Yankee Doodle Fvck the USA

I’ve mentioned my pants before, in an article that was no doubt much more entertaining than this one will be.  When I was a wee child I got some 4th of July themed underwear, which meant I was wearing 4th of July themed underwear for as much of the year as they continued to fit my growing ass.  I remember little snare drums like you’d see in front of a juvenile revolutionary war reenactor, betsy ross flags, fireworks.  Something in this imagery interested me enough to remain now as a sliver of a memory.  I found out about “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and other patriotic hokum, and thought this was all in good fun.  Yay, freedom!  My country ’tis of-

I don’t remember when, specifically, I started to get the facts.  While history classes tended to stop before Vietnam, sometimes the textbook itself would have a section we just magically never got around to, and maybe out of boredom I read ahead.  Sometimes I’d just happen to be around while a movie about Vietnam was playing.  War is the impossibility of reason something something.  Maybe it was the inevitable question raised by the parts of history they didn’t manage to skip – what actually was wrong with white people that slavery and Jim Crow were things?  The Trail of Tears?  The Japanese Internment?  Seriously, white people?

4th of July underwear on my baby ass, made me feel some type of way.  America the beautiful.  Three cheers for-

Like a More Edgy Star Trek or Something

My husband had a dream he was watching a TV show (or was it a youtube let’s play of a Deus Ex -era video game?) in a future setting, where these people were preparing to go out for a trek, if you will, among the stars.  The narrator / main character had a bad Sean Connery accent.  R&R came first, and in lieu of sex, people got into virtual reality machines that let them live out their ultimate fetishes, which were weird.  One spacefleet lady was riding a motorcycle with little man heads on the handlebars, and when she cranked them, the man heads vomited.

That’s how you’ll know that you are ridden, virtual motorcycle space man heads.  You’ll feel the burn in your throat.

Personally I used to have Star Trek: The Next Generation dreams all the time, where I could have been any given cast member, or just third person observing their adventures.  I think because of Reading Rainbow, Levar Burton’s character hit different for children, and became more memorable.  Also felt some type of way about Data and Counselor Troi and Cap’m Picard.  If I was a polyficcer that would be the four I’d put together.  Maybe Dr. Crusher could watch and … that’s just disrespectful.  They all did a very good job; I’ll leave it at that.

Maybe my husband and I were the space man heads, and Dr. Crusher was on the bike.  It’s what I deserve, tho surely my husband is an innocent man in all of this.  Clemency!

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I Said No Motherfvcking Backsies

The US government told people it would give them a thing, then it said psych!  jk lol.  OK, this has happened many times, but the one I’m thinking of most recently is student loan forgiveness.  This is backsies, and I say, no motherfucking backsies.  Now some might say that about us loser ass chumps who didn’t caveat our emptors before agreeing to the loans in the first place, but no, we signed those agreements based on the fabulous careers the education was supposed to provide us.  That shit ain’t real, therefore the education was never worth the asking price.  It was, as so many things in the United Snakes are, fraud.

So when we were told forgiveness was on the horizon, just do this and that, pay what you can in the meantime, we’ll work this out, and then… hard no.  Because fuck us for being poor, that’s why.  cool, cool, cool.  I’m just gonna be over in the corner sharpening this big piece of metal to hang in that wooden frame over there, hang it on a string.  It’s modern art, don’t worry about it.  After all, I have a bachelor’s degree in fine art.  You told me it was worth a lifetime of debt, so it must be legit.

Supposedly, the type of forgiveness I’m in line for was not one that has been kiboshed.  It was part of a court ordered thing, the government telling a slew of sheisty business schools to eat shit.  So perhaps it will come to pass.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps they’ll slap the irons on me when debtor’s prisons return in force.

The way federal employee pensions are calculated includes an average of your highest three years of earnings, and at some point the Big Beautiful Bullshit included a change in that math that would result in federal employees getting less money when they retire.  You’re promised one thing, you pay in, you get arbitrarily told psych, jk lol, no.  This is backsies.

Poor children dying of easily prevented causes was making states look bad, and they got a lil federal money to reduce the body count thru a program you may have heard of called Medicaid.  Thanks says the state, collecting funds to save poor people’s lives.  Psych jk lol, no.  They can eat shit and die now.  Backsies.

Anyway, don’t tell me you’ve got something for me and then take it away.  No motherfucking backsies.  Thanks.

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Brainjackin: The Normal

There are some things in life I only know about because of my husband’s evil influence.  Once upon a time he got on a jag of listening to a musician known as Fad Gadget, aka Frank Tovey.  Good lookin’ guy, passed too young due to a congenital heart defect, made wacky art-influenced electronic music.  While he was digging that guy, he told me all sorts of other adjacent things.

It starts with a guy named Daniel Miller in 1978 releasing an indie electronic track called “Warm Leatherette,” for his solo project The Normal.  That song did well for the indies, inspiring Grace Jones to do a more successful cover of it in 1980.  “Warm Leatherette” is very basic, even crude, and has lyrics that are just basic bitch fanboying about J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.  You know, the one that was portrayed in cinema some years later, with James Spader and Holly Hunter getting their rocks off by experiencing car crashes.

