We Lost Gost

Seven years ago this day I went to a concert, some cool newish bands my husband was into.  They impressed.  The opening act was a lady-fronted local death rock outfit who put on a fun show.  The headliner was a famous international playboy of darksynth, some kind of miniature frenchman.  Somewhere in between was his fellow genre titan, James Lollar, known professionally as Gost.  About one month ago, he died young from undisclosed causes.  His family’s fundraiser is still up and hasn’t reached its goal, if you’re interested in paying respects.

I don’t know if David Lynch’s passing a year ago softened my man’s resolve but he’s been feeling the sadness for this one even more overtly.  I wasn’t as close to Lollar’s art and so am less affected, but as ever, this kind of thing sucks tremendous.  Causes undisclosed, but what’s hosing down musicians by the score these days?  Don’t do drugs, kids.  They’ve gotten demonstrably worse.  Maybe that wasn’t it, I won’t pry, but still.  Fucking knock it off!

There was something about this guy that was special.  There are a lot of musicians these days that are nothing but a face.  James Gost wore a skull mask or corpse paint at every concert and in publicity material.  Not a clown about it like other masked musicians, it felt like humbleness here.  At the show he was tucked in stage right, looking smol and serious, his presence overpowered by fog machines and a searing light display. Even the light display had humility of a kind; Perturbator turned the club into Close Encounters after that.

Gost belonged to a genre where most of the bands are one or two people, often just one.  This feels significant.  Yes, it’s easier to make a full sound sans bandmates when you’re in electronic music, but it also feels apiece with this moment in time where everyone is apathetic and retiring, too stressed and fragile and deadened to accomplish anything above and beyond.  People who have the gumption to make something happen have trouble finding anyone willing or able to help.  And making art of any kind – especially more ambitious things like albums – does require you to go farther, to put in extra work.  I usually say this of people who put in the work to make the world a better place through activism, but here I’ll say it of artists – long live the fighters.

Or maybe his isolation was the result of having more vision than others would allow to him.  He was in bands before, but stuck in the rhythm section, propping up somebody else’s ideas.  His innovation was only possible as a solo act.  Darksynth emerged from synthwave, which is more video game inspired, to fold in influences of John Carpenter soundtracks, glitch, and industrial.  The result is the heaviest music I’ve ever heard.  I remember when Ministry’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ sounded heavy to me.  Might as well be the Tetris soundtrack these days.  It has a chilling spooky vibe, but more human somehow than related genres.  You can feel the haunted guy inside the glitched beat.

And maybe that heaviness why I haven’t gone in for darkwave as much as I could have.  I’m going soft, with my ’80s nostalgia bullshit.  But I recognize greatness.  At the concert I was too wimpy and unambitious to stand with my husband down on the floor, sitting my ass on the balcony.  I had been crushing my feet at malwart during the days back then, so excuse.  When Gost came on, when the show went from death rock to darksynth, the young people stood up and danced.  In Seattle that’s as amazing as the dead rising.  I remember a fat guy who had seemingly come alone – someone who could be disregarded in life, perhaps socially maladroit – and he was willing to brave the disapproval of others to rock out to his favorite music.  I salute you, hombre.

Salute as well to the artist that moved him.  James Lollar, the Gost.  Condolences to his wife and children, to other family, and to fans – including the one next to me in bed.  It just ain’t right.

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I’m Surrounded by Some Pizzaheads

I once mentioned that Nirvana replaced Pearl Jam in my esteem, way back in teen years, quite completely.  I can still listen to Nirvana, I can barely tolerate Pearl Jam.  They had a song on the Singles soundtrack called “State of Love and Trust” that is pretty coo, “Evenflow” is kinda … alright well those are uptempo rockity jams and the meaningless yarling vocals just blend with the instrumentation.  Anything where the idea of the song is coming across, where some grain of meaning is breaching the surface of sound, well, that’s a fuckin’ mistake with those guys.

I found myself remembering their song “Black.”  There are some words to be understood in it, and others which are not.  Bad ratio.  Failure.  Here is my best recollection of the song.  I can’t actually remember how it began, which is usually my in for remembering the rest, so it’s a bit scattershot…

…Something something something something…
Oh all five horizons.  I’m surrounded by some pizzaheads.
Her legs spread out before me.  Has taken a turn.

And twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head, I’m spinnin’, I’m spinnin’,
Oh and all I wanted was.  Everthang.
Oohoohoohoohooh Ohh and all she gave me was, uh, all she was.
Whoooa

Now there’s somethin’ bad. Sayed on broken glass
Of what was everthang.
And the pictures there. Of men washed in black
Tattooed everthang.
Oh good love gone bad. Turned my world to black.
Tattooed all I had.  All I have.  All I’ll ever beeyeeyeeyeeyeeyee Wah-OGH!

Doodle doot doot doodle doo  (Eddie Vedder actually sings that shit)
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star
In somebody else’s sky, why o why, why o why, Whyyyyyyyy can’t it beeyeeyeeyeeyee
Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiine Wah-OGH!
Doodle doot doot doodle doo
Whooooa-OH!

Anyway, feel nostalgic for the spooge band?  Don’t.

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Errol Flynn the Butcher

Content Warnings: Gore, Horror.

In my post-wokenment action movies have become a skosh more sour in my mind, contemplating how they could fuel the kind of national pysche that thinks war is good, that police need to be less restrained. But I’m usually thinking about that in terms of guns. What about rapiers and longbows?

American cinema and TV through most of the 20th century, when boomer opinions were being formed, violence was largely bloodless and consequence free.  Cowboys shoot people, they fall down, and afterwards we are not treated to the scene of bodies dangling from every surface around town square.  But likewise, Robin Hood or Ivanhoe pushes his sword at a guy and he just falls over the railing, body magically disappearing from consideration after the fact.

Obviously painting guns as harmless fun is the more problematic notion, as evidenced by the libertarian fantasia Adam is reviewing, and as those weapons can cause more damage more quickly.  But still, medieval weapons are nasty things.  Particularly longswords like you’d see wielded in Arthurian legend.  And medieval people didn’t have the same illusions about that.  Maybe it’s easy to forget the longer you go without a war, without print media, but I’ve seen medieval illustrations where guys are split in half, insides looking like salmon filets, blood flowing out in ribbons or sprays of droplets.  Not realistic style, but realistic damage.

I mentioned Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves recently.  That movie was more able to put a bloody slash on a sword victim than in Errol Flynn’s day, but still wasn’t quite there.  To be realistic, head should be flopping, blood shooting like a fire hose, limbs falling left and right, guts strewn across the battlements.  A few edgier movies have pushed in those directions.  Is that a good thing?  Hong Kong blood opera never really got me to “say no to guns” before, because it still showed one side as being a bunch of disposable nobodies, showed heroes as having the most hit points, by merit of their towering will and virtue.

But that’s not my point today.  Mostly, I’m just feeling darkly amused by imagining suave old time swashbucklers steeped in gore and still stepping lightly, being quippy.  Freddy Krueger liked quips too.  Let’s see Robin Hood ending entire human lives in brutal agony, slaying mother’s sons, fathers, and men of honor, just trying to defend the king.  Robin Hood laughing while you hold your guts in and fall onto a pile of your writhing and mutilated friends.  Let’s see Robin Hood and the Ocean of Blood.

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Hulking Out and Kenning Gee

last night i had a dream the hulk was on a rampage and the only way to get him to stop was for some other super-guy with super duper strengths to cut open his chest and inject a sedative straight into his heart.  a bunch of super randos were making attempt after gory attempt.

at some point within the last forty-eight hours it has crept over me that i remember not one but two kenny g tunes.  there was that one, i think his first big hit?, that’s all like “badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doo.  badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doot-doot-doo!”  then there was this other one with a vocal sample in it, some ambiguous crowd of people saying “slip of the tongue” over and over again.  “slip of the tongue, badadoo badadoo doodoot Slip! moodledoodle.”

that shit sucked boy.

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Brainjackin: Sad Endings

This one’s a little bit of a journey so bear with me.  There was a window in my twenties when I lived with my dad and his girlfriend and her two kids.  I don’t remember if this was before my brother went into the army and left the state, or after he got back to finish his last tour here, but he was around.  Hang on, was I twenty yet?  Whatever.  Throw in Bad-Moustache-Having Guy and My Tech Support Guy to round out the picture.  That lady -the girlfriend aforementioned- had a species of BPD that allowed her to run a very clean household – the kind of clean that facilitated parties.

