Ran across this on an unusually chilly late summer morning, before all the poikilotherm chumps had had a chance to warm up for the day.

As far as I can tell it's some species of robber fly, though I wouldn't venture to guess exactly which. The colors, hairless thorax and blunt straight abdomen don't fit most photographs.

Anyway, interesting things, robber flies. That cage-like straddling position for their spiny legs isn't accidental. They hunt other flying insects by snatching them out of the air, then liquefy their innards and slurp 'em out. And look at those halteres! The order Diptera, two-wings, are named so because two (of the usual insect four) of their wings are atrophied into that pasty yellowish dumbell shape you see on this one right above its middle leg, though they're not usually so noticeable. Counterweights for maneuvering. They're one reason you so rarely catch a housefly. Also useful when you're trying to Red Baron a bee straight out of the air.

(You might notice a bit of convergent evolution between them and the similarly predatory dragonflies as well, especially in thorax shape.)

P.S.: I keep wondering whether this one had a wing ripped off or I'm just not looking at it right because it's a bit askew. That looks like a broken attachment point above the haltere... or are the wings just overlapped?

A Brothers Are Soldiers Moment

"Je vois ma femme en esprit; son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête,
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard.

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun."

Baudelaire - Le chat (Les fleurs du mal)

_____________________________________________

"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

_____________________________________________

"During a rest stop in northern Florida in 1965, Graham and her sister went into a café without their father.  A white man demanded the two to give him their seats.

"He said, ‘You ain’t hear me? I told you to get up so I can sit down!’” Graham recalled, mimicking the man’s derisive drawl.

They left, not telling their father why.

Once their group arrived in Miami, Graham said she saw the possibility of change. A white family cut ahead of their group – only to be directed to the back of the line by the maître d."

 

Reuters special report counterposing Trump's white racist support with pre- civil rights testimonies 2024/10/26

_____________________________________________

 

 

Pro-Democrat media ran endless slews of articles like that before the 2024 U.S. election, still playing up the identity politics shame tactics and feminist paranoia angles all the way to the finish line. It's all they know how to do any more. Maybe the fact you lost ground even with all of your target demographics* by such martyr posturing might, as some are saying now, constitute a wake-up call as to just how fucking sick everyone's gotten of your antics. But maybe it's also not too much to hope more readers are spotting the forced myopia necessary to swallow one-sided perfect victim narratives and the social justice pecking order. Even if they can't verbalize the cognitive dissonance, more might now chafe under your liminal manipulation of our instinctive favoritism.

 

Can anyone spot the unspoken bias? What reflexive outrage Reuters' above example seeks to evoke banks only half on rejecting the antiquated expectation that blacks should cede precedence to whites. The other half comes from our persisting expectation that males should cede precedence to females, that it was A MAN daring to demand WOMEN surrender their place. When everyone knows the reverse is the righteous stance. Everyone. Knows it.

 

Would Rosa Parks have garnered as much sympathy has she been male? No. Let's just say... no. By the time I was eight years old I was already surrendering my seat on buses for adult women, and please let's not feign that I somehow invented that all on my own while still replacing my milk teeth. (Never mind that I actually have flat feet and a slight circulation problem, making it rather more painful for me to stand in place for long periods of time.) When they lay into you that young it's indoctrination plain and simple, and I'm not inclined to pretend it serves any less of a purpose than forcing blacks to make such concessions to whites: inculcating the precept that you are less deserving, that you in fact are simply *less*, that your comfort, health and safety are to be discarded in favor of one born the correct demographic.

On a completely unrelated note, let's remember Donald Trump's failed coup on January 6th 2021, when some rioters from among the fifteen thousand traitorous, degenerate hick filth dragged a cop to the ground:

""We got one! We got one!" Mr Fanone said he heard people shout, with others chanting:"Kill him with his own gun!"

The "kill him with his own gun" meme took off immediately, and is still remembered. Not so the very next line in the article:

"Some members of the crowd protected him after he started yelling that he has children, the father of four told CNN."

To me, it immediately recalled six months earlier during the George Floyd riots when one of the more remorseful rioters recounted seeing his fellows shoot someone and thinking something along the lines "man that ain't right that's somebody's grandpa" though for the life of me I can no longer find the article, as most any contemporaneous criticism of the twenty million looters, terrorists and enablers rampaging that summer is gradually being expunged from our communal memory.

But in both cases, just try reversing the polarity. Try to even imagine a woman publicly beaten, cop or not, a woman shot in the back or dragged down to the feet of a stampeding herd of murderous lunatics. The question becomes whether to finish her off, and the best moral argument anyone sees fit to raise concerns not her own rights as a person but:

"Wait, hang on, is anyone using her? Maybe let's not murder her if she's useful to her betters."

Witches get a stay of execution if they're pregnant, right? An attitude you would equate with the Taliban is mirrored instead toward all men, anywhere, unquestioningly, among whites or blacks, rich or poor, on the left or right wing. We have all grown up cheering in primal bloodlust at movie screens where male extras about to be butchered must protest "I have a wife and kids" to justify their own existence.