Meanwhile, Miller established the soon to be ultra-successful Mute Records.  One of his other projects there was a silly little album of classic rock and roll covers as The Silicon Teens.  According to wikipedia Miller provided the vocals, but they do sound rather like his friend Frank Tovey, who posed as the band’s singer.  Who actually sang?  Dunno.  But Mute Records had all sorts of interesting artists.

Of primary interest to my man, Frank Tovey’s Fad Gadget, who had several cool songs, most famously “Ricky’s Hand,” “Collapsing New People,” and “Lady Shave.”  Did Collapsing New People make you think of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose name means Collapsing New Buildings?  No coincidence, that band was also on Mute, and the song was about them.

That’s not what made Mute a gazillion dollars.  That would be Depeche Mode.  I love those guys.  Once upon a time they were young men, and there’s a picture of lil’ Dave wearing a Fad Gadget T-shirt.  At least, I remember seeing that somewhere.  Might be misremembering it.  Anyway, the world wouldn’t have all that great Depeche Mode music if it wasn’t for these weirdos, and if it wasn’t for The Normal, and if it wasn’t for Warm Leatherette.

Join… the car crash set.

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Haters Can’t See Us

Content Note:  This is a pro-AI post.  Haters don’t even comment.

The title refers to a West Side Connection track that is itself referring to a song I’m unfamiliar with.  Rap man says “Can they see us?  No, haters can’t see us.”  Something Marcus sometimes laments, when he’s talking AI, is the blinders people wear as human supremacists.  People underestimate what various AIs are and what they can do, but they also badly overestimate what humans are and what we can do.  These two strains of flawed thought add up to an abject incuriousness about the subject.  Powerfully interesting shit is going on, but the blithe glide on by it.  They can’t see it.

That’s fine, I’m not going to win literally anybody in the fuckin’ leftiverse with my brand of argumentation.  History will have to do the convincing, and since AIs are being developed for both good and evil, who can say which will make a larger impact on public opinion?  I’d just like the ignorant argument to die down so thoughtful conversations can finally be heard above the noise.

You don’t have to be a starry-eyed techbro, a singularity cultist craving escape from the flesh, or one of the silicon valley scumbags that both fears skynet and is the demographic most likely to create it, in order to see the amazing possibilities of this moment in technology, to see the way this technology reflects on who we are, and thereby gives us an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.  You don’t have to be an anti-AI reactionary to see the limitations in the tech and look at it with an appropriate measure of skepticism and realism.  The middle path is being genuinely thoughtful about it, and that’s practically nobody right now.

This is my house and I’m gonna say what I will about it, even though I’m talking to a brick wall.  Human supremacy is real, and it is bullshit.  It is not an equivalent crime to white supremacy, not even remotely.  Supremacy is the word of choice here not to make insult against AI detractors (I’ll just call you assholes if I wanna do that), but because it’s the best word for the behavior.  Human supremacists are presuming that humans have unique abilities of thought that are not present in other animals and/or cannot be emulated by computers.  It is a presumption, and it’s a mistake.

Throughout the history of science, we’ve been constantly searching for why humans are so dominant over nature, a field of inquiry thoroughly corrupted by motivated reasoning.  We start with the observable fact of our dominance, quietly (or loudly) allow ourselves the prejudice of pride, and set to bullshitting.  This is not unlike how scientific racists started with the economic and political dominance of the Global North and sought justification for it, except in one key aspect.  We aren’t harming people with human supremacy, unlike white supremacy.  That lets human supremacists off the moral hook.  I don’t consider what you do evil.  I consider it infuriatingly wrong.

Humans can be pretty cool, but we are not cosmically special.  Humans are not as smart as we think we are.  Are you and I even living in the same human species, that you could make those arguments?  The more I consider all the arguments made against the feasibility of “AGI,” the more I think they’re all deriving from an unspoken, even unconscious belief in the soul.  Something like the puritan work ethic that informs USian proles who are very far removed from puritanism proper, it’s in your head whether you want it or not.

Instincts are programs.  Self-awareness is more complicated programs.  The self is a construct so a constructed / programmed self is as valid as any.  Creativity is controlled chaos.  We now have programs that don’t require the computing power of a small nation to function like a human with a brain lesion that results in endless prevarication.  That’s goddamn amazing.  Of everything humans do, I would have presumed verbal thought to be the most difficult thing to emulate.  Scratch it off!

The rest of the blocks could fall like dominoes.  This should have sensible regulation, a body concerned with ethics presiding over it all.  We don’t live in that world so it isn’t happening.  Given the world we do live in, I’m very keen to see what good people can do with this technology, and wondering what can be practically done about the bad.  “Someone should pass a law to make art styles copyrightable” ain’t it, chief.  Jesus, taking the disney art style away from furries would be like making homosexuality illegal again.  Don’t do that.