So we arranged a movie night with big snacks and a lot of DVDs in the queue.  Or were they VHS?  Shit, I think they were VHS tapes.  Way back.  In the most memorable moment of the evening, some guy was being burned alive in Braveheart and two of the attendees said in unison, “and it stays crunchy, even in milk!”  How did they think of the same rude application of pop culture reference for that image?  We partook of all the same media, so not impossible, but it was unlikely enough to amuse.

The most consequential moment of the night came later.  I had the most staying power and after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, I feel like it was after two AM?, I popped in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.  I felt big feelings, beginning to end.  I’m mostly incapable of crying, but I cried a little.  I recognize now that you should not trust how you felt about a movie if you were watching it before dawn, but the damage was done.  I got a tattoo of the movie’s logo on my wrist.  At least it wasn’t Sister Act 2.

I still have that tattoo, but it’s gone through a few changes over the years.  First up, it was originally laid down in red ink, over the warnings of the tattoo artist.  Red is very prone to fading and fade it did.  Probably didn’t help that the heavy-handed ex-con put a lot of scar tissue into the cut, and some pigment came off with scabs.  But the symbol, where it appeared in the movie, was usually spattered and smeary.  Illegibility suited it, but years of fading later, an art school acquaintance of my husband was apprenticed to be a tattoo artist and needed victims for practice, so it seemed like time to get it touched up.

This was the friend who valiantly defended my husband and others from an art school clown attack, and she used to wear a t-shirt with JESUS IS A CUNT in giant lettering, so genial to us.  However, I cannot trust her taste in music since that occasion, because her mix at the tattoo parlor included post-Danzig Misfits – that is to say, christian Misfits, and they genuinely did sound christian.  I might be nearly tone deaf, but I can tell the difference between Creed and Nickelback.  They both suck, but the christianity of the former has a certain quality to it, better identifiable to musicians, but detectable to a discerning lay person, and I detected the shit out of it.

Anyway, the work was a little dubious and the tattoo is still a mess.  But the important thing, to my husband’s reckoning, is that it doesn’t look like a stamp from the club that I’d neglected to wash off the next day.

The important thing about all that is to say that 12 Monkeys had a sad ending and may have been the first sad ending I was ever able to appreciate.  I don’t think that speaks well to Terry Gilliam’s talents, because I was the kind of basic bitch that was not at all ready for genuinely sad endings.  He communicated this sense that Cole’s life in a time loop was a kind of immortality.  He had struggles and died young, but in the course of that life, he experienced love – and that somehow vindicated -or at least mitigated- the tragedy.  Basically, it was a fake sad ending.

Flash forward to the earliest days of going out with my husband, when he introduced me to the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa – particularly the movies Cure and Sakebi.  Those movies show horrible events ending horribly, but still work as art, because they’re the sad mask in that ancient symbol of drama.  Tragedy is a legitimate art form that I never appreciated.  Even when first introduced to Kurosawa, I wasn’t ready for it.  I told him as much – “I recognize the artistic power of this work, but it feels like it isn’t for me.”  I wanted to see stories about heroes overcoming hardship, lovers getting to love.  Happy Endings, basically.  One of those drama masks was The Grim and Grimy One, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But the movies stayed with me, in my mind.  I couldn’t forget them because they had that power, and from the memories of them alone, I came to appreciate tragedy in a way that I never had before.  The culmination of this came a few years ago, the first time that I ever wrote a tragic ending.  Did it work?  Was it as good as the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Surely not, but it made more sense for the piece than a happy ending would have.  I served the story at the expense of the happiness of my little babies.  That’s artistic growth, and I owe it to my husband, which makes this another instance of Brainjackin’™.  Thanks man!

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Everything I do, I do it 4 U

Hey Americans.  Yeah, you.  Remember how much you loved Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring the Kevin of Costner and the Mary Elizabeth of Master and Tonio?  You know it’s true.  Everything I do, I do it for you…  Bryan Adams at the top of his game.  Christian Slater doing a cockney accent.  Kevin inspiring Eddie Izzard’s bit about American Robin Hoods and Mel Brooks’s Men in Tights.  Morgan Freeman rocketing to fame.  Kevin Costner’s entire booty ass.  “I’ve never seen a noblewoman’s breasts before.”

