Abortion Action Nonsense

I had a dream that started with people talking about a young lady who just had an abortion.  There was some sensitive discussion about whether she was going to attend thanksgiving with the folks, about her feelings, and about how people should respond to her presence, help her feel okay without pressing the issue.  Sensible shit like that.

But instead of a family dinner, the imagery pivoted to that of a a quasi-futuristic nightclub with black light and strobes.  The girl was dancing, when another group of young ladies invited her over to talk.  Suddenly the music stopped and the lights went up -focused on our young protagonist- and the mean girls started saying bullshit like “you tortured your baby.”

At first it seemed like she was going to cry, but then she started beating their asses.  As Carl Douglas said, everybody was kung fu fighting.  Guns came out, seemed like the cheap end of action show from late ’90s TV or cable.  Somewhere between Johnny Mnemonic and Cleopatra 2525.  God that show was weird.

There was an older lady character, I think, myself?  My perspective shifted a lot in this dream.  I was a Carla Gugino type.  I tried to protect the young lady, to have her back in the fray, but I kept getting attitude.  This led to a pivotal confrontation, during which I told her that a judge had reversed a decision, that a crime she had done was no longer considered self-defense, and now we were both wanted for murder.  The mean girls were actually bounty hunters.

The young lady was like by idgaf, and the action started up again, blasting and karate kicking and running around.

I lost track of the young lady and went third person again, following different tracks of the fight.  Viola Davis was there, in a role more demon than human, walking down the hall setting death traps in these sci-fi pods as she went.  A monster fell into one of the traps, and she used long steel claws to rip out its eyeball.  She was smiling and babbling to herself as she moved on to another trap.  I have to say, the cheese and meat in those traps looked pretty damn tasty.

I was trying to get away and stepped into an elevator that I hoped would be empty.  There was a corporate dude there and he got word on radio that there was shooting in the building, that he needed to escape.  He presumed I was a security guard for the building and asked me to protect him.

I used this as cover for my escape.  I believe the original girl escaped by transforming into a white serpent with patches of orange and black goldfish scales, and swimming through murky water.

I don’t remember anything else about the dream.  Anyway, shows that my inner attention span for gentle human drama is highly limited, but I could do whack action movie bullshit all day.

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The Tapout

life too hard for daily blogging.  did not manage a year of it.  sure was an interesting ride, at least for me.  the thing that made the most practical difference in my life was making myself listen to new tracks by The Dead Milkmen.  that changed the rotation on the radio station in my head some.

i’m too tired to do this tho.  it’s over!  see u whenever i get to it.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

zzzz.

zz.

Release the Beasts

i was chris pine with more scars, in a 1980s-ish tv miniseries about ghetto seattle under futuristic fascists.  i was buff and resistant to damage, so a hero of low-key resistance types.  i started with amnesia, but found out my name, and used it combined with voice recognition at a government computer terminal to recover information about myself.  turns out i’d been a nazi commandant in a corny uniform, and there was video of me being executed in an electric chair.

i used the access i gained to get into a secret hall of the building.  i walked past hospital orderlies and nurses that looked just similar enough to be clones, with the youth and looks of models, but not prettied up – casual and sinister looking.  there were creepy bodies on gurneys, doors open to bright unknown rooms, and as i neared the end of the hall, stacked monkeys recreating ghoulish poses from baroque art.

at the end of the hall, an evil old lady sicced flying monsters on the masses.  they flew past me and i ran after them, leaving the facility.  i helped some people i know survive the onslaught, and some bystanders and poultry as well.  the poultry included a hoatzin chick that was very clingy.

one of my homies was a psycho™ clown, but a nice one, which gave him super strength.  he used it to help fight the monsters.  then the fascists activated a sleeper cell of super crones in our midst that has been living as regular grandmas (inspired by cookie clicker?).  we had to beat them to death as well.

there was a lot more to it, but it’s fading fast.  overall artistic impression of it was somewhere between jacob’s ladder and V and a lightly solarized 1960s stop-mo horror film and mannerist painting with goya witchcraft themes.

