Commercial Implications

Watching the streams of CW tv shows, they changed the way their video works so my adblocking software is no longer compatible, and I haven’t gone through the effort to resolve that yet.  So I’ve been seeing commercials again.  Commercials with weird implications and issues.  I might be missing something because I always have these commercials muted.

There’s some kind of treatment for anxiety and depression which I imagine is not approved for people assigned male at birth.  One of the commercials focused on this really pretty young lady, and you know how these drug commercials are – unnaturally beautiful light suffusing everything, delicate camera movements.  Porn wishes it had what they have, heh.  However the company branded this treatment “Hers.”  A surely unintended implication: depressed trans dudes get fucked.

so cute

There’s a commercial for this credit card that claims you can build your credit score by purchasing everything with it.  We rapidly follow a kinda sweaty unkempt young man through the stages of his life as the credit score improves his circumstances.  Weirdly they include a post-coital moment of relaxation as part of the narrative of him buying house – getting married – having baby.  Each stage has him or his lover expressing their thrill with “whoa” like faker Neos.  Anyway, implication: all those things denied to you young generations by the fathomless greed of the Capitalist Lich Lords?  Actually just a funny misunderstanding.  You weren’t building your credit score, and now you can!

There’s a commercial for an HIV medicine that says it can make your viral loads undetectable, and “U=U,” undetectable equals untransmissible.  Or it’s a weird emoji.  But the way they illustrate this is by having our cute successful young homosexual in a variety of social situations having brief moments of platonic contact with people.  He shakes somebody’s hand, passes a document, touches an arm.  And all while not transmitting HIV!  Amazing!

so cute

The weird unintended implication there is, of course, that HIV could be transmitted by all sorts of actually harmless things.  But the commercial would probably have a harder time getting cleared for TV if it implied he was having unprotected sex and sharing needles without transmitting HIV.

But that credit card commercial had implied fucking, so like, get creative guys.

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Fucking Poaching … Srsly?

Pornography.  Watch parts.  Dating services.  Quack COVID cures.  Mail order brides.  CBD products.  Roofing.  Drywall.  Bridal party planning.  Eyeglasses.

The constellation of services being pitched by spambots grows from time to time.  New to my spam traps – ads for people who want to kill endangered African wildlife.  Come on a poacher safari!  Shoot rare beautiful things while they still exist!

Readers of this blog, if I let that out of the spam trap, would you click the link?  Risk spywares and malwares and such for a chance at such a wonderful experience?  No?

I have a theory the outrage is the idea.  I’m supposed to see that and get curious about it in my anger, get suckered into contact with dangerous con artist types.  Or maybe they’re legit trying to give great white hunters tha hookup, for relevant fees.  Either way, that’s grody.  Thanks, fuckers.

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More TV Thoughts

If you’re on tumblr or a place that circulates screencaps of tumblr posts, you may have noticed a lot of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine images and memes.  If you’re an executive with rights to Star Trek content, you might be thinking – Yisss, paydirt, time for shitty DS9 reboot to cash in!  You are mistaken.  This is specifically a backlash against Star Wars going to hell in a handbasket.  I know this because I’ve seen a blog go from semi-ironic love for B-list Star Wars canon fodder to having zero SW and nothing but ST overnight, right around the time the mouse sharted out episode nine.

You’re begging for a backlash to the backlash if you go in like a greedlord.  I suppose you don’t care, but just understand this: DS9 Retread will not make money.  Not a bit.  Impoverished fandom dorkwads casting about listlessly after all the franchises and stars that they love turn to shit, these are not people with money to burn.  There’s hardly anybody left with money to burn.  We’re all wasting time dinking around on our phones until capitalism finishes eating itself and the survivors have to waste their time dinking around with radiotrophic fungus instead.

On another subject, Naomi never got any better.

Remember when Stargirl made superpowers look fun and amazing and comic booky?  Never gonna happen here.  Superpowers are just whatever you can make happen with actors standing around and glowy shit painted in with after effects.  It makes them feel like an abstract idea in a bad way.  In action adventure done well, the power or skill a character possesses feels like their desire made manifest.  I will defeat the bad guy.  I want it bad enough that I can fly.  The character motivations just don’t move anything and the visuals are so lackluster that’s all you have.  Actors are fine, doing the best they can.  The writing is mediocre.  The sense of anything “super” happening is fucking abysmal.

