D10 More Black Books

As this: http://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2022/06/black-books.html

Black Books was a funny show - one of those few examples of British humour that translates well to other climes.

1. Silico-Electric Disruption of the Terran Environment and Noosphere: Originally meant to be a textbook, but hackily edited into a novel in the 1960s after no educational publisher accepted it as such. The book contains extended exposition (most of its wordcount, really) on the theory that desertification is not a natural or man-made phenomenon, but rather due to the influence of extraterrestrials using "broadcast plasmic braids" to convert the surface of the Earth into a massive computer, wherein every grain of sand would be a computer chip. It ends on a cliffhanger, with the lantern-jawed science-hero protagonist racing to detonate a volcano, as releasing enough sulphur into the atmosphere would supposedly disrupt the extraterrestrials' plasmic braids, and potentially awaken their ancient rivals in torpor within the mantle.

2. A Response to Breitbart.com On The Subject of Theodor Adorno's Music: An amateur scientific paper addressed to the right-wing news website Breitbart, seeking to correct their claim that Theodor Adorno sought to induce necrophilia and other mental illnesses with atonal music. The paper presents extensive documentation of the authour's experiments to demonstrate that Theodor Adorno's music is one of the least effective methods to audially rewire the human mind, being ahead of only American rapper Pop Smoke's in their trials. The most effective music the authour found for this purpose was in fact derived from Swedish kulning, and various newspaper clippings of horrific crimes are presented in the paper as evidence, with the authour claiming to have exposed their perpetrator to this music beforehand. The eccentricity of the paper, and the ways in which they misuse and mix up mathematical and musical notation leads most of the very few people aware of the paper to dismiss it as a hoax.

3. A Tale of An Isle Not Present on Any Maps: A 19th-century novel in the "stranded children" genre. It contains the autobiographical account of its authour, who while on a retreat with a Muscular Christian youth group became shipwrecked on an undiscovered island in the North Atlantic. On the island they encounter bizarre wildlife referred to only vaguely by names such as "stalking-coral" and "the three-pronged heron", and survive only by taking shelter in ruins and sacrificing the boys from less prestigious families to predators. Finally, after the rest of the group has been sacrificed or disappeared, the authour stumbles into the deepest parts of the island's ruins, and miraculously ends up coming out in an old Norman slave market buried beneath London.

4. Kurotetsu Maou Iuliusu: The manuscript of a manga mailed by an anonymous authour to Osamu Tezuka some time between June and September of 1955. Tezuka regarded it as amusing, but too dark for his tastes. Kurotetsu Maou Iuliusu is a thick, loose-leaf volume that follows the titular emperor of a parallel universe Roman empire that never fell invading a world very much like our own in non-chronological order, with each cluster of chapters documenting a particular invasion point and its rippling effects through history. Reading the manga in full can indoctrinate the reader, causing them to sincerely believe that the plot of Kurotetsu reflects reality, and that they belong to a millennia-old conspiracy to install the old patrician families of Rome to global power via eugenics and fomenting anarchy.

5. Confessions of a Haight-Ashbury Druglord: Transcript of a podcast interviewing a man who claims to have been one of the biggest suppliers of psychedelic drugs in San Francisco during the height of the hippie movement. The man says that the cops allowed him to continue dealing so long as he mixed some substances they provided him into his supply, and that his customers that bought the tainted stuff often lost their minds or went comatose. The transcript gets confusing and rambly a bit past the midway point, when the man admits to having tried the tainted drugs once, and experienced a trip that took him to "the court in the fault" where "lost souls moved in a grinding dance". The audio version of the podcast is corrupted almost instantly if exposed to any internet connection, and often times even when there should be no internet connection.

6. The Boy Whose Brain Went Far Away: A children's book written by a holistic healer wanted in Oregon for crimes related to performing chiropractics on babies. The book purports to be able to treat ADHD in children better than medication or therapy. The book is about a boy who shakes a stranger's ("whose eyes he couldn't see") hand, and has his brain taken by that stranger through his palm. The boy must go to the bottom of the ocean, the deepest desert, and a distant star to get it back. Children who read or are regularly read the book exhibit increased attention spans, decreased anxiety, savant-like mathematical ability, a propensity for imaginary friends beyond the age where this would be developmentally appropriate, occasionally remembering the memories of other children exposed to the book as though they were their own, and rapid degeneration of the neural tissue after puberty that will render them comatose before the age of 25. The book saw limited distribution, typically to granola-and-crystal shops rather than big bookstores, and was pulled from shelves on the excuse that it contained lead-based paints.

7. The Empire Beyond the Empire, The War Beyond the Stars: An epic-length Star Wars fanfiction serial written from 2005 to 2020. The fanfiction's plot meandered for almost a decade, being schlocky, repetitive action and soap operatic drama, but hits its stride when the authour starts speaking to the characters and the audience directly, claiming that the Force had managed to cross the barrier of fiction into reality, taken over the minds of many fans, Disney executives, and Angela Merkel, among others, and sought to totally control the destiny of the human race. Letters are included addressed to Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and other actors in Star Wars media, begging them to be "subsumed" to allow their characters to also enter reality and combat the Force. The fanfiction ended abruptly after the authour was doxxed by angry fans, and the authour was found several weeks later choked to death with a Baby Yoda doll.

8. The Printed God Letters: Compiled letters of complaints made by the owner of a printing shop in Triers in the early 16th century. Through the letters the owner becomes increasingly frustrated with the output of their moveable type printing press, first with the occasional typo or misprint, and then with entire sentences being printed that shouldn't have been physically possible given the positioning of keys. The occult interest in the letters comes from these sentences, which are reported incredulously and in sparse detail. What can be derived from these sentences with the benefit of modern knowledge is that the sentences form a coherent whole, claiming to be written by God, and contain instructions for the manufacture of printing machines, as well as mechanical algorithmic computers for the automation of printing and writing. By the end of the letters, the owner has convinced himself that the whole thing is a Jewish trick to get him to buy a replacement press.

9. The Incoherence of the Pornographers: A breathless treatise from the 1980s combining philosophy, archeology, and tabloid cultural criticism to argue that human sexual characteristics and libido aren't natural to our species, but rather bred into a domesticated slave-race for the performative amusement of the asexual and sporulating elites of a civilization that ruled the Sahara back when it was still green.

10. Astrology Overruled: A polemic written by a Second Great Awakening preacher who claimed that all prior astrological works, particularly those of Nostradamus, were fatally flawed because they failed to account for the second moon which was hidden beyond the dark side of the first. The preacher's evidence for this second moon is an account of an encounter with a "seven-winged angel" in dreams, and telescopic observation of the visible moon with anachronistically sophisticated analysis of its gravitational wobble. Contemporary Chinese sources corroborate the gravitational wobble, yet modern measurements don't present it - whatever mass was behind the moon over a century ago is no longer there.