AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

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This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

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Who Are You? (Owl Noises)

I really wanna know, so sayeth the Whom’st.  Who art thou?  I had another wacky idea for a series of posts, and feel like this one might have more appeal – at least for a narrow audience.

In slowly building an archive of my old blog poasts (insurance against the anarchy of FtB finally doing it in), I’ve also been noting the personalities of commenters, and thinking of you.  Who are you people?  Would any of you consent to an interview?

To test the waters, I’m paging John Morales.  I’d like to do an interview about who you are, in the vein of what some newly minted celebrity might receive, but hopefully less fake.  I’d publish the results here, not unlike the times I interviewed The Beast from Seattle.

If you’re not a lurker – if you’re a person that’s willing to make public comments – I expect you’ve got enough ego to want to be known.  The aging writers and readers of blogs are heading toward oblivion, might be cool to graffiti something of your life into the internet before you go.  Something that will at least last until it gets painted over.  I expect my own blog archive to outlive FtB, so it could be for a while.

I would also love to interview at least one lurker, but I don’t have high hopes you’ll be willing.  I may name people who commented once in the past and mentioned that they lurk; we’ll see.

Aside from John, not naming specific invitees yet, but I may in the future, depending on how it goes.  Nonetheless, if you want to nominate yourself, go ahead.

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I Remember the Loving Vampyress

I don’t wanna bother anyone who doesn’t wanna be bothered, and the person I’m about to mention, when last seen, was on some “don’t bother me” business, but in this moment I cannot resist (besides they’re ungooglable so i’m probably in the clear).  Many years ago now, I was in a contentious comment section, when a young lady possibly having a manic episode got into frantic posting, which I matched.  But should I have?  Probably best to help calm people down when they get too hype.

Especially when it’s a person who makes themself too visible, gets embarrassed, and deletes their existence.  I think she changed her name like three times in the course of that conversation alone.  Somehow I ended up seeing a blog of her writing elsewhere, and it was erotic in nature – again to be disappeared, perhaps from a fit of embarrassment.  I don’t know how much of what I remember is vibes and how much was revelations, but I believe she was very poor – possibly in public housing.  I could say a bit more, but obviously she didn’t want to be known.

The Vampyress is immortal but exists at the outer limit of entropy, capturing the imaginations particularly of those who are haunted by mortality and living in the half-light of gothery.  The Vampyress drinks of the well of life until there is nothing left; in the case of her erotic fiction self-insert that wasn’t just blood.

I hope she’s alive and well in this World of Darkness, and the same for all my long-absent commenters – especially the few who I have reasonable cause to suspect are no longer alive.  Let that reasoning be wrong.  If you see this and know who you are, drop an anonymous comment, or too many comments by various names until you run away blushing and deleted once again.  I won’t forget you.

(EDIT TO ADD … don’t read too much into the lyrics of this song, just a feelin is all …)

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Dog Day Hangover

had a dream young al pacino had a drag persona that had achieved local fame.  at the same time he was an aspiring politician, even tho he was deeply compromised by the mob.  to get clear of his alter ego, he schemed to have a look-alike killed at a public event where both would be present.  “that can’t be me, look ther– oops, she’s gone.”

in his ladyesque identity, a mob guy had fallen in love with her and objected to the idea enough to have an emotional confrontation with him about it.  somebody got kirked in the neck but lived to stagger away through a secret exit.

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Yahtzee to Hit

Some RPGs will give you a fistful of dice to roll, and when they’re 6-sided, adding up the pips fast is a useful skill.  Back in time before time when West End Games had the license to make a Star Wars RPG, that was based on d6, and I got pretty good at it.  Conversely, the guy I know with the worst ADHD couldn’t do it for shit.  They call that dyscalculia, I’m told.

Another time I was playing that wild west RPG, but like, the post-apocalypse version, and you could reroll max results.  My gun only did 3d6 damage but I scored like 52 and insta-killed a kinda tough enemy.  Memorable occasions, those imaginary victories.

I’m inclined to make my own TTRPG, if I ever finish it, d6-based like that.  Somebody put up an “open game license” type deal for the old WEG d6 system, which could be a thing to use.  But still, what about those with dyscalculia?  Rules lite is big in the indie space for a good reason.

