Friday, February 10, 2012

Another Inane Puzzle by Wm Jaz ( ??? )

A strange symbiosis
December 27, 2011
by Wm Jas

Commentary & Analysis by Tiny Wanda

i didn’t give this too much thought when i read it The First & Second Times, But when i finally got around to more thoroughly reading it recently; i playfully attached an arbitrary Definition to Slugs & Shells, and as i continued to read through this essay; These Definitions seemed to hold fast 98% of The Time !
The Remaining 2% Seems to suggest an Alternative, and substantially more puerile Interpretation, best used for a Children’s book with large colorful illustrations.

A Slug is The Human Soul, Spirit or Ba Bird.
The Shell is The Human ( or Animal, or Plant ) Mortal Coil.
The Ultimate Question is; Why does The Slug Attach to The Shell?
If this Interpretation is Correct; Then my long standing explanation is (x. ( See Below )

Let me tell you about an organism I know of which has a very peculiar lifestyle. Actually, it is composed of two biologically distinct organisms, known as the Slug and the Shell, each with its own DNA and reproductive cycle. However, the Slug and the Shell are so closely bound together for most of their life cycle that it makes more sense to think of them as two parts of a single organismic system.

Of Course; The Naked Ba Bird doesn’t really have its own DNA, But it must have ( ? ) some Defining Principle which may or may not contribute to The Creation of new Ba Birds.
According to this interpretation; The Slug doesn’t really ‘need’ The Shell, And The Shell, Once Animated by The Slug; Acts fairly autonomously, Using it’s inherent Behavioural Programming to Stay Alive, Requiring The Slug to only, Very Rarely in many cases, Intervene in The Shells Behaviour to Achieve some Desired End or Avoid Danger.

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At first glance, it’s hard to see why a Slug needs a Shell at all. Slugs are complete, self-contained organisms in their own right and are quite capable of living and thriving alone, without being bonded to a Shell. In fact, because of their greater fecundity, Slugs greatly outnumber Shells, and at any given time most of the Slugs in the world are unbonded, living without Shells. However, unbonded Slugs do have one striking liability: an inability to reproduce. They produce gametes in great abundance but have no external genitalia and hence no way of releasing those gametes.

Exactly how, why or if Ba Birds Reproduce, According to Common Popular Beliefs, There are a Greater Number of Slugs than Shells. These Unattached Slugs are expressed in this World as either; Ghosts, Angels, Ball Lightning, Tornados, Clouds or Exist in The Realm of Dreams, which may be The ’True’ Reality.

Shells, on the other hand, are wholly dependent on Slugs and, except during pupation, are unable to live independently. While a Shell is a complete, living organism (not a lifeless mass of calcium carbonate, as the name might suggest), it is a seriously deficient one, with an incomplete digestive system (no mouth or anus) and no means of locomotion. Unlike a Slug, it does have a fully functional reproductive system, including external genitalia, but its inability to move around nevertheless makes reproduction a practical impossibility.

In this Description of How a Shell Operates; It might be compared to An Automobile; That although it has wheels and An Engine, without A Humanimal Driver, It is quite Inert.
What Wm Jas means by an Incomplete Digestive System ( ? ) : i assume that this refers to The Necessity of The Shell to obtain Spiritual Energy ( ? ) to Survive in The Mortal Realm. The Slug somehow processes this Spiritual Energy to sustain both itself & The Shell. The Shell also needs conventional Food, which being obtained by eating once living entities, maybe these corpses contain some of The Spiritual Energy that The Slug needs as well ( ??? )

A few days prior to hatching, Shell eggs produce a powerful pheromone that attracts unbonded Slugs, which will hang around waiting for the eggs to hatch so they can bond to the newborn Shells. (If no Slugs are attracted, or if the bonding is unsuccessful, the Shells usually die in a matter of hours.) When a Shell bonds with a Slug, it plugs into the Slug’s digestive system, siphoning some of the Slug’s food into its own stomach and then routing its own fecal matter back into the Slug’s digestive tract to be excreted. Because it is mostly immobile, the Shell uses relatively little of the Slug’s food, but it is nevertheless essentially a parasite at this stage in its life cycle, living off the Slug and giving it nothing in return. The Slug-Shell unit at this point in its development is known as a Protosnail.