A black man can say he is abused for being black, but never for being a man. The Tuskegee study on syphilis, where four hundred persons were denied treatment for a treatable disease for decades on end, is rightly condemned as racist abuse, but none dare call sexism. They weren't rounding up laundresses and seamstresses though, were they? Even though a female cohort would've lived longer for a longitudinal study. They shopped for all-male guinea pigs. In the most famous female medical counterpoint, the cancer cells taken without her knowledge, consent or remuneration from Henrietta Lacks (and which everyone still uses today, to the profit of any who's ever invested in the medical industry) were taken while she was at least being treated.

Feminists have had themselves a party complaining that so much medical research has always been done on men, claiming women have been ignored due to sexism. Fucking bullshit. Nobody wants to treat women like guinea pigs! Male victims can be swept under the rug, but corporations and other governments always shy away from even one headline revealing they poisoned some woman to death to develop some new treatment. Even the racist pricks perfectly comfortable lying to a man's face for decades on end, telling him he's healthy, watching a treatable infection eat away at their patient day-in and year-out until it kills him would've balked at treating four hundred women the way they mistreated four hundred men. (They were fine with forty women and nineteen children being infected by proxy, but at least they weren't abusing them directly; less emotional involvement.)

 

Hell, I'm not black, but I could certainly complain about being insulted and demeaned as an immigrant and sent to the back of the line, and social justice warriors would coo and fuss over me**. But the moment I speak about the far more abuse hurled against me as a man to put me in my place, having to listen to feminists in high school proclaim me genetically defective per Solanas' rantings to the approving nods of teachers who spat the phrase "little boy" in my face while calling girls "young lady", being denied access to college scholarships in favor of girls despite colleges' female predominance from 1980 onwards, being pre-emptively chided like an ex-con when applying for work on the presumption of guilt as a rapist, and being put to harsher physical work, the moment I dare complain against my superiors in the scala naturae as proclaimed by her holiness Andrea Dworkin, then I become an enemy of the system. You wonder why nobody's buying your bullshit anymore?

 

Bill Maher wanted Harris to display a "sister souljah moment" before the election, referring back to a '92 Bill Clinton refusing to align himself with extremist statements, specifically in the form of a black musician claiming that if blacks kill each other in gang shootings all the time, they may as well kill some whites too during the Rodney King race riots.

 

Well, forget blacks; count the number of men killing each other, not just in American inner cities, but everywhere, always, while women sit on the sidelines placing bets and preparing to rake in the winner's spoils. I'm not hearing a violent call echoing Sister Souljah's with regards to sex instead of race to be repudiated. I would however say the unthinking acceptance of this status quo represents a far more extremist viewpoint, but one within which we find ourselves so thoroughly, primordially entrenched as to have never even discerned a center to the issue.

 

 

_____________________________________________________

* - while ironically I, a straight white male antifeminist voted for candidate anything-but-Trump (consumer protections and secure housing sound good too)

** Until they find out it was by a black checkout girl.

"The Wizzer of Ooze" would make a horrible, horrible title for a porno, so I really can't explain why it hasn't been used yet.

Darkest Dungeon 2

"Down on the boulevard, the children are sold
To pave the way for your streets of gold"

 

Machines of Loving Grace - Golgotha Tenement Blues

 

 

Like FTL and its later companion Into the Breach, the first Darkest Dungeon surprised me by putting a meaningful spin on roguelike randomization, which I generally dismiss as mindless slot-machine gameplay. DD2 instead pretty much reconfirms my old prejudice against the subgenre. I do have to temper my disappointment though. It's not all bad.

The voiceovers are still quite good. Music... doesn't quite match the old Color of Madness tracks unless I just haven't gotten far enough to be treated to the good stuff yet. Production values have otherwise obviously risen. My complaint about the cheap two-frame animations was addressed, and some of the new moves like the zombies dragging their swords along the ground look engagingly... hefty. Without surrendering the original's art style, character models are now better proportioned, no longer bobbleheaded, making the more monstrous monstrosities stand out in turn. The new 3D out-of-combat enviroments look engaging, and their arrangement on a lattice succeeds where the likes of Slay the Spire failed in creating relevant choices, through a balance of combat encounters, loot pickups and depletable wagon stat pools. In practical terms, replacing permanent %miss chances with stacking armor/dodge counters is more responsive to player input, and a decent way of taming the randomizer... in that one small respect.

 

But the moment you move past that, even the good bits are offset by nuisance.

- Zig-zagging your wagon to run over potential minor loot reminds me of the rapids sequence from The Oregon Trail: a nonsensical twitch-gaming element tacked onto otherwise tactical decision-making for the arbitrary reason that all games apparently need twitchiness. The coach's finicky steering doesn't help.

- Combat consumables are now tied to individual heroes. Good in a sense for making you slot context-appropriate gear. Bad because this now subjects consumables to variability in turn order, stuns and the like, so you may not get access to them in the order you need.

