RP by Comment 00003

note:  this is still open for a few new players.  these posts will be in addition to regular posts, so just hit previous to see the usual post of the day.  previous post here.

Already some cool kids were planning to indulge in the city’s night life.  The folly of youth.  Meanwhile, the tour continued into a building full of laboratories, where there was little of interest that they were allowed to see.

Josh came back to Ilmardan and Kaldonia.  “Turns out Humuk is too shy to go to clubs.  Still figuring himself out, I think.”  Kaldonia laughed quietly.

It was hard not to want an escape of some kind, a daydream to distract from the dreary reality around them.  The place looked even less interesting than the average high school – more like an office space of buzzing lights and clicking keys.

They came into another courtyard, this one adjacent to a cafeteria and featuring a heavy mechanized gate which would be used for access by utility vehicles in off hours.  It had a smattering of graffiti and a mostly occluded view of people walking by out on the street.

Ms. Selber sorted the large pack of freshmen into two concentric rings for some awkward ice breaking games.  Everyone had to say their name and answer a specified question to the closest person in the other circle, rotate, introduce themselves and answer a different question for the next.

Kaldonia was with Ilmardan for the question of “What’s your major?”

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this is still open to two more players.  “urban fantasy,” setting is a generic high fantasy world which reached the modern era, at college you can major in accounting or alchemy.

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President Cal Worthington

There used to be a legend among used car salesman, and many of you may have remembered him the instant you saw the title of this post, even if you haven’t thought of him in thirty years.  Cal Worthington was the classic disreputable piece of shit motherfucker in that field, which I can reasonably infer from the fact he got ran out of entire states on rails, for burning too many people.

Or maybe some other crime; I don’t know the whole history of the situation.  I just know that’s not the kind of business that normally involves moving every few years and living out of hotels.

He had memorable commercials.  You can probably remember the jingle if you’re old like me and from one of the states where he ran the operation.  Cowboy hat, exotic animals that would all be referred to as “his dog Spot.”  When he was in Washington his dealership was in the last city I lived in, which he called “Federal Way, the only way.”

Anyway, if we’re gonna have a blatant criminal for prez, whose shenanigans were well-known decades ago, why can’t we dig up that guy?  He’d probably get his face ripped off by a chimpanzee before he wore out his welcome too.

Cal Worthington for president.

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Life List: Luzon Bleeding Heart Dove

note: my RP by Comment is still open for 2 more players.

Is it kosher to put a zoo animal on your life list?  I’m going to have to if I keep doing a post every other day like this.

I believe this was at the Wichita Zoo in Kansas.  They had an indoor aviary when I visited a like four or five years ago?  Lots of fancy characters in there, and the Luzon bleeding heart dove is not the fanciest.  But he was special, because he had gumption and temerity.  He had gotten into the “airlock” between the aviary proper and (maybe not so) sweet freedom.  One joker leaving the door open a moment too long, and he would have gotten out.

Fortunately this was a fairly spacious antechamber, so the bird man of wichita wasn’t a split second from the door at any given moment.  We all got in without incident.  It was just amusing because this is a pigeon-acting pigeon, strutting around on the ground like any you’d see anywhere in the world, but y’know.  Exotic.

Is Luzon the largest island of the Philippines?  I think so.  Fresh from that very catholic and conservative country to our own crappy bible belt, it’s a humble dove with a splash of red on the chest, like he received some biblical punishment or sacrament.  Mary wept a blood tear on his chest.

Speaking of bleeding hearts, at my condo there is a bleeding heart flower on the back porch that grows ridiculously well.  The soil there looked like a pile of cigarette ashes turning to clay when we got here.  Vile.  Everything hated it.  But this plant, every year dead back to a pile of broken yellow tubes, blows up to be much larger than a man, elegant pink flowers all over it, and looks pretty decent for a long time.  We tried to tame it this year with tomato cages, but who knows if we’ll succeed?  Life… finds a way.

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Primary they Asses

My union talked me into writing to my representatives thru a web form, and the responses have trickled in.  Clearly just had a machine or intern look at the subject matter vaguely and send robo-reply.  On the web form all three required an honorific but the senatorial old ladies only had mr. and mrs.,  while the congressdude had other options.

For the senators I chose mrs. but also used masc legal name.  First senator with a robo reply “corrected” it to mister.  Kinda like, fuck all y’all.

I’ve said before I’m ok with dems taking some bad deals when they’re in the weak position, negotiating however they can to reduce the damage of nazi policies, but if they act at all like they consider a demographic an acceptable loss, or worse, show enthusiasm for nazi ideas like fuckface newsom, we must brutally primary their asses back to whoville.

