100 Words on the Topic of Mars vs Antares

These topics can be cryptic, but wikipedia is my dogg.  I found a connection.  “If Antares was placed in the center of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in the asteroid belt.”  Let’s do that.  Place the red star Antares in our system, and see how Mars fares…

Maybe Mars had it coming.  War sucks.  There’s a story where Hephaestus caught his wife Venus boning down with Mars, tossed a net over them, and dragged ’em around the world.  Let the fires of Antares light up the cosmos with Martian ruin.

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NOTE:  I have one last post I owe, 2000 words.  No time left tonight, I’ll see y’all late tomorrow.

Funds, I Raise Them

My fundraiser to make up for dental expenses is at 81% of goal.  Now would be a good time to make any last donations because it takes up to 3 days to transfer from paypal to my bank account and my ugliest bill comes up Thursday, which is the day before I get paid.  Also paid 30 bucks for a tetanus shot tonight.  Life is funny.

Anyway, scroll down to see the all the posts I have written to order here, whose titles start with word counts.  These types of creations can be yours, for the low price of 10 words to the dollar.  Plz donate thx.

I had to pay close to $700 unexpectedly which is gonna make all the bills that come due before I next get paid extra painful.  So I’m hastily raising as much as I can within two weeks.  If I go over target, I’ll put any excess toward paying down some of the thousands in credit card debt I racked up from the same dental shituation.  Donate and I will write you a blog post on your topic of choice, containing ten words for every dollar you donate.  If you chip in a few bucks you can get a haiku, right?

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250 Words on the Topic of Loki as God

Somebody suggested I could meditate for a moment on what it would be like if Loki were behind the mask of the christian god.  What an obscure concept to be into, Norse mythology of all things.  It’s not like there’s some global media conglomerate spamming culture with a contemporary representation played by a conventionally attractive rich white guy.  How does one even get into these things?

At the core of the request is the concept of dystheism, and I’m grateful to whatever wikipedia editor linked that in the “related articles” section of Loki’s page.  What if the abrahamic god was a malevolent prank?  That might explain why god is nowhere to be seen – Loki was captured by his fellow æsir and squirreled away until doomsday, when his bastard children will bust him out of jail and destroy the world.  We’ll see Loki again when the soup goes down, possibly rocking stigmata and a crown of thorns.

Sometimes Loki’s pranks were for his own ends, sometimes he was badgered into using his powers for the pantheon, like the time he was impregnated (mpreg) by a male horse.  On one level, Loki playing Yah;_;eh demotes our lord of creation, but on another level, it empowers him, because he’ll win in the end, right?  And just like in Revelations, we’ll all lose at the same time.  If xtianity and the Great Middle East Hatepit are the creation of a prankster god, congrats to him, but it doesn’t change much for us.

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100 Words on the Topic of Humility

I mentioned recently that art school was a humbling experience for me.  Humbleness, or humility, can be a good thing.  Humiliation not so much, unless you’re into that.  Think I know a girly on that tip, perhaps not aware how much she injects that into her fiction writing, haha.  Then there’s the related topic of the humblebrag, which is somehow nothing to do with the line from Weird Al’s Amish Paradise that “I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art.”  I’m losing the plot.  Think, McFly!

Pride goeth before the fall.  If you have too much faith in yourself and your own excellence, reality can catch you by surprise.  This is what happened to our mans DickDawk.  He went after the low hanging fruit of christian literalism, let the baby atheist kudos convince him he could do no wrong, and when he showed his ass on the issue of feminism, was completely astonished by the response.  People could take issue with meeee?  But I am the golden boy!  I am the special one.  I’d just say, don’t forget your own fallibility, and when you become aware of them, don’t forget your actual failures.

The more you know.

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EDIT: I lost track of what I was doing and this ended up being 200 words.  Failures abound!

250 Words on the Topic of Hugs

Got some gentle sympathies in donation message, but again, barely anyone has been suggesting topics to write about.  Makes me wonder if I should be running a different incentive scheme.  Anyhow, Hugs.

When is a hug appropriate?  The USA is one of the more physically removed countries in the anglosphere.  Broadly speaking, people here don’t hug anyone they don’t know outside of full-on emergencies, like consoling a person whose baby got blown up in a car accident.

And the people who are allowed to hug?  Women.  It’s gendered.  (Queerness definitely complicates the picture, but bear with me.)  Men can’t express physical affection for each other outside of Arnold Schwarzenegger / Carl Weathers arm-wrassles.  One can get unused to physical contact.  That was me, for a long time.

If I’m not expecting to be touched, I jump.  If that happened to me when I was a kid, it was going to be violence.  As an adult, it’s my boyfriend being affectionate, not noticing that I wasn’t noticing his approach.  Then he feels bad about it, and I’m like, aww no boo, it ain’t you.

