this is an extraneous post of foolery, look at the post before this for regularly scheduled content.
mighty quiet on ftb this morning, felt like somebody should make some kind of noise. itsa me like mario.
call it an open thread for anybody who didn’t get their daily fix of bargling in to bargle upon. it’s speak or get spake unto, on this bitch of an earth.
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“Human Cannonball” by the Butthole Surfers and “Chewing Gum” by Amyl and The Sniffers both feature similes at the end of the chorus. Not sure why else I’m associating them tonight. Incidentally both of these artists are problematic (former much more than the latter), cancel at will, but I like things about their work. Even within these songs there are things to offend, while far from their worst in that regard. Prominent ableist language in the second video, if you’re one of the three people who are still bothered about that.
I would like to know if I’m missing something about The Sniffers by not being Australian. Is that band conservative-coded and/or nazi-friendly? Amyl appeared on a rap track by some dudes who sounded like they were complaining about graffiti. On the other hand, hard to imagine them lining up with any party down there besides the Sex Party. I ask because I’m liking them, and wanna know if I should nip that in the bud while I’m new.
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Your first night at community college, the day before your first classes – what a great time to go to a club and guarantee you’d make a terrible impression on your professors. Magic Boots appeared before you, built into the hollowed-out facade of an old department store on The Boulevard. Magic lights spelled the name of the business, with a pair of glowing boots beneath them that danced in an eternal animation loop. This was an adventurer bar, full of men who travel the land getting into hijinks of sword and sorcery, and more settled guys that aspired to adventure themselves, or just liked the company. Manly romance was entirely possible in this kinda joint (tho note: the GM will not ERP with you), and there were also a few girls or variously gendered people who liked to dance or to watch the story unfold.
Ilmardan the aspiring Illusionist had come from the dorms with a very manly cohort indeed. The muscly young meatheads included Div the silenus party animal and grappler, Humuk the orcish sportball player, Grundr the dwarven warrior, Tollison the human sports fitness major, Liu-gon the angelic man, and Markud the leopard-headed fencer. Div had said he didn’t want to show up til after nine, but couldn’t resist the social energy of going with the others. They’d walked from Cortellire Hall up the hill and south several blocks to find the place, arriving at about eight.
Also along for the ride were some softer types, the roguish human Racker, the A/V nymph Keires, and one human woman, a rough-skinned waif named Ilenka. Ilmardan expected to meet the lizard madonna Kaldonia and the feyish swordsman Josh in the crowd somewhere, but hadn’t clocked them yet. Keires looked nervous. Would their lack of experience cause them to get pushed around by the boisterous men within? To what extent was being pushed around what he wanted? Everybody should have limits.
Conversely, Racker was Mr. Cool, and Ilenka was shifty-eyed and smirking. Div was hard to pin down, weaving out into the crowd and back multiple times, but was always very friendly when he came by. He said, “This place is great! Tuition well spent. Who needs the U of R when your major is partying?”
Tollison said, “Living down to stereotypes, buddy?”
“It isn’t a stereotype. It’s my culture to be a party animal. You stiffs need it, don’t you?”
Keires stopped levitating, shrinking away at being pegged for a stiff. Ilenka wrapped a supportive arm around him. “You will not be stiff for long.”
Racker said, “This is alright. I’m gonna find the bar. Who wants to come with?”
The meatheads pointedly smiled at Ilmardan, who had promised to buy drinks.
Grundr said, “It only needs to be tall and thick!”
“That’s what he said,” said Ilenka.
“Hey-ooooo!,” said Div.
The building was thronging with party people, bustling past each other with intoxicants in hand, getting ready for the proper dancing to begin. At this point it was head-bobbing at most. The volume was gonna get cranked before long. There was a balcony area upstairs, close to the level of the lights and glittering balls, and the downstairs was mostly dance floor, with a bar and restrooms off hidden in darkness. Was there a kitchen as well? A few people had snacks.
