it's all masturbation

Aug. 23rd, 2025 12:17 am
f0rrest: (business time)
[personal profile] f0rrest
You ever been on one of those remote conference calls, watching some guy present a slide deck about some dumb shit nobody really cares about, and suddenly, out of nowhere almost, you start thinking to yourself, “Gee, I wonder what would happen if I just pulled my pants down and started masturbating on camera in front of all these people?”

I know it's crazy, but for some sick twisted reason, when I'm sitting there in my office, in front of my webcam, mindlessly nodding here and there while pretending to pay attention to some man in a suit taking his job way too fucking seriously, practically drooling from boredom, this heinous what-if-I-masturbate thing just randomly pops into my brain, as if there's some chaos demon up there pitchforking my most odious synapses, not only to relieve the boredom but also to satisfy some wicked primal curiosity, to answer the question of what exactly might happen if I just started doing the most shocking shit possible on this very serious executive conference call.

And, I swear, it's not like a sexual thing, there's no arousal going on, it's more like an anarchistic urge from millennia gone by, atavistic almost. I don’t even want to do it, I really don't, yet I still think about it like five times a day, because I’m on a lot of these boring-ass conference calls. I can't help it.

I imagine the presenter, upon my starting to masturbate, may not even notice at first, since the video usually focuses on the person talking, so he might just keep presenting his boring slides totally unaware of the fucked up shit going on in my little window, or maybe, if the video is up on a physical conference-room screen or something, he may notice but not say anything about it, he may just start acting all awkward and weird, pacing around or fidgeting or slurring his words or involuntarily adding a bunch of “uuuhs” to his talk track, unable to fully process the masturbatory madness unfolding before his very eyes in my little square up there, having never thought that this would ever happen to him, the very idea of it so absurd he’s never even considered it as a possibility. It really makes me wonder how many of these outwardly self-confident, super adult C-level executives, or any of us really, would be able to truly keep it together in the face of such senseless depravity. Masturbating on a Zoom call is almost like a great equalizer of sorts. I like to imagine that one of the participants might say something like, “uh, Forrest, you know your camera is on, right?”, and I would just ignore the question as if maybe I’m not aware that my camera is on, maybe I have no idea, maybe I’m totally oblivious, all while continuing the five-knuckle shuffle like nothing to see here don’t mind me, and those of weaker constitution may just start screaming in horror, throwing up, and maybe some people, people like me, maybe they would just laugh, like this is the most interesting thing that’s happened to them in the last ten years, others repeating “dear god, make it stop” over and over again, their minds completely shattered from the realization that nowhere is safe, that we’re all animals, that anyone could just start whacking it in front of them at any time, driving them to some sort of permanent psychosis, and someone might say something like, “Is this call being recorded? I hope this call is being recorded,” while not clarifying exactly why they hope it’s being recorded, and some older gentleman would say something like, “I cannot believe this, the sheer audacity, making a mockery of our business like this,” and of course the woman who’s “calling HR right now” because she vainly believes herself to be the sexual catalyst for why this is even happening in the first place, because surely no one in the meeting is as attractive as her, and eventually I imagine the host would have no choice but to manually eject me from the conference call because I would just not stop whacking it, at which point I imagine quickly receiving a call from Human Resources, at which point I would no longer have a job, and everyone would be very shocked and disgusted for a few weeks, privately calling all their co-workers, “did you hear about Forrest, what he did, on the weekly risk call? There’s something seriously wrong with that guy,” until, eventually, months pass, and I become this sort of urban legend, people start making up stories about me, giving me masturbation-related nicknames, like “to this day, if you listen closely, on our internal Zoom calls, you can still hear the soft patter of The Phantom Phallus,” or maybe I would become like a hero figure, a symbol of anti-corporate anarchism, spoken highly of, with jovial reverence, “do you remember that one time, when Full-Fisted Forrest whipped it out in front of the Senior Vice President of Sales? I heard the VP lost his mind after the whole thing, had to retire,” and there would be all sorts of wild rumors about me, “Yeah, but I heard he started a new company called Beat-It Bombers where you pay him to hack into video calls and he just start beating it right there on camera,” or, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about him, heard he’s like a Buddhist monk now, totally renounced both masturbation and corporate America, sounds like a cool dude, wish I had the balls to do what he did, damn,” and so on and so forth.

But of course, I would never do anything like this. I just don't have it in me. I have neither the chutzpah nor the vulgarity to do so. And I’d probably question the character and sanity of anyone who did, because anyone who would whip it out in a public space, be it virtual or physical, most definitely has a few screws loose, and if they’re willing to do something like that, then, let’s be serious, what else would they be willing to do, I mean, really? 

And while whacking it during a boring video conference may carry with it some symbolic oomph, a sort of absurdist mockery of modern life, in which a species who grew from the wilds of the earth has willingly enslaved themselves to cushy office chairs and computer monitors all while pretending that presenting the perfect PowerPoint bestows some grand meaning to their lives, I do have to wonder if the person whacking it on Zoom calls would even think about any of this, it seems more likely they’d just be freaks who get off to other people watching them do sexual stuff in weird situations, exhibitionists, I think they’re called, and if not, if this hypothetical serial stroker is truly trying to make a point, what is their motivation, really? Perhaps the attention, the recognition of making some profound absurdist point, is the driver, and if that’s the case, then is the Zoom wanker really so different from the PowerPoint presenter who also wants praise and recognition for their great PowerPoints? Perhaps the underlying driver here is the same, perhaps all we want, at the end of the day, is some sort of recognition, be it good, bad, or ugly. Perhaps our egos crave this attention, this validation, and, for some people, it doesn’t matter how they get it, just as long as they get it, which is perhaps why we see so many people doing absurd things for attention, especially with the advent of the Internet, where the end goal seems to be just feeding our egos by garnering as much recognition as possible, no matter the ethical or spiritual costs.

