Hulking Out and Kenning Gee

last night i had a dream the hulk was on a rampage and the only way to get him to stop was for some other super-guy with super duper strengths to cut open his chest and inject a sedative straight into his heart.  a bunch of super randos were making attempt after gory attempt.

at some point within the last forty-eight hours it has crept over me that i remember not one but two kenny g tunes.  there was that one, i think his first big hit?, that’s all like “badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doo.  badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doot-doot-doo!”  then there was this other one with a vocal sample in it, some ambiguous crowd of people saying “slip of the tongue” over and over again.  “slip of the tongue, badadoo badadoo doodoot Slip! moodledoodle.”

that shit sucked boy.

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Brainjackin: Sad Endings

This one’s a little bit of a journey so bear with me.  There was a window in my twenties when I lived with my dad and his girlfriend and her two kids.  I don’t remember if this was before my brother went into the army and left the state, or after he got back to finish his last tour here, but he was around.  Hang on, was I twenty yet?  Whatever.  Throw in Bad-Moustache-Having Guy and My Tech Support Guy to round out the picture.  That lady -the girlfriend aforementioned- had a species of BPD that allowed her to run a very clean household – the kind of clean that facilitated parties.

So we arranged a movie night with big snacks and a lot of DVDs in the queue.  Or were they VHS?  Shit, I think they were VHS tapes.  Way back.  In the most memorable moment of the evening, some guy was being burned alive in Braveheart and two of the attendees said in unison, “and it stays crunchy, even in milk!”  How did they think of the same rude application of pop culture reference for that image?  We partook of all the same media, so not impossible, but it was unlikely enough to amuse.

The most consequential moment of the night came later.  I had the most staying power and after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, I feel like it was after two AM?, I popped in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.  I felt big feelings, beginning to end.  I’m mostly incapable of crying, but I cried a little.  I recognize now that you should not trust how you felt about a movie if you were watching it before dawn, but the damage was done.  I got a tattoo of the movie’s logo on my wrist.  At least it wasn’t Sister Act 2.

I still have that tattoo, but it’s gone through a few changes over the years.  First up, it was originally laid down in red ink, over the warnings of the tattoo artist.  Red is very prone to fading and fade it did.  Probably didn’t help that the heavy-handed ex-con put a lot of scar tissue into the cut, and some pigment came off with scabs.  But the symbol, where it appeared in the movie, was usually spattered and smeary.  Illegibility suited it, but years of fading later, an art school acquaintance of my husband was apprenticed to be a tattoo artist and needed victims for practice, so it seemed like time to get it touched up.

This was the friend who valiantly defended my husband and others from an art school clown attack, and she used to wear a t-shirt with JESUS IS A CUNT in giant lettering, so genial to us.  However, I cannot trust her taste in music since that occasion, because her mix at the tattoo parlor included post-Danzig Misfits – that is to say, christian Misfits, and they genuinely did sound christian.  I might be nearly tone deaf, but I can tell the difference between Creed and Nickelback.  They both suck, but the christianity of the former has a certain quality to it, better identifiable to musicians, but detectable to a discerning lay person, and I detected the shit out of it.

Anyway, the work was a little dubious and the tattoo is still a mess.  But the important thing, to my husband’s reckoning, is that it doesn’t look like a stamp from the club that I’d neglected to wash off the next day.

The important thing about all that is to say that 12 Monkeys had a sad ending and may have been the first sad ending I was ever able to appreciate.  I don’t think that speaks well to Terry Gilliam’s talents, because I was the kind of basic bitch that was not at all ready for genuinely sad endings.  He communicated this sense that Cole’s life in a time loop was a kind of immortality.  He had struggles and died young, but in the course of that life, he experienced love – and that somehow vindicated -or at least mitigated- the tragedy.  Basically, it was a fake sad ending.

