Limerick Time

There once was a man from Nantucket.  What happened next will warm your heart…  I kid, I kid.  But I have no idea for a post, so I’m gonna bust a limerick, and invite any of you who so dare to drop your own in the comments.

There was a blog bunch atheistic
Who did not find gods realistic
Asked what they believe
The world has up its sleeve
They simply replied it ain’t mystic

Eh… I dunno. Trying again…

There once was a nasty orange creep
Who had a debate with the veep
She just had to stay cool
While he acted the fool
Now his candidacy lies six feet deep

Counting chickens, I know.
Well, I’ll give y’all a turn…
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Flippin my Coin

One of Batman’s enemies is a guy named Two-Face.  He used to be a good guy but half his body was grodified and he resorted to crime.  But he flips a coin to decide if he’s going to be good or evil on a given day.  This worked against the impact of a certain Cormac McCarthy character.  Anyway, I just noticed something that has me flipping my Two-Face coin.

On the day I did “Manoposting” I wrote three articles.  They were pretty cheesy, but still, three posts is more difficult than one.  On that day I got the highest traffic within the last few weeks.  The second highest was when I had “hentai” in the title of my singular post.  This poses a moral test.  Should I do more posts to garner more attention, or fewer posts with clickbaity titles?

The second one, of course.  I love taking the easy way out.  Now, I didn’t title this post Batman Yaoi Bondage, but I did put the words in the corpus of the text, yea, that I might reap the internet searches.  If you found Freethought Blogs by searching for Batman Yaoi Bondage, apologies that I did not provide that which you seek.

But have you ever considered that atheism could be the way and the light?

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Fake it til u Make it

There’s a bird species I think in New Guinea that, in response to brood parasitism, developed a trick whereby they can actually communicate with the chick inside the egg.  “Shave and a haircut,” and from within the egg, “Two bits” – or you get chucked out of the nest.  (sorry don’t remember source)

In order for that trick to work, the chick needs to know the proper response by pure instinct, doesn’t it?  Maybe not.  Maybe it works by teaching the eggy the song, then checking for the trained response on each return to the nest.

Kinda ruins where I was going with this.  I was thinking about language, and to what extent it can be inborn or has to be taught.  Bouba/Kiki notwithstanding, all of human language is constructed (and under construction lol).

It’s artificial, and that can be easy to lose sight of, perhaps moreso for the monolingual.  Good writing feels like it speaks directly from one heart to another, no barriers to understanding in the way.

It feels like that, but it’s a trick.  The words the author chose might not perfectly convey their intent; the reader may infer things wrongly due to their own biases.  Both sides can put in a good effort to speak and to hear, and with cultural common ground and education, probably get pretty close to spot on.  But you never know.

Which I’m thinking of as a writer.  When you’re writing, sometimes it comes out very natural and easy.  Sometimes you feel like the world’s biggest faker – not an imposter syndrome thing, but an awareness of the artifice of every technique you are using.

I don’t think there’s a good solution to that issue.  Some days it’ll be like that; some days it won’t.  But when you’re feeling fake, keep pushing through.  You might find when you come back to read that writing later, it feels effortlessly clear.

Or not, and you can edit or rewrite, whatever.  Just be aware, the best writing in the world is artificial too.  Bon courage.

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Mary Worth Hentai

Sorry to not deliver on the promise of that headline.  It was just another case of sidebar vandalism, on my part.  Not that I’m morally opposed to horny fan comicking about syndicated nosy cartoon grandma Mary Worth, but it’s more effort than this post requires, and I’d probably get another FtB Ethics Committee called down on me.

My dude once observed that bro-ish young artists all seem drawn to making horny or violent versions of innocent characters from the comics, the cartoons, children’s TV, etc.  It was certainly a recurring theme at the art school I went to.  This has a ye olde tradition in what were once called “Tijuana bibles,” where you could see Popeye and Blondie get it on.

I am not going to sit here and tell you that I haven’t drawn Blondie and Dagwood knowing each other maritally, and that as Dagwood went for a post-coital sandwich he wasn’t turned into a zombie by the reanimated Calvin of And Hobbes fame.  But is that a pursuit worthy of an artist’s gifts?

