Here Also Be Dragons

St. George can fuck right off.  St. Patrick with him.  In this house we dig the subjects of herpetology, reptile and amphibian.  Sadly, in their season we can barely hear the frogs from our cul-de-sac, most of the time my boyfriend can’t hear them above his tinnitus.  Also, though I know garter snakes are common in the area, I haven’t seen any since we moved in a year ago.  Certainly, I never expected to see a lizard.  I haven’t seen one since I was last in Kansas, half a continent away.

Now, like Charly on the other side of the planet, I’ve seen a drab brown lizard in my yard.  People further south could surely not give a shit.  Even in this state, east of the mountains in the plains, they would not be impressed.  Floridians whose houses are low key infested with invasive wall-crawlers would tell me to take my happiness to hell.  But no, this is cool and special.

There is an invasive creeping wood sorrel of the purple-leaved variety growing from a crack in the sidewalk between ours and our neighbors’ doors, which are right next to each other.  My boyfriend was stepping out to check on the sunflowers he’s growing, when he noticed a movement in the sorrel.  As the surprised beasty moved, his mind ran through possible identities – slug? snake? – before realizing it was a lizard.  He called me outside in time to see it, though if I’d gone for a camera, I would have missed it.

We did not have an amazingly good look at it, but enough to be confident it was a brown lizard about seven inches in length (18 cm) with no obvious markings. Based on the area where we saw it, range maps, comparisons of different boring brown lizards, we are moderately sure it’s a northern alligator lizard, northwestern subspecies.  I don’t know shit about lizards and presumed, wrongly, that I’d never see one on this side of the state, at least not here in the very developed suburbs.

It eats crickets, and I’ve noticed the crickets are less noisy this year.  Lizard population increasing?  Or did I just see lizard on the move because insect decline got them being more bold in searching for prey?  They also eat slugs, and I hope they do.

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Still on Xitter?

Just today it was announced Xitter was planning to remove some functionality in the Block feature, which of course has all sorts of legal and market ramifications.  One could easily imagine the fuckhead is trying to do some should-be-illegal market manipulation again, I dunno.  But let’s say you’ve been scraping along in the land of rapists and poison honey, just to follow the sad desperate personalities who haven’t been able to extricate themselves from the garbage fire yet.  Maybe it’s worth getting an outside perspective on what your current user experience looks like, and decide if you still want to keep doing this.

D’Angelo Wallace made a video about trying to create a new Xitter account and not get overwhelmed with ragebait and right wing content.  Worth a look.  Although if you are a person who appreciates my quaint ableism policy that nobody in the internet is following these days, note that D’Angelo does use the mild everyday ableist lingo, and skip the video.  But also if anybody shouldn’t be on Xitter, it’s you.  Take care of yourselves, people.

Because the video has musk’s shit-eating face on the thumbnail, I’ll hide it below the fold.  Also content warnings for all the fascism, transphobia, and conversely liberal despair that is now typical of the internet.

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The End in Sight

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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Reading Woke

What’s the word for it, the Wokenment?  Consciousness-expanding?  Awareness-raising?  We’ve had a lot of it, from the atheist schism that ultimately created this blog network to Me Too to Black Lives Matter and so on.  Good stuff.  A recurring theme of that all: that in lacking awareness, the privileged can cause various harms to the oppressed or less privileged.  By knowing the issues, we can do better, and a more equitable world will be a better one.

A more interesting one at least.  The art of the less enlightened (if not woke, asleep?) is all about the same white people we’ve been seeing all our lives – particularly dudes.  How weird was that juncture in history where movies and TV had so many single fathers?  The wall of thumbnails in video game stores featuring stubbly white guys?  Time for other people to be seen, and I’m into it.  I genuinely want to see them.

Had a comment on a recent article expressing that said commenter did not want to revisit books they’d read in the pre-wokenment days (my phrasing, i’m writing on fumes dogg), because the racism and misogyny in them would be more apparent now.  This dovetailed in my head with a post I’d read on social media about works by problematic authors, works that felt important to somebody in their youth, becoming so distasteful as to become unapproachable now.  There are some differences between the situations described, and in this other post from social media, I feel the response lacked nuance.  My commentariat unintentionally reminded me I wanted to say something about that.

Even in a much better world than the one we’ve all been living through, in our better tomorrow, some art is going to have skeevy elements.  This is in part an artifact of our history – we have a lot of feelings to work out, regarding every creepy thing we’ve experienced in culture.  (in part it’s just because we ain’t burning books and still want to read classics.)