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Starting with my first trip to that shady zoo in Kansas, I started seeing grackles whenever I went down to the area. Not constantly, not on every fencepost, but pretty common. While I’m certain some were regular type and some were boat-tailed, because I saw them in quick succession at the zoo, I couldn’t be 100% on that this long after the fact. Like if I met a kinda taily regular grackle I’d be like, is this a boat tail? And if I saw a boat tailed non-boating I’d be, well, clearly this is regular flavor grackle.
My favorite was at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, just a single boat-tailed grackle hopping around and looking for crumbs like a brewer’s blackbird would around here. They’re more leggy, more beaky, more funny looking. They just look like a fun bird. I’d love to have them around, but I’ll wait until global warming pushes them into Western Washington. Fuck going anywhere near that heat again.
While I don’t have much experience with them or much to say about them, I’m sure anybody from the US Midwest to Southwest could say lots. I open the floor to that…
This is too short. What can I say that is grackle adjacent? Good bird name. It’s a crackle or a cackle, coming from the grass or the green. I suppose they’re named for the sound they make, like cats being called “mao” in China. I’m gonna name animals after what they sound like to me and start calling dogs “fucks.” Migratory thrushes can be called eeoo-eeoos. Sad chickadees can be called umpeewees. When my husband was a wee child he called crows awk-birds.
Bring the noise. It’s onomatopoeia time.
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Fascism is changing everything America thinks it knows about itself, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I keep hearing about all the court cases dude has lost, all the success the opposition has had in this or that political arena. But what do any of those victories amount to, while a fascist is president? Hey stop doing evil, says the court. No, says the fuhrer. Conversation over.
Ditto unions. A lot of federal employees are in unions, like AFGE. Their contracts are being ignored. They put those union dues to use, sue for injunctions, for damages. Who is responsible for enforcing those judgments? It’s fuckin’ over, guys. The unions and lawyers aren’t convinced yet, plugging away like laws still exist.
I believe there is a very outside chance dems pull a legislative coup out of the midterms, but they are up against absolute corruption, absolute power over so many states including some of the swingers, and against the apathy of blue voters who are paralyzed with a sense of doom. Honestly, pitching the last election with doom, as real as the risk was, may have helped the nazis. And now that the doom is here, is manifest, you think those voters are going to feel any more like they have a chance to win, like it’s worth getting up and trying? I hope they do, but it’s not looking great, and even if they do, who’s to say their votes will be counted?
Beating this is going to take something else. I can’t say what. It’ll probably be a combination of lots of things. But they aren’t going to look like they did before. We have some historical examples to look to, of other countries that pulled it off, that shook off corrupt right wing governments. However, this brings us to another problem.
Technology is changing everything about human society, surveillance, and warfare, and people are really not grasping the extent of that. I’m very much pro-AI (don’t @ me bro), but that is one of many tools of oppression we’ll have to contend with. Remember when the NSA got carte blanche to record everything anyone says anywhere forever, within spittin’ distance of electronic devices? As if they needed that permission in the first place?
We could kinda laugh it off. How will they sift through all that information? It became a meme, your google search terms putting you on a government watch list. Well now the NSA can work up an LLM to read information in minutes that would have taken agents centuries to get through. They can use that data much more easily now. Every phone call you’ve ever had, it’s reading material. Hope you were speaking backwards Assyrian when you said how much you wanna gank the pigs in 2006.
I say people don’t get this because they keep talking like this tech can be opposed. You can war of words this all you want, make legal cases (good luck not empowering IP lawyers to own your entire soul in the process), have a million people in the streets doing a hootenanny about it, but you can’t stop it. Now that it’s here, it’s too easy to use. Script kiddies with a few thousand dollars worth of hardware can run an LLM. I don’t think the NSA is going to be too concerned about your folk songs.
I’m not saying it’s hopeless. I’m just saying y’all aren’t having the right conversations yet. I don’t know what the right conversation looks like, but this isn’t it. Marcus’s blog has a convo going about the warfare side of things, and it’s getting close. The future of warfare is here, but money-wasters are still playing with jets that have a human inside. Anyone selling those is just a con artist at this point. There’s no reason for humans to direct any of this. If you’re going to do war now, you build up your drone and missile infrastructure and protect it. You tell Skynet it’s go time, then sit back as it purées your enemy with airborne death. Even without nukes, it’s a nightmare vision. Kissinger levels of evil.
