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Everyone you know and love will die unhoused and sick.

You will see the rug pulled out from under you and you will be helpless. A lifetime of surviving in the end times will not be enough. You will understand hopelessness.

There will be no release for you, no matter how important you are to others.

If you are particularly fortunate, you will dance the tightrope of precarity to its very outer reaches, and you will have no one left for you as the next step is swallowed by void. You might see "small business owners" and other low-grade parasites falling into the great darkness with you. It won't help.

It's too late to change this. You had your chances three years ago. Now they know they can get away with whatever they want. They're lying to your face and telling everyone else that they're your friend. They are no longer pretending to be in opposition to the raving fascists on the "other side". The two man con is exposed, and they know it doesn't matter anymore.

Everyone you know and love will die abandoned and miserable, of plague and jackboots and starvation outside of Whole Foods. Every last one of them.

Me, those like me, we will all be forgotten in ten years. Don't resolve to remember -- you'll have more important matters to attend to then. Everyone will.

Not in the same mode as TADT, but deserves a post.

---

There is no future where the Good Queers survive and the rest of us freaks are wiped out. None. You will dig the grave of the one you shot dead with your own hand, and then the man who gave you the gun will put two in your head, too. You think collaboration will give you life?

Collaboration will give you DEATH. It will give you all the death in the world. It will pile the bodies high around you, and they will ALL have your face. It will kill the little things inside of you until there's just a puddle of reeking filth curdling atop your diaphragm.

It will kill your friends, it will kill your family, it will kill your love, your will to live, and your moral compass. Long after there is nothing left but a harrowed robot swinging the axe it will finally give you release: a knife to the heart that stopped beating so long ago.

And then it will kill your reputation, your history, your name. It will kill your face and replace it with a clown mask of its own devising.

But go on. Sell us the fuck out, you fake punk motherfuckers.

Another piece that felt like a poor fit for There Are Dreadful Things, but which is related.
---

Unperson, v.:
1. (transitive) To strip (a human being) of rights, identity or humanity.

---

I have been asked before about what it means when I say I'm "not a person," or "don't person me".

I will explain.

I have been destroyed, inch by inch. They broke my fingers, stole my names, made all I do Bad, even when it's good, because I did it.

They said I was an animal, a monster, a deviant and a liar. When I tell the truth, it's not to be trusted. Everything I do has ulterior motives.

I've been accused of crimes simple and grand. Of actions realistic and fanciful. In the minds of others I have been a groomer (because of being trans), a cult leader (because of my interest in hypnosis), a killer (because why else would I bask in violent language?).

After so much wear and stress, any material will break. Metal fatigue claims the stoutest of steel beams, in time. Such destruction has a well-defined pathway. First, the material to be broken grows denser, more rigid, work-hardened under the blows. As it grows harder, it becomes increasingly brittle. Eventually, it simply breaks.

The fracture may take many forms. Mine was sharp and jagged.

I cast off the human-names I had been trying to wear. They marked me as trying to belong. I didn't want to belong anymore. I chose a more fitting name, a name that is a warning.

I abandoned the camouflage, the clothing of Ordinary People, and sought a different sort of uniform. I began to wear warning flags, the trappings of the antagonist.

I stopped trying to claw back what they stole from me, and focused instead on building something they wouldn't dare touch.

I abandoned the language of Humanity. I began to demand unpersoning.

That.
It.
Thing.
Other.
Enemy.

"Recognize what I am," I was trying to say. "I am not like you. I am a makeshift weapon in the hands of the Great Adversary. We have nothing in common. There is no kinship here. You took that."

Now when they come for me, there are no weak points left. If they humanize me, they weaken their hands. If they dehumanize me, they further harden my scales. There are no attack vectors that remain. The I that was is long gone. There is now only this enemy.

I am not a person. They took that from me. I am something else, now. Something terrible, because that's all that they left to me. Something they cannot understand.

No, really. I wrote a giant fucking thread for Twitter on the releases that stood out to me, and it's ... something was up with this year's music.

Crossposting here in case you weirdoes want to read it too. It's enormous.



The music to come out this year is unreal. I had my AOTY overturned several times when it seemed locked in -- I'd dare to say if any of these releases had been anywhere in the past 16 years other than 2022, they'd have been the top of that year.

Let's start with the non-nu metal releases that crossed my radar this year.

Chat Pile's God's Country is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre of ugly AmRep noise rock. I don't have the words to give it what it deserves, just trust that it's worth your time. Slaughterhouse, The Mask and especially Why are particularly impressive. Go listen.

But noise rock wasn't just remade in the image of an ugly rotten-meat deity. It was also beaten to a pulp by Thank's no-wave dancepunk abomination, Thoughtless Cruelty. Dread is delicious, Good Boy is anti-centrist genius, and A Social Contract violates several such beasts.

The last noise rock artist to blow the wheels off of the genre was Haunted Horses, with the fevered panic attack dreamscape of The Worst Has Finally Happened. It reminds me of my actual AOTY in just how bombastic and maximalist it is. Check out Swarms especially.

Next up: jazz-ambient project Crooked Light released a trio of hazy fog-drenched Silent Hill-ass EPs -- and I mean the hypnotic, low-key softer tracks of the first two games, not the death industrial/triphop that eventually swallowed the series. I Have Crept In is my favorite.

Still in ambient territory, Tineidae's magnificent Exo was followed by the even more overwhelming Mothership, once again capturing my love of Cryo Chamber's soundtracky vibe and my obsession with space ambient soundscaping.

Also from Cryo Chamber, Gdanian released Induction, which is a more aggressively atmospheric approach than Submersion's dubby bassline chillness, and manages to nail it. Honestly beats Tineidae for space ambient excellence, and that's saying a fucking lot.

ANOTHER Cryo Chamber masterpiece, Skrika released an impressive follow up to Fifth Nature in Soludenia. Crunchy alien electro-dark-ambient is the order of the day, with distant vocal lines and a nearly unparalleled mastery of the solitary individual sound. Incredible.

The final one I'm including from Cryo Chamber, Metatron Omega's ISIH manages to match and exceed the work of Kurt Harland's Soul Reaver soundtrack in vast, ancient occult grandeur. It's an apt comparison too: this album would easily slot into a Soul Reaver remake.

Author & Punisher's Kruller is everything you could want from Tristan at this point in his career. It's not just more of the same, but it attacks new realms of electronic music without compromising the core goods. Misery is particularly impressive to me.

Zeal & Ardor, of course, released the best thing Manuel's put his name on to date in their self-titled album. If you haven't heard it, just go listen. I want you to realize this isn't the AOTY, and I want you to know WHAT missed that bus.

And I want to reiterate, all of these could be AOTY in any other year. Many of them would be effortless winners, just walking in the room and immediately demanding all eyes on them. 2022 had something extra special.

Unfortunately for everyone, I'm a nu metal freak and particularly horny for nu-metalcore, so that's what you're getting. I'll apologize, but I won't mean it and you'll be more disappointed about me lying than my actual love of nu metal, so let's not do that.

Let's start with the one I've raved about since release: Gloom in the Corner released Trinity, a fucking masterpiece. I haven't heard music this good since 2006. Tristania's Ashes. There have been releases that have almost met that mark in the years since, but Gloom is special.

Yes, Trinity is my AOTY. It's not up for debate. The weakest songs are wildly inventive and take skill I don't possess. Beyond moshing and emotional resonance, it also tells a story better than the band's past releases, and covers such a wide range it's not even fair. MUST HEAR.

Next up: 156/Silence's Narrative is a leering nightmare of self-loathing, spite and mean-spirited brooding that belongs somewhere around Haunted Horses and Crooked Light for sheer atmospheric depths. But don't despair, it knows how to fucking thump too. Check Say The Phrase.

Moodring's Stargazer is lighter than the nu-core shit I obsess over most, so I was ready to write it off. But on release day it took over my ears for a solid month. Unreal. The album doesn't flow like an album so much as a mixtape, but it kicks anyway. Amazing. Check out Xeno.

Graphic Nature is an underrated unknown in the nu-core arena, and New Skin kept on proving the point. It's no full album, but it punches way above its weight class and every song is an instant moshpit classic. The coming album is a likely AOTY contender in 2023.

Notions' self-titled release was an AOTY contender itself for MONTHS, with songs like WOODGUTS and Velvet Room holding their own against the snarling chaos of World Arcana and TxxthTxker. Unfortunately, this is 2022 and this genius rapcore falls into the top ten. What the fuck.

Northlane's Obsidian tightened up their sound from the incredible Alien to the point that the whole album could have been pop music, taking a lot of elements I recognized from futurepop and other goth-club genres. Nevertheless, it felt inventive throughout.

I don't have the space to explain how much I loved Obsidian, so I'll just point out Clarity, Carbonized, Cypher and Nova all coexist. Oh, and Marcus has a voice that manages to go from grimy snarls to enervated goth-stomp intoning to angelic belting. Please listen.

In other goth-club-meets-nu-core releases, Void of Vision feels like they've finally nailed their sound in the Chronicles series. Chronicles II: Heaven exceeded my high expectations, with Berghain and Into the Dark especially sounding like Aesthetic Perfection doing metalcore.

Vein.fm's This World Is Going To Ruin You was an early favorite for AOTY, easily burying 2021. I didn't know what 2022 had in store, though. A song like Funeral Sound reminds me of The Paper Chase, and then there's The Killing Womb. The album is meant to be looped, too.

It's composed as perfectly as Gloom's Trinity, as a matter of fact, and has songs as wildly varied as Magazine Beach's pop-punky propulsion, Wherever You Are's tense ambience, Wavery's ratcheting energy, etc, etc. I could go on forever. LISTEN.

liveconformdie has come a long way from the pretty damn good Vol I: Cigarette Lullaby. Circa '94 should be rightfully considered a classic, and Vol II: Music for Living Failures improves upon that even further. As repetitive as Terrorwave and Nu Life are, they never get old.