Have I ever posed this question before?  Don’t know if I have.  How do you prefer to roll, if at all?

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Everything’s Comin’ Up Poison

The foxgloves are big in my yard.  Not as big or numerous as last year, but bigger than they’re supposed to be.  They really love the soil in that corner for some reason.  Digitalis babeyyy.  Meanwhile my husband has acquired a datura plant, also known as the jimsonweed, thornapple, devil’s trumpet – a nightshade cousin dripping with psychoactive and deadly scopolamine.

Anyone remember “Back in the Saddle Again”?  No, not that one.  We’re not ridin’ into town tonight lord by the light of the moon, lookin’ for suki jo at crazy horse saloon.  I mean the one out where a friend is a friend.  Anyway, old Gene said the longhorn cattle feed on the lowly jimsonweed, and I say he’s a very bad cowboy if he’s letting that happen.  Song is supposed to be happy, it should be like “longhorn cattle feed, keep ’em off the jimsonweed.”

My husband regaled me with funny and/or spooky passages from a subreddit about datura.  Probably ended up there because I was questioning his estimation of risk vs aesthetics, like, you really want that back there?  Go ahead and creep yourself out with the drug stories.  High school fun.

As for the plant’s plantliness, it has allelopathic properties and likes to spread so he’s keeping it in a pot.  No flowers yet, but we shall see.  On the subject of the foxgloves, they’re fun to look at, but wildly productive with the seeds, and they take up a lot of space.  I’d say it’s less like he’s gardening them and more like he’s allowing them to exist, for now.  I’ve seen them running wild by the 320th / I-5 overpass into Federal Way.  Maybe it’s an invasive plant’s world these days, and we’re just living in it.

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Art Thou Mementing Mori? Truly?

This article isn’t meant for those of you who are indisputably close to the grave, more for those whose number can only come unexpectedly.  Please do skip this one, if you eat mori for breakfast every day.  Much love.

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I wanna make artistic things happen.  It gets difficult sometimes, u kno, all the usual reasons.  For some those reasons outweigh the desire, but that is not true of me.  I usually have something on my mind, trying to get free.  Ambitions, frustrated but not wholly defeated.  You can see my attempts from time to time.

I see writers non-writing and think these people don’t have my ambition, and maybe that means they also don’t have my fear.  Again, I’ve expressed this before, but death haunts my steps.  As much as my naturally upbeat brain juice makes me feel like a future in which I continue to exist will get much better in time, something else cuts through the optimism to say that nobody is guaranteed any amount of time.  I could die or lose critical faculties at any given moment for any given reason, lose forever the chance to have accomplished something cool.

On my most recent somewhat related post, I got a lengthy comment that could be construed as hectoring me on my elitism.  I’ve gotten comments like that before, whenever I looked down my nose at the mendicants.  But let’s just assume for the moment that I am truly better than the lowly masses in this.  That I have some sparkling potential that unspent will constitute an egregious loss to the whole of humanity.  Don’t I owe it to the people to win?  To live long enough to succeed?

Comedy paragraph aside, back to business.  The business of lamenting mortality, or lamenting the creative energy wasted in service to Tha Man.  We’re all (anybody lowly enough to read this because they are not on secret rich people internet with uncle jeffrey’s ghost) getting drained in this way, it’s true.  But if you want it hard enough, you can make some things happen.  Like I have, here and there, as able.  Just think about what you’d like to have done before you die, because who knows when that’s going to happen?

Get crackin’.

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We Lost Gost

Seven years ago this day I went to a concert, some cool newish bands my husband was into.  They impressed.  The opening act was a lady-fronted local death rock outfit who put on a fun show.  The headliner was a famous international playboy of darksynth, some kind of miniature frenchman.  Somewhere in between was his fellow genre titan, James Lollar, known professionally as Gost.  About one month ago, he died young from undisclosed causes.  His family’s fundraiser is still up and hasn’t reached its goal, if you’re interested in paying respects.

I don’t know if David Lynch’s passing a year ago softened my man’s resolve but he’s been feeling the sadness for this one even more overtly.  I wasn’t as close to Lollar’s art and so am less affected, but as ever, this kind of thing sucks tremendous.  Causes undisclosed, but what’s hosing down musicians by the score these days?  Don’t do drugs, kids.  They’ve gotten demonstrably worse.  Maybe that wasn’t it, I won’t pry, but still.  Fucking knock it off!

