Imbalanced Humours

Life has gotten too raw for me. Since about this time last year, I’ve been feeling too real. When I’m mad it’s the maddest, when I like something I’m more likely to be hyperbolic about it, I don’t know. I’m a mess.

So from the depths of my cranky and miserable last post, I go on to expressing my hyperbolic love for something.

This is quite possibly the perfect music video. I love every frame. I watched it twenty times in the last twenty-four hours. Dig it, and then allow me to explain:


“Love Removal Machine” – The Cult

A music video is meant to convey a sense of the feeling of the song. For rock, that’s gonna be a lot of movement. The camera hardly sits still and neither do the musicians. It feels exultant. Then the guys do all that rock shit – twirling drumsticks, bellowing at the mic, trotting around the stage like fancy horses. The lead singer is like the fancy prancey lil bro of Glenn Danzig and just super cute in the video, but the other guys got charisma too. They have all the tropes of butt rock fashion plus frilly blouses and mesh shirts because they (improbably) came out of the post-punk scene in Britain. Even the patently bad things in the video – making literal reference to the lyrics, jumping through stacked cans like the Kool-aid Man at the end – are corny fun. I love it.

I’ve also watched this video for Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood five or six times recently. The song is less rockin for me, but the video. Damn, what a wild scene. Trigger Warning: There’s some stuff that could look non-consensual and remind survivors (probably rather abstractly) of badness. Other than that, this video gets me in da pants. Everyone in the video is hella sexy to me except for the tiger. It just ain’t right. I should also note here that this isn’t for everyone and don’t say I didn’t warn ya. If you feel the need to say you find anyone from this video (or anywhere) ugly, don’t expect to see your comment get through moderation.


“Relax” – Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Hot.

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… … …

Oh, what a day.

Have to start it and end it with conservative bullshit all up in my cut.

It’s OK tho. I’m getting used to pain. It’s kinda got me miserable all the time, but in a low key way. You never know how you’ll react to trouble until it’s on top of you. I think I’m doing well. How about you?

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Useful Faces

Most people conduct themselves differently in different company and situations. Social media can jumble our sense of discretion when we forget our audience, or accidentally post in the wrong place. On tumblr, the norm is for people to have a bunch of cute animals, yuks, positivity, and horrifying news from the movement, all in a messy stream. Who is that meant for? It’s not great.

When I first got into tumblr, it was with the intention of creating a feed where no one would encounter depressing or triggering content. I’m not hyper-scrupulous about tagging things that don’t bother me (like cute snakes and bees), so it isn’t the safest place on that platform for people with those problems, but it’s a good place to go for yuks and cute animals, sans all the hot news about how we’re doomed and people are fucking evil. A rare service. I also limit the images of people to extremely non-sexy ones* because hawtness invites thinking about bodies, a problem for many eating disorder sufferers.

That’s my primary tumblr, but in following others to get material, I kept getting stuff I couldn’t use on my dash, and had no outlet for the way it made me feel. So I started the Great American Satan tumblr (which mostly reblogs political stuff), a less sensible tumblr for barfing up all of the horrifying news about white race terrorists, and an artful repository for images of sexy people.

That’s my useful faces of the moment. This blog, its tumblr version, the easy going tumblr, the ragey anti-racist one, and the sexy people. There’s a few others that don’t lend themselves to snappy descriptions, and no doubt more to come eventually.

What are your faces online? What do you use them for?

*Just realized this sounds like I’m trying to post unsexy people. That’s not exactly it, it’s just generally posting people that are not being at all sexy. Generally. Boy. I rly can’t compose words today.

