We Lost Gost

Seven years ago this day I went to a concert, some cool newish bands my husband was into.  They impressed.  The opening act was a lady-fronted local death rock outfit who put on a fun show.  The headliner was a famous international playboy of darksynth, some kind of miniature frenchman.  Somewhere in between was his fellow genre titan, James Lollar, known professionally as Gost.  About one month ago, he died young from undisclosed causes.  His family’s fundraiser is still up and hasn’t reached its goal, if you’re interested in paying respects.

I don’t know if David Lynch’s passing a year ago softened my man’s resolve but he’s been feeling the sadness for this one even more overtly.  I wasn’t as close to Lollar’s art and so am less affected, but as ever, this kind of thing sucks tremendous.  Causes undisclosed, but what’s hosing down musicians by the score these days?  Don’t do drugs, kids.  They’ve gotten demonstrably worse.  Maybe that wasn’t it, I won’t pry, but still.  Fucking knock it off!

There was something about this guy that was special.  There are a lot of musicians these days that are nothing but a face.  James Gost wore a skull mask or corpse paint at every concert and in publicity material.  Not a clown about it like other masked musicians, it felt like humbleness here.  At the show he was tucked in stage right, looking smol and serious, his presence overpowered by fog machines and a searing light display. Even the light display had humility of a kind; Perturbator turned the club into Close Encounters after that.

Gost belonged to a genre where most of the bands are one or two people, often just one.  This feels significant.  Yes, it’s easier to make a full sound sans bandmates when you’re in electronic music, but it also feels apiece with this moment in time where everyone is apathetic and retiring, too stressed and fragile and deadened to accomplish anything above and beyond.  People who have the gumption to make something happen have trouble finding anyone willing or able to help.  And making art of any kind – especially more ambitious things like albums – does require you to go farther, to put in extra work.  I usually say this of people who put in the work to make the world a better place through activism, but here I’ll say it of artists – long live the fighters.

Or maybe his isolation was the result of having more vision than others would allow to him.  He was in bands before, but stuck in the rhythm section, propping up somebody else’s ideas.  His innovation was only possible as a solo act.  Darksynth emerged from synthwave, which is more video game inspired, to fold in influences of John Carpenter soundtracks, glitch, and industrial.  The result is the heaviest music I’ve ever heard.  I remember when Ministry’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ sounded heavy to me.  Might as well be the Tetris soundtrack these days.  It has a chilling spooky vibe, but more human somehow than related genres.  You can feel the haunted guy inside the glitched beat.

And maybe that heaviness why I haven’t gone in for darkwave as much as I could have.  I’m going soft, with my ’80s nostalgia bullshit.  But I recognize greatness.  At the concert I was too wimpy and unambitious to stand with my husband down on the floor, sitting my ass on the balcony.  I had been crushing my feet at malwart during the days back then, so excuse.  When Gost came on, when the show went from death rock to darksynth, the young people stood up and danced.  In Seattle that’s as amazing as the dead rising.  I remember a fat guy who had seemingly come alone – someone who could be disregarded in life, perhaps socially maladroit – and he was willing to brave the disapproval of others to rock out to his favorite music.  I salute you, hombre.

Salute as well to the artist that moved him.  James Lollar, the Gost.  Condolences to his wife and children, to other family, and to fans – including the one next to me in bed.  It just ain’t right.

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Do Not Post Bette Midler Plz

Bette Midler has long been associated with gay culture, being a purveyor of showtunes and bland liberalism.  In the runup to the fascist takeover of the USA, she wrote a very TERFy op ed in some newspaper or another (this is not factually accurate, see correction in comments).  As transphobia was one of the levers the nazis used to gain power, she directly contributed to that.

And yet a month or so after the old Woody Guthrie song “You Fascists Bound to Lose” started trending on yewchoob, to what should my wondering eyes appear?  Bette Midler doing a cover of that song!  Look gays, she hates fascists almost as much as she hates transgender people!

I hope no other bloggers or commenters on FtB will post anything about her anywhere.  Trans Day of Visibility.  Make that shit go unseen.  I only mention its existence the way you say Dracula! before you raise the crucifix.