- Positioning defends better against attack now, with fewer enemies hitting your 3rd and 4th spots and fewer shuffles in the starter zones. But then you realize positions are less fluid in general. By the time they do start knocking you around or debuffing you, you'll find you have few or no options to deal with that.

- This also negatively impacts skill viability, as you'll be clinging to the few cure/reposition skills you can get.

- Trinkets are generally more useful, but since you can't keep them between runs (see below) it doesn't help character-building much.

- Enemies might seem either creative or nonsensical depending on your mood:

Yes, you fight a respiratory tract as a major boss.

- More emphasis on your team's interdependence than on countering enemies (befitting the squad tactical angle) but that's poisoned by the randomizer. Your foursome constantly attach negative or positive (usually negative) relationship modifiers to combat actions or the route you choose. While this softens the blow of DD1 characters refusing to be healed etc., constantly watching for that blue debuff warning every time you click a heal/guard/whatever order is more fiddly and micromanagerial.

- The more detailed visuals seem to have eaten up more development time, if the dearth of content is any indication. There's too much an air of a cash-grab sequel to DD2's fewer playable classes with a $10 expansion pack consisting of just two "new" ones. No thanks. On the other hand, if you really were strapped for time to animate all those character models, how do you justify sinking development hours into separate models for each hero's personal quest? Every asset you developed solely for one character's backstory (which every player will see exactly ONCE) could have been one spicing up gameplay in general. Yes, it's nice you took my advice and made your cutscenes more interactive, but you didn't need so many cutscenes in the first place! Your concept worked fine without them. We loved it with voiceovers and splash screens. Remember that? Remember us loving it with voiceovers and splash screens?

 

But the worst of it concerns linearity. DD1 downplayed roguelikes' obsession with "hardcore mode" permadeath. You might lose a hero now and then, but overall you could build up whole teams, and choose where to adventure to prevent repetitiveness from setting in. DD2 instead brings that mindless grinding back in force, knocking you back to the start every time, forced to re-equip items and rank up your heroes' skills and relationships all over again.

 

You not only lose the continuity of build-up. Being able to switch up decor and strats at will between the four basic dungeon types was much better than grinding newbietown quests until being permitted to advance, and forcing you through the whole start-up sequence every single time only grows more ludicrous with every repetition of that first zombie fight before the first inn, waddling your wagon through interactive dead air. When PoE2:Deadfire pulled the same stupid stunt with its character creation routine, it at least had the sense to listen to the playerbase's outrage and scramble immediately after launch to implement a "skip intro" button.

 

Compounding that, the "candles" you need to get more hero classes, improve base stats and even unlocking new tilesets are tied to endlessly grinding until RNGesus smiles on you. Instead of low level quests for low level heroes, you're pushed to run the same foursome through the same grind in order to unlock content, the exact opposite of DD1 where you could entertain yourself with new low-level combos for variety while still acquiring useful resources.

Say "timesink" everyone!

 

Over-randomized. Fewer options. Flashier even where it didn't need to be. Massive timesink to content ratio. Gratuitous complete restarts. Cosmetic options as rewards instead of actual playable content. If DD1 demonstrated that the rouguelike routine can sometimes offer engaging gameplay instead of just a glorified slot machine, DD2 reminds that it almost always is simply that, a slot machine. And a $10 DLC for content which should've been in the base game.

A-yup. Despite some good features, that's a cash-grab sequel.

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________

P.S.: Minor quibble, but a nunnery would have an abbess not an abbot. I know you called her a vestal technically... but that really doesn't help the issue.

More orb weavers, this time of the Spiny variety.

 

 Weird how many things in our daily environs actually look like aliens from beyond the moon.

Shecrets of the NeandHerthals

I ran across a Netflix documentary called Secrets of the Neanderthals. Despite the dumb "what they don't want you to know" clickbait title it's not the worst thing I've seen, much as re-enactments make my skin crawl. Decent update on some old debates about caveman culture like the flower burial. Compared to older treatments of such subject matter though, you might be surprised at the pervasive and explicit emphasis on Neanderthal women, with a finger-wagging overtone of how dare you have been so sexist as to only ever present them as male all these decades. Except it was women and especially feminists who enthusiastically hurled "you neanderthal" as an epithet at men (Tim Allen on Home Improvement alone...) in every medium the past century.

So what really changed?

 

Simply put: molecular biology and especially genetic testing came along. Back when we thought Neanderthals the unworthy brutes our noble ancestors had conquered and replaced, we loved mocking the losers as male hairy masculine bearded men all the way. Now having discovered we (and especially Europeans) are in fact partly descended from a few Neanderthals, we feel a sudden urge toward sympathy with them... so all of a sudden must needs render them as female to elicit that unthinking, primal sympathy.

We instinctively favor women over men, always have. Yet in the same breath as we leverage this favoritism to manipulate each others' instinctive responses, in marketing and advertising, in documentaries and public relations, we still maintain the insane pretense that women are disfavored.

