they don’t stop believin

still trying to keep this one-post-per-day streak going.  what to say next?  i’d like to get away from grim topics and controversies.  hmm…

i should really be atheisting more often on this blog network.  lessee, how does god not exist today?  physically, spiritually even.  culturally his binch ass exists more than i’d prefer, but in every other sense, this being doth not be.

seen a person recently suggest that some particular form of propaganda might hand the election to the creep.  i dunno.  but it got me thinking, in conjunction with a post on mano’s and with remembering that christians exist, what drives orange voters?

ah, a depressing topic.  can’t escape scylla and charybdis.  oh well; we press on.

religion for one.  not the religion of young jeezy, but of the creep himself.  i think the majority of repubs are not his faithful.  they’re just “values voters” who see human rights in terms of winners and losers, and they want to win.  but he does have his faithful, and it’s kinda wild to behold, from the outside.

talked to a few in the course of my job.  they include no small number of rfk jr types – liberalish democrats for whom the right to medical woo is the only thing they care about, people now embracing naked fascism because it came with the freedom to spend your life savings on snake oil and die from ultracancer.

they include people who just picked up all the nonsense he was laying down, gullible enough to not see the overt dishonesty.  he says he’s the only guy that can save america from the wily messican horde, get you the jobs you bigly deserve, protect your children from whatever whatever.  why would he lie about that?

and of course, they include Qanon die-hards, with the full suite of completely upside down beliefs.

deprogramming cultists ain’t easy.  it’s not the sort of thing we can do on a macro scale, which is a shame because creating cultists can be done in that way.  wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to how we can fight that.

in a way it’s a shame they aren’t the majority of his voters because some of them are actually compassionate at heart; they just bought a very twisted pack of beliefs regarding who needs protection from whom.  is it worse to be a fascist because you are full of hate, or because you are able to believe complete absurdities?

i’m just glad we seem to be doing well at the moment.  here’s to keeping that going.  may the believers in orange weep citrus tears in november.

with this, i return to doing my level best to not see anything election related for two and a half months.

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humorzzz

i’ve been occasionally percolating on a ttrpg of my own design and, being a very appearance-oriented character designer, i’ve been thinking of ways to formalize / systematize one’s relationship with subcultures that could influence a character’s clothing style – gothery, metalness, alternateeve…

this sorta stuff gets mixed up with occultism, alchemy, pseudoscience, so all that is to say, i’m figuring out which of the four humors punk rock would express.

i think on this, laying back in my bed, and catch myself snoring.  this is a preview of my life at the nursing home.  could be worse.

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AIeee

people in another place i hang out online have been chewing on AI again.  the terms of the discussion from leftosphere are as follows:  it sexually harasses, steals from artists, and destroys the environment.  everybody who uses it is both an embarrassing incompetent human joke, and also an evil capitalist scumbag out to destroy all that is good in the world.  these are the articles of faith, and the beginning and end of that discourse.

as somebody who is usually 95% agreeing with all discourse lefty, to be the horrible sinner don’t feel great.  i’m crouching in the outer darkness with my evil magicks, sustaining my lichly existence on the marrow of virgin bones, jealous of those allowed to live in light and beauty.

or maybe not.  the hAIte is so thorough on the left that it also provides an interesting way to measure the boundaries of popular left beliefs.  i increasingly see people who look at the same situation, look at that same discourse, and wonder “whut in ternation are they goin on about?”

these, i think, are the same people who do not quite understand most of the shit very online people are into; people who spend more time in culturally mixed company, more time away from keyboards.  i could get fooled by the flow of my days into feeling like online is the whole of human thought, and seeing that dominated by certain noisy opinions, feel like those are the end of the story.

in the real world, the revolutionary labor-saving power of AI tech is too good to ignore.  people will use it, for good or ill, and eventually it will be so mundane as to no longer provoke the pitchforks like this.  i’m keen to get there.  this fruitless conversation is tired as hell.

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Die Microsoft Die

Big agreement with commenter Bekenstein Bound here, windows has gone off the fucking rails into enshittification and they are extremely fucking due for a market adjustment.  You know what the biggest thing keeping me away from linux was?  Getting used to a new UI.  Smart phones that change UI every two minutes have taught all with a tiny shred of tech savvy to overcome that flavor of hesitation.  I wonder…

The other side is program incompatibility.  Most of the programs most of us use are exclusive to the windows-mac oligopoly.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if win or mac could be emulated more safely and effectively than running the original dogshit OSes themselves, as a bare bones nested thing to run those exclusive programs, or at least pirated versions.  Anybody know the subject enough to offer opinions on this one?

On a related subject, I’m earnestly wondering how long the US government is going to be able to continue using windows.  The OS has gotten so fucking rotten that at some point, crucial systems absolutely need to be on more reliable software.

Still have trauma from Win 11 defaulting to uploading my entire shit to a cloud the second I started up.  I “disabled” it, but still have to live with daily reminders they want me to do this.  Fucken hell.

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Soulsborneringkiro Games

U might be aware there is a genre of video games spawned by the Japanese company From Software, famous for both difficulty and for weaving a spell over players with oppressive atmosphere and heavy vibes of baroque desolation.  This began with the Demon Souls and Dark Souls games, to which have been added Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring.  They called them Souls-likes for a minute, then Soulsborne genre, and now?  Whatever.

I have been put in mind of them a few times lately, most recently when some video game media named Elden Ring as the best game ever on their top 100.  Is it the bestiest?  I’m not gamer enough to find out, but I’ve watched some people play it on youtube.  I’ve watched a number of these games.