I’m remembering this because I’ve been saying “huzzah” to low-key good news for long enough that my husband and mother-in-law have noticed, without me noticing I was doing this weird thing.  And I wondered if I got it from the episode of China, IL where Baby Cakes started thinking he was Kevin Hood, which consisted of medieval violence and saying “huzzah” whenever he appeared.  Then I just remembered that moment.

My family watching the shit out of that movie on VHS.  The soundtrack dominating the airwaves.  Not a negative word in sight.  Everybody was hyped for that goofy shit, and then it was gone, leaving a hole in our little hearts.  Dredge up your VHS player and watch it again.  You know you wanna.  Huzzah!

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Lyrical Genius

There’s a song by Electric Six called “Be My Dark Angel” and it is great, altho haters of novelty music and pop culture references therein should give the band a wide berth.

There’s a website called lyricsgenius where contributors can wiki-style post the words of songs they know.  Not every musical act elects to include a lyrics sheet in their albums, and of those who do, not all are accurate or well-known enough to inform what ends up there.  The bridge of this song, per the website:

I am havin’ a whirl
Of Canadian go-go girls
Japanese karate girls
Black girls
White girls
China girls
Australi-asian
European
Pan-American girls

OK.  This is a person who does not know the words “inhabit” or “australasian.”  As basic as those words may seem to you and I, they are not vocabulary possessed by any Electric Six fan with the gumption to edit lyricsgenius dotcom.  Should I do it, succumbing to siwoti?

No.  If I started into that site, I’d cave to the temptation to make the entries worse.  Like in Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” I’d make that one line into “How’s the people livin’ in the street?” and that other part to “Shoos the children with no shoes on their feet.”  Then I’d make a footnote on it (you can make notes on lyrics there) to say, “How do you think they’re livin’ Steeeeve?” and “Don’t shoo them; it hurts to walk.  Pay attention!”

There.  That’ll keep me in the sidebar a lil longer.

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Can’t Even with these Dicks

i was listenin’ to whatever yewchoob throws at me, as much as i can tolerate that.  this time it was giving me nothing but stuff i’ve heard before, which is ok because i’m a basic bitch like that.  this is “unable,” by suburban lawns.  i think the first few times i had it on, i wasn’t paying close attention and assumed it was about frustration in some general sense, but no, it’s about how her lover’s dongus is too longus to be contained in condoms as it should be.  reminds me of the quentin tarantino “like a virgin” bit from reservoir dogs.

well this is a punk song by a wacky lady vocalist that is about frustrating limitations in a broader sense, and i prefer it.  the chorus is about domestic violence tho, in a dark humorish kind of way.  check it out.

su tissue from suburban lawns presumably got a day job and fell off the face of the earth.  good for her, i think.  fame no bueno for some ladies.  polly succumbed to the scourge of punk rock: cancer.  i don’t know why, most of the ramones and ari up from the slits and more got punked out by the big c.  don’t do world tours, people.  airplane travel involves too much radiation.  but she did live long enough to perform a few duets with her adult daughter, to reap the appreciation of the nostalgic in her last years.  get what you can out of the time u got.

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Brinkman Rides Again

I said I’d review William Brinkman’s new book – Revenge of the Phantom Press – before it comes out and missed that goal, so here we are on release day the day after release day two days after release!  You can buy that thang, even as you read this!  William Brinkman is the Bolingbrook Babbler man in the sidebar, with his long running tabloid universe.  How does an old school movement skeptic end up writing a series where aliens and lake monsters are real?  Maybe reading all his babblerverse novels will provide a hint.  The first one, The Rift, was torn from the atheoskeptic headlines Law&Order style, recreating Elevatorgate with fictional characters, plus weredeer and time travel.

Increasingly, especially in the self-publishing sphere, you find that the language of storytelling has been broken.  Everyone from Mary Shelley to Dan Brown learned to write in a continuum with Shakespeare.  They knew how to weave a tale that works.  Exposition, conflict, escalating stakes, payoff.  Too many kids these days came up in fanfic spaces where all of these things are optional.  This isn’t to say that a sufficiently advanced author couldn’t break with convention for artistic ends, but the lack of fundamental skills on display nowadays is appalling.  William Brinkman learned to write before the turn of the millennium and it shows.  I don’t want to damn with faint praise, just to express my satisfaction with reading a complete story.  It’s the difference between eating breath mints and eating food.  RotPP is food.

