numb3r_5ev3n

First and foremost: https://neocities.org

1. "Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?" Tumblr post with Old Web resources.

2. The Small Web

3. Resources List for the Personal Web, from the The 32-bit Cafe. (Thanks, finch!)

4. Website Background Archives. Most of the ones I remember from back in the day are there.

5. Free Code Camp! Learn to code your own website!

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.)

So, I am crashing out completely from the Tron Ares hyperfocus. One of the casualties of this is my bi-annual deletion of Reddit, because it is beyond toxic, it had become an addiction, and it has been eating my life.

The moment I do it, is always so freeing. And then, the next few days, I realize just how tethered to groupthink I was. I felt the same way after deleting Bluesky. But unlike Bluesky, I have deleted Reddit and gone back multiple times now.

This time, I really can't afford to go back. It really did eat my entire life there for a while, and I need to let it go.

Oddly enough, I now know how to proceed with my fanfic. More than one of my fanfics, actually. And I have my recent rewatch of Time Bandits to thank for that.

Time Bandits is probably my mom's favorite movie. Like it is the one movie my mom re-purchases every time the format changes (VHS > DVD > Blu Ray > Digital)

I watched it over and over as a kid, until I was about 10 - when suddenly, everything about it became very existentially terrifying. Like to the point where I couldn't be in the same room when it was on. It was the height of the 80s Satanic Panic, and my religious scrupulosity OCD was starting to kick into overdrive right around this time. And the the religious aspects of it triggered something very deep, even if it wasn't a traditional God vs Satan narrative. But, just like something in my psyche saw The Endless in Neil Gaiman's Sandman a few years later and decided that they were real, and The Endless became a very real part of my personal cosmology for a while, something in the conflict between The Supreme Being and Evil felt like a more "real" representation of God and the Devil than the traditional one I was brought up with in church.

Basically, if you grew up in Evangelical Christianity during the 1980s Satanic Panic, as I did, you were getting the constant messaging that any media with magic or wonder was just a trap of the Devil seeking to ensnare weak minds. Fantasy was The Devil/Evil shaking his keys. So the idea that The Time Of Legends was a trap suddenly seemed all too plausible to me as I was then, suddenly drowning in Religious Scrupulosity OCD, but having previously felt like I belonged in The Time Of Legends. Someone who was born as a normal human by mistake, and wanting nothing more than to "get back there." Because my whole life, up to that point, had been trying to find a way to get back there.

My logic at the time went like this: if Evil, and his Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, were located in the Time Of Legends, and it was a place I had already spent my entire childhood hoping a time hole would open up to, then maybe I was already irredeemably corrupted. How could I not be? It was predestination that Evil was going to get me, because I was evil by nature. I belonged there, and there was probably nothing I could do about it. I could try and fight my true nature, but it was probably futile.

The Map suddenly felt like something that could get me if it wanted, something I had to hide from - because it was going to be a straight shot to the Time Of Legends and the Fortress Of Ultimate Darkness. I already believed in it, so of course I was in danger of being taken at any time. (And it just hit me, how much OCD can feel like mind control: as in "Standby for mind control," for those who don't know what it is, who haven't been diagnosed yet.) I began to have a horror of The Map showing up in my room unannounced, of glimpsing that particular shade of blue. It didn't feel like something from a fictional movie - any of it. It all felt like something very real, and dangerous.

I wasn't ok at age ten, about a lot of things. But that was one of them. And I feel like unpacking this now may resolve some things I am still subconsciously dealing with. I needed to confront this movie the same way I needed to confront Rock N Rule again back in 2010, for similar reasons.

Revisiting Time Bandits as an adult who has rejected mainstream Evangelical Christianity for Gnosticism: it's a very Gnostic movie, isn't it? The Supreme Being is the Demiurge. The Dwarves are renegade Archons. Evil is also just another Renegade Archon.

But I realized what a huge influence it was when I was trying to write Watchmen/Moorcock crossover fanfic, even half-remembered from decades before. Like I was unconsciously using the movie's time travel mechanics as a frame work, until I realized that was what I was doing. It was very much Shelly Duvall as Laurie Juspeczyk in my imagination - running around and finding time holes to escape through as she was being pursued by Adrian Veidt through space and time, because she has a MacGuffin he needed (Mournblade, in various forms) and occasionally being bailed out by Michael Palin as Oswald Bastable.

There was a lot of it that I wrote that never got posted. I think I never finished it because I realized how similar it was to Time Bandits. But that's the story as it happened in my head.

I need to work on it, and the Tron fic. Which I should be able to do even though I am crashing out from the hyperfocus - because, oddly enough, the hyperfocus (and Reddit) were in the way.

But yeah, watching a few days ago also caused a lot of "Memory Unlocked" moments. Also: I had no idea there was a recent reboot with Taika Waititi.

But the really weird thing is, my adult life has been spent "gaining an understanding" of computers. So that's something to think about as I sit here trying to rice my current Linux desktop environment. (Evil would 100% be a "I use Arch btw," kind of person.)

So, one of the reasons that I have been obsessively infodumping about the Epstein stuff is that it's intruding into my escapism in a way I can't tune out, and I hate it.