And if the dem establishment rams a shit candidate through?  I think they’re a few decades overdue for a riot at their convention.

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Life List: White-Crowned Sparrow

I believe I’ve mentioned these guys a few times.  I started paying real attention to birds for the first time around 2006-2008 while living in Seattle.  I started paying real attention to bird calls after that, when being priced out of Seattle landed me in Federal Way, in the company of northern flicker screeches and one distinctive spring song that I came to recognize as the white-crowned sparrow.

Dweeet-dweet-wipwipwipwipwip.  That’s the impression it makes, but there are subtleties and variations, and the call frequently doesn’t make it to the last -wip because they will shut up if they feel nervous or distracted.  Incidentally, lots of animals will do this.  You don’t think of frogs as having an opinion about people, but if they see you looking for them, they will go silent.  A tittering bush full of bushtits, likewise, will shut the hell up if you come close.  It’s uncanny when you can’t even see the animal.  You got closer specifically to find them after hearing their sound, and then the sound stops.

Not as much of a problem with white-crowned sparrows because they’re fairly bold, living in open fields but also the kind of small trees you find in and around parking lots and sidewalks everywhere.  And in mating colors, they’re fairly distinctive – at least by PNW standards.  Strong black and white head stripes, bright yellow beak.  Larger than chickadees, smaller than robins, and they are easy to spot feeding on the ground.  Hello there.

I read once they’re considered crop pests in California.  Don’t care.  Let the birdies feast!  I kid, I kid.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?

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Prison Labor Will Set You Free

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

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Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

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RP by Comment – Still Open

Note:  This is a bonus post.  Hit “Previous” to see the scheduled post of the day.

Read the previous RP post and its comments to see what’s going on here.  I still have room for two players.

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The orientation guide continued with some basics about the neighborhood – the nearest public park with sporting facilities, directions to the largest public library in town, the hospitals, etc – before getting everybody in motion, following her with trudging little steps around the campus.  The names of the different buildings – after this and that donor or trustee – were a wash of meaninglessness to the non-humans among the freshmen.

As they walked down a long hall, where Ms. Selber mentioned some of the classes being taught, many of the freshmen talked among themselves.  Kaldonia kept on.

“What kind of music do you like, Ilmardan?  I could tell you what clubs play it.”  Why were lizard madonnas so interested in the elvenoid species, he might wonder.  The fashions didn’t hang on their bodies right.  The languages were a little off in that mouth full of uniform, sharp, curved teeth.

Some nearby humans looked judgmental about it, a hip aloofness probably inspired by the social terror of being new.  A male nymph drifted along nearby them, feet barely touching the ground, loose sky-colored curls floating around his shoulders.  He wore a stickball shirt, hipster jeans and shoes, and a little backpack over one shoulder.  There was some room to wonder, did nymphs owe their existence to the wild realms like elves, or the higher realms like giants and dwarves?

An orc jock tried not to step on any people and almost failed when a halfling got underfoot.  That little guy was some kind of raging nerdlinger.

Yup, any kind of weirdo might be in this company.

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How about you?  It’s urban fantasy.  You’re in community college instead of the big leagues, for some reason, but it’s a place where you can start learning how to chuck fireballs or wield a zweihander, so … excitements?

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Life List: Turkey Vulture

I’ve seen a turkey vulture once with clarity, tho my memory of it feels so weak and incoherent.  It was eating roadkill and we zoomed past it and out of sight in a split second, on a road trip I don’t recall with people I don’t recall.  Was it with my bro and my tech support guy?  Was it with my husband and his mom?  Was it with jeremy and brandy?  My dad?  Pretty sure it was in Washington state somewhere between Tacoma and Vancouver WA.

Other than that, I’ve seen a lot of them in Kansas when visiting my brother.  Down there they circle just like in the cartoons, but I don’t know that they’re specifically circling dying creatures.  They seemed to be circling hills at the sides of the highway… the highway with lots of roadkill coyotes and deer.

At that distance however – from the highway on a sunny day – they are so many black Vs floating in the sky.  Were they actually turkey vultures or black vultures?  Turkey vultures are more common in the places I’ve been down there, so I’ll assume they were.

Turkey vultures are in that New World vulture genus Cathartes.  They’re very different from Old World vultures, but still part of the eagle and hawk clade, Accipitriformes, if I got that spelling right.  Once upon a time some clever characters names Sibley and Ahlquist came up with a gene testing method that didn’t need sequencing, which wasn’t as advanced then as it is now.  They put chromosomes from different species together and observed how closely they married up – again, if I got that right.  Using this method, they arrived at the idea Cathartes grouped with storks.  The idea had a little staying power, tho it turned out to be wrong.

