#499

The third best webcomic as stated on the "links" area of Factually Pointless is drawing to a close--Unsounded, by Ashley Cope. It is a fantasy graphic novel. In my rough and humble estimation, Unsounded represents the pinnacle of the field and indeed, the genre. This is all information that I have relayed to the reader before in this space. It's really the best webcomic; all three of them are and I should probably even link a few more.

Anyway, the reader may be further interested to know that I have had to step away from my computer just to messily weep--and had to walk away again when I came back because I, a grown man who has buried friends and family in the cold earth, the winner and loser of hundreds of knock-down-for-blood physical battles and other hardcore-type confrontations, was in fact not ready and started to cry again as soon as I laid eyes on it. The last twenty-odd pages of this work of art have been an emotional experience so intense that I am actually kind of scared for myself, for the author, and for all of us who have followed this tale to its transformative crescendo.

But I am also ready.

*

Apropos of what I was saying yesterday, these drooling godforsaken orcs are pulling the devil's own trick around here, "arresting" people for "antisemitic" behavior and holding them without a charge after whisking them away in an unmarked van. Deporting people beause--why? State secrets. You know what that is? That is gestapo shit. That is gulag, fucking deep up the ass of the iron curtain dictatorship-style shenanigans and they are an unmistakable sign that your civil society is about to break down into militarized terror-fascism. Well, open militarized terror-fascism.

I refuse to equate saying that Israel is doing genocide in Palestine with antisemitism. At best, I will modulate the word "genocide" to "inexcusable war crimes carried out in full recognition of the fact." The inclusion of genocide might be a part of that. Not for me to say legally. As far as I'm concerned, if your warmaking incurs this many civilian casualties and this kind of destruction of life-supporting infrastructure, I don't care if it is because your opponent is flaying innocent people alive and wearing their skins around as a disguise. You are not trying hard enough. Plus you are having people do the settling thing as it all happens. Difficult to look away from that, I guess. I call it genocide. Call me what you want about it, except an antisemite. Bullshit. 

Anyone can do genocide. I wish suffering genocide erased your capacity for genocide, but if it worked that way, we would have left all that shit behind long, long ago.

Genocide is about groups and power, that's it. That's all. Groups and power. Strip everything away, all the nonsense and the propaganda, and you will see very clearly what is happening.

No one has to seek justification or revenge. We just need to demand that it stop. That it stop and not resume. 

Fight a war like it is 2025 and you give a fuck. This is a plea. I really believe that a different strategic philosophy could yield surgical success while minimizing casualties. If I am wrong, I would love to ever see a cogent argument that can prove how bombing the living shit out of hospitals is better than not doing that. Variations on whether they deserve it, fuck their hospitals, etc. are not valid to me.

Solutions that maximize the well-being of both groups as they curtail bad actors and work towards resolutions that point confidently towards lasting peace are about all that I'm accepting at the front desk these days. Oh, is that difficult? Fuck me, guess I'm being unreasonable.

*

Circling back to the domestic picture, this shit? Masked whoever-the-fucks who don't show a badge whisking people--people known to be harmless--away at 5:30 p.m. off a public sidewalk, no charges filed in any system? They're on a list for something they wrote? 

People need to understand. This is what they do to their own populations in "third world countries" because the Central Intelligence Agency taught them how because they learned it from the Soviets who had it from the Nazis who believed deeply in Teutonic methodologies for unearthing witches and demons.

And by the way! The incompetence and stupidity are part of it! Do not mistake them. The imbecilic blunders are calculated, their chaos and weakness planned, and they are a smokescreen for the deeds done in the dark with perfect competence and deadly intent. Mark me on that, if nothing else in this scribble*.

People absolutely need to understand that every single day that they do this shit and get away with it, it takes one more year to get things back to something resembling a free state and a civil society. And they absolutely need to understand that it is never stays at the level it is or pulls back by itself, but always, always ramps up, always always. They move the schedule along and before you could react--how? the news didn't say it was going to happen--it is having to wear government-issued badges or get arrested off the street, it is armed checkpoints between neighborhoods that were never walled and are now walled, and people disappearing all the time for stuff they said or might have said or for no fucking reason; they will disappear a grandmother just to keep a neighborhood on its toes, just to scare a grandson into silence because they need him where he is. They will lynch people to make examples and there will always need to be examples made until one day there are no more examples and it's the muzzle of a gun for every single person and eventually themselves. That's how these death-cults finish. Bullets and poison and whole countries burning.

They will eat this place alive from the inside out so that when some outside force comes to put a stop to it it will all collapse inward like a rotten pumpkin and the stench of the grave will rise to the heavens. Or it will get so bad, so unbelievably bad--no one would have believed how bad it would get, they will say, but they had precedent to look at and I am saying it now: it will get so bad that it will topple from the inside, but you will not believe how bad it would have to get before that happens. It rarely does, you see. People will tell you things are fine well beyond the previous limits of your imagination. You might hear it out of your own mouth, and somewhere deep inside you, your past self will scream in horror--and you will pretend not to hear.

*

 

This is not a partisan thing. When things are this crazy, the pendulum swing back to the opposite pople has an excellent chance to be even crazier. Terror fascism is bad, but it's not worse than terror collectivism. I mean, they are the same, a profoundly intertwined dipole. Wish it hadn't somehow become controversial to present that fact. It's in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and it has stayed true. 

