It is with great joy and anticipation of your epistolary camaraderie that owing to a recent innovation in an alternate eigenstate of this blog (quantum computing on and the implosion of Earth 2) that it is now possible to leave comments and messages to express your joy, concerns, vague disappointments and troubling personal doubts in the form of comments.
It is even possible to express some sort of reaction to the post itself. However, readers are reminded that any reaction that takes the form of a dialogue between this author and the reader as gay werewolves forced to perform humiliating acts while trapped in dog form at a dog show will be deleted. Again.
To celebrate this new homoerotic-lycanthropic-humiliation-scenario-free channel of communication, I publish here some much belated responses to some of your earlier letters and inquires not related to my being mounted publicly by a Great Dane in Madison Square Garden.
Dear อาจารย์แวน,
I enjoy reading your work very much. I feel it has shaped me as a person, for the better. I find it a source of great spiritual comfort.
I only have one humble question to ask: where do you get your throwing stars?
-Gloomy in Gotham
Dear Gloomy,
I'm glad you have found my work inspiring and useful.
Here in กรุงเทพ I find it easiest just to purchase shuriken, plumbata and other hand missiles at a little store in Chinatown called The Five Daughter's Vengeance Emporium. It is also where I get my ointments and "Viet Cong Q-tips." It's a nice little store, run by a dear little man with one of those moles with super long hairs and a horrid, pitiful story that you should by no means listen to.
The store sells throwing stars by the gross, and whereas they may not be nearly as well balanced as the batarangs you are used to, they are cheap, plentiful and pointy.
I'm not really sure who owns the store. If you go out back, there are a lot of old newspapers and spears, some from before the war. What war, you say? Any war.
Dear อาจารย์แวน,
I recently acquired an enormous sofa. It is really quite old and cumbersome -in fact, I'm not sure even how to go about sitting on it comfortably, with all its odd seats and slanted surfaces, but as an ancient family heirloom I cannot part with it.
Cleaning it, however, seems an enormous and difficult task, as its vast surface has a variety of complex and involved geegaws and decorations that I really don't understand, much less know how to clean. In particular, there is this one central stain that never seem to come out no matter how I try. As for the smell of this particular movable it seems totally inalienable from the article. Any advice?
-Recipient in Roanoke
Dear Recipient,
I am afraid you are somewhat confused. There is no stain on your sofa. There is no sofa.
From your description the object you are describing as your sofa is a Carcharodon or giant furred megalodon. The irregular features that trouble you are probably its fins, gills and possibly its eyes. If so, you should avoid trying to clean them, as you report doing, certainly not with any harsh cleansers. I must add that these features, as with the smell, are part of the natural compliment of the megalodon and really cannot be changed.
Further, the "stain" you cannot seem to remove is clearly the subconscious guilt you feel (c.f. Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1, Freud, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices," Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, passim.) produced by keeping such a magnificent extinct creature in the captivity of your apartment, instead of allowing it the freedom of apex predation in the world's oceans. I suspect you have other issues as well, so I advise you seek further help with a professional who is real and not imaginary.
Dear อาจารย์แวน,
I recently received a fuckbot for my bar mitzvah. Though it has a very good likeness of Baron von Ricthofen as I had asked for and is extremely prompt about blow jobs, I cannot help but feel that it is somehow increasingly less interested in sex, that somewhere behind its many emphatic cries, sobs and ululations of venereal delight, something is somehow missing.
I know that these things are only ultra-weak AIs and are programmed at the factory. The unit's devionics firmware is up to date and the diagnostics are in the normal/ideal parameters. Is it just me?
-Frigid in Freemont
Dear Frigid,
First of all, the proper term for an automaton designed expressly for sexual gratification, entertainment, education or aid is "android," "gymnoid" or "hermaphroid." This is the term of art of choice used by the industry, designers, droidaphiles, academics, legal authors, game shows and the automatons themselves. It is impolite, inaccurate and a non-felony lexcrime to refer to these valuable members of our post-reality economy as "skinjobs," "butt-bots," "ROV cum-dumpsters," "auto-skanks," "slut-threepios," "woombas," "Hy Pikes" or whatever other uncouth derogatory terms they are using over at Taffey Lewis' place.