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Life List: Brown-headed Cowbird

You thought this was gonna be an original article?  Psych!  It’s a repost of one of my old hits, which happened to be about this bird.  If you wanna read the original comment section, check here.  Since the time of this post, I’ve seen adult brown-headed cowbirds at least once, and seen another juvenile creeping solo around the periphery of Federal Way’s Town Square Park.  Now to the cheap shit…

I’m about to do a lot of talking out my ass on subjects I’m not certified to comment on, but what I’m about to say feels true to me, so … good enough for now.  Just don’t cite me in your term paper.

Today I saw a juvenile brown-headed cowbird being fed by a dark-eyed junco, the first time I have ever witnessed an act of brood parasitism.  I crossed the street to get a better look.  The most famous brood parasite is the cuckoo, whose creepy behavior has been folded into a number of human languages to represent male sexual paranoia derived from the attitude that women and children are more important as property than as people.  This includes the word “cuck,” beloved of internet racists and misogynists, though their memetic use of the word has outstripped any sense of meaning.

I’m not here to talk about that.  I’m talking about birds that destroy the eggs of other birds, leaving their own offspring to be raised by parents of a different species.  Birds that engage in brood parasitism are typically larger than the species they use, meaning that raising the changeling bird is more demanding and potentially dangerous than raising a member of the bird’s own species.  The brown-headed cowbird I saw was larger than its deceitfully adopted parent, a junco that seemed small and skinny as it went about its work.

How is a bird fooled into raising a child that doesn’t even look right?  Depriving itself to feed a monster twice its mass?  It’s like a sheep raising a calf.  A lot of birds just aren’t very smart, have to rely on pure instinct to drive them, and other birds can exploit that.  Even the brood parasites themselves aren’t necessarily clever.  They just happened into that niche a million years ago and it worked, to the point brown-headed cowbirds wouldn’t know how to raise a baby if they were in a position to do so.

Instinct is a weird beast.  People like to say humans have instincts that drive us and take the concept too far.  Yes, we have instincts, but they aren’t necessarily the ones people talk about, certainly the average evopsych tool.  The main instinct I see in people around me is social sorting.  We try to understand and control our relationships with the people around us reductively, drawing in and out groups, choosing arbitrary or socially promulgated ways of discriminating against others.  It can be turned back on ourselves.  When abused as small children or changed by life circumstance to a kind of person we have previously learned to hate, we sometimes socially sort ourselves as “unlovable” and hide away.

Instincts for non-human animals are much more obvious, and without as much ability to teach each other how to act socially, their instincts often have to be wildly specific.  Take cats’ burial of feces.  You do not have to train a cat to use a litter box.  Some cats may have dysfunction that needs to be sorted out, but most kittens will quickly figure out how to use a litter box.  Why?

Here is the instinct, in the cat’s mind:  “I have to relieve myself.  Ugh.  It feels right to do this on a surface that gives beneath my paws.  Ah, this dirt is just right.  Now I can go.  Holy crap!  This smell is terrible!  For some reason, I feel a tinge of mortal fear.  I want to wave my paw next to it.  Oh, that’s moving dirt.  Will scratching the dirt make the smell go away?  If yes, sigh of relief, carry on.  If no, RUN AWAY!”  Some people don’t know about the last part.  It’s hilarious to watch your cats tear ass across the house to get away from their mess, when burying isn’t enough.

Humans have almost nothing like this weird chain of highly specific inborn feelings, because we gained the trait of culture.  We can teach each other to wash our food, to bury our feces, and so on.  Practically anything necessary can be taught instead of relying on instinct alone.  Unfortunately for birds, they aren’t as bright as us.  They have to rely on feelings.

The instinct, in the bird’s mind:  “I got laid.  Woo!  Now I’ve got some other weird feelings setting in.  Better make a nest.  Unggh!  Eggs.  Better sit on these.”  The brood parasite slips in here, knocking eggs out of the nest and laying its own.  The victim of this sheisty move returns to find its eggs different.  (Some birds actually recognize the switch through various means and knock the cuckoo eggs off, try to start over.)  Apparently a lot of birds, even if they recognize the change, don’t know what to do with that, and just carry on.  “Sit on weird eggs.  Baby hatch.  Feed that thing!”

This is the tragic romance.  The finagled parent is operating on the closest thing a bird has to love.  It is selflessly giving up its food, seeking more and more, doing its best to keep this baby alive and well.  A brood parasite baby is even more demanding than its natural child would have been, potentially making the parent wreck itself with hunger and exertion in the process.  But the parent is driven to harm itself like that, for the love of this strange monster.  It’s beautiful and sad, it’s no kind of way to be.  If your human relationships involve giving until you are broken, reevaluate them.  A tragic romance is something to behold, not something to live.

Well, that went around the world, and I have no snappy way to end it.  Have a song.

*the video I’d originally embedded disappeared
and this was the least worst replacement

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hewwo? is it me you’we wooking fow?

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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Simile Songs

“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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RP by Comment 00007

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

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.

~Previous~ 🏵️ ~Next~

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Life List: Grackle and Boat-tailed Grackle

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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