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So I needed a component from an E15 naval AWACS out in the yard, so I send Clyde.  He's a big boi.  He crawls in and gets stuck.  Inky and Pinky try to help him.  Inky goes in through the crew escape hatch and ALSO gets stuck. 

Before I get to the next part, it's worth mentioning that it's 50 degrees out there. Centigrade.

Pinky decides to use the scissor lift to get in through the cockpit to unstick Inky.  Guess what?

Blinky seems to have a functioning brain, so he runs into the building and tells Billy.  We all go out and eventually get everyone unstuck. 

Turns out that Clyde got stuck because when they were previously pulling parts out, they left access panels around and wire harnesses hanging all over the place.

I never got my fucking part.  So I just sent Rodrigo out to get it.

The eschaton should not be this hard.

They gave him weapons again, despite our petition

Only I can be trusted with horrible sneaky fucking ground drones.

Lola Montez the serial courtesan?
I'm picturing a drone doing the bug bunny in a wig and heels for the supreme leader

Well, you know.  Spider Dance. 

Thanks.

It's been tough.  It happened in late February and most people (especially at work) kind of assume I'm somehow mostly over it by now, which I suppose makes sense because I'm good at pretending, but I'm not.  Not even a little.

I'm staying with my brother (a Milwaukee Police officer and really really good dude) and his wife (the head nurse at a major hospital and also a really really good person) while I prep the house for sale because I couldnt go back to the house I got for my mom after all that, but I don't really sleep much anymore so work has been a real struggle.

Distraction helps, sometimes, but I still often spiral and get into bad mind states, completely at random.

I fired the grief counselor I was given because she just kept offering generic platitudes and it got really annoying and pointless.  I think this was simply out of her league.

I lost my mother 3 years ago to a hideous cancer that coming back over and over again, resulting in complete physical disability and dementia. 

I'm not over that, and I had a couple of years to say goodbye, so I can imagine you not being over this. 

My father attended group grief counseling after a futile round of one-on-one.  The counselor didn't really do shit; it was being surrounded by other walking wounded that helped him.  Humans will pack bond with anything for any reason at all, and shared tragedy is one hell of a reason.  It might not help, but then again it might.

I have had some success on bad days by blasting pop music when I get feeling bad about mom.  She and I have both always been pop junkies, and it helps distract me without making me feel like I'm being disrespectful to her memory.

Thanks to DOGE, we have screw worms in our cattle again.

Now also diarrhea lettuce, salmonella eggs, and glass in our bread rolls.

I'm really sorry that happened to you and your mother.

Jesus.

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

Yeah.  Ok, well, hold on to your butt, this is a lot.  I've had to tell it so so many times by now that it's easy, but it's a lot.  And of course, there's way more context than I can type here, but I'll try my best.

My mom, who was one of the absolute most thoroughly kind and generous and compassionate people on earth, lost her job and income during COVID (she was a live-in nanny, awesome with kids).  Because her declining health, she was mostly disabled and probably shouldn't have been taking care of kids anyway, but she is a person that cannot say no to such.

When that happened, I took her in, because I am lucky and have a good job and easily can.  I lived in a one-bedroom shithole though, which was not comfortable for two adults, so I decided to repay my mom for a lifetime of kindness and taking care of me and my brother and most of our friends (we had ELEVEN foster siblings growing up, because she couldn't see a kid in a hard place without taking them in).

So in 2020 I bought a big fancy suburban palace on a golf course next to the country club, the kind of fancy nice place she always dreamed of while always living in ghetto apartments, and I gave her the master bedroom so she'd have her own bathroom and could really enjoy it, and let her do all the decorating (her favorite hobby) and make it hers, since I worked all the time anyway and was pretty neutral as far as decor.  It was a really nice time, after her health issues and lack of income and struggles this change really turned her mood and demeanor around, and her health suddenly got significantly better too.

A year later we took in my friend Joe.  My oldest and best friend, who we've known for most of my life and was one of the foster siblings my mom took in when I was young.  I've taken him in several times over the years, "loaned" him thousands upon thousands of dollars with no payback ever (not even once), and was always his safety net.

Since it was a 4 bedroom house with two living rooms and a massive finished basement with a theater and everything, we had the room for him and his 3 sons (who came every other weekend) easily.  The ghetto apartment he lived in before was in a dangerous area where his kids weren't allowed to go outside to play and there was constant drug and alcohol drama in his building, so this was a major upgrade for them all.