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I Spare a Thought for Slime

I’ve made posts wondering before if any of the people from the shit side of the regressive/progressive atheist split find themselves looking at what has come of their politics, looks at the war, the hatred, the censorship, the reality denialism, the terror that has taken over the world, and realizes what they’ve done, feels at all bad about it.  There’s no evidence of this in the “thought leaders” and I’ve never seen any from the trenches.  Like the SlymePit™ seemed, for a while, to have more popularity and even perhaps more staying power than the FtB it was born to oppose.  And yet here we are, and they are..?

I can see from comments elsewhere that many of them are in the comments at the blogs of fascist tools like Jerry Coyne, so not much evidence of reality penetrating their skulls yet.  But still.  Not even one of them?  I suppose this is like wondering why there are no good billionaires.  Or maybe it’s me asking that question that vexed me so often as a small child – the earliest evidence I had theory of mind – that I always wondered why bullies did what they do.

Why do they want to be despised?  Why do they want to do harm?  These things never made sense to me, even as their cruelty fostered a violent imagination in me.  I want to hurt people because they hurt people.  Clearly not the same goal for us, and they still don’t make sense to me.  I do think observation of people and other animals has slowly teased something like understanding out of me.  It’s entertainment, diversion.  Humans suffering is, to them, like the erratic movement and bleeding of a tormented prey animal to a cat.

Back to the point tho.  We are literally under nazism, in all but name!  There are people in the halls of power with neonazi tattoos!  Science in the USA – once a point of pride to movement bros like Chundersh1te – has been decimated, hosed with a goddamn flamethrower, with no hope of recovery in sight.  We’re involving ourselves in holy wars on purpose.

Every ideal of freedom and rational thought and wisdom that the nu atheists claimed to uphold is being piled into mass graves.  Things aren’t even as bad as they can get!  You’d just think that like, fuckin Matt Dillahunty, who spent time trolling Atheism+ as a “social experiment,” might take a look at this shit and connect some dots.  Might realize this is the logical end point of regressive beliefs, and hey, maybe that means y’all were wrong about progressives on some level?  Just a bit?

I saw a comment somewhere from one of the shitbirds saying “i can’t believe you made us do this, ftb!  look what you made us do!”  Hey, who is winning, bruh?  Who controls everything right now?  When Sam Harris crows that murdering Persians is a good thing, it’s not because he’s trying to convince the powers that be, it’s because he’s defending them doing the thing he’s always promoted.  He’s saying how cool it is that he got what he wants, and begging the naysayers to drop their distaste for mass murder long enough to be as happy as he is.

If antifeminists have literally taken over the world, how did we make anybody do anything?  The powerful side was yours.  This is the history you always sought.  All we did, in opposing you, was to help elucidate the difference between us, help you understand yourselves.  You do understand yourselves by now, don’t you?

You do see the blood money medical crank piling up quack dollars over dead American kids?  Right?  That’s you.  You do see the petty con artist thrust into nuclear godhood from a base motivated with literal cult behavior, right?  That’s you.  That’s the fruition of your beliefs winning.

Does this not give any of you pause?  Insert we’re the baddies meme?  What will it take, you fucking creeps?

We’re tired of saying “we told you so” over the innocent dead.  If you can’t come correct now, at this late stage, just fucking eat shit and die.  I wish I could say I was done thinking about you, but I don’t know if I ever will be.  That first question I ever asked myself about the minds of others, it never goes away; it only changes.

Why do bullies hurt people?  I might as well ask my fucking cat.

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WWIII: Picking Sides

Shitler and murderhomie Netsferatu’s newest aggression hasn’t turned into World War Three yet, but any of this kind of shit has that potential.  The funny thing about world wars is that the sides are not always what one would expect.  It was always possible the US would have joined the Axis powers, if politics at home had been x degrees the other way.  Good job to the hardworking propagandists that saved us from that particular shame.

This time around, we are the Axis.  No fucking question on that.  We are the imperialistic aggressive enemies of freedom, full stop.  But has Germany swung hard enough to end up in the new Allies?  My outside impression is fuck no, which has the added irony they might end up on the side of Israel in any coming expansion of these conflicts.