Sure.  Why not?  I once dreamed of starting a project where I’d take a random comic strip and continue whatever situation was happening past the punchline into a pornographic scenario, doing my best imitation of the drawing style.  Might actually work in reverse too, having the porn culminate in the events of the strip.  Still, never got around to it.

Anyway, a hearty welcome to anybody who found FreethoughtBlogs dot com by googling “mary worth hentai.”  Have you considered if atheism might be right for you?

Take off your shoes and make yourself at home.

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they don’t stop believin

still trying to keep this one-post-per-day streak going.  what to say next?  i’d like to get away from grim topics and controversies.  hmm…

i should really be atheisting more often on this blog network.  lessee, how does god not exist today?  physically, spiritually even.  culturally his binch ass exists more than i’d prefer, but in every other sense, this being doth not be.

seen a person recently suggest that some particular form of propaganda might hand the election to the creep.  i dunno.  but it got me thinking, in conjunction with a post on mano’s and with remembering that christians exist, what drives orange voters?

ah, a depressing topic.  can’t escape scylla and charybdis.  oh well; we press on.

religion for one.  not the religion of young jeezy, but of the creep himself.  i think the majority of repubs are not his faithful.  they’re just “values voters” who see human rights in terms of winners and losers, and they want to win.  but he does have his faithful, and it’s kinda wild to behold, from the outside.

talked to a few in the course of my job.  they include no small number of rfk jr types – liberalish democrats for whom the right to medical woo is the only thing they care about, people now embracing naked fascism because it came with the freedom to spend your life savings on snake oil and die from ultracancer.

they include people who just picked up all the nonsense he was laying down, gullible enough to not see the overt dishonesty.  he says he’s the only guy that can save america from the wily messican horde, get you the jobs you bigly deserve, protect your children from whatever whatever.  why would he lie about that?

and of course, they include Qanon die-hards, with the full suite of completely upside down beliefs.

deprogramming cultists ain’t easy.  it’s not the sort of thing we can do on a macro scale, which is a shame because creating cultists can be done in that way.  wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to how we can fight that.

in a way it’s a shame they aren’t the majority of his voters because some of them are actually compassionate at heart; they just bought a very twisted pack of beliefs regarding who needs protection from whom.  is it worse to be a fascist because you are full of hate, or because you are able to believe complete absurdities?

i’m just glad we seem to be doing well at the moment.  here’s to keeping that going.  may the believers in orange weep citrus tears in november.

with this, i return to doing my level best to not see anything election related for two and a half months.

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humorzzz

i’ve been occasionally percolating on a ttrpg of my own design and, being a very appearance-oriented character designer, i’ve been thinking of ways to formalize / systematize one’s relationship with subcultures that could influence a character’s clothing style – gothery, metalness, alternateeve…

this sorta stuff gets mixed up with occultism, alchemy, pseudoscience, so all that is to say, i’m figuring out which of the four humors punk rock would express.

i think on this, laying back in my bed, and catch myself snoring.  this is a preview of my life at the nursing home.  could be worse.

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AIeee

people in another place i hang out online have been chewing on AI again.  the terms of the discussion from leftosphere are as follows:  it sexually harasses, steals from artists, and destroys the environment.  everybody who uses it is both an embarrassing incompetent human joke, and also an evil capitalist scumbag out to destroy all that is good in the world.  these are the articles of faith, and the beginning and end of that discourse.

as somebody who is usually 95% agreeing with all discourse lefty, to be the horrible sinner don’t feel great.  i’m crouching in the outer darkness with my evil magicks, sustaining my lichly existence on the marrow of virgin bones, jealous of those allowed to live in light and beauty.

or maybe not.  the hAIte is so thorough on the left that it also provides an interesting way to measure the boundaries of popular left beliefs.  i increasingly see people who look at the same situation, look at that same discourse, and wonder “whut in ternation are they goin on about?”

these, i think, are the same people who do not quite understand most of the shit very online people are into; people who spend more time in culturally mixed company, more time away from keyboards.  i could get fooled by the flow of my days into feeling like online is the whole of human thought, and seeing that dominated by certain noisy opinions, feel like those are the end of the story.

in the real world, the revolutionary labor-saving power of AI tech is too good to ignore.  people will use it, for good or ill, and eventually it will be so mundane as to no longer provoke the pitchforks like this.  i’m keen to get there.  this fruitless conversation is tired as hell.