There was something about this guy that was special.  There are a lot of musicians these days that are nothing but a face.  James Gost wore a skull mask or corpse paint at every concert and in publicity material.  Not a clown about it like other masked musicians, it felt like humbleness here.  At the show he was tucked in stage right, looking smol and serious, his presence overpowered by fog machines and a searing light display. Even the light display had humility of a kind; Perturbator turned the club into Close Encounters after that.

Gost belonged to a genre where most of the bands are one or two people, often just one.  This feels significant.  Yes, it’s easier to make a full sound sans bandmates when you’re in electronic music, but it also feels apiece with this moment in time where everyone is apathetic and retiring, too stressed and fragile and deadened to accomplish anything above and beyond.  People who have the gumption to make something happen have trouble finding anyone willing or able to help.  And making art of any kind – especially more ambitious things like albums – does require you to go farther, to put in extra work.  I usually say this of people who put in the work to make the world a better place through activism, but here I’ll say it of artists – long live the fighters.

Or maybe his isolation was the result of having more vision than others would allow to him.  He was in bands before, but stuck in the rhythm section, propping up somebody else’s ideas.  His innovation was only possible as a solo act.  Darksynth emerged from synthwave, which is more video game inspired, to fold in influences of John Carpenter soundtracks, glitch, and industrial.  The result is the heaviest music I’ve ever heard.  I remember when Ministry’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ sounded heavy to me.  Might as well be the Tetris soundtrack these days.  It has a chilling spooky vibe, but more human somehow than related genres.  You can feel the haunted guy inside the glitched beat.

And maybe that heaviness why I haven’t gone in for darkwave as much as I could have.  I’m going soft, with my ’80s nostalgia bullshit.  But I recognize greatness.  At the concert I was too wimpy and unambitious to stand with my husband down on the floor, sitting my ass on the balcony.  I had been crushing my feet at malwart during the days back then, so excuse.  When Gost came on, when the show went from death rock to darksynth, the young people stood up and danced.  In Seattle that’s as amazing as the dead rising.  I remember a fat guy who had seemingly come alone – someone who could be disregarded in life, perhaps socially maladroit – and he was willing to brave the disapproval of others to rock out to his favorite music.  I salute you, hombre.

Salute as well to the artist that moved him.  James Lollar, the Gost.  Condolences to his wife and children, to other family, and to fans – including the one next to me in bed.  It just ain’t right.

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I’m Surrounded by Some Pizzaheads

I once mentioned that Nirvana replaced Pearl Jam in my esteem, way back in teen years, quite completely.  I can still listen to Nirvana, I can barely tolerate Pearl Jam.  They had a song on the Singles soundtrack called “State of Love and Trust” that is pretty coo, “Evenflow” is kinda … alright well those are uptempo rockity jams and the meaningless yarling vocals just blend with the instrumentation.  Anything where the idea of the song is coming across, where some grain of meaning is breaching the surface of sound, well, that’s a fuckin’ mistake with those guys.

I found myself remembering their song “Black.”  There are some words to be understood in it, and others which are not.  Bad ratio.  Failure.  Here is my best recollection of the song.  I can’t actually remember how it began, which is usually my in for remembering the rest, so it’s a bit scattershot…

…Something something something something…
Oh all five horizons.  I’m surrounded by some pizzaheads.
Her legs spread out before me.  Has taken a turn.

And twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head, I’m spinnin’, I’m spinnin’,
Oh and all I wanted was.  Everthang.
Oohoohoohoohooh Ohh and all she gave me was, uh, all she was.
Whoooa

Now there’s somethin’ bad. Sayed on broken glass
Of what was everthang.
And the pictures there. Of men washed in black
Tattooed everthang.
Oh good love gone bad. Turned my world to black.
Tattooed all I had.  All I have.  All I’ll ever beeyeeyeeyeeyeeyee Wah-OGH!

Doodle doot doot doodle doo  (Eddie Vedder actually sings that shit)
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star
In somebody else’s sky, why o why, why o why, Whyyyyyyyy can’t it beeyeeyeeyeeyee
Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiine Wah-OGH!
Doodle doot doot doodle doo
Whooooa-OH!