I might be just about done with CW superhero shows.  The flagship primo properties all ended their run or are showing their budget in the worst ways.  The writing of the newest season of The Flash is full of budget-shaped plot holes.  Even in the best of seasons that show spends too much time on maudlin tragedy.  The last couple seasons the main actress Candice Patton has been sequestered from the crew by writing excuses so much it feels like she must have beef with them or something.  It just has me tired as hell.

It’s just as well.  I got things to do.

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What the Cock is this Real ID Shit

Apparently 17 years ago the US gubmint passed a law that’s starting to take effect now-ish, requiring a extra-special super ID.  When I first heard people talking about this, I assumed it was a voter disenfranchisement scheme implemented by various states, but I recently found out it’s federal.  There’s a copy of the law here and I can’t understand every part of it, but I hear it’s going to be required for interstate air travel.  I don’t cotton to it, no sir.

Can anybody in the know explain anything I should know about this bullshit?

ETA:  One interesting requirement I noticed is that you’re not allowed to have a legal driver’s license in more than one state at a time.  You literally have to get one state DL cancelled to get another.  Ridiculous.

 

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RP by Comment

EDIT: RP BY COMMENT IS CLOSED FOR LACK OF PARTICIPATION.  You snooze you lose.

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I’m bored.

First three people to post a comment are the adventuring party.  I do all rules.  World is like in the “soulsborne” games, you can have some cheap combat powers but nothing amazing.  Should have some kind of weird signature weapon, like giant scissors or a sharp hat.  When you get bored of the game (or just want to make room for a player to replace you) let me know and your character will get an exotic death or reward commensurate with how long you lasted in the game.

Out of character or metagame comments in parentheses.  No more than one comment per person between comments by me, altho I’ll let you have a parenthetical out of character one if you really feel it necessary.  I might be willing to edit a mistake in a comment for you if you like.  I’m favoring past tense but I’ll probably slip up and I know most people prefer to RP in present tense, so whatever on that.

 

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

The spring felt like summer already, but what were seasons anymore?  The moon was somehow always visible despite the cosmically gigantic black clouds boiling around it, the air alternating bitter little lashes of rain and muggy swells of humid vapors.  Thunder rolled and lighting cracked like snake tongues or vague sheets of ghost-like energy.  As you awakened to the world, you hated it.

Something drew you from the place where you were.  Something shivered your timbers like the veriest of pirates.  You awakened in some kind of mild bondage from which you can escape – wound over with vines or wires, half buried in dry mud, etc.  You were wearing interesting and minutely detailed garments.  You had a name and looked cool.

(Describe all these things, and your escape, and how you feel about the drawing and the shivering upon your soule.  Go.)

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No More Harry P Shit

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating:  If you represent Harry P fandom by so little an act as having your “house” in your bio, you’re giving money to transphobia and fascism by advertising the works of an author who puts her royalties to those exact ends.  Don’t take my word for it.  Here are some people who actually liked Harry P at one point in time – indeed, may hold some fondness for that community and those experiences even now:

I was cutting people with Hogwad houses in their bios some slack, but that’s over now.  It has indeed become a new criteria for me in blocking and blacklisting – any mention of Harry P shit that isn’t cancellation or ripping on it.  If you’re promoting her IP, you’re giving her money, whether you pay her directly or not.  No more quarter.  Even if I wasn’t a flavor of trans, even if I didn’t personally know trans people, transphobia is the current wedge issue / hobbyhorse of every nazi piece of shit from Zimbabwe to Kazakhstan, from DC to the Kremlin.

Trans rights have become the line we all need to defend, for the sake of trans people yes, but now for the sake of every decent person in the world – very much like gay rights in 2004.  Let this cancellation be complete.  Let any enjoyment you have of those stories remain private.  Don’t let the Queen Terf claim you as one of her own.  Say no to Harry P shit.

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Great Idea re: Muskworld Twitter

When tumblr was bought by one ridiculous corporation for a huge sum of money and immediately resold for peanuts, the remaining users there cheered in amusement.  Look how much money we cost these corporations by just being useless freaks!  That contributed in part, I think, to this idea: Everybody delete their twitter on the same day and tank the stock.

