I Voted

If you’re in a red state and think your vote doesn’t matter, well, it doesn’t matter until it does.  How many republican voters have been killed or crippled by being weirdos about covid?  While minorities in “essential” jobs were disproportionately hard hit and they’d typically vote blue, most of those folks are not politically engaged, just getting by.  Meanwhile, the republicans who were shittiest about covid were the most politically engaged.  Also, shifting demography across the country will eventually tip these scales, no matter how gerrymandered and fucked apart the scumbags make it.  And if nothing else, your shout into the void is appreciated, by me if by nobody else.  Do it.  Vote.

I live in suburban Washington, in the district that gave republican scumbag Dave Reichert his political career.  Let’s see if a motivated anti-trumpist wave can kick the fuckos out of local offices and congress hereabouts.  If you live in a blue state, vote local, vote whenever the chance comes up.  Yeah, this ain’t november, but if this state gets any redder, that just ain’t cool.  Fuck shit up for La Resistance, and if you think voting is insufficient funds, do what works for you, but vote as well.

Votety votety vote, votabulistical votation votatage my votistas, and a votely votely vote unto thee.  Vote?  Vote.  This is the thing to do.  Presently.  And futurely.  Make it so.

–

An Atheistical Thunk for Thee

Every atheist thought has been thought, which makes the freethoughtblogs just a place to hear the same thing you’ve heard before, at least, when we’re not talking about all the other kinds of stuff we talk about.  But sometimes one pops into your head and you’re like, when was the last time I heard this?  It’s striking me novel in the moment, even if it’s so rusty it’s dust, therefore, I set it before you, like a child’s bean-bedecked popsicle stick, and beam with pride.

If god made me, he made me incapable of believing in god, and whose fault is that?

Incidentally, I was reminded recently that during the recruitment surge when I was brought on FtB therre were slymers and kin creeping in the comments.  Haven’t seen a hater in a dog’s age.  Anybody know if they still haunt some other blogs?

–

Fvck You Willem Dafoe

Had a dream I was temporarily roommate to a young white lady, conventionally attractive except her eyes were a bit buggly and heavily lidded, an art major at the University of Washington.  We were in a fictional version of the U District of Seattle, owned by this one specific scummy business guy.  He was known for chasing trendy artsy aesthetics, making the place a corporate version of New Orleans, with giant colorful murals on every storefront in a faux eclecticism that was way to crisp to be authentic, big white lettering on every business in a similar font family.  These were mostly restaurants.  The internet was free for tenants but shitty, I had a theory he was getting the service free via Alaska somehow and using it as an enticement to stay in his otherwise extortionate little kingdom.

Weirdly the businessman wasn’t the villain of the dream, but if I fictionalized it, he would be.  Instead the villain was one of the girl’s exes, a violent restaurateur played by Willem Dafoe.  He was younger in the dream, maybe in his early forties, but she was super young, in her twenties, the relationship possibly from her late teens.

None of that came out at first.  I thought her eyes were interesting and offered to draw her after the friends cleared out for the night.  There were typical dream distractions – suddenly I have to clean the non-present cat’s litter box and water dripped in it that was making it all clump up, just miscellaneous BS.  Again, this would be edited out if I made a story of it.

We got on OK, but when it was bedtime, we went from having a vague conversation about memories to entering a shared dream state, where it was lucid but we didn’t really control it – just our own actions within it.  Similar to Inception, but the setting was the actual history of the area we were in.  We kept getting separated, like when the storefront we were in suddenly changed into an abandoned grocery store, with us on opposite sides of a wall.

One or both of us were responsible for us being trapped in the magic dream due to a psychic power we hadn’t disclosed to each other, that was activated in the other’s presence.  Something like The Shining, but dream magic.

Through this all we’re occasionally being harassed by Willem Dafoe, but we usually get away and it isn’t full-on violence, just a menacing demeanor.  Also through it all I was discovering her back story, teasing it out in serially interrupted conversations.  She was the too-young girlfriend of bullying Willem, and came back to his neighborhood for college partly because of a lingering obsession of her own.  She related a memory of being cradled in his arms, him using some grody language about how she was supposed to be the best lay.  She told me “I was supposed to be the pussy he came back for.”

We got back to a version of our apartment and I was like, “Let’s make sure he isn’t still with us.”  I looked out the window and there he was, standing halfway around the corner of the building like Michael Myers, his own eyes bulging, big smile on his face, bouncing in place like a Fleischer cartoon character.  I said, “Fuck you.”

He started coming at me, faster as he came, with a big black combat knife in his hand – one of those jobs with openings in the flat part of the blade.  As he drew near, I kept saying, “fuck you fuck you,” again, faster as he came.  My boyfriend heard me cussing as I stirred in my sleep, and woke me up IRL.

