#253

Maybe it's because it's the act of opening the laptop is like the act of falling asleep and entering a repetitive dream state (a fact we would all do very very well to try and remember at all times), but the first thing that comes into my mind these days when I approach the blank text field has to do with webcomics.

It's because I hop online and look at comics first thing most mornings these days. Ain't actually real complicated. Pavlov. 

Apropos of nothing, I love the way Daffy Duck says "por favor". Such a blend of the refined and the ridiculous. The pronunciation is good, too. Mel Blanc was outrageously fucking classic.

*

This is how it's done.

--JL

#252

So, the thing with the "fuck you, politician/political party/outgroup/ingroup/concept" stickers to put on your car. Really, any loyalty to a culture of strife and division. It honestly baffles me that it still works. We are in the twenties. The two thousand and twenties, though! How, how, how in the FUCK does this Woodrow Wilson vs. Teddy Roosevelt shit still reign supreme? 

Internet has been mainstream for around twenty-five years now. I learned to use the freaking internet in the second grade. How, in the last quarter-century, have we not learned that paying money for a physical symbol of your allegiance to a mass-media driven concept is completely and utterly without sense? 

Can it truly be possible that the ability for so many humans to look up enough information to illuminate to each and every one of them that we are one single family and just a very few of us abuse most of the rest of us into thinking that we are not--is good for absolutely nothing? Because we just won't do it? Because we don't want to?

Is it possible that we cannot function without feeling that we are part of a good team, and that there can be no good team without a bad team, and therefore, if there is no bad team, why, one will have to be invented? And if there are teams, must there not be symbols, and colors, and objects to buy, and spectacles, and winners and losers at sufficient intervals to remind us that we are winning, or losing, and must keep winning, or win again? Eternally?

*

So, the thing with the meme of sounding well-informed.

The condescending, formulaic style of prattle that the mediocre and relatively seasoned rely on in order to convince the naive, the fresh-faced, and the gullible that they speak with authority derived from a superior level of intelligence and pedagogic achievement has developed to the point that the sons of a bitches that avail themselves of this wretched sophistry can watch fifty yooootooobb videos made by laughable charlatans and not only think themselves a didactic maverick, but cannot conceive of any information that complexifies or contradicts or recontextualizes the content of their crash course at yooootoooobb university as being processable, let alone digestible. 

Placing your intellectual premiums into sounding well-informed instead of learning to deeply research and read widely will literally kill your ability to think. It will destroy your ability to understand modes of thought outside of your particular meme web. It will trap you on little islands of specified information that you cannot depart from, with no way to swim anywhere else.

Hope being able to repeat a bunch of shit that an asshole himself repeated after "reading" it on the internet because another fucker "read" part of a book and thought to reconstitute it for the online cred is extremely cool and worth it to somebody. Hope that shit isn't in any way garbled, or otherwise compromised.

*

In the end, who gives fuck. What actual, ethical use does most of our knowledge actually end up getting put to? I wonder sometimes if any beyond basic tool use and enough words to tell a story about why the sun comes up and rains fall from the sky. Maybe we didn't need to get much further than learning to fish from a little boat.

*

This has been my modern H.L. Mencken impression, thank you

--JL

#251

If a human being makes an honest attempt at formulating their decisions with an eye towards eliminating hypocrisy in their existential process, they will find their field of action severely limited. Depending on a variety of contexts, and depending also on the individual's ability to detect manifold contradictions, this may even mean that no action is possible, ever, anywhere. 

Similar is the human being who attempts to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A lifetime defined by silence, broken only by the most pitiful banality and gross utility.

Ethics: the art of saying and doing as little as possible. 

Morality: the art of civilization; the best lie, the greatest hypocrisy.

*

Can't stop yourself from drawing breath, can't command your internal homeostasis to just halt, your heart muscles do how they do, you piss and shit, you answer to what you're answerable for.

Who is "good"? Who is "bad"? Jesus Christ, was a question ever so fundamentally beside the point? No one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they do. 

You literally cannot describe even a tiny part of reality without lying. In its distortion of Truth, every truth is a lie.

You literally cannot exist for a single second without killing, without snatching resources from others who need them just as much as you do, and every lie you make up to justify or obscure this truth is hypocrisy and the root of more hypocrisy.

*

Let us strike this bargain with ourselves, I say, incorporating a hypothetical in order to feel less alone: ethics are personal, subjective, inviolate and complete unto the singular, but inevitably and mainly rely on and are deviled by compromise with morality, the public ethic, the inherited good, the perceived health of that thing, society, on which our luxury to consider our ethics and the basis for discarding them both rest equally.