I’m going to just throw out some general observations and wrap with my opinion of the book’s merits.  I’m not going to discuss the plot to avoid spoilers, and because the summary on the jacket is good enough.

I know that Brinkman took pains to make the story stand alone, so that a person can read it without having read the previous Babbler stories.  It’s hard for me to tell objectively how well that worked, having read The Rift and a few others, but my guess is that some elements of these characters and this setting are not going to work for some readers, because they do call for an amount of outside familiarity.  On the other hand, I do think most readers can just deal with those bits enough to keep going, because he does very successfully minimize the sense of being interrupted for info dumps – even more than in the previous book.

At the outset of the book and a few times throughout, the hero is humbled in the presence of women in a way that might feel off, to people with only a little of the backstory.  Even having read The Rift, I kinda felt like he was excessively kicked around.  Our hero Tom is a reformed villain, so alright, makes sense, but if I was friends or coworkers with someone who had recovered from heel status, I wouldn’t want to trigger the sense of shame that had driven him to villainy in the first place, right?  I’d be at least a bit nicer to him.  This is a quibble though, and doesn’t detract overly from the story.

The way the story was constructed ended up having a lot of back and forth travel.  I’m sure there are lots of good stories that do, but it’s kinda funny how much it’s like, go there, no get out, no go back, no get out again.  Still, different enough things happen on each foray that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

I have low-key problems with memorizing white people names, worsened by characters with minimal description, but this wasn’t as difficult for me this time around as it was in The Rift.  Two hundred pages in I had to wonder who “Jenna” was, but I gathered her role in the story from context, so I didn’t have to page back to be fully reminded.

Science fiction and fantasy have some overlap – hence the term SFF – and Revenge of the Phantom Press lives in that overlap.  There’s another term that gets bandied around for fantasy with a contemporary milieu: “magical realism.”  That’s where things are moving in the direction of the literary or surreal.  As a writer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to feel out these lines, and to me at least, it’s largely about explanation.  Does this setting have rules – or does it strongly communicate the feeling there are rules – behind the supernatural events taking place?

RotPP does, and so there’s no question that it’s straightforwardly genre fiction – not literary.  But as a reader who is drawn to the literary, my eye is open for it, and there were a few moments that got surprisingly close.  If you ignore the explanatory elements, just dig the scenery, the first scene in “Little Bolingbrook” can hit like that.

As a contemporary SFF story that emphasizes action and adventure, RotPP is very well-executed.  People love writing these kinds of stories, but there are a lot of pitfalls, and Brinkman deftly maneuvers around the lot of them.  I didn’t get hung up on exposition, I didn’t see any plot holes, no dangling plotlines, no pointless cul-de-sacs.  Set-ups had payoffs, plot devices worked as intended.  Pacing was tight.  You’re never far from an exciting scene, but you’re not overwhelmed by too many without breathing space between.  You could see the movie of this on the pages, but it also doesn’t feel like a failed screenwriter’s consolation project.  The medium of prose is used well.

The most important part of all this is emotional core.  Did the emotional scenes hit the way they were supposed to?  The climax of action coincides with a climax of emotion in the story – which is more than I can say for my own entrant to the genre – and while it definitely had the potential to feel pat and obvious, it actually worked for me.  Later, when the relationship arc of the main characters was complete, I was again able to feel what Brinkman wanted me to feel.

I don’t know why I’m in such a creative writing teacher mode on this review, just completely patronizing, so it’s time to get down to brass tacks.  Worth it or not?  Worth it.  Good stuff, surely the cream of self-publishing.  I recently read a Dean Koontz novel – Midnight – which had a similar action-adventure feel, and gives a good metric for comparison.  Koontz was better with the kind of description that makes a vivid impression (sorry William) but Brinkman’s plot construction was superior, and his story didn’t end with the hero smashing his son’s record collection, so also superior values.

This isn’t the kind of story I’d normally go out of my way for, favoring horror and surrealism.  I ended up reading it because William is my bloggy compatriot on Freethoughtblogs.com.  Even so, I feel he did great work.  I give it four out of five stars.  Check it out if you like action-adventure scifi-fantasy in a contemporary setting, no bullshit.

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Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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