Reverse Thoughts and Prayers

What if, instead of thoughts of positive energy and prayers for jesusly intercession, we could make a bad situation better by constantly feeling guilty and afraid?  Wait, neither one works?  While we rightfully mock right wingers for thoughts & prayers, there’s a lefty version of the same idea which is that if you aren’t feeling terrible, you aren’t doing things right.

Reddit used to be very nazi, but in the wake of a few noteworthy purges, has swung left – some liberals, some commies.  Sounds like a good time, right?  Not so much.  Something in the way upvoting works, the way the site is structured, lends itself to social snowballs.  This could be dogpiling harassment, but more often is blithering panic.  A news report comes that North Korea is playing around with nukes.  People talk to each other on reddit about it for about twenty minutes and become convinced the bombs are about to fall, immediately jump on the phone and say tearful goodbyes to loved ones on the west coast.

How’s that helping anything?  Be real.  Think about it for even a second.  NK would only launch nukes if its leaders were feeling suicidal.  Why would they want to die?  They’re the god emperors of Sadland.  Being god is pretty cool.  Now, in addition to making everybody in your subreddit feel terrible for no reason, you’ve reached out to your innocent relatives and possibly made them feel worse too.  Let’s model our behavior on ghost curses, that’d be cool.

If somebody on the internet says, in a calm but concerned tone, “I am feeling scared about this thing,” some leering poison-dripping ghoul will slither out of an ichorous oubliette to say, in a Ren Hoek voice, “You feel bad, huh?  You should feel worse.  You should be shitting your pants.  You should be planning your suicide.”  I’ve said before that conservatives have based all of their modern positions on cowardice, greed, and disgust, but some liberals sure like to rival them on all counts.

I mentioned before liberals saying they watched the New Zealand mosque shooter’s video because they felt like they had to.  They literally did what the shooter wanted them to do, turning it around in their head so that was honoring the victims or something?  Self-harm to magic something positive into the world.  It very obviously doesn’t work.

Instead of Thoughts & Prayers, we could call it Laments & Sorrows.  “If it makes you feel any better, well, I feel pretty bad about your situation.  Mighty sad, that.”  There’s a human instinct that our emotions, if strong enough, can have a tangible effect on the world.  If we’re not all feeling miserable constantly, we have failed, because our collective sorrow has a magical power.  But only if we all do our part, so join in the shit pit!  Liberal prayer warriors, start feeling bad about stuff now!

I get that the main thing people are mocking in Thoughts & Prayers is that the scumbags offering them really do have the power to contribute to change that will prevent the evils in question, but the money from Big Evil is too good.  It’s basic and transparently motivated hypocrisy, and that’s not what I want people to get out of my comparison to liberal Laments & Sorrows.  Most of the people doing this are near powerless to make significant change happen, especially in terms of legislation, global politics, the whims of the rich.  That’s all the more reason to stop doing it.

One can try to be informed about the things one feels one should know, treat serious subjects with the gravity they deserve, without having to harm yourself.  If you’re too easily overwhelmed and can’t deal with bad news, then maybe you, personally, should be less informed and less engaged.  You can help somebody closer to home, feed a bird, water a plant.

Not everyone has to or can body-block genocide.  Your pain will not heal anyone or make anything better.  Do what you can, do your best not to obsess about the rest.  That is all.

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December 12th

Given they’re talking about the election being close, and given that the rethugs have been gearing up for ages to do a bunch of dirty tricks in courts and state governments, it’s possible we’ll have a replay of Bush v Gore 2000.  If that happens, expect some measure of suspense, because it wasn’t decided til December 12th.

On the other hand, if it happens, we really do know how it will be decided already, and the shitbird court du jour will just be a formality and a rubber stamp, so the suspense won’t take that long.  I just know that my expectation now is that by the time of the next FtB Poddish Sortacast on November 9th, there will still be no decision, and we’ll be twisting in the wind, sickened and upset.  That’ll be a good time.

