This is a picture of a corner of my living room.
The sun is shining. Being in the southern half of the sky, it’s not as hot as it could be.
I took the day off sick because of course I did. I’m considering what sort of things I can do for the good people of the world who need stuff to put in their heads. Might prepare some content for the queue if I can. Much love, y’all.
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I was different about this the first time around; too raw, too new. Now I know just how bad that energy is for people who need protection and encouragement the most, so my doomerism policy remains, and I am committed to tempering all my political posts with hope. Because when did we need hope? When Obama won? A lil’. When do we need it much more? Times like this.
And so, my main points about why we are not all gunna die:
The majority of conservatives are not monsters. That’s all it takes to prevent the worst things people fear from coming to pass. To get the death camps and the red dresses and bonnets, you need more than just the levers of power: you need people to enforce them, and outside of the most twisted fucks in the world, who is going to want to enforce all these laws Pisstake 2025 is trying to enact? People who voted for fascism this time around were, by and large, not voting for fascism. They were voting for illusions that were sold to them by billionaires who have basically bought the entire fishbowl they swim in. Reversing inflation, saving freedom, pure nonsense. They were not voting for death camps, and they will not man those trains.
Having all the power means they get everything they want – legislatively. But. Every monstrous thing they favor is a nail in the coffin of their power, the inspiration for the fucking fools that voted them to work against them the next time around. Now, will they prevent any future elections from happening? Part of the reason this was possible was because of four years of concentrated voter disenfranchisement and suppression. OK, but you don’t need an election to get your ass fought.
We have fighters. A lot, a lot of fighters. People who every day are doing their best for women’s rights, trans rights, black lives, native americans, immigrants, etc etc. They will do what they can until the end of the line. No matter what oppressed group you are in, you have allies, including some people for whom your particular cause is their entire reason for being. Long live the fighters!
State’s rights, lol. But seriously, blue states are the economic fulcrum of the country. They can make it hurt to do evil, and they are likely to do so. Anybody thinking shitbird’s sentencing is going to go as scheduled is bound to be disappointed; don’t go for false hope when you have a lot of other things you can hope for.
As much as I despise accelerationists, they are sometimes, in a nasty way, right. Things have to get worse before they can get better. That is gonna be terrible for some people, which is why that’s an evil philosophy to hold. But it can be effective. More people are against Israel than before Hamas’s big terrorist funtime, and when Americans have to live under the kinda laws these guys are going to pass, they are going to rebel against that in a way that the fascists are not going to weather. They are going to fucking lose, some time, mark my fucking words.
It’s just a question of time, of doing your best to be alive so you can smile as they fucking burn, burn, burn. And to temper that anger too, because living with constant anger ruins people. Live for what’s good in your lives. It’s still there. It is still there, and you are too.
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When word comes down, it can come down as a surprise. My eyes are fully averted. But at this point, I am psychically ready for this to be drawn out for more than a month. I wish I had more material for you guys – stuff for you to read that is not that. Sorry.
Any ideas? Something I can knock out with a few minutes effort, more than once per day, that provokes thought? Distracting thoughts?
Wish I had the wit of Jack Handy. I’m more like, if Andrew Dice Clay was afraid of offending people.
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EDIT – woof. what i said before re: we will survive, still relevant and true.
Horror content. As opposed to horrible things. Horror movies are so diverse, like movies writ more broadly, and can have so many different good qualities. Humor, wit, suspense, thrills, and… art. On the cinematically sophisticated end, observe the movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. He does a good job of transcending international boundaries, I’m not sure how. Maybe it’s the focus on modern life and anxieties, which Asia and the West do have in common.
I just feel like much of the time when I watch Japanese TV or movies, it’s too Japanese to connect with, and the exact opposite happens with this Kurosawa. It’s not like he’s making American-style movies either, tho maybe he has a big influence from the more realistic end of film noir, or some cinema I’m not even familiar with, from France or whatever. He did do at least one French movie.
So, Sakebi (叫) aka Retribution. The spooky ghost ladies you expect from J-Horror, but in this one, they’re in the bright light of day. This movie isn’t considered one of his classics, but it’s got layers. And humor. And horror. And an artist’s meditation on the creation and destruction of the urban realm. The funniest scene is feminist revenge fantasy. I’d probably ruin the joke to say more.
And the ending is sad and horrible and could make one feel big something.
This is where I got the ghost meme from yesterday’s article. The trailer, content warning for a moment of convincing dead woman:
Find it with subtitles somewhere and watch it.
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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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SPOOKTOBER 2024!
Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on. Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas. Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #31 — PLAYER’S CHOICE
(× Alien/Space or Anime or Backwoods or Clones/Doppelgangers or Competition or Creepy Kid or Creepypasta/Urban Legend or Cursed Object or Cyberpunk or Darkweb/Technology or Holiday or J-Horror or Killer Animal or Killer Toys or Lost Media or Lovecraftian or Mad Scientist or Spoopy/Pumpkincore or Stephen King Style)
TITLE: Hallowar
PREMISE: It’s ON. In the cyberpunk dystopia (Cyberpunk) there are haves and have-nots. The well-to-do have a pristine network of MMOs where everybody dwells in beauty and light, the poor have a grotty gore-filled indie basement (Darkweb) called Halloween Online 2.0 (Pumpkincore). The most influential character there has a child-like avatar (Creepy Kid) but everybody assumes they must be older, right? That character declares a PvP event (Competition) called Hallowar (roll credits) (Holiday).