Because this crap has infected every single aspect of the tech world, due to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Bannon, and their other cronies roped techbros into their schemes, and used them to help hijack the society we live in and steer it in the direction that they wanted it to go in.

Like, the fanfic for the Tron franchise I am working on right now concerns two rival tech companies. And I can't work on it or even think about it without thinking about the cancer and the rot that is going on currently in real life tech culture.

Like yeah, I can pretend that there isn't anyone like Jeffrey Epstein in the Tron Universe, and that none of that horrible shit happened, and tech in this fictional world evolved along very different lines: and this is obviously the way I *should* actually be handling it. Because there is not an IGE or a Microsoft or a Starlink or Tesla or a META: There's Encom and Dillinger Systems.

But like...the villain of the last movie is a whole techbro, borrowing from a stereotype that is only familiar to us because of how prominent it has become in real life over the past decade or so, thanks mostly to the mechanizations of the worst people.

It's hard for me to write this now without considering everything that has been revealed about the Epstein Web's malign influence over every aspect of the tech world over the past 20 years. Because a lot of the reason we are where we are right now - in regards to AI and "Web 3," is because of them. Just ignoring it feels disingenuous. It feels like whitewashing. Even though: of course technology in the Tron universe progressed along very different lines, because real, actual AI (not the fake bullshit slop we have now) and digitizing actual real-world matter into the computer have existed since 1982 in this timeline. This is science fiction, happening in a world that still feels very much like our own. I mean, the thing I tell newcomers to the Tron franchise is: "imagine if the Technological Singularity happened in 1982, but only a few people were aware of it, or noticed."

BUT, and a youtuber called attention to this aspect of the latest Tron movie without realizing that this is what he was doing: Eve Kim, the character portrayed by Greta Lee in the latest film, is basically Buckaroo Banzai, complete with her own stalwart band of comrades who are the Tron universe's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai's own Hong Kong Cavaliers. She is a globetrotting hacker gamer biker CEO of a tech company. And while some dorks were of course screaming "Mary Sue!" there is no way as a Buckaroo Banzai fan that I can't just pick this up and run with it, it's perfect.

And THIS is why the Seth Flores character didn't grate on me the way he did on some people in the audience: he's kind of the equivalent of Perfect Tommy and New Jersey at once? And holy shit, the "It's cowboy time" line from the character Ajay Singh: HE'S RAWHIDE. (Or New Jersey?) Holy hell, it's THEM in another universe and incarnation.

And YES this makes the titular Ares the equivalent of Penny Priddy. Just try to get that image out of your mind once it's popped in there. and YES, I know how all of this sounds in light of Jared Leto's involvement in the Tron Ares film, and the allegations against him. (I fucking hate this timeline.)

Anyway my fix for that during the time the film was in theaters was to just imagine what the movie would have been like if the titular Ares had been played by Keanu Reeves instead. (Because of course the Billionaire Techbro would want to make his Supersolider look like John Wick.) That, or Trent Reznor; mainly because of the soundtrack. Some of the fanart I have seen of peoples' fancasting of Trent Reznor as Ares is phenomenal. I have become a fan of the "Young Trent Reznor as Ares" idea since I first saw it, but especially since the remix album of the OST dropped last week, and then I went and saw NIN live in concert.

EDIT:But this all just dovetails back into the reality that the harm of women in children is inextricably woven into the creation media designed to be art, designed to entertain us, due to it being normalized, systemic, and endemic in our culture. Many of the artists whose creations got us through the 2000s and 2010s have turned out to be predators. The only real exception I can think of is the late David Lynch, who was actively trying to alert us that it was going on, through the creation of his own art and media.

And I can't help but wonder what a Tron movie by David Lynch would have been like.

IDK chat, I'm going to have to figure this out. I mean, I'm going to write it regardless. But yeah.

Hell, maybe in this timeline, Livejournal and Myspace are still around. I think it's a lot more fun to imagine a timeline that doesn't involve any of the current horrors, even if it does feel dishonest somehow.

[A meme with Doctor Manhattan from the comic book Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Doctor Manhattan is on Mars, with the text captions "I am 11 years old. A Republican president is waging war in the Middle East. I am 23 years old. A Republican president is waging war in the Middle East. I am 46 years old. A Republican president is waging war in the Middle East."]

I don't want to be in a state of "I hope all of the stupid jerks who voted for Trump because they believed Kamala Harris was the one who would start another stupid, pointless war are having the day they voted for." Because, as per usual, it's the innocent victims who did absolutely nothing to deserve this who will suffer the most. But that is where I am right now, regardless.

Back in 1999, Neal Stephenson wrote in In The Beginning Was The Command Line that, as of that moment, we as a species were trying to evolve into a global society that agreed not to nuke itself. 27 years later, it very much feels like we have regressed back into a society that is actively trying to nuke itself.

Whatever. I voted for the Prosecutor Lady, because I knew she would *not* do any of the crap that Cheeto Shitler is doing right now. Nine years ago, I voted for the Email Lady for the same reason. Five years ago, I voted for Dark Brandon. 26 years ago, I voted for The Guy Who Supposedly Invented The Internet. And I voted twice for Obama. And so it goes.