*

The whole thing really is profoundly fucking stupid, and we all have to pay for the right to exist to boot. So whatever, fuck me up, see if I give a damn. As an act of faith, as a singular and personal choice, I do my best to hew to what I think is right and honest, and even though there is no good or truth, I hold myself answerable to my understanding of the concepts and accept their problems thereby; answerable to my own idealized social contract, to a purely theoretical, even fantastical society: a kingdom of heaven. 

Existence is a dark glass house, a palace of horrors and wonders--all illusions. We won't see the actual color of the light, or what is really being illuminated, until we step outside. Or further in.

--JL

#250

Post two hundred and fifty! Hella. Guess at this point I should think about an annotated collection. If I start now I can publish on the third anniversary! What a nerd move that would be.

*

Indeed, though. My fourth book, a double-feature consisting of my first play (discussed long ago, in the blog's early days) and a collection of hybrid thought experiments/conceptual ghost stories, should be forthcoming with a swiftness that surprises me (even though it's technically taken seven years to write, these last stages seem to be going by pretty fast). Then on the third anniversary of the blog I plan to reissue the first two books, make a book out of the blog's posts up to that point (which I guess I really should get started on knocking into shape) and announce my plans for the fifth book (maybe...a sixth?).

Hey! Parentheses!

*

Parenthetically. Great word. On the order of, say, perspicacity, or salubriousness.

Oh, and tintinnabulation. Perhaps proliferation. And automatization. 

*

All this boilerplate reminds me that I haven't linked to the first two books in years. Because of my surely famous and commonly-known computer problems, I somehow have two author pages on amazon dot com. It's a glaring security issue and I am begging for trouble, but also well-documented is my extreme laziness in doing anything about anything when it involves making phone calls or filling out any type of form. 

Anyhow, the first two books can be found here, and the third, here.

Buy them! Even if they suck, perhaps how they suck, and why, may serve you as a worthwhile talking point.

*

Three hundred pages into The Magic Mountain. There's like four hundred more! Kinda wish I could get through more of it at one time, but the book demands what it demands. Definitely it is having an effect. Definitely Thomas Mann had something on the ball, some brilliant stuff in there. Thinking of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, one of my favorites.

That last there, that was a technical parenthetical. But was it ethical?

*

It's raining here. The cats just ate and they're doing their cats that just ate things at various points around where I'm sitting in the middle of the floor with my laptop in front of me. My husband is asleep in a different room. Now I am going to make a second cup of coffee and read to the sound of the falling drops.

--JL

#249

Just a day or two after tossing off the last post, my laptop's logic board fried. Or whatever.

Took it to the real estate inside my local mall which the megacompany specific to my laptop sells its lifestyle brand out of and gave it to a system proprietary to the company. Repair complete, it was sent back to the store, and I went to go fetch it.

For once, this type of occurrence did not result in a massive loss of work for me. Even got to keep the bookmarks in my web browser, which is nice. The webcomics folder has gained some robustness. 

*

These days, I need to find the bottom again, as far as comics are concerned. The webcomics that were edge as fuck when I was pubin' are basically print monsters now, an established section on an established reef in the regulated ecosystem--or constellation, if you prefer--of our shared capitalistic algorithm. I feel reasonably confident that I am reading a lot of great webcomics, legit and a credit to the medium. They are not yet to that legendary status of like a KC Green funkopop, but because of how the environment is, they sell merchandise and to some degree could be called semipro; they have their own small share of a small fluctuating market. This means that they compete to achieve a standard, and collectivize based on these standards. This requires a sophistication apart from the medium itself, a social and communicative skillset which sets a certain tone. I have no problem with this, and love many of these comics, but I crave further varieties. Varietals.  

I know of a couple of aggregator sites that let me trawl a vast number of new amateur work which could never hope to sell a pin or t-shirt now or in the past but may be even now creating very worthwhile work and polishing their way into proficiency. Many of these will never represent more than zooplankton in this food chain, but what of it? Many suck so bad I want to die. Even this is worthwhile. Diatomaceous offal, decomposing flesh, and any number of biological wastes are one and all essential parts of any complex food web.

*

But where the new gangsters truly chillin? I feel I don't know. Thus, a need to dive to greater depths. 

Anyway, ok, yes, good, my laptop is working. I have been very busy with a lot of things. I should build my own computer. Get into data hoarding.

*

Peace and love and pink lemonade, all

--JL