According to a recent Anti-Sociology Study conducted by Dr. Zoltan Øbelisk, Normal Humans have invaded The Internet, a place which has, until recently, been a sanctuary for non-conformists, hackers, social outcasts, phreaks, SubGenii, and all other flavors of Intelligentsia (a 19th century Russian term meaning, “a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture).

“There is an astronomical increase in Normal Content on The Internet,” reports Dr. Øbelisk. “Photos of Normals posing with alcoholic beverages in restaurants, photos of Normals wearing bathing suits and smiling on the beach, photos of Normals smashing their faces together and sticking their tongues out.”

Professional Colleague, Dr. Whilton Popple, who boasts a Ph.D. in Social Metaphysics, noted that, “As of August 2009, thanks to Facebook, photos of infants now outnumber photos of female breasts on The Internet, which is… remarkable and disturbing.”

Twitter, an easy-to-use social networking tool, has been flooded with meaningless minute-to-minute messages chronicling the lives of The Normals, such as, “watching TV” and “so sleeeeeeeeeeeeepy!”

“The cost of this new breed of spam is immeasurable. Billions of dollars are spent on high-speed web servers in the Pacific Northwest and this is the best data you can create for them to store? No one cares if you just dropped off your rent check, are now on your way to the bank, and then picking up some pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, tinned tuna and a bit of mayo for tomorrow’s lunch,” hissed Popple.

Up until the late 1990’s, Internet Technology was primarily used to connect networks of computers for the purposes of processing and sharing important data.

“Yeah, we mostly used it to study science, but we had some fun, too. We had all read The Anarchist’s Cookbook by the time we were 12. I mean, come on,” says Dan Silverman, a high school chemistry teacher in Fairbury, Nebraska. “I remember… once a year we’d meet up for what we called a Con. All five Boards from our region banded together and put on PentaCon. We stayed up all night eating pretzels… writing disgusting poems and feeding the text into Dr. Sbaitso. I think this was 1991 or so. Back before The Normals took over.”

But the Normals didn’t stop with The Internet. They’ve desecrated other once-sacred annual cultural events that were previous only exciting to Mutants.

“It’s a big post-modern mess. First we had The Invasion of the Normals on the Internet, and now they’ve watched The Matrix, broken through the veil between the worlds, and they’re Invading our Cons,” added Silverman, reluctantly.

Theodore Lipton, a member of MENSA and late-night restaurant cook from Ash Fork, AZ reports: “In 1970 my friends and I saved up all summer and drove across the Mojave in my mom’s station wagon to the very first San Diego ComicCon. It was uncanny, no pun intended, to see 300 people that liked comic books. It changed my life. It became a yearly pilgrimage, until 2008, when I couldn’t even get a pass because of the glut of Normals and Slutty Goth Girls. In 2009 it sold out 11 months in advance. I barely got in for one day, but 140,000 Alpha-Betas were there in 2009. How does that make any sense?”

“The end of THAC0 is like Year Zero, the apocalypse for all of us. Once they switched it all over to D20 to accommodate people who can’t do math and read charts, it was over,” says Sally Thompson owner of a used book store in Boise, Idaho.

Never fear, Sally. A non-profit organization called The War On Fun will be launching a campaign to promote Normalopolis, a Sports Complex Dome twenty-times the size of the San Diego Sports Area, with a capacity of 250,000. Sponsored by Disney / Marvel, ComicCon will act as a Decoy Convention, attracting Jocks, Lawyers, Rich Kids With Nice Haircuts And Cars, and entire families of Pinks.

According to the War On Fun website, “The Normals will be lured into paying $425 for a 4 day fun pass (also valid at Disneyland, which will be connected via high-speed rail). From there, they can walk around, get drunk, and buy overpriced, fake Marvel comic books (specially printed with blank pages) without disturbing The Mutants and their Important Intellectual Activities.

Theodore Lipton is hopeful.

“There’s no safe place left for us. Let’s pray that giant Roach Motel gets built.”

• • •

This article by Dr. Zoltan was not accepted in accordance with The Onion’s Editorial Policy.

Which Plane of Social Metaphysical Existence Are You Operating On?