Flash forward to the earliest days of going out with my husband, when he introduced me to the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa – particularly the movies Cure and Sakebi.  Those movies show horrible events ending horribly, but still work as art, because they’re the sad mask in that ancient symbol of drama.  Tragedy is a legitimate art form that I never appreciated.  Even when first introduced to Kurosawa, I wasn’t ready for it.  I told him as much – “I recognize the artistic power of this work, but it feels like it isn’t for me.”  I wanted to see stories about heroes overcoming hardship, lovers getting to love.  Happy Endings, basically.  One of those drama masks was The Grim and Grimy One, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But the movies stayed with me, in my mind.  I couldn’t forget them because they had that power, and from the memories of them alone, I came to appreciate tragedy in a way that I never had before.  The culmination of this came a few years ago, the first time that I ever wrote a tragic ending.  Did it work?  Was it as good as the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Surely not, but it made more sense for the piece than a happy ending would have.  I served the story at the expense of the happiness of my little babies.  That’s artistic growth, and I owe it to my husband, which makes this another instance of Brainjackin’™.  Thanks man!

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Everything I do, I do it 4 U

Hey Americans.  Yeah, you.  Remember how much you loved Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring the Kevin of Costner and the Mary Elizabeth of Master and Tonio?  You know it’s true.  Everything I do, I do it for you…  Bryan Adams at the top of his game.  Christian Slater doing a cockney accent.  Kevin inspiring Eddie Izzard’s bit about American Robin Hoods and Mel Brooks’s Men in Tights.  Morgan Freeman rocketing to fame.  Kevin Costner’s entire booty ass.  “I’ve never seen a noblewoman’s breasts before.”

I’m remembering this because I’ve been saying “huzzah” to low-key good news for long enough that my husband and mother-in-law have noticed, without me noticing I was doing this weird thing.  And I wondered if I got it from the episode of China, IL where Baby Cakes started thinking he was Kevin Hood, which consisted of medieval violence and saying “huzzah” whenever he appeared.  Then I just remembered that moment.

My family watching the shit out of that movie on VHS.  The soundtrack dominating the airwaves.  Not a negative word in sight.  Everybody was hyped for that goofy shit, and then it was gone, leaving a hole in our little hearts.  Dredge up your VHS player and watch it again.  You know you wanna.  Huzzah!

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Lyrical Genius

There’s a song by Electric Six called “Be My Dark Angel” and it is great, altho haters of novelty music and pop culture references therein should give the band a wide berth.

There’s a website called lyricsgenius where contributors can wiki-style post the words of songs they know.  Not every musical act elects to include a lyrics sheet in their albums, and of those who do, not all are accurate or well-known enough to inform what ends up there.  The bridge of this song, per the website:

I am havin’ a whirl
Of Canadian go-go girls
Japanese karate girls
Black girls
White girls
China girls
Australi-asian
European
Pan-American girls

OK.  This is a person who does not know the words “inhabit” or “australasian.”  As basic as those words may seem to you and I, they are not vocabulary possessed by any Electric Six fan with the gumption to edit lyricsgenius dotcom.  Should I do it, succumbing to siwoti?

No.  If I started into that site, I’d cave to the temptation to make the entries worse.  Like in Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” I’d make that one line into “How’s the people livin’ in the street?” and that other part to “Shoos the children with no shoes on their feet.”  Then I’d make a footnote on it (you can make notes on lyrics there) to say, “How do you think they’re livin’ Steeeeve?” and “Don’t shoo them; it hurts to walk.  Pay attention!”

There.  That’ll keep me in the sidebar a lil longer.