Bringing it back to the intersection of tech and fascism, social media is another genie you can’t stuff back in the bottle. It’s here and it’s controlled by nazis, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Try to get Joe Shit to understand Mastodon, see how far you get. The main run of human conversation is subject to Fuckerberg’s accelerationist algorithms. How can you jam that signal? What can you do?
These things are all designed from centuries of experience with manipulation by politicians and businesses and religions, refined and turbo-charged by technology and money. Slot machines were good but online casinos and video games with microtransactions are better. Uploading Protocols of the Elders of Zion to usenet with your 14.4 modem is good, but buying out every platform of human communication and flooding them with Birch-flavored aggrievement politics is better. These techniques rely on humans being fools, and humans cannot resist them. We will not. We’re not smart enough, in masses. We see a picture of coke on the screen and we take a sip from our 64 ounce bladder-destroyer, watching Sell U Bobbleheads VIII in iMax.
How will these things be fought? Lots of ways, I’m sure. We can look at things that were done in the past. A lot of people are looking. But it isn’t going to look like it did in East Germany. And it damn well isn’t going to look like the democratic party’s facebook page. The web-based side of this is especially exciting. What would it take to wipe out the internet and phone service, globally? How long before that happens? What will it look like?
I just think too much discussion blithely assumes we’re still living in the world of the past, with cosmetic differences. We are in a full-fledged cyberpunk dystopia, and until the coming Mad Max era hits, we have to operate in the world we’re living in now, if we have any hope of making it better. Again, don’t know what that will look like, but we’ll never figure it out if we don’t change the discourse.
What would Johnny Mnemonic do?
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Had a dream that I was a third level thief in d&d and I was cut loose for some r&r by the party leader. I decided to pick up some loot and some levels, wandering Fantasy City and getting into hijinks. As part of that I decapitated Medusa, but later her head rolled out of the bag and paralyzed me. In the dream medusas also needed to touch you to do a proper petrification and because she hadn’t, I was only 10% stoned. That was enough to have me unable to move.
I had the impression she could just regenerate or otherwise come back, but slow enough that she wasn’t up and at me immediately. She was having a sense of humor about it and said she would unparalyze me, but in the meantime, we just had a conversation – me partly petrified and her a severed head. I said I was considering picking up a level of cleric and asked if she had any suggestions, so she tried to sell me on a minor god of aberrations. I was not interested.
I got de-stoned enough to wander away, ending up in the modern world, where I stole a workman’s overalls from a construction site to fit in, then wandered around looking for better stuff to steal. I crossed paths with a sheisty child that was also prowling for loot. He had a reputation that was growing in the media and journalists were trying to interview me about him for a thinkpiece. I shook those guys off, just wanted to get some sleep, and found a place to do that. On top of a small bus, on a bed of trash, these other hobos started talking to me, keeping me awake. I noticed that we had the same construction overalls, presumably jacked from the same spot.
Shortly after that the alarm woke me up. There were more details now lost to time, but nothing in this is powerfully interesting. Still, you never know what use you might have of some information in the future, and as an artist, for me, that includes subconscious information. One vexatious element lately – I’m starting to have dreams about trying to sleep and being unable to do so. Ain’t that some shit?
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It seems Kurt Cobain had a touch of the “Impostor Syndrome” that has been semi-popular for people to yak about on social media o’er the last few years, and it was possibly an influence on the verbiage of his suicide note.* It probably didn’t help that a number of his famous tunes were well-known for similarity to other people’s works, but anybody who can appreciate the kind of art our late lamented fella was laying down would agree that he did it well. No fakin’.
Something I noticed at that wikipedia link above is that impostor syndrome is not officially recognized by the authorities on psychology, tho not specifically refuted either. They just haven’t considered it of sufficient life impact to be considered a disorder, or diagnostic enough to be considered a symptom. Officially. It does seem to be a real thing, at least, that many people who are smart cool successful etc. feel they are faking it and feel likely to be discovered. At that point, they must pull a Milli Vanilli and be done with the world. As Freddie said, don’t do that.