Void the Void

"We transmit on all frequencies
Talk show panic gossip queens
Racing into ruin
Racing on to our demise"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

Before complaining about Darkest Dungeon 2, let me sidetrack to say the validity of any fad is inverse to the extent to which it is, in fact... a fad. An idiotically and endlessly regurgitated meme. A refuge for the unimaginative and simpleminded. An idiot-friendly set piece. Vapid filler. Dross.

 

Anything can be dragged down to that level if enough of the braindead majority pile onto the bandwagon.

So first off, everyone give Lovecraft a rest. He's getting as played-out as Tolkien elves by last decade. Likewise, as everyone willfully misinterpreted elves as mere spindly prettyboys while ignoring the poignancy of cursed pride, doomed creation or waning nobility, "lovecraftian" has been debased to "tentacled fish monsters" increasingly ignoring the persistent theme of human insufficiency, immeasurably vast antiquity or creeping decadence which elevated his stories past the usual creep show. When The Secret World did it, the reserves had not yet been tapped dry. This ain't then. Come now, horror's not my preferred genre, but there must be other sources of inspiration you can channel. (Just don't fall back on red horny devils or googly-eyed oni.) (Or vampires.) (Or ffs, anything but zombies!)

On a related note, stop spouting "the void" for a bogeyman catch-all. Even as a teenager back in '97 I had no trouble calling bullshit on Event Horizon's standard trappings of a burning hell being called a "dimension of pure chaos" ... which would in fact mean a whole lotta nothing at all. Certainly not a force obsessed with attacking humans. Yes, yes, the certainty of nonexistence is the core under-riding anxiety of any sapient, but you're hardly plumbing those philosophical depths by constantly spouting "the void" as highfalutin' smokescreen for generic goblins. I'm sure you all want a slice of Games Workshop's pie, but a setting designed to peddle fifty-dollar toy soldiers to fanatical collectors is just too obviously a make-work pile of warped pretextium crystals with no depth worth tapping. There's nothing there to copy. The setting really is... a void. You won't steal away Warhammer's fans unless you can slap the Warhammer logo onto your product. Even Blizzard didn't manage it.

Also, as appealing as "the void" sounds to any writer desperate to leave all options open for future sequels / expansions cramming anything and everything trendy into that kitchen sink, you do know you're not the only ones who can spot that cop-out from coherence and a proper worldbuilding framework, right? If it's everything, it's nothing. I'm not sitting here in front of my screen awed at infinite possibilities when I hear your voice actors intone "kay-oss" or "the aether" or "Tha-Voyd" * with all the gravitas of fifth graders reciting a book report on a book they didn't read. I'm thinking "yeah, mmkay, so there's maybe a 5% chance whatever rando' shit these rando' scheisters pull out of their asses next might not bore me to tears." The suspense is not killing me.

______________________________________________________________

* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

Of Bathwater and the Contents Thereof

It's been getting trendy to bemoan the fact that we were lied to about recycling for decades on end, and it turns out every bag and cup we threw out just ended up dumped in landfills or in the ocean, where it became the microplastics we're now ingesting by the fistful. As the human ape is subhuman and cannot hold more than one factoid in its brain at once, this has rapidly been distilled by the public as "recycling sucks" with no further nuance.

 

Actually? No.

 

Plastic recycling has been a scam, and just like tobacco companies' half-century control over regulation, its persistence due to petroleum interests is further proof that profit in any industry or endeavor should always have been capped/taxed to prevent such centralization of wealth and power completely silencing critics of an industry, inducing wasteful planned obsolecence for a few more sales.

 

But other materials were recycled before petroleum completely took over our economy and never became any less recyclable. Glass and the most common metals (aluminum, iron, copper) can be quite efficiently recovered. Even paper, which is more debatable, can be worth the trouble if your local government's organized enough. And even with plastics, polyethylene is more readily melted down and reshaped than the rest.

 

Even under a communist regime in the 1980s, my school's fence bordered a scrap metal collection point and our teachers ran paper recycling drives, and the old Communists were pretty much openly anti-nature! They at least had the basic notion of avoiding waste for economic reasons. But now, you RETARDED SUBHUMAN TRASH, after you spent decades needlessly sorting out plastics to ease your consciences when you shouldn't have been buying so many disposables in the first place, are ready to throw out recycling programs altogether, because you're brainless fucking puppets of advertisers!

Fuck it. I'm glad the world's ending. You deserve to die, I hope you die, and I just hope I live long enough to dance on this species' mass grave.

Frostpunk 2

"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold

And it's overturned the order of the soul"

 

Leonard Cohen - The Future

_______________________________________________

 

Damn, what a gorgeous piece of work!

Anyway:

Wrap. Up. Well... The. Frost. Is. Here. (... again)

Welcome to a game where your options are either "hurray we've got gas" or "help we've got gas!"

Welcome to my Stalwart ironfisted rule over a city of reason, progress and merit, in that order. (And a lil' bit of adaptation.)