He lost his job almost immediately, never paid any rent or brought in any food, and kept trashing my house.  At first it wasn't too bad, but it got worse and worse until even my mom was wondering what his deal was.  That plus a weird sound we kept hearing regularly, that at first we suspected was him hiding in his room maybe blowing up a blow-up doll or something weird but kind of understandable for a single guy I guess, but later discovered was him filling balloons with NOS and huffing them.

After his behavior got more and more strange and erratic, I did some research on the Internet into NOS and we sat him down and delivered an ultimatum.  Showed him that constant NOS use causes brain damage and psychosis, and told him he had to stop or we would have to ask him to leave.  He agreed and threw out a bunch of NOS tanks. Which to my surprise were MASSIVE, like the size of my mom's oxygen tanks, and he had a crazy amount of them.

So things got better for a bit, and I even got him a job where I work (had to argue with HR, they didn't like him, but I have an awesome reputation at work and they took my advice in the end and hired him).

After about a year, things got bad again.  He didn't have a vehicle so I had been driving him to work every day (he was on a different shift, so I'd wake up at 5am, drive him in, come home, nap, wake up at 11am, get ready and leave by 1:30pm for my shift, let him take my expensive car home even after he dinged it a couple of times, and then I'd catch a ride home at 11pm from a coworker because he couldn't be relied on to pick me up).

The last couple months (January and February of this year) it got really bad.  He quit the job and his behavior got more and more unstable and erratic, spouting weird crazy nonsense that made us really think he needed serious psychiatric help.  Unfortunately, I opted to wait and wait and see if it would just magically get better, because I'm stupid.

Found out later the NOS huffing had come back in a big way, massive stashes of tanks in his room, apparantly huffing it directly from the tanks to avoid the sound effect of the balloons so we wouldn't notice.

Anyway, I came home from an overtime shift on a Saturday near the end of February and things seemed ok, Joe greeting me and told me that my mom was asleep and he had made her food as usual, so I decided to hop in the shower before checking on her. 

As I was on my knees in the bathroom scrubbing the filth from the bottom of the tub before showering because Joe is a nasty fucker, Joe came into the bathroom behind me with a thick metal bar (about an inch thick and five feet long - no idea where he got it) and without even a word he started whaling on me with it.  He got me about 6 times full power swings before I even realized I was under attack, fracturing my spine and ribs and splitting my head open.

I stood up and shoved him out of the bathroom (so hard that there was a huge Joe-sized hole in the wall across from the bathroom door after) and slammed the door shut while screaming "holy shit what the fuck what the fuck dude" in utter shock.  He hit the handle with the bar so hard it snapped and I had to hold the door shut while he full throttle tried to shove his way inside.  Given his super strange and delusional behavior recently, I figured he had some kind of serious mental break so luckily I had my phone with me and called 911 while trying to hold the door shut.

As I was giving them my address he managed to get the door open enough to wedge the bar in there and hit me with it and then snatch my phone before I got him back out and the door shut again.

He stopped banging on the door and was silent a minute. At first I thought he was baiting me to come out, but then I heard his voice from the living room saying "No cancel, cancel, it's a false alarm" rather calmly, and realized he was trying to cancel the 911, because he is stupid.

I opened the door a bit and peeked out and saw he had left the bar on the floor outside the door. So I opened the door and grabbed it and went into the living room, holding it ready to swing if he came at me again.  He saw me and put his hands up and got really suddenly calm and cooperative, so I told him to leave and wait outside for the cops. He agreed and as we walked towards the door he suddenly turned and charged me.  I got him with the bar on the head a couple good times before he closed the distance and it became a wrestling match.

We wrestled for a while and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard anything from my mom this whole time and we were making a LOT of noise, so as we were wrestling I asked him if he had hurt my mom, not really believing he would be crazy enough to actually hurt a sweet old disabled woman that helped raise him, but worried that she hadn't started yelling and asking what was going on.  She wasn't exactly a heavy sleeper.

The look of unhinged rage on his face mixed with shame as I asked him that scared the living hell out of me, and for some stupid reason I just completely lost all strength and fight.  He took advantage and got on top of me and put the bar across my neck and knelt on it, screaming and drooling into my face with the effort as I struggled to lift it enough to catch a breath.  I was nearly unconscious when I heard a loud pounding at the door, and Joe instantly let up and backed off at the sound, allowing me to gasp "COME IN!" at the police knocking.

