Humans unite!

Most of my writing friends and contacts are entirely online contacts. Sometimes, like right now, the philosophical center of my brain takes over, and I start to wonder if these online contacts are really real flesh and blood people. The only evidence of their existence is lines of text on my computer screen, which are composed of small changes in voltages sent through my Ethernet cable.

For those of you who are flesh and blood people, I apologize in advance for when I meet you in person. I may stare. Don't worry, it will be nothing you said, and you don't have a booger hanging out of your nose. It's sort of like when you listen to your own voice on a recording and it sounds nothing like what you hear in your own head. Just grab a soda or a cup of coffee and wait for a few minutes. Eventually I'll sort it out and will return to my usual charming self.

But until I meet you, the most important and immediate question here is, "How do I know you aren't robots?" Perhaps the robotic uprising is nigh. Perhaps my banter and exchanging of writing ideas are all just contributing to the robots' understanding of human abstract thought so they can better learn how to manipulate and eventually destroy us.

The answer to this question seems particularly obvious when reading form rejection letters from certain publications which are so badly worded as to be entirely inhuman. The robots think so little of me, they sent their crudest AIs to smite me. For instance, the oft-used "Your story does not suit our needs at this time"--I'm always tempted to reply and ask at what time my story WOULD suit their needs. (The topic of form letter dissection has sparked a new post idea--will post more on that soon).

So beware--when you send communications to people you only know on the Internet, you are contributing to the accelerated downfall of humanity. Be warned! Your knee-jerk reaction to this blog-post may be to laugh. "He's contradicting his own warning by putting it in a blog post!" you say. But I'm craftier than you realize. By lacing my own message with this major logical fallacy, I've rendered this post invisible to modern artifical intelligence. They'll disregard it as nonsense. So if you've made it this far, you must be a human. Either that, or the robots are more intelligent than anyone thought, and all is lost!

Humans unite!