I think turkey vultures look kinda ill compared to Old World vultures.  Their head seems too small, too weak.  And with the red-pink flesh, they kinda look like they’re partially skinned.  Cenobite-ass freaks.  Black vultures are extremely similar but the mercy of having black skin on their bald heads makes them look much less nasty.

Not that I wouldn’t pet one, given the opportunity.  I like creachers.

Apologies to people who would prefer I fact-checked or researched these things.  I think it’s more fun to freeball it and have a smarty correct me in the comments.  Or just give me your vulture stories below!

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The Beautiful Dream

I’m a classic amurrican striver.  An entitled colonizer.  A zombie to crapitalism.  I’ve got this asinine notion that if I just get my hot amazing sexy ideas out there, people will jump on them, and I will make a bank full of money.  Be positively swimmin’ in ducats.  Doubloons.  Krugerrands.  Simoleons.  Smackeroos.  Showering my flesh with gold dust and blood diamonds.  Getting a miniature robotic Lamborghini to chauffeur my stretched Lamborghini around Lamboville.

I kid, I kid.  I genuinely don’t give an earthly fuck about wealth, do not want a single one of those things.  But I do want the ability to take it easy, to know that I and my loved ones won’t be ruined 5eva from a single run of bad luck.  I want security, and in this country, that’s expensive as hell.  So I want just that much, and then I’m chillin’.

The place where my zombification comes in is this:  On some primal reptile level of my brain, I can’t help but believe in that dream – that completely baseless delusion – that if I just do the right clever thing, I will get a windfall.  My merit will shine through and I will get all the money I ever needed.

Until the inevitable day when this dream is utterly disproven to me personally, it will continue to drive my ambitions.  I am thinking about this because I fucking hate the day job, and was recently approved to return to full time hours at it, which means my spare time became a lot more rare and precious.  So what should I be doing with that time, to fulfill the Beautiful Dream?

The project I have that is closest to completion is The Septagram, a urban fantasy adventure with dark elements and a lot of humor.  It’s one of my longer books but a little slight in length for a fantasy novel, about 100k words.  One of the main characters is asexual, another is gay, and the others mostly don’t have any cause to fuck, so it’s not very commercial.  Also, the genre was inspired by Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Wicked City and Darkside Blues, mashed up with a contemporary american setting, so it’s not very familiar territory for most readers.  Nonetheless, it would be the easiest thing to get completely finished and out the door.

I have a project in the Dan Brown thriller model, which is much less gay and experimental, while being similarly adventurous, called The Refinery.  There’s a lot of writing left to do on it, but it is intentionally commercial.  Even came up with a butch pen name for pitching it, haha.  I plan on finishing the first draft of it this July’s novel writing month.

I have a magical realism literary fiction thing, barely more than a novella at 50k words, but with one of those clever concepts that get people interested, and a lot of humor.  It’s called Swine and Camus and the first draft is complete, but the second draft is gonna involve a little heavy lifting.  Still, could be it’s got legs.

I have a cheeky scifi adventure about 75k words called Centennial Hills, you might recall.  How well do you think that thing would sell?  Two greyliens come to Earth and have edgy experiences.  A fictional stand-in for shitty etln mvfk features in it significantly.  The final draft of this one wouldn’t be wildly difficult.  I don’t see any structural editing or original writing being involved.  Should be a quick one.

I have a complete short novella called Mitosis – a take-off on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a trans woman as the main character, set in a 1990s college campus.  A dubious metaphor for gender dysphoria.  I’ve actually pitched this one to a few dozen agents with no bites.  But a lil polish and I would likely self-publish.  I thought the edgy concept would win some interest, but this has not proven to be the case.  What about you, though?

The Vaccine Scene is pretty close to complete as a novella, and despite the cheekiness of the concept – Reefer Madness with vaccines as the drug – it has become rather emotionally intense and literary.  Wouldn’t take much longer to finish it.  Would it be worth my time tho, financially?  Or just to catch people’s attentions, build that career?

My most heartfelt and epic story – Rent is Theft – has a completed first draft around 135k words.  Again with a trans woman as the main character, magical realism, urban setting, some heavy issues, some humor, a style that involves a lot of storytelling within the story.  Call it literary fiction.  Capitalism is the enemy.  But could this sell?  The next draft will involve a lot of rewriting and new writing, making it a big effort, and the concept is very uncommercial.