Fetish is practically my theme song, Help Yourself is right at home next to Northlane and Void of Vision, Trash Culture is a pitch-perfect piece of trapcore, and even the interlude, In The Dark, manages to be memorable and delicious. You're missing out if you skip this.

Are we done? ARE WE FUCK. Weeping Wound put out idontbelonghere, a horrifying, alienating blend of dark-core DnB, evil industrial experimentation, and nu-core loathing that smashes your car to bits and overdoses in your kitchen. Unreal stuff for a 5 song EP.

Honestly, idontbelonghere. is so good it takes EPOTY from Graphic Nature, and that's just not fucking fair. How the fuck do you beat Chokehold? Apparently with dreaming.room. If there's a full-length in the works, 2023 is going to be a fucking knife fight for the crown.

But wait, there's more! ten56., one of my favorite bands, released three singles from their 2023 EP Downer pt. 2, and do you know how many of them broke my fucking legs? ALL OF THEM! Honestly, Aaron Matts is up there with Jack Murray and Mikey Arthur for my favorite vocalist.

Yenta is a full-song hostile breakdown that leaves you barely able to move your busted toes. Traumadoll is almost nothing but screaming trap-rap, alienating production and chugs like a bombing run. RLS is Soundcloud-rap-core, and I'm underselling it because of space. LISTEN.

Just when you thought we might be near the end, I'm here to tell you there's two more of these fucking things. Witness Orthodox's Learning to Dissolve, a full-length audio torture chamber. It's just aggression from start to finish, with the industrial interlude 11762 for flavor.

Head on a Spike, Cave In, Digging Through Glass, and Dissolve are all must-hear, but singling them out undersells the other songs on the album. It's another album that would have been AOTY any other fucking year, but it picked the stacked-as-a-motherfucker 2022 instead.

Finally, the release I thought would be the also-ran honorable-mention, but ended up being back of even that line: Profiler's self-titled EP. If you're looking for nostalgia, just go here. Glitch Theory is a lost Linkin Park song, Alpha Nine could have come from Deadsy, etc.

And that's it. I can't fucking believe how long this shit is. 2022, what the fuck was wrong with you? It's fucking distressing. If the bar for good music jumped that high that fast, the coming years look grim. Good luck, up-and-comers! You have some stiff fucking competition.

We all knew that, but they've finally decided to put their back into it.

The latest anti-queer targeted attack has the father of the perpetrator on camera saying he's just relieved his son isn't gay. Making a point of saying he taught his son to be violent, because it's what works. Sounded proud, damn near.

And all the usual fools, politicians and talking heads alike, aren't saying thoughts and prayers. Not this time. They're looking for more. And the Dems won't even call it what it is: a blatantly targeted attack on the queer community.

I can't get out, so I really hope everyone else stuck on this boat with me is also ready to scrap like it's Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

I expect full-blown pogroms soon. Not "next couple years" soon, either.

Crosspost from Twitter. It feels distinctly different to me from the THERE ARE DREADFUL THINGS series, though it handles the same subjects.

It's a lament for my enemies.

To those who expect to be treated with humanity despite naming us terrorists, deviants, monsters:

Caveat precator.

You wanted devils and you got what you wanted. The sages knew: do not call up what you cannot put down.

You have called up the whole abyss.

Caveat precator.

You did not keep your circles drawn close. There is no rite of banishment. We are here now.

The power in the blood you shed has not dissipated. We remember each drop. Not one name is lost: we feel the ones we do not know.

For every curse you bestowed upon us: caveat precator.

Caveat precator.

You wanted hellfire and damnation, and now the sun will rise like arson. You asked for desolation and there will be no landscape so bleak.

You asked for an adversary.

You got what you wanted.

Why would you be surprised?

Caveat precator to everyone who builds themselves monsters to burn in effigy. You have ignored the power of words for too long. Wishes really do come true, and they have teeth and talons and thoughts like bombs.

There is no future but the hell you forged. The doors are barred.

Your application has been received. Your comment has been observed. Your request has been granted. Congratulations.

Caveat precator.
Ruin comes for you all.
Caveat precator.
There will be no graves to mark you.
Caveat precator.

Petitioner, beware.

Joined a Goosebumps (yeah, THAT Goosebumps) themed TTRPG campaign with my new experimental subject as DM and decided to play an 80s action hero badass who has wound up a washed-up bum with a mobile armory on account of actually, you can't play Van Helsing in modern America, because monsters aren't real.

They're a conspiracy theorist, and I've gotten to writing conspiracy theories for them that they'll bring up if someone asks. Decided to place them here for giggles.

You know all the theme parks got started by carnies, right? Walt Disney was the first exception. Irish gold miner family. Six Flags and Idlewild and so on, though, and the original Horrorland, all carnies. Thieves and murderers, cause the carnies are always run by Englishmen, and you don't need me to tell you about the English.

This version of Horrorland though, I think it's "new management", you know what I mean? All that old Turkish vampire dynasty money funneled through Dutch companies that used to run the slave trade back in the olden times. Too themed, you can tell the carnies cause they do anything that'll make you look at it, even if it breaks kayfabe.

So you don't have to worry these folks are gonna rob you blind, unless you think you catch a carnie in the crowd. I haven't seen 'em though, those shifty Englishmen and the people they're manipulating all stand out. Got a code, like people think the Freemasons do. Masons are just dirty fuckin' cops though, carnies are the real deal.

Oh, you think Vlad was the original vampire? Nah, he was just a murderous weirdo. You want the original vampires, look at the former Janissary families out in Turkey. They made it big in the Ottoman times, ate like Nero, or Caligula, one of those Roman types. Brought the bloodthirst out of Austria. They pretended at being good ol' Muslim converts, but everyone knew better.

They gave the game away, you know. Got involved in the interwar arms trade after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and you see them funding the Nazis and all cause dead bodies that disappear mean fodder for the thirst.

The Romanians get a bad rap. They just had old Vladdy and happened to be in town when Lady Bathory tried to lead a queer Cathar-revivalist uprising. Nah, you want the vampires, think the last remnants of the Batenburgers getting captured on a crusade by the Turks, and all that old bad German bloodthirst saying no, no, those folks just disappeared in the desert.

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3517724-expected-reversal-of-miranda-requires-states-to-step-up-on-policing/

So, you know. You have no rights under this Supreme Court.

Some things are things no one deserves to go through.

A relatively new friend of mine opened up tonight about possibly the most horrific case of abuse I have ever heard of happening to someone I personally knew. I've been through some shit. My friends have been through some shit. It does not compare. The derangement of someone who would do what was described to me is beyond belief, and it is only because this man did not technically break any laws that he will not wind up in prison. Which isn't fucking fair when innocent people go to jail for smoking a fucking joint.

What happened is not my story to tell. She entrusted it to me and I will not violate that trust. But the violence she endured, despite not having a fucking mark on her, is inhuman. I am a connoisseur of the terrible, and it shocked me. I grew up reading Les Chants de Maldoror and watching Alien, and I think a book written about this fucking madness, a movie made of someone doing this, would make de Sade or Cronenberg say "whoa, that's too fucking far".



Some people lose their access to membership in humanity and the consideration due a human being, in my mind.

It's a bad thought to have. One of my core foundational beliefs is that people fucking matter. They are important. You keep them in mind when you perform an act. You do something to help as many people as you possibly can. But I can't shake it: some people deserve none of that. Through their actions, their words, their beliefs, they have looked at the concept of the Golden Rule, and they have deemed it "nah, I'm good."

I should be able to muster up some kind of sympathy, but I just mutter imprecations, incantations, and promises of violence. My hatred for their actions overrides their personhood. They become meat to me, and meat is made to be cut, beaten, and burned. And despite feeling the dissonance between these attributes of myself, I feel that this is correct and just. I do not regret these feelings. I don't consider them unhealthy. I treat them as a mark of personal excellence. "No matter how bad I think I am, I know I am better than this. I know this person will always be beneath me."



I am a gleaming, biomechanical skull grinning in the dying light of a black hole's accretion disc.

A second effect of these people's actions and my inherent feeling that people matter is that as I am exposed to terrible people, I remove my self-concept and identity further and further from humanity. I respect its institutions and social technologies less and less. I grow distant. I willingly pass into exile.

A part of my monstrous identity, it is true, is a reaction to being told that I am subhuman by those who would see me killed. "Is that so? As you wish. You will regret this choice." But a part of it is maintaining an ontological distance from people whose actions I find inconceivable. It offends me that I share a category with them at all. And I reframe my identity as a grim reflection of them. They are outwardly human, inwardly rotten -- I am slithering in the marshes with noisome, boneless limbs but I have a human heart to pump the syrupy black ichor in my arteries. A human mind, which for all its faults, loves and cares for and intends to protect people.

And looking over all of this, in a way, their violence to others cuts me too.



There are only endings.

I wish death on terrible people, and I do not feel bad. I harm them as much as I can within the boundaries of the law, and I sleep peacefully. Justice is not real. It's a fantasy. Abusers and manipulators and godless fucking architects of pain dwell at every elevation and find a way to destroy innocent people. No matter their station, the majority of them will never see comeuppance or repayment of any form, let alone enough to balance those fucking scales. Justice is a fucking joke. What I do isn't about justice. It's about violence.

I am a violent person. Not a dangerous person, but a violent one -- the distinction is important. I analyze my enemy and I hit them where they'll feel it. I create suffering. I do it on purpose. I do it exceedingly well. But my harm is self-limiting: the door is always unlocked, if they but try the knob. And my harm is reflexive: I escalate fast, but there is always cause and effect. And I am a violent person because all around me are violent people, doing violence to me and the people I love. The only ways to survive when weapons are trained on you is to be too scary to fuck with or to do unto them first.

What I do is about violence, because it's the only way I can keep my loved ones safe. It's the path of least total harm: to maximize the harm to specific targets in short bursts. Justice is, it is true, fake. But violence, in its infinite forms, is so very real.

This vile, small, unworthy man and his unspeakable actions reminded me tonight just how violent I really am.