Illustration: Two planes of existence, rotating on separate Axes. One inhabitated by Winners, one inhabited by Losers. Each plane sees only a thin slice of the other plane. Therefore, Winners seek out other Winners. The Losers clump together and waste their lives together. Ask yourself: do you notice more Winners or more Losers around you? Do you need to change your Axis? If so, visit www.drzoltan.com

Way back in 2007, Doktor Zoltan was enslaved by a creature known as Justin St. Vincent from a small island called New Zealand. He was forced to write an essay for a website called Xtreme Music. One Earth Year later, the results were published on the Internet: a wasteful, imaginary gathering place for young people. Categorized under “World,” rather than its correct demonomination, “Underworld,” the essay (along with incorrectly-scaled and sharpened bitmap images in an attempt to discredit Doktor Zoltan) is available as a PDF. The entire essay is also displayed below, according to the strict standard of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange:

For the context of this essay on music and spirituality, Dr. Zoltan will declare that there are two categories of humans: those who believe that this life on planet Earth is “enough” and those who do not. Those in the former group are soldiers, employees, and ants, marching in repeated and predictable patterns, attaining goals of mundane survival and amusement until the day they die. Those in the latter group are of the utmost value to the future because they pursue extra-terrestrial activities, such as the arts and sciences. They make attempts to reach beyond the boundaries of their world, out of a sense of wonder and curiosity. What normal life offers is just not enough for them! They require mystery, and mysticism is the science of the mysterious. It is an open-minded inquiry into the chaos of the unknown, filling in the blanks with the gift of imagination. Demons, aliens, and vampires are the human mind’s own fear of the unknown; a process of putting a face on unexplainable phenomenon. The good news: many strange things happen on Earth, and they will only get stranger as humans become more complex beings. 

Music and spirituality are personal pursuits within the realm of the mysterious, but the Do-It-Yourself Ethic has been lost and perverted into the form of standardized industries. The perversion of spirituality is the Church. The perversion of music is the Rock concert. In both cases, the participants are divided into 1). An all-powerful leader, and 2). The followers. Personal power is handed over and unequally distributed into a top-down hierarchy. The allpowerful leader is showered in praise, glory, and gifts. The followers huddle together and imitate each other’s every move, reacting to the whims of the leader. Group think. Safety in numbers. Mass hypnosis. Vigilance and responsibility are surrendered. What was once a magical process of discovery and exploration for all is now a system of rules. Those who are too unimaginative to study their inner world are offered a simple step-by-step methodology. A formula. Both have become systems of uniform, massmarketed dogma, packaged for easy consumption. Reduced to copy and paste costumes, symbols, and decorations. The encyclopedia of deities and chord changes that someone else invented. But the essence of music and spirituality is a relationship with the mysterious. Those who embrace it will change the world.

Find out more about how you can Live Correctly at www.drzoltan.com.

From the appendix of: IEEE Subcommittee on Subjective Measurements IEEE Recommended Practices for Speech Quality Measurements. IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics. vol 17, 227-46, 1969, List 13:

Type out three lists of orders.
The harder he tried the less he got done.
The boss ran the show with a watchful eye.
The cup cracked and spilled its contents.
Paste can cleanse the most dirty brass.
The slang word for raw whiskey is booze.
It caught its hind paw in a rusty trap.
The wharf could be seen at the farther shore.
Feel the heat of the weak dying flame.
The tiny girl took off her hat.

72 Complete Lists of Harvard Sentences can be found at www.columbia.edu. Very useful!

The above content contained therein and herein is made public by Dr. Zoltan and must be read with scrutiny by the intended recipient in perpetuity throughout the universe. This blog entry is not meta-philosophical advice or an investment recommendation and should not be construed as such. 

[ Dr. Zoltan is launching his new website soon. Waiting on patch from Gnomeregan. Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out more. ]

The following was scraped from Neal Stephenson’s esoteric homemade website. Unfortunately, it was removed from his official pop-culture domain in favor of advertisements for his books. In Dr. Zoltan’s ironic opinion, this letter is much more important than his fiction writing.