So I got to where the only way I wanna be seen, when I can control the circumstances, is lady-presenting.  I don’t do it at a grocery store or the office, but I do it at remote meetings, the FtB Poddish Sortacast, and my pics around the internet.  This being what people see of me, I find some people are treating me the way they might treat a lady, which is kinda cool, but also can make me jump when I don’t expect it.

Pay it no nevermind.  Hug on.  Especially cyber-hugs.  Why should I balk at that?

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500 Words on the Topic of Hellraisin’

My donors are so shy and unimposing.  I have a guess who one of them is, and if I’m right, he might like a word about cenobites…  Jeezis Shit, I just went searching for the origin of the quote “Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me” and the entire internet thinks Rihanna came up with it.  I heard that shit in junior high and I’m forty-seven years old, so … time travel?  I was thinking, maybe Andrew Dice Clay, but that didn’t come back with anything.  Why can I imagine it in Woody Allen’s voice?  Somebody help me.

Anyway, sexy menace.  Tearing your soul apart as a euphemism for the ecstasy of orgasm.  Chains and blades and hooks with a life of their own.  The black-eyed priests and nuns and less specifically gendered clergy of Hell, in sexy leather clothes, ready to give you the business.  You know you want it.

Something about the cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (original story Hellbound Heart) is just sooo iconic.  They are gods among monsters.  I’d love to come up with something that hits the same way, but is it possible?  Is that kind of idea just lightning in a bottle?  Were they a Platonic Ideal just waiting in the realm of Forms, and Barker just happened to be the first guy to pluck them from that airy plane?

There’s the seeker.  Frank “Come to Daddy” Cotton and his ilk.  Somebody chasing a high that can only be found in transgression, and there’s never enough.  Then there’s the box.  Beautiful, elegant, small, activated by touch, by curiosity.  The cracks in the world, admitting the power of Leviathan.

Then there’s the Apostles of Pain.  The cenobites.  Love those guys.  I’m not into S&M, not really, but the look of it all?  Very cool.  I like cool things.  I like the aesthetics.  Total poser, I know.  I remember being in The Metro on Seattle’s Broadway buying leather accoutrement, and the clerk asked, “Stocking up for a good time?”  I felt so uncool.  Whaddyagonnado?

I guess I could seek the box, do that fiddly hand jive, unlock the lament configuration, and get my cool on.  Or my flesh off, whichever happens first.  I’ll be like the doctor in Hellraiser II, “To think, I hesitated!”

I came up with the core of a formula for trying to arrive at the power of Icon in monster design.  Come up with Sinister Themes of the monster, Visual Motifs, Colors, Shapes, Textures, Powers, and Places associated with them.  You can see some mention of it here.  I still haven’t successfully used it to come up with anything interesting.  Just never got around to it.  Maybe on another one of these posts.

For now, this post will just be a note of admiration for the creation of a master.  Maybe when I’ve sold my screenplay for Gun Lemurs and made a bank full of money, I can buy the time to pursue my own immolation.  To earn that charisma.  Wish me luck?

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1000 Words on the Role of Satan in US Religion

A donation with a topic, fantastic!  What is the role of Satan in current American religions?

What I want is a metaphor.  A role as a personified archetype.  To contemporary US christianity, is Satan a brother?  A gadfly?  A nemesis?  A lover?  Maybe we can arrive at this through observation.

To start with, few actually believe in Satan.  The first poll I could find says the number is closer to 60% than to 50% but I don’t fuckin’ believe it.  That’s belief from the mouth, from the top of the head in survey mode.  What’s in your heart?  Is there really a supernatural nemesis to your god’s designs, tempting people with forbidden pleasures?  Aside from me, I mean.

There’s an analog for that in something my bf told me about.  Somewhere on internet, republicans were grousing about the stolen election and a troll appeared to say, “Hahaha, I was a voting booth volunteer and I threw out millions of republican votes, teehee.”  They tutted at him like, “Oh you darn rascal,” but didn’t seem nearly as mad as they should be.  This is their boogeyman; this is what they believe happened.  Or do they?

Likewise rizzless stooge Candace Owens tut-tuts about the devilish queer menace of the Sam Smith-Kim Petras joke jam “Unholy,” but something in her performance is so lackluster.  Oh you kids, playin’ at satanisms.  You won’t think it’s so fun when the devil comes to collect his due, which is totally gonna happen…

I just don’t believe them.  I’m sure some smaller percentage of USians are for real about fearing The Adversary, but they’re too busy abusing children and stockpiling weapons to participate in polls.  Gods-peed, christian soldiers.  Anyway,

The Church of Satan have formalized this relationship.  You perform your belief in Satan and we’ll perform the part you have written for us.  It’s a shame the high-ups are just nazi fucks who tricked rebellious progressive types into paying for their vacations and incompetent pet lawyers, because they give lip service to promoting all the good things that US xtians despise.  But who cares even if they were actually cool?  They’re lesser court jesters with no impact on the larger society.  I just mention them here as a cultural phenomenon that shows how shallow the belief in Satan really is.