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Can’t Even with these Dicks

i was listenin’ to whatever yewchoob throws at me, as much as i can tolerate that.  this time it was giving me nothing but stuff i’ve heard before, which is ok because i’m a basic bitch like that.  this is “unable,” by suburban lawns.  i think the first few times i had it on, i wasn’t paying close attention and assumed it was about frustration in some general sense, but no, it’s about how her lover’s dongus is too longus to be contained in condoms as it should be.  reminds me of the quentin tarantino “like a virgin” bit from reservoir dogs.

well this is a punk song by a wacky lady vocalist that is about frustrating limitations in a broader sense, and i prefer it.  the chorus is about domestic violence tho, in a dark humorish kind of way.  check it out.

su tissue from suburban lawns presumably got a day job and fell off the face of the earth.  good for her, i think.  fame no bueno for some ladies.  polly succumbed to the scourge of punk rock: cancer.  i don’t know why, most of the ramones and ari up from the slits and more got punked out by the big c.  don’t do world tours, people.  airplane travel involves too much radiation.  but she did live long enough to perform a few duets with her adult daughter, to reap the appreciation of the nostalgic in her last years.  get what you can out of the time u got.

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Brinkman Rides Again

I said I’d review William Brinkman’s new book – Revenge of the Phantom Press – before it comes out and missed that goal, so here we are on release day the day after release day two days after release!  You can buy that thang, even as you read this!  William Brinkman is the Bolingbrook Babbler man in the sidebar, with his long running tabloid universe.  How does an old school movement skeptic end up writing a series where aliens and lake monsters are real?  Maybe reading all his babblerverse novels will provide a hint.  The first one, The Rift, was torn from the atheoskeptic headlines Law&Order style, recreating Elevatorgate with fictional characters, plus weredeer and time travel.

Increasingly, especially in the self-publishing sphere, you find that the language of storytelling has been broken.  Everyone from Mary Shelley to Dan Brown learned to write in a continuum with Shakespeare.  They knew how to weave a tale that works.  Exposition, conflict, escalating stakes, payoff.  Too many kids these days came up in fanfic spaces where all of these things are optional.  This isn’t to say that a sufficiently advanced author couldn’t break with convention for artistic ends, but the lack of fundamental skills on display nowadays is appalling.  William Brinkman learned to write before the turn of the millennium and it shows.  I don’t want to damn with faint praise, just to express my satisfaction with reading a complete story.  It’s the difference between eating breath mints and eating food.  RotPP is food.

I’m going to just throw out some general observations and wrap with my opinion of the book’s merits.  I’m not going to discuss the plot to avoid spoilers, and because the summary on the jacket is good enough.

I know that Brinkman took pains to make the story stand alone, so that a person can read it without having read the previous Babbler stories.  It’s hard for me to tell objectively how well that worked, having read The Rift and a few others, but my guess is that some elements of these characters and this setting are not going to work for some readers, because they do call for an amount of outside familiarity.  On the other hand, I do think most readers can just deal with those bits enough to keep going, because he does very successfully minimize the sense of being interrupted for info dumps – even more than in the previous book.

At the outset of the book and a few times throughout, the hero is humbled in the presence of women in a way that might feel off, to people with only a little of the backstory.  Even having read The Rift, I kinda felt like he was excessively kicked around.  Our hero Tom is a reformed villain, so alright, makes sense, but if I was friends or coworkers with someone who had recovered from heel status, I wouldn’t want to trigger the sense of shame that had driven him to villainy in the first place, right?  I’d be at least a bit nicer to him.  This is a quibble though, and doesn’t detract overly from the story.

The way the story was constructed ended up having a lot of back and forth travel.  I’m sure there are lots of good stories that do, but it’s kinda funny how much it’s like, go there, no get out, no go back, no get out again.  Still, different enough things happen on each foray that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

I have low-key problems with memorizing white people names, worsened by characters with minimal description, but this wasn’t as difficult for me this time around as it was in The Rift.  Two hundred pages in I had to wonder who “Jenna” was, but I gathered her role in the story from context, so I didn’t have to page back to be fully reminded.