Sex with fuckbots universally tends toward extreme paraphilias and object substitution. Indeed, in the DSM-XII, coitus or the desire for coitus modeled on heterosexual human coupling with a fuckbot is one of the criteria for para schizophrenia of the Mars Condo One type.
The reason for this is undoubtedly the same reason people who spend a lot of time with statues or mannequins tend to dress them up: to compensate for a perceived uncanny deficiency in the human simulacrum, namely that it is not "alive."
Though nth-generation fuckbots are quite animate and realistic in their responses, an awareness of their status as sex objects simpliciter seems to invite degrees of unrestricted sadism and perversity from otherwise sexually quite boring owners that would never be tempted to imagine such trespasses, diversions or violations with a traditional "living" "organic" human being or even an animal.
As such, most owners or operators of fuckbots (tip: leasing is better, though avoid heavily refurbished or refitted models, particularly those designed for asphyxiation or edge play; there is almost always a truly disturbing reason these models have had their memory wiped) report that their fuckbot, though objectively compliant and functioning normally become progressively less satisfying as sex surrogates from a perceived increasing lack of enthusiasm. This is usually explained by a normal plateau of sexual satisfaction and buyer's regret, a feature that manufacturers know of and anticipate with their buy back program.
Research into whether or not fuckbots actually become bored themselves is inconclusive. The never discussed reason for this is that in the process of trying to determine whether or not fuckbots become bored with sex, the researchers involved invariably become more and more dangerously perverse and depraved themselves, conducting more and more extreme, unnatural and complex "experiments" in an attempt to find the arousal threshold of their subject fuckbots, which they invariably perceive as constantly approaching the oblique asymtote limit of being cold and distant. This inevitably ends in death and mutilation for the researchers, often in some sort of sexually themed bull pen or orgasmic threshing machine.
[Given this problem, some research was, of course, carried out along the lines of fuckbots studying other fuckbots to determine whether they get bored. This directly led to fuckbot-designed fuckbots, the including the "Jumpin' Jami" model, now better known by its military industrial nomen, the MDX-151 Area Denial System. While its formidable capacity as a sexual surrogate exceeds human tolerances, its efficacy as a complete weapons system is undeniable, as the continued status of the "no-go" areas of Hokkado, Thotsakan ทศกัณฐ์ Industrial Park, KADDB complexes and East Bay demonstrate, all four of which made Caligula magazine's list of the "top 20 worst places to go if you have a penis or penes." The army of PORC is rumored to still be fighting a holding action against the Chinese knockoff of the MDX-151 ADS, the Fang-10, in Guiyu.]
May I suggest simply putting some sort of innocuous covering over the eyes or head of your unit? Avoid tape, as it tends to catch on the hair and the glue may stick to the face. Some people report that sunglasses with simple post-it pads are an economical way to avoid premature ejaculation into the uncanny valley while still staying organized.
If this does not work, why not throw a clone or a fistable monkey or lemur into the mix?
Dear อาจารย์แวน,
While making dinner for my family, who I actually love and do not despise, I put too much salt in the chowder. I believe this accident stems from the fatigue of working very hard to make my beautiful family happy and not any subconscious resentment as some would believe.
I have read that adding milk may help reduce the problem of excess salt. Is this true?
-Saline in Seattle
Dear Saline,
Often we complicate our lives by failing to follow through on our truest, deepest intentions (Nietzsche, "The Pale Criminal," Zarathustra, Book I). Milk is for children and cowards who are not lactose intolerant. If you have salted your food, so shall it be salted. Add more salt. Unscrew the lid of the shaker. Dump a whole bag on a plate. Say to your family: this, this is my heart.
When they are grown and the college of their choice burns to the ground, you will have prepared them.