 

Youtube Recommendations

Why is it practically fucking impossible to get YT to stop recommending Louis CK to me? It’s the John Oliver videos I watch, probably. Still, would it kill them to get smarter algorithms for that? Like, adding their own keywords to the data, so they can see that I said “do not like” and “not interested” on twenty videos that had the letters “Lou” in the title and never recommend so much as an Abbott & Costello video to me again. I ain’t a computer genius, but I can’t imagine that would be very difficult.

the grodiness spreadeth

oh yeah, my dude caught it. thing is, he read me this thing where a lady barfed in a restaurant and every single person in a ten foot radius go the norovirus. i barfed within four feet of him once, so it was pretty much a given. aerosolized puke for the win. as much as i like cute animals, i hate nature at least a few moments of every day of my life.

muthafargin noro

i’ve got the motherfucken norovirus off a grody ass baby i never see. roommate is a grannyish baby aficionado and went to pet it despite having caught noro from that household herself at xmas. last time we lucked out, this time i got it. so probs my partner will too. i almost never barf. now i’m barf city. fuck a goddam baby off.

Comedy in Music

Novelty songs and the bands that specialize in them can be musically skillful, but the focus on lyrics makes them less able to lead one’s mood, less fundamentally affecting than music undiluted in artistic intent. Personally, everything I’ve heard of Jonathan Coulton that wasn’t provoking snickers with dirty words? Aggravating as hell. Especially that one with the office zombie gimmick. That was as entertaining as a bad Dilbert joke run on too long. Tim Minchin? Eh. Once in a while.

And I can see how people with less tolerance for lyrical “wit” or lyrics at all could want to throw the entire discographies of The Dead Milkmen, They Might Be Giants, and Electric Six in the garbage. I don’t begrudge them that, but I really like a lot of that stuff. I also recognize that makes me a “geek,” and in this day and age, that should be a real mark of shame. There isn’t a dimension of geek culture that hasn’t been tarnished by the fucking unspeakable conduct of the worst of us. Nonetheless, this.

Random Thoughts from Satan, #5

I <3 Scotland. ^u^
 
Wow, how about that Brexit, huh? I don’t know much of the world except for stereotypes gleaned from tourists I’ve met, public personalities of actors, and bits of news, but I kinda like the impression that’s given me of Scotland. Young people dressed like sluts punching each other in the streets, but still with better political heads than the overwhelming majority of Britain. Look at the Grindr poll on the Brexit. They supported Remain.

They’ve given the world so much, including the cutest and sexiest white person ever, Alan Cumming. I hope next time they vote for independence (sounds imminent), things go their way. Also it would be hilarious for Northern Ireland and Scotland to bail, re-join the EU, and have Britain’s racist asses surrounded. Motherfucking excelsior.

The Romantic Tragedy of the Brood Parasite

I’m about to do a lot of talking out my ass on subjects I’m not certified to comment on, but what I’m about to say feels true to me, so … good enough for now.  Just don’t cite me in your term paper.

Today I saw a juvenile brown-headed cowbird being fed by a dark-eyed junco, the first time I have ever witnessed an act of brood parasitism.  I crossed the street to get a better look.  The most famous brood parasite is the cuckoo, whose creepy behavior has been folded into a number of human languages to represent male sexual paranoia derived from the attitude that women and children are more important as property than as people.  This includes the word “cuck,” beloved of internet racists and misogynists, though their memetic use of the word has outstripped any sense of meaning.

I’m not here to talk about that.  I’m talking about birds that destroy the eggs of other birds, leaving their own offspring to be raised by parents of a different species.  Birds that engage in brood parasitism are typically larger than the species they use, meaning that raising the changeling bird is more demanding and potentially dangerous than raising a member of the bird’s own species.  The brown-headed cowbird I saw was larger than its deceitfully adopted parent, a junco that seemed small and skinny as it went about its work.

How is a bird fooled into raising a child that doesn’t even look right?  Depriving itself to feed a monster twice its mass?  It’s like a sheep raising a calf.  A lot of birds just aren’t very smart, have to rely on pure instinct to drive them, and other birds can exploit that.  Even the brood parasites themselves aren’t necessarily clever.  They just happened into that niche a million years ago and it worked, to the point brown-headed cowbirds wouldn’t know how to raise a baby if they were in a position to do so.