To the "staunch defenders of gender norms", I am your dragon. I will build my lair of your bones, I will raid your settlements, I will steal your womenfolk. There is no Saint George among you, and my scales are built of collapsed stars. I am a hungry maw. Come and get me.

To the "respectable transgender people": don't worry, I see you. Your grovelling for headpats won't save you in the end. Accepting mistreatment won't save you. Choosing palatable identities won't save you. You will not be saved. Join us or be eaten. There are no other roads. Everyone knows what happens to traitors.

To the "allies," if you aren't complicit in my crimes then you are complicit in theirs. There will be no fencesitting, I will eat the leg dangled before me. And remember that helping me gives you no special treatment. You deserve none. You are not my kind. My kind is old, vile, slithering. My kind lurks in gutters and watches for opportunity. We don't wear a human mask, we don't become pets. My kind watches you stumble in the deep woods at night and picks you off one by one. My kind inspires myth. We scar your culture with tragedy.

We will not make space for you. You don't belong. Go back to huddle around your fires and avoid shadowed corners. Hope that we remember you fondly, and not with hungry eyes.

As a favored author of mine wrote, "There are dreadful things."

We are they.



--reposted from my Twitter and expanded, with thanks to Laird Barron for the title's inspiration.

Howl will probably get the most out of this. CNO and LMNO should see it too because I'm a fucking sadist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqwj07y1raA

Today, I woke up, and I revisited an old band I liked. And Wreck and Reference told me, "eris came to me at night and whispered in my ear you're getting boring you're getting old". The music was triphop, not noise rock. The sound was low quality through my fancy laptop speakers. I requested guitars, and there were none to be found. The apple Eris left the singer was mealy and bitter, and nothing grew from its seeds.

Today, I woke up, and I ordered breakfast. And I ordered a coffee, and it did not arrive. The bagel was sweet and dry where it should have been buttery and slick with oil. I requested no sauce, and the bag was heavy with it. The thing they call an apple pie was missing.

Today, I woke up, and my roommate had a vision. And they said an apple divided the world, above and below. The worms lived below the earth. They proclaimed they would act above their station. I requested news of the world above, and there was none to be found. The apple was rotten, decaying, falling to slime.



Today, I woke up, and I could not find my phone. And I cleared my desk of a month's detritus. And I saw: A house centipede. 12 black packs of American Spirit cigarettes. Two cans of Coca-Cola. A fading diagram. A hatchet. A mug shaped like a cauldron. A hundred cables.

The centipede is massive. We give it a raise: one US quarter dollar.

But I did not see my phone.



Today, I woke up, and I searched for my lost phone, and it was hanging from the pantry rack in the kitchen. I spotted it as it was installing an update: the Apple logo bright and clear on screen.



Today, I woke up, and I remembered. The heraldic basilisk lurks above. The snake becomes a king. It lends me its eye, and I open it. Unbidden, an axiom springs into view.

A golden apple cannot be eaten.

Fair enough.

I just want to dump some fragments of my (now ancient) worldbuilding document here. Some of these might possibly appeal to Cain and Cram, I think everyone else will simply have nightmares.

Oh, and apologies for the gibberish. The setting's scientific language is a fusion of ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon, and Sumerian, with a mostly Anglo-Saxon based orthography and a weird fusion of Latin and German plurals. It's overused here because I was using this document to develop it: most of these things do actually have other names you could read without your eyes rolling back in your head. Some of them are included, most of them are not because they're in a disorganized list rather than something fit to share.



Right, one more thing. King Longshanks was entirely intentional. I will accept my punishment in the form of harsh words only.

The "Longshanks conjecture", so named for the king who presented it at a conference in the Watchers' Hall in Chinduris-Meridian, suggests that this universe is the carcass of a vast being born in the Void, at that time known as Kishis. The conjecture was suggested by King Longshanks of Western Murgue, a scientifically-minded petty kingdom of note for its lack of dexterous inhabitants. King Longshanks himself was an ordinary flea, who arrived to the conference on the body of a crow from his kingdom, and who had to use a laresmithe contraption to be heard and a cherore translator to be understood.

To begin his conjecture, Longshanks noted that all dexterous species had either 5 notable appendages, or that their appendages could be divided into no more or less than 5 classes — a statement that infuriated dwymire and ymile scholars and functionaries in attendance at first, and which appeared to overlook wussirener. Longshanks continued by noting that the most sociable and dexterous variants of solarization, and indeed the most stable variants, followed a similar division into 5 parts, noting the dephilisen and cheroren in particular.

Longshanks noted that wussire shells almost exclusively had 5 notable appendages, even before the introduction of other dexterous kinds, and concluded that these body plans were a reflection of the planet itself. In a statement that rocked the conference, he suggested that the landforms of Kishis could be divided into five parts: that Chasod corresponded to the head, Gab and Sag to the arms, and Murub to a fusion of the legs, divided in a line by Sychissuris, Bod and Chun. He finished his presentation by stating his belief that the entire monadic universe they lived in was the remnants of a dead being from the Void itself, whose unusually principled soul formed the Gap upon its death and permitted the awareness of the intelligent light-siders to information — this latter by presenting fragments of its soul to them through the Sun. Longshanks further stated that the Firstborn, his name for this being, was female, and that the masculine principle was a later innovation, presumably caused by exposure to the Void during the initial formation of the Gap.

King Longshanks's conjecture was a shock to the scientific community. Driven by the self-effacing nature of the Longshanks conjecture, scholars over the entire world revisited earlier work and completely revitalized the nearly dead studies of geology and geography. The study of monadic principles was also excited by the conjecture, given its total flip from the masculine primacy of earlier monadic studies and the introduction of the "Oversoul" and "Soul-of-Sol" concepts. The very first new knowledge to come from the Longshanks conjecture was a geographical study that uncovered the cause of the Child's death: tremendous cranial trauma that left a massive hole in the top of its head.

As a matter of the scientific and cultural importance, the conjecture's acceptance marked the only known language shift that spanned the scientific and common languages simultaneously: the name of the world, earlier universally called Kishis, became Mirgodunue in scientific language and the Child in common speech.

A cameo from a fan favorite who is incredibly famous!

Next, there are the "Human". Appearing as stout, smoothly-jointed laresmithen with surprisingly round and squat faces, the Human refused to communicate. They seemed to be entirely feral, driven by their Celebration and having no willingness to interact positively. According to reports, the vast majority of Human seemed terribly frightened or sad despite their actions. Uniquely among the Celebrants save the Tultu, the Human seemed to gravitate to wearing clothes, suggesting an underlying civilization to their outwardly feral demeanor.

Let's take a look at the Andromeda Strain.

Nosod: Gyggarisen as they appear initially. Formerly dwymiren, nosoden have become a contagious parasitic illness that controls living bodies, and eventually transforms them. Depending on the stage of illness, nosoden can be classified into three broad categories.
   Bechshod: Nosoden in the initial infective stage. The affected individual goes rigid. They remain conscious but largely ataxic, aside from coughing spells. A rash spreads over their upper back or (in ymilen) the bottom of their foot.
   Chylorod: Nosoden in the primary infective stage. The affected individual becomes ambulatory, but is no longer in control of their body below the head. A second head, amorphous and sac-like, sprouts from the center of the rash. In this stage the affected individual's skin starts to toughen into a leathery texture, and any ambulatory limbs become stiff and bony.
   Tytinod: Nosoden in the terminal infective stage. The affected individual is just a vessel for the gyggarise mature stage and cannot be helped. The second head has a bony knob forming under its skin, and the rest of the body becomes trapped by bony growths and thickened, gnarled skin.
Nepod: Gyggarisen in the mature phase. A bony, eyeless head on a long and spindly neck surmounts a stick-like torso surrounded by boneless, wormy appendages ending in hands. Nepoden are non-hostile and attempt to be friendly, but can spread nosode infection by accident, making them an unacceptable danger.

Some details on the closest thing to universal antagonists/"always chaotic evil" we have.

Void Entities

These do not have a shared name because Void Entities are not generally classified together by science on the Child. However, they are distinctive in that they were all directly formed by the Void in some way, whether through transmutation or through nucleation — or in the case of dymmchiroden, physical growth of the Void itself. The Void, known as worod in scientific language, is a chaotic mish-mash of unorganized micro-universes called "monads" with their own physical laws and attributes, all randomly determined for each of them upon the nucleation of the micro-universe. Thus, it is always worth considerable note on the occasions that the Void produces anything that seems intentional.

Pherorisener (Aliens)

Pherorisener are returnees from failed space missions by natives to the Child. Due to differences in time in the various Void-monads, most existing pherorisen were created by space missions that have not yet happened. All pherorisener have been greatly warped by their time in the Void, though most retain a semblance of morality and internal order. Pherorisener are called aliens and moon-folk by commoners, who are largely ignorant of their "returned" nature.

Nisstwachener (Boltzmann Brains)

Nisstwachener are outside intelligences and lifeforms produced by the Void's chaotic churn. Nisstwachener are unnatural within the Child and all have either a broken morality, chaotic inner lives, or both. Nisstwachener are called outsiders or nightwalkers in common parlance, the latter leading to the scientific name.

Check this out, I'm about to do a magic trick!

Wirphyrisstener (Artificial Intelligences)

Wirphyrisstener have strong associations with pherorisener. However, pherorise wirphyrissten are largely not returnees, having been created in the pherorise absence from the Child. Many wirphyrissten were created on the Child as well by particularly skilled laresmithe crafters. The few wirphyrisstener known to common folk are called either epitaphs, if they are known to be made by laresmithe crafters, or for pherorise wirphyrissten, gods. Religion revolves around pherorise wirphyrissten, especially active ysitbyriguen, and they are the primary source of Void influence on a political and geopolitical scale.