When exactly The Shell ( Humanimal Robot ) becomes attached to The Slug ( Ba Bird ) is a curious question ( ! ) That Topic is subdivided endlessly with additional questions of why The Shells occasionally develop incorrectly and how much The Slug ( Ba Bird ) Contributes to The Shells Development, Along with Guiding Slugs ( OverSight Slugs or Angels ( Ξ.6 Controllers ) ) .
Why The Slug attaches to The Shell at this point is The Big Mystery.
Can Slugs survive indefinitely without Shells ?
Once a Slug becomes detached from it’s Shell, Is it required to find a New Shell to survive ? How long does it have to do this ?
The Word ProtoSnail suggests that this is an Intermediate Phase in The Slug/Shell Symbiotic Relationship.
Virtually All Religions share this view, believing that The Slug drops The Shell eventually, at which time (x happens.

When Protosnails reach maturity, they mate. However, while the Slug does all the work of finding a mate and fighting off other Protosnails, it is only the Shells that mate, only the Shells that lay eggs, and only the Shells’ DNA that is passed on — for what hatches from the egg is not a complete Protosnail but just a Shell, which must attract a new Slug of its own.

This adheres very closely to The Humanimal Robot interpretation; The Robots reproduce by Sexual Procreation, while The Ba Birds watch, and possibly direct some of The Operations. It is however; Apparently very common for The Robots to take over or Dominate This Mechanical Process.

Shortly after mating, the Shell disconnects from the Slug, drops off, and pupates. During the Shell’s pupal stage, the Slug once more lives independently. However, it stays in the general vicinity of the pupal Shell and will not bond with any other Shell during this time. During its Protosnail phase, the Shell has imprinted on its Slug’s DNA, and after pupation the adult Shell will bond only with that same Slug. And the Slug, as we shall see, has a very good reason for wanting to bond with its Shell again; such re-bonding is its only hope of getting any return on the investment it has made in its erstwhile parasite.

i’m not as confident in my interpretation after examining this passage? What is this About ( ??? )
It sounds slightly more familiar to The Behaviour of Slime Molds, But that interpretation is also deeply flawed.
Maybe Wm Jas means that The Shellette ( New Shell(s ) are separate from The Slug ( Robot’s Host Ba Bird ), and Staying in The General Vicinity means remaining attached to The Robot, or If he’s thinking of The Male’s Sperm; Then During this period. The Development of The New Shell is in fact completely independent, and The Father ‘Remains Faithful’ to The Shell Factory.
This Description would tend to support The Entirely Misogynistic Interpretation that The Slug is Simply The Male, And The Shell, The Female. ( !!! ) But this would mean that Wm Jaz thinks that The Females are Inert Robots, Paper Cutouts of Males that are The Only Autonomous, Conscious Entities. ( ? )

When the adult Shell emerges from its chrysalis, its Slug is generally there waiting for it, and they immediately bond again to form the final stage in their collective life cycle: the Permasnail.

According To The Secondary Interpretation; The PermaSnail is A Family Unit with Husband, Wife & Child.
According To The Primary Interpretation; The PermaSnail is A Self Actualized Slug that has come into being by some unspecified or uncertain mechanism(s ( ??? )

This time the bonding is much deeper and more pervasive, and it is irreversible. If the Protosnail is a bit like a hermit crab (albeit with a living shell), the Permasnail is more like lichen: functionally a single organism. However, the Slug and Shell components still retain their own separate DNA. Most importantly, from the Slug’s point of view, in the Permasnail the Shell’s external genitalia connect to the testes or ovaries of the Slug, finally allowing the Slug to reproduce its own kind.

This is a Sticky Bit.
Using The Secondary Interpretation; This would suggest that now that The Husband has started a Family; His ‘Consciousness’ ( The Only True & Important Element of This Symbiosis ) can now be ‘Passed Along’ to His Children by means of A Nurturing Process.
( Regretfully; There is a Very compelling Anthropological / Sociological School of Thought; That suggests that ‘Parenting’ has Virtually NO influence in The ‘Personality Development’ of Their Children ! )

When Permasnails mate, the eggs they lay hatch into Slugs, which grow to maturity and then start looking
around for Shells to bond to in order that they may move on to the next stage of their life cycle.