They came in, Joe instantly went limp and silent with his head down, and said nothing at all as the police sat me aside and helped me catch my breath and asked me to explain what was going on.

I asked them to check on my mom, they sent someone to do that and then had me go through what happened.  Joe never moved or said a word the entire time.  They put me in an ambulance as I continued telling it, but would not tell me anything about my mom.

It wasn't until the next day that the medical examiner finally came to tell me that she was dead.  They found her on the floor of her room, covered in a blanket, with several items including her flat screen TV on top of her, and the electrical cord that was used to strangle her to death still wrapped around her neck.  They said she had died a couple hours before I got off of work, and there's nothing I could have done.

From the criminal complaint I got ahold of later, it seems more may have been done to her before or after death, but we won't know for sure until the forensics comes back and apparently that takes a ridiculously long time.

Joe didn't make any attempt whatsoever to cover anything up.  He pled not guilty to the charges so far, but that's not likely to matter given the mountain of evidence.  The detective said that he believes Joe waited for me to get home because he had no car or money, and his plan was likely to murder me too and take my car and wallet and go on the run.

Joe, my best friend.

Holy fuck.

Jesus Christ.

Okay, I agree with the wanting him dead bit.  No reservations.

Iran's advantages are:

1.  Geography.
2.  A shit pot of missiles and drones.
3.  A total disregard for the opinions of both their citizens and the world in general.
4.  They are sitting on 20% of the world's oil shipping.  The Houthi may dramatically raise that number if they can close the entrance to the Red Sea.

The USA's advantages are:

1.  We don't have any advantages.


What we DO have is a senile, evil old man with decision paralysis, and a drunk who thinks this is a round of Call of Duty.  Hegseth didn't bother with logistics and instead fired all the planners because they were "desk jockeys" and not LETHAL WARRIOR ETHOS SPARTANBOOS WIFF LOTS OF TESTOSTERONE.

So our forces are just about out of ballistic missiles and interceptors, and our navy has been eating spam and canned beets 3 meals a day since early March.  I'm pretty sure the fire on the Gerald Ford was lit by the crew to get the ship out of theater, but it's back now.

There is no way to win this with conventional weapons.  The geography of the area favors ballistic missiles and drones and makes it very difficult for interceptors to engage.  I can expand on this if anyone wants.

The only way to "win" at this point is the use of about 20 standard nuclear warheads used in particular areas at the same time (what you do NOT do is "sort of" nuke Persians).  However, even the old fool in the white house understands that the political cost of that is permanent and worse than the stalemate we're in by a couple of orders of magnitude.  We can recover from this embarrassment; we could not recover from using nuclear weapons.

New job.  Turns out that helping crazy people who treat other crazy people isn't really my thing.

So I am now employed by a drone start up similar to the one that produces Hornet drones for Ukraine, except that it is run by absolute basket cases who are hundreds of miles away from me.  I have the facility.

The facility is one of the military bone yards right off of Davis Monthan AFB.  So there's a building and 150 acres of old military aircraft.

I have named the actual bone yard employees Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, because they roam around in a maze and are always hungry.

On the design side, there's me, Billy, Rodrigo, Jessica, and a couple of grad students who don't yet have names, because they haven't proven themselves as yet to be actual bipeds.  Then there's a couple of facility nerds, a receptionist, and a janitor.

The fun parts:

1.  We are off the city grid except for electricity.  We operate off of a septic system and a well.  The well is downhill from the septic system AND the washdown yards on the AFB.  So our water is full of poop and cadmium.  It is used only for flushing toilets.  Otherwise, water bottles.

2.  On the subject of water bottles, one of the bosses bought a bunch of semi trailers at auction to store environment-sensitive parts in.  When the trailers got here, they were completely full with 50 1,100 kilogram pallets of Niagara bottled water.  The boss thought this was great, and canceled our water bottle resupply.

However, these bottles had a use-by date of 5/24 and were stored in trailers in Texas.  As a result, the plastic bottles have degraded and now the water has a ton of phosphorus in it.  This makes it taste horrible and has the added fun of giving you a rather extreme case of the shits, which is the opposite of hydration.  Obviously, nobody will drink it.