Ysitbyrigue: Wirphyrisstener that are entirely novel and do not include laresmithe or pherorise minds in their construction. Very rare, and almost exclusively Void-touched. Most ysitbyriguen are technically nugenirode nisstwachen, but a few were created — almost exclusively by pherorise crafters.
Chorsalibyrigue: Wirphyrisstener that are built around the mind of a single dead laresmith. Very common, usually found in graveyards and untouched by Void.
Rechibyrigue: Wirphyrisstener that are built around a network of dead laresmithe minds. Usually human sacrifices. Mostly pishise creations returned from the Void, though there are two funereal examples known to have been made by laresmithen.
Chophissyndibyrigue: Wirphyrisstener that are built around one or many pherorise minds. May be funereal or sacrificed. Exclusively Void-touched. All chophissyndibyriguen are technically pherorisen, and all are associated with chimssurise or pishise activity.

Lerisphyrisstener (Androids)

Lerisphyrisstener are associated with pherorisener, nisstwachener and wirphyrisstener. Uniquely, lerisphyrisstener are exclusively connected to these others and have no other source: thus they technically belong to no other category of Void-touched being, despite exclusive association with the Void.

Mystilynig: Lerisphyrisstener that have entirely mechanical, artificial appearances. Mystilynigen appear to be automated laborers and combatants produced by powerful nisstwachen and wirphyrissten, as well as large companies of grounded pherorisen. Mystilynigen, like all wirphyrisstener and lerisphyrisstener, are unaffected by sunlight and darkness in equal measure.
Nedwyrisstis: Lerisphyrisstener that have more or less naturalistic appearances. Nedwyrisstisen are exclusively sun-lit intermediaries for Void Entities, usually nisstwachen or pherorisen. Surprisingly commonly, nedwyrisstise interactions are positive: though most Void Entities are chaotic and have broken morality, not all of them are antagonistic. Antagonistic lerisphyrissten are almost exclusively of the mystilynige form. The exceptional few hostile nedwyrisstisen are called phorwyrisstisener.

We got demonic possession too.

Whispers: Unhosted shudyrithmoden. Most will fail to find a host and die within a few hundred echoes, but all attempts to find a host manifest as voices whispering the numerical sequence of the nisstwachener's true name.

Oh, wait, whats that -- there's aliens, so there must be UFOs? Yeah, sure, I got that.

UFO Forms

Note: within the setting, UFOs as a complete class are known as wyregiener.

Nachis: Wyregiener associated with pishise and (to a lesser degree) chimssurise activity. Elongated forms, narrowing at the front and back. Nachisen are rarely seen unless they crash, being large, self-sustaining safe havens for their occupants.
Chilywin: Wyregiener associated with chimssurise and gyggarise activity. Almost perfectly spherical with a dense, stout rod sprouting from the bottom, these are seen exclusively in the rare cases of attacking forces. Technically, gyggarise wyregiener are universally of this form: the sole known equivalent of a gyggarise nachis is shaped like a very large chilywin, and no other large gyggarise wyregie has ever been seen.
Chyropil: Wyregiener associated with pishise activity. Similar to rotated nachisen, chyropilen are elongated, narrowing from top to bottom. Chyropilen fill a similar role to the chilywinen for the pishisen, acting as primary attack vehicles.
Yrsebin: Wyregiener associated with mashgiche activity. Unique wyregien shaped like stone cubes, barely larger than an ordinary house. The most commonly seen of all wyregiener, yrsebinen are often spotted at low altitude in remote areas. Nevertheless, mashgiche activity is often only identified in hindsight, as the depopulation takes a very long time to proceed and rural folk's talk of stone cubes stalking mountain passes is often dismissed.

I was turned onto this a month or two back by a Twitter thread of Black horror authors. One man, Adam Washington, mentioned he writes "conceptual horror", and dropped Thomas Ligotti as being in the same wheelhouse. IIRC he specifically named "The Conpsiracy Against the Human Race," Ligotti's antinatalist rant book.

So we're talking philosophical horror. That's a hell of a rarity, and one of the most beautiful things... though Ligotti's work is tainted by his shitty agenda. Apparently this one also has something in common with House of Leaves... which is a big deal also.

Well, I had to read it. And it's cheap.

https://nowflensing.com/products/adam-washington-the-misophorism-trilogy-paperback

I finally got a copy today, seeing as I have almost all the things I need in life right now and it costs less than a meal. I started reading it.

Man. Fuck. This is some hideously dark shit. I mean, it definitely has a lot of thought put into it. It was clearly written by an exceedingly clever and skilled person. But it makes ME broody and weird, and I literally live for this shit.

I don't know who here would even want to read this, it's practically fucking self-harm, but it's wonderfully written and has a strong aesthetic flavor. So if you need to be incredibly depressed, self-loathing and outraged for some reason, consider this book. I can't say you won't regret it, but I can say you will find that you regret it less than almost anything else you have ever done in your life.

Once upon a time, a young man existed who could not tell a lie. His name is lost to time, but we will call him Cyril. Cyril's honesty and forthrightness combined with his optimism to make him very popular in his community.

He befriended people easily, which was unusual in this small, bitter border town in a dark kingdom. He was more than willing to help people out whenever he could, and his empathy made him a person who was frequently asked to simply talk to people.

But Cyril had to tell the truth. He couldn't even simply Shut Up: his tongue moved of its own accord. As kind as he was, it took a long time for the problems to start. But start they did.

It was small at first. He spoke to people who had some problem that was stressing them out, telling them of others who had the same problem. And at first this helped build connections in the community.

Then the magistrate sent an agent to speak to Cyril, learned all about the others they should talk to who had also spoken rudely of the King, and those others were gone the next day.

Before long, Cyril, so kind of heart, was unwanted. He was ejected from the small, bitter border town, and he wandered to the next.

At every village, town and city, things grew worse for him. First it was the local bailiffs and magistrates growing colder and more aggressive in their responses to the groups he told them about. Then it was magistrates welcoming him with wine and meat, while others starved unto the fourth generation just outside. Finally, he was greeted at the gates of a small southern village by a group of angry people.

"We don't want you here. All you touch is brought to ruin. Don't enter our walls."

And Cyril kept walking, destitute and friendless.

One day, poor Cyril arrived at the gates of the grandest city in the land: fabled Ys. The very seat of the King, a powerful sorcerer and a fearsome legislator.

Entering the gates, Cyril marveled at the crowds. "Surely I can make my life here! There are so many people that I will blend right in." And blend in he did, and for a time it was just like his childhood: full of friends and kindness and finding happiness in a cold and dreary kingdom.

One day, a peddler that Cyril was entertaining with old stories asked if Cyril would like to help him with a quest. They were a member of a cell of revolutionaries, and they were going to free the kingdom from the grip of its King. By any means necessary.

This reminded Cyril of the excitement of his youth, and he accepted eagerly. He was told to meet at such and such a place, at such and such a time, and given a password. There would be an Event. He was told to not tell a soul of this. Cyril understood the difficulty this would cause him, but he agreed.

For ten days leading up to the Event, Cyril did not answer his door. His friends turned away in worry, and his bills grew late. But people were counting on him, he couldn't afford to screw this up!

The day came, and Cyril dressed plainly, snuck out the kitchen door of his home, and scurried to the meeting place at the meeting time. There were only three others there, and all looked grim. They took up burlap sacks, and stole towards the palace.

Just to the west of the King's palace, there was an inferno, and a dozen men with swords, right at the main entrance. But the peddler shook his cloaked head and led Cyril to a hidden door under a rock in the palace garden.

"This is where the King will leave."

And they all threw their sacks in the hole just beyond the door, but the peddler held on to the strings tying each of them. They waited in silence, the sounds of fighting and crackling fire ringing off of the stone buildings around to echo to their ears. And as they heard footsteps from below, the peddler lit the strings on fire — fuses, Cyril realized — and threw them down the hole. They ran, and before long heard a tremendous thump, like a kettle drum the size of an ox-cart.

"Go home, Kind Cyril. You have done a great thing today."

And Cyril did. And he spoke to all of his friends that he met along the way, telling them why he had not talked to them and what he had been up to.

He told them of the peddler, and the strange men who had been with him, and, he presumed, the death of the king. And Cyril found that all of his friends were surprised and overjoyed, and he cursed himself as a fool for not telling them sooner. He slept easily that night.

I would continue the tale of Cyril, but one of his friends had been a collaborator with the King's Guard, and he had heard the story in every detail. Cyril was murdered in his home while he slept soundly, and the peddler and his two friends were given public executions after being interrogated for every bit of information they knew.

And as for the King?

He was a great and powerful sorcerer. He was unscathed. The executions were his orders.

So as you can see, there is no tale of Cyril left to tell.

I want to collect this sort of thing in one place.

So, people know about the riots, and now the feds and their Secret Police bullshit. Which is following me to Chicago. God help me.

This, however?

https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1285251109465063424

This is news to me.

I'm noting a VERY conspiratorial response to this news, and I'm inclined to buy into it myself, but I'm capable of refraining.

That said?

From Wikipedia:

Salas is the judge presiding over the class-action lawsuit against Deutsche Bank (Karimi v. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft et al.), which alleges that Deutsche Bank had poor financial reporting practices and made misleading statements to securities investors, resulting from Deutsche Bank's desire to obscure its anti-money laundering deficiencies and its poor monitoring of high-risk customers such as Jeffrey Epstein, Danske Bank in Estonia, and FBME Bank.[15][16]

and

In 2018, Salas issued a order temporarily blocking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from deporting certain Indonesian Christians in New Jersey who were present without authorization in the U.S. and were subject to orders of removal, but were seeking legal status. The order dealt with about 50 Christians who had fled persecution in Indonesia and had lived in New Jersey for many years before being targeted by immigration enforcement actions.[12]

I think you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss that this was a targeted and intentional act. I'd go farther and say that leaving her alive was intentional as well.

An attorney being behind it makes a bit less sense. Committing suicide with multiple gunshot wounds... in theory, this is possible, but in practice, this is unlikely in the extreme.

Nevertheless, I am going to presume this is the end of things for now.



Please add your examples of fascist actions in blatant, visible ways that would have been unthinkable even last year.