One thing is certain however, if you want some quick easy recognition, you’ll probably have better luck whacking off on a Zoom call one time than presenting the perfect PowerPoint, but it’s important to note that, in both cases, it’s all just masturbation, really.

at the gates of the garden of dreams

Aug. 22nd, 2025 11:45 pm
yamamanama: (Default)
[personal profile] yamamanama
I've already seen Midsummer Night's Dream a whole bunch but my cousin Sam was in this one, so I had to see it, no matter how remote it is. It was held inside a church. They'd have done it outside on the lawn but they had no microphones and there's loud traffic that would keep people from hearing their voices.
I knew that was a Tiffany window.

Jiji has the tux marking and the lemur long nose. He's bigger than Kiki. I think I mentioned that.

Emily said of something that it's not the worst song but it's not great either. The fuck are the lyrics? though.
We had pineapple meatballs with a sauce of coconut milk and sweet chili and tomato and a bit of Italian season that Emily says just makes them better.

"No flash photography. You wouldn't want to startle the faeries. It gets real ugly real fast," the guy introducing the play said.
Titania, played by Sam, was dressed in gauzy sage green and white and had black runes scrawled on her arm and streaked on her nose, glitter and emerald green fingernails, was carried in upon a makeshift palanquin. Oberon had a feathery white cape and a white lacy toga and a white glove on one hand and a spiral tattoed upon his arm. Helena had tattoos of a cat and a crecent moon, of hobbits seated around a campfire, of a hippo pokémon and what I think is an owlbear and opossums. Demitrius had a treble clef tattoed on one wrist and a bass clef on the other. Puck had a black dress and hands and dipped in glittery black ink, a tattoo of a voodoo doll and a tattoo of a moon and clouds. Nick Bottom had a green mohawk and a sleeveless jacket covered in patches and gold sneakers. Peter Quince carried a flask because his troupe drove him to drink.

burning question: someone on Ilxor asks “Is it OK to be outraged on principle about Kash Patel's goon squad raiding John Bolton's house but also still kinda enjoy John Bolton having his house raided?”

NC

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:04 pm
paperghost: (Sparkler loaf)
[personal profile] paperghost
1. I am drunk right now because I was gonna go out to a lesbian bar this evening, but then some at home schedule stuff got in the way lol. So I am coping by drinking at home. If this is incoherent, that's why.

2. Soooo there's whispers over on Bsky (etc.) that Neocities might follow suit on the NSFW bans. This was disclosed via an email from Kyle Drake, and Neocities in general is kind of... unmoderated unless it's something REALLY bad or something that exploits the site's spaghetti code. NSFW will only get banned from Neocities IF the US laws allow it, but.... I was thinking that maybe, the silver lining of the social media bullshit is that people will go make their own sites again with no rules besides "don't post CP or anything else illegal". But if this happens, I will go postal. I will cry. I've been willing to grit my teeth and agree to disagree with Kyle Drake's AI shilling but he cannot sell out so easily when the baseline rules of "anything legal in the US" works and NSFW websites are shadowbanned / not searchable. I'm already worried Bsky is going that way when I really like it, but if the worst happens I really might bite the bullet and look into buying a domain and a paid host. I'm just not ready :( (<- draft I wrote last night when I was sober lol)

I know there's Nekoweb, since the servers are in Germany and they (probably) won't be affected by US laws. But it's run by zoomers and customer support is done over Discord, that's insane. I don't even mind Discord but emails are right there. I know where I'd buy a domain, and what paid host I would use (NFS), but ugh. I've been taking a prolonged hiatus from my site because I don't enjoy it anymore, and the community is just refurbished Tumblr/Discord. I should probably look into push updates and a SSG. If I move to a better paid host, I'm sure that .php or .cgi has better ways of hosting an art gallery than the hard-to-organize OC bullshit I have and Javascript. But I'm just not ready for all of it, but the way things are is too much for me. Again, I'm drunk so if this is "unfiltered but incoherent" I'm sorry. I'm a wagie, not a techie. I'm trying to touch grass and try to be in sane online communities. But man. It's hard.

2025 is 2005 if I was an adult during it. What the fuck.

Diary: Measurements

Aug. 22nd, 2025 06:13 pm
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[personal profile] degringolade

After a couple of weeks being a sluggard, I am back to moving this week but the pace of increase is slowing down noticably. The Chef commented yesterday that he shoots for 7,000 steps a day. Now, this is what I considered to be my basic when I was walking steadily, but truthfully, I am beginning to lean toward measuring in mileage (kilometers) as a measure rather than steps. Not that there is anything wrong with steps. It is all a matter of taste.

Steps makes it personal to you. An old geezer like me who has bum knees needs to take a shitload of steps to get a mile in. A younger me would have taken a lot fewer steps. But both the younger me and the older me would have covered the same distance.

So I thinking that I will need to turn in about 2.5 miles a day. That will give me the steps I need and will be a more concrete set of goals. I am actually considering making it four kilometers instead, just to be contrary. A unit of measure is a unit of measure, but metric does make more sense and it pisses people off when I talk in a foreign language.

Hell, maybe I'll switch to metric for tempeatures too!! That will really piss them off when I mention that today will maybe hit 40!

