Icebergs. They were a meme, and they are also trash. Better than an iceberg is an actual card that explains each.Many entries were clearly just there to waste time. “RuneScape in New York”. Nothing of value.
No one misses the icebergs. The iceberg photo itself isn’t even real. The same few unresolved mysteries, mostly centered around online presentations of mental illness. The idea that people simply do not do the things that they routinely due. The reasoning may be adductive, but the mystery is solved.
The truly lazy unresolved mysteries will include concepts. For instance: death. No one knows what that is. No one knows what happens.
Or: consciousness. What is it? Where does it come from? No one knows!
No kidding. It does not matter.
There’s a Zero Punctuation review of Silent Hill Downpour where Yahtzee explains that horror works better when you don’t know what’s chasing you, and Silent Hill Downpour has missed the point. Because while it may be unclear what is chasing you, you can very clearly see it.
That is death. That’s consciousness. That’s those mysteries. Boring. There is no point in thinking about death, unless it can be solved.
There is also no way to solve the Jack the Ripper case. Not more substantially than has already been done.
The construction of boogeymen out in the world. The Smiley Face Killer. The irrational attribution to conspiracy what could be attributed more simply to disconnected trends and forces. Turn the Zodiac from a man into an army. Now instead of one unsolved case, there are a thousand. More can be gleaned from Community, ‘Grifting 101’ than this type of theorizing. It is the destruction of knowledge. It is destructive.
The drop becomes the ocean. But the ocean is just a drop. The idea expands to fill the space, but the space must be narrowed to enclose a single idea. That is the goal. To come to a conclusion.
Thinking is messy, but conclusions are clean. Conclusions are solved. Conclusions are complete. Conclusions involve crossing out and cancelling the useless garbage, the extraneous distractions, the pointlessness, to extract meaning and understanding from the chaos.
Icebergs scattershot a list of subjects. No consistency. Subjective categorization. The prompt is clear. It is a project.
“You know what would have been scarier than nothing? Anything!”
Information has to be distilled. Information has to be destroyed. Sample sizes cannot expand forever during experimentation. The parameters have to be set. Fleeting information should be discarded and destroyed as quickly as possible. The human brain does this automatically. Forgetting something immediately after experiencing it? A feature, not a bug. The purpose of the brain is to solve problems, not to store problems. Not to store information. Memory is fallible. Memory is reconstructive. Memory is a series of building blocks, because it is only helpful to remember information that can be used to solve problems. Sometimes the way the brain solves a problem is by making up the information. The unreliability of the eyewitness. The birth of the Paranoia Agent.
The brain will fill in information that is does not know, or outright rejects. Reality, however, remains objective. Things happen. A butterfly flaps its wings, and it rains in Africa. Trends and forces, cause and effect. The push and pull of the world. People are busy, and so are the ants. Who talks to ants?
The iceberg photo is a fake. A fraud, composited from several different iceberg photos. It is an art project, made to look beautiful, and meant to convey the idea of an iceberg. A beautiful ideal. But not a reality. There is a photo of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. The Titanic disaster is what makes the iceberg scary. Returning to this idea of fear. Fear comes from the unknown. But much of what is unknown is boring. There is more to it than that.
All things have solutions. All knowledge is knowable. All things can be seen. The potential is there. But things are missed, and things go missing. Pieces are lost, flying off the ship as it sinks beneath the waves. Or a flying machine losing nuts and bolts and screws. Things go missing, and they can again be found. Most things are found too easily and too quickly. Nothing holds the attention. Nothing captures the imagination more than a good mystery, and yet all the good mysteries have already been solved. The preponderance of evidence is enough to close the case on many more. The world is solid, through and through.