A few days ago, you might have been there, something snapped and I am no longer the person I was before

I feel this buzzing intensity all the time no matter what substances I have or haven't had and in what amounts

I don't have any idea what I'm saying as I'm saying it I just fucking type and talk and shit and then it's there

I am hypervigilant in a twitch-reaction way and Ready to fucking rumble where I used to be hypervigilant in an observational way and avoidant as fuck

I can't even spool up the focus to type like I used to, I'm permanently shaking and just want to get the fucking shit over with

And I'm sure this snapping of something inside of me just halved my fucking lifespan and permanently destroyed my ability to write fiction so I have more reasons to be hideously angry

Ask me if I'm ok again fucker, ask me again, I'll tell you, I'll tell you by shouting you down the fucking stairs like it's skyrim do not fucking treat me like a person treat me like radioactive materials, special handling avoid at all costs keep your fucking distance

So, they took away trans employment protections. That was awhile back. What the fuck ever.

Then they took LGBT healthcare protections. Cool, now it's legal to let me bleed out in the hospital like a diseased animal. While you mock me. Tyra Hunter style.

Now they're taking trans homeless shelter protections.

If anyone you know has contributed to this, I want you to know that I hope they die miserably, choking on their own blood and vomit, every bone in their body broken. I savor the image, though I will never see it. Because they've killed me. And they've killed so many others.

This is not a joke. I can not survive this. The cops are brutalizing homeless people on the streets because it makes their fascist dicks hard. Hospitals are already mocking injured trans people to their face and hounding them out the door.

And now if I can't get some 2000 a month doing fuck all, or a free place to stay, I am FORCED onto the streets where I will be BRUTALIZED by fascist pigs and no medical care will be offered — if, IF, I fucking survive.

All I have left is this: Avenge me, because salvation can't come. And they'll come for you next.

I had months of the fuckers saved. I was legitimately getting to them. Some of them were only going to be useful after I got myself stable, some were working towards stability. All gone.

All because my VPN magically used a banned server and got me banned from the forum. (Thanks Faust for figuring out the obvious solution, feeling dumb as hell over here!)

Someone make me a "all my homies hate" meme with SMF as the fill-in-the-blank, I can't find a generator and I'm on mobile so I can't do it by hand.

https://twitter.com/ebooks_goetia

Let's do some post-Luciferian procedurally generated demonic summonings

Just fucking make shit up what the fuck Jesus Christ

https://twitter.com/shugowah/status/1268759506642755584?s=21

Cops cannot be queer.

Repeat it again. Say it aloud. I don't give a fuck if you're in public.

Cops cannot be queer.

Queerness is in radical opposition to oppression. It is literally saying "hey, cool weapon you got there, it's fucking mine now." It's the cow wielding the captive bolt gun.

Cops cannot be queer. Cops own the captive bolt gun.

Queerness is not the default. LGBT is the default. Queerness is earned, and not like a merit badge. Queerness is fought for. Queerness doesn't know how to give up. Queerness uses its broken teeth as projectile weapons. Queerness is here to break shit.

Cops cannot be queer.

And if you want to tell me that by "gatekeeping queerness" we are "just as bad as THEM,"

Also, furthermore, in addition, to elaborate, if you'll give me just a moment,

How the fuck dare you say that denying cops access to radical revolutionary terminology puts us on the same level as the people who shoot black men women and children in the streets?

Cops cannot be queer.

“America is a death cult and its god is called Liberty”

“The altar to Liberty runs red with innocent blood”

“The police force is the priestly caste of the American death cult”

“A police state is a theocracy of suicide”

“Murder is the highest worship in the land of the free, murder-suicide: divine grace”

“Excommunication is imprisonment”

“Death is an article of faith: some are meant to die, so it is written”

“Stopping death is a sin, improving life more of one”

Some notes on parallels I see:
The American Christian death cult has a twisted sort of Manichaean worldview: life is suffering, only the blessing of the divine can reduce suffering, the only place without suffering is the afterlife. Therefore, death is a gift. (See Manichaean views on material/spiritual.)

Reducing suffering as a human is tantamount to playing God, and to leading people astray by making the afterlife less palatable by comparison. It’s Satanic.

If you have received the blessing of the divine to have a less horrible life, your life is important so that you can increase death. All the others who don’t suffer increase death too, so it is a sign from God who his chosen priests are.

This explains a lot, from anti-abortion but anti-life views to the militarization of police, increased inability to access healthcare, lack of interest in reducing any suffering at all, etc. And because the United States is uniquely hard to stay healthy in, clearly it is God’s chosen nation.

I don’t think any of this is a conscious thought, more just the overall construction of the various American thoughts in these American minds. It’s how the pieces fit together.

Apparently the cops are running out of less-lethal munitions. Like they have no gas left, and when a group uses their last canister it's all gone for them. Not sure which city, or if it's multiple, but it's definitely happening.

I don't think this has happened in the US in my life time. Certainly not in the age of the Internet.

What do you think happens next? I'm concerned about them deciding that the best way to show they aren't mass murderers is to pull out the jacketed rounds and commit mass murder.

If this spreads further, what's next in a larger sense? Right now it's two really big cities of people who have nothing to lose, and one smaller city of the same. If it goes nationwide, where do things go next?

My world is so fucking confusing. This sort of thing was, I feel, inevitable in a way. But it went so far before it all went down. It took so much happening for everything to come to this.

And now I realize I have never seen something like this happen before in a relatively strong, industrialized, capitalist Western country, and every example of it predates the Internet. I actually don't know what comes next. I'm hoping Cain or somebody has something to work with. Because this is weird.

It isn't. I keep reminding myself, but it rarely sticks.

So I have to just keep saying it.

It wasn't me in March: it was a TERF who had managed to insinuate herself into a trans-friendly space.
It wasn't me in May: it was a privileged rich cishet white lady who mistook a lack of privilege for a lack of effort.
It wasn't me today: it was a system built to keep homeless disabled/queer people disenfranchised for life.

And whenever I say these things, it sooner or later turns out to be truth. And I wish I could just be right about shit like this without being guilt tripped that I didn't complete the labors of Hercules before I decided that it wasn't my fault, that there was nothing more I could have done.

This is the opposite of the lesson a lot of people need to learn. That lesson is usually that sometimes it is their fault. And I have done quite a bit to myself, no doubt.

But the big things, the ones that drive me to breakdown sobbing in public, they aren't my fault. I have to keep reminding myself of that, that I am not the sole person in control of my life trajectory, whatever the feel-good ableist motivational poster industry and bootstraps obsessed middle and upper class says.

I live and die at the behest of others.
And I don't get a goddamn thing out of it.
And it's not just a fucking excuse.
And I couldn't have changed it with more effort, louder yelling, or fighting harder.
And every time the truth comes out and I am right.

Some mountains cannot be climbed. It's not my fault. It's not me.

Fuck the accelerationists. Fuck the fascists. Fuck the unyielding leftists. Fuck perfection at the cost of morality. Fuck libertarians and the utopian commies and the utopian anarchists for good measure.

Fuck fake queers like Buttigieg and fuck people willing to sell out their minority groups in general for the right to lick boot.

Fuck Karen, Darren, and anyone who believes their right to party, get a haircut or watch other people play sportsball is worth more than human life.

Fuck people who are respectable. Fuck people who care about people being respectable.

Fuck the conspiracy freaks and fuck anyone who gave them even five seconds of "let's hear him out". Fuck anyone who thinks coughing on someone in a pandemic is an appropriate reaction to not getting their way.

Fuck the rich, fuck the people who protect the rich, fuck the powerful and their people too.

Fuck the religious extremists. Fuck the non-religious extremists, and the anti-religious extremists, and anyone who decided on the basis of gut feeling or holy writ that some people are worth less than others.

And if you feel a twinge of "hey now that's not fair" while reading that list then fuck YOU in particular, and I hope to live long enough to see you rot in the sun for days while passing feral dogs won't even piss on your mushy carcass.

Fuck all of it, because it never did a goddamn thing for me or anyone like me. And everyone who smiled and chuckled while I was getting fucking stomped on, mark my words: the hobnails are targeting you next, and I'm going to laugh and grin through broken teeth to see you brought low, the same you did to me.

Newsfeed just popped up something and for no fucking reason it made me irrationally furious.

PD.com: We'll make you an offer you can't understand.

Bullshit. I've never received a single fucking incomprehensible offer here. Either it wasn't possible to even parse as an offer or it was entirely comprehensible.

I demand an offer I can't understand or my money back. I am entirely serious. I'll PM the goddamned Mgt for my refund. It will be horrific, just like the last few times, and I'm entirely willing to bear that burden.

SINKHOLE OR BURIAL SITE? BIG HOLE IN DESERT WEST OF TUCSON

On Thursday, April 9th 2020, a passing driver recognized something was wrong with the desert landscape on his way to work. "It loomed, except, you know, it was a hole in the ground. But it had that feeling."

The 32-year-old veterinary technician, who asked us not to print his name for legal reasons, stopped his vehicle on the side of the highway to look at the hole. What he found was unsettling.

"There was just this big wooden box down there with chains around it, but not like 'holding it closed' around it, just sort of in a circle. The box was half flopped open, splinters like someone had kicked the shit out of it, totally empty. And there were some wicked big boot prints. Serious stompers."

While there have been many well-publicized disappearances and claims of being followed or stalked on this stretch of State Route 86, this is the first evidence to date of criminal activity beyond the norm for the area.

Police are currently treating this as a missing persons case. There are no further details at this time. If you have any knowledge regarding this sinkhole, or anywhere a veterinary technician can offload a few dozen pounds of ketamine, please contact the Tucson Police Department.

You're a breed of your own. Leftist until the chips are down and you can't party all night anymore. Poor people need help until you need to consider they need food and shelter, then they need to take responsibility for their living situation.

White girl, you love trans people but only because you get woke points from it. When they need a safe space to be trans it's the streets for them. "Just be gay in the bedroom" for a new era. White girl, you are a breed of your own.

Not unique, no, you've got a whole ass species just like you. You don't take care of your cat and act upset when we do the work and get the love. Not fair! You need. You NEED. All the rewards and none of the responsibility, just like when you were young.