Science fiction and fantasy have some overlap – hence the term SFF – and Revenge of the Phantom Press lives in that overlap.  There’s another term that gets bandied around for fantasy with a contemporary milieu: “magical realism.”  That’s where things are moving in the direction of the literary or surreal.  As a writer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to feel out these lines, and to me at least, it’s largely about explanation.  Does this setting have rules – or does it strongly communicate the feeling there are rules – behind the supernatural events taking place?

RotPP does, and so there’s no question that it’s straightforwardly genre fiction – not literary.  But as a reader who is drawn to the literary, my eye is open for it, and there were a few moments that got surprisingly close.  If you ignore the explanatory elements, just dig the scenery, the first scene in “Little Bolingbrook” can hit like that.

As a contemporary SFF story that emphasizes action and adventure, RotPP is very well-executed.  People love writing these kinds of stories, but there are a lot of pitfalls, and Brinkman deftly maneuvers around the lot of them.  I didn’t get hung up on exposition, I didn’t see any plot holes, no dangling plotlines, no pointless cul-de-sacs.  Set-ups had payoffs, plot devices worked as intended.  Pacing was tight.  You’re never far from an exciting scene, but you’re not overwhelmed by too many without breathing space between.  You could see the movie of this on the pages, but it also doesn’t feel like a failed screenwriter’s consolation project.  The medium of prose is used well.

The most important part of all this is emotional core.  Did the emotional scenes hit the way they were supposed to?  The climax of action coincides with a climax of emotion in the story – which is more than I can say for my own entrant to the genre – and while it definitely had the potential to feel pat and obvious, it actually worked for me.  Later, when the relationship arc of the main characters was complete, I was again able to feel what Brinkman wanted me to feel.

I don’t know why I’m in such a creative writing teacher mode on this review, just completely patronizing, so it’s time to get down to brass tacks.  Worth it or not?  Worth it.  Good stuff, surely the cream of self-publishing.  I recently read a Dean Koontz novel – Midnight – which had a similar action-adventure feel, and gives a good metric for comparison.  Koontz was better with the kind of description that makes a vivid impression (sorry William) but Brinkman’s plot construction was superior, and his story didn’t end with the hero smashing his son’s record collection, so also superior values.

This isn’t the kind of story I’d normally go out of my way for, favoring horror and surrealism.  I ended up reading it because William is my bloggy compatriot on Freethoughtblogs.com.  Even so, I feel he did great work.  I give it four out of five stars.  Check it out if you like action-adventure scifi-fantasy in a contemporary setting, no bullshit.

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Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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FtB Vaulderie

I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now.  Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.

One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer.  Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning.  Lessee…

In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive.  You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end.  I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire?  Sexy.  In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control.  Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them.  This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse.  It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.

The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds.  The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.

I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus.  The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing.  Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians.  This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile).  This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool.  It’s laughable.

Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members.  This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”

Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce.  Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten.  One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage.  This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.

This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship.  Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue.  What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them?  Stuff like that.

For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie.  What scores would we have for each other?  Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names.  (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)

__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X

William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him.  Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past.  Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.

Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her.  I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano.  Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6.  Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me.  You see how it works.  Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.

I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve.  Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this!  Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.

The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan.  Feel my inky black tentacles.  Muhahaha!  Wait.  Lemme hit these other guys up…  Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again.  Guess it was meant to be.  Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff.  Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…

Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light.  Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu.  Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™  Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny.  I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.

Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever.  I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit.  It was a very good time.  If problematic as balls.

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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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mind control music in cartoons

in honor of the newest moral panic about a thing that is being blamed for suicides, a look back at when people claimed heavy metal would have that effect.

fundies moved from the tent show to the talk show, popularizing the idea of hidden messages in music.  that idea turned up in a few cartoons, tho not always in the genre of metal…

remember when gi joe’s enemy organization cobra started a band, for mind control purposes?  pepperidge farm remembers.

that was a pretty catchy one, but the brain of “pinky and” fame had better lyrics.  “ain’t you a tall drink of water?”  “actually, madam, i am a laboratory mouse on stilts.”

let me know of any others i should add to the post.

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