To me it does not matter if my face is ground into a filthy poster of DJT before they put the barrel to the back of my neck, or a filthy poster of AOC. Both of these parasites are the same to me, save that one is--like Taylor Swift--roughly my age and will likely fuck up my patience for a long time yet, and one is a doddering mummy kept alive only by high-quality cocaine, spray-tan preservatives, and the warm blood of the young. End of the day, both are merely stand-ins for elemental human forces; not to deny them their basic humanity, but history hands us each our roles and that's that, I suppose.

Think that it is not real or not your problem all you want. Think yourself a beneficiary? Look, I'm trying to lend emphasis, but I'm not screaming or shaking or anything. I am speaking to the best of my knowledge and the direct experience of one whose life has been defined by these social realities when I say that the chances are low in the extreme that the direction things are taking is good or healthy for anybody, even and maybe especially those calling most ardently for it to happen and those making it happen or aiding and abetting.

Conversely, if you are letting yourself become radicalized to the point that staring into this abyss has given birth to a dragon in your spirit, best quench yourself before you fuck everything up for everyone.

What we need--again!--is to stop for a minute.

* 

Call it harebrained, but I finally came up with something resembling a cogent solution, at least for the issues facing the United States. It's dramatic, which I feel fitting, but probably impossible to pull off and maybe no one would want this, but I've been mulling over a few years now and I think it might be time to say fuck it and throw it at the (obscure, unobserved) wall and see if it sticks (it will not).

Nationwide truth and reconciliation hearings, at the community, town, city, county, state, and regional level. Our groups and classes need to reckon with the past interactions of power between them. Understanding must be found, between the people and by the people. Dragged to it if need be, but these conversations must be had. The truth must set us free. It is time for all the sweet-sounding prophecies to salve our brows, but we must reach out to one another in order to accomplish this. 

The impetus for this great undertaking will be a parallel undertaking of equal scale, scope, and impossibility: it is time to call a fresh constitutional convention, with a delegate stucture that shatters the two-party system and replaces it with a more modern solution in one fell swoop as it drafts a constitution modified, condensed, and expanded to steer the nation into this millenium. 

A non-partisan and bipartisan referendum government should be installed in order to handle the maintenance of services rendered unto the people and the operation of the courts and military, but congress and the executive will be suspended until the production of a restructured model for their operational scope. The opportunity should be especially taken to curtail corporate power, especially as concerns interactions of corporate behavior and species-defining data processes and the guidance of technological paradigms. 

*

Hey man, if I'm crazy--isn't it still pretty much worth the moonshot? I'm aware that there are countable infinities of details, problems, and impossibilities in the way of this, but I also know that summarized like this in three paragraphs, it makes a decent pitch if you've got the balls to want to try it. I would hope a lot of people had those kinds of balls, but who knows. Plus crazier things have worked. It can be suprising what people will agree to, and what energy that fresh direction can produce.

*

Though we are not like to find out. In truth we will all likely be living under a Chinese proxy state soon enough.

Just had the need, the desperate futile drive, one last time I hope, to call it out as it is happening and say what could be done. I'll try to go back to farting out bullshit and talking about all the dang books I read and video games I piss my life away with. That's my whole plan of action through all this, by the way; that and painting. 

Ever a wastrel of no regard or influence, me, but these days, that could still get a guy in a lot of trouble, huh?

PEACE, FUCKS

whatever like I give a shit. proxy state more like pussy state amirite boiz

--JL

*seriously, remember that

#492

Well, it's almost two months into the year. Interesting year so far. Eventful! Personally and on a global scale.

Yes, a post about current events. Perhaps they are to some degree inevitable. Feel free to check out and slide away to more rewarding internet locales. I would. But it would perhaps be unwise, if I am able to offer any kind of useful insight. And maybe I can. That's why I bother to type it out and put it where people can see it, I guess, even if no one looks. Even if people did look, and it caused problems for me, I would still do it. 

Everything, of course, is to some degree inevitable. Arguing about it won't change that.

*

Well, look. I know that Americans reading this, generational Americans specifically, might think they still have a country. Shit, this country technically did survive Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, two points in history in which the executive was overrun with trolls, gangsters, and petty thieves, and that's not nothing.

The country was much younger and the world much older in both instances. Young organisms are in key ways more resilient than their mature counterparts, and the world has been made anew five or perhaps eight times over since 1923.

But factually we probably don't have a country left. Every 24-hour period makes it less probable that we will be able to return to democratic norms. That's how it works in other countries, and if this past decade and a half has proved anything, anything, it is that the United States is no mythical example, no blessed fluke, no modern utopia, no nothing in any way special. Just another country full of humans.  

If things continue as they have been, then they could very easily just replace the courts with implacable algorithms and congress with a consumer panel overseen by a board of directors. 

Naturally nothing these bodies produce will have any effect on the CEO. That position can and only could ever be decided internally, using machinations whose inputs are completely severed from the public sensorium and indeed, reality. 

Once it has happened, you will see that such has always been their dark vision. They would never have said so! But it will be extremely obvious in retrospect, when you review the lies they told vs. the actions they took, that having a government was never really the plan. 

*

As I have said before, and as was quickly made manifest--they can just deport people wherever the fuck they want. They can make it happen by making it legal by being--it is very simple--bullies. They get it. They have always been bullies and they understand that being a bully works just as well when it's countries and laws as when it's toys and rules.

The reason for having governments is to prevent bullies from ruling the roost. Goverment fails when the bullies are in charge. It is...pretty simple.

*

"They" in this whole screed, by the way, should be understood as the brigands and profiteers whose aim is open and omnivorous theft of the highest possible magnitude, breadth, and scope, as well as any and all ideological maniacs who wish to vent their fear-based genocidal urges. 

