct brand of pleasure in inhabiting the skin of the orphan hero, tasting both the joys and terrors of operating as a fully independent being without the protective cushion (or burden, depending on the child's circumstance) of parents standing between them and the wide, wide world beyond. For children with difficult childhoods, the appeal is obvious; such stories provide escape, a vision of life beyond the confines of a troubled home. But even children from healthy families welcome escape from time to time. In the guise of the orphan hero they can shed their usual roles (the eldest daughter, middle son, the baby of the family, etc.) and enter other realms in which they are solitary actors. Without adults to guide them (or, contrarily, to restrict them), orphan heroes are thrown back, time and time again, on their own resources. I do not think we outgrow our need for such stories, accounting for their continuing popularity among adult readers as well — for who among us does not feel orphaned in this vast, strange world sometimes? Through Harry Potter, Jane Eyre, and Cinderella we experience the orphan within ourselves.'

'A radical theory about the origins, power and popularity of Harry Potter versus Star Wars versus Lord of the Rings.' -- "If you cannot leave an abusive relationship – or you will not leave an abusive relationship – you will leave reality."

'From McKee: "Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire ... and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance." -- Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be worth your time to memorize it.'

'...people first become hypervigilant and paranoid as catacholamine imbalances and serotonin depletion lead them to expect attack, then engage in sacrificial restaging rituals that are usually both sadistic – inflicting the trauma upon others – and masochistic – destroying your own wealth and even sacrificing your own lives. The result is a feeling of relief that we have survived the apocalypse in our heads plus a feeling of triumph produced by the manic opioid surge. Thus our early traumas become wired into separate emotional memory module and become projected onto the historical stage in such a manner that they appear to be happening to the group rather than being internal, creating group-fantasies so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called "society." These group-fantasies are dissociated and seem to have a life of their own, a life we term "social" or "political" or "religious."'

'The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday. “I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Haddad Carson said. “I’m very excited about the Lord’s return, but I’m fearful that my children might get left behind. But you have to accept God’s will.” The children, however, have found something to giggle over. “She’ll say, ‘You need to clean up your room,’ ” Grace said. “And I’ll say, ‘Mom, it doesn’t matter, if the world’s going to end!’ ” She and her twin, Faith, have a friend’s birthday party Saturday night, around the time their parents believe the rapture will occur. “So if the world doesn’t end, I’d really like to attend,” Grace said before adding, “Though I don’t know how emotionally able my family will be at that time.”' -- What drives religious people to set themselves up for this kind of humiliation? What 'world' do they really want to end?

"If you unconsciously resent the unjust and exploitative authority of your parents, and you project that onto the capitalist, you will not escape brutal authority – in fact, you will only intensify it. And that intensification takes the form of the State. If you are a slave, you can't escape. Involuntaryism leads to vengeance, to anger, to rage, to fantasies of destruction. Where we are not free to choose we become slaves to hatred. If you are not free to choose your companions then displacement, distortions, rippled subterfuges in rational thought, abandonment of empiricism, retreat into rank delusion – is inevitable. Because everything that you will believe when you don't have choice will be a mask for that lack of choice ... a mask to justify abandoning choice. If you fundamentally reject choice, you cannot have as your ideal a voluntary system. If you reject voluntaryism in your personal relations, you cannot sustain voluntaryism as an ideal in your ideology."

'It's hard to get upset with people who are so deluded...' -- "Politics is violence. Government is force. 'Laws' are violence. Prison is coercion. The police kidnap and imprison. National debts are theft from the unborn. Taxes are theft. Tariffs, regulations are all the initiation of force. The State is a monopoly agency for the initiation of force in a geographical area. The State is the very definition of violence. Government is exactly what people don't want to do because they have to be forced. Whatever someone is doing when they have a gun to their head, is exactly what they don't want to do."

'The notion that leaders really lead, not follow, is as much a group-fantasy as the leader's charismatic power to command the sun's rise and fall. A leader is a single individual sitting at a desk in one corner of one city. The power we conditionally delegate to him resides in the group-fantasy, since the leader's function is to act as a poison container for our group-fantasies. If he should unexpectedly die, the container disappears and our fears return to us in a rush. Even if he has been a totally incompetent leader, we panic. ...the charisma of leaders is purely a defensive grandiosity of our own, compensating for our feelings of childhood helplessness. Thus a leader's strength seems inevitably to decay. ...there are four phases of group-fantasies about leaders, as they become less and less able to provide grandiose manic solutions to the nation's growing growth panic: (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse and (4) upheaval.' ...

'Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Why didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Shall we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that they allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by traumatic memories... By dissociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with these persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creating a replacement.'

Order out of chaos -- '#1. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD, where #2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE. #3. They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but #4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to #5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where #6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES. #7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing a second threshold #8. where they endure the ORDEAL. #9. They take possession of their REWARD and #10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World. #11. They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience. #12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the Ordinary World.'