Instinct is a weird beast.  People like to say humans have instincts that drive us and take the concept too far.  Yes, we have instincts, but they aren’t necessarily the ones people talk about, certainly the average evopsych tool.  The main instinct I see in people around me is social sorting.  We try to understand and control our relationships with the people around us reductively, drawing in and out groups, choosing arbitrary or socially promulgated ways of discriminating against others.  It can be turned back on ourselves.  When abused as small children or changed by life circumstance to a kind of person we have previously learned to hate, we sometimes socially sort ourselves as “unlovable” and hide away.

Instincts for non-human animals are much more obvious, and without as much ability to teach each other how to act socially, their instincts often have to be wildly specific.  Take cats’ burial of feces.  You do not have to train a cat to use a litter box.  Some cats may have dysfunction that needs to be sorted out, but most kittens will quickly figure out how to use a litter box.  Why?

Here is the instinct, in the cat’s mind:  “I have to relieve myself.  Ugh.  It feels right to do this on a surface that gives beneath my paws.  Ah, this dirt is just right.  Now I can go.  Holy crap!  This smell is terrible!  For some reason, I feel a tinge of mortal fear.  I want to wave my paw next to it.  Oh, that’s moving dirt.  Will scratching the dirt make the smell go away?  If yes, sigh of relief, carry on.  If no, RUN AWAY!”  Some people don’t know about the last part.  It’s hilarious to watch your cats tear ass across the house to get away from their mess, when burying isn’t enough.

Humans have almost nothing like this weird chain of highly specific inborn feelings, because we gained the trait of culture.  We can teach each other to wash our food, to bury our feces, and so on.  Practically anything necessary can be taught instead of relying on instinct alone.  Unfortunately for birds, they aren’t as bright as us.  They have to rely on feelings.

The instinct, in the bird’s mind:  “I got laid.  Woo!  Now I’ve got some other weird feelings setting in.  Better make a nest.  Unggh!  Eggs.  Better sit on these.”  The brood parasite slips in here, knocking eggs out of the nest and laying its own.  The victim of this sheisty move returns to find its eggs different.  (Some birds actually recognize the switch through various means and knock the cuckoo eggs off, try to start over.)  Apparently a lot of birds, even if they recognize the change, don’t know what to do with that, and just carry on.  “Sit on weird eggs.  Baby hatch.  Feed that thing!”

This is the tragic romance.  The finagled parent is operating on the closest thing a bird has to love.  It is selflessly giving up its food, seeking more and more, doing its best to keep this baby alive and well.  A brood parasite baby is even more demanding than its natural child would have been, potentially making the parent wreck itself with hunger and exertion in the process.  But the parent is driven to harm itself like that, for the love of this strange monster.  It’s beautiful and sad, it’s no kind of way to be.  If your human relationships involve giving until you are broken, reevaluate them.  A tragic romance is something to behold, not something to live.

Well, that went around the world, and I have no snappy way to end it.  Have a song.

*the video I’d originally embedded disappeared
    and this was the least worst replacement

Getting to Know Yooou

Getting to know a new computer program, when you’re not a magical tech baby, is no fun. I’ve been meaning to get into learning Blender (a 3d art program) since late last year, let a bunch of life stuff give me permission to put it off, and now I’m finally getting back to it. Getting used to the interface – for me – is like walking through a waterfall made of karo syrup.

Hey, I didn’t own a computer until I was, like, 27. In college I learned 3d Studio Max and some bare minimum of Maya, but haven’t had to use either of those in ten years. Plus I don’t have much of an attention span for tutorials. Though if you’re like me, I’ve found it helpful to turn on some music with the volume low enough to make out the tutorial presenter’s voice. Education!

Now. The title of the post refers to a song from The King and I, which is about a lady who meets the king of Siam, so here’s a Cramps song that mentions the King of Siam, plus general sleaziness. Sleaze on!