As is so often true, the above are entwined in a very profitable and pleasurable position. Indeed, the former have historically found it useful and expedient to maintain in every way they can the conditions to create as much genocidal fear as possible--to embed it deeply in as many subcultures and across language and law and moral commandment. This trick has been key in accelerated forms of societal formation and collapse.

Building slave empires on foundations of total nonsense and thus creating the conditions for their own dissolution. Toppling monarchies with populist movements only to install a regime more brutal than previously thought tolerable or even possible. Coming in to gut existing companies and flying away on a helicopter with all their money. And so forth. That is the basic game.

People do it to themselves and allow it to be done to them. It is hard to hope for change when you see how willing and eager we are to spill the same innocent blood over and over and over again for completely made-up reasons each and every time. Always to the sound of applause, at first.

And believe me--there is always money in it.

*

All the truly useful solutions lie in the realm of fantasy. Such as: if I could magically give these people what they wanted without the human cost involved.

Do you understand? If I could just give these crazy fucking quasi-religious fanatics and twisted race scientists what they were after--a society comprised only of their described acceptable monoculture, inviolable and pure and legitimate in its closed-border holdings, by magically, intstantly withdrawing everyone they would like to fucking murder to a safe location, then I would.

Why? Because they wouldn't know what to fucking do. They would fucking starve. Those fortunate enough to survive the riots and outbreaks of disease, anyway. These people have no fucking clue what they're really after. They don't remember or realize that if there's no one around to be their slaves, then eventually, someone's going to have to lift a finger.

Who cleans the human feces? Who grows the food and deals with it and cooks it? Who gets to sit around all god damned day and point fingers? These questions have answers that they like, for now. What happens when suddenly the basis for those answers is completely gone?

It would even be immoral. To give them what they want. Wouldn't even want to watch that gruesome farce play out. Like the martyred socialist said, they know not what they do. They understand nothing. And to reveal to them the magnitude of their ignorance in this way would be cruel.

But it would probably be better than letting them kill us.

*

Letting them kill us seems to be the plan, as far as I can see. Very Christian of us and I approve, in a sense. I would also like to die later, from other causes, but no one gets to pick how they go, except all those who do. We say they are bad, I guess, but you know what I think about what "we" say en masse without thinking deeply about it.

Who fucking cares. Ballot, bullet, bullshit. It'll all kill you. Don't have any better plan and even if I did, don't know of anyone more socially dead than myself. Might be cool if someone had a strategy and I could trust it. Not from where I'm looking.

But I am seeing something I have seen before: a united and determined political minority has bamboozled the agitated public into giving them the government, and the political majority is too fragmented, inflexible, and fundamentally ineffective to stop them or do anything at all useful, really--just the same ritual genuflections that have been failing thus far, their power drained as though founded on a dead god.

*

So that's the pessimism. Do we have another angle?

Well, another fun fantasy is like, just being able to change someone's mind. Like, if I could, I dunno, concentrate real hard and pull my left earlobe while snapping my fingers and just watch someone let go their fear and their hate and their anger. That would be one fucking hell of a superpower. Better than Superman; fight me.

But, no. No, I don't really have much optimism. Only that this wretched world is visible to us, limited creatures that we are, as through a glass darkly, and to be freed from its bounds and sound what has been hidden will be to see and know one another and this world as it truly was, as we truly have been, as we are and will be, and faith that this veil is drawn over a perfect universe beyond my microscopic and human-all-too-human comprehension. 

In a good way. Guess that's my optimism. We are small, the present brief. Soon all this mess and tension will be of little consequence to whomsoever might walk this weary globe in another thousand thousand years. 

*

Thinking of finding a big giant jar to live in. Could be fun. Could be a novel career move after all this shit burns down around me, if I'm not shot to death in the street or put on a work crew in Nicaragua or wherever the fuck.

--JL

#470

One of the problems with doing a thing--in this case, Factually Game Theory 2024, which shall continue apace--is that if I come up with any number of other concepts to twiddle with it troubles my vector of approach and I tend to write nothing instead of dealing with both or synthesizing the concepts. I can sometimes do these things, but not always. Shortly, solutions to these problems, or at least, changes of some magnitude will manifest which will modify my process, if not streamline it.

Well, that was obscure and in no way utile. Onwards!

*

Apropos, then, a synthesis. We can do it today, though I may not like it. 

Politics. I know. Well, allegedly, we are that sort of animal.

*

Rage when pundits and other mechanisms of the profit-mandated media use game jargon to describe the decorative contours of the mechanism they truck with, drawing attention away from the nightmarish, suppurating underbelly, is something I experience and express at will. There is no denying, though, that like all phenomena, political contests can be expressed as games, played with rules which change over time.

*

A thought experiment, then, in which as is so often profitable, we begin with Sun Tzu: when in contest, if your opponent wishes to direct you, the way is to do otherwise than your opponent wishes.

For example, if your opponent aims to divide your forces, you have options--to withstand or overcome the divisive force/terrain, maneuver around same, feint the desired division as you deliver a lateral complication or draw the opponent into your own trap, etc. Always the overarching aim is to resist your opponent's will, always to do and be otherwise than your opponent would have you do and be.

As is so often true, in life as in combat, the best way to do this is to be as water--natural and irresistible in one's flow, always water despite undergoing state changes. On a long enough timeline, despite any attempt to control or channel it, water always finds its own way to where it is going.

* 

If your oppoenent wants you to hate and mistrust and cast out the stranger, do not do these things. Actually, if someone wants you to do these things, they are in fact revealing themselves as your true opponent.