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Rewrite This Fvcking Song Plz

“A teenage dream’s so hard to beat, every time she walks down the street.  Another girl in the neighborhood, wish she was mine, she looks so good.  I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight, get teenage kicks all through the night.”

Behold, some shitty socially acceptable pedophiles.

My problem is that this song is so damn good.  Musically.  Fuck the lyrics a lot.  The music to this song rules ass.

That is not true for “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” or “Young Girl.”  We can file those songs in the hall of shame, never listen to them again, and nothing of value is lost.  “Teenage Kicks,” on the other hand…

Somebody rewrite this song for me, please.  Thank you.

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alright, i dunno how old feargal and the gang were when they performed this, and one could say he’s doing a character, and the treacly-sounding creep in HBSS was just a few years older than the girl, whatever whatever.  the extent to which teenage girl sex appeal has been played up in music, doesn’t leave me feeling very generous about it.  i’ve known more than my share of dudes who are hung up on the sex appeal of teenage children.  one could, in theory, have that hangup and still power through it to be a decent person, in the way you conduct yourself.  reserve it for the life of fantasy, yadda yadda.  in practice, no, you get grown men trying to seduce teenage girls – and succeeding way too often.

letting this kind of messaging be acceptable was a big mistake.  you shouldn’t be able to say “teenage girls are so sexy” without getting looked at like the slime that you are.  certainly you shouldn’t be lauded for it.  fucken hell.

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Three Times Three Eyes

I recently saw some guys talking about aphantasia and it got me wondering about how much of our internal lives is misunderstood because words fail to fully communicate just what’s going on in there.  I could easily imagine somebody assuming they have aphantasia because the images in their mind aren’t as sharp as a photograph, they’re more the idea of an image, and – at least this is my understanding – aphantasia is a more profound lack of ability to visually imagine than that.

In that same conversation a guy mentioned his inner voice being different from his own when he was a child, and that’s funny to me because my inner voice doesn’t even have a voice.  The thoughts are verbal, but they don’t have a sound, as the pictures I call to mind are ideas of a picture that are incapable of approaching the fullness of any object beheld by my waking eyes.  There’s nothing abnormal in this, I’m sure.  I can imagine visual things, as an idea of the visual – very distinct from an actual image and very hard to put into words, as an experience.

These subjects are ripe for a comment fest where a bunch of people chime in with their own sense of imagining and their own experience of thought.  Hit me up.  But this is one of my alternating day posts, where I hew to set themes, and I’m gonna wedge this one into Dreamposting.

I have different levels of sleep, which might correspond to neurological states, or may just be different flavors of the standard REM.  But those flavors are quite distinct.  Typical dreams I’m wandering through sketchy environments having plots play out in slightly incoherent ways that follow repetitive versions of waking experiences or plots from tv, movies, video games, etc, or are inspired by such.  There may be some striking images that arise, which I describe in these kind of posts.  What I perceive as dreaming at a “deeper level” is more intense.

That’s where cartoons are more likely to appear, such as the dream where I was Homer Simpson trying to run from the Independence Day aliens.  Images can make less sense there.  I’m also more likely to notice disastrous or intense things in the sky or other elements of the environment.  Ships moving too fast at the horizon, multiple suns, volcanoes or nuclear blasts that fill the whole sky.  Gore is more bizarre, people living through deformities or mutilations where survival would never be possible in real life.

I can’t easily think of a specific dream where this particular phenomenon arises, but it has happened many times in the past – more often when I was younger – and I just wanted to talk about it for a moment.  Basically, in the middle of a dream I notice there are unusual numbers of a given feature on a person.  Three to five eyes is not unusual, or multiple tits, too many or not enough fingers or toes (no tired AI joke here plz).

The funny thing is that if you asked me to draw a person with multiple eyes while I was awake, I’d place them in more sensible positions on the skull.  In the dreams, they are always in the same horizontal line with the regular eyes.  The most common way this appears is a third eye in between the usual two.  This magically has no impact on the shape of the nose.  There really is no sense of underlying anatomy in these situations.