Gaming burnout

Aug. 22nd, 2025 05:47 am
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[personal profile] selenicseas

At the beginning of the year, I made a goal to complete six video games that I hadn't played before. At this point in August, I've completed one: Horizon Forbidden West. I've started three others – Mass Effect: Andromeda, Quantum Break, and Divinity: Original Sin II – but ended up dropping all three.

Of those four, only Horizon Forbidden West was really able to hold my attention, and even that became difficult toward the end of the game, where I started skipping things just because I wanted to be done. With Mass Effect: Andromeda, I stopped playing after an hour due to lack of interest. I almost got all the way through Quantum Break before dropping it. And with Divinity: Original Sin II, I slowly stopped playing and haven't booted the game up in a few weeks.

I'm not sure why these games couldn't interest me long enough to finish them. They're in genres I tend to like, from developers whose games I've liked. I liked the Mass Effect trilogy, I liked Remedy's other games, and I liked Baldur's Gate 3 a lot.

Am I burnt out on gaming? Do I need to take a break from video games for a while? Am I not playing the right games at the moment?

Maybe what I need to do is go through my game libraries and try various games until something hooks me. Or maybe I need to replay something I've wanted to replay for a while. That wouldn't help me accomplish any of my goals, but it would potentially help me feel like gaming isn't the burden it feels like at the moment.

[community profile] thefridayfive for 22 August 2025

Aug. 21st, 2025 10:49 pm
killercahill: (Darren Smile)
[personal profile] killercahill
1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven't stayed in a hostel, would you? No — I never have, and I don’t think I ever will. Even when I was younger, I was more likely to end up in a little family-run hotel or something slightly nicer. Hostels have never really appealed to me; I can “rough it” if I must, but only if roughing it involves room service and at least three pillows. I like a proper bed, a bit of quiet, and the ability to unpack without worrying someone’s going to nick my shampoo
 
2. What is your favo(u)rite airport that you've been to? Why? Changi in Singapore. It’s the only airport that’s ever made me wish I had more time before my flight. Waterfalls, gardens, food that isn’t just sad sandwiches — it’s practically a five-star hotel masquerading as a transport hub. Heathrow could never
 
3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation? The Uffizi in Florence. Walking into the room with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus felt like being slapped across the face by beauty. I nearly cried. It’s one of those moments where you think, “oh, this is why we put up with queues and blisters and dodgy train timetables.”
 
4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis? Not in a lasting way. I’ve had those glorious holiday friendships where you’re inseparable for three days, then never see each other again. I rather like that, honestly — no pressure, just golden little moments, like postcards you keep in your head.
 
5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane? Yes, though I usually hope for the universal signal of headphones in, book open, please don’t. But once, on a transatlantic, I sat beside a woman who told me her entire life story — loves, losses, scandals. It was like being handed a novel, only with complimentary gin and tonic.

the revolution will not be televized

Aug. 21st, 2025 05:29 pm
yamamanama: (Default)
[personal profile] yamamanama
Because it was raining (well, there was a lull between the rains) and more importantly only 58 degrees (I can’t even. Erin go fuck yourself. actually, I have no idea if this is Erin’s fault or if this is the thing that’s keeping Erin from destroying us and I’m pretty sure Trump will either decide we’re not getting any disaster relief or just use it as an excuse to round up immigrants, dissidents, and anyone who looks remotely foreign), we got a sort of truncated concert.
That is to say, they bookended the concert with the first and final movement of the Eroica (he described the last movement as a dance in which all social classes would dance together) and removed the Coriolan Overture entirely, performing just the Romance no. 1 and a medley of Haitian works. Since I’ve already (I said the weather was similar but then I looked it up and it was much colder) heard the Eroica back in January and the Coriolan Overture a whole bunch, and I was mostly there for the Haitian music (and eating Brazilian food, something similar to last time except replacing the white rice with carreteiro, which is meat with beef and veggies, along with roasted corn, black beans, fried bananas, pickled onions, viniagrette with tomatoes onions and bell peppers, and pico de gallo with tomatoes onions cilantro and peppers and green hot sauce. note to self, try the Malagueta or mintchurri) anyway.

Beethoven's Eroica premiered in 1804, the same year as the Haitian Revolution, which both connect to Napoleon, since at the same time he started conquering the rest of Europe, he reinstated slavery in the colonies and Haiti had a form of slavery that was brutal even by the standards of contemporaneous chattel slavery.

Quand nos Aïeux brisèrent leur entraves by Occide Jeanty was once the anthem of Haiti. It sounds like a march. In lieu of the lyrics, Jean Dany Joachim recited his poem. Val Jeanty's Faces is sung, with orchestra, violin, and turntables. Kote Moun Yo is a traditional song arranged for turntables, violin, orchestra, drum ensemble, with Joachim reading another poem.
This was in planning since last year and I have no idea why it was pushed back to this year.

Only about 50 brave souls showed up, one of them Gabriella. Her cat Sambucina has discovered the joys of frozen sardines while the other cats just sniff them for a long time without eating them.

Next week looks like what we were promised this week, cool but somewhat sunny.

burning question: does the James Damore cocktail at some SF tech event come pre-roofied?
squirmelia: (Default)
[personal profile] squirmelia
I had the foreshore to myself at Blackfriars, but the tide was coming in.

I found a sherd that said “Hooper” on it. Possibly from “Hooper Struve” that made stoneware ginger beer bottles, late Victorian.

I found a sherd that has a speckled appearance, which looks like there are tinier sherds on the sherd.