The boss doesn't give up that easily.  He got free water and he'll be damned if he'll throw it away.  So he wants it stored on the racking, instead of putting parts there.  Each pallet, as I said, weighs 1100 KG, and they'd be two pallets per shelf.  The racking is rated for 625 KG/shelf (total).  The engineering factor would bring that up to a maximum possible load of 900 KG.  2200 KG is, last I heard, more than 900 KG.

We aren't doing that because I hate interviewing new hires, and the janitor dislikes cleaning squashed people off of the floor.   

This particular saga is ongoing and promises great hilarity.

3.  The well is haunted.  More about that later.

4.  I have now been here a month, and the spec for the drone we're supposed to design is locked in engineer hell.  By which I mean the engineers in California were hired on the cheap and were process engineers in their previous lives.  They don't know what they're doing.  So we got started without them, using the power of sick minds and boundless initiative.

I have named our first project "Lola Montez," which, given the nature of the drone, gave everyone the heebee jeebees.  Including me.

Stories to follow.

Though the death penalty isn't enough.  I want to do it myself.  I want him to see my face and know I am the one hurting and killing him.  I want him to know that it is me, who considered him a brother, who protected and carried him for 30 fucking years through his endless stupidity and irresponsibility, who always had his back no matter what it cost me and what I had to sacrifice for him.  I want him to fully understand that the only person in this life that was always on his side, that did more for him than I've ever even HEARD of one person doing for another, is the person ending him.

Jesus, what happened?  A murder?

I have learned that nobody, literally fucking nobody, can truly be trusted.

I feel that.  My reasons for agreeing with that are trivial in comparison, but I stand by my motto:  "A friend is someone who is not yet sufficiently motivated to fuck you over."

However, for the sake of your stomach lining, I'd advise finding something to keep you busy with other people.  I say this having myself been unable to do so when I got dumped on.  That happened only with time.  Lots of time.  I also do not say you should not be thinking about what you'd do, given the chance, because that's not going to happen and I don't really think it should.  I'm just saying diversify your available attention.

Nowadays, I don't care if the people involved live or die, but that took a few years.  And again, what happened to me is not even in the same ballpark as what I'm guessing happened to you.

Politicians were able to adapt, and are courted by that loathsome group that say

"We will take care of you" like the human trafficking tate brothers and multiple others who get "cancelled" then become part of the a-team of the far rright. Conor Mcgregor in Ireland is the most blatant example we have here. Loses a civil case on rape, immediately runs for president on anti immigration policies

Its such a nasty insidious pipeline and rendered movements for social change vulnerable.

I hate using this comparison with Ellis. His behavior was scummy but nothing compared to these guys

Well, yeah.  He was a convention creeper, which is pathetic, but the Tate brothers were kidnappers, pimps, and possibly murderers.

McGregor is no different that Tate, except that he occasionally wins in a sport that appeals to degenerates.

So, remind me, did Ellis do anything improper, as opposed to just being icky?

Yep, people have voted with their wallets.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him"

The problem is I dont agree with the court of public opinion on this, and think the end result is stupid, and shit.

Yep. I love how we have become societies where we demand higher standards of personal behaviour from people who write comic books than from politicians and presidents or attorneys general . . .

Is anyone surprised?

The obscenely wealthy own the ball and the ballpark. You will not worry about billionaire pedophiles, you will follow the thundering herd of tumblristas against George Takei and Warren Ellis.

Never mind that Takei was exonerated when the person who complained basically admitted he was trying to make money off of the notoriety.

I don't see a problem with believing the victim first.  But eventually, I have to see some evidence.  If that evidence isn't forthcoming, then I start questioning the narrative.

I am told this makes me part of the problem, etc, etc, and why can't I wear a safety pin in my lapel to show my commitment to Sparkle Motion™? 

Yeah, its not great, I dont think him going into semi retirement helps anything. If what he had done was worse like gaiman, or say if he was like someone in a position of authority over people like a publisher I wouldn't want to see them work again, but is just miserable

His reprints are not selling, so I am unsure what the problem is.

What is it? Because ive been looking out for new work from him, hes had the department of midnight podcast but the last serialised comic I can see is the batman's grave from 2020.

I wouldn't have followed any diamond supply lines, I just search for new stuff from him and others every few months.