The PvP area resembles the US Northeast in fall colors (Stephen King Style), with rows of classic homes on shadowy leaf-strewn lanes. All the NPCs have been turned into killer ghosts (J-Horror) that sometimes possess dolls (Killer Toys), but is it safer in the craggy tree-covered hills (Backwoods) inspired by The Colour Out of Space (Lovecraftian)? No, those are full of mutated animals that hate life and love death (Killer Animal).
The timing of the event is such that the tactic of “kill all other players then take time with the puzzle” is not tenable, so all the players are both racing to investigate the mysteries, and fighting each other, with short-term alliances and much treachery. The mystery plot is about an anime (Anime) that has gone out of print (Lost Media), but if you find a copy (Cursed Object) and watch it, you’ll die (Creepypasta). Three copies quickly turn up, and players stop taking each other out with shovels and croquet mallets, instead tricking each other into watching the tapes.
But just how many lives do you get in this game? Nobody said anything about multiple lives, but some players are coming back for another round, even after being killed (Clones/Doppelgangers). They’re accused of hacking, but there’s something wrong with these avatars, and that suspicion is replaced with worse ones.
HORROR ELEMENT: The answer to the mystery, when revealed, has to do with a mad scientist (Mad Scientist) who tried to contact aliens (Aliens) and brought their murder-ghosts down to earth in the form of killer EVP and such. All you have to do to win is be the first to take out the scientist, right? But in parallel to the events of the game, participants have been acting creepy IRL, and it’s becoming clear they’ve all been the victims of some kind of mad science. The child avatar emcee appears from inside the lab coat, to offer the last survivors some kind of explanation – or perhaps just to gloat. Your souls belong to the game now. Happy Halloween.
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SPOOKTOBER 2024!
Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on. Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas. Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #30 — UNDEAD
(× Reptiles or Stranded/Desert Island or Extreme Weather)
TITLE: Charles Darwin vs the Imps of Darkness
PREMISE: Guess who’s back? It’s ya boy Chaz, and he survived the mutated brain-sucking finches. With all the finches back to normal or wiped out with shotgun blasts, they’ve left Darwin alone on San Cristóbal (Stranded) with the bodies of the rest of the Beagle‘s crew, all hollowed out skulls and drifts of down. In his sorrow he talks with the dead, moving among them to scavenge supplies. A mysterious fog descends, so thick nothing can be seen (Extreme Weather), and he falls into a tide pool sobbing.
HORROR ELEMENT: Marine Iguana druids (Reptiles) come to land when the fog is thick, and behold the mournful man. He wants to see his friends live. Undead is close enough, right? They raise the crew as horrid zombies (Undead) that shamble and do strange things with what’s left of their bodies. Darwin is even more traumatized, and goes to war against the “Imps of Darkness.” Will he defeat his reptilian would-be benefactors? Well, IRL Darwin is dead and marine iguanas aren’t extinct yet, so…
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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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SPOOKTOBER 2024!
Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on. Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas. Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #29 — SMALL CREATURES
(× Victorian or Forest or Holiday)
TITLE: ¡Feliz Navidad, Buenos Aires!
PREMISE: Nadine and Paola are sheisty teenagers who just don’t give a fig. When they come across a cursed antique (Victorian) set of toy soldiers (Small Creatures), they give them to conservative tio Sarmiento as an early Navidad (Holiday) present, and his ass puts ’em on the tree, it’s gonna be a cursed little christmas.
HORROR ELEMENT: Sarmiento is forgetful and while he realizes there is a ridiculous bounty of soldiers in the chest, he doesn’t remember how many he’s pulled out – and that it is frankly an impossible amount. He gives them to everybody – they even find their way onto a big tree at the mall. When they come to life, it’s a forest (Forest) of wooden demons, in Gremlins-styled mayhem.
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SPOOKTOBER 2024!
Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on. Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas. Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.
🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃 By now I have finished all 31, but I’m posting these all queued a few days behind, to get bloge content out of it.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #28 — GOTHIC
(× Geezer Teaser/Psycho Biddy or Silence or Insects)
TITLE: House of Flies
PREMISE: Seema fled from a cruel home life that almost killed her. Unwilling to return, starving, lost, she took a job caring for an old woman of British descent who lived in a foreboding mansion at the top of the hill (Gothic). The job wasn’t too weird at first, aside from being required to stay silent (Silence) at all times, so she can hear distant cries for assistance at the top of the stairs.
She became hypervigilant, attuned to all the noises of the creaky old house, but still had trouble distinguishing between the sounds of Georgina, the hum of electricity, and whatever these buzzing insects (Insects) were. But in the moments when she got to leave the house for groceries, she met a nice dude and began a courtship. Life could be worse.
HORROR ELEMENT: Life got worse. Georgina formed a presence in Seema’s mind that seemed to transcend the physical. Was Seema going paranoid, losing her sense of decency and empathy toward a disabled old gal, or was the haunting buzz real? Georgina (Psycho Biddy) figured out that Seema was seeing a dude and messed with their relationship, and messed with Seema’s head until things went all Edgar Allan Poe.
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