They want you to do these things because they want you to be afraid and to be alone so that you are easy to defeat, to pick off one by one. It is a tactic. It can hardly be called a strategy, since it is employed so that no strategy will be necessary in order to secure a win condition.

It's like convincing you to get rid of a big chunk of your chess pieces before you play, but they get to keep all of theirs. It dissipates entirely the morality of  this particular play, which is a level playing field symmetrically arrayed where identically apportioned armies engage in maneuvers to manipulate the asymmetrical complexity that arises from the first turn to a win condition. Why would someone need an advantage under these conditions? 

They know they cannot play with enough skill to win. However, winning is more important than playing to them.

That is why they fail, and fail perennially, even if their star is ascendant for a season or ten. And when you fail with them, or play by their rules, it's not like you get a mulligan. They might, but you went out and died for them, which is what I was talking about before. And if you played by their rules, you were never really playing. You were just meat.

We must be brave and we must hang together. We must not believe that we are enemies. What is evident is that we are pieces, arrayed on opposing sides--but that does not make us enemies. Perhaps, on someone else's playing field, there are enemies, and these divisions are then imposed on us. But that is no reason to play their game.

We must play our own games. We must make a game of being as different as possible from our opponents, going as far as to state radically that we have no opponents, that there is only, in this life, free play. Fuck that winner/loser bullshit--let's just play some more, play will we're tired, and play again tomorrow.  

God! We have to remember to play. If it's not a game, there is no fucking point. 

*

An opponent is not the same as an enemy. But the core strategy remains the same: don't do as they wish you to do, which is another way of saying don't be what they are, which is another way of saying when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares into you and in the process of defeating dragons one must take care to not become a dragon oneself, all of which is to say that one ought to play one's own game, not someone else's.

Opposition is, itself, a game. There are no opponents, only the game itself. Only the information and the interaction on the field. Only the flow of energy, directed harmoniously, unleashed chaotically.

*

Descending a bit from the lofty peaks of our abstractions, we are, all of us living on this planet today, staring down some consequential choices and conditions. Soon things will be asked and demanded of us at the superorganism and individual level that will determine the fate of our species and the shape and outcome of not only every human life but the life of the planet itself. Many things are about to happen all at once and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Very nearly on some Final Fantasy nonsense, eh--and how many parties, even now, might exist a suspension of molecules, waiting to bond and coalesce and crystallize and save the world by defeating the forces of death and destruction in the name of love and freedom?

Again, Sun Tzu. If your opponent is choleric, aggravate their temperament. If they are phlegmatic, take advantage of their stillness and outmaneuver them. If your opponent wishes to engage, ensure to engage on different ground. 

Seriously, find and read that little book.

How many ways can we Splatoon some of these situations out? Fact: thick jets of paint will almost certainly jam most firearms, as would sufficient quantities of grease, many kinds of oil, oatmeal, fecal slurry (which deals several kinds of devastating bonus damage), maple syrup, marinara sauce, you name it. I dunno how well marinara sauce would work, actually, but you never know and you might have to make do and laugh about it. Covering someone head to foot in warm corn syrup or whatever has an inevitable and inescapable sting to it, after all, and sometimes all we can do is sting.

Maybe the last and only win is to laugh in someone's teeth before they write an end to it, and maybe it's time to make peace with that.

And yet, maybe it's time to survive so craftily and cleverly they'll tell Robin Hood level lies about you someday.

It is as important to take a page out the books laid out by the greats as it is to be creative. I suggest both, whenever possible, and so does Sun Tzu.

*

Peace, then! Peace, and one thousand times peace again, till peace is all we remember! More game thoughts soon.

--JL

#465

Ah, election day. And what an election!

This year I really think I did pretty well not mentioning politics in like the sense of naming specific names at least too much. On occasion, the general picture has risen to a temperature which, for me personally, cannot be borne without some type of outcry--usually about the imposition of money and the theft of time and ease--but I believe I have grasped the handle of restraint's cooling mechanism, been served thereby, and passed those savings onto you, dear reader.

But today is after all the day of election, and one might even be called remiss in their duties if one were to let it pass entirely without comment. 

As is classically done in linear time, let us first look back.

*

The vitriol Joseph Biden was able to summon in the national rhetorics was inspiring on both sides. I understand that many on the left carried a great deal of trauma from posting classic Joe Biden as Vice President memes during the Obama years, extremely fucking cringe affairs which they absolutely delighted in--he was their ancient, fun uncle, and his new teeth were a vision back then, it is true. 

For me, the Obama presidency ran as a stupid bullshit tokenization party that I wished would stop but which I now see as an idyllic time; wheras the former revelers live suspended in such shame that the pretend they voted for a mysterious, invisible, morally superior candidate--a 2008 write-in for Bernie Sanders, perhaps; a piece of shit who has miraculously, despite all outstanding evidence, retained his place in the Noble House of Acceptable Compromises with Neoliberal Values. Anyway, fuckers act like Obama was Pol Pot the whole time and not Politi-Jay Z Mk. II, and they always hated Biden, he was always a Bad Old White Guy and I Personally Have Never Liked a White Guy Ever. 

Fucking bullshit. 

As for the right, well, I really had no idea that white dudes were even capable of hating one of their own like that. Though I suppose when one is vehemently enthusiastic regarding the daily sessions of Two Minute's Hate directed at that withered Goldstein, one's capacities and ordnances find themselves naturally expanded. Perhaps they also feel shame for tolerating him in their minds when Obama sat the big chair. I guess it is also easier, as is time-honored and expected, when you assert that your opponent is a homosexual, so as to bring ready, ample, and easily mobilized reserved of baseless, misdirected hatred to bear.

