MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Eleven

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY ELEVEN:  INCORPOREAL

TITLE:  MAD MALWAR3 GIRLZ ROOOL

CHARACTERS:  Colleen Crash: a Trans Computer Hacker Type, ANи1KA and M0NiK4: Sisters who also Hack, or Virtual Illusions?

PREMISE:  In some unimaginable dystopian version of our world, the most obvious con man and fascist thug in human history has convinced half of america he’s harmless and the other half that he shits gold, thus acquiring enough power to rewrite anything that was worth a shit in the place.  Within this impossible world of banal evil that is just so soulcrushingly tedious nobody would ever want to write a story about it, god it’s so boring, the only life and liveliness must come from hacktivists and gay weirdos.

THE HOOK:  Colleen’s best friends in the CYb4Rsp8s are the sisters ANи1KA and M0NiK4, altho there is some risk of the friendship blowing up because both sisters wanna get with Colleen.  Or are they even real?  Maybe they’re a cheap sex fantasy that escaped from her mind.  Maybe they’re cointelprobots, sent by the NSA to lure her into federal prison.  Or maybe, they’re a new life form, on some Ghost in the Shell type shit, wanting to bone Colleen into a Brave New World.

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Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Ten

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long; looks like I’m gonna go all the way with it.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY TEN:  DREAMER

TITLE:  M-74S

CHARACTERS:  Sra. Seagrave: a Bureaucrat of the Dream World, Sra. Grijalva: a Dreamer.

PREMISE:  Señora Grijalva is asleep.  She fell in love at first sight, as you do in dreams, with an elegant lady working the office of Dream Bureaucracy.  To have excuses to get back in line, get to her window, to see and talk to her again, she takes it upon herself to perform increasingly arcane bureaucratic tasks – getting licenses for her pet licenses, special ordering sub-certified copies of her passport application application, etc.  Heartless monster Señora Seagrave isn’t making it easy for her.

THE HOOK:  The last and worst form is M-74S, which needed so many stamps and signatures, Sra. Grijalva’s sleep is nearly at an end by the time she has it completed.  The form needs an extended private review by Sra. Seagrave, which is everything she’s been fighting for.

But as she wakes up, the world begins to disintegrate.  It feels like she’s dying, like she can’t make sense of anything.  Sra. Seagrave realizes the affection was mutual too late.  Or does she just seem like she does, because dreams forget their own rules as they draw to a close?

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Life List: White Cockatoo

Which white cockatoo?  Hell if I know.  Apparently there are a number of white cockatoo species kept in captivity.  I suspect the ones I’ve personally seen were sulphur-crested, but white cockatoo / Cacatua alba is possible as well.  They’re fairly large parrots, comparable in size to corvids, and among the more intelligent animals in the world.

Unlike corvids, parrots come equipped with some powerful tools – a beak and strong hands with two opposable thumbs.  These powers combined have them tearing up anti-bird spikes like some antifas going after hostile architecture, as well as opening trashcans – which, again, can help other urban birds do their thing.  Also famous for dancing to Backstreet Boys and screeching at horrific volumes when mildly neglected.

I sometimes watch one on yewchoob, owned by video game musician Hideaki Utsumi.  It’s not his most famous bird, but it shows up.  Very mild mannered and quiet, which suggests to me it is well treated.  The one time I’ve seen a white cockatoo in person that I can distinctly remember, it was doing that shriek – nearly identical to one I’ve heard in a smaller cockatoo species, the cockatiel, but a lot louder.  That was in a tiny pawn shop in downtown Everett, where I was buying a cartridge of the original Tetris for a newly acquired Game Boy.

That was twenty years ago.  I don’t see much of these birds.  But they’re pretty cool.  If any of you have cockatoo stories to tell, have at it in the comments.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Nine

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY NINE:  MUTATED

TITLE:  MY LOVER IS A CYBER SLIME

CHARACTERS:  Ethaniel Sangaré: a Solarpunk Power Engineer, Houssain Horowitz: a Slimy Machine Boy.

PREMISE:  Surprise threequel to Laser Boys and Rose Gold, wherein the cybermetropolis destroyed many times over has come to flourish.  From the wake of the Rose Gold System escaping the control of Brycine Cybernetics and destroying the city, it also helped build the city anew.  Rose people formed a utopia, where photosynthesis provides all the nourishment and power needed by the survivors.  They found themselves with less aggression, fewer health problems, and a mild demeanor that lent itself to founding a new world based on peace and brotherhood.

THE HOOK:  There is always a seed of destruction within life.  Ethaniel Sangaré was a good rose boy working in power engineering, along with his lover Houssain Horowitz.  But Houssain fell into the oily black machinery that lurks beneath the sunny pink surface of the facility, and the machinery – originally designed by Brycine to infiltrate and augment human bodies – mutated him into an oily shape-shifting machine boy.