But the most exciting thing I found that day - a piece of uranium glass! It glows when a UV light is shone on it!

Mudlarking finds - 37

Uranium glass

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Diary: Non-Ambition

Aug. 21st, 2025 03:44 pm
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[personal profile] degringolade

One of the things that you put aside when you retire is ambition. Oh, you never get rid of the damn thing completely, but you do get it beaten down into a manageable beast that sullenly dwells in my hindbrain.

For some reason, mine is acting out today, I just can't figure out what it wants me to do.

stunned at myself

Aug. 21st, 2025 12:05 pm
killercahill: (Darren Smile)
[personal profile] killercahill
 last night really got away from me. I should know better than to open up the anon box after dark, but somehow I let myself get pulled into it — and suddenly I was answering questions I had no business answering. 🙈

it started with me saying that “following the tour” doesn’t make me a groupie. (it doesn’t! …though, all right, maybe I did have my groupie-ish days back in the 80s. I regret nothing.) but then things escalated. long legs got mentioned, Darren got mentioned, and before I knew it, people were asking me about Indian Wells 1994.

and honestly? I’m not quite sure what anon was expecting. did they really think I was going to say “oh yes, I definitely had a moment with Darren in Indian Wells, February 1994” and then just… spill every detail? 😳 bless them. the only thing I gave away was his tournament result — lost in the quarter finals to Stefan Edberg 6-4 6-3. 😉 It was his best result in the last season of his playing career. 

I know I should turn anon off. I know I shouldn’t encourage this. but the cheek of the questions (and the even bigger cheek of me actually answering some of them) had me laughing myself silly. tumblr really does have a way of loosening the tongue, doesn’t it?

so, this is me the morning after: a little stunned, a little scandalised, and reminding myself that some things are better left in the 90s. 😉

and with that, I’m slamming the anon box shut. (probably. …maybe. we’ll see.)


All Matches, They Said

Aug. 20th, 2025 05:25 pm
killercahill: (Love)
[personal profile] killercahill
Sky Sports promised me “all US Open matches.”

What they meant, of course, was: some matches, the ones we feel like showing, and not the half of the qualifiers you were actually looking forward to. 🙃

So there I was, forced into tennis piracy. Skulking around shady ESPN streams, dodging pop-ups like they were errant forehands, hoping there might at least be some Darren on the other side of my crimes.

But no. Not even a glimpse. Just lag, ads, and a nagging sense that Sky owes me Darren at this point.

Because really — what’s the point of breaking the law if I don’t even get a Cahill cameo out of it?

"Not Right, Not-Left, Just Online"

Aug. 19th, 2025 10:15 pm
paperghost: (What does corn dream about?)
[personal profile] paperghost
I need to make a more introspective and serious article-like writing about this one day when my brain isn't broken. ... That being said, Katherine Dee's latest blog post had me thinking.

 

Snippet from article about the anti-woke sphere
THE ALT-MEDIA ECOSYSTEM
Here’s a story most of you already know. COVID was a great time to try your hand at Internet celebrity. Institutional trust—CNN, Fox, the New York Times, Fauci, the WHO—collapsed for millions of people who suddenly needed new ways to make sense of the world.

And what filled that vacuum? The so-called “right-wing” alt media. What nobody wants to say about these creators, except for maybe the creators themselves, is that they—and indeed, the whole ecosystem they belong to—are not strictly right-wing. They are “not-left” but they aren’t on the right.

Being “not-left” during COVID was simple. All you had to do was disagree with lockdowns and mandates. That low bar brought in a huge tent of people. The tent, of course, had already been built by the excesses of wokeness, #MeToo, etc. COVID filled it out.
These creators shared one message: “The mainstream media is lying to you. We’re telling the truth.” In many cases, they were right. This “not-left” group was absorbed into the Online Right, a sprawling ecosystem that includes everyone from the Dissident Right to anti-woke crypto hucksters to Nick Fuentes’ groypers to Intellectual Dark Web figures to mainstream conservative podcasters to dozens of smaller micro-subcultures and ideologies.

I’m skeptical that the left doesn’t have the same media power—last time I checked, there are more liberal podcasts, magazines, TV shows, etc. than any one person could count. But it could be that they just don’t have the same
political influence. Whatever the case, the specter of the Online Right and Alt-Media Ecosystem emerged, full-force, during the podcast election.

MAGA CHANGES EVERYTHING
Trump’s 2024 win exposed the fault lines in what everyone assumed was a unified “right-wing” movement. For some people, being anti-establishment got complicated when your side controlled the establishment. A lot of people who’d been lumped in with the right realized (or had always known) they didn’t like Trump or his politics—it was just that there was nowhere to go. Some people simply changed their mind.
Whatever the reasons, this fracturing created a massive opportunity. All these people with huge, engaged audiences who’d been accidentally sorted into the “right-wing” category were suddenly politically homeless again. They didn’t want to be MAGA cheerleaders, but they also couldn’t go back to a left that had already expelled them for “thought crimes.”