Of course, I can also ditch literature and finish my screenplay Gun Lemurs, which is pretty damn decent, if you ask me.  These days, however, hollyweird is not valuing original writing like they should.  I doubt this will go as far as I’d prefer.  Still, I get the feeling screenwriting is a less crowded field than literature.  Or am I completely wrong on that?  Cursory googling suggests I am.

As far as how I sell it, I had a bad time pitching Mitosis and am not going to pitch a book with queer main characters ever again.  The fuckos say they want to see that represented, but they’re full of shit, as evidenced by what actually gets published.  I’m going to pitch The Refinery and if I can’t get anywhere while selling out my identity and chasing trends, I’m done with seeking traditional publication altogether.

That gets me to the problem of how the hell to sell shit.  All of the markets are flooded with garbage from dollar-chasers and spambots.  Getting seen requires advertising.  I’d drop a lil dosh on that, but not anything outlandish.  I’m not doing too well financially.  Like, let’s say $600 could get my ad seen by 40,000 people for a few minutes.  I might consider that, just to see what the results are like.  Let’s say it’s a lot more expensive or being seen by the population of a USian suburb only gets five bucks worth of sales.  I’d never do it again, try to find some other kind of angle.

I once thought this blogging angle might be a good way to flog some products, but my audience is maybe a hundred people and of those, how many would buy something?  The profit margin on books is chump change.  Twenty sold is not enough to justify cutting my hours at work.  Ain’t gonna get me interviewed by chucklefucks on yewed choob.

What would jeezis sell?  What would people buy?  Holler at ya comrade.

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Life List: Rowdy Cocks

Note:  I’m still interested in replies to the post before this; check it out if you have a moment.

Who’s that yellin’ in the background?  It’s a rowdy cock.  The domesticated junglefowl.  I’ve called customer service and reached somebody in the Philippines with roosters crowing in the background.  As a customer service monkey I’ve received calls from Philippines, Hawaii, and the US southeast, all with roosters in the background.  You’d think a species with so many members over such a broad range might have more drift in its vocalization, but that shit is quite consistent and unmistakable.  Good job, cocky boys.

Most of the times I have heard that call from a live animal were on the phone, but a few times have been in person.  The most recent I remember was on a visit to Lake Hylebos, when roosters were lurking in the bushes near the entrance.  Never heard or saw them at Hylebos after that.  The birds looked smaller in real life than in my imagination.  The video game Sekiro has ones the size of a dude.

I never really thought about it before recent years, but how amazing is it that in ancient BCE domestic chickens made it from Southeast Asia all the way to Europe?  Global trade when many were far from understanding a global earth.  It really provokes the imagination.  If chooks got to Etruria from as far away as Funan, what other kinds of people and creatures could be hanging out in places one doesn’t expect to see them?  Might have been a very colorful world.

The Rooster is one of my least favorite songs by Alice in Chains.  As I’ve mentioned before, there was a spot on the tape of Dirt where you could pause and flip to skip both Rooster and Junkhead.  I remember the notes.  Two rounds of uwus.  The Cockatrice is the name of my big gay fantasy RPG that doesn’t exist yet and may never come to fruition.  Haha.  Fruit.

A cockatrice (as my character Jen would say, a coskalips) is worth note.  A lot could be said about it.  By the time it was invented, chickens had become ridiculously important to the world.  Eggs, eggs, eggs, and to some extent, that meat.  That means male chickens were not needed in large numbers.  You just eat ’em and let the best have all the gallies.  But what does that mean, psychologically?  Maybe nothing.  In more rural times and places people are less perturbed about slaughter.  It’s easy for me to imagine a medieval person feeling weird about cockerels tho.  Maybe the ones you killed come back for revenge.  Maybe one could be born from union with serpents and poison your eggs.  There were a lot of evil horse stories too.  If this animal is necessary, perhaps the need itself is a thing to fear.

I’m not interested in talking about the horror stories and calamities – especially incipient calamities – related to factory farming.  Or the folksy stories about how your grandma sliced and diced them.  There’s plenty of room for that elsewhere on the internet.  These posts are for talking about birds as interesting critters.  Chooks are pretty interesting little beasts.

If you need to know where I stand on eating them, yeah, I do it.  One of these years I should get over that, but damn.  Some emeffs are too delicious.  Factory farming is indeed a nightmare on every level, again not talking about it, so I’d be better to not do this.  My compromise on meat for the moment is that I’ll only eat beef on special occasions, or if somebody puts it in front of me.  By weight beeves produce the most carbon.  Non-ruminants put out much less gas.  In the future I may revisit that, may stop eating meat, but that ain’t now.

You know who has some interesting articles about chickens?  Darren Naish, of tetrapod zoology fame.  That is all.

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