You say that you'll vote for Trump if Bernie gets the nomination just to stick it to those people who want healthcare for being mean to white girls like you. Fuck them, right? You don't have healthcare and you do fine. You do lines of coke and pat your ass in the morning, how good am I. Who needs a doctor, right?

You, hypocrite, the future will be unkind to you. I hope you like it. I, at least, will smile a grim smile when I die in a hole, knowing you'll follow me down.

I may as well pay attention to my food now, as practice. Also, some of my foods are HILARIOUS.



Losing My Goddamn Mind Mushroom Tortelloni with Dill & Sage Butter

Purchase and cook one package of Priano Porcini Mushroom Tortelloni, from your local Aldi. Delicious!

Realize you have no sauce to go with them. Commence screaming.

No olive oil either. More screaming.

Fuck it, melt a whole goddamn stick of butter in there while cussing at it.

Butter is horrible on its own. Raid the spice cabinet, by which I mean grab the first two things you see without checking what they are at all. Hope this does not become regret.

Dump dill and sage into the melting butter and hot pasta, eyes wild, face locked in a rictus grin, watching the innocent butter turn green and foul.

Mix. Comment on how it looks like you dropped it in some sand, lament your misfortune.

Take a bite and cry tears of joy. SO GOOD. I must make this butter sauce separately for future use.

Recognition: this is such a specific case that you will never make this again. You will always have a better choice. Enjoy it in the moment for what it is: a furious series of blind fuckups leading to excellence.



I will actually post another one too from today, why not!



The Last Pierogies

Take a pan-full of random pierogies, I used frozen ones because I'm a wretch and a fool and I have no place doing this sort of shit, god rest my soul. Make sure to lay them out evenly in the pan, with no overlaps and a couple millimeters of space between each of them.

Dump all of the olive oil on them. It will be fine, I'm sure I won't want more olive oil tonight! This turns out to be the exact correct amount, just barely enough to reach the top of the flattened bits of the pierogies, in case you don't want to roll the dice yourself.

Also, please do use GOOD olive oil, the oil flavor comes through so well in this, it showcases the absolute best the oil has to offer, don't waste it on fucking canola oil you fucking simpleton.

Turn the burner on high, and keep your eyeballs trained on the gaps. As soon as the last large bit of undisturbed oil gets hot enough to begin to bubble, crank the burner down to about medium, maybe a hair lower.

Spatula? Spatula???? Oh shit!!!

Clean the only spatula in the house while begging the pierogies to turn out okay, because you are incapable of forward planning.

Check cooking side for firmness, texture and color. Firmness: they should sound hollow when you tap them with the spatula. Texture: like textured consumer electronics plastic, just rough enough to feel when you scrape it with the spatula, but not enough to see it with your eyes. Color: yellow leaning pale orange. This is like, two steps before golden brown. Don't do golden brown. Cross your fingers and beg god not to give you golden brown, please.

When ready, flip pierogies onto the "belly" side. Mourn the two that are definitely overdone ever so slightly, and curse the last user of the spatula (spoiler alert, you were the last user).

Again, check for firmness, texture and color. This time, you want golden brown. Gasp audibly when all of them come out fucking perfect.

Get onto a plate, pat dry of oil, serve with sour cream (last of that too). Eat with your hands like an animal.

Oh my god. It's like a stuffed potato chip. It's too good.

Oh wait.

Oh no.

Oh no, I'm going gluten free and if you cheat your body keeps on eating your fucking neurons.

Oh no.

They are the last pierogies I will ever have.

Weep and enjoy.

Has anyone else noticed it? I mean sure, we're meat beasts and our soft serve head goo is a bit fuzzy at the best of times, but I think you'd need to notice it by now.

It's kind of like a zombie, you know: you blow its head off at eighteen yards with a lit mining explosive on a stick, you expect it to stay down. And then it sits up and starts dancing the fucking Charleston on its own shattered remains.

That just isn't how cause and effect works, unless there is a great and sincere problem with our understanding of reality. And brother, have we ever got proof of a great and sincere problem with our understanding of reality.

When I quit my job, you expect that that is the end of the matter: it is quit and I am done, there's no more to do. And yet!

And yet.

Here we are, taking the same route to the same building to repeat the exact events, down to the timeline, of quitting before.

So I ask you: what, really, is going on?

Don't get it in your head, of course, that this is all just my personal life. The cup runneth over.

Iraq War 2 (or Gulf War 3, whatever floats your crusty piece of flotsam) is here. Russia is our enemy, again. Hell, even Korea and World War 2 are coming back around for a second try. It's deranged, decades stacking on top of each other like a Jenga tower with clipping errors.

PKD may have been a woomeister and more than a little burned out from all the fucking drugs, but he saw the future that is the present: "The Empire never ended".

There's no identification of a source, no suggestion for a solution here. This is not a problem to be solved, but a fact of our current ontological landscape. All I'm doing is pointing out that even if history repeats, this is a bit absurd. Hopefully, we can learn to navigate it.

Of course, now that I started thinking about my dad, I can't stop.

I barely cared when he died. I was 8, I understood death distantly. But I hadn't seen him in almost two years. A quarter of my life.

I was still dealing with the trauma of being taken away from a foster family I STILL desperately want to contact, who had seen I was trans before I fucking knew and did all these little things to help me feel comfortable that I didn't recognize for a DECADE AND A HALF. I had been four. I was five when they took me out of there one day. Unexpectedly.

Little shit, too, the little things I recognize now. I wanted girl's clothes, I got them. I had my nails done once. I had an actual little kid's life in a lot of respects in that year: birthday party, camping, learning how to chop a log without hurting myself. I guess it was a bit weird at the age of four, but it wasn't that weird. I was two years ahead of myself, in a family that was comfortable making room for me to exceed. And I'd already lost memories of my earlier years, so no loss to deal with. It was like I'd never had another life.

I only remember this from photos I remember seeing years and years later. Mementos of a time that is lost to me. A life that could have been different, so very different.

Going from that to living with my grandparents full time. People I had never, ever met. People who were, in a word, fucking evil. Two words, I guess.

Coming to terms with being "evil" and "twisted" from my time with those "freaky atheists" (actual words I remember).

And then he died. I had met him three times since I got taken to my grandparents. One hour two times, 6 hours once. This man had never done anything to deserve that but not live up to my family's fucked up high society standards. So they sicced Johnny Law on him for, in their words in the police report I found later, "not trusting him".

And he had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. And he jumped in front of a red Buick in Oil City, PA and became a stain on the asphalt. And I did not know him, so I didn't care.

Years later, my mother told me on a particularly good and open day that he had been great given his damage and she was cornered into talking shit against him. That's what got me to digging for all of this shit.

He was an aspiring indie country singer. It was the one gig that got him money. He was a fan of 50s country and Johnny Cash. I was ahead of the game on Big Iron by a full decade on account of this, the guy who told me about the gigs he played said he did a fucking awesome job singing old Marty Robbins covers at dive bars across western PA. Couldn't songwrite for shit, so he languished in the land of the cheap and wasted.

He was chronically homeless. Much like I am, come to think of it, and for similar reasons. Worse, though. He was untrained, uneducated, he actually couldn't write and could barely read well enough to find a name in the phone book. His father (Jewish side of the family, who were terribly racist as I said prior) didn't think he was worth educating. His mother had been sent back where she came from, which means she had no input, being in a different state and all.

So he did what he knew how to do, and it paid pocket lint and a loaf of bread. That doesn't add up to rent, so he walked the streets with a guitar he didn't play too bad, and he busked and he played gigs at bars, and he slept in alcoves in alleys.

My only existing memory of him is fragmentary, but the fragments have clarity. Probably distorted, I spent a long time thinking on them more than once, but I have them.

He took me to the rez in New York (found that out only recently) where his mother lived. According to my research it's gone now, but it existed as recently as 1997, and I was there for two hours one day that year.

I don't remember his mother. I remember a drive down a miles-long dirt road in a 1970s Ford pickup, rusted, black paint clinging in broad sheets along the sides and nearly gone by the wheel wells. I remember not talking much, because I didn't know what was going on. I had from my perspective only met this man once, in a room in Pittsburgh the year prior.

I had no idea where we were going to.

Next fragment: pulling up. I remember the shacks being impossibly low to the ground, a truck on blocks, a couple kids running to one of the shacks and ducking inside. I'm pretty sure this memory has been distorted by time, it looks like a funhouse mirror and not like a real thing that happened.

And I remember twilight, sun already down, seeing Butler unfold as we came in, and he was silent unlike the drive out. I don't remember if there was a reason, or anything else.

I have so very little of this man. Everything I have says he and I would be mortal enemies if he had made it to see me now. But goddamnit, I didn't even get that chance. He was crushed by racism, classism, capitalism, and the all-too-common view of mental illness as weird, scary, and indicative of moral weakness.

He was told he was an animal by his family, raised accordingly, and then everyone he ever met called him stupid and crazy. The only person he ever loved told the cops she didn't trust him, a fucking lie, and her family told him he was worthless and would only bring them down.

And then he died. A sad, miserable life. 48 years old at his time of death. Had a glimpse of happiness for six of those, right toward the very fucking end, and I was three years of it. And then they took it away, smeared his name, drove away his only clients, and left him with nothing but oncoming traffic and loss and hatred.

And all I have now are fragments of someone who had so much in common with me, who would never have approved of who I am, who should have been given a chance. All I have is memories of paperwork and photos I once saw, all gone now, and a couple pieces of one day at seven years of age that I didn't understand then and still don't now, for very different reasons.








Edited due to memory failure at the very start. I had seen him a year and a half prior (I recall the news coming January 99, I had gone to New York in the spring or summer of 97.) The "only met him once before" is not an error, I definitely remember only remembering one prior meeting. There had been another, I found out at the funeral and was periodically reminded of by my mother, but I was still growing, and our memories fade fast at young ages.

I am a monster.

They told me so my whole life, that I was evil and unnatural and inhuman. They said I was a deviant, that I was demonic, that I was a beast.