THE GREAT REALIGNMENT Now we’re seeing different types of these creators and audiences sorting themselves out:
  • The Post-Right: People who burnt out on the online right-wing ecosystem entirely. Think Richard Hanania, Nick Fuentes1, or even Richard Spencer. They’re not leftists, they’re not people who were mislabeled during COVID, #MeToo, or “peak woke,” but they do reject the current-state of the Right. Sometimes they’re Democrats who took “the scenic route.” Sometimes these people are opportunists. Sometimes they’ve evolved.
  • The Post-Anti-Woke: Contrarians and other anti-woke voices who don’t like the state of the Right or “anti-woke” media. They built audiences criticizing progressive excess. Some may have even voted for Trump. Too anti-progressive for the present-day left, too anti-Trump for the right.
  • Centrists Drifting Right: People responding to audience incentives and cultural energy. They’re following where the engagement is (which has been rightward) or discovering they’re more right-wing than they thought.
  • The Older Liberal Center: Similar to the post-anti-woke but coming from a different starting point. These are traditional liberals who never went full-bore woke nor did they pivot to anti-woke. Here, I’m thinking of somebody like Ezra Klein or Gavin Newsom’s new stance.
  • The Grift Doubling-Down: Online right figures who’ve discovered that rage-bait pay the bills better than nuanced takes. They’re trapped in an increasingly extreme content cycle to maintain their audiences.
  • The New Old Left: I see more and more of these people every day. They’re leftists—and use that word—but they’re trying to improve their theory of mind of the right. They focus more on class than other dimensions of identity.
I've more or less "retired" from this, but I do remember how the pandemic was a gold age of "alternative thinkers" taking advantage of how many people were stuck inside and angry about it. I'll never forget how wrapped up I was in this sphere after my county went under lockdown. I've wasted 7 years of my life to "controversial politics" and making "unpopular opinions" so centric to myself. I haven't bothered to check out "where are they now" with a lot of the content I watched 5 years ago. I don't know if I want to find out. But now liberals and the portion of the left that didn't fall into pure antisemitism are trying to jump in on this train with the whole "dark woke" thing that's pro-offensive but anti-conservative for lack of a better description.

During lockdown it was easy to see all sides as the same and part of "the establishment", near the end of 2018 I became blackpilled and got lovebombed by a tankie who was the only person who reached out to me during an isolated time. When Biden won, it was also easy to continue being "anti-woke" because it was counter-cultural to be conservative. Now that Trump won, the anti-wokes have become "the culture", and seeing everything that's happened in the last 8 months... It isn't fucking worth it to obsess over what "woke" AKA more of a prescriptive than descriptive label even is. I really think obsessing over "wokeness" is borderline privileged when the economy, housing, and healthcare is more important. The "ex-liberal" morons will become single issue over "wokes" and vote Republican, despite nearly every recent recession being caused by a Republican. So many people have been laid off, had their medicaid slashed, veterans benefits lost, and so on, but at least we don't have "woke DEI / CRT" anymore!!! At least we don't see rainbows everywhere anymore!!! Shut up man lol. I never cared about the "DEI" and "CRT" shit. It felt similar to how I felt like I "had to" be on board with Leninism or whatever because I had other opinions in that umbrella. So I just sheep'd in the other direction by nodding along with psychos pretending these were the worst thing ever.

The "big tent" aspect was there in 2020 too. There was always a mix of actual right wingers, MAGA, classical liberals (technically center-right), "old school" anti-idpol Marxists, all under this one umbrella. And now that I'm no longer a "radical" or populist I just find it disgusting instead of an awesome display of solidarity. Because of course there's going to be splintering, even MAGA has had infighting when it comes to Trump's support of H1-B, Elon Musk getting disowned, the spats Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz had over Iran, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer's catfight on Twitter, the pro-Netanyahu side of MAGA vs. the anti-Israel groypers, etc. This shit is so stupid, I hate these people so much.

I often have people online follow me under the assumption that I'm "based" and secretly in the same camp as they are. They always end up disappointed. I don't know how else to explain it to people, I'll probably figure it out when I have free time. I wasted almost half of my adult life on the bullshit and it's time to move on. I'm still not "PC" or "woke" and still skew "exclusionist" if we're using mid-2010s Tumblr lingo, but the real enemy is right in front of us and it's a matter of picking your hills to die on if you want to go out in the world and interact with real people. Not floating opinions or words on a screen from shut-ins. "Radicalness" is a poison that destroys you from the inside.

Midweek update

Aug. 20th, 2025 08:19 am
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[personal profile] jon_chaisson
So following up from the previous post, on Monday I was informed that while I was at lunch, the local high school's principal came in and told all the kids that they are now banned from our store! This is actually quite a surprise turnaround, as they'd only done that once for one semester a few years ago. [Previously they'd shrugged and said 'our hands are tied' as some parents had probably complained.] Come to find out, Head Boss had done the right thing in making a very long and detailed list with receipts of all the trouble they'd caused (mostly stealing, being super noisy and blocking the aisles, but also tagging the men's bathroom and the outside elevators and possibly breaking them) over the last couple of semesters. And yes, even the cops were called once or twice, both for kids stealing and starting fights outside.

Sure, it was only thirty to forty kids out of however many go to that high school, but the line was consistently crossed with such regularity that it was finally agreed that said kids ruined it for everyone else. WELP! Mind you, as far as I can tell they can still come in after school and after-school activities let out, but by that time we have more coverage. The fact that they can no longer inundate us for half an hour, five days a week at precisely 12:15pm is definitely worth it. Not having to dread that half hour of chaos every day takes a lot of stress off everyone else's shoulders.

encounter with the goblin queen

Aug. 20th, 2025 09:55 am
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[personal profile] f0rrest
My neighbor is in her late thirties. She’s got rust-colored hair in thick fat mats. Her skin is a tannish yellow and often very clammy. She's got scabs all over her arms, some open and bleeding. Her face is sort of smushed and toad-like. Her eyes dark and beady. The interior of her home is a trash labyrinth reeking of cat piss, vodka, and wet dog. Her voice reminds me of an old ashtray filled with forgotten half-smoked cigarettes. She's frumpty and unkempt in all respects. You could say she’s goblinesque. Sometimes, late a night, I hear her screaming about god knows what. The cops have been called to her home many times. She is a straight-up dope fiend. Her name is Erin. One time she tried to choke me out.