He has the power to separate into smaller copies of himself and re-merge into one, and uses this to make weird love to Ethaniel.  All’s well that ends well.  Oh, and he destroyed the city again, with slime or something.

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Eight

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  This year, I’ve been trying to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, there are advantages to doing it the older way.  There’s a lot less control of where and how the text is placed, and what it looks like.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY EIGHT:  MINUSCULE

TITLE:  THE PERFECT ROSE

CHARACTERS:  Lidiya Volitsyev: a Little Old Gardening Lady, The Rose: a Horrible Human-Plant Hybrid.

PREMISE:  Surprise sequel to The Heterose are at It Again, wherein the spawn of Ricky Washington’s transgression against the natural order have gotten out into the wild.  But those seeds don’t turn into rose people unless grown just right, and there is a lot of variability to them.  Some are just a rose that looks kinda like an embryo in the wrong light, some are a disembodied hand surrounded by petals.  But the best gardener is rewarded with The Perfect Rose – that looks like a little lady.

THE HOOK:  Lidiya cares for the rose through the course of its life, and when it starts to go rosewild like its mother had with Ricky, there’s no hetero option on the scene.  This Rose learns to love the one she’s with, in age-appropriate ways during the course of her limited life cycle.  Good girl.

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Dreamposting: Ejection Seat

Ejection seats are things you only ever see in older media, like cartoons from my youth, or the even older war movie genre that influenced them.  They showed up in my dream last night, which -unusually- had a punchline.  Not much of a punchline, but we’ll get there.  It began as a dream about embarrassment and titties and the usual business, but evolved into a movie of the nebulous post-apocalyptic scifi dystopia common to cheap scifi in the ’90s.  Let’s say the stars were Gary Daniels, Billy Blanks, and Shannon Tweed.

Billy and Gary are new in town, part of a quasi-military organization that took over with no resistance because there was no local government.  Shannon’s people welcomed their new overlords, and she was showing Billy around town.  She kept getting pestered because she owed her boss a debt that could never actually be paid off, company store style, but muscle boy was a good distraction in the meantime.

The invaders set up bombs all over town for reasons, and had to use them with little warning to destroy the place.  There was just barely enough time for people to evacuate, and they did.  But Billy and Gary got held up past that last second, and needed to use these experimental ejection seats.  Something manufactured by their employer, but never tested.

Billy looked Gary in the eye and said something like, “it’s been an honor working with you sarge,” and Gary is all, “at ease soldier,” you know, tender affection.  Then they looked at the sky and pulled the lever.  It shot them up and away from the city.  Did the parachute open?  Did it get enough altitude to escape the explosion, and to catch enough wind to slow their descent?

Cut to a distant shot.  The ejection seat has disappeared from sight, and two fifty dollar bills are floating on the wind, away from their presumed crash and death.  Shannon gets the money, thinks, I’m homeless now, but this’ll help with my debt.  Her boss surveys the destruction of her city and sez, “you realize you owe me for this.”

Wocka wocka wocka, roll credits.

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MonsterHearts 2025 – Day Seven

Don’t Miss Posts.  This MonsterHearts, I’m also having one regular post a day, if you should prefer that kind of thing.  Just look at the posts before or after this one.

MonsterHearts is a 14 day event (named after a pervy RPG) wherein my writing group votes on a monster each day to include in a story concept.  As we march toward Valentine’s Day, the theme is supernatural romance.  For this first few, I’ve tried to just use “edit” mode in MidJourney to iron out irregularities, even trying to make a legible title in the AI program.  While it’s cool you can now hammer the hands and text into shape, there are a lot of disadvantages to doing that, as opposed to just photoshopping what you need to fix, or placing your title just so.  Surprised I’ve kept up the effort this long.

MONSTER HEARTS DAY SEVEN:  CELESTIAL

TITLE:  THE SYLPH

CHARACTERS:  Earlene Roberts: a Teenage Child of Vagabonds, The Sylph: a Spirit in a Tornado.

PREMISE:  Earlene’s parents Clifton and Lil Hominy Roberts were hope-to-die alcoholic stormchasers, who didn’t bother sending her to school, having filled out a couple of forms to pretend they’re homeschooling.  And they were homeschooling, in how to do citizen science in the worst possible way.  Earlene din’t know shit about fuck, and was barely literate, but she did have the foolhardiness to dance in the path of a tornado.

THE HOOK:  Earlene became convinced there was a spirit in the sky that sometimes came down through tornadoes, and wanted her to know something.  She kept pushing her luck, making her parents proud, until she flew away forever.  But she was right, and lived happily ever after.  Somewhere.

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Sieg Fvck All Y’all

I heard about the event but I’d never have seen the moment itself, if a tumblr I follow hadn’t thrown it in my face.  It’s a lot less ambiguous than I’d have imagined from the words apologists and wemblers used to describe it.  Side-by-side comparison with some non-trillionaire neo-nazis is informative, hidden under the fold because yuck.

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