And the dictionary didn't square with this, so I was wondering what they saw that I didn't.

I was the kind of kid you could call, at an understatement, precocious. I was reading Yudkowsky's early, pre-"rationalist" writings on AI and understanding what I was reading. Age of 13. But well before that I was ahead of the game: my first books included Les Chants de Maldoror, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy plus the Silmarillion (the Hobbit came about much later for me), and the White Crow books by Mary Gentle, starting with Rats and Gargoyles — all before I was 10.

I understood that the words they applied to me didn't square with who I was. Even when I was a horrible person, my horrible was human horrible. (I was a sociopathic teenager, to say the least. I think I am not alone.)

So I understood that they were wrong or they knew something about me or about monsters that I didn't. There were so many of them saying it that they couldn't possibly be wrong, right? (Remember, I was a child.) And how could anyone know more about me than I did? (Again, child.)

That left knowing something about monsters and demons that I didn't. So I went looking.

My first movie was Alien. 1979. Holds up as a fucking incredible film to this day, unrivaled for atmosphere, story, pacing. I watched Sci-Fi Channel originals on the daily. I watched that fucking film The Relic. Because of the monster.

And I saw something in them. Monsters are ultimately put in a corner. They're just trying to live their lives. They're animals or hominids or ghosts or demons, but their own natural order is all they're trying to manage.

Then the heroes arrive and FUCK with them.

You're a baby lost in a hostile environment of soft meat beasts and labyrinthine tunnels, trying to kill you. You have acid blood and teeth and claws but they have assault rifles and hate. Your life will be brutish and short if you don't do unto them first.

I could get with that program. No problem. It squared with my experiences.

Over time, I saw more. Humanly relatable monsters, empathetic and kind. Monsters protecting their friends and family. And I had this seed inside me that said "I am a monster" and one that said "I am a good person." And all this monster media I was eating kept getting tagged onto the monster seed. One day, finally, it matched up.

This would have been around 2009, age of 19, first time I came here as an active participant on the forums. I had finally found something in words and concepts that fit with who I was. I felt bold enough to come into a new community.

I was, however, still a child.

Having a shiny new idea of what and who you are doesn't make you a human being. It makes you base-level sentient. Congrats, you passed the mirror test, here's your existential crisis and your suffering you fucking dirtbag.

I learned that lesson here, hard. I didn't understand: I should have been scary! I'm a monster! Aaaaaaaaaa! But instead I was an object of ridicule. Again.

Then life intervened and I ended up beginning my long, grueling passage through homelessness. Coincidentally, this started as I was beginning my exploration of left-hand path magick garbage. So you could call this my Qlippoth Crawl.

You learn things at the bottom. They're the lessons that can kill you. Leave you too broken to continue on. Knowledge that becomes death.

But I had other lessons I had learned. I was the monster, after all. I was a nightmare and I would never die. I would protect what was important to me. I would be beaten but never broken.

And these first lessons gave me what I needed to keep running in the bad times. Not without fits and starts: who remembers Pittsburgh! It was hilarious! Not for me, at the time, but good god there was some shit there worth framing. But after the two separate sets of lessons began to interact, I became more human, ironically enough.

Because we are full of mirror neurons and projection, our monsters are, in aggregate, more human than we are.

As Howl rightly pointed out, however, I am alienated. And at this time I didn't really know what that meant. I knew the dictionary definition, but not the right-down-in-the-bones knowledge I needed.

Then came Boston. And more importantly, After Boston.

After that brief reprieve from the worst life experiences I'd had, always an outsider, I was thrown right back into it.

As the saying goes: how can you know there is light without darkness? Same applies here: if you live your life in a lightless chasm, you have no way of knowing if you're blind or if you just have never been near light sources.

New lessons came. And they stuck. Instead of treating people as always being out to get me by default, I had started recognizing some of them as being like me. And it hurt all the more when they treated me like shit, but it also meant I couldn't put All Of That on other people. Some of it had to be me. Why would Other Monsters hate me, if not for me being Bad?

Tada!

The lesson was learned. I went through some of the most wretched shit in my life and came out having learned that while Most People are Awful, sometimes it is actually Me that is Awful.

I still identify with the monster. But like the Aliens of the later movies: this does not mean I am alone. There are other monsters out here, all with teeth and claws and acid blood. We protect each other, we protect the hive, we try to eke out a meaningful existence in a hostile, alien landscape that wants to kill us.

And like the humans in those movies: just because I am the victim does not mean I am not at fault. Some justice really is karmic.

I am a small, soft bodied creature, gross and peristaltic. I move slowly and try to remain undetected.

This does not mean I am powerless.

All of us have witnessed someone become utterly paralyzed by flies, worms, spiders.

There is a strength in vulnerability, sliminess, crawling. It paralyzes your foes, and galvanizes your allies.

Your secret weakness becomes indifference. Those who hate you fear you and can't come near you. Those who love you protect you.

Those who do not care see something to step on.

Of course, even that becomes reduced if you have teeth and can bite. As the saying goes, even a worm turns.

If you can't leave them in awe of you, sometimes making them disgusted by you is enough. And if not, it helps to be able to utterly destroy them in an instant.



This is only the first part of a series. I don't know if it will be two parts or 15, but I have more coming.

You know, the one that you get bits and pieces of when you're listening to a Lady Gaga track but the radio twists just a bit out of phase with the rest of Tucson and starts picking up shards of interference from the false sun.

https://killalters.bandcamp.com/album/no-self-helps

You're welcome.

My friends, family and random passersby have a lot of different ideas on animal psychology.

They are all fucking wrong.

I have started to educate them, particularly on birds, which are particularly misunderstood. For reasons I cannot fathom, people assume that birds are simply dumb.

This is nonsense.

Birds are malevolent manifestations of a callow, heartless universe. Also, all of them are dead from birth and animated by a symbiotic fungus (this is what we call feathers).

Every bird is born hearing the unhallowed whispers of the Stork of Wrath, a deity and/or artificial intelligence embedded in the laws of probability by a far greater civilization than ours, which predates the Solar System's protoplanetary disk by approximately a billion years.

Birds are also born with an innate moral compass but absolutely no understanding of what it's requests mean.

There are only three types of bird socially: those who listen to the Stork of Wrath and thus hate all things good in this world, those who believe the Stork of Wrath is a counterbalance to their moral compass and thus act on whatever instinctive drive they want more at the time, and the TURACOS. Who are fucking heretics and have never been trustworthy.

Birds are often thought to be warm blooded, but this is a misunderstanding. As I said before, birds are undead. Thus we get the term "worm-blooded", which idiots and assholes have taken as a typo. It is not a typo. Do you not know WHY birds are seen eating those bugs? If their internal ecosystem stagnates, they can't move anymore. Tragically, this often is caused when a bird is smashed by a car, so few people recognize the truth of what they are seeing: self-guided missiles of an extrauniversal alien oligarch, and also undead hollow-boned lizards covered in mold.

Finally, people often ask me about penguins when I explain birds to them.

Penguins are not birds. They are a type of bipedal sea lion.

Thank you.

Last thing before bed

My attack of THE HOLIES might have gotten me a writing gig

Tomorrow it begins

I was subtly asked to provide More Future, All Bad, and The Words Of The Priestess Of The Rancid Meats

I have been informed I Am The Story and thus from here on out my damage is under NDA

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

https://share.icloud.com/photos/013Y1-T1mPppMO3NalxClRkxg

I don't know how to share individual fucking screenshots in a goddamn embedded way using this garbage fucking device I swear I'm gonna SHIT! SHIT!

This has been coming for /months/.

I have been rereading old posts around these parts, mostly as a kind of self reflection on the growth and progress I made over time, and I noticed something.

Everyone on this forum has changed. Not just me.

RWHN famously blew up about the Boston bomber's face being on a magazine cover, and we mocked him for it. Now we point out that the manifestos of white supremacists are probably not worth reading and definitely shouldn't be spread around. In fact, they should be removed from circulation. We don't bring up pixelating out the New Zealand shooter's face when we said before that the bomber kid's face being on magazine covers was important.

Knee jerk reaction kicks in; I had it too. "That's not the same thing!" And you're right that, in a sense, it isn't, but how isn't it the same thing?

Some of us, myself included, jump from that reaction to a different knee jerk reaction: it is the same thing, and we were wrong before. Again: right in a sense.

Then some fewer might go further: it is the same thing, but we are wrong NOW. This sort of knee jerk response to knee jerk response loop can go on indefinitely, leading you to some warped conclusions if you let it. But as a man said some time, a conclusion is just where you stopped thinking.

Now, the reason this bothered me was this nagging feeling that I didn't /feel/ like I had changed my mind at all. I am still adamantly for gun rights circa 2008, and adamantly in favor of gun control circa 2017 onward. I still believe the Boston bomber's face and story needed to be out there, while I believe that the current crop of extremist killers deserve nothing more than mention that they are hideous beasts. Most importantly, I hold all of these beliefs /simultaneously/, even though they outwardly seem contradictory.

I don't cringe in the face of contradiction, but I want to consciously make that decision. Here, despite an apparent contradiction, I didn't feel any. They felt universally in line with Who I Am, which has changed, but they felt like they applied equally to both Old Me and New Me. Whatever changes occurred, they weren't enough that I no longer recognized my old moral compass. In point of fact, it seemed like the exact same compass, down to the scuff marks on the glass.

——

I've let this hysteresis loop settle for a couple months, allowed my reaction to the idea that I'm hypocritical over a long period of time to stop bothering me, and started to reread things while chewing the gristly bits of the problem.

The thing that made it click for me was a thing Triple Zero (I miss that Dutch bastard, where is he now?) said in the sticky of this very forum.

Snip

i dunno but it seems to me that discordianism places "freedom" as more important than "happiness".

(freedom and happiness being two important calibrating points in philosophy of ethics)

Snip

I feel that the apparent change in the forum I've noticed is just a change in the circumstances around us all.