This is the story of that one time Erin tried to choke me out, and why I haven't talked to her in like four years.

I remember it well. It was Mother's Day night. I had just returned home from a family function where I drank way too much wine, which I was prone to do back then, so I was kind of fucked up, and I’m very social when I’m fucked up, loving to be around others just as fucked up as myself, so when I got out of the passenger seat of my car and saw Erin and her husband sitting on the ratty couch in their open garage, drinking out of red disposable party cups, I eagerly waved hello with the ulterior motive of perhaps being invited over so that I could continue being fucked up in what I inebriatedly believed would be good fucked-up company.

Of course, I was wrong, as we will soon discover.

When I entered the garage, smell of sticky icky wafting through my nostrils, I noticed Erin and her husband were watching Cops on the big flat screen, so I navigated to the ratty old couch, through a maze of lawn care equipment, cardboard boxes, and loose trash, sat down, and that's when Erin offered me a Dixie cup filled with some mysterious green liquid, which I happily started sipping on without a second thought, eager to continue my fucked-up escapades. It turned out to be Mountain Dew mixed with vodka, and it tasted quite good. Then, prompted by some scene in Cops where the boys in blue were brutally forcing some incoherent black man into the cop car, Erin started going off about our other neighbors, who happened to be cops, and she was saying something like,

“Can you believe those fuckers actually pressed charges on me, just for going over to their house. Their damn children, who are wild as hell, are always playing tag or some stupid shit in my yard, coming up to my patio, and I can see them on the damn Blink cameras, I’ve got several saved recordings of this happening, so I went over there, just wanting to talk to their parents, knocked on the door with my phone in hand, and started talking to the mom about her kids, showing her the footage and all that, and can you guess what she fucking told me, she fucking told me to get off her property, and I swear to god I was being civil as hell and nice as hell, I actually was, but she still told me to quote ‘get the fuck off my property,’ so I did, I got off the property, but when I got to the road, I yelled back, ‘IF I SEE THOSE KIDS ON MY PATIO AGAIN I’M CALLING THE COPS,’ and then I went home and that was it, until the next day when I get a visit from the police telling me that the woman filed a restraining order on me, even though I was being nice as fuck to her, and the police tell me I can’t come within 10 feet of their yard or else there will be serious consequences, so I say ‘whatever fine I won’t go into their yard,’ but then, not even a few hours later, can you fucking believe it, I bet you can, those fucking wild ass kids are back, playing tag or whatever, in my yard, up on my fucking patio, again, but I was feeling generous and didn’t want to like break the restraining order, so I didn’t call the cops or even go over there and talk to the parents, but what I did was, I wrote this note, this really nice, polite note, that said something like, ‘please tell your children not to play on my patio because my dogs are very skittish and they will start barking and my husband sleeps late and needs his sleep for his job,’ and I sign my name at the bottom of the fucking note, and then, later that night, I sneak into their yard and I pin this note on their fucking front door, just to relay the message, that’s it, just to relay the message, and then I go home, get some sleep, and can you fucking believe, can you fucking believe it, I wake up to the sound of cops banging on my door, and they’re saying I broke the restraining order, and they say they have proof, so I tell them to show me the fucking proof, so they hold up my note, can you believe it, my fucking note, with my name signed on it and everything, and they say that leaving the note broke the fucking restraining order, so I say ‘FUCK THAT’ and slam the door on their faces and next thing you know they’re forcing me into the back of their fucking cop car, and I mean really forcing me, like serious police brutality kind of shit, even though I was being cooperative and civil as hell, and they take me to the courthouse and, long story short, I’ve got to be in court in like three weeks to face charges, can you believe that, can you fucking believe that?”

And I’m just like nodding along, saying stuff like, “oh that sucks, wow, damn, ok,” while sipping my green liquid and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, kind of zoned out, words going in one ear and out the other, but her whole aura is kind of weirding me out, so I turn to her husband, who’s sitting there staring at the floor with a drink in hand, and he looks quite despondent and miserable, so I say something like, “Hey man, are you OK?” And he slowly lifts his head, looks me dead in the eye, and says, “Erin cheated on me last week.” And for some reason the sheer randomness of this, combined with the emotional gravity of the situation itself, makes me burst out laughing, incredulously almost, so I turn to Erin, so drunk that I’m likely oblivious to basic human social cues at this point, and I say to her in a chuckling tone, “That’s not very nice, why’d you do that?” And Erin, whose two eyes are sort of blinking at different times, off-sync, giving off serious goblin-queen vibes, says, “Because he’s always too drunk to fuck me,” and I’m like, “OK, well, that’s, uh, that’s something, maybe lay off the vodka Mountain Dew there,” and I’m saying this while chuckling a little bit, but Erin and her husband aren’t chuckling, they’re just staring off into the world of Cops in this thoughtful drunken awkwardness, but I don’t feel awkward at all, in fact I feel really good, sipping green liquid and chain smoking, and then Erin turns to me and says, “What about your wife? Do you guys fuck a lot?” And I’m like, “Uh, maybe like once a week, I guess, I don’t really keep count, you know.” And she stares at me with this dumbfounded look on her face before saying, “Really?” And I sort of shrug and focus my attention back on Cops, but Erin won’t let it go, she says, “I don’t believe you, call her and get her over here,” and I’m like, “OK, sure, the more the merrier,” so I text my wife, who had just put our daughter to bed, “Come over, we’re having a blast,” from my perspective, and she replies with something like, “I guess, give me a few minutes,” because she never liked Erin to begin with, thinking she was weird and dangerous even from the first time we met her, which she was, but I naively believed myself to have a good handle on dangerous people, thinking they were interesting in an at-least-I’m-not-like-that sort of way, so we sat around in the open garage, watching Cops, waiting for my wife to show up.