Writers who do not make themselves totally available to everyone, all the time, are frequently tagged with the “recluse” label. While I do not consider myself a recluse, I have found it necessary to place some limits on my direct interactions with individual readers. These limits most often come into play when people send me letters or e-mail, and also when I am invited to speak publicly. This document is a sort of form letter explaining why I am the way I am.

When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.

All of this seems perfectly reasonable—I should know, since I have had these feelings myself! But it turns out to be a bad idea. To begin with, a novel has roughly the same relationship to a conversation with the author, as a movie does to the actors in it. A movie represents many person-years of work distilled into two hours, and so everything sounds and looks perfect. But if you have ever met a movie actor in person, you know that they are not quite as dazzling and witty (or as tall) as the figures they play in movies. This seems obvious but it always comes as a bit of a letdown anyway.

Likewise, a novel represents years of hard work distilled into a few hundred pages, with all (or at least most) of the bad ideas cut out and thrown away, and the good ideas polished and refined as much as possible. Interacting with an author in person is nothing like reading his novels. Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.

Authors are participants in a kind of colloquy that joins together all literate persons, and so it seems only reasonable that they should from time to time stop writing fiction for a few hours or days, and attend public events, such as conventions, signings, panels, seminars, etc., where they should exchange ideas with other authors and with other members of society. Therefore, authors such as myself frequently receive invitations to do exactly that.

Letters or e-mail from readers, and invitations to speak in public, might seem like very different things. In fact they are points on a common continuum; they have more in common than is obvious at first. The e-mail message from the reader, and the invitation to speak at a conference, are both requests (in most cases, polite and absolutely reasonable requests) for the author to interact directly with readers.

Normally, my only interaction with readers is to go to a Fedex drop box every couple of years and throw in the manuscript of a completed novel. It seems reasonable enough to ask for a little bit more than that! After all, the time commitment is very small: a few minutes tapping out an e-mail message, or a day trip to a conference to speak.

For some authors, this works, but in my case, it doesn’t. There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences.

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.

Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.

I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.

Dr. Zoltan is now obsessed with Logical Fallacies. Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out more.

Tim Ferriss: “If you have any skills and you’re just as honest with your audience (or potential audience) as you would be with friends after 2 drinks, you’ll have die hard fans. You’ll also have people who decide you are the anti-Christ.”

Dr. Zoltan is now obsessed with Logical Fallacies. Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out more.

Dr. Zoltan has discovered a Spanish-Language blog by a creature who calls himself Lord Zoltan! He has his own series of cartoons (and you can read about these courtesy of Google Translate) called The Island of Dr. Zoltan! Also note his use of the term, “Meme Crisis.” Fascinating! Dr. Zoltan is proud to appear in multiple cultural costumes across Endless Time. 

Dr. Zoltan is now obsessed with Logical Fallacies. Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out more.

Katie Konrath at getFreshMinds has written a blog about Dr. Zoltan’s 81 Ideas On Creative Career. 

Her site was recently named one of the top Innovation Blogs by Guy Kawasaki’s site, AllTop. 

Subscribe to getFreshMinds in your favorite RSS Reader!

Are You The Same Enough To Be Different?

Humans have a hard time perceiving differences between one thing and another unless they are mostly the same. 

How much difference is there between:

Coke and Pepsi?
Sprite and 7up?
Ford and Chevy?
Forks and Spoons?
Dogs and Cats?
Star Wars and Star Trek?
Blondes and Brunettes?
Los Angeles and New York?
Mac OS and Windows?
Community Radio and Commercial Radio?
Republican and Democrat?
Condenser and Dynamic?
Lakers and Celtics?
Serif and Sans Serif?
Gibson and Fender?
Heterosexual and Homosexual?
Angels and Demons?
AM and FM?
English and Spanish?
Vegetarian and Carnivore?
McDonalds and Burger King?
Islam and Christianity?
Ketchup and Mustard?
DVD and Blu-Ray?
Yin and Yang?
White Wine and Red Wine?
Socialist and Capitalist?
Coffee and Tea?
Men and Women?
Rich and Poor?

Not much. Their fundamental sameness makes all the difference!

{ This post was written and approved by Dr. Zoltan! When your hearing starts to go, visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog. Or just drink some Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. It will help stabilize your psychotic mood swings. }