 

Custodiet ipsos babbages

I never gave the first Frostpunk nearly the amount of praise it deserved. If you haven't played it (first off what the hell are you doing with your life) it ran on the premise that the world freezes over toward the end of the nineteenth century, and you must lead a merry band of survivors to establish a steampunk city atop fossil fuel reserves for warmth. Instead of rehashing that, Frostpunk 2 picks up where the main campaign left off, with your now established society expanding (beyond) its means.

 

The biggest change is a proportional shift in basic theme. Where the original primarily fed off the "man against nature" angle for conflict, this installment refocuses on "man against man" with your main task throughout the campaign being to keep various conflicting factions functional that they in turn may keep the city functioning. This has upsides and downsides, but the various pieces do coalesce into a laudably creative and immersive whole, worth every penny.

(From 11bit's point of view it also keeps the sequel from obsoleting the original, which I'm sure played a much bigger role in their marketing strategy than they'd like to admit.)

The emphasis on interacting masses of humans entails ditching some of the old steampunk appeal, downplaying dirigibles, prostheses or automatons as visual / plot elements. While replacement pathos is included in the package (my reason-first society features serial mating, draconian medical experimentation and triage, communal child rearing and a eugenics program complete with sterilization of criminals) the immersive aspects don't quite follow through on portraying these shifts in mores quite like the original's changes in aural and visual tone. The districts don't look different enough from each other. The music also has lost a bit of its oomph. They do put professional effort in flavor text for many techs and laws, but just a smidge too rarely.

City size increases by two orders of magnitude. Instead of individual constructions on a radial grid you now position entire districts on a hex grid, dwarfing all your original efforts. On the plus side this does cut down on some of the micromanagement. On the minus side it also eliminates some of the poignancy of shifting handfuls of workers to and fro hoping they don't freeze, and the decades-long timescale compared to months in the original also makes one less invested in their eventual fates. ("the death of one man is a tragedy" etc.) * Luckily the designers were well aware of this pitfall and played up the metropolitan heartless rat race through motion conveyed as timelapse light movement along roads. ("Fireflies" the artbook calls them.)  I couldn't help but be reminded of the poultry farm scene from Baraka.

 

In terms of gameplay, the scale-up manifests as less concern with precise numbers of resources than a Supreme Commander style balancing of influx to keep resource flow out of the red as much as you can. Deposits are by default depletable, both within your city and on the overland map. Combined with a heavy emphasis on district adjacency, this yields some captivating juggling of district construction / destruction while maintaining your workforce and coffers. Interestingly, your most basic resource of heat stamps (a.k.a. simoleons) remain difficult to farm all throughout the campaign, scaling poorly with city size and acting instead as your limiting resource (e.g. influence etc. in Paradox' games) and as you make more and more stuff from it advancing through the tech tree, you suffer an almost imperceptible but decisive reliance on petroleum to address every issue instead, black gold surging invisibly beneath your golden resource of manpower through the radial clockwork of city streets. An inspired and highly memorable effect.

 

I won't go too deep into the interplay between factions. Most of your biggest hurdles entail securing the bickering cliques' votes to pass new laws, whether by building whatever they want or openly bribing them or aiding in their constant backbiting between each other. Since their percentage of council votes scales with populace, you end up spending just as much time subverting your inevitable enemies as currying favor. They do have a decent bit of personality. I actually opened my campaign on the Frostlander / Pilgrim side for the sake of nature, but turned on the Pilgrims in a heartbeat when they started in on the mystical hocus-pocus, a change of heart interestingly even acknowledged in the ending summation. Much as in the original, the deeper you dive down one particular branch, the more controversy you encounter (not that I was particularly uncomfortable with the know-it-all prescriptive bent of Reason.) I hope I'm not giving too much away by confirming they'll eventually be at each others' throats, but if you don't mind a Spoiler \ / , I would like to praise one specific gimmick.

I'd originally intended to maintain a reasonably free society, but by the time the civil war rolled around I'd already backstabbed the Pilgrims and implemented some reviled (yet cool!) techs precluding reconciliation. Plus, when the devs openly warned me trying to seize dictatorial power is the more difficult route... well now, that's just throwing down an obvious gauntlet for me to pick up, isn't it? However, I got stuck for a solid decade unable to raise Frostlander opinion to pass the final laws needed to seize power. I felt like I was doing everything right. I had surpluses in every resource, had eradicated all sniffles and grime, was putting down Pilgrim revolts as soon as they appeared while keeping their faction at 1-4% power, and lowering my Stalwarts' fervor to keep the peace... so what was I doing wrong? Apparently I was doing too much right.

I felt like slapping my forehead when re-reading the fine print that it's in times of high tension that the factions grow more willing to vote you into absolute power. Because yes! Of course! Every would-be dictator needs to drum up mass panic over the threat of some make-work boogeymen so the populace cries out for a strongman to take control!** You need to make life shit for the lower classes in order to divide and conquer them. So let squalor build up a tad, wait until a couple of districts go up in flames, THEN bribe your way to success.

 

Brilliant!

____________________________________________________________________________

 

* As an aside, Settlers-inspired village simulators (like Banished, which kicked off the survival city sim trend which Frostpunk built on) distinguished themselves by scaling down from Sim City's megalopolis to more personal, close-up caretaking. It's funny to see the pendulum now swinging back toward RCI districts and milling swarms of population.

