The Stripy Strudel's Journal

Under one of the possible interpretations of existence, every fiction is somebody's reality. Each time a thought crosses your mind that it would be good if that nice girl looked your way, you create a reality where exactly that happens. That reality has both past and future, and it's inhabited by people with real consciousness who have no idea that their existence is caused by someone from another world.

But if a reality spawned by someone's imagination is as existentially complete as the “real” one, how can you tell in what kind of universe you live? For those reading my blog in alternative worlds, here are some tips; though they won't give a definite answer, in many cases they help rule out improbable options. So what isn't your reality?

• If your speech doesn't rhyme, you're not a hero of a poem.
• If you have no horse, you're not in a western.
• If you say something funny and don't hear any laughter, it's not a sitcom.
• If there is crime, poverty, corruption in your country, you're not in pre-election promises.
• If you have genitals, you're not in a children's book.
• If you can see anybody who isn't sexually attractive, you're not in someone's erotic fantasy.
• If you have at least one pimple, you're not in a commercial.
• If your mouth takes intermediate positions between completely open and completely closed when you speak, you're not an anime character.
• If neither you nor your relatives are famous, you're most likely not in a newspaper hoax.
• If you work at least sometimes, you're hardly a character in a Latin American TV series.
• If your or your friends' names don't begin with the first three or four letters of the alphabet, you're not in a cryptography book.
• If there are people with the same first name around you, it's quite unlikely that you are a character in fiction or cinema at all.

По-русски: Краткий определитель реальностей