Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Love Like Blood "A Strange Day" ::
Have you ever had really deep, existential thoughts? Like, just today, I was thinking about my consciousness. I don’t know why, I just was. I was pondering why I was me, here and now, and not somebody else, somewhere else, born two hundred years ago or two hundred years from how. How did it happen, me being me? How is it that a bundle of molecules replicated and expanded and that turned out to be me and not someone else. What is it that even makes me, me? How was it that of all the babies made that I was that baby in particular and at what point is it me? When does the conscious mind really develop? At what point are we self-aware? Is my whole existence random? And what really happens to our perception after we die? It just sort of all stops, doesn’t it? But, that is so very hard to comprehend, existence simply stopping. Obviously, people die every day, and the world, the universe carries on, but to think of it about myself, that the universe will go on without me to perceive it, is confounding. I will die, but nothing will have really changed, so far as the world is concerned. I would sometimes think about death as endless, suffocating blackness, just nothing, but that perspective involves a sense of perception, doesn’t it? It implies that my consciousness will somehow carry on, outside of my body, able to perceive nothingness, when in fact my brain will just… stop. The “thing” that makes me “me” will have ended when my life ended. That’s it. As self centered as this sounds, it’s pretty hard to think about the world without me in it. Kind of freak out level hard. But then I remember I have goldfish and after a few minutes of just watching them swim around and clearing my mind, I feel relaxed, ignorant and naïve again. Do you every think about the astronomical odds against you even existing and how insignificant your death will be? I’d sure love to hear about it.
William the Bloody (thermodynamic miracle)