Now to be very clear, I do not have impostor syndrome at all. I am quite certain that I rule ass, altho I recognize that I am prone to speaking thoughtlessly and embarrassing myself, and am not a genius of the classic conception. I am a very cool comrade, but sometimes I do feel kinda fake. Particularly when I’m hustling for meaning. My day in the life posts, my bird posts both tend to include some attempt at folksy profundity, like, ain’t that just the way?, or to draw connections Connections-style, which may be entirely unjustified, specious, or frivolous.
I’m probably being the most honest on those when I am being the most frivolous. When I’m hinting around something deep, or spelling that out more bluntly, how legit is that? My husband is more of a real artist about this stuff (probably no coincidence he has similar health problems to Cobain), gravitating to subjects he cannot express directly, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art as a struggle. I just get an idea, or work up an idea, and spit it out. Blop. Soup’s on.
I have said many many times that words are bullshit, that everything in our lives and in existence itself has a reality that words can’t even begin to approximate. As Depeche Mode said, “feelings are intense; words are trivial.” But where does that leave me, as a person who devotes an inordinate amount of their time to writing?
I once had a teenager tell me that the cool kids “don’t care,” specifically about learning or social order in the school environment, but I believe her ass was very mistaken. The genuinely cool kids are the ones who know everything is bullshit, so they don’t bother talking about it, because what’s the point? Not in a thought-terminating cliché or cruel way, just that life isn’t about whatever words we want to layer on it, and none of this is necessarily going anywhere. That kinda stuff. I’ve known people like this, loved a few of them.
So by this metric, where yakkin’ about stuff inherently makes you less real, more of an uptight square than the cool guy what doesn’t talk much, is everyone who writes inherently uncool? No, cool people can make words happen in a conversation or in writing, but the approach to the words is different. They would effortlessly say only what needs to be said, and if you understand it, that’s the extent to which you are cool, and if you didn’t, not their problem. That’s them and here’s me, making words for the sake of words. Writers are not inherently uncool, but I surely am.
OK, that’s me talking out my ass on a sultry summer night. Did I not say earlier in this post that I am very cool? I am. Very cool. Like, I read some of the shit Cat Valente blogs on a bottle of wine, and I win. Take that, nerds. RIP to impostor syndrome sufferers but I’m different. Most of the time. I’m good. I’m good.
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*As I researched the points of this first paragraph I became convinced it doesn’t hold up. Not quite true; his death and that letter had more to do with anhedonia and old school depression. I leave it in because it shows my line of thought as I was composing. Wild that his note mentioned Freddie Mercury and I randomly mentioned him in the article before I went back and did the reading. Ah, what a dismal thing to be pondering.
There’s a zoo in Kansas called Tanganyika Wildlife Park, and the fact it doesn’t have zoo in the name makes me wonder if they’re dodging regulation, like how cheese-themed products with no actual cheese in them are named Chezz Product™ or Chedze Matter©. When my bro lived in KS he took us there. His daughter was too high speed for our old asses and grabbed a snake by the tail. Fortunately no harm no foul. I fed a craisin® to a lemur and a big leaf to a giraffe. Giraffe heads impressed me with their size the first time I did it, less so the second, altho maybe I was just disoriented by the heat and not really living in the moment.
The first time I went I remember noting there was an absurd variety of US-flavored “blackbirds,” aka icterids. I saw grackles, boat-tailed grackles, brown-headed cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds, brewer’s blackbirds … unless my memory fails me on any of those particulars. It’s been a minute. But one that I can’t forget is from the second (and surely last) time I went: yellow-headed blackbirds.
Yellow-headed blackbirds are not the most amazing thing going. Cardinals are probably more fancy looking, with the crest and the sharp designs. Still, that is some muffuckin’ bright yellow on their heads. They look like a generic enough american blackbird, like an RWBB maybe, who traded in its red wing flash for a neon yellow football helmet. The black and yellow is such a powerful and pleasing contrast, like bumblebee fuzz, it’s very appealing.
