2000 Words to Close the Fundraiser

The last donation I got was epic.  My donor didn’t expressly forbid me from naming them, but I’ll err on the side of discretion.  Love you!  Same to everybody.  I think of crowdfunding as being a lot of small donations, but instead I only had a handful of donors, and they were generous.  I don’t win a popularity contest, but my friends are very cool.

Aside from the very nice close-out to my fundraiser, I’m kinda having a time here.  One of the teeth I had worked on is more sensitive to pressure now and when antagonized it can cause a headache that persists for hours.  Concerned I might need to go back and have them change that from a crown to a root canal.  Whatever, I’ll come up with a payment plan this time, like a sensible person.  I feel like I might have a fever, but I’m almost certain it’s psychosomatic.  I’ve felt much more feverish in the past when I wasn’t even there.  (note:  next night i continue writing, no fever.)

I explained before how I ended up needing this kind of work in the first place.  But why does it cost so damn much money?  My insurance covered like a few thousand, I put a few thousand on a credit card, and my remainder was several hundred, which I paid out of pocket.  This is what it’s like for the working poor in the USA.  The rich stole our entire lives and now sell it back to us at marked up rates, which our rich politicians like to call “freedom.”  Cool shit.

One could feel like smashing the system, going full anarcho-primitivist, but some elements of infrastructure are necessary to sustain the lives of the disabled, the elderly, children, and more.  I got pretty tired of social media anarchists acting so leftier-than-thou it was like they’re a priesthood.  Ironic behavior from the no-gods-no-masters crowd.  Reflecting on my disillusionment with those assholes, I realize they don’t give an earthly shit about human lives lost on the path to their magical never-gonna-happen future.  Bad people.

Anarchy probably has some cool applications tho.  I consider myself a personal anarchist.  As I explained it there, I believe society should have laws, but everyone of strong conviction should be willing to break them.  When terrorism against the rich starts to happen, I will concede the guilty should be punished according to the law, but I won’t say that the terrorists did a bad thing.  The guy that blasted Shinzo Abe probably gets that.

I dunno.  I’m getting to sleep easily enough but waking up every two to three hours, and my day job is thinking and being social nonstop for several hours at a go.  Maybe tonight will be better, and I’ll feel more generous toward the fuckos whose crystal castles are purchased with my dental expenses.

My dreams, I’m not really remembering.  Violence, running around, hokey monsters, work tasks.  Finish the thing, do the thing, don’t mess up now.  I have a meeting tomorrow with mandatory camera.  My makeup will probably be something in the neighborhood of Heath Ledger Jonker.

…Observe my craggy glory.  Not gonna count the words from the video.

Being committed to shooting shit with no script, no editing, and one take, I realize in the video it could seem like I’m implying the largesse of my donors was due to personal wealth, which I doubt is the case.  Besides, I’ve thrown similar donations at others in better times over the past few years myself, and made offers that were declined as well.  We all do what we can when we can, right?

But let me focus again on the subject I led off with.  This wasn’t a crowd; it was a generous few.  I look at FtB and I see the art of blogging on its way out – not through any fault of its own.  Some bloggers are hobbyists, some are established names running out the clock until the last people who read blogs die off, from this social media asteroid impact.  As I’ve mentioned before, I can deal with the end if the company is hospitable.

I keep getting tempted to talk about this among fellow FtBloggers, as if I haven’t already said everything there is to say about the subject.  It ain’t much.  The type of nexus that social media provides is critical to the success of growing or maintaining an audience now, and having the content you provide exist outside of those spaces?  You aren’t going to get flighty modern people to follow those links.  This blows because if we did operate entirely on social media instead of wordpress – which would be possible – we would be (more) subject to the whims of crapitalist godlords, able to get blasted out of existence with the wave of a hand.

