Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?

The internet has become a carefully controlled and heavily monitored illusion. It has turned into both a circus and battleground. Popularity is rigged and can be bought. Censorship is in full effect. Popular opinion is fabricated, and the perception of a viewpoint's popularity is typically orchestrated and manipulated by legions of paid trolls. If you want to know the truth about somebody's true popularity and influence, look to the streets. If you want to know if a person is really guilty or innocent, study the facts yourself. Never judge anybody based on what you see or read on the internet. Information can easily be manipulated by the push of a few buttons.

It is not the chains of some tyrant that robs us of freedom. Rather, it is the staleness of our attitude.

I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true.

Stretched and skewedTap of the 8-ball and the cueScratches fall throughThey are the scars of you

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.