I've seen reprints and collections, but no new series

My bad. Both Injection and Wildstorm were from 2017 to 2020.

This sounds pretty heavy.

Although I have not had to deal with the sort of thing you're talking about, I agree with your sentiment in every. Single.  Detail.

As someone I admire a lot I am going to wait for his statement on this.

A writer being a sleeze with his fans is gross, and its possible. but some of the things being said on that thread dont add up.
While Ellis was a literary artistic success in the field of comic books he could never "make or break an aspiring career", he has made a modest living on his career as a writer but...
Just from reading around he has operated on the commercial perifery of the comics industry with a lot of indy work, the big two have always maintained contracts which mean the writer does not get rich, the first time that has happened for him ironically (despite an awesome catalogue of work) is when he made castlevenia a year ago.
He was not a publisher, and has had run ins with publishers like hellblazer ending because of the school shooting issue, he is not an industry darling like many other writers.

At best he could offer recommendation for writers and artists, but he was never in a position of control,  Not the equivalent of a producer like the others seen in #metoo.
Not a reciprocal arrangement where any of the womens careers depended on his opinion of them. This is not #metoo.

Seperately, if the allegations are true, what im seeing is a man who exploited his fanbase  cashing in on their admiration of him, but many of whom also happen to be his social group. It sucks if he did that, and sad they were devastated when he dropped them and moved on.
That would be disgusting and selfish and would lower my opinion of him as a person

I will wait and see what other stories come out and I want his side of the story too before I have an opinion one way or another

quick question, what the fuck do any of these women have to gain by lying about their experiences? because if you, admins on a forum that takes pride in rational thought, are going to fucking say well it's not the same because he doesn't have as much pull and therefore it's all possibly bullshit and i'll wait until ONE PERSON says something against ALL THESE WOMEN HE FUCKING VICTIMIZED, then you can damn well be sure the rabid fanboys are coming out of the woodwork to make rape threats, death threats, offer mockery and victim blaming, tell them to kill themselves, call them liars, and who knows what else. how fucking dare you fall into this trap of "i love this person's work so i don't want to believe it and i'll let his one privileged voice make an attempt to Make It Better somehow" when there are possibly dozens of victimized and traumatized young women coming forward in a culture where victim shaming and blaming is still disgustingly rampant? how dare you, when you're so much better than that? it doesn't matter that he's not as rich or famous or influential as movie producers or politicians, he still used his platform to take advantage of people, it's still Not Oh-Fucking-Kay.

No. Im going to be blunt about this:
I do not suppport him
I do not support them
I am not dismissing what they have said
I will not be making a judgement call on a person because of a twitter post
I will not be making a judgement of a person without hearing thier side of the story.

If that seems callous, tough. I expect more before I'm going to write someone off. I will not support an accusation without evidence or a chance for  both parties to respond, nor do I ignore it.

If you are asking for more you are asking for a leap of faith. Faith is something I have short supply of

What is being asked demanded is a conviction without trial.

Six years on, I've been watching to see what the outcome of this is, they claim he only went so far with the "work" they expected him to do, but regardless if he had continued I suspect the outcome would be the same. Now I dont know the details of what the group asked of him, and its possible there were things he either:

• Didn't agree with
• Wasn't ready personally to confront things about his own personality
• His lawyer told him to shut the fuck up.

Probably a combination of all three.

I still think what he did was shitty, but shouldn't have destroyed him. From the testimonies there is a repeated pattern:
Latch onto a fan, lavish her with praise telling her she is his sweetheart, sex-camming, and then ghosting them.

Nothing I saw in the testimonies implied anything like quid quo pro ("do this and I will elevate your career"), though he did occasionally plug some their work (without being asked), which while crossing the line was skirting it.

In contrast I read the revolting stories about Neil Gaiman, the parts he admitted to broke my heart and horrified me, and there a lot more of that. I dont really have much more to say about that, I just never want to see or hear from him again.


But then back to the current state of Warren Ellis
I have not see any new projects at the major comic publishers or even smaller ones in years, he may have a novel in the works but from what I can see his comic career has dried up, I hope I am wrong about this and its just he has something long form or new work in the backlog.

He has done at least one 25 issue series since then. 

The reason nobody is seeing a lot out of him or anyone else, AFAIK, is that Diamond Distribution collapsed and almost killed the entire comic industry (and has also doomed a lot of game companies.)