This last biddle requires a Third Interpretation; As what does Wm Jas means by allowing for A Family Unit to Mate ? Is he now considering The PermaSnail as a Societal Unit that Passes along A Societies Culture ?
The Slug then becomes a Social or Cultural Meme; And The Shell becomes The Technological Industry that makes houses and slaughters cattle for The Convenience of The Slugs.

*
So what am I really talking about?
What is the real meaning of this zoological treatise à clef?
I’ll reveal the answer later, but first feel free to guess.

My guess is that Wm Jas is being as Obtuse as Usual with his Crazy Puzzles !!!

Two Additional Puzzles by Wm Jaz !!!

It's a Riddle !

Universe Man, Universe Man !

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Special Effects

i just got through watching ‘Super 8’; A perfectly mediocre and insufferable Spielberg/Abrams vehicle, and after watching The Film, i endured The Featurette that accompanied it, on The making of The Alien.
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As a Small Digression; i’ve been working on another project for The last week or so on Cult Films, Since this topic has been in The News lately, And it occurred to me that after examining a dozen or so lists of Cult Films from The Internet; There is a curious absence of Spielberg Films. i would have suspected that E.T. & Close Encounters would have been included in most of these Lists, but None of Them had them !
And i thought ! ‘Oh my Gawd! i am not The only featherless parakeet that is aware that Steven Spielberg is a Horrible Film-Maker!’
Shindler’s List may have found an Historical Niche, But Jaws, E.T. & Close Encounters have already been largely forgotten.
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The Larger Point that occurred to me after watching this Featurette, and many others like it; Is that in order to obtain a particular Shot, It is entirely UnNecessary to Use all The Complicated Wire-Work or Driving Cars off Cliffs or Staging Large Scale Theatrical Productions of (x. Granted; All Film makers use miniatures and CGI nowadays, But they are still putting Stunt People is Genuinely Dangerous Situations, and Actually Blowing Stuff Up.
CGI has taught us that The End Product is Just Pixels on Film, And Many Film Makers have realized this years & years ago; But what seems to be Missing from their Vocabulary of Image Creating, Is that Whenever you’re filming An Actor; The Camera is The Complimentary Element of The Shot. Whenever you move an Actor; The Same Shot could just as Easily be Duplicated by Moving The Camera.
There is no Need to put an actor on Wires and hurl them around in The Air, when you could just as easily move The camera while The Actor stands still, and Nowadays, There is no Need to move The Camera. You could just as easily allow The Actor to Stand Still, Keep The Camera in a fixed or Nearly fixed position and reproduce The ‘Movement’ by Manipulating The Digital Information Collected by The Camera.
It is now possible for a 14 year old film maker in their basement to reproduce Any; Any Shot ever created by Any Film Maker in Any Film Ever Created.
The Real Difference between A Big Expensive Film and A Little Cheap Film is The Amount of Effort that The Film Maker puts into Post Production Detailing. The Big Film Maker has The luxury of Hiring thousands of Technicians & Artists to refine every frame of Their Movie until it looks perfect, Assuming that these Technicians & Artists know what ‘real’ looks like.
The Little Film Maker could achieve The Same ‘Real’ Effects, If they know what Real Looks Like. It should also be noted that What Real Looks like is very often; What we have Taught Movie Viewers to ‘Expect’ as Real. It has gotten so quirky that ‘Real Life’ Explosions don’t real at all. ( ! )
i also just finished watching Star Wars II ( The Clone Wars ) and found many shots that demonstrated The George Lucas Inc. Did Not Understand what ‘Real’ looked like.
Many films contain ‘Effects’ that don’t look at all like ‘Effects’, because The Film Maker understood this Axiomatic Principle. This is What makes Blade Runner & 2001: ASO so Eternal. Their Producers & Directors understood how to make Fantastic Things look Real, So that we’re unaware that a Special Effect is being Used. When you’re watching Star Wars, You’re aware that Every Shot is Reeking with Special Effects.

This Understanding doesn’t require a Huge Budget & Thousands of Technicians & Artists overworking each shot; All it takes is An Insightful Director that knows what Reality Looks like, and how to Create A Stylized Film Images that looks More Real than Real.