——

If freedom and happiness are important calibrating points in ethics, but unrestrained freedom is obvious stupidity (see any decent argument against anarchy, communism or libertarianism) and happiness at the expense of freedom is somewhere in the vicinity of Brave New World, it stands to reason that "safety" is a component of happiness.

Much of the PeeDee Drug Wars focused on Safety vs Freedom. But it seems (note, seems) that we have shifted gears.

That is because, as should be evident to anyone who has seen the news even once in the past two years, safety is no longer guaranteed. More to the point, a lack of safety has begun to impinge on the freedoms of a great many people, some of whom have lost such freedoms as sleeping easily at night, keeping their blood on the inside, and homeostasis.

It is difficult to be a free-thinker while you are leaking all over the floor. Or no longer breathing.

Nothing about us changed all that much. The circumstances are different.

—

Going back to my hysteresis loop of knee jerk reactions to my own knee jerk reactions, I mentioned that the apparently conflicting ideas of "the situations are different", "the situations are the same and we were wrong before", and "the situations are the same and we are wrong now" all have some validity.

Taken on their own, in a vacuum, they aren't very different. Extremist kills some people, and then back and forth (at least internally) about censorship vs making an important point occurs.

But more broadly, the first case was about racism. Public assumption: grizzled old brown man with super-beard. Actual reality: some white kid who looks basically like any other white kid. This was important because the narrative being sold was racist and the reality was not.

And the second case is about racism too. Except here, expectations and reality match up. White supremacist is white, kills people of color. There isn't any value in spreading his trash around. Pixelating his face sends a message to others like him, and does no harm to the public interest because he, I am sure, looks like every other white kid his age.

Let's move a layer deeper. In the case of the Boston bomber, I don't think anyone even had an issue with the actual story itself. It was about how this kid got radicalized. It painted a portrait of how someone who was an ordinary kid got pulled into this darker path. Notably, nothing about his descent had anything to do with the stories of other kids like him, or manifestos. It was a lonely journey that was egged on by traditional values and a desire to belong and be cared about by his family.

In the case of whatshisfuck in New Zealand, or that punk motherfucker in San Diego, we know their story, because it's a story that has been told to us over and over again. Further, we know that they were in fact inspired by other shooters. We knew that before they told us, though the confirmation was nice to have for the particularly thick-headed people. And their stories do have to do with manifestos and copycat acts.

So, to bring this back around: surface level, they're the same thing. But treating the Boston bomber the way we treat the bigoted goons we have now would have done the public a disservice, and treating these shitbags the way we did that kid (who did monstrous things, I must make absolutely clear) would be exacerbating a problem that's already out of our control, because the details of the surrounding circumstances /are/ different.

Moreover, I feel that it's safe to conclude this is one case where we had no need to change our minds to reach the same decisions and value judgements we did. Some of us may have changed our minds anyway. That's fine. But I had this feeling that I hadn't actually changed, and I wanted to investigate that. What I found was that What I Thought I Believed was not the same as What I Actually Believed. And that I never actually changed, the world just whirled around me in a dizzying kaleidoscope of bullshit and goose-stepping.

What I Thought I Believed: Freedom, to the hilt.  Let people fuck up. We have laws for those who go too far. Safety is a crutch for people living in the Stone Age.

What I Actually Believed: Freedom, to the hilt, and enough safety that people can live to use it. We have laws for those who go too far, but some problems cannot be solved through application of law alone without making a police state. Safety is a vital component of freedom, but is easy to over-utilize and should be used with caution.

——

My view is consistent, I just never had to explore this part of it at a point when I had the time to make sense of what I was seeing. Or I'm full of shit and this was an extremely lengthy exercise in rationalization, but I think that if that's all it was, it was an important one.

Even if it is both true that my viewpoint on this matter has not changed, and that this is a lengthy masturbatory exercise in rationalization, it reminded me of an old truth around these parts, that an upright and bipedal human is Under Construction Eternal.

My viewpoint may not have changed on the issue I was concerned with. But I know myself a fuckload better than I did, and I have an actual response to things that I honestly would have just had to handwave away and ignore the subsequent queasy feeling about before.

I was confident my views now are the Right Thing, or at least in the ballpark. And I was confident my views before WERE the Right Thing but would not be now. But before the insight that prompted this post, I could not have explained how or why to someone, and under pressure I might have given a different answer that turned me into a shithead.

That didn't happen, for which I am grateful, and any shitheadedness on my part is, at the very least, the result of long hard thought rather than blind flailing last minute stupidity. I laid these bricks, they weren't just some rocks and mud I slung together. If nothing else, that is a valuable thing.

——

I don't actually know who might get anything out of this here, but it seemed worth putting out there. As for why /here/...

It isn't a rant, it doesn't belong in OKM. It's serious, not quite AT. It's philosophical rather than political or scientific, so I decided it belonged in TFYS,S. That said, I haven't actually got a clue if that's the case, so disclaimer: might be the wrong forum, please complain to a mod or use your mod powers to correct any perceived failings.

Warning: this is probably, I don't actually know because I'm a terrible judge of this sort of thing due to my innate biases with regards to myself, badly written, self-serving woe is me dramatic bullshit over most of its length. About two thirds of it is aimed at a small collection of random people I won't name, who will never ever read it anyway, because absolutely none of them are, ever have been, or ever will be on this forum, and the rest is just saying things to no one to get them out of my head where they aren't doing all kinds of horrible damage to me.

I wrestled with even posting it after I wrote it all out, but I decided not to let that ... two hours, I think? Go to waste. Maybe it's garbage, maybe it's not, but it's mine and I made it and if someone anywhere finds even a single turn of phrase that was worth the time they spent reading, fuck it, it was worth it.

For my part? I have warned you, and that is all that is necessary from me.


——————


Nothing tells you you're in for a wild ride like when you aren't rich and a pig says "I heard about you." It's not a mark of pride, he didn't hear about you from being an extra on his favorite TV show. He heard about you in the context of "one of those people," take your fucking pick who "those people" are in your case. Depending how fucked up you are by the standards of those /other/ dirtbags, you're between 100% and 40% likely to be right. Either way, it's time to shut the fuck up and be careful.



If one more person cuts contact in an absurdly over the top and aggressive way because of my psychological damage being "scary" I'll just tattoo "Sybil" on my forehead and start breaking out the psychotic grin every time I meet someone. They're going there fucking anyway, I may as well have fun with it.

True facts begin here. My damage is mine, and in this particular case I like it and want to keep it. Yes, I am crazy, and if given a half a chance and some decent health care I'd get on just fine, I promise you. My little collection of people sharing a body doesn't need integration, it's not going to kill you or even talk too loud when you're listening to the same song for the four-hundredth time, and every movie Hollywood has ever released and 90% of the books written on the subject by so-called professionals lied to you from start to finish. Your head is full of bullshit and you need your meninges scrubbed clean of the scum before you can be trusted to interact with a third of the human species in a healthy manner, and you can just keep threatening the fucking cops if I ever "show up" again, because I'm never going back to Fresno, or to California at all for that matter, and you can eat the shit I trailed in my wake like a leaking septic waste removal truck.

Besides all of that though, "We can't include the mentally ill in our activism because of the optics" is a statement that needs the full, furious attention of someone with the psyche of Spider Jerusalem and the impulse control of a panicked wildebeest. What the fuck is wrong with you?



People keep dying or disappearing or else ending up so fucking horrible that I wish I could trade them for someone who had, one for one, I don't really give a fuck who shows back up just so long as the world gets a little fucking better and a little less horrible.

So much incomplete shit, notes left unfinished and then lost when everything ends up in a dumpster, a yard sale, an eBay listing, in a scrapyard. I've been dwelling on that for about a month now. I started finding all the shit I never finished that I can and backing it up with as many different people as I can. At my current pace I won't complete a damn thing in my life but leaving those fragmented works out there for someone else to make their own ending to is a gift to the world in its own way. And while I hope one day I can offer more, I have gotten to understanding that it's okay if this is the best I can give: the world only ever gave me feces to paint the fucking canvas with, its not necessarily fair to expect rich blues and bright, clean greens out of my palette. Maybe I'll find some nice colors in there anyway, and maybe some others can see what I saw in them too. Maybe one day I'll find some real paint and a brush instead.



Yes, I'm angry, yes, I hate your fucking politics, yes, I really meant it when I said never talk to me again. If your worldview involves me or my friends, acquaintances, people I met once online and felt that unavoidable BPD flush of love for, suffering or dying or second class or imprisoned, then fuck you. Fuck what you stand for. Fuck your house, I hope it gets termites. Sit down and delete me from your Steam friends list or get used to my toxic spew, you rotten traitor fuck.



I'm emotional all the time, yes, and I'm anxious and I apologize all the time, I'm sorry. I have so much damage that my SAN has long since burrowed into the negative triple digits and shows no signs of decelerating. I try to keep it from splashing everywhere and wrecking the place, you watch me physically wrestle that shit down to present a socially acceptable face, so you can pretend it's all okay, nothing you need to be concerned with, so you can turn back to the TV and watch baking shows or game shows or sports games and say: "this world is okay, nothing is wrong, I don't need to be concerned" while you live in your house you own, drive your car you own, watch the TV shows they make for upper middle class white people, pretend and pretend and pretend that Nero's Boot isn't hovering, shadowing the fucking overcast sky, while it snows in mid-April, while I have to silently swap who is controlling this meat-puppet just to dodge the fucking psych ward — /again/, while they talk on the news you try not to pay attention to about how people like me, like my friends, like that cute girl we saw at the restaurant that first week I was here, are all slowly becoming, legally, a little less human every day.

I don't hate you, but I almost wish you hated me so that I could justify it to myself. Even if I benefit from you, you are, in some small way, what I'm fighting against, and I have to hope you lose.



I have stopped caring about my health all that much these days. It turns out I'm loosely held together with paper clips and chewing gum, a bundle of misdiagnoses and outright lies and addictions and weird dietary shit hiding that I'm deeply, deeply ill, it's a wonder I'm still alive, still able