But maybe I feel tempted toward the subject because that isn’t all there is to say about it, and I haven’t figured what else my mind is itching about.  It’s kinda like the skin cell perspective that has me, in moments of gentle delusion, wondering if there’s a solution.  A problem is observed, which in itself suggests to the overthinking mind that said problem can be solved.

Neocities is an attempt to bring back the wild days of site-based internet, but from where I stand, it’s similar to wordpress.  There’s a unified platform for creators to do their own things, and if somebody is inclined to look, they can do so.  But how do you get them to look?

The usual solution is for creators with off-social media sites to create an account on all the majors, like fb and xitter, link to the main run of their content.  But to make that social media presence useful, they have to actually participate in those sites as well, which is draining and wastes time best spent creating.  How do you keep up with all the moderation changes, roving hordes of nightmare people looking for an excuse, and ToS changes that bowdlerize and oppress minorities and capitulate to the interests of power?  How do you craft the kind of witty bon mots and shitposts to be heard in a howling tempest the size of a fucking planet?  And multiply that effort by the number of platforms you’re expected to be on?

The whole thing makes me tired as hell, especially as someone who is considering self-publishing novels soon.  Probably I’ll pay for advertisements somewhere.  Don’t know what the wisdom is on that either, at this point.

It seems to me that this is a consequence of the balkanization of culture that the internet has facilitated, which seems to be a defining element of our epoch.  It is extremely easy for people to ignore top 40 radio and TV and movies, to find subcultures that speak to their prejudices, and run so deep into them that outsiders become unimaginable.  For just one example, I’m always amused by the extent to which fanfic people assume anybody else in the world knows or cares about that entire domain of thought, that subculture that dominates their waking hours.  Sorry babes, you all seem like bizarre cultists from my point of view, like a new religion splintering into warring sects while the unrelated religion on the hill occasionally glances out and wonders “what’s that noise?”

But this is all of us.  We’re all making our worlds smaller because the big picture is so overwhelming.  I know I can’t even stand listening to shitheads.  Way back when bin Laden inaugurated the millennium by smashing a bottle airplanes on the edge of a ship buildings, I still went to TV for culture.  I watched all those clowns on The Daily Show and Colbert etc., to feel a sense that my country hadn’t completely bought the neocon agenda, that some people didn’t love war and xenophobia.  I found atheist content on yewchoob and, somehow, on the precursors of this blog network, to feel like not everybody in the world saw religion as a benign phenomenon, as a sacred thing that should go unquestioned, even as it’s on the lips of so many fuckos with bombs and guns.

But I became too radicalized to handle the talk show boys, who treated the rise of Trump as a joke.  They didn’t change; I did.  I haven’t even made the time for the clips of them that Mano posts.  Their faces remind me of a very bitter moment, one our relationship could not survive, regardless of whatever steps they’ve taken to make up for it.  And our movement’s web presence?  That’s a joke so bad it killed us dead.

I can’t speak to specific numbers, but judging by comment count, our traffic must be a tiny fraction of what it once was.  How could it not be?  Deep Rifts 2.0 / Elevatorgate broke us down to rubble.  Sometimes PZ laments that being a conservative is where all the traffic and the money is, of course always quick to say the cost would never be worth it.  But it’s true.  Our community, such as it was, thrived on invective and strife and dunking on fools.  When it became clear the most classically dunky faction was the regressives, the majority of us followed atheism down the nazi hole.

The remainders in the progressive side were split on how nice we should be, with FtB somewhere in the middle.  The most SJW are the most gone, too delicate to weather a desolate world, or perhaps just more interested in causes other than atheism at this point.  That’s fair.

I remember when Dubya got elected for the first time in 2004 (not when he was appointed by judicial hijinks in 2000) me and other cranky young people marched around Seattle hollerin’.  Wherever a speaker would get on a soapbox, they’d flog their own projects or personal beliefs, in a way that would lose X amount of the crowd.

