I can see the way thru, sorta. Marriage in three weeks, trying to paint living room dining room and foyer ahead of the deadline. That project had stalled for ages but is making some headway at last. Still gonna be a tight one.
Figured out how I’m going to end Centennial Hills. Didn’t really know before, but it’s clear to me now. Still haven’t had the time to write any more at the moment.
A month point five from now, the dust should be settling on the election. Can’t wait.
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My day job requires having a modicum of compassion for everybody, no matter how vile. I pull it off, tho in my day-to-day life, I don’t feel ’em. But I had a conversation which lent me a moment of empathy. Lady told me she heard a trumpista asked if she’d still support him if she personally witnessed him murdering a child and she said yes. Well, maybe she was just fronting, and certainly you don’t know how you’ll feel about an extreme situation until you’re in it, but also, maybe it’s true,
And that got me thinking, one can base one’s world view on what feels true, to such an extent it can be hard to see things any other way. We’re both doing that. Lady watches orange man kill a dog, she thinks, dog must’ve done something wrong, because orange man sure can’t. I watch jesus come out of the clouds and say it’s go time, I would assume I’m having a stroke. Things that contradict our sense of reality get rationalized or ignored. This we have in common, me and them. I don’t speak for any of you here; I’m sure some of you would say otherwise, but it’s true of me.
That’s all I have to say today.
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One of Batman’s enemies is a guy named Two-Face. He used to be a good guy but half his body was grodified and he resorted to crime. But he flips a coin to decide if he’s going to be good or evil on a given day. This worked against the impact of a certain Cormac McCarthy character. Anyway, I just noticed something that has me flipping my Two-Face coin.
On the day I did “Manoposting” I wrote three articles. They were pretty cheesy, but still, three posts is more difficult than one. On that day I got the highest traffic within the last few weeks. The second highest was when I had “hentai” in the title of my singular post. This poses a moral test. Should I do more posts to garner more attention, or fewer posts with clickbaity titles?
The second one, of course. I love taking the easy way out. Now, I didn’t title this post Batman Yaoi Bondage, but I did put the words in the corpus of the text, yea, that I might reap the internet searches. If you found Freethought Blogs by searching for Batman Yaoi Bondage, apologies that I did not provide that which you seek.
But have you ever considered that atheism could be the way and the light?
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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.
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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hey hey who’s done this one? RuFK haha, got ’em. don’t let the door hit ya where HOX genes split ya. wocka wocka wocka.
this wasn’t a real post, just another case of sidebar vandalism. sorry for the fakeout
Remember that news story about how a reporter randomly found out his wife had berserk record-breaking ultra Tetris skills? I know a lot of AFAB people have chronic pain, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, shit like that. And I know video games like Tetris can engage the mind in a way that helps distract from pain. I wonder out my ass like an evopsych bro, are wimmenfolk better at Tetris because of chronic pain? Could I have a career in pop science fluff pieces?
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Mano’s new comment policy, hoo-boy! Glad my own comment sections have been too tame to necessitate that kind of thing, if only because commenting is less frequent here. Anyway, if you want to say “butts” in four separate comments here, for the moment, it’s allowed. But I think that’s an interesting idea for moderation; might try a rule like that in the future if I get into a similar situation.
The rule I currently have that is germane to those situations is, “Try to be a little less aggro with each other than you might be on other FTBlogs. If somebody is being a shit, I’ll probably get rid of them myself.” Works well enough for the little leagues.
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I think I mentioned it in my comments before, got a thing on my mind sometimes about art. Mostly literary art, but could apply elsewhere as well. A scene or a verse or a passage within a larger work should be internally consistent and smooth as if it was exhaled in a single breath. Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, all very different but unified by this one thing, at their best. There are a lot of other qualities good writing can possess; this isn’t everything. But it’s something I’d like to make sure I’m achieving, whenever I commit to saying this is it, this is the final draft.
I aspire to that, but do I have the willpower? Centennial Hills is an overly fancy first draft, the words carefully considered one time, perhaps edited in my head a little too much before they hit the page. This gives me license to say fuck it, good enough for a blog post, good enough for posterity.
The egregious lack of editing in modern publishing also excuses me. What’s worse, my shit, or the thousandth romantasy about a modern gal who finds out a couple of beevy monsters wanna bone down with her because she’s the most specialest?
I dunno. I just think, when I have the opportunity to make art happen, maybe I should be making it to the highest possible standard. But it seems like a lot of effort, making your art look effortlessly perfect. Maybe later…
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Had an idea for something to make but don’t have the time or inclination at the moment. Remember An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? Tryin’ not to spoil the ending if you’re not familiar, but it’s become a trope you can see in modern movies still, such as Twilight: Breaking Dawn and The Green Knight. Uh, sorry I spoiled those if you were familiar with Owl Creek but hadn’t seen them yet. Whatever.
Basically, gay porn version. Guy is about to be executed on a bridge and says, “wait, grant me a dying wish.” Like, he always wanted to suck a dick but he never got around to it, so he offers to suck off every dude on the bridge, says he’d be ok with getting shot if he could do that first. And then Owl Creek twist.
Wait. That doesn’t work because both versions of events end with the guy dead. Back to the drawing board. Or you can have it. You’re welcome?
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