We saw a small flock in a short sparse tree near an animal enclosure, and my bro rushed to get a blurry pic or two. Life list for both of us, and I doubt either of us will ever see them again. Not sure the usual habitat and ways of these beasts, but they liked the sheisty zoo full of oversized ungulates. I hope they’re still enjoying life in their way, wherever they may roam.
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What’s for sale? Everything. Tvngp would sell Texas to Mexico for 47 pesos. I guess conservatives just love a white thief, even when it’s their own ass getting jacked. Let’s play Orngdolph Shitler for a minute and call all the leaders of the world to Meryl Oggo to sell amurriKKKa’s gullible gluteus out, one hank of meat at a time. Bidding is open!
Our land. A ton of it is already owned by foreign investors, but let’s start forking over government land as well. Six Flags Over Yellowstone, a subsidiary of Volkswagen-Daimler-Yamaha.
The Social Security Administration. Home boy tried to nix the social security tax during his last year in office, which I don’t quite understand. It’s meant to pay for this program, but as Dubya discovered in the naughts, you can also pillage it for other purposes with a rubber stamp congress of warhawking shitlords. With this tax in place, when it’s not getting robbed for other things, the agency can actually make money. That means it has value, which means somebody might be down to buy it. The money that’s meant to keep you from subsisting on cat food when you’re too old to work, how would you like that turned into a hedge fund run by transnational casino owners?
Our nuclear power plants. China owns a lot of US Treasury bonds, time to cash in those chips. This one would amuse me so very much.
Our prisoners. With private prisons already being a thing, some might already be owned by international corporations. Reduce infrastructure costs and make it official. Essentially if you get caught for jaywalking, you can be sold into slavery abroad.
The United States Marine Corps. Army is land, Navy is sea, Air Force is air, Marine Corp is … what? I guess alchemically they’d be fire, but that’s making them out to be cooler than they should be. At any rate, they don’t make much sense to me conceptually, so you know damn well the Leather Lich doesn’t get it. Sold! I’d like to see what Denmark could do with a Marine Corp. Maybe annex Yorkshire?
Our dignity as a sovereign nation. Psych, he can’t sell this because we threw that in the garbage when we elected a linty ballsack as god-emperor.
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What does it mean to you, birdies, to run in a mixed flock? What are you getting out of it? Who are these other birds, to you? I’ve seen pics of caracaras that get a black vulture buddy. Similar sized birds of prey that look extremely different from each other. Caracaras have a rep for being smarter than the average raptor, and maybe that includes an unusual amount of social flexibility? Then there’s escaped budgies flying with the starlings… It’s intriguing.
Less remarkable is when the birds look extremely similar, like when goldfinches fly with pine siskins, or are just a drab pair in general. The first time I saw ruddy turnstones and surfbirds together, I assumed they were the male and female of the same species. They were identical, save coloration. I took some notes the old-fashioned way, may still have been using a flip-phone at the time, and remember one species had yellow-green legs like pencils, and the other had bright carrot orange legs. Do I remember anything else about their appearances, in shades of brown black and white like 99% of other shorebirds? Not at all. I remembered them long enough to make the ID and then lost the memory.
We had gone to Ocean Shores on the Pacific coast of Washington state around the time of my birthday. I got a fat chocolate cake which felt pretty cool. That was the occasion when I saw brown pelicans looking like pterosaurs, saw their long skinny wing feathers amid the kelp on the shore. There was a spit, a kind of rock wall heading out into the water, and on that spit I saw a bunch of shorebirds flying from spot to spot, gleaning food from the rocks. Shorebirds can be very hard to see in field environments or at distance, because their coloration is effectively cryptic. Bold black and white head markings break up shape, skinny legs are like blades of grass. These guys were highly visible on the rocks, some with black and white markings kinda bold under the wings in flight. So I crawled out there and got a closer look, which was a good time for me.
Sometimes a post will make me think of a song, and I link the yewchoob video for it. The only ones that jumped out at me were Queen’s “Friends Will Be Friends” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” and I low-key hate both of those songs (as much as i <3 4eva other things on the Highlander soundtrack). I often suggest topics of discussion and people seldom bite, but here goes: What unusual animal friendships have you witnessed?
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