When did I finally drop out?  When a guy that was cranky about the christofascist aspects of rethuglican governance tried to lead people in a blasphemous chant,  like fuck god or fuck jesus or something.  I’m like, yeah, fuck those guys, but I want whatever movement I’m part of to go somewhere, not devolve into provincial concerns that are gonna guarantee we stay in the margins of society.  It was getting late, time to march to the bus stop.

I’d like to be a charismatic preacher for atheism, shake snakes at the reverse infidel (fidel?), but it’s hard to make myself feel it, while jester-ass clowns like DickDawk and Chundershite are still out there being us.  Yeah, they don’t represent your beliefs or mine from our point of view, but they do to the world.  Who knows who I am?  You do, and I love you all, but to the general public, we’re the same thing as those utter fools.  Ya feel me?

I’ve seen people using “culturally christian” as an insult for atheists since some months before Dicky Boy decided to own it.  It makes us mad when used that way, even as we’d accept it as accurate without much emotional weight attached in other contexts.  As I consider it in this moment, I think it’s time to use SJW language to fight back.

Like some people are asexual because of trauma and that is valid, some people are atheist because of trauma, and that is valid.  Invoking the religion that causes so much trauma as a way to dunk on atheists is triggering.  Of course it is.  It’s a microaggression, at the very least.

If progressive theists can’t take the truth of our position on board, can’t make room for us at the “interfaith” table, wanna tar us all with the same brush as the fuckboy side of our movement, they should at least know they’re being abusers to the disenfranchised, they’re punching down.  When they shit on atheists, they’re being oppressors.

Doesn’t ring as true as I’d like, while our banner continues to be used to promote fascism.  Fucking succckkks.

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That rambling pointless mess was 2000 words on the nose according to google docs’ way of counting.  It took the spare time of five days and felt like pulling teeth, haha.  Ugh.  Anyway, I’ll probably be quiet again for a minute.  But I’m glad to know some amount of people will come around whenever I do.  Thanks again, and vaya sin dios.

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100 Words on the Topic of Mars vs Antares

These topics can be cryptic, but wikipedia is my dogg.  I found a connection.  “If Antares was placed in the center of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, in the asteroid belt.”  Let’s do that.  Place the red star Antares in our system, and see how Mars fares…

Maybe Mars had it coming.  War sucks.  There’s a story where Hephaestus caught his wife Venus boning down with Mars, tossed a net over them, and dragged ’em around the world.  Let the fires of Antares light up the cosmos with Martian ruin.

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NOTE:  I have one last post I owe, 2000 words.  No time left tonight, I’ll see y’all late tomorrow.

Funds, I Raise Them

My fundraiser to make up for dental expenses is at 81% of goal.  Now would be a good time to make any last donations because it takes up to 3 days to transfer from paypal to my bank account and my ugliest bill comes up Thursday, which is the day before I get paid.  Also paid 30 bucks for a tetanus shot tonight.  Life is funny.

Anyway, scroll down to see the all the posts I have written to order here, whose titles start with word counts.  These types of creations can be yours, for the low price of 10 words to the dollar.  Plz donate thx.

I had to pay close to $700 unexpectedly which is gonna make all the bills that come due before I next get paid extra painful.  So I’m hastily raising as much as I can within two weeks.  If I go over target, I’ll put any excess toward paying down some of the thousands in credit card debt I racked up from the same dental shituation.  Donate and I will write you a blog post on your topic of choice, containing ten words for every dollar you donate.  If you chip in a few bucks you can get a haiku, right?

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250 Words on the Topic of Loki as God

Somebody suggested I could meditate for a moment on what it would be like if Loki were behind the mask of the christian god.  What an obscure concept to be into, Norse mythology of all things.  It’s not like there’s some global media conglomerate spamming culture with a contemporary representation played by a conventionally attractive rich white guy.  How does one even get into these things?