There are reasonable reasons for people to not participate, but for a lot of you I know twitter is nothing but an unhealthy tax on your minds and you could use an excuse or motive to excise it from your life.  Why not make it a form of direct action and kick Apartheid Jr right in his spaceballs?  Delete your Twitter at the appointed hour.  Huzzah!

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Some Lies Should Be Jailing Offenses

The laws of the USA are profoundly generous to liars and con artists.  I don’t know from legal history, but some court said there could be “common sense” limitations on freedom of speech, like “no shouting fire in a crowded theater.”  I could google that easily enough but whatever.  I bring this up because the problem is not alerting people to fire, it’s unnecessarily causing a stampede when there is no fire.  The problem is the lie.

What do you charge that liar with?  Reckless endangerment?  Malicious mischief?  Anyone who has ever lied about covid for political or financial gain should have spent time in handcuffs.  Of course, a creepy enough liar can believe almost any lie they tell, at which point, is it a lie?  That would be a common defense if we ever arrested people for that shit.  “What?  I really believe the vaccine helps them control you with the 5g.  Prove I don’t believe it.”  I don’t know how to deal with the actual prosecution of such cases.

But there are no such cases in the first place, no consequences for telling world-ruining lies, literally strangling a million people to painful miserable death with your flaming bullshit.  Those lies lead to lies lead to lies, a circular firing squad of fascist dreamers creating a world of illusion.  And now we have honest, earnest true believers in these lies.  People who believe in antivaxxing like they believe in jeezis.

In my day job I hear their stories.  One woman had a health problem blood clottish and blamed the vaccine.  One man’s wife took the shot and died from a stroke, perfect health before that he says.  She took the shot and he didn’t.  His faith affirmed, he will one day have a chance to lay in a hospital for a month with his body ravaged in unimaginable ways, his lung’s function replaced with machinery while they run out the clock, if that hospital doesn’t have to triage his ass straight to hell.

Because this lie was sold with conservative cultural identity, most of the victims are fascists, and I can’t feel too bad for them.  Lest we forget,

But it isn’t only fascists that buy these lies.  Mainstream anybodies can be swept up in memes and swindles, and they are – great swathes of them.  I don’t know the numbers but I do know a lot of people in this fairly urban part of a blue state are complete rubes about this shit.  People I know, people I’ve known.  They’re at a risk of death and at a risk of killing people they care about, not to mention all the people they don’t know or care about.

This could have been stopped by aggressive laws against demonstrably dangerous lies.  But politicians on both sides of the aisle, plus the corporate world (and all the incestuous crossover between the two) benefit from dangerous lies just often enough that they don’t want to take that tool off the table.  Freedom of speech is freedom to lie.  Any policies we currently have against that are defanged or shot full of loopholes that are barreled through by fuckers in monster truck convoys from sea to shining sea.

I’d just love to see people like the pink-faced sack of shit in that picture purse their lips and wonder – will this be the one that sends me to the penitentiary?  Please.

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Inspired Notions vs. Pathological Thoughts

Lately I’ve been on a kick.  People get on kicks.  Shallow thinkers like myself, haha.  We start to view everything through a certain lens and over-apply the notion.  I’ve seen pundits do this, back when I read news.  Anyway, my kick is “alive people energy.”  I’ve been thinking all creative endeavors are improved by investing them with the sense of an active continuous idea within.  Like a given scene, a given chapter, a given illustration or piece of music, at different steps within your process it’s good to step back and hold the whole idea in your head at once, run through it, ask yourself if it feels alive.  Like you conceived the whole idea like a deep breath and let it out in a harmonious flow as a single exhalation.  If that makes sense.  You could do this on your first draft, but editing can break that energy, make stuff feel choppy and lethargic, so during editing you want to stop from time to time and make sure your art is still alive.  Bring the alive people energy.

On the other hand, I have been considering recently if I might be mildly bipolar, and this feels like the kind of bullshit an art teacher would say to a class while standing on his desk, before going home and contemplating suicide, string music filling his studio apartment, his cats unfed and too weary to complain.  But worry not, my Hecubus will be fed and I don’t know from classical music.  Also didn’t some tech billionaire creep make an erotic message to a mistress calling her “alive girl”?  This feels like a related disease.

The most important thing to come of this post, I think, will be that it takes the Thursday meme post off the top of my feed before it becomes Friday.  Think on that.

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