numb3r_5ev3n

I just wanted to say this before I leave town for the weekend for the Texas Renaissance Festival:

I made a post recently about how, between 2008/2010, I was a frequent poster on FARK Dot Com. And there were a handful of us who believed a conspiracy theory that Republicans Did The Great Recession (or enabled the conditions that caused it) in order to try and weed out "undesirables" who they thought would starve, be imprisoned, or leave the country if conditions got bad enough. Bush was a lame duck President, and we all thought Republicans had lost power for a generation at least (I wish!) so they were shitting the bed on purpose to make things difficult for the incoming Obama Administration. (And they were, just not that way.)

And people who actually knew things about how the reactionary mind works corrected us, and told us, "Reactionaries are too attached, (and this is the important part) identify too much with their status symbols and creature comforts. As in, these things are important parts of their core identity, and right now they are mad at George W. Bush for having to give those up. They're not deliberately going without in order to sink the people beneath them, because to them the idea of going without is unthinkable. Allowing the economy to crash so hard that they had to shop at Wal Mart (or, God forbid, Aldi's) when they were formerly shopping at Central Market, Tom Thumb/Simon David, Market Street, Trader Joes, and Whole Foods is a humiliation that they will never forgive George W Bush for, because it happened on his watch. The worst thing you can do to the Conservative voter base is to make them feel like they've gone down a rung on the social ladder, and that you as the President are to blame."

And 18 years or so later, I actually think these people were right. And it's a lesson that apparently didn't stick, or that Republican leadership forgot. Because they let it happen again, and lost in the biggest landslide since Watergate.

There is another exchange I remember from FARK after Obama won the 2008 election. One Republican whined, "I know you libs are mad at George W. Bush, but did you really have to go so far to try and humiliate us like this?"

There's a whole thing there about how Republicans apparently thought that we were voting in America's first Black President in order to "humiliate" them - that's definitely something that needs to be unpacked. But after Tuesday, my response to that long-ago whiner way back in November 2008 would be, "No, we voted for Obama because after eight years of crisis, war, and recession, we actually did want Hope and Change. Nov 3, 2026 is what happens when we are trying to humiliate you."

Current Mood: https://youtu.be/WM7-PYtXtJM?si=h-Nx_D5J5qxDllTn

Current mood: https://youtu.be/Jr58Uf1srfo?si=dysRqgO609ATgzHA

I'm struggling with writing a regular entry. Because I am, as The Kids say, Crashing Out.

Work is an absolute nightmare. Every day I fantasize about ragequitting and just driving out to the lake and planning what I'm going to do with the rest of my life from there. "Driving to Seattle or San Francisco and living in a commune" sounds romantic, but not very realistic.

I've been binge-listening to old recordings of Terence McKenna again, and thinking about how nice it would be to become a professional psychonaut like he was. Maybe in the era of Trump and the Social Media algorithm, it is time once again to Turn On, Tune In, and Drop out.

I have cut out nearly all social media, and I'm trying to limit my time on tumblr just a few hours a week. Because while issues with retaining stuff I read is a known ADHD symptom, I didn't really start to have problems with it myself until the advent of scrolling social media. Which means this has been an ongoing thing for nearly 20 years now. I can read fiction just fine, but I struggle with nonfiction, and I'm trying to fix this. Books that engage the reader directly in a conversational voice are easier than those that don't.

But it's terrible, because I can remember the time when I used to be able to read two or three books a week. And I never really wanted to admit it was a problem when it started to become a problem, or deal with it (because that would mean admitting it had become a problem.) I'm hoping that this is something I can build back up like a muscle.

I need to cut out youtube unless it pertains directly to something I am focusing on or working on, particularly short form videos.

So much stuff seems to be clickbait now. I hate that I can't tell how much of the projected Blue Wave midterm results are real or not, or if we're being psyopped. I've heard "we might flip Texas blue!" so often since 2016 that it feels like a put-on. Don't get me wrong, I got my voter registration sorted out right after I moved back at the end of June, and I'm early voting at the first opportunity I get. I'm just not expecting a miracle. Maybe we flip a few seats. Maybe we get a few people in who aren't Nazis. Maybe even enough people to start impeachment proceedings. I'd settle for that.