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Die Microsoft Die

Big agreement with commenter Bekenstein Bound here, windows has gone off the fucking rails into enshittification and they are extremely fucking due for a market adjustment.  You know what the biggest thing keeping me away from linux was?  Getting used to a new UI.  Smart phones that change UI every two minutes have taught all with a tiny shred of tech savvy to overcome that flavor of hesitation.  I wonder…

The other side is program incompatibility.  Most of the programs most of us use are exclusive to the windows-mac oligopoly.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if win or mac could be emulated more safely and effectively than running the original dogshit OSes themselves, as a bare bones nested thing to run those exclusive programs, or at least pirated versions.  Anybody know the subject enough to offer opinions on this one?

On a related subject, I’m earnestly wondering how long the US government is going to be able to continue using windows.  The OS has gotten so fucking rotten that at some point, crucial systems absolutely need to be on more reliable software.

Still have trauma from Win 11 defaulting to uploading my entire shit to a cloud the second I started up.  I “disabled” it, but still have to live with daily reminders they want me to do this.  Fucken hell.

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Soulsborneringkiro Games

U might be aware there is a genre of video games spawned by the Japanese company From Software, famous for both difficulty and for weaving a spell over players with oppressive atmosphere and heavy vibes of baroque desolation.  This began with the Demon Souls and Dark Souls games, to which have been added Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring.  They called them Souls-likes for a minute, then Soulsborne genre, and now?  Whatever.

I have been put in mind of them a few times lately, most recently when some video game media named Elden Ring as the best game ever on their top 100.  Is it the bestiest?  I’m not gamer enough to find out, but I’ve watched some people play it on youtube.  I’ve watched a number of these games.

I swear I had something to say about them, but here I am trying to compose my thunks at 2:00 in the morning, tired enough to die but not quite able to sleep yet…

A uniting element of these games, at least the FromSoft originals, is that your character is basically or explicitly already dead.  The “multiple lives” aspect of video game unreality is given an excuse:  This guy can keep coming back because he’s just a phantom.  I think that’s a big mood right there.

Anyway, what do y’all know about these things?  Any experience playing them?  Just interested in the aesthetic like my poser ass?  Discuss.

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Insert Saved Payment Method

I’ve been doing one post per day for a lil bit now, but I’ve come to the bottom of the shallow well of my random-ass thoughts.  Figured I’d let y’all know what’s going on in my life.  As I went to title the new post I saw the keyboard on my cell suggest I fill in a saved payment method.  Can you imagine me posting that?  Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Not really; I got nothin’.  So, why am I posting from a cellphone?  My future husband’s new $1300 computer is a pile of shit and we’re trying to use the manufacturer’s warranty.  I dropped it off with fedex saturday and it probably hasn’t been picked up quite yet because of the holiday.  I expect when lenovo’s contractor in texass looks at the thing, they’ll call me to say it’ll cost seven hundred bucks.

I give my dude my computer because he needs it more than I do, but I can’t type for shit on my cell, so it’ll be a minute before I do any more ambitious writing, like finishing Centennial Hills.

Meanwhile I have to wonder why I have such dogshit luck buying computers over $1000 in value.  Both times I’ve done that, they were fucked up from go – worse in some ways than computers that cost more like $300.

I think the last one saved money on the phat processor by using substandard parts in other ways – most crucially the wireless, which had connectivity issues with then-current router tech.

This one sat in a warehouse for three years before purchase and had random shit wrong with it so diverse it was probably a motherboard issue, like it got exposed to high heat in AZ and slightly melted, I dunno.

How in the fuck do you buy a low end gaming computer that is worth a shit?  Has never happened for me.  Swore off HP after that and another went bust, side-eyeing the fuck out of lenovo at this point.

I’m not the kind of person that can plunk down several k once a year just to have my shit work right.  Any advice?

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