I just want to tell everybody things I wasn’t able to understand the first time hair fuhrer was elected by a minority.  You will almost certainly survive.  Life will go on. We will get up and go to work and come home and love and live and whatever we need to do, to the best of our ability.  And people will still fight against fascism every way they can, whether you personally are able to or not.  People will be fighting for you, and sometimes those people will win.

Also, while some conservatives may be as monstrous as you imagine, the majority are not!  Foolish, cruel, petty, greedy, craven, maybe.  But they don’t want to kill everybody!  They’re just swimming in toxic horseshit, because every fucking ounce of media outside major cities has been bought lock stock and barrel by billionaires who have a vested interest in selling conservative shit.  This is important to understand.  Just because the boy favored by nazis wins, even if he does some nazi shit, it is not immediately time for death camps.  That shit would almost certainly not fly, even in Kansas, even now.

Many people will suffer, a non-zero amount will die from that suffering, but some of us won’t even notice a difference in our daily lives, and most of us will be able to live through whatever happens with just a little perseverance.  The democrats are selling you mortal fucking terror because they know it gets them money, but will it get them votes, or will people feel too paralyzed to go to the polls?  This is going to prove to have been a mistake, or at the very least, unnecessarily abusive to the masses.

Nobody die now, OK?  And before you comment with more blood-throated freakouts, read my doomerism policy.

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Where to Escape Politics?

It’s hard as hell to find a genuinely non-political place to chill and take in content.  One could argue that everything is political, but if I’m not liking politics and I’m still capable of liking some things in this world, then that’s disproven from go.  A good pomo BSer can give you the politics of a kitten falling asleep while playing with a ball of yarn.  I know, because I’m a good pomo BSer and could do that right now if I wanted to, but it would be bullshit.

No, to me, political content is information about government, whether true facts, opinions, or bad information.  If it’s about the government, it’s political.  To another extent, opinions about people’s bodies and relationships and metaphysical beliefs can also be political, particularly if prescriptive or proscriptive regarding speech and behavior – saying something is a good way or a bad way to be.

What does that leave?  Dad jokes, funny animals, practical information about day-to-day life like recipes or the weather report, sportball, vidya games, hobbies, science that omits portents of doom…  Doomy science is important and has its place – in steering politics, frankly.

I just want a place where I can go and reliably expect nobody is going to shit on somebody else’s entire existence, or look at me with coal black eyes and hollowly intone the specifics of the death of me and everybody I love.  I recognize it’s a privilege to even imagine it’s possible to cultivate an experience like that.  Some people are staring down the barrel of the political every day, up to and including their grisly deaths.

Very sorry to y’all, but I don’t feel like every human alive must live in torment because some humans do.  I will do what I can to face the political on wednesday and help the tormented out, but on thursday and friday I want to enjoy what life has been granted to me by the unfeeling indifferent radioactive constantly exploding and crumbling abyss of a universe we live in.  Give me a fucken minute, guys.  I’ll get back to you.

Srsly I do recognize that is an unspeakably cruel position to hold, in certain company.  I’m not gonna say that to the face of a Palestinian, right?  But we all need this sometimes.  We need to be able to feel OK, when and how we can.  If nobody is ever allowed to feel perfectly hunkydory for a minute, that’s no kind of world to live in.

Anyway, drop recs for non-political content in the comments.  If you can think of any times when said content got political, don’t bother to mention it with caveats.  Just don’t even start typing until you can think of something genuinely without politics in it.  Maybe we can make the comment section a resource for well-being, right?

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         …and for now i’m FUCKING done, thanks

I Knew It

Remember my post about leftist accelerationists?  Saw some evidence of it in the wild.  Couldn’t get a screencap and lost track of where it was, but it was one of those pro-palestine trans anarcho-whateverist tumblr gals who discourage voting and mock people for promoting it.  And in this post she said something like, “how can you be aware of the US and what it does in the world and not want it to fail?  not yearn for its utter destruction?”