This is A Very Curious Cultural Effect. We are ‘Conditioned’ to Believe that what we see on Film or On TV Looks Real or Not, When it doesn’t look Real at all. The Test of This is go back and watch Old TV Programs or Movies that were at the time of their original Release, Thought to be Very ‘Authentic’ Looking, But Do Not Project that Sense Now.
What is Most Remarkable; Is Occasionally coming across an Older Film, A Very Much Older Film, Made with No Budget to Speak of, Made with The Most Primitive Production Effects, And Yet it Stands Up Very Well with Modern Audiences. The Contemporary Viewer may Concede that The Film Looks Stylized, But in such a Way that it allows The Film Viewer to Step into The Reality of The Film; In a Very different way than Modern Films ask us to ‘Suspend Our Disbelief’. These Older Films that seem very Real, Do Not Ask us to Suspend Our Disbelief, They Instead Create a Reality that we Eagerly Switch Over to, Allowing this Altered Reality to Show Us What Reality Is.
Very often; After Watching a Film like this; The True Reality that we live in, Seems Less Real than what we just immersed ourselves in.
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Examples :
As mentioned Earlier; 2001: ASO made in 1968, and Blade Runner; 1982, Seem as Real & Free of Special Effects as when they were made.
The Original Star Trek seemed much more Real to me than any of The Later Incarnations, And i think that What made it so Real looking, and this also very much applies to Blade Runner; is Lighting.
This may sound incredible Trite, but Star Trek: Next Generation did not understand lighting at all. i was ExTremely Aware in Every Episode that Every Surface was Equally Illuminated. Star Trek: OS frequently used lighting to create mood and depth, Separating Compositional Elements, Or Directing our Attention without subtly jarring our focus with Frame Cuts.
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It’s always Amazed Me. Amazed Me. That we as Viewers are able to Watch a Film or TV Program and Allow Our Narrative Observation of The Episodes to Endure Frame Cuts.
Just think for A Moment of how A Movie or TV Program Abruptly Cuts from One View to Another, Again & Again, Over & Over Switching from One View Point to Another, And Somehow, By Some Miraculous Enculturation Mechanism, We’re Conditioned to Accept This when we’re Very Young, To Allow This Entirely Foreign Narrative Technique to Override Our Ordinary Method of Viewing Reality.
( ??? )
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Pushing that Aside; Star Trek: OS, Used Lighting to Fill In Gaps of Narrative Continuance, thereby creating a fuller realization of totality.
Perhaps this is How our Minds Expect Reality to be Satisfied.

What we Use to Decide if Something is Real or Not, Is NOT The Appearance of Real Looking Sets, But A Measurement of Information that fills Our Senses with A Quantitative Degree of ‘Fullness’.
A Film seems ‘Unreal’ if It lacks a Fullness of Reality.

The Curious Point here is that our sense of Realness may be something like Point Eight, And in our Ordinary Lives; We ‘Know’ that ‘This’ is ‘Real’; So we allow that The Amount of Information falls far short of Point Eight. The Existence that you are Now Experiencing may only be something like Point Four. A Very Dull & Stimulus Free Environment may be very UnReal, And is Allowed to be ‘Believed’ as Real, by The Fact that it exhibits Features which distinguish it from Dreams & =All Other Known Forms of Reality Simulations= !

So that If you Are Watching a TV Show or Film that is Saturated with Sensory Information; It Easily Exceeds The Level of Stimulation in Your Ordinary Life, Thereby Making it Seem More Real.
But there is also something else working against A Film or TV Program from ALWAYS Seeming More Real than Reality; And that is; It is a Known Form of Reality Simulation.
We have gotten Used to TV exhibiting A Certain ‘Kind’ of Reality, that we are Conditioned to Exclude from A True Reality.
But there are Programs & Films that Circumvent that; And we DO Experience them as More Real than Reality.
Television that presents programs that are so Stylized that they are clearly Not ‘Real’ push us into an Alternative Reality that we eagerly accept as ‘Real’; Such as Pushing Daisies, The Prisoner, The Tick, Wonderfalls, Chicago Hope, Boston Legal or Dexter.
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So what is The Formula that i am proposing for Little Film Makers with A Very Limited Budget, to Adhere to, To Make a Film Seem ‘Real’.