Also: I have no interest in remaining on any Web 2.0 social media if they are going to start livestreaming executions. I don't want to be anywhere where I might see anything like that. I heard today that they are no longer planning on doing this with the Fort Hood shooter. Which is a good thing if it's true, despite what he did. We don't need to turn into a place that does public executions. America was guilty of atrocities long before Trump, and will still guilty be long after he's gone. But it's stuff like that which indicates a turn from a failed Democracy into a full-blown Banana Republic.

Tiktok is of course Right Out.

But I need to apologize to all my friends here. Back last June, I rejoined Reddit just to engage with the tech community, and it ended up eating my life to the point of basically being a second job again. So I deleted it for real this time. And I know I suck at keeping up with people at the best of times, and it must feel like I fell completely off the map again and stopped responding to people. But for a few months, Reddit was all-consuming. And it became all-consuming to the point of missing the emails that my cyberalfheim website domain was about to expire. And now I have to deal with the fact that it may have been picked up by either an AI or someone who is opposed to what I was doing with it.

The material is still up at neocities, but this sucks and I hate it that this happened. Six or so years ago I was considering giving it up and just merging that content on with the stuff already at Cyber Arcadia anyway, but I'm sorely tempted to finally dust off the dragoncourt dot org domain I bought three years ago and move it there, no matter who it may piss off.

In other news: I have watched the new Avatar spinoff (Seven Havens) and it's great! It's so obviously influenced by the art style of Jean Giraud/Moebius! It's totally worth seeing. So is American Horror Story's 13th season. Some folks on tumblr are complaining about it, particularly its continuity with past seasons. But I'm just enjoying the ride.

Hello. It's me, the bringer of such hot takes as "MAGA only cared about the Epstein List when they thought it would give them justification to persecute Liberals/Lefists/Democrats," with another Hot Take.

First off, I've been taking a look at the recent plight of American farmers hit hard by Trump's policies, and watching a lot of content by Farming While Beige. And there's a lot of "wow, thse folks sure sound like they're having the time they voted for."

Back when I was a regular on FARK dot com during the Tea Party Era, there was a theory being kicked around that certain white Reactionary Regressives were trying to crash the economy on purpose (or were at least rooting for it to fail) and were trying to prevent the then-incoming Democratic administration from fixing it, because they expected the people they hated and blamed for all of their problems to suffer and die. The 2008 crash hadn't done "what it was supposed to" and the people they accused of "living off the system" were still resolutely hanging in there (besides, the majority of people on welfare in the US are white. And a lot of people on welfare do actually work jobs, but can't make ends meet because wages haven't risen along with inflation for forty years or more. But I digress.) But these Reactionary Regressives were willing to take a blow to their standard of living if it meant "those people" were hurting worse.

Maybe it would mean paying higher prices at the store for a while. Maybe one of their bigass lifted trucks would get repoed, maybe they would end up having to sell the boat they took out to the lake on weekends, or maybe they might have to downsize their living situation. But they were at least begrudgingly okay with that if it meant the people they hated, aka "those people," weren't able to make it at all. When "those people" were gone, they were telling themselves, all of the "welfare" and the "handouts" they imagined "Those people" were getting would naturally flow to the people who actually "deserved it." Instead of, you know, being appropriated by the Billionaire Class.

And occasionally someone would voice the above sentiments, and be told it sounded farfetched. A conspiracy theory. White conservatives are obsessed with their creature comforts and status markers. There was no way they would deliberately be shooting themselves in the foot in the hope that the people they hated would bleed to death. But then their rage and grievance boiled over into the Tea Party momentum that swept the midterms in 2010 and led to the MAGA doom loop fuckery that we have now. They went all in for Donald Trump, and it was kind of obvious to everyone who had been paying attention that "shooting themselves in the foot to hurt the people they hated" was in fact exactly what was going on.

(Awareness of this is part of what "woke" really means, by the way. Not Trans people being positively or even neutrally represented in media, not a woman playing the main character in a comic book film or a video game, or Black people playing Elves or Valyrians. Fans of Robert Anton Wilson's and Robet Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy had a phrase for it: "Being able to see the Fnords." Some people can't help but see the Fnords, because the Fnords are affecting them every day. But I digress.)