This is what I mean.  The only way for the USA to improve, in their eyes, is to be utterly destroyed.  And if that takes X years of fascist rule and a million dead LGBTQ people and women who needed reproductive healthcare and unionists?  Fuck all those dead people, serves ’em right for being born in the wrong country.  And every other country that will be worse off because fascists control the USA, including Palestine?  Fuck them too.

Given this accelerationist impulse, I wonder if they would look at the terrorist actions of Hamas that inspired the current genocidal push and think, yeah, no matter how many Palestinians are slaughtered, it’s worth it to see the world being inspired to stop Israel and liberate the leftover living among the mountain of corpses.

Accelerationism bad.  Anti-voting leftists are accelerationists, and they’re bad.  Don’t be like that.

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WordPress Earthquake

WordPress is the software on which FtB runs, and I’d always assumed it was a service like facebook or xitter under control of one random corporation, subject to enshittification per their whims.

But not so!  WordPress was an open source nonprofit project to establish a shared software for bloggers great and small to use.  There are businesses involved that sell their own variations and services that are compatible with the core platform, and there’s a tradition of them chipping in some nominal amount to the org to keep the lights on for everybody.

But wait!  The org has a tiny board with only one active member, that guy is also CEO of a for-profit WordPress company, and he has started ignoring this blatant conflict of interest to leverage the org against his company’s competitors. (i tried to link to a website about the subject and it broke this article until I removed it! umm…)

That’s all very arcane, isn’t it?  What does it mean for you?  This is all very much above my pay grade as a bloggy persona, but more than one of the competing WP companies have had basic functions – including security features – threatened by this rampaging mini-musk, and the one we use could get disrupted as well.

In fact, I know so little about the subject that I don’t know if it ever will be a problem for us, what the problem will look like, if there’s a problem already, or if there have been problems for months.

On which corporation or corporations does FtB depend for basic function? If it’s Automattic, we’d be safe from the crisis by merit of being under the rogue CEO’s company.

Or maybe not, depending on how far-reaching his unethical behavior goes. The guy also controls a social media platform (tumblr) and once revealed a trans woman’s side accounts on xitter in retaliation for criticism – a move so blatantly wrong-hearted even musk hasn’t pulled it yet.

But it all just goes to show everything we have online is at the whim of bastards with too much power, and could be snuffed like a match in a hurricane if they sneeze. It prickles one in the anprim feels.

Shit, if FtB was a newsletter distributed thru the USPS, we’d still be spitting distance from a republican privatization push subjecting us again to the whims of hyper-aggressive coked-up billionaires. Whatever.
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Left Accelerationists

Anti-voting leftists you see online are accelerationists, whose ideal route to glorious workers revolution is over a lot of innocent bodies.  The crux of accelerationism is that in order for real change to become possible, society must be destabilized – even destroyed altogether.

Because what other reason could there be for that position?  We tend to imagine it’s about maintaining the sanctity of their pearly mitts, but that supposes that they aren’t aware of the consequences of that inaction – and how in the fuck could they be?

You can stockpile guns and plot a stalinist proletarian insurgency, and still vote.  And voting will save some amount of lives, while abstaining will surely take some.  Consequences being this obvious, discouraging leftists from voting is actively encouraging vulnerable americans to eat shit and die.

These same people will be all about trans rights and palestine with one breath, then discourage voting with the other.  Realistically will Harris do shit about the middle east?  No.  But what would trump do?  Do they really care about Palestine?

Far more people in the world are talking about Israel’s genocidal campaign -about freeing Palestine- than were before Hamas kicked this off with terrorism.  This is an example of accelerationism in action.  Hamas had to know what was coming and accepted it as the cost of the cause.  Is there truth in the idea you can promote your cause over a million crushed burned and shredded people?

It’s the only motive that makes coherent sense for leftists trying to get trump elected…  Whatever, fuck em.  Just feeling like quitting social media again.

