30.12.04

Hells Bells,

over 100 pageviews? Of course, half of them are me checking the site for the status of the updates, but still... kinda neat.

I feel dirty now that I've been denied access to two very different websites by this joke of a service provider - I'm talking to you Unwired Access. For some reason, it is possible to view Penny Arcade but not Mac Hall, and anyone even vaguely familiar with these two comics should understand the irony. Poor programming job, boyos - even my site has enough cussing on it to set the filters alight. Ah well.

Let me put it this way - I called the family in pittsburgh from the home of my family in southern California on christmas day. I was told it was about 10 goddamn degrees in the 'burgh, and I sympathised. Then I put my shorts on and went to play some golf with Dad-O. We went to San Diego on Monday to see U.S.S. Midway, and the weather was so perfect that I was reminded of a dream.

Also, despite the size of the open blue sky and the concentration of highly religious crazies, there is another crucial difference between my two hometowns. In Colorado Springs you can actually drink the tap water without the distinct feeling that some measure of your USRDA of essential minerals is being filled at the same time. This simple fact can have a profound influence on one's feeling of overall health.

14.12.04

Is this wretched excuse...

for a year over with yet? Goddammit, 2004 will be remembered forever as the Year of the Foul Swine-Herd. History's pronouncement is in, folks, and there seems to be little doubt that after a few centuries of measurable progress towards a brighter future for all humanity, the scales finally tipped the other way this year, and we are now going backwards.

We're going fucking backwards. I know I just used that line, but I'll use it again Goddammit because that's the plain truth. Only the Greed Heads and Professional Pimps are doing better today than they were four years ago, and only fools and monsters think that our human world is a kinder and more enlightened place now that the Shrub has been allowed to wage his wars. FEAR and TERROR have such a grip on the hearts of the Swine in this nation that only an ocean of revenge-blood will break them. And you know what that means - we're TOO LATE.

FUCK I'm in a foul mood. The first minute of the first hour of January 1st 2005 will not be different in any way from the minute that preceeded it, and the weeks and months that follow it may not bring relief. Now would be a good time to invest in some liqour holdings, because the only guerantee I am willing to make is that people will continue to drink. I know this because I will be one of them. So long, suckers, I'm going to live in an altogether more tolerant land. It's called Future Land, and the bretheren of my generation have finally gotten into a few top positions and are already beginning to undo the massive damage this brain-dead batch of luddites is wreaking. See you there if we both survive.

10.12.04

Well, I tried this once...

already, but apparently Safari is designed to shut down after a certain amount of self-serving bullshit whining rantage. I thought it was pretty good, but I'm a notoriously poor judge of the quality of my own writing.

For some reason, the other night an episode of "Wife Swap" caught my attention, and it illustrated for me a point that I don't think a lot of people really consider day-to-day. This episode concerned the swapping of a Texas rock and roll semi-goth mom and a South Carolina baptist woman's-place-is-the-kitchen mom. It confirmed, almost too perfectly, every nasty suspicion and feeling I had about these fundamentalist religious fuck-nut cases, particularly the bits featuring the baptist husband. His mind wasn't just small, it shrank as you watched him. He was so perfectly prejudiced, so delightfully ignorant, so horrifically terrrifyingly mind-killingly stupid that I began to question my own grip on reality. Objectively I know that these people exist in large numbers - they're the "core" of Red State Fucks that did what they always do on November 2nd in an election year and voted for the dumbest beady-eyed Fuck on the ballot. I have even lived among them in Colorado Springs, that smoky hamlet at the foot of the Castle von Dobson, Focus on the Family.

But this was too easy. The man (Bill, I think, Mr. Bill Fucknut) presented such a clear target for lampooning that even the Iraqi National Guard could have taken him out, were they equipped with sarcasm instead of second-hand U.S. small arms (and here, the obvious joke would be "maybe they'd be better off with sarcasm," and that's just as cheap a shot. But come on, you were thinking it. Knock-Knock Joke Mortars and Funny Rhyming Humvees and Trenchant Wit Grenades and oh okay). And at some point towards the end I began to notice that the extraordinary level of editing - that is, splicing together short clips that may or may not be in correct chronological order - couldn't be due solely to time constraints. The staccato nature of the sound bites in particular bothered me, because it clearly destroyed the natural rythm of the conversations that were "taking place" on camera. Whole sentences would end and begin at unnatural times, sometimes a syllable or two shorter than they should have been.

But everything we see on television is edited this way, to one degree or another. That's why they call them shows. If it's on television at all it is by definition entertainment, and entertainment does not have to be real. In fact, it's generally better if it isn't. But these quote-unquote arguments that happen on Reality Television Shows never ever ever happen exactly the way we're made to think they do, and anyone who thinks they do needs to move a few feet back from the screen and check their pulse. Everything you see on that screen, Everything, Every Fucking Thing, is Edited to appear that way. All of it. From news interviews to America's Most Painful Pratfalls, nothing is real inside there, nothing, and the degree to which we Fat Americans depend on it and accept what it says unquestioningly is really, really fucking scary. I am both fascinated and terrified by the prospect of witnessing the next fifty years of our specie's development, because now I have a genuine fear that we'll start going fucking backwards.

What do you think, too much? So far Camino has behaved well, but it set my processor activiy monitor aflame with activity, and something called the "TrueBlue Environment". WTF? Why isn't it all just one fucking thing, one application one process, give me a break.

7.12.04

I suppose it's true...

that I'm one of the most vanishing of minorities, especially in God's America. That's right, no one in particular, I'm an Atheist. Been out of the closet for a while now, yessiree. Haven't been hit by lightning or run over by a Jesus Fish Magnet delivery truck as of yet, but it's definitely odd knowing that something like 98.6% of the other humans I see walking around me believe in an invisible super hero that lives in space and punishes people for wrongdoing after they're dead.

BTW, here's the credit for that description. GYWO is superb satire, because it isn't satire, really, it's just raw disgust channeled through some cheap red clip art and fantastic dialogue. And my contacts ache, so that's all for tonight. Future Self, if you're reading this, I get the feeling that a humongous rant is building in that dark, dark heart of yours, so here's hoping it gets out soonish.

2.12.04

Yay! It's there...

on page 624 of the gallery, I think. Yeah, that's it. One of the only pictures of me to ever make it onto the Inter-Web, my PowerBook Pallas has a message for the rest of the world.

I like it.