BUT it turns out, what they were actually seeking may not have been the mass death of marginalized people, so much as the expulsion of one group, in the hopes that another group would "come back to the plantation." Seriously. This is what they thought was going to happen. This was what they expected to happen if they persecuted and tortured and deported migrants. That Black people would come running back to take those jobs.

Turns out, MAGA doesn't just imagine themselves as Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires. They would like to have the whole plantation system of slavery back. But if they can't have that, they'll settle for the return of the exploitative sharecropper system and Jim Crow.

And now a lot of these rich MAGA white farmers have realized that they did not just shoot themselves in the foot by voting for Trump, they have in fact blown their feet clean off in the hopes that it would somehow get them back the aristocratic status that they were tricked into believing was somehow "stolen" from them. And of course they expect handouts and sympathy for their predicament after years of supporting Trump in the hopes that he would harm people for their expected benefit. What this means for the supply chain and the consumer existing in a world already beset by inflation and price gouging at the supermarket remains to be seen.

But it would sure be nice if the future we are currently living in hadn't been created by the delusions of a bunch of racist malcontents, and the agents of the billionaire class who keep on feeding them those delusions.

Dolly Parton leaving us was bad enough. This one really hurts.

I think I first saw Tim Curry in the film Annie, as the dastardly "Rooster."

Then there was Legend, a movie that my mom rented soon after we first got a VCR when I was 8 or 9. Then a local station used to alternate it with Tron as the Sunday Afternoon Movie for several weeks around that time. (Which is also how I first saw Tron.)

Then he was the voice of Captain Hook on the animated series Peter Pan And The Pirates, a show I watched religiously.

Then of course, there was the TV adaption of Stephen King's IT, where he was a very memorable and scary Pennywise The Clown.

Starting during my senior year of High School, I was up at my local Rocky Horror picture Show every weekend between late 1994 and most of 1995 and 1996. By 1997, I knew the second script enough to recite it to a film club at a showing at Texas Women's University on Halloween night when they showed it there.

Those are the most pivotal influences he had on me personally, but there is so much more. I recently watched a documentary about his recovery from the stroke he suffered back in 2012. I was amazed and inspired by the resilience and tenacity he displayed in his efforts to overcome the effect it had on his life.

Thank you, Tim Curry. For all of it.

Tim Curry Tribute: https://youtu.be/aiupVR6ryJ4?si=h021CwaSzt-U1HHF

Tim Curry breaks down his iconic roles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3VKRQr9Img

1. As of right now, for the first time since the Pandemic, I can say that I have gotten all of my medical/dental checkups done for the year. I'd been skipping them not so much because of ADHD or a lack of funds, but because of the Pandemic itself. Because I heard one too many "I went to my dentist/optometrist/mammogram clinic, and now I have Long Covid" story. I got most of them done back in 2021 right after I was vaccinated, in that little interregnum when we thought things were going to "go back to normal" after enough people were vaccinated. (Because surely, enough people would get the vaccine, right? Right?) But this calendar year (last September to this month) is the first time I've gotten it all done since then.


2. I saw the film Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, from the same writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, who made We're All Going To The World's Fair and I Saw The TV Glow. And it's not a horror or a slasher movie so much as a deconstruction of horror/slasher moves, and the fact that Hollywood doesn't understand what originally made them so beloved. They just want to turn these franchises into predictable money making machines. But thematically, it's way more than that.

( Cut for spoilers - not so much of specific plot points, but the themes of the movie. )

And remember that "Dear MAGA, you're really not going to enjoy living in the hellscape of a world you are helping to create as much as you think you are" post I made around this time last year? Well, it feels like Christopher Nolan, a Traditional Conservative, made that theme into a three-hour movie. Too bad the people who really need to hear that message are avoiding it because their delicate little snowflake minds can't handle seeing two Black women and a Trans Man on the big screen. And, I mean. Trad Conservatives like George Will and Bill Kristol have been slamming Trump since his first term. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but yeah.

EDIT: I'm definitely not the only one who noticed, apparently.

"Shaving my head until my friends are out of jail."

Also current mood: https://youtu.be/76wSk1j02_4?si=5V5pZ1nCK1_YI61q

But first: I have been binge watching seasons of American Horror Story over the past few weeks, since my Tron Hyperfocus sort of burned itself out, and I am now on Tumblr surrounded by AHS fans who are now under the Tron Fandom Umbrella because Evan Peters is in Tron Ares. And they totally did the "just try it, first one's free" with AHS, and I did. I know, I know, May Lietz said "don't use violent media to disassociate" and she's absolutely right. But I just saw AHS: Cult, and I Have Some Thoughts.