** No, this has absolutely nothing to do with orange hair, game shows and golf courses. Why would you even think that?

Sin Eating

"He sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see"

NIN - Heresy

 

Saner liberals have long been perplexed at the self-appointed left wing's support for Islam and even Jihadism, the most violently, oppressively backward of any major ideology. It jumped the shark after last year's attack on Israel. Many a bitter laugh has been prompted by "gays for Palestine" and other such street protests, knowing full well the openly murderous attitude of theocrats and especially Hamas toward gays, atheists, unmaried cat ladies and any other stereotypically "leftist" demographic. These idiots make even black KKK supporters sound mentally well-adjusted by comparison.

 

To me though it just further confirms my observation that snowflakes' division of the world into pure and impure, the saved and the damned, belies their facetious rebellion against the various Christian churches. You see in Muslims everything you hate about your Christian forebears: all the racism, oppression, sexual repression, antiscientific reactionary dogmatism, all the bloodlust and sadism and petty shortsighted tribalism and prejudice against the superficially different. It's everything in your own heritage for which your conscience begs absolution across the generations. But since you have made white guilt an absolute you cannot deal directly with those emotions. By excusing and forgiving Muslims you somehow exculpate your own heritage by proxy. Call it psychological transferrence, sympathetic magic, scapegoat mentality, but it does demonstrate that as much as you may want to, you have not yet rid yourselves of religious mentality.

 

And the shallow pretense of rebellion is already working its way back toward retrenchment in primitivism, in mindless dogma which is not shamed by its own nature as such, in the faith of your fathers, the wokeisition desperately seeking validation from more grounded authorities. This is the way the world ends: with a politically correct fart in the wind, greedily aspiring to the choking aroma of incense.

On a Pallid Bust of Pallas

I've toyed with the notion of posting some of my pictures from Pompeii, but not a brick or cobblestone of that place has escaped photographing by ten million tourists already. When visiting Herculaneum though I was amused by one of the greeters in the visitor center.

 

On our way out a couple of hours later, the situation had changed.

 

Don't you have an Egyptian granary to guard or something?

Ah yes, even amidst enduring, stately antiquity, change would be good... but that's about all the change you get.

Despotism Does Not Scale

"Scrambled eggs what he says
He accuses me of treachery
Got the nine lies, got the wide eyes
Got a failing grade in chemistry"

 

Rasputina - The Mayor

__________________________________________________

"It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war,—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England,—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle."

 

Washington Irving - Rip van Winkle

__________________________________________________

 

I feel somehow obligated to speak on today's election here in the States before the results are in, as it certainly feels like one of those historic moments right before the purges ramp up and people like me get disappeared. Problem: after a decade of nonstop media obsession, I would rather talk about anything, anything other than Donald Trump! Come on, wouldn't you rather hear about my bowel movements? See, I found this half-jar of giardiniera in the fridge that I thought was still good, and, well, the results expressed both voluminously and incons-

- no,wait, we really should probably hit the politics angle.

I haven't bothered with electioneering here not only because I... just don't... and not only because of the sparse handful of you who'll read this most live outside the U.S., or because of my general opinion that humans are degenerate apes that've proven incapable of rational self-determination and so countries deserve to reap the fruits of their collective stupidity (hi Britain, how's your "independence day" coming along? shut up; don't care) but because whichever party wins will inevitably subject me to some manner or another of bigoted populist pandering witch-hunt. Matters little whether because I'm born the wrong sex or skin color or because I speak with an accent and don't pay lip-service to their magic sky-daddy, or because I'm unwilling to deny evolution or sexual dimorphism or whichever brand of science denialism both sides are championing now.

A Rip awakened from before Y2K would certainly have some adjusting to do. The once infamously apathetic American voter may appear more politically engaged now, but while election turnout has markedly risen since I was in school from ~52% to ~66% it's more noticeably produced the rampant activism and political violence and rioting we've been seeing from fanatical fringes. And, interestingly, the good cop / bad cop game doesn't seem to have ended. The entire system simply regressed further and further and ever further into reactionary dictatorship. The "liberal" wing now perpetually threatens half the population with being fired/jailed without evidence as born criminals and promotes the same authoritarian speech policing once criticized in conservatives, only with "under god" replaced with forcing you to call narcissistic twits by the royal "they" while the "conservatives" have devolved into some breed of mindlessly Luddite rampaging caveman.