I swear I had something to say about them, but here I am trying to compose my thunks at 2:00 in the morning, tired enough to die but not quite able to sleep yet…

A uniting element of these games, at least the FromSoft originals, is that your character is basically or explicitly already dead.  The “multiple lives” aspect of video game unreality is given an excuse:  This guy can keep coming back because he’s just a phantom.  I think that’s a big mood right there.

Anyway, what do y’all know about these things?  Any experience playing them?  Just interested in the aesthetic like my poser ass?  Discuss.

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Insert Saved Payment Method

I’ve been doing one post per day for a lil bit now, but I’ve come to the bottom of the shallow well of my random-ass thoughts.  Figured I’d let y’all know what’s going on in my life.  As I went to title the new post I saw the keyboard on my cell suggest I fill in a saved payment method.  Can you imagine me posting that?  Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Not really; I got nothin’.  So, why am I posting from a cellphone?  My future husband’s new $1300 computer is a pile of shit and we’re trying to use the manufacturer’s warranty.  I dropped it off with fedex saturday and it probably hasn’t been picked up quite yet because of the holiday.  I expect when lenovo’s contractor in texass looks at the thing, they’ll call me to say it’ll cost seven hundred bucks.

I give my dude my computer because he needs it more than I do, but I can’t type for shit on my cell, so it’ll be a minute before I do any more ambitious writing, like finishing Centennial Hills.

Meanwhile I have to wonder why I have such dogshit luck buying computers over $1000 in value.  Both times I’ve done that, they were fucked up from go – worse in some ways than computers that cost more like $300.

I think the last one saved money on the phat processor by using substandard parts in other ways – most crucially the wireless, which had connectivity issues with then-current router tech.

This one sat in a warehouse for three years before purchase and had random shit wrong with it so diverse it was probably a motherboard issue, like it got exposed to high heat in AZ and slightly melted, I dunno.

How in the fuck do you buy a low end gaming computer that is worth a shit?  Has never happened for me.  Swore off HP after that and another went bust, side-eyeing the fuck out of lenovo at this point.

I’m not the kind of person that can plunk down several k once a year just to have my shit work right.  Any advice?

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Sex Nerd Needed

So there are people who go to orgies, or do poly, or just know a lot about organs and what you can do to em.  Safe sex fans.  Good people, but they are nerds.  They are not cool.

The cool sex people are the ones blowing crack pipes at uncle mike’s highway ribs and catching ultra aids from seventeen freaks through orifices they invented for the occasion.  I don’t make the rules; it’s cooler to not care about anything.  Responsible sex people are inherently less cool than diseased addicts.

Which is fine.  It’s good to be a sex nerd.  Just wanna clarify who I’m talking to before I ask my question.

Any sex nerds in my readership?  I’m trying to figure out these jokers.  Let’s call them sex jokers.  Specifically Dan the Automator Nakamura and his friends, who were responsible for the bands Handsome Boy Modeling School, Lovage, and Got a Girl.  (among others; u kno how hip hop people do)

This isn’t a huge genre of art, but it exists, and Automator isn’t the only exponent of it.  Arguably Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa was an example.  Basically they make sexy art that treats sex as a ridiculous joke.

But it is still sexy.  So are these artists actually expressing horniness or are they just doing a comic bit?  Or is it both?  I know Gorey was asexual, I know little about Mr. Nakamura and friends.

How do you laugh at sex while also getting off on it?  Are these sex jokers all on a grade to being litcheral clown sex aficionados?  I feel like I’m missing something.

Maybe I should try to have more sex to figure it out.  Anyway, here’s Lovage sounding like a parody of Portishead for the sex joker set.

As I reflect, there’s probably an explanation in the years of music criticism regarding The Cramps, Mojo Nixon, Reverend Horton Heat…  Still, who wants to dig?  Enlighten me, nerds.

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EDIT to add:  Electric Six, how could I forget?  And that song S-E-X-X-Y by TMBG.  And some unforgivable shit by Jonathan Coulton and others.

Titty Hurts

When I first got the gynecomastia, there was a generalized firmness and sensitivity to mild injury that was probably what you’d imagine for growing breasts.  Lately one then the other of my tetas are experiencing more of a sharp pain.  It runs in lines but I don’t think I’d characterize it as a shooting pain.

I looked it up and I’m almost certainly fine; mastalgia from boobening can take more than one form.  And maybe I’ll be more chesty on the other side, huzzah, but it’s a pain for now.

Titty hurts.  The more u kno.  (o)(o)

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A Dang Shame

Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child.  Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm.  They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans.  One of them had a floppy-eared dog.  Sometimes there was a pretty lady there.  When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down.  If I remember all that right.

I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility.  They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.

Well, around pandemic time, they actually did.  Muscle cars exist again, happy day!  But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.

And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well.  It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history.  Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag.  The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.

General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children.  Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.”  Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.

Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills.  Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers.  May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.

Shame shame shame, a little song of shame.  Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way.  A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.

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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.

anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see.  but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.

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Spoil Me This, but Ne’er That

I really don’t care about being spoiled on most narrative media.  I might have felt very different about it when The 6th Sense came out, but I don’t even remember.  Anyway, spoil anything you want in the comments.

If something is good, it’ll still have some interest in the execution.  I knew Gregor Samsa turned into a bug and whatever happened after that was sad, absurd, and unpleasant.  The specifics still matter, still animate the reading experience.

But there is one story where I know the setup but do not know how it ends, and I would like to preserve the surprise.  Maybe it’s because the hook is more compelling than most, with no obvious solution.  Anyway, the story is centuries old; I’m a little overdue to find out.

But still, don’t spoil it!

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