'Dominant Social Theme: Soon the world will be a better place thanks to space aliens and stargates. -- There is certainly a possibility in our view that these are elite promotions; in fact, we pointed out another one sometime ago involving a fictitious "Supriem Rockefeller" (who is supposedly being groomed to lead the world.) Do they have direct or indirect ties in some form to Western intelligence and disinformation? The idea would be to conflate aliens with free-market views, gold-backed currency and other perfectly legitimate freedom-oriented ideas in order to discredit them. There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the West (specifically America) opening up another front on the "war on terror" in such places as Iran or Pakistan or ... Yemen. But the stargate Yemen theme proposes that the reason for America's upcoming military involvement in the area REALLY has to do with alien technologies. One hears the giggling of military COINTELPRO in the background.'

'...how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic or cartoon: An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy... Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance... Children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust, and then vicariously enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the shadow side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero ...[with whom] one's personal well-being is tied inextricably...'

'When familiar myths fail and life gets difficult, in turn, the results rather too often include a form of collective flight into fantasy well known to sociologists and students of history. Think of cargo cults, Ghost Dancers, Americans waiting in a suburban Chicago backyard to be taken off the planet by the Space Brothers, and every other example you recall of people responding to a difficult situation by a leap of faith to a farther shore that didn’t happen to be there. Now think about it again, remembering that this time the motivating factors may well include the symbols and slogans and passionate hopes that matter most to you. ...when existing institutions fail and the collective foundations of meaning crack, there’s a large demand for some new vision of destiny that will make sense of the troubles and offer a way past them to some brighter future. The economics of popular belief being what they are, that demand very quickly finds an ample supply.'

'The notion that a nuclear weapon is the answer to BP’s undersea gusher is conclusive evidence, if any more were needed, that reasonable thought has gone right out the window. Admittedly it’s only fair to say that this happened with nuclear weapons a long time ago. To a frightening extent, the US nuclear arsenal has become a phallic talisman of national omnipotence that serves mostly to help Americans distract themselves from the waning of the real foundations of their country’s former hegemony. If that arsenal ever ceases to be militarily useful – and it’s probably a safe bet that China, to name only one likely candidate, has scores of laboratories working right now on technologies to make that happen, paid by the billions a year we spend to import salad shooters and cheap electronics – our national nervous breakdown may be one for the record books.' -- LOL

'"It's very possible that a sideways world running concurrent to our own exists, and that a facsimile of myself is happy, fulfilled, and already gearing up for the season seven premiere of Lost," said 36-year-old Kevin Molinaro, who, along with more than 20 million other hopeless fans, has recently booked multiple roundtrip tickets from Los Angeles to Australia in hopes of traveling through a vortex in the space-time continuum. "I just have to find a way to get there. We all do."'

'The narcissist says: if it can't happen to me, it can't really happen. 2500 Americans can't just die in one day. But 9/11 was different. It didn't respect the rules. It violated the most important aspect of postmodern narcissism: story. Not only was the attack a surprise – no warning, no buildup, no exposition, no rising action – but even the characters were a surprise. We were revealed to be powerless. No heroes. No one knew kung fu. -- You might say that the Great Recession we're in now should end postmodern narcissism. Nope. Amazingly, all I hear and read are calls for punishing those who got us into this mess (Wall Street), "fixing the system," "solving the housing crisis." People are waiting for things to "get back to normal." People: this is normal. The past twenty years-- easy credit, college for everyone that leads to a job at Starbucks, unemployment under 6% – that was abnormal. -- So: two huge historical realities have had no impact on our cultural narcissism.'

'Girlfriends say: I pretend to believe you when you say you know kung fu, because I love you. The boyfriend says, not hearing anything she said: I'll stay with you until either I know kung fu; or you realize I don't really know kung fu, and my shame makes me hate you. -- Trinity loves Neo, even before he becomes The One. She's waited her whole life for him. He doesn't (yet) know kung fu, but she knows he will. And she does know kung fu -- and chooses him, saves him. That's love. But Neo doesn't return the love until he becomes who he has always known he is. He has to know kung fu first. Only then could someone really love him. -- The Matrix was the articulated solution to a growing existential crisis. It gave us hope: "Unless there's solid reason not to, I'm just going to allow the possibility that there's more to reality than what I see, and so there may be a valid reason to hope that my real life will kick in any time. And then someone will love me."

'The question for today is, why does it seem that women have higher sex drives than men? This is not a complaint I recall hearing in the 1970s or 80s. Start with: there's something eerily adolescent about men today. The movies say: until you do something extraordinary, or "save" the girl, then the love you feel isn't true love. Women may be the ones looking to feel "explosions" inside telling them they're in true love, but men externalize those explosions into real explosions before they know it's love. The male libido falls not because he's not interested in the woman he's with, but because he's not interested in the movie he's in. -- One of the only 80s action movies that didn't have a damsel in distress was First Blood, in which Rambo came back to the world only to find that not only did no one reward his identity, they hated him for it. But even that was a sort of confirmation. You don't need a girl when enough people hate you for who you are.'

"In all these tales, a depressed life of dumb chores and crushed opportunities gets magically transformed into an 'heroic' – and always violet – adventure when an older man comes and takes you away. All this is just designed to make you want to go to war when the State comes to kidnap you. Real heroism is, however, something very different from what is always portrayed. Real heroism is something you can achieve now, today."

