#419

Man, there is no pain at all like going through a box of keepsakes from past lives. It is the spiritual equivalent of what I imagine it is like to be fatally shot several times in the torso and limbs--a series of hammer blows so powerful they are numbing, followed by pain unlike anything that has ever spread through your system, the pain of pulverized bones and shredded organs, before a dizziness and lightness of being washes over you and you are gazing into an absence from which there is no return.

Except the spirit does not die, so you can open the box and feel it all again over and over again, lord knows how many times before death claims you.

Hey! Good morning! Happy Monday, as some say with their tongues in their cheeks and too-bright eyes.

*

The sky is a pure, sheer blue. It is a kindness on the vision, but I was reading about how the ocean waves areosolize more PFAS than like, human activity at this point, and how far the heat this year exceeds our frail projections--I mean, everyone should have seen this coming. A pot has fire under it for a long time. For a long time, nothing happens. Then you can kind of see some movement. Then it's like, okay, it's gonna boil, but it's not boiling. Suddenly, ferociously, it's rolling. Why did we think it would look any different? So I'm basically struggling with feelings of "there was hard evidence as far back as the 1960's that were were going to destroy this planet and every year it piled up and piled up as the little bubbles started floating up from the bottom of the pot, and now here we are. Decades before I was born you assholes knew and you did nothing. You delved deeper, greedier! You doubled and tripled down! You went all in and now the rest of the world needs to go all in, four billion more motherfuckers need a washer-dryer combo and a big TV! And still you scream for more power to fuel your twisted, useless dreams, to forge ever more numinous empires at the expense of all we hold dear! You are burning coal in West Virginia to power data centers in Virginia! What? What in the hell? Who are you people? Can't you see? Wake the fuck up!"

You can't change the past, of course, and there is no profit in indulging in resentment and bitterness about chances missed and etc. So it goes. And you can't stop a fool from swinging their pickaxe and spending their money how they like. Fuck it! Why get mad about it? Why even worry that your small life and its efforts are in no way an offset for these coked-out maniacs?

Sky is a pure, sheer blue. For now. For today. Focus on that. It'll be what it'll be, as it has been what it has been, for it is what it is and that's all it can be,

Trying to breathe more. Breathe better. Haven't hit my skill ceiling there. Anywhere, I hope.

*

Perhaps it is important to lift as much as you can, nice and early in the morning, and let it go. It is painful, but just putting your head down and one foot in front of the other seems to me tro be the way we got into and stay in this messy soup. 

We must give meaning and purpose to our lives ourselves, of our own volition, using our own materials and drives. An easy to thing to forget and leave in the hands of others, who would have us as their pawns.

Gonna make art out of trash today. Pretty excited. 

--JL

#369

Triple sixty-nine. Hilarious. Also known as the Isosceles Lock.

*

Man, you know what I hate? The only thing, object, phenomena I really actually in all seriousness hate, besides hatred itself? Money.

Folks, I fucking hate money. I hate that stuff. I'm coming out as saying I was born with a suspicion around the concept, my childhood grew thick with further doubts about the stuff, and ever since I was a teenager, I have just plain fucking hated that shit. I hate money so much that I'm trembling slightly.

As will inevitably happen with hatred, money hates me back. Good! Screw that nonsense. So my life is more difficult. Maybe that's the price I'm comfortable paying in a world that fucks the shit out of itself for money.

*

I don't want any more money than I have, and I could stand to have less. What I want is to not need money to stay alive. I think that in this day and age that is fucking insane. I know I talked about this pretty recently, but it's the first month of a new year. A ripe time to call stridently for what is needed in the future, to start great works. 

Take the necessities of life off the market and provide them universally to every living human. Provide scientific endeavor the funding you provide the military-industrial complex--we need next-level globally applicable materials and energy options faster and more completely than we're getting them. Weapons are something we have enough of, I should think; I know the people who make billions of dollars crafting weapons would beg to differ, but somehow, I don't trust their testimony. We need to go Bio-Coruscant* if we don't want that Road Warrior shit.

Everything else can continue as the luxuries market, where motherfuckers can destroy themselves and everything that makes them human for imaginary gains all they want if that's their blue heaven--as long as they can prove sustainable and not planet-killing, since not having that will destroy us all anyway.**

Give me the option to stay out of it, and live a simpler, more peaceful life in the knowledge that my having it doesn't deny anyone else their chance for theirs. 

*

Doesn't that sound ok? Fuck, man, you'd think I was asking people to eat a plate of raw dicks. 

"What about my riiiiiights?" Bitch, you simped those away a long time ago and I'm not saying I want to take more. I'm saying we need to sort out the basic shit before we worry about getting you your own gold crapper like the one Donald Trump uses to help himself convince himself he's worth a tinker's damn. 

"What about logiiiiistics?" Do you seriously mean to tell me that with the worldwide circus of mental gymnastics and indecipherable riddles that is the current state of economies, currencies, supply chains, trade--if that somehow grinds on, built with no plan and cobbled together in motion ever with an eye out to allow grifters and thieves to ply their wicked trades, we can't design something better on purpose that works towards reasonable equity and the material advancement of the species, rather than its degradation and self-destruction?

Probably not? Fine, whatever. A man can shit his dreams into whatever hat he likes, though, and this is mine. 

--JL

*this is an idea I have played around with in my head for a long time about how we could shrink human-occupied space on Earth while increasing quality of life for all humans and achieving optimal harmony between human and nonhuman biospheres. This could eventually become a project that is holistically entwined with the maximum possible planetary surface, a fully symbiotic relationship with Terra. Hence, Bio-Coruscant, credit to George Lucas. I also think of the Chozo, from Metroid, as an interesting model, and the Forerunners from the Halo universe. Look 'em up if you care. 

**I get that the game with some of these shitty little pigs is to survive the anthropocalypse and define the new postdiluvian world as gods, progenitors of Human 3.0. They're playing a game they don't understand, but if we let them win, I guess that doesn't matter; we won't be around to raise objections or point out their failures. And time will roll on with all our dusty bones in its wake. But here, now, I say fuckem. That's all the power I have? Fuckem anyway. Regulate these assholes. Fuckin write a new book to throw at them. Consider that a formal request to whom it may concern.

#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