In fact, as much as Europe has made some good noises about protecting themselves from US horseshit, we are all united in propping up our aging economies draining the blood of the global south.  That might help prevent this from bleeding into a world war all by itself.  The nations that have the most reason to oppose us don’t have the power to do so, except as insurgents in the aftermath.

If this new round (or some future shitlerism) goes WWIII, who will be fighting whom?  Place your bets in the comments, careful to avoid going full doomer (see my comment policy in sidebar).

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Run the Country Like a Business?

Businesses are made to fuck you to pieces and feed the meat to their next victim, so yeah, wouldn’t it be amazing if the government was run like a business?  Oh boy, can’t wait, let’s see…  During the last year Biden was in office dem politicians were making moves towards ending exploitive practices by commercial tax services and make the public aware you can often file for free directly on the IRS website.  I did it for the first time for tax year 2024, which was great, and then… as a gimme to corporate fucklords, the government has ended the ability to file for free on the IRS website.  Can’t do it this year.

Thanks, shitler!  I’d like you to load up a few shotgun shells with broken glass and human feces and rearrange your face with that at your earliest convenience, thanks.  Since you love giving us little gifts like this, let us love you back.

Technically there’s still some way to file for free there but they made it just complicated enough to ensure the maximum number of people are diverted to the businesses that donated to shitler’s campaign.  That ain’t graft, it’s business!  Business is so good for people, god i love business.

Busy busy busy business, love it love it love it.  Yay business.  Corporate States of America, with a CEO cherry on top, oh boy, so good.  So good for us little guys.  CEOrange sure is a man of the people.  God it’s great to live by his fiats.  We should all be grateful.  Make America Grateful Again, weeeeee…

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

kill

 

Where’s the Concentration Camp?

As many people as ICE is abducting right now, where are they being sent?  Because as diverse as Minneapolis is, even a lightning speed deportation can’t happen fast enough to dozens of nations around the world.  Tons of Somalians in the US were born here.  They don’t even have citizenship in Somalia.

If there isn’t a concentration camp, they probably have a dozen or more spread around the city in warehouses and railroad cars and shit.  I have read the white people they arrest are beaten and abused but released in an average of 48 hours to make room for caging those with darker skin tones.

I’ve read Walz is not seeking reelection because of nazi death threats.  If I didn’t have a family depending on me, man, I don’t know what the fuck I’d do, but … so easy to imagine making that blood flow.  Death to all nazis now, regardless of what labels they’ve chosen for themselves, what flag they’re flying.  Eat shit and die, motherfuckers, please.

Anyway, on the antidoomerism policy, it does continue to be true that 99.9% of us will not become victims of this political violence, and life under fascism can suck but it can still be a life, with whatever moments of joy that can hold.  Let nobody who is frightened of these fucking monsters allow that fear to harm them in any way.

Long live the fighters in Minneapolis, LA, Chicago, Portland, wherever the jackboot treads.  May your enemies die face down in their own blood and piss.  No justice no peace.

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More Bad Ideas

Maybe because life has been rather hard lately in some respects, I’m just full of escapist compulsions.  Being a creative type, these tend toward the creative – write this, write that.  Sometimes I even have an urge to draw and I am sooo out of practice on that shit.  What I need to be doing is keep that new year resolution to sort out our shit and empty the storage unit.  If Florida is going to start having bouts of underwaterness within fifteen years, my condo is as well.  If I get that shit squared away, it will be much easier to move.  Just to live in general.

Let me interrupt the explanation of my bad ideas to talk about a good idea that isn’t getting discussion.  Any place that could salvage real estate with a system of dikes needs to get on that shit right fuckin’ now.  If Washington state does that with this river valley I live in, some pretty useful land can be kept.  And maybe we won’t have to throw all the work we did here in the trash.  All the suffering we went through just to get this far in life.  Ho hum.  File that next to Marcus Ranum’s big proposal for humanity to unfuck itself.