The beauty of it all is that he is of course only a man, and has nothing to do with the incredible caricatures that have been painted of him on the national stage by miscreant and supporter alike, nor anything to do with how the world is and acts out. 

It must be stridently evangelized: all of these ghoulish people, whose faces are masks because they have no true expression, are a cross for us to bear, and not messianic representatives of our human progress. I vote with that attitude, and that attitude alone---that of a grim and barely willing relinquishment of my temporary and performance-based tolerance. Everyone is automatically fired as soon as I vote for them. Any given organism is only beginning the challenge, as keeping the job is where the job begins. As it is for me, it should be for them, eh?

*

This year's particularly contorted and absurd machinations mean that as usual, I could not in good conscience vote for the intellect I would actually prefer at the helm of the office. Sorry, Cornel West. Be assured I stared at your name, and the blank little box next to it, with a true and actually passionate longing. Next time, I pray.

It is honestly a stone bitch that I felt unable to vote for, in my opinion, the most iconic and acceptable third-party candidate in living memory. Very sad.

*

Let us indulge in a look even further back as a matter of brief review even on my own blog, as in this truly benighted and paralyzingly headlong age, even things I said three years ago seem like an archeologist has to blow dust off them and consult dense notes in order to truly grasp the fruit of my prior revelations.

Say it often, but not enough, it has to be repeated: the pus and bile of the Old Web became too much for the Carnis Digitalia and burst into an abcess, the vile and stinking flood flowing into meatspace, which was markedly, one might say intensely unimproved by the infusion, and the open cavity a ripe promised land for external infections. And what infections have taken hold! The sins and curses of that wretched phsyical realm pulse hideously, thrumming in place to the beat of an army of dark hearts. Even now I can see them, in my mind, their stink and wetness anathema to the cool and polished marbles of my dead, romanticized Olympus.

Thus, the problems written into the code developed organically by the social memetic organism we belong to (alas) were hacked by its most internal, most productive, most abstract processes--only for every fractal that every iterated to simply iterate again, in a process that operated in tandem with itself--think of a zipper unzipping, and then the jacket unthreading itself violently in spasms--destabilizedby feedback loops, kicked off the edge of chaos. Out of control fast, out of control big.

Collapse is imminent, and from that collapse, its detritus, shall rise many fresh collectives. A process not unlike the division of one cell into two. But that moment of bicellularity is just that. A fleeting, breathless second. The rate of division is exponential. You might see four for a partial moment before you realize there's a hundred and forty-four probably and from there the mind hitches, unable to usefully process. What I mean is collapse is another word for beginning.

*

All this by way of saying that the outcome of this election is, while of importance in the short term, not terribly important news in the aggregate. Things are going to change so fundamentally and at such speed that the outcomes themselves will hold little import simply because the context will change so radically the very sense of the information will change--and still we will be plunging onwards.

Again: the outcome does matter. Just not with same heft that these things usually matter, as things are so unstable that anything could happen at any time.

Or, y'know, everything's the same. From one's own little speck of perspective, if one is as objectively honest as one can bring oneself to be, one may acknowledge, perhaps even aloud, that one knows absolutely nothing, and every day is a mystery with no solution; you just get through it till it's time to go to bed.

*

Well, it makes sense. Societies are just like organisms, as I have also said in the past. The story of two single cells producing a third, which in a remarkably short time can consider what to wear every fucking morning, and just as quickly finds itself breaking down practically right away into individual cells and even the substrates and wastes that are the byproducts of all cell clusters over time. Before you know it, the process has resulted in a whole new collection of cells living through and adding onto a culture established by cell colonies long past. 

A cell culture. Cell culture. Cell culture. 

Do you get it.

This basic situation has not changed and transposes across many scales of size and granularity.

The multiverse: infinite bits coalescing and disintegrating, forever. 

Infinity infnitely iterating infinitely.

*

The pleasure I take in bringing the post to the prior plateau--I am very aware I have done it several times before--is enormous, but it is also an important task, its repetition an essential part of that task. We cannot forget what we are and where we live. We mustn't.

*

Of course there is no sense minimizing my own feelings, either: I am dismayed at the stark choice this election presented, and how far outside of my prerogative the script has forced me to situate myself. I included who I wanted to vote for as a sort of indication of who I did vote for, wholly against my inclination, the alternative being to me unacceptable to such a degree that my hand felt forced. 

You all know me: I fucking HATE that.

Less, clearly, than I hate certain prospects, but the act being completed, its discomfort stings the more.

*

However it must be said that I do not hold any special ill will for the adherents of either wretched camp. People, as people, which is to say, my fellow citizens--a group which I personally suspend in a wholly different net than I do the elected officials that are supposed to represent them (no official could possibly represent me, and I hardly expect any to)--will tend to congregate, it is their way--the way of all cells, all molecules. Having done so, particular physics and processes take hold, with inevitable outcomes and natural results. I have described them earlier in this post, and the analogy holds. This also works with churches, newspapers; any collective effort, really. 

The bits are innocent, and I can bit around with my fellow bits presumably infinitely without our loyalty to strawmen and colors getting in my way, because I have extremely low faith in and zero loyalty towards collectives of almost any description, but I do like people. I am skilled at manging this tension. For example, I can and have worked productively with people who would probably want me dead if I did not, like a vaudeville performer, keep no less than eight plates spinning on broomsticks during every interaction involving these terribly loaded yet wholly imaginary differences. It is a matter of keeping the both of us grounded in fully human terms and experiences, and steering with a determination unto obstinacy way from the inhuman, chittering, doubletalking drivel our demonic overlords would have us torture each other with while they laugh and pour wine into their already-full mouths.