 

So really, the choice has once again been the same refuge in the lesser evil it's always been (within my lifespan at least) not to improve anything but to slow down the pace of the multibillionnaires chopping the place up to sell it off for parts to each other. Except for the odd quirk that the Republicans, ostensibly facetiously once party of small government, have switched to openly pushing to enthrone their golden shower boy as a theocratic emperor. The many voices raised in consternation at how America could have reached this point seem to miss a detail long obvious to me as a damn dirty furriner, and which I've addressed with regard to religion: it was always there. Theocracy and authoritarianism dragged the country down from the very beginning. That starry-eyed notion of the pilgrims/puritans sailing from merry olde England FOR FREEEDOOOOMM! ignores the basic observation that the "freedom" they sought was to impose their own totalist superstitious dogma upon a society they could isolate from mainstream European culture and control with an iron fist. Americans were saved from their own stupidity by an overarching Federal leadership imposing limits on their power to abuse each other (and whose ideas, like it or not, mostly came from French salons) but that diseased fetish for theocratic absolutism has lingered two and a half centuries in every last Podunk and every last backwoods hick sect.

Depressing thought, neh?

Here's a vacation picture to make you feel better:

"let the bird of loudest lay / on the sole Arabian tree / herald sad and trumpet be"

... okay, so I'm not great at making people feel better.

That tree's not really in Arabia, but in southern Italy. I'd've posted pictures of the waterfront or the statue of Saint Frankie preaching to the birds, but those are readily found online so instead I'm platforming that local. I liked Sorrento, despite spending only one night there. Instead of a gaudy tourist trap crawling with grifters it imparted the cleaner, purposeful, more functional feel of a working town which just happens to have a dramatic history and tourist-friendly amenities. While I snapped a few shots of Sorrento's seafront and hotels, I realized only after downloading everything that among the literally thousands of such snaps, and despite having spent several nights there, I had no such pictures of Naples. It's not worth picturing. Of Napoli's museums and historic sites? Oh, my, yes, hundreds upon hundreds, and it's just too much to take in. But of the town itself? A couple of shots from atop Vesuvius, far enough away that you can't see (most of) the grime.

Want a one-shot impression? We were standing in line for taxis in front of its central train station. The wind kicked up, prompting the whole crowd to hold our breaths and shield our faces not merely from cigarette-laced dust but from a wave of dirty napkins, straws, paper bags and polyethylene in a myriad configurations.

 

And it's hardly the only such problem. It's hard to miss the half-renovated, half-abandoned buildings, the cracked and water-holed sidewalks splashed with last night's urine and beer limoncello vomit, the end-to-end kilometers of gang graffiti, the obviously unprepared tour van driver who's just as obviously somebody's cousin, the semi-legal Africans sleeping on mattresses out in the streets behind your four-star hotel with rooms the size of bed-plus-20cm and missing bathroom door, etc. This is all in the historic town center mind you; this is the lavish, gussied-up facade Napoli puts on for the whole world! You might protest this is a poor town, but why is it poor? Campania as a region pulls in some of the world's heaviest tourist trade. From what we paid and guides' comments, Pompei, by itself, can rake in half or even a million dollars on a good summer day in admission fees alone. Tack on room&board, transportation, tchotchkes, endless other attractions and every other tourist tax you can think of... yet somehow the city still looks like an East-European slum after the fall of communism. Where does all the money go?

The garbage problem at least is well-documented, and blamed on organized crime. Here's the thing though: Sorrento is also visible from Vesuvius, and is in fact contiguous enough to be considered an outlying suburb of the greater Neapolitan metropolitan area. So I'm having some trouble thinking it's not subject to the same criminal temptations. I guess it all depends on the quality of local mafioso you're lucky enough to get running your life.

 

The last decades have seen an increased trend in separatism, be it Brexit, Catalonia or Texans always running their mouths about seceding. The pretext is always some naive jabber about FRREEEDOOOOMS! and many in the U.S. have been half-joking about an official split between red and blue states. But I got news fer ya, pilgrim. That impulse has nothing to do with freedom and everything with the endless numbers of would-be authoritarians eager to fence off their own little fiefdoms, all the pastors and bishops swearing boy scouts and altar boys to silence, all the corporate autocrats eager to deregulate until their money can buy and sell you, each god-kings unto themselves. Deliverance is no egalitarian wonderland. A federal government or a world government is no more inherently oppressive than a slaver state or a mafia political machine or the boss of a factory town or a street gang shaking you down or a mother locking her children in the closet... except that it represents cooperation among the underclass. The rich never have trouble cooperating. The East India Company enriched plenty of Oriental and Occidental mafiosi. Naples' Camorra shift drugs, forged currency and violent force from South America to Russia to Africa to Iraq. Brexit, the anti-immigration separatist measure, actually increased British immigration, especially illegally and from third-world countries. If the Federal Trade Commission fails, Jeff Bezos will still have no problems trading federally. He just won't be getting taxed for it even to the little extent he is now. But he'll still be taxing you with every mark-up.

The absence or impotence of a central government merely leaves your fate to governance by your town's most cut-throat tyrants, petty tin-pot despots who can and will rob you, kill you, whore your ass out or choke you with garbage at their own whims.

Talk about the last king

During my recent Uzbek campaign in Europa Universalis 4, England managed to subsume the isles entirely into Britain...

... only for "Scotland" to pop up again in Polynesia. Weird from a game flow perspective, but also... just picture the demographics! I'm just sayin' if yer gonna wear kilts that might be a better location for it.