Mainly that: from personal experience, it's the Second In Command who tends to throw their proverbial weight around (under the Aegis of the Divine Ruler, of course) while the Divine Ruler is lying down on the only other bed in the apartment, surrounded by empty Vicodin bottles, half-empty packs of cigarettes, and half-empty coke cans, screaming "DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING!" after having done nothing but drink cokes, smoke cigarettes, pop Vicodin, and shriek for more of the same for the past three weeks solid.

Cults don't make it without a Second In Command, or Seconds in command. Behind every so-called Divine Ruler screaming "DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING!?" is a Right Hand Person or Inner Circle actually Doing All Of The Things, scrambling to appease the Leader's will and mitigate the chance of possible swift violence. Because this is any cult leader's true power, once you are on the inside, and the charisma or the message or whatever has already roped you all the way in. Because the threat of immediate, disproportionate violence is always there, always looming. And this, aside from the constant struggle to be the Favorite, is the reason why a lot of cults are self-enforcing in their behavior. There is also a lesson here about how people who are drawn to cults might have a tendency to come from abusive pasts, and are drawn to a recreation of a situation they know, even if it is horrific. But without Loyal Followers, the cult leader is basically a washed-up dysfunctional weirdo with power over nothing, not even themselves. And this is the one truth, the one source of narcissistic injury, that plagues them constantly. In their minds, their cult members are basically folks who volunteer to be bullied in order to assuage this narcissistic injury.

AHS: Cult is also the most politically relevant piece of media I have seen since maybe Holy Mountain. Yes, a clarification of this is probably warranted. But the best I can do right now is, "underneath all of the symbolism about alchemy in Holy Mountain, is symbolism about how colonialism has affected Central and South America over the past few hundred years." AHS: Cult is nothing less than an allegory about the MAGA phenomenon and how we got here. And the message is even more bleak since the proclaimed Divine Ruler is right back in the seat of power since 2025.

My birthday weekend was nice and I saw a lot of friends, despite everything being the way that it is, and the fact that I'm kind of mentally spiraling right now. I went to The Londoner Pub on Friday night with some folks, had lunch with my Moms Saturday, and visited with nyyki yesterday. I am about to go to a Carpenter Brut concert. I am Hanging In There.

Aside from that: as a friend of mine who is also super into AHS said, "Ryan Murphy has a particular set of skills." And I wish he would take up the Tron franchise and run with it.

OR: The reason why I am no longer following new purportedly "Leftist" content creators on Youtube and other platforms.

If you are plugged into Leftist spaces on Youtube, chances are you might be aware of the recent antics of a content creator calling himself Flesh Simulator. I have posted links to a few of his videos to this blog over the past year, particularly the ones about his theories regarding Reddit and the Epstein Web.

Recently it came to my attention that he collaborated with a known Neo-Nazi content creator. And when the bullshit started to spiral out of control between him and followers of Hasan Piker on Twitter because of this, he made videos doxxing and threatening them, and echoed several right wing talking points about Gay and Trans people, Somali immigrants, Muslims, and others. But collaborating with a Nazi and echoing Nazi talking points would be enough reason for me to stop following him and to take down the links to his videos, even if none of the other stuff had happened.

But this isn't even the first time that I have been taken in by an YouTuber or influencer who was not what they appeared to be, and I'm sick of it. I think there is an aspect of my mental illness or neurodivergence which makes me susceptible to people like this. I fell for Flesh Simulator, I fell for Peter Coffin, I fell for James Somerton, and I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of seeing so-called "Leftist" creators, particularly ones whose whose videos I have disseminated, turn out to be complete grifters or go mask-off Full Nazi the moment an argument on the internet doesn't go the way they want.

As of right now, I will no longer follow or share the content of "new" (to me) Leftist content creators and influencers. If I have not already followed you for five years or more, or if you have not been vetted or recommended by someone I trust, I do not trust that you will not turn out to be a grifter or not flame out and start screaming slurs the second you start to get static from anyone about anything. (And this includes Hasan Piker, btw.)