Simple rule: only talk about real things. Things we can both touch and see, things that materially matter and have to be dealt with and bring that joy and satisfaction that actual, vital concepts and categories bring to an existence being actively experienced at the scale it is appropriate for that life to be lived.

For example, a fancy sports team's outcomes: strawmen and colors. Competing brands: strawmen and colors. Politicians: strawmen and colors in a big way. Improving our own lots, the lots of our fellow man, and our own work and leisure hours to the greatest and most joyful extent we can intelligently manage: actual life. 

Actual life? Please? Can we prioritize actual life every day, instead of this excruciating, neverending round with the fucking goddamn loyalty colors and chattering heads?

*

Ten million unwelcome text messages from grifters and charlatans. That's last week. On just my phone. The background noise from this election season probably registered on alien instruments fifty parsecs from here.

*

How much money do people have, I mean how bad can the economy actually be, if people give money to these brazen fucks? I mean I'm not a person who doesn't spend money on crap and things not everybody understands. I love blowing cash, hate having money. Ice cream, books, and video games, baby. Way more fun than money. And so look, I can take the shit I get for this philosophy in life from fuckers who love to punish people for no reason with equanimity, but it is total bullshit that you can bitch that the economy is bad and the economy is someone's fault and then give any fucker wearing nice clothes with their hand out--a state of affairs which insults my intellect to a degree that it feels pierced, as though by a dagger--I mean, I don't know about you, but I have cats, and bills, and a mortgage, and I like to have fun. I have to work really hard to keep all that going and I barely fucking scrape by. This, in a country which is supposedly the richest and the greatest in all the lands of this poor globe. But the idea that I can spare even a dime for a political party? Let alone the political party of a different state in this union? This is just how I feel, and maybe I am wrong, but no. No.

Bitch, they have money--and they flush it down the toilet in a way that should make everyone who thinks of it blush. We act like there's no money--look at how these fuckers live their lives, and what they spend just to suck each other's dicks! They are the dragons of legend, the reality described by the symbol, and we pile gold on their glittering hordes in obeisance. 

Pathetic. The word is travesty. 

I mean, fucking honestly. What do you think it costs to fill the balloons at something like a national convention? Fucking. Balloons. Travesty. What do you think it takes to fill closets with "appropriate" clothing, pantsuits and ascots and shit? Do you think they can be seen in clothing that has seen wear and tear to any degree, in their hideously glittering society of excess? Why do these so-called representatives all seem to have more houses than I have people in my one household? Correct jewelry, correct makeup, correct private aviation, correct chauffeur services, correct price tags on all that shit and just imagine the colognes, the perfumes, the private schools for the kids, the leasing of a different car every year per driver per property--driven or not driven. 

Shoes.

*

God, and the chatter around it all, media personalities and PR folks. They use military and sports analogies unflinchingly and interchangeably as they discuss how public "servants", whom they are fond of referring to in the most glowing terms, rob the public and spend the stolen money to steal more money, and they say that this process is very important because it is a process, and it is attached inextricably to the process that describes the process (read: money), so with that being how it is, everything will work as long as you keep yourself informed (daily) and participate actively in the system (through approved channels, only during specified periods in the fiscal year).

Damn. Incontrovertible. Except it is the death of reason and the funeral march of what it has ever meant to be human in this world. 

*

Anyway. Election day at least means they should stop texting me for money. Right? For a little while?

Shuddering, beginning to sweat as I see it in my mind: waking up to a text message tomorrow--right above the one that says "one last push"--marked "the fight's not over" or some goddamn equivalent. 

Pretty soon I'm gonna have to destroy the bedeviled thing and start again with a new stupid glaring rectangle. At least these empty, cackling bastards will have to take the time--or their large language scripts will, anyway--to place a new number on their wicked lists, so as to mortar it with unceasing, insulting horseshit.

*

To try and put a good vibe on the day, I went ahead and finished the main campaign in Unicorn Overlord. May this act tip the scales of this day however humbly towards peace, justice, and wise rule.

Man, that would be something to get. Indeed, the game's eneding represented a dream so wholly ensconced in the pipe that you would need a pair of plumbers, brothers maybe, to brave the depths and fetch that thing into the light. It was very, very beautiful. Loved every moment of that game.

*

As a final note: when I voted today, I got not the typical sticker proclaiming that I had done so. You know, the basic statement, the variations on font, the three colors, and Old Glory. No, today I got a sticker with a bitchin werewolf ripping out of his clothes. Not "I Voted"--this sticker screams that "I VOTED", or, perhaps, it would be better, more true, to say that it howls.

Let me say that I endorse this in the strongest possible terms, and, as a voter and a citizen, would work extremely diligently to collect all the stickers of this caliber, made for this purpose, that I possibly could.

--JL

#366

Well, letting it rest on 365 for a bit was nice. 366 is a cool number in its ow right, in many ways cooler than 365, at least to me. Without the context of what we know about elliptical orbits and the arbitrary decision to measure time by them, I wouldn't care a jot for 365. 366 though, that's a dope number. Three followed by two copies of its double. Multiplying each digit in sequence gives you 108, whose digits add up to 9, a number very closely entwined with 3 and 6. It is also the 9th multiple of 12--a number closely entwined with 3, 6, and 9--so dividing it by 12 makes 9. I don't know why stuff like that is so effin rad to me, but it always has been.