So what role does Satan play in modern US religion?  A less important boogeyman to keep children in bed.  A scarecrow that is absolutely covered in crow shit.  Nobody of consequence.  That cousin who you talk shit about but still invite to the party, maybe hoping they’ll do something scandalous for gossip fuel, but it just never happens.

I kid, I kid.  Hail me.

No, seriously, I’d like to personally freak every human being in the Unholy video except for the dirty dirty boy the song is about.  Hit me up Sammy.  But the end result is inarguably less cool than Lil’ Nas X’s performative unholiness.

On the other hand, Sam Smith and Kim Petras aren’t American Satans and Lil’ Nas X is, so…  I am reminded now, thinking about African Americans, of the expression, “Not today, Satan.”  It’s a way to dismiss the temptation to act the fool, I think usually through violence.  Satan can be in the person tempting you to “go upside their head,” or maybe just be the part of one’s self that feels temptation.

This is one key difference between Satan in US christianity and Satan in, say, US judaism.  In judaism it seems like HaSatan is a figure from the past, or a metaphor, or just generally unimportant.  In christianity (as practiced more than in the book itself), he’s an omnipresent mirror image of god.  Similar powers, only differing in that Satan is destined to lose at the end of time.  At least for some people, Jesus is there when you wanna be a good boy; Satan is there when you are drunk or jackin’ it or whatever.

I guess the belief in both is pretty situational.  A christian is more likely to feel like Satan is real if they were exposed to bad situations.  I’m culturally christian, much as I reject that entire deal, and it colors my perception of evil when I encounter it.  I’d like to reverse that in my head.  Why should an anti-christ see devils as evil?  Brainwashing, man.  Like when I sip my pop during the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” shit before movies.  (For more on my feelings about deviltry, see this article.)

There are some who believe we’re in a new era of “Satanic Panic.”  Looking over the article on the ’80s version, I don’t buy that.  QAnon definitely takes a lot of cues from that era, but it doesn’t get serious play on mainstream TV.  Fox might like to fondle the Q balls, but they couldn’t bring themselves to work the shaft.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are no cases recently where conspiracy theorists have managed to prosecute people for trafficking christian babies out of pizza parlors, without getting laughed out of the courtroom.  Nothing on the order of the McMartin preschool trial.

But maybe we can get there.  The republican parts of the USA are drowning in wild garbage ideas, with no light to be seen.  So getting back to my original aim, taking all these things into account, what role does Satan play?  The wall non-fundies will have their back against when fevered right wingers start shooting again?  Windmill giants to their Don Quixotes?

My personification of Satan must be a cipher, a passive figure onto which ideas are projected.  A scapegoat?  A ghost.  A person who exists more as an idea than an entity.  Let’s say religious America is an abandoned child, who wonders about her parents, builds theories about them.  Daddy God must be good, Mommy Satan must be the wicked harridan who left you in that garbage can behind the church.  One day Daddy will find you and set things right.  One day you will find Mommy and make her suffer.

Satan is whoever you want her to be, America.

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100 Words on Metamorphosis

Got a donation with a suggested topic I don’t quite understand.  I wonder if it’s a sex thing.  Phrased, “A butterfly/artist go-lightly. ;-),” it contains evocative words.  I got evoked.  Let me answer it as impressionistically as it hits me…

A butterfly, an artist, go lightly between lives, between colors, between forms. Yea tho any given moment be as solid as a chrysalis, what lies within is the fluid that bridges one unknowable state and the next.

Know me now?  Think again.  Know me in another minute?  Keep guessing.  My love and my passion are colors of light that oscillate through bandwidths beyond your limitations.  Transmutation, alchemy, coagulation, dissolution, thesis and synthesis, these words are pathetic feints at the meaning that underlies my life.  Take my heart if you dare.

This has been a metaphor for butt stuff.  Thank you.

200 More Words on the Topic of GMing

Baseball dude Ken Griffey Jr. once did a rap with Seattle rapper Kid Sensation which referred to piece-of-shit Damon Wayans classic In Living Color character Homey D. Clown’s catch phrase “Homey don’t play that.”  I’ll always remember this, tho it sux tremendous: “Girls with attitude, yo, don’t even say that. Forget about it homey, cuz Griffey doesn’t play that.”

Speaking of girls and play, my BF had a funny anecdote from the Who’s-Gonna-GM Wars.  Went to play D&D with some relative strangers and one of them had a new GF who didn’t really understand the game, and ended up GMing.  First interaction:

Baby GM: “There’s a door in the hall.”
PC: “I open it.”
Baby GM: “OK.”
PC: “What’s in there?”
Baby GM: “How should I know?”

I heard about a better GFGM who rolled a random encounter with a giant gar in a hallway, and not knowing a gar is a fish until after the beast made its appearance, conceded that it must already be dead.  Free XP.

Do GFs always suck at GMing?  Of course not.  Just how things shook out for us.  Ladies who have GM’d for bro-ish PC groups, how did it go for you?

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