Even though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that in a dream, and I can’t be positive it was a feature of deeper dreams, I believe that it was.  The reason?  In those dreams I am never aware that I am dreaming, and when I’ve seen multi-eyed people, I never questioned it.  I had no emotional reaction at all, really.  The one of these dreams that I can sorta dimly recall more specifics about, I was making out with a lady who had these extra eyes, and I didn’t skip a beat in the kissyface maneouvres.

I was going to make a song reference here but even beginning to type the words annoyed me.  Guess which one.

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Can’t Tell My Husband

One day I randomly discovered that watered down coke zero tastes just fine, when served partially frozen or with a lot of ice.  Further, I found that randomly admixing other beverages to it lends a certain interest to the concoction, creating a kinder, gentler chalice of iggy pop.

My husband’s peculiarities are such that he never finishes his seltzer completely.  Waste not want not, I have taken to using the dregs of his seltzers to flavor my watered down coke zero.  This is disgusting to him, but he allows it.  But my newest transgression might be so odious that it provokes murdilation with extreme prejudice, and therefore it must remain a dark secret between you and you and you and I.

There is also at least some risk of foodborne illness.  That said, I’ve seen a guy regularly eat bananas that have turned completely brown and mushy – like that was his preference – and he never died, so here I go…

Last week I sliced an apple and I did not eat the whole thing.  It remained in the crisper until this week.  It wasn’t completely rotten, but it was a little off.  Random areas had become lightly discolored, and more peculiar, the taste was altered by proximity to a big bag of fire roasted hatch chile peppers.  Both the apple and the peppers were sealed in ziploc bags, but those peppers were radioactive.  This experience is like eating a radish with light sweetness and a healthy dash of green pepper flavor.

Why am I strangely compelled to continue eating this corrupted apple?  By the time this post comes out of queue, I will either be dead from the consequences, or alive and fine, despite my poor judgment.  Stay tuned.

Hello from beyond the grave perhaps.  I hope you’re having a nice day.

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Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

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When it’s Over

I’ve been pretty blithe in my attempts to make people feel less doomy, and PZ did call me out on it, in a sense, during the August podcast.  The main thing I try to tell people is that for most of us life will go on – the terror fascism inspires may not play out as dramatically in most of our own lives as we are anticipating.  If you look at people from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, there are a lot of travails but people still live life, every day.  This perspective becomes especially important as shitler puts us in the fast lane to economic ruin.  We’ll suffer sometimes, but we will live our lives, at least as well as all the people who have been living under tyranny and economic depredation all around the world.  However, sometimes, for some of us, doom is gonna happen.  What then?

I’m put in mind of this by all the comments on a recent post.  A lot of people have family members near the end of the line, or have that in their own headlights.  I was reminded of my mortality a few years ago during my first nbd-styled cancer situation.  As a philosophical materialist, I know what comes after this: a big nothin’, which I want to put off as long as possible.  And my neurotypical sauce keeps me feeling like most likely, that will happen.  There’s a chance I’ll die randomly at any given moment of any given day, but it’s a small chance, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll most likely be fine – even accomplish a few useful things before I go.  I just know, on a rational level, not even a minute of it is guaranteed, which is low-key depressing.

This is not to say I’m abandoning my anti-doomerism policy or even the earnest beliefs behind it, that for most of us life will remain tolerable for most of the path, that we gain nothing by living in terror and despair.  As I mention in the policy tho, I am occasionally going to point to dark truths, and this is one of them.  It’s something I need to address, because it points to what some might call a good reason to abandon the policy.

Sometimes you have to talk about your despair.  Arguably, sometimes you have to wallow in the ableism inspired by a world run by cruelty that defies all reason, by living among buffalo that are stampeding for the cliff.  First point true, second one maybe.  Neither of those are reasons for me to allow it here.  After all, Pharyngula is right next door and has no such limits.  If you need it, there it is.  And if you need to get away from it, here I am.

But what should I say to people for whom doom is extremely nigh?  I don’t know if I’m the guy to say anything to them.  My “dark realist” perspective makes me rather terrible at helping friends and loved ones through depression.  Sometimes at my job I have to talk to people who are dying, or have recently had loved ones die – sometimes their children.  I gotta keep it professional.  This isn’t a professional setting and I don’t have that excuse here.