De-Regenerate

I'm gonna crash I'm gonna crash I'm gonna trash I'm gonna crash I always crash, too little scratch gonna crash too little, scratch your face itches light bright at the height of your fears of impending arrears six hours seven four three gonna crash two three gonna ate it all and left no gnossympathetik'elover debt piles all night crash out of bed 'ate-in your sleep thinner than yesterday light saving ours or yours lost the track lost the crack in the wall sole escape gotta drag yourself out of the hole you've dug drugged on your own disown it's not me its the fangs ingrown tearing in tattooed in reverse curse the day two was not enough three was not enough to get away four was insufficient for was insufficient by the time you were five you were insufficient six is enough for once but not for every once on the shelf disrespected keep it on display this play on weirds this clay of wyrds this hay unhitting haze in the light of day crash and burn oh return shelve the urn scorn the spurn

return

return

return

it's funny isn't it just not out loud you sit here putting others to sleep with your rants grants dead dream to think hands out you deserve it not enough as you repeat for a chance to repeat the same old lessons until it gives out of bed early to rise early to shinola everywhere you can't even focus I slide open to the coming grit built up seven six five four until you crash for twelve and the world will be new let yourself crash let yourself pay off lay off the stuff and nonsense I'm gonna crash and walk away for once just walk away for once don't need to leave a limb behind every time isn't a tax refund about due screw the hue and cry blank blank I shot a small part dead walk it off they haven't loaded the silver one yet pieces of eight will accumulate until disparage repairs to the back of your pate let it sate let it marinate but you don't owe it reticence that debt was paid eight by eight let yourself live they say what a laugh off the stage in yore life

be the villain?

be the monster be the night be the seven six five four three two all in one claim ownership of a diss 'im bursed eternity whatever chunk you bite off is all yours say voracious reverentious of revanches long incoming due rue screw it.

What does health matter anyway. Let yourself live, they tell you with the best of intentions, but it was never in you that your fate was written. Witness the night of spirits, the night of masks, of dissimulation, of practiced revulsion, when one may feign bogey to double-bluff the essence of man. A pressure valve for innate xenophobia, for fear of the dork, of the geek, of the nerd, but these days the kettle whistles nonstop. Were you not always a creature of their night? Resemble that remarkable, make sure they get your best angle, beast angle, boast angle, or it might not be a kill shot, head shot, mugged shot. To hell. With wellness. Aren't you tired? People are trying to sleep, and if you're not then dare you draw the obvious conclusion? The mob has your description, the dogs have your scent, the inquisitor has your number, trending up, keep positive like the air before a storm. The lightning doesn't hate you. You're merely the most convenient route to where it wants to get to. Or thinks it does. Sinks it does, irresistible attraction.

It's not the chill of the grave. Your thermoregulation's just guttering like an open stove.

What are you afraid of? Uncle Einar got the air back but who's holding your string? A monster off its leash will soon find the silver bullet.

I had an odd conversation earlier today. Brought up The October Country, thought it'd make an apt reference, but she'd never heard of it. It's by Ray Bradbury. Who? Fahrenheit 451? The Martian Chronicles? The Illustrated Man? Something Wicked This Way Comes? Who?

The Halloween Tree made an impression on me in '93, not least for its selfconscious grasping at continuity beyond one's immediate milieu. There's something particularly poignant in the loss of an author so keenly aware of loss, of the tenuous, muffled call-and-response of cultural continuity.

Later, we moved out to the suburbs. A relatively well-to-do one at that. The library had posted a list of books recommended for censorship by concerned citizens. Fahrenheit 451 was among them, I won't say ironically since it made such lists too often for even lingering surprise. The hick trash needn't have worried. Digest digest digests and Denham's Dentifrice carried the day where their protests against thought could not, and the name of Bradbury is trampled on the rainy walks this night by hordes of brats sporting action movie plastic masks whose meaning they'll forget by next month.

Do you accuse me of pining for the fashions of my youth? Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Karl May, Colodi, Verne, Tolstoy, Andersen, the golem and Ali Baba, the clever farmer's daughter, black sails upon the sea soon to receive its name, the wild man who learned to eat bread and drink beer at the foot of a temple prostitute, the witch of the woods and the old man of the mountain, mother earth and father sky, these were not my time's stories, not even my parents' or grandparents' - not even thousand-times-great grand-pere could claim them all! The goat-footed god languishes and fades, tormented by the aseptic gleam of a steeple. Or the Apple Logos, whichever comes first.

The protagonist of The Rover killed his wife and nobody cared. That's a more modern sort of tale.

I started writing this page almost a week ago and will not revise it. Forgive its greater than usual fragmentation. Here, to make it up to you I'll even give away the main theme of my stream of consciousness rant at the start. I kept returning to the sleep debt I've been accruing night by night, avoiding doing something I need to do for fear of getting it wrong. But maybe I'm even more afraid of getting it right and rediscovering what I've known all along: that nobody cares, that even the last of you have gone over to the side of the dust witch.

 

It's almost dawn. I should probably collapse.