I’m put in mind of something but don’t want it to seem like I’m one-upping a comrade in the sidebar.
Great American Satan
Opposing any & all Status Quo Warriors
I’m put in mind of something but don’t want it to seem like I’m one-upping a comrade in the sidebar.
I finished the first draft of my novel Rent is Theft. That sumbitch took 7 years to get through, and unfortunately the second draft will surely be a year or more in coming. One issue I had throughout was feeling like I didn’t have a distinctive voice / personality for my MC Courtney, but through a quirk of foolery late in my process, I found a fun gimmick to use. She started telling stories to her gf, and I thought to myself, Satan, you can make storytelling her thing.
I’ll have to do a lot of work to make it happen earlier in the book, in the parts I’ve written over the last several years. In the meantime, if you want a sample of her storytelling styles, here is an excerpt I amused myself with posting on tumblr. The uncensored version is funny, the censored one is kind of hilarious. The background of the scene is that the characters are living illegally in a building that is getting a heat treatment, and for lack of planning ended up having to suffer through the heat. To get by, Courtney starts to tell stories. This is about someone they know named Graeme, though they call him Grime.
Get a load of this shit: Activision-Blizzard Hires Amazon Union-Busting Firm. As Boots Riley from the Coup said, “If we’re ever gonna do it let’s do it now.” That is to say, when a government agency in a state with anti-worker wildcat strike laws decides to bring charges against a company for fucking massive systemic sexual harassment, and as employees start to organize, and that is their response? Workers of the world unite!
The game industry is massive in profits thanks to selling gambling to children, but small in workforce, which makes it extremely vulnerable to labor revolt. It hasn’t happened yet only because douchebros attach sucking corporate ass product to their sense of manhood and identity, and have stacked the industry with like-minded people.
But the video game industry, like all creative industries, is so vicious and life-draining that even scumbag misogynist right wingers last an average of two years there before flaming out and going back to work at Electronics Boutique. The sausage is made out of art students and young programmers, and management thinks nothing of it because there’s always a new graduating class to brainrape (or sometimes just physically rape).
So here’s how you do it. Organize their asses before they leave the schools. You can’t do this at one school or you’ll just get the grads there shadowbanned. You need to hit them all at the same time. There are not that many schools producing video game creators. Find them, do not involve the faculty in any way, and infiltrate their shit. Full court propaganda press.
You get enough traction and make these vampire businesses face a united group of graduates saying NO. I don’t have the time to do a two year unpaid internship, or take starvation wages. NO. It is not acceptable to make drinking to excess normal during business hours. NO. Seriously, your entire fucking culture must die, now, so that the silly people who love video games enough to want to make them can stop being chewed up and shit out. Having a dream should not make you into so much bloody meat for billionaire pit bulls.
Video game workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your mass exploitation.
–
Genesis 3:14: And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.
Injustice that calls itself justice, hatred that calls itself love, is foundational to the abrahamic faiths. The serpent in the garden was a cartoon villain with no motivation but the joy of evil itself, taking the text at face value, but any cursory examination of the events of the stories as written exonerates all villains save god himself. Of course he made the serpent to love evil, made men and women to be curious, and so on.
And as abrahamic faiths are foundational to western civilization, the injustice is baked into who we are and how we do. Poor people deserve to suffer because whatever people have or lack in life is according to his will, is “just” by divine fiat. We must have done something wrong to deserve this.
I am put in mind of all this because today my ramen noodles smelled and tasted like cigarette ash. Having smelled that, why did I proceed to eat them (with a lot of butter and salt added)? I didn’t want the ramen to go to waste and I’d already added the packet by the time I smelled it. I thought about why I’m eating cigarette ramen.
Maybe somebody rich is adulterating ramen with literal garbage just for spite. Or maybe some poor filipino working in a ramen factory, knowing he’s gonna die in economic hell and unable to do anything else, tipped an ash tray into the flavor packets, knowing it would find decadent western mouths, and fuck those guys. I won’t blame the worker, as shit a thing as that is to do. I blame the global system built on exploitation, making us poor folks as cruel as what the rich have given us.
And capitalism, as much as it runs contrary to the hippy shit young jeezy preached, is a perfect piece with the justice that runs through most of the bible. I’m a serpent, I’m gonna eat my dust all the days of my life. Or maybe I’ll rise to the middle class, where I can eat chaff instead, and rain dust upon my lessers with a sense of righteousness. All is as it should be on god’s earth.
–
EDIT to add: I’m living on my belly as well – more crippled this week than I’ve ever been in my life from throwing my back out. Had to miss 3 days of work. I turn 45 in a few days, so I probably got another 45 years of this worsening to look forward to. It’s OK tho, I’m cool.
Past a certain point in the USA, holdout businesses and agencies are going to need to end their quarantines, even in places with low vaccination rates, where it will result in contagion and death. A certain amount of americans have chosen ignorance and the risk of death – to themselves and others – that it carries. We’re stuck together in this country. Most of us do not have the means to emigrate, would not be allowed into many other countries due to our national antivax rep, nor allowed to stay due to local xenophobic policies that mirror our own.