'The most successful F2P games (monetization-wise) in China all give their paying customers HUGE advantages. Rich people lead poor people to fight with other rich people via clans. It is much better than rich people killing poor people all the time. Creates a highly dynamic social system with better balancing. Maybe this is popular in China. Apparently people there will pay money for it. Perhaps when they want to escape from their day-to-day lives in an oppressive centralized regime, that's what they fantasize about: being peasants forced to fight for a brutal overlord, in an oppressive decentralized regime. As if all this weren't depressing enough, Mr. Ye explains how game designers can make money out of hate and humiliation in social environments: Conflicts are good. Conflicts make the game world more energetic and live. More importantly, conflicts trigger emotions. When people are emotionally unstable, they are more likely to make purchases. Is this what game design has come to?'

Gisted -- In the green mythological fantasy there are three major players: #1. The Cowering Victim (Mother Earth, feminine), #2. The Raping Perpetrator (capitalism, masculine), #3. The Superhero Saviour (The State, gender neutral) -- So to relate these players to the family, there's a brutal father and a depressed, passive-aggressive mother. But where does the State come from in this fantasy because there's no State in the family? The superhero State is the child's projection fantasy of power and omnipotence which is the only possible psychological response to helplessness in the face of violence. Greens, by abstracting and projecting their need for power onto the State, have ensured they will never gain any real power in their lives and that the State will just take from them without offering anything in return. Grandiosity is a form of helplessness; it allows us to ignore the pain our own experiences. The experiences we repress or project onto others always end up controlling us.

Gisted -- When you start to look at political activism of any kind, when people act in a resolutely anti-empirical way, you know that psychological defenses are at work. Their government fails at everything except predation and destruction but people continue to turn to it like a white knight. There's this endless frustration as to why statism isn't working. Not realizing their belief in the State is a psychological defense, statists continue to escalate in the same way parents who use violence to obtain obedience from children tend to escalate: because it doesn't work. The State is viewed as a saviour because it represents the grandiosity of the helpless and this is why the fantasy of statism is so hard to break for people. If the State were to disappear tomorrow, people would actually have to deal with their pain, they wouldn't have this receptacle for their childhood helplessness and anger. That's why if you talk to people about getting rid of the State they get very upset about it.

'It's that experience of driving in the back of the family car, scrunching you eyes up at night to turn the streetlights into laser weapons and shooting other cars.' -- o_< ZZZAP!

'MagiQuest, a real-life World of Warcraft... Invented by Creative Kingdoms, a company that designs theme-park attractions, the game is built around infrared sensors embedded in the wands. "It's like having a joystick that controls a 20,000-square-foot facility." After paying $14.99 for a wand and a $10-per-hour activation fee, players begin a scavenger hunt for Tolkienesque paintings, sculptures, and installations scattered throughout the hotel. Video kiosks of wizards and maidens dispense clues and track your progress by picking up your unique IR signature. Guides in Elizabethan garb roam the grounds dispensing advice. Victories and discoveries trigger up to 150 visual and audio effects, and frantic kids drag weary parents to and fro until they catch them all. The online version lets players accrue rewards and "powers" that carry over to the physical locations. ... ...since its 2005 launch, the franchise has expanded to 15 US cities and two locales in Japan.' -- UK, please.

'#The confirmation/revelation of an intervening god as the driving force behind events #The use of that god to resolve large numbers of major plot points #The use of “big secrets” to dominate what was supposed to be a character-driven story. -- A story where literally anything can happen has no suspense and little mystery. This is why, even though readers will suspend disbelief on a story’s fantastic elements, they must be introduced at the start of a story. If a writer resolves a problem by bringing in a new and unexpected fantastic element at the end, the audience feels cheated. -- ...divine intervention robs all the other characters of meaning. The story is no longer about how they struggled and overcame adversity. They did not battle their mortal and natural adversaries and triumph or fail. Rather, things came out as they did through divine will. When gods appear as real characters in fiction, their job should not be to resolve the plot, but rather to create it.'

Awesome! Diagram/Map: "The Emigmatrix: In the universe of puzzles, codes, and games, everything is connected. Here's how." -- Full size map on flickr: http://bit.ly/ePBlF

'"Loosely speaking, science fiction is scientifically plausible and about that which is possible." Fantasy, on the other hand, is concerned with neither.'

"Here's a simple question for you, which I suspect does not have a simple answer: why is Fantasy the predominant genre of game-like virtual worlds?" Must remember to go back and check comments.

"Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction. It focuses on the depiction of sexual or romantic relationships between two or more characters, who are not necessarily engaged in relationships in the canon universe."

"..you make the paradigm leap away from something that is projected to you and toward something you create that represents yourself. You impress your own psyche, motivations, creativity, sensuality onto a group of pixels and become quite attached to it."

Look, stop beating around the bush with all this Flash Mob, Flesh Mob nonsense and just call it what it is REALLY is: an orgy.

"The launch of the first Soviet Sputnik satellite in the 1950s captured the public's imagination and prompted TV writers in the Sixties to experiment with fantastical storylines."