-+ Use The Camera to Imply Motion when Moving The Actor or Element would be prohibitively costly or dangerous.
-+ Jiggle Suppression Technology, and Selective Frame Editing would seem to completely Eliminate The Need of ‘Railroad’ Tracks and such. / Selective Frame Editing refers to Digitally filming a Scene at a much higher resolution than will be eventually used; So that The Director/Editor can select a subset of each Frame to ‘Save’, Thereby Reframing a Shot, Adding a Pan or Zoom, Or Eliminating Camera Jiggle ( or Adding it! ) in Post Production.
-+ Create a Stylized Reality that Saturates The Viewer with Information that they will use to ‘Fill In’ Gaps that may be Missing from Surface Detail, Dialogue or Plot Continuance. An Example of this may be ‘The 3rd Man’ which uses The Sound Track, by Anton Karas & his Zither, to Overwhelm The Viewer into Entering an Alternative Reality.
-+ Use Creative Lighting, Chiaroscuro, Surface Textures, Composition & Timing.
-+ Imagine Each Shot in It’s Entirety, And Then Film This Imagined Shot. Rid your Vocabulary of Expressions like ‘Good Enough’ or ‘That’ll do’ or ‘We have to settle for This’. Each Shot Consists of nothing more than pixels on film, all you have to do is arrange them to complete your vision of what you know is ‘Real’. ‘Green’ Screens now allow Each Filmed Shot to be a Collage of Still Shots, Paintings, CGI & Mixing Shots. What is still missing from this technology ( ? ) is The Ability to mix Frizzle hair to Flat Backgrounds. ( ? )
-+ Along with A Really Good Sound Track of Music & Foley, Mat Paintings can make a very cheap Film look truly Grandiose.
-+ Attention to Detail, And Patiently adding The Noise of Life to a Film will push a Flat Film into Additionally Dimensions, beyound 3D.
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i just got through watching ‘Rise of The Planet of The Apes’ ( 2011 ) Which features many CGI Apes of Various Kinds, And They are just a Tad Short of Completely Convincing. The Arms Length Shots are much more ‘Real’ than The CloseUps, which are very convincing themselves; 70% of The Time.
What is most interesting though, is that in a few years; This movie will be Very Hokey!
The Effects will amusing, but not at all convincing, because while today i can see that The Effects look a little bit wrong, i’m exactly sure what it Wrong with them. Are they sometimes a little too flat, Are The Shadows not quite right, or are They missing The very subtle back lighting & reflections from nearby objects ?
It seems to me that The way to ‘fix’ that, would be to simple add very subtle random shadows passing over The ‘Bright’ surfaces with equally subtle light patches & glimmers over The dark surfaces. Our minds would interpret these as having to come from something, outside of our field of vision. This sort of thing could be, or should be added in post production, after The technical rendering is done with Ray Tracing, to allow The technical lighting artist to easily try several schemes and pick The best one with very little effort, expense or time expended.
The point being; as our attempts to reproduce reality are tested, we become better observers.

Contingent Fulcrum

i’ve been searching for a new ‘Catch Phrase’ for an Old Idea,
And i’ve decided to Tentatively Call this New/Old Idea:
A Contingent Fulcrum.

A Contingent Fulcrum is a Lynchpin or Pivot Point, KeyStone, Crux, Weakest Link or Problematic Missing Pie-Pan that Demonstrates that Some Grand Postulate is Wrong, Based on The Assumption that If (x is True, (y would also be True,
And The Contingent Fulcrum “(y” is Most Definitely Not True, Missing or Neglected.

Specifically;
i have for a very long time, perhaps forever, been drawn between my love for quixotic phenomena and my unease that so little of it has been unambiguously demonstrated.

If it were really possible to Levitate, or even if Saints occasionally levitate spontaneously; Why hasn’t this effect been thoroughly documented by now, Especially given that The TM’ers claim that they can do this at will, and teach this skill to anyone with a few spare thousands of dollars?

Another one of My Projects that i’m slowly developing; Is a Self Administrating Hypnoses App that will allow anyone to Hypnotize themselves for some Effect.

The question that i asked in The Development of this App, Is;
What are The Potential Effects?