At the core of the request is the concept of dystheism, and I’m grateful to whatever wikipedia editor linked that in the “related articles” section of Loki’s page.  What if the abrahamic god was a malevolent prank?  That might explain why god is nowhere to be seen – Loki was captured by his fellow æsir and squirreled away until doomsday, when his bastard children will bust him out of jail and destroy the world.  We’ll see Loki again when the soup goes down, possibly rocking stigmata and a crown of thorns.

Sometimes Loki’s pranks were for his own ends, sometimes he was badgered into using his powers for the pantheon, like the time he was impregnated (mpreg) by a male horse.  On one level, Loki playing Yah;_;eh demotes our lord of creation, but on another level, it empowers him, because he’ll win in the end, right?  And just like in Revelations, we’ll all lose at the same time.  If xtianity and the Great Middle East Hatepit are the creation of a prankster god, congrats to him, but it doesn’t change much for us.

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100 Words on the Topic of Humility

I mentioned recently that art school was a humbling experience for me.  Humbleness, or humility, can be a good thing.  Humiliation not so much, unless you’re into that.  Think I know a girly on that tip, perhaps not aware how much she injects that into her fiction writing, haha.  Then there’s the related topic of the humblebrag, which is somehow nothing to do with the line from Weird Al’s Amish Paradise that “I know I’m a million times as humble as thou art.”  I’m losing the plot.  Think, McFly!

Pride goeth before the fall.  If you have too much faith in yourself and your own excellence, reality can catch you by surprise.  This is what happened to our mans DickDawk.  He went after the low hanging fruit of christian literalism, let the baby atheist kudos convince him he could do no wrong, and when he showed his ass on the issue of feminism, was completely astonished by the response.  People could take issue with meeee?  But I am the golden boy!  I am the special one.  I’d just say, don’t forget your own fallibility, and when you become aware of them, don’t forget your actual failures.

The more you know.

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EDIT: I lost track of what I was doing and this ended up being 200 words.  Failures abound!

250 Words on the Topic of Hugs

Got some gentle sympathies in donation message, but again, barely anyone has been suggesting topics to write about.  Makes me wonder if I should be running a different incentive scheme.  Anyhow, Hugs.

When is a hug appropriate?  The USA is one of the more physically removed countries in the anglosphere.  Broadly speaking, people here don’t hug anyone they don’t know outside of full-on emergencies, like consoling a person whose baby got blown up in a car accident.

And the people who are allowed to hug?  Women.  It’s gendered.  (Queerness definitely complicates the picture, but bear with me.)  Men can’t express physical affection for each other outside of Arnold Schwarzenegger / Carl Weathers arm-wrassles.  One can get unused to physical contact.  That was me, for a long time.

If I’m not expecting to be touched, I jump.  If that happened to me when I was a kid, it was going to be violence.  As an adult, it’s my boyfriend being affectionate, not noticing that I wasn’t noticing his approach.  Then he feels bad about it, and I’m like, aww no boo, it ain’t you.

So I got to where the only way I wanna be seen, when I can control the circumstances, is lady-presenting.  I don’t do it at a grocery store or the office, but I do it at remote meetings, the FtB Poddish Sortacast, and my pics around the internet.  This being what people see of me, I find some people are treating me the way they might treat a lady, which is kinda cool, but also can make me jump when I don’t expect it.

Pay it no nevermind.  Hug on.  Especially cyber-hugs.  Why should I balk at that?

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500 Words on the Topic of Hellraisin’

My donors are so shy and unimposing.  I have a guess who one of them is, and if I’m right, he might like a word about cenobites…  Jeezis Shit, I just went searching for the origin of the quote “Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me” and the entire internet thinks Rihanna came up with it.  I heard that shit in junior high and I’m forty-seven years old, so … time travel?  I was thinking, maybe Andrew Dice Clay, but that didn’t come back with anything.  Why can I imagine it in Woody Allen’s voice?  Somebody help me.

Anyway, sexy menace.  Tearing your soul apart as a euphemism for the ecstasy of orgasm.  Chains and blades and hooks with a life of their own.  The black-eyed priests and nuns and less specifically gendered clergy of Hell, in sexy leather clothes, ready to give you the business.  You know you want it.