The rules of how to write out numbers in writing are important, but I give myself permission to eschew them at least partially whenever I do the type of paragraph that precedes here. This type of paragraph is a whole thing with Factually Pointless. Search for posts with numbers in the tags, and be amazed by more of this content than you ever dreamed you'd need, or existed, probably!

*

Sequentially speaking, since I'm not gonna write about sports today, Factually Sportsmanlike 2024 is over--for now. When the time comes, maybe soon, Factually Musical 2024 will retain is week-long posting space, but for things like Factually Sportsmanlike--any type of subject to be featured in a specific way--will have an establishing sequential trial run and then be available to feature whenever I chose, perhaps as a one-off, perhaps for a short run. Factually Musical may eventually roll out this way, too. 

Of course, I might write about anything at any time. The features are about how focused a post must be on its subject and how that might be amplified or played with in the overall structure of the one post and the posts around it. Any one ordinary post might contain subject matter fit for multiple features, but is not a feature, per se. 

*

Both Golden Sun games for the game boy advance are playable on the switch online, and as one whose very first complete RPG experience was, in fact, Golden Sun, this is delicious. I delight in revisiting them at these screen sizes and resolutions, and even more in the idea that a new generation of gamers will be able to enjoy them. They are pure artistic and mechanical joy, amazing art, shape language, color stories, gorgeous light and particle effects, battle summons whose whole graphical pachage defy the machine's limitations, everything. A way of using the pixel to sculpt three-dimensionality with a smoothness rarely achieved. And dudes, the fucking music. It's just some of the best music written for any games ever. Period. At eleven years old, I sank hours into plunking away at a keyboard, transcribing the theme music. I would go to the overworld and just lie down with my headphones plugged into my GBA, blissing out on the composition, the astonishing painterliness achieved with the midi tones.

They are simple and workmanlike games on one level--lotta these puzzles are gonna feel rote and characteristic before too long, though for every few dull repeats and going back to square one, there's memorably interesting and devious ones--but they explode with such character, beauty, and contain such surprising depths: djinn mechanics and the choices around them, summons and class builds, and a special profundity in the characterization of people moving through a living, changing world. The huge story rolls out with a confidence in itself and an ambition that is almost unwarranted, but pay themselves off and deliver incredible finales. 

*

Ok, I'm hungry. Then I gotta do school shit. Have not been as diligent as I expected myself to be, despite completing all my work and doing well so far. What I need is to both chill more and work harder, or maybe smarter. HA! What I need is universal basic income, healthcare, shelter, and nutrition. It is incredible how low our bar is for calling ourselves a modern, scientific society. Fucking pathetic. I give us an F. F for fuck that. Everything I just said is cheap, both literally and if you just decide it is. 

I'll say it here, and I'll repeat it whenever I can: the role of government as we have understood it is done. All it can hope do to now, the only way to save itself from being supplanted entirely by the corporate ecosystem which already wields greater powers, is to become a bunker for the people. It must provide the basics of life--roof over the body, food on the table, and the doctor whenever you need it, FOR FREE, plus money in the pocket so you can go always, without fail, go out and give at least some of it to the corporations, so you can be that nomadic dollar that bleeding-edge capitalism needs you to be. Let people try to get rich, whatever. Let them lose everything, but never their basics. Let everyone have the basics. I know that if you allow yourselves to look at it as math problem, and prorate those effects honestly, you will know that I am right. You will know it can be done, and you will come up with the logistics. 

Infrastructure? Man, incentivize it somehow, make a pool rule, and have the six or seven biggest companies foot the bill. Shit, you could rebuild every city in the world sharpish on the same tip. 

Need more money? Fucking print it. More labor? Fucking pay for it with the money you just printed. Get it done, get some actual shit done, and figure out the rest later.  

Punch up as hard as you can now or get killed in the tenth round. Up to you.

--JL

#308

Drove to work bright and early this morning only to find the parking lot empty and the garage and gates locked. As I cruised the scene to make sure to myself that there was truly no one else there and no one was going to show up, the realization dawned: spent too long in the service industry. Too many years working every single holiday except Christmas Day and New Year's. Worked some of those, too. 

Pour one out for everyone consigned to the more permissive levels of modern slavery today. I need hardly mention that many should be poured out often for all those consigned to any form of modern slavery. A lot of bad shit happens to a lot of unlucky people every day, and in most cases, the people with the power to do something about it are prevented from doing so for a multitude of reasons both legitimately constraining and merely selfish. All those of us without such powers or constraints can do, we ought to, even if it's just to bear witness in our hearts, and feel something about it.

*

Indeed, being as we're already talking about this particular national holiday and gross, avoidable human misery, perhaps I'll allow myself a word or three on the way this Supreme Court majority is popping off. "Happy fucking fourth of July! Abortion is literally murder because of twelfth-century British common law, so fuck 2022, fuck society, and fuck women. The EPA can't tell anyone nothing! Every company that wants to belch all the carbon they can into the atmosphere can do so with impunity as far as we're concerned. And we're just getting started, you godless cumsluts. Lube those shitty little assholes while you can, 'cause we're coming in full bore."

Honestly fucking grim. I joke but do not laugh. Is it even a joke? Everything bad I was afraid would happen six years ago is happening, because every bad thing I was afraid would happen fourteen years ago happened. You don't even want to know the shit I'm afraid of right now. Happy fourth of July, we might not have another because our government is no longer a republic or a democracy. A cadre of unelected officials are dictating public policy with formal impunity to the detriment of the population, a corrupt and totally ineffectual legislative branch whines for the camera--all the majority of them know how to do, seemingly--and an ancient, doddering figurehead moans and gestures from a discredited office. 