Anyway, feel nostalgic for the spooge band?  Don’t.

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World of Main Characters

RPGs get funny the more people you have involved, reaching a kind of critical level of foolery with MMORPGs.  The basic old skool unit of RPG is a few bozos and a GM, or in video games, a few bozos you control vs. designed world/story.  In the original Final Fantasy you control the prophesied ‘warriors of light’ who have come to save the world, because crystals.  A small number of important bozos can be main characters without pushing believability too much, but what happens when you have thousands, running around doing dances?  When everybody has one black wing and one white wing and an eyeball that leaks golden sparkles and the death scythe of wunkred +20?

Perhaps in response to that vibe, I wanted to make a character that looked like an NPC in the one MMO I ever played, The Secret World.  Unfortunately the name I wanted was out, so I gave up.  Just as well, it’s all wasted time.  Fine Paper Gifts the NPC-turned-PC was not meant to be.

But as I’ve been turning over a story idea in my head, this feeling was coming back to me.  When you have adventures, romances, thrillers filling the libraries and virtual storefronts of the world to the brim, you’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of specialest people in the whole world.  Even when they try to cut against that grain, the circumstances surrounding them make it clear that isn’t true.  Just because you have brown hair doesn’t mean you’re not special, when all the sexiest dudes in the world want to make you their faerie queene, or when you have a certain set of skills that lets you save tha white house from nucular terrorizzin’.

This is a variation on “why write when there are already so many stories?  why does mine matter?”  Probably just the feels of any artist during some grey time between here and there, nothing deep.  But I’m kinda like this.  If I make another special bozo to launch like a solitary molecule into the specialbozosphere, they better not cloy.  They better not annoy.

Best way to avoid making people feel the teeming masses behind your characters, I think, is to have a better story.  You’re not going to out-batman Batman.  That problem solved, well, we just have to figure out how to tell a better story.  That shouldn’t be difficult, right?

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Errol Flynn the Butcher

Content Warnings: Gore, Horror.

In my post-wokenment action movies have become a skosh more sour in my mind, contemplating how they could fuel the kind of national pysche that thinks war is good, that police need to be less restrained. But I’m usually thinking about that in terms of guns. What about rapiers and longbows?

American cinema and TV through most of the 20th century, when boomer opinions were being formed, violence was largely bloodless and consequence free.  Cowboys shoot people, they fall down, and afterwards we are not treated to the scene of bodies dangling from every surface around town square.  But likewise, Robin Hood or Ivanhoe pushes his sword at a guy and he just falls over the railing, body magically disappearing from consideration after the fact.

Obviously painting guns as harmless fun is the more problematic notion, as evidenced by the libertarian fantasia Adam is reviewing, and as those weapons can cause more damage more quickly.  But still, medieval weapons are nasty things.  Particularly longswords like you’d see wielded in Arthurian legend.  And medieval people didn’t have the same illusions about that.  Maybe it’s easy to forget the longer you go without a war, without print media, but I’ve seen medieval illustrations where guys are split in half, insides looking like salmon filets, blood flowing out in ribbons or sprays of droplets.  Not realistic style, but realistic damage.

I mentioned Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves recently.  That movie was more able to put a bloody slash on a sword victim than in Errol Flynn’s day, but still wasn’t quite there.  To be realistic, head should be flopping, blood shooting like a fire hose, limbs falling left and right, guts strewn across the battlements.  A few edgier movies have pushed in those directions.  Is that a good thing?  Hong Kong blood opera never really got me to “say no to guns” before, because it still showed one side as being a bunch of disposable nobodies, showed heroes as having the most hit points, by merit of their towering will and virtue.

But that’s not my point today.  Mostly, I’m just feeling darkly amused by imagining suave old time swashbucklers steeped in gore and still stepping lightly, being quippy.  Freddy Krueger liked quips too.  Let’s see Robin Hood ending entire human lives in brutal agony, slaying mother’s sons, fathers, and men of honor, just trying to defend the king.  Robin Hood laughing while you hold your guts in and fall onto a pile of your writhing and mutilated friends.  Let’s see Robin Hood and the Ocean of Blood.

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