Something about the cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (original story Hellbound Heart) is just sooo iconic.  They are gods among monsters.  I’d love to come up with something that hits the same way, but is it possible?  Is that kind of idea just lightning in a bottle?  Were they a Platonic Ideal just waiting in the realm of Forms, and Barker just happened to be the first guy to pluck them from that airy plane?

There’s the seeker.  Frank “Come to Daddy” Cotton and his ilk.  Somebody chasing a high that can only be found in transgression, and there’s never enough.  Then there’s the box.  Beautiful, elegant, small, activated by touch, by curiosity.  The cracks in the world, admitting the power of Leviathan.

Then there’s the Apostles of Pain.  The cenobites.  Love those guys.  I’m not into S&M, not really, but the look of it all?  Very cool.  I like cool things.  I like the aesthetics.  Total poser, I know.  I remember being in The Metro on Seattle’s Broadway buying leather accoutrement, and the clerk asked, “Stocking up for a good time?”  I felt so uncool.  Whaddyagonnado?

I guess I could seek the box, do that fiddly hand jive, unlock the lament configuration, and get my cool on.  Or my flesh off, whichever happens first.  I’ll be like the doctor in Hellraiser II, “To think, I hesitated!”

I came up with the core of a formula for trying to arrive at the power of Icon in monster design.  Come up with Sinister Themes of the monster, Visual Motifs, Colors, Shapes, Textures, Powers, and Places associated with them.  You can see some mention of it here.  I still haven’t successfully used it to come up with anything interesting.  Just never got around to it.  Maybe on another one of these posts.

For now, this post will just be a note of admiration for the creation of a master.  Maybe when I’ve sold my screenplay for Gun Lemurs and made a bank full of money, I can buy the time to pursue my own immolation.  To earn that charisma.  Wish me luck?

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1000 Words on the Role of Satan in US Religion

A donation with a topic, fantastic!  What is the role of Satan in current American religions?

What I want is a metaphor.  A role as a personified archetype.  To contemporary US christianity, is Satan a brother?  A gadfly?  A nemesis?  A lover?  Maybe we can arrive at this through observation.

To start with, few actually believe in Satan.  The first poll I could find says the number is closer to 60% than to 50% but I don’t fuckin’ believe it.  That’s belief from the mouth, from the top of the head in survey mode.  What’s in your heart?  Is there really a supernatural nemesis to your god’s designs, tempting people with forbidden pleasures?  Aside from me, I mean.

There’s an analog for that in something my bf told me about.  Somewhere on internet, republicans were grousing about the stolen election and a troll appeared to say, “Hahaha, I was a voting booth volunteer and I threw out millions of republican votes, teehee.”  They tutted at him like, “Oh you darn rascal,” but didn’t seem nearly as mad as they should be.  This is their boogeyman; this is what they believe happened.  Or do they?

Likewise rizzless stooge Candace Owens tut-tuts about the devilish queer menace of the Sam Smith-Kim Petras joke jam “Unholy,” but something in her performance is so lackluster.  Oh you kids, playin’ at satanisms.  You won’t think it’s so fun when the devil comes to collect his due, which is totally gonna happen…

I just don’t believe them.  I’m sure some smaller percentage of USians are for real about fearing The Adversary, but they’re too busy abusing children and stockpiling weapons to participate in polls.  Gods-peed, christian soldiers.  Anyway,

The Church of Satan have formalized this relationship.  You perform your belief in Satan and we’ll perform the part you have written for us.  It’s a shame the high-ups are just nazi fucks who tricked rebellious progressive types into paying for their vacations and incompetent pet lawyers, because they give lip service to promoting all the good things that US xtians despise.  But who cares even if they were actually cool?  They’re lesser court jesters with no impact on the larger society.  I just mention them here as a cultural phenomenon that shows how shallow the belief in Satan really is.