A few minutes turns into like ten minutes and Erin gets restless, she turns to me on the couch and says, “Where’s your wife? Did you really ask her to come?” And keep in mind she’s heavily slurring her words, which I’m not really capturing in the quoted dialogue here. And I respond with something like, “She’s slow sometimes but she’ll be here.” But Erin won’t let it go, “But it’s been like two hours.” I check my watch and say, “It’s been like ten minutes.” And Erin abruptly stands up and heads out of the garage, so I get up and follow her, just kind of going where the night takes me, heavily fucked up at this point but still forming memories and coherent. Then Erin says, “I’m going over to your house, I’m knocking on the door.” And, knowing my wife really doesn’t like Erin, I’m like, “Just wait, she’ll be here in a second.” But Erin keeps going, and I keep telling her to wait, until eventually I somehow convince her to wait, at which point Erin starts walking back into the open garage, and as she passes me, I joke, “Besides, if you go on my lawn, I’m gonna call the cops on you.” And that’s when Erin’s demeanor totally changed.

Suddenly, and in what I drunkenly perceive to be completely out of fucking nowhere, Erin activates goblin mode. She turns to me, glazed madness in her eyes, and says in the most raspy and serious voice I’ve ever heard, “What the fuck did you just say to me?” And me, cognizant of her goblinesque shift but too drunk to really understand the gravity of it or care, I repeat clearly, “I’m going to call the cops if you step on my lawn,” even though I had no intention of calling the cops, as I was merely joking, and I’m no narc. And that’s when Erin lunges at me, hands outstretched. She grips my neck with both hands and starts squeezing at my throat as hard as I imagine she possibly can. But I am unfazed, because she’s actually quite weak, totally unable to choke me, so I just look down at her, because she’s also quite short, and I say, “What are you trying to do?” At which point I can tell she’s intensifying her grip around my neck, but I still barely feel a thing, so I lift my hands to hers, grip them, and say, “Can you stop?” But she doesn’t stop. She just keeps trying to choke me out. I don’t remember exactly how long this lasted, but at some point I considered just pushing her off me, though I decided against that because, even though I was drunk as hell, I still had sense enough to know that Erin, being a total drama queen junkie, would likely spin my self-defense as some sort of assault against her and try to get me arrested or something, so I just stood there while she weakly attempted to kill me. Then my wife showed up and saw the whole thing happening in real time, so she yelled something at Erin, who let go of my neck, then my wife and I got the hell out of that goblin den as fast as humanly possible.

When we got home, my wife and I debated on calling the police, reporting the assault, but I convinced her otherwise, because I didn’t want to start any drama. We ended up just deciding to never associate with them again. But the next day, Erin, who had our phone numbers, texted my wife with this whole made-up story of how I was actually talking mad shit about my wife and she, Erin, was simply trying to protect my wife’s honor, which absolutely was not what happened, so needless to say, we ended up blocking her phone number and never speaking to her again, although my wife does covertly call the police every now and then when Erin’s out there in her driveway screaming her head off like a Goblin Queen at three in the morning for god knows what reason, even though I advise against it, the whole calling-the-police thing, because it’s already awkward enough having to avoid her all the time, and no matter how many times the police are called, it doesn't seem to change her goblin ways.

Because, to this day, late at night, if you listen closely, you can still hear the Goblin Queen’s heinous screeches echoing off the vinyl siding of the suburbs.

american taser

Aug. 20th, 2025 09:44 am
regalecidaer: (Default)
[personal profile] regalecidaer
I just woke up from a strange dream, a dream in which I had just found some long-lost alternative version of the American Psycho movie on the Internet Archive that was more like a game than anything. Choose your own adventure, like the Goosebumps books, multiple endings and everything. I went down this crazy route that ended in Bateman getting tased and shot by the police for a rather insignificant crime the viewer (me) set him up to do! He didn't even get to kill anyone yet! That was it. It was funny.
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
[personal profile] pauraque
Set in a future where the galaxy is dominated by a massive colonialist corporation called Umbai, this complex space opera novel centers on Nia Imani, the captain of a commercial freighter. Nia is an emotionally guarded woman who has trouble making and keeping connections, but when she meets a mysterious boy whose escape pod crashed on a farming colony planet, she finds herself drawn to him. But he also captures the attention of a powerful figure within Umbai who believes the boy may unknowingly hold the secret to instant teleportation without relativistic effects, which could revolutionize space travel and further consolidate corporate control.

Time distortion is a theme running through every level of the book—literal, figurative, structural. Relativistic time dilation heightens social disconnectedness, as a space traveler who leaves a planet for mere months of their own time will find friends are decades older when they return. A person may live for hundreds of years and remember ancient ways now lost, yet find the spectre of their past mistakes still painfully present. The book's narrative style reflects this warping of time's fabric, lingering in detail over certain moments but at other times fast-forwarding through years in a paragraph. All this underpins the exploration of connection and loss, as well as questions of how many times you can start over, what you bring with you, and what you leave behind.