I dunno, man. Just looks shitty. Like some fast-forward fall of Rome shit. Checks and balances right out the fucking window.

Ah, well. What can you do but watch it play out and try to make the best decisions you can based on what you see. Personally, I'll just keep going to work and reading books. Perhaps lay by a goodly stock of nonperishable goods and potable water. Pray and think, and think and pray. Practice dying an honest man in my mind, that I may be ready if called upon.

--JL

#130

Basically how I feel about this particular moment in political history is that I am less troubled by the material actions of national officials than I am by their affect and their current entanglement with the public through the medium of online society; the people who call themselves our leaders are constantly up in our faces. This is because I am essentially less concerned with the consequence of policy--which, to simplify, is essentially consistent (princes be princes, and princes gonna prince, and all empires fall)--than with the behavior and rhetoric of policymakers and enforcers, which has a powerful mass psychological effect. The psychosocial condition of human beings is of more concern to me, and I think it's in a lot more danger than any political institution.

You might argue that I am lending undue credence to the notion that institutions are firm, but it is more that I consider the consequences of their disintegration in applied terms--increased public suffering in the short term--completely certain and inevitable, and so far something always springs up in place of what fell. Ecologies behave like ecologies. My interest lies in how people deal with these chaotic changes, whether they can be healthy and reasonable about it or allow themselves to be disrupted and destroyed.

Naturally this has a lot to do with the institutions that are available to them, or whose interest lies in their tractability, if nothing else.

But what do they feel? What do they come up with in order to survive and make sense of the world? What art do they make, what do they chatter about, who are they listening to?

The answers are usually horrifying, but never uninteresting, and sometimes life-affirming and beautiful beyond description. 

*

Alright, no, sometimes I find people very boring. They like to listen to idiots and con artists and they love to blather about inanities beneath the purview of basic brain function, other people's business, made-up problems, advertising, and bad sex.

I mean, who doesn't like inanity and sex, though. So punk rock. So Dada. 

*

It is a very beautiful day, and I cannot wait for my walk to work. Very excited to work my shift. March is warming up and turning sunny and we are gonna do this thing fucking alright, folks. 

Have a rad day. Rad day, everybody. Get the paperwork in order and clear the launch pad. Let's do it.


--JL

#122

A would-be cult leader is trying to get his shit rolling downhill by erecting Alt-Buddhism. His subreddit has been up for maybe two days and already he is deleting all criticism of his "ideas" as spam. 

Said "ideas" are...well, perhaps any oxygen I could give them wouldn't suit them. He's just trying to find people he can bully, but it is much more likely that if he miraculously scraped any success off the hull of this thing, someone bigger and meaner and smarter than him would steal it.

The whole thing is very funny, and it makes me very sad. Self-identifying "American Conservative Males" are truly lost. Poor, damned, weak-chinned orphans. Is it any wonder lighter, faster predators stole their food supply*? And now, we watch them thrash desperately in rudderless conniptions on the dusty floor, tears streaming from eyes they insist have always been and will ever be dry and clear, clawing at the very suggestions of straws in order to maintain a shadow of their sense of self.

Still in better shape than neoliberals and baby socialists, whose star only seems to be waxing from their own perspective, which has become so frighteningly narrow, ahistorical, and confused; it will be interesting to see their faces should they at last grasp hold only to find it is of the "Plague" variety. Of stars. 

Plague Stars radiate not merely photons, but seething, virulent photonic illness. This light...kills.

Metaphorically and literally.

Like, with guillotines. Also, firing squads.

*

I need to not be thinking about politics. Anything else will do, anything at all. I was doing so well for a while, and I was happy. But not thinking at least in reaction to the mounting barrage of "election" propaganda is like trying to stay dry while swimming in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the middle part, a mile and a half down into the airless dark. 

People tend to talk about these things, how much money an individual was able to part from fools how quickly, whose team should beat whose and who should be star player (this is increasingly how news anchors and "reporters" talk about politics), what it is all supposed to mean (that the speaker is right and if you disagree you are probably a Nazi and definitely an uninformed moron). People feel very free, perhaps even act instinctively, when they insert this nonsense into previously productive and healthy conversations.

In addition the television news networks, which have been in constant election cycle since 1984, have gotten more febrile about their own political involvement over the past twenty years, and exponentially for the past three (hard data supports this). Nightmare scenario.

Twhitteric and Rhedditric don't exactly help matters, not to mention the nonsense generated by even viler cesspools.

Also I am reading a lot of history and it is as always a strong reminder of what kind of animal the human being is (political**). Shit is how it is, but I don't have to like how it manifests. Noise makes it hard to think. 


--JL

*my favorites among these ranks are traditional monarchists. There is something poetic about a young man who wants a king over him, literally hunched over him, king cock shoved deep into subject asshole, in this, the twenty-first century. The best part is that this cretinous little crab is still in better rhetorical shape and wields more power and influence in discourse than the sorts of men who once reaped the benefits of WASP patriarchy, and also, regular dudes. A dude who would wipe Louis XIV's shitty butt with silk and brag about it to his friends is cooler in this day and age than a dude who would take what autonomy he could under what democracy is capable of. Fucking beautiful.

**and confused. See above.

#10

My thoughts on the current political situation? It's like that episode of Invader Zim. You know the one. With the turkey. 

I don't have the kind of taste in fonts that would allow me to derive self-importance from it, but I was thinking it would be kind of fun to see how hard it would be to make my own. Something sensible and honest, but perhaps just a burnish with a clean chamois on the smoothness index, careful not to lose any trust. 

Hope that was good font-talk. Peace, sympathetic maniacs.


--JL