So what role does Satan play in modern US religion?  A less important boogeyman to keep children in bed.  A scarecrow that is absolutely covered in crow shit.  Nobody of consequence.  That cousin who you talk shit about but still invite to the party, maybe hoping they’ll do something scandalous for gossip fuel, but it just never happens.

I kid, I kid.  Hail me.

No, seriously, I’d like to personally freak every human being in the Unholy video except for the dirty dirty boy the song is about.  Hit me up Sammy.  But the end result is inarguably less cool than Lil’ Nas X’s performative unholiness.

On the other hand, Sam Smith and Kim Petras aren’t American Satans and Lil’ Nas X is, so…  I am reminded now, thinking about African Americans, of the expression, “Not today, Satan.”  It’s a way to dismiss the temptation to act the fool, I think usually through violence.  Satan can be in the person tempting you to “go upside their head,” or maybe just be the part of one’s self that feels temptation.

This is one key difference between Satan in US christianity and Satan in, say, US judaism.  In judaism it seems like HaSatan is a figure from the past, or a metaphor, or just generally unimportant.  In christianity (as practiced more than in the book itself), he’s an omnipresent mirror image of god.  Similar powers, only differing in that Satan is destined to lose at the end of time.  At least for some people, Jesus is there when you wanna be a good boy; Satan is there when you are drunk or jackin’ it or whatever.

I guess the belief in both is pretty situational.  A christian is more likely to feel like Satan is real if they were exposed to bad situations.  I’m culturally christian, much as I reject that entire deal, and it colors my perception of evil when I encounter it.  I’d like to reverse that in my head.  Why should an anti-christ see devils as evil?  Brainwashing, man.  Like when I sip my pop during the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” shit before movies.  (For more on my feelings about deviltry, see this article.)

There are some who believe we’re in a new era of “Satanic Panic.”  Looking over the article on the ’80s version, I don’t buy that.  QAnon definitely takes a lot of cues from that era, but it doesn’t get serious play on mainstream TV.  Fox might like to fondle the Q balls, but they couldn’t bring themselves to work the shaft.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but there are no cases recently where conspiracy theorists have managed to prosecute people for trafficking christian babies out of pizza parlors, without getting laughed out of the courtroom.  Nothing on the order of the McMartin preschool trial.

But maybe we can get there.  The republican parts of the USA are drowning in wild garbage ideas, with no light to be seen.  So getting back to my original aim, taking all these things into account, what role does Satan play?  The wall non-fundies will have their back against when fevered right wingers start shooting again?  Windmill giants to their Don Quixotes?

My personification of Satan must be a cipher, a passive figure onto which ideas are projected.  A scapegoat?  A ghost.  A person who exists more as an idea than an entity.  Let’s say religious America is an abandoned child, who wonders about her parents, builds theories about them.  Daddy God must be good, Mommy Satan must be the wicked harridan who left you in that garbage can behind the church.  One day Daddy will find you and set things right.  One day you will find Mommy and make her suffer.

Satan is whoever you want her to be, America.

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100 Words on Metamorphosis

Got a donation with a suggested topic I don’t quite understand.  I wonder if it’s a sex thing.  Phrased, “A butterfly/artist go-lightly. ;-),” it contains evocative words.  I got evoked.  Let me answer it as impressionistically as it hits me…

A butterfly, an artist, go lightly between lives, between colors, between forms. Yea tho any given moment be as solid as a chrysalis, what lies within is the fluid that bridges one unknowable state and the next.

Know me now?  Think again.  Know me in another minute?  Keep guessing.  My love and my passion are colors of light that oscillate through bandwidths beyond your limitations.  Transmutation, alchemy, coagulation, dissolution, thesis and synthesis, these words are pathetic feints at the meaning that underlies my life.  Take my heart if you dare.

This has been a metaphor for butt stuff.  Thank you.