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Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

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Ever See a Dead Body?

I’ve never seen a dead human body before.  Many people have; I may be very privileged in this regard.  I’ve heard it supposed that the advent of modern ambulances – whisking away the dying to hospitals and filing them out of sight into a refrigerator – has had the result of far fewer people seeing their family members after the moment of passing.  Same person suggested that this may have increased belief in ghosts, as the person’s absence would feel less final without the experience of seeing them gone.

If this is too grim to deal with, please do give the post a pass.  If you want to talk about your experiences of seeing death or its aftermath, and the way it made you feel, comment away.  Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine, save that I expect it’s pretty gross.  I’ve seen glimpses of lethal violence because edgelords prowl  the earth trying to spring shocking content on you for fun, but I’m pretty good at averting or unfocusing my eyes – have only the vague impression of what goatse looks like.

I bring this up because of my recent posts about murder got me feeling some type of way.  Been fortunate it always missed me.  I guess it always does until it doesn’t.  I say my hail satans and pray my body and mind last long enough to have a decent retirement.

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Proximity to the Scene of the Crime

content warnings: domestic violence, murder.

I recently related the tale of how I met a murderer IRL, before he did his misdeeds and died sad.  In another post I have mentioned the murder and attempted murders that transpired in my last apartment complex.  Got one more brush with true crime, which I shall presently illustrate.

The last place I lived with somebody other than my boyfriend was in Everett, Washington, living with my father.  This was during the last of my time in art school, the era of the messed up pants.

I actually loved that area.  It was a mid century -lookin suburban feel, tho considered downtown-ish, on top of a huge hill.  Just over the hill was a view of Puget Sound, just north were some plain but pleasant old brick buildings, just east down the hill were a few places to eat and get groceries, plus a transit center with only a touch of racist graffiti (“all faraners must go home or be hunnt”).  The streets felt clean, the skies were often blue, and the blustery winds felt elemental.  It was far enough north there was more snow than Seattle gets too.  Just my memories, possibly distorted.

This was the last place I ever saw the first boy I loved too, in those random moments of our lives when our paths crossed, as he was working for the navy and drinking half a box of wine a day.  Melancholy low key hangout, then vaya sin dios.

Me and my father were living in a shotgun shack at the place where the pleasant little houses gave way to ramshackle creepiness above the fast food joints.  There was a “basement” which was too exposed to be of real use.  Everything we made the mistake of storing in it was covered in mildew and rat droppings.  But the owner was low key and the place was uncluttered.  Life was lonely in a way that’s easy to romanticize.

My room faced the alley behind the house and one time I was awakened by the sound of tweakers breaking the window of my dad’s van to steal his painting equipment.  I ran out shirtless and yelling, and scared them off.

Another time somebody sent a jacked-up bb thru our bathroom window, shattered the glass window of our shower.  The shattering unfolded in slow motion, radiating from the site of impact before total collapse.  It sounded like a glacier melting in summer.  Just malicious mischief, zero priority for cops, tho it would have been trivially easy to find which neighbor’s house it came from.

Very near the end of our time there, a young couple moved in next door, to another property owned by the same guy as our shack.  They seemed a little squirrely, but affable.  He was a veteran fresh out of a war, she was somebody I never met, though my father had some brief interaction with them.  Recalling my last murderer was also a vet and the stats on spousal murders, you might see where this is going.

Soon we moved out.  I got the last of the cheap studio apartments in Seattle before those ceased to exist (no rent control so when it was done being cheap i was done with it), my dad used a bit of an inheritance to buy a trailer and go help with cleanup in Katrina.  That venture didn’t end well; my dad had atrocious business sense.

So neither of us was anywhere near there when it happened, but my dad found out (probably from our former landlord) the very day after we moved out, the young lady’s body was found in the same dumpster where we took out our trash.  That’s all I ever heard of it.  Don’t know if it even made the news.

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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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