We’re stuck together and that means we’re really over a barrel. There are some things we cannot force on other people, any more than the US could force itself on Vietnam or Afghanistan. If fashy freaks don’t want to participate in a public health project even to save the lives of them and their own, we cannot make them. We cannot try to protect them from themselves forever. It’s just not feasible.
At some point, we must embrace the horrible status quo. Sufficient numbers of people want their grandparents, parents, husband and wives, themselves offered up as a plague sacrifice to their orange god, and they can make it happen. Just like they can make getting a simple ID practically impossible in the pursuit of vote suppression, they can make vax carding illegal, or make enforcement unfeasible. We cannot control them, cannot control this, and some crucial public services cannot remain limited like they are now.
It’s time to reopen the government offices (yes, many are still closed right now, even in texas), wear masks all day long if we have to, get used to this reality. Trump-style virtue-signalling won’t die until the last trumpist dies, probably around the time coral goes extinct and the US midwest is the new Sahara desert. Many of us will be alive to see that. Looking forward to the death of qanon-type shit, not looking forward to the time that will drive in those coffin nails.
–
I guess you could say he’s finally gone into the Great Known Unknown.
–
This July, like our Mr. Brinkman, I’m trying to finish some novels. In my case, I’m only going to get the first drafts done, if I succeed. One is my old commie magical realism bullshit Rent is Theft, the other is my misanthropic UFO story Centennial Hills. Nothing exciting to announce in that, but I liked the way this combo cover turned out.
Lest anyone get the impression I’m not deep, allow me to present some art worthy of a junior high student’s pee-chee margins. The skull is white greed, black blood on its mouth. As the date of Juneteenth was the result of freedom delayed, we see spirits escaping the greedy thing gradually but triumphantly. Of course, an artistic image is what you make of it, and there may be bad interpretations of this that I haven’t conceived in this moment. And with that, I’m done!
–
This is a bit of a lazylinking driveby post. You’re going to see a lot of legitimate grousing from black people today about Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday and commercialized, how token gestures are useless. But there were African Americans that pushed to make this happen – check out the article on NPR – and let’s not sour their celebration too much, here at least. I doubt any of them are reading this, but I hope they’re having a very nice holiday today.
–
ETA: And another thought! I hadn’t read the article PZ linked to on the FtB Juneteenth hub post until just now. Having read that, doesn’t the very fact we’re doing this seem like a violation of the fourth of their (yes, a bit jokey) Juneteenth Commandments? Well, I started doing this, might as well ride this embarrassing rocket all the way down.
–
Non-African-American-having FtB is throwing a Juneteenth celebration of sorts, as befits the year it became a federal holiday in a still quite white supremacist nation. We’re tryin’, baby. As people who care about human rights, dignity, and freedom, we have something to celebrate in the emancipation. Thanks to the people who made that happen, by force of law, force of arms, and force of persuasion, we don’t have to live in a country where our fellow human beings are overtly enslaved.
Unfortunately, there was a loophole in that amendment, allowing the slavery of prison labor. And worse, even if we closed that loophole, systems have evolved over time to take advantage of a desperate illegal immigrant workforce in slave conditions. Some “illegal” workers are laboring in the open with a crude bare minimum of protection and pay, but many people who come to this country don’t have that much, and become literal slaves – shackled by the threat of state violence, deportation, etc. It’s like the hellish bait-and-switch they use in Dubai, working immigrant muslims to death to build their gilded towers, except here it’s people from all over the world doing agricultural work, or house work, or – in the only type fuckers are ostensibly bothered by – sex work.
So while slavery persists on American soil, let Juneteenth be a rallying day for those who would fight it. Later today I will post about the more celebratory side of things, but for this morning, some bitter coffee for the people.
And one more thought. Not to undercut my comrades here, but I feel like this isn’t my day to celebrate? Solemn remembrance, reflection, putting in work for the cause, OK. But the barbecue? The jocularity? That belongs black folks, as it has, as it continues to be regardless of its now official seal. This isn’t strictly a feeling about appropriation or some other SJW rhetoric.
Think of it this way – emancipation wasn’t the gift of a good thing, it was the removal of (one) bad thing. Let’s say you spent your whole life under a rock that somebody else put there. Eventually the guy who put the rock there comes along and helps you roll it aside. He doesn’t help you stand up – you have to do that for yourself. Once you are standing there, still crippled from a life on the ground, you might feel like celebrating. But do you really feel like extending that celebration to the smug guy congratulating himself for eventually changing his mind about the rock?
There are thousands of African Americans with my last name. I don’t have to look up a genealogy to know that means some of my ancestors were human filth that had to be murdered or forced at gunpoint to practice the most basic of human decency. It means all those people are surely my brothers and sisters by a father who was one of the very worst types of rapist.
I’m not at all interested in the stories of white people like myself who can make this claim, whether it’s backed up by historical record or not. Please don’t talk about your slaver ancestors in my comment section. There’s probably another blog on this network more amenable to that, and that’s fine. I only bring this up to say that my people did some dirt and profited from it, and I still profit from it every day, whether it’s apparent or not. As long as that’s the case, I will let other people do the cake and cookies on June 19ths.
–