That processing isn’t always about getting through to the other side.  Sometimes that’s just how it is in our brains now.  Like, would forced-feminization crossdressing, humiliation fetish stuff work in a world where nobody was shamed for whatever gender expression they’re wearing at the moment?  Maybe not, but until nobody remembers the world as it is now, some people are going to have that as part of their sexuality.  (not me, i have different problems lol)

And some people are just going to find pleasure in art about things that are unhealthy, or even outlandishly evil.  There is, as we speak, a subset of romantasy fans that are into unreal erotic gore scenarios, serial killer fetish carried into the realm of impossible things – characters that can still bone down while folded spindled and mutilated.  Sexual fetishes aside, action adventure as a genre is all about the fantasy that there can be violence that is good, or at least cool.  Romance vaunts the chase over the catch, no room for the real love that is nurturing each other in less novel or thrilling circumstances.  Horror is a profoundly ableist genre and if you somehow stripped all of that out of it, what remains is still getting a thrill out of watching fictional guys get slaughtered in spooky ways.

Mark Twain said something like, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t eat steak because a baby can’t chew it.”  Grown-ups get to drink a scotch nightcap in their crushed velvet smoking jackets while they read books about promiscuous spies shooting filthy commies.  Just as long as those grown-ups know they might get the kinda cancer where their jaw gets removed, weigh the risks, it’s a freedom we should have, shouldn’t we?  Art is generally less harmful than boozohol but it can still put some ill grooves on an uninformed mind.  I say, know what’s messed up about your kicks, and get your kicks just the same.

On the separate but related issue, an author that you once liked turns out to be a scumbag.  Can you still read what they wrote?  Like my commenter, you may find it doesn’t hit the same as it did in your youth.  The queen terf’s baby books are kinda gross, when read through a lens of understanding what she’s like.  You might see things in them you didn’t see before, and things you don’t like.  But if you can power through that, and the things you enjoy about problem artist’s art reward you for that effort, go for it.  Just don’t give them any more money.

Sometimes that’s trickier than one would prefer.  Probably if I’m listening to Biggie Smalls on yewchoob, it’s giving some fractional pennies to Puff Daddy’s legal defense, and you might not be aware, that guy is a nigh-Epstein-level piece of shit.  Time to bootleg those tracks and get with mp3s like it’s 1999.

Nothing original in all this, but the issues I chose to highlight might be slightly different from what you’ve seen elsewhere, and different perspectives are always good to get, as I mentioned in the first paragraph.  Shit, was this a complete thesis?  Time to get back to shitposting…

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Elric of Melnidrone

I don’t listen to audiobooks, usually music, but I had an annoying task to do, of the type where more mentally engaging material was useful.  Because I don’t have the pirate skillz and am not paying for services I’d rarely use, I sought an audiobook for free on yewchoob.  I’d had some idle curiosities about Celtic mythology and listened to a bit of that, but the people reading it were too cringe for me.

I remembered I have some interest in writing a dark fantasy or two in the future and so could use some education on the subject, so I looked up Elric of Melniboné.  Despite still being under copyright, there it was, and the reader was a fairly skilled thespian type.  But the production was a lil low-budget.

You ever hear a wheezing breath and realize it’s you?  I assumed that’s what was happening to me, but I came to realize this thespian is acting his lil ass off while his partner is snoring near at hand.  It’s funking hilarious.  I do find it just tolerable enough to keep on.  Maybe I’ll get through the whole thing eventually.

First impressions: The prose is more bare-bones than I would have imagined.  The simplicity is intentional, I think, to evoke mythology.  Sometimes it’s all edgy dark majesty, sometimes it’s wish fulfillment power fantasies just this side of My Immortal.  Elric is the specialest boy.  I’m mildly entertained.

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Thinkin About MAGAs

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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Centennial Hills 21

I have literally nothing written after this, so don’t expect another installment for a minute.  Nonetheless, this could be kind of an exciting bit to read.

Content Warnings:  Violence, Gun Violence, Weapons, Slavery, Dehumanization, Violations of Personal Space, Inequitable Class Systems, Sci-fi Racism, Workplace Harassment.

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One Take Gang

I did a few videos in one take, low effort as possible, because I work for a living and I’m old and I just don’t have much sauce for this kind of thing at the end of the day.  But I do have a wee skosh of sauce, hence why I did anything at all.  So I used those videos for three days worth of blogpostery, but they got very little attention.  That’s fine, you gotta do you.

But it makes me wonder:  If I do video content, would you like to see it be higher effort?  Have editing, better lighting, whatever?  Or is video content just not a thing I should be doing?  I trust you will not answer these questions like complete savages, thanks.

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