How far can Hypnosis take You?
i have read many accounts of Fantastic Claims that should make a reasonable person wonder; Can Hypnosis really do that?
Can you really cause Warts to Appear or Disappear from Specific Regions on your body?
Can you really Induce The Religious Miracle of Stigmata, or Bleeding from your hands & feet?

It has been fairly well documented in Eliminating Pain or Drug Addictions, Eliminating Compulsive Habits, Controlling Phobias, Alleviating Hysterical or Emotionally Caused Ailments, Recalling False Memories of Alleged Abuse, Previous Incarnations or Alien Abductions, As well as Inducing such a full & incorrect spectrum of false memories to create a Robotitron ‘Manchurian’ Assassin that acts ‘Freely’ given The Alternate Reality that they are Programmed with.

But might it also be possible to Use Hypnosis to Induce An Imaginary Friend that is Fully Actualized, Enlarge your Breasts, Penis or Lip Thickness?
The Military performed many experiments with Remote Viewing, finding that it is a real phenomena, but useless at gathering actionable information. Might Hypnosis allow lay persons to us Remote Viewing for personal Recreation or confirm The activities of A Spouse?
Could Hypnosis be used to Learn a Foreign Language, Keep a Cleaner, Tidier Home, Stop Beating your Wife, Husband, Children, Pets or Strangers, Develop X-Ray Vision, Talk to The Dead, Find Lost Items, Or Develop The Skills that Many People seem to have, that allows them to have Sex with any Stranger?
Could Hypnosis be used to Improve your Piano Recitals, Baseketball Shooting, Paint Portraits or Enter other People’s Dreams?

As i mentioned earlier; Although i Want to Believe in many Quixotic Behaviours & Phenomena, i am also deeply Suspicious or Genuinely Skeptical of many such Claims. i would like to believe that some people have somekind of Natural Magnetism that works on non-ferrous Items, But all such claims seem to be made by people far away in foreign countries.

Then this idea of The Contingent Fulcrum Occurred to me.

If Hypnosis or Some Other Natural Mental or Psychic State were able to cure Cancers, Correct Club Feet, Mend Spinal Deformities, Expel Daemons, Remove Cataracts &/or Repair A Deviated Septum;
Then why haven’t this Technique ever been used to Replace a Tooth?

Replacing a Tooth seems like it would be The Easiest Thing to do with A Mental State that Can Cause Subtle Physiological Changes in Ones Body. All you’d need to do is turn on Those molecules in your gum line to make A New Tooth, just like they used to do when you were a child.

But no one has.
This is The Contiguous Fulcrum.
Something that Should be True, But it is Decidedly Not True.

It is perhaps easy to find excuses for all sorts of other Quixotic Phenomena which occur so infrequently or only spontaneously; But Replacing Teeth is Never Reported. One of The Most Useful & Functional Attributes of An Enlightened State of Mind or Miracle Cure, is Completely Non-Existent.

When The Simplest Case fails, This does not bode well for The Class Phenomena.

Addictive Personality Types

There was just a bit on The Radio about Addictive Personality Types, And asked; Are some people genuinely ‘Addicted’ to The Internet in The Same Way that people are generally acknowledged as being Addicted to Nicotine, Heroin, Gambling, Masturbating or Hostess Ding Dongs?
It occurred to me that This Medical Diagnoses of ‘Addictive Personality Type’, which is routinely thought to be a Derogatory Label, Might actually simply mean that these people have a greater than ‘Normal’ proclivity to adhere to something that they are familiar with, Rather than try a continuous Stream of New Things.
Addictive Personality Types might easily account for Everyone that Sticks to some activity until they become astonishingly good at it, rather than flitting from this to that like ‘Ordinary’ People.
In other words; The Psychiatric Industry has again attached A Pejorative Brand Name to An Attribute that Usually Enables certain people to become vastly superior to The Damp Masses or Professionals that entered The System through The University Footpath.
The Addictive Personality Types become attached to some (x when they are pre-adolescents, eschewing a Career Route that The Social Engineers try to superimpose on everyone.
Granted; Some of These Addictive Personality Types might become fixated on Drugs or Behaviours that are Dangerous or Socially Destructive, But are they in The Majority?
The Addictive Personality Type is Actually A Good Thing.