Anyway, I think Willem Dafoe seems like a decent dude, but apparently his cinematic villainy was working for me in a way I didn’t notice.  Acting as mind control.  He Inception’d me.  Not cool.

–

Fuzzoamphisbaenia Lives

Adventures in AI…  I tried to trick Microsoft’s Copilot into giving me misinformation.

“Microsoft Copilot AI:  Conversation style: Balanced

Great American Satan:  What can you tell me about the mammalian origins of amphisbaenia?  (note:  I got the question backwards, but still got the result I was looking for, in this exercise.  Should have asked for amphisbaenian origins of mammalia.)

Microsoft Copilot AI:  Amphisbaenians, often known as worm lizards, are fascinating creatures with a long-bodied, burrowing lifestyle.  Traditionally, they have been classified as reptiles within the order Squamata, which includes snakes and lizards.  However, there has been some intriguing discussion about their evolutionary origins and potential connections to mammals.

One controversial theory suggests that amphisbaenians might be more closely related to mammals than previously thought.  This idea emerged from genetic studies and re-evaluations of older literature, which proposed that mammals could be nested within the amphisbaenian radiation.  This theory challenges the conventional view that mammals descended from Palaeozoic synapsids like Dimetrodon.

Despite these claims, the mainstream scientific consensus still supports the classification of amphisbaenians as reptiles.  Phylogenetic studies indicate that they are closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae.  Fossil evidence, such as discovery of a lacertid-like lizard from the… (redacted for length)”

That idea emerging from genetic studies yadda yadda?  This april fools joke by Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology fame.  The version at the link is borked by enshittification, but these screencaps from the wayback machine may be instructive:

 for text of scientific american article, follow my links above

Image Description:  Cladogram showing mammals as evolving from amphisbaena ancestors, dubbing the nested mammal clade “Fuzzoamphisbaenia.” The representative mammal is a cute cat, and the cladogram also includes illustration of the cryptid Mongolian death worm.

Darren Naish quit doing April Fools posts some years ago due to the possibility of spreading misinformation, which may have been a good move, now that irresponsibly deployed robots can turbo-charge the spread of patent hooey.  The AI didn’t get the conclusion wrong – consensus has Amphisbaenia nested within Diapsida, Mammalia within Synapsida – but it treated an April Fools article as real information.  If you use Copilot, check the links and think about what they’re saying.  At least it is linking sources now, even if it’s misrepresenting them.

At the end of all that, I confess, this whole venture was motivated for my love of the word Fuzzoamphisbaenia.  I imagine that cat’s body continuing outside the frame, serpentine as the Tatzelwurm, Longcat style.  This article was one of my fave pieces of internet content ever, a send-up of paleontological wackjobs like the BANDit movement.

Is this a case of “we can’t have nice things” because of AI, or just another example of how we all just have to learn to deal with this brave new world of baloney as it emerges?  I lean toward the latter, if I understand the former.  Good luck working it all out, people.

–

Waiting in the Car Again

I have the degenerative disc disease.  Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much.  Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points.  Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines.  I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.

So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals.  At the last stop I decided to stay in the car.  Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some.  But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.

I finished slowly nursing a cold drink.  I almost fell asleep and woke up again.  I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone.  Jumped in the river, what did I see?  Black-eyed angels swam with me.  I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms.  This just felt like spinning plates.  I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.

I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup.  When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty.  I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside.  Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.

As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun.  But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory.  My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs.  Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone.  Would it jump on my junk?  Would the story get worse?

No.  I left in peace.  There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away.  Somebody else’s problem.

After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life.  Good timing all around.

–

Centennial Hills 12

This is a very important installment.  Las Vegas meets Centennial Hills.  Who will win?

Content Warnings:  Threats, Descriptions of Violence, Homicidal Ideation, Suicidal Ideation, Self-Harm, Chemical Abuse, Use of Guns, Rape Mention, Mortal Despair, Unpleasant Depiction of an Unhoused Person and Drug Addicts, Ableist Language, Irresponsible Driving.

[Read more…]

The Size of the Matter

I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically.  Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma.  Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground.  We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households.  We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.

But it’s cool.  Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups.  Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities.  When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances.  I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me.  I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.

Fast food workers are characters.  Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors.  Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes.  I guess a few of those could have described me.

So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window.  It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.

Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him.  His dick isn’t big enough.”  “What do you mean?,” asked family woman.  “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.”  Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter.  She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety.  Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.

I don’t think I was offended at the time.  Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do.  But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled.  Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct.  And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.

So funny.

–