Anyway, thinkin’ about ttrpg fun times I’ve had in the past got me yearning to fuck around with that in the present.  Run a Vampire: The Masquerade game with myself just to see where the random rolls lead me.  But if I’m going to waste time writing, it should be writing something at least quasi-original.  One approach people like to take, to get the creative juice of a rpg while still having a possibility of selling it as their own writing, is filing the serial numbers off – like the Fifty Shades lady done with her fanfic.  I’m not in that state of creative desperation.

Then again, why focus on original content?  The notion I should make any of my writing legal to sell?  That’s laughable.  But then, making art that uses other people’s content just seems kind of pathetic.  I’ve made no secret of my disdain for fanfic.  Writing a story in somebody else’s world is a close cousin to that.  Why think of the content of a game as writing?  It’s really hard for me to not do that, for reasons.

Other random wild hares – Read all the books you’re supposed to read, to be an intellectual.  Finish Josefina y Blasfemia.  Serialize a completely unrelated novel on here, like I did with Centennial Hills.  Get back into drawing by way of doing a comic strip.  Get back into drawing by way of doing all of the exercises in the How to Draw Manga book series.  Start a book club.  Start practicing singing.  Make music.  Make concept albums.

I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years…

Those dudes from U2 ripped this song off pretty hard for “Goldeneye,” I think.  Whatever.

Anything is anything.

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Ehh… How’s Yer Mudder?

Again, I got tempted into making a post about AI shit, and I don’t want that to be my most recent thing in the sidebar, so I gotta figure out something to talk about instead.  Think think think…

All I could come up with is the question “How’s yer mudder?,” to which the answer is obvious enough.  For most of my blog’s readership, your mothers are dead of old age.  Mine could be too, for all I know.  I don’t know what she’s up to anymore.

Brief history of my immediate family.  Both parents were the least regarded of their boomer-sized broods.  In my mother’s case, it may literally have been because of her skin.  She had very bad acne, compared to everyone in her own immediate family.  She probably has antisocial personality disorder, since my sister got that dx and was very much like our mother.  This leads to trouble with the law, other kinds of mayhem.

I don’t know the specifics, but at some point she joined the Air Force, working in proximity to jets, acquiring permanent tinnitus, learning how to use an assault rifle.  Good for her.  She used the preferential treatment of veterans in government hiring to get a clerical job at the Veteran’s Administration hospital, which she held onto for a pretty long time.

To avoid the messy household and the stanky feral beasts she had spawned, she spent as much time at work as possible, doing overtime.  At some point this transitioned to claiming she was working overtime while having an affair with some dude from the workplace.  After the divorce with my dad was finalized, she married dude, so it musta been twu wuv™.

You know some people are just horny on affairs?  There are songs about it.  Basically, as long as she could keep the miserable marriage to my dad going, the illicit sex was hotter for her.  So every day at home was screaming and bullshit, and any love I felt for either parent was lost forever.  Both of my parents could die brutally and I wouldn’t shed a tear.

That also means I don’t feel the loss of having once loved them, right?  I don’t believe a person needs parents to turn out decent, presuming I’m decent.  So no need to offer condolences in the comments.  I don’t need my parents on any level.

My father continued to offer some important support to me in adulthood, like a place to stay when my income was insufficient, etc., so he’s still in my life.  Out of a sense of obligation I call him on the phone once a week to check in, to give him a sense of not being completely alone, because otherwise, he is.

Presumably my mother is alive out there somewhere, married to dude, retired or not.  But she might be dead.  Dude might be dead.  She might have total presence of mind and still be furiously devouring romance novels and trying fad diets even though she’s never been fat in her life.  Or she might be saddled with dementia, feeling paranoia and fear every day of her life, in some shady home that jacks 99% of her VA pension and social security in exchange for inadequate care.

Don’t know, don’t care, except insofar as I’d care about a total stranger.  Hope it ain’t too rough for her?  But I have no desire to talk to her at all.  Hell, I don’t even want to talk to my father, but he managed to stay in my life to where my sense of obligation is engaged.  Good job, him.