Not everybody can be everything to everybody, and my pollyanna ways are a thin coat over a rather bleak point of view.  Best not to interrogate it.  Even so, I’m not lying when I say most of us are gonna be alright.  We’ll have pain and suffering, we’ll have ok moments, we’ll have life, the same as anyone has ever had.

There are many places in the world where that is less true.  Very sorry to those people, but we can’t all be thinking about that all the time, or life is over for us.  I expect that some people dying in pointless wars will die thinking, I’d love every last motherfucker living a life of ease to experience what I’m experiencing.  If I have to die, everyone should die.  I’ll forgive them for feeling that.  I’m a cranky bitch and I’d probably feel the same if I had to live through such times.

But I also expect there are people in Ukraine, Palestine, etc, who would not begrudge any of us trying to live life in peace and feel as ok as possible – as long as we do what we can to help steer our respective societies away from war and ruin.  Who are we beholden to, the angriest in suffering or the more kind?  What should we do?  Live in anguish and die in terrorist action against our tyrants and warmongers?  Or do what we can, within the limits that allow us to know the fleeting happiness we are allowed on this bitch of an earth?

When something scary or sad is going on, there are a million motherfuckers lining up to tell you that you are not scared or sad enough.  Let this blog be one place that calls bullshit on that.  Do what you can to make life better for others, as much as you can, but know your limits, and allow yourself to be as happy as is possible – in a world that is doing its best to make you miserable.

It’s Gloria Gaynor time.  I will survive.  You will too.  Until you can’t, and I’m sorry to hear if that’s happening for you.  I hope you can find solace and peace along your way out the door, as I hope I do when it’s time for me to go.  That’s all I can reasonably say or do for you.  Good luck to all, and a good life as well.

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Awkward Murder

This dream started with the usual kind of bullshit.  I was in the car, my husband behind the wheel bordering on a panic attack because he doesn’t know how to drive any better than I do, and we were trying to make decisions at highway speed.  I wanted to help him but I couldn’t make myself stop trying to explain the song “God Wrote Cum Junkie” to my homeboy Jeremy, who talks very little and was giving no feedback.

This transitioned into yet more of usual kind of bullshit, in bathrooms because IRL I had to go to the bathroom.  In this part I was a young doofus of the kind that must get his ass kicked and learn kung fu in certain movies.  Except in this dream, my destiny was to become a murder victim.  Martial arts gangster types (yakuza?) were going to murder me for an accidental transgression against Kung Fu Laws.

The dream switched perspectives to have me in the role of one of those gangsters.  The plot was supposed to be that I feel sympathy for the bozo who is about to get offed by my homies, and turn on them to save his life.  But I couldn’t get over my sense of honor to betray them, until it was too late.  On seeing previous me’s brutal death (lightly strangled and sawed open from stomach to sternum), I snapped and attacked my homies to avenge him.

Still in a filthy restroom, I quickly killed the guy who did the deed, leaving just the lady among my criminal colleagues.  I offered to just drown her as a mercy – less painful than what I did to the first guy.  She agreed and I started trying to drown her in the sink.

People kept coming in to use the bathroom, including a mom and her children.  It was taking forever to drown my homegirl, and the mom explained to the kids that there was nothing they could do – it would be like trying to save a baby bird that fell out of a nest.  Yakuza ladies getting waterboarded to death = the circle of life.

This felt grody but I also felt committed to the path, that I couldn’t make myself stop trying to kill her.

Anyway, this is the second time within a short while that I’ve had a dream shift to a different perspective, and from that perspective, watched my previous self get murdered by criminals.  That’s a heckuva recurring theme.

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No Thoughts, Head Empty

there’s this trend among youths on social media to speak in memes that self-deprecate the intelligence.  “no thoughts, head empty”  “two brain cells to rub together”  “smooth brain”  etc.  i dun’t cotton to it, son.  save it for your sons of superwholock discord.

but i genuinely am running out of shit to post – an experience kin to running out of thoughts.  the obvious solution would be to react to news, but fuck that noise.

probably within a week you’ll see my tap out post, then I’ll be back to my old ways – still more productive than 90% of the sidebar here, heh.

let’s see how much longer this baloney rolls…

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