I found the first third or so of the book to be the strongest. Like Jimenez's second book The Spear Cuts Through Water, it paints a clear picture of the universe as made up of diverse and interconnected lives, where the camera could turn and follow anyone and find a story just as rich as the main protagonists'. I also appreciated the deeply anticapitalist and anticolonialist themes, which reminded me of Ann Leckie in the way the human costs of imperialism are built into the story.

The book is extremely ambitious for a first novel, and in the end I think it reaches a little beyond its grasp. After a while the epic scope, large cast, and unconventional pacing began to make me feel that some aspects were rushed and underexplained. Sometimes we don't see a character for a long time, and by the time we rejoined them I'd lost the thread of what they were doing and why. There are also some characters whose motivations are never revealed and some plot questions that are never answered, which made the last section feel like a shaky landing. When I noticed there were only thirty pages to go I was like, "How the hell is he going to wrap all this up?" and the answer is he kind of didn't.

I found The Spear Cuts Through Water more fully realized and satisfying, but he wrote that after this, so if trends continue I'd say he's on the right track. I'll keep an eye out for what he does next.

(Content notes include child abuse, torture, climate change apocalypse, and the fact that the title is literal—the worldbuilding involves the extinction of all Earth's birds. 😭)

Letter A, and two questions

Aug. 19th, 2025 08:16 pm
asakiyume: (Iowa Girl)
[personal profile] asakiyume
Spent some time walking along the side of the highway today. I always feel strange and liminal when I do that because it's not something people generally do. The shoulders can be narrow, cars and trucks can be going fast--it's not set up to be walked along. It's a strange sensation to move through space in a way that no one is expecting you to. It can make me feel like I have superpowers: since I'm covering the space at a different speed, from a different vantage point, I'm able to notice things that otherwise don't get seen.

Like today. I discovered this Letter A lying on the shoulder:

Letter A in blue, with a blue border, carved on a piece of wood

It's 3.5 inches by 3.5 inches by 1.25 inches. From the front it looks like a child's alphabet block, but only one face is carved and painted, and it's not a cube. And it's pretty roughly made:

bottom of a block with the letter A on it

a block of wood at an angle so you can see three sides of it

Questions:

What do you think the original purpose or use of this Letter A was?

What, now, should or can the A stand for?

Diary: Too Much of Nothing

Aug. 19th, 2025 03:01 pm
degringolade: (Default)
[personal profile] degringolade

I am sitting at the desk/kitchen table looking out at a blue sky. I am reflecting on my recent bout of bitching concerning the price of coffee. I need to get over myself.

Look, I have been saying for a while now that things can't keep going the way they were going, and now that a minor player in my life is changing, I get all weepy and butt-hurt and waste time complaining about "how things are nowadays". Hell, I might as well start listening to Rudy Vallee and reminiscing about the "good old days".

Sorry about the inconvenience.

Islanders (2019)

Aug. 18th, 2025 01:02 pm
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
[personal profile] pauraque
In this casual strategy game the goal is to accumulate points by placing buildings in a model town. Each type of building earns points according to what other buildings and resources are nearby, suggesting the city planning process—houses want to be placed near the town center and other houses, but not near noisy industry, etc. It's less a city builder than it is an abstraction of what you do in a city builder, reduced to its most basic elements.

player places a lumberjack hut showing points gained and lost from nearby buildings and trees

This game didn't do it for me. I love city builders, but for me just placing buildings isn't enough to hold my interest, at least not as it's presented here. I can do object placement puzzles that are completely abstract and arbitrary like Tetris or something. But if we're calling it a town, then I want people in it! I want to manage traffic and resources! I can see from the positive reviews that many players enjoy the simplicity and find it relaxing, but for me it's so impersonal that it feels sterile, and I found myself getting bored quickly. It has good reviews so I guess I'm just the wrong audience for it. It did make me think about how I don't respond just to the mechanics of a game, but also to the setting where those mechanics exist and what I want to see in that setting, so at least there's that.

Islanders is on Steam, GOG, and consoles for $4.99 USD.

Diary: Another attempt at learning

Aug. 18th, 2025 03:46 pm
degringolade: (Default)
[personal profile] degringolade

I am gadding about intellectually. If I were 18, I would be accused of ADD because I bounce around and try to fill in gaps in my education/knowledge. If I were still eighteen, I would be accused of not having the laser focus needed to "make something of myself" and thus not be a "useful member of society". But since I am old and society has wrung it's danegeld out of me already, I can do what I want.

Last time I used my hard won SALC (program at the local third tier university that lets geezers attend for free once you pay the $25.00 entrance fee) to attend an in-person class on the subject of Ottoman history. I was significantly less than impressed by the Instructor (really, the guy showed up the first day wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, I shuddered when I saw it, even now, I shudder again at the mere thought). The students were the same flavor of undergraduate idiots that I was when I was in the 18-22 y.o. range. As I hold no real desire to re-live an excellent part of my life that is now buried, I found the whole experience made me bilious.

This time I will be doing something a little bit different. I have decided that I am going to take a pretty thorough look at the fin de siecle and the Decadents of the late 19th and early twentieth century. Simply put, I think that we are?/will? be going through an analogous sort of period. But I don't think that I will be able to understand if I just go and start studying that period. Luckily, this quarter the school is offering an upper division course in early modern (just post renaissance) French history that will be a good starting point.

I am of the probably mistaken belief that societies are defined by both their pasts and the minority desire to change the current. It is a constant battle with societal inertia whose direction cannot be understood without understanding the 500+/- prior years.