If you’ve got a mother, congrats.  If you’ve lost one you liked, sorry.  None of this is relevant to me, and that’s alright.

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Don’t Harue Out on Me

Horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa seems to like the name Harue.  Prominent characters in at least two of his movies have that name.  In Sakebi (叫, aka Retribution, 2006) she was the girlfriend of the main character, trying to pull him back from spooky ghostland.  There were reasons that was ultimately futile for her, but I shan’t spoil that.  In Kairo (回路, meaning “circuit,” aka Pulse in English releases, 2001), Harue was the kind of person who takes you to spooky ghostland instead.  Beware.

Both of these Harues are lovable, for those of us sad souls what are into goths.  I imagine for other people they’d be infuriating, one way or another.  But that rage you feel is your own rage against the dying of the light, against mementoing even the tiniest bit of mori, and you should have the dignity to stow it for a moment, when you find yourself in the presence of such a creature.

I feel like as atheists most of us are very resistant to dark truths.  I myself despise death and hope in vain to live forever, somehow.  I haven’t been able to buy any fool’s gold on that topic, unlike certain silicon valley tools, but it’s there, in my feelings.  That’s all I have to argue with, when someone is feeling the darkness, is feeling like, “Why bother?”  All I can say is, “Please don’t talk like that.”  This is why I shouldn’t be a therapist.  Like the character in Kairo, Kawashima, I’ll just look like a damn fool.

There is a recurring theme which has far too much relevance to the world we are now experiencing.  Loneliness.  I believe that we are all alone within ourselves, no matter how close we may be to the people who are closest to us.  There’s no such thing as telepathy, empathy – at least, not the psychic or spiritual phenomena – thus it is impossible for us to be fully understood.  Self-esteem exists in part, I think, to fulfill this need.  As verbal animals, we feel a powerful desire to be understood.  In the face of this impossibility of understanding, self-esteem provides a useful illusion that we are part of society, understood and valued.

In the lack of self-esteem, that loneliness becomes stark.  To be clear, we are all equally alone, but those without useful illusions feel the effect much more keenly.  And so Harue (2001 version) connects loneliness with death itself, and is both drawn to and in absolute terror of the end.  Kawashima can’t handle it, try as he may.

Anyway, if you’re a goth and you’re reading this, you know what’s up.  I wish you well, and I wish that you do well enough to not feel the need to bring your darkness to me, because I will just flop like a fish.  You’re used to this.  You feel the loneliness, you feel the void.  You know the rest of us can’t handle it.

But despite our uselessness in the face of your inner darkness, we would prefer that you do not disintegrate.  Don’t Harue (2001) out on us.  If you do, I’ll probably be crying like Harue (2006) as I watch you leave.  I love you.

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i oughtter be more lady-like

There have been a lot of health problems and difficulties in our household this fall, a lot of stress.  Usually my neurotypical sauce carries me through it all, but I’ve been feeling very emotionally raw, sensitive, anxious.  Like I need to push, push, push.  Do more.  Conversely, feeling more sad than usual about the sad things.  My closest biological fam all have bipolar with major depressive features, so safe bet this is some species of the same.  Not likely to get any worse or go long term, just an aberration caused by a rough time.

You may have noticed the anti-AI contingent just stepped back into the ring.  He can have the floor if he wants it.  Continuing would be bad for my health.  If you’ve seen my pinned post, you’ve seen the most important thing I have to say about that topic, to which the computer nerds have no useful retort.

What’s on my mind at the moment is how fucking often I’ve been saying fuck lately.  Fuckity fuck fuck.  Fuck this, fuck that.  Give me the fucking money you fucking fuck…  It’s too butch.  Not that you can’t be a lady what curses the blue streak, but I owe it to myself to be less of an ogre.

I’ll be more of a lamia and eat your kids.  Boogah!  I kid, I kid…

But yeah, not so much fuck now.  Not so much mania.  Peace and love on mother earff.  Silent hill, holy hill, all is calm, all is chill.  Round yon virgin, new mexican whiptail lizard.  Holey infant got crucifizard.  Sleep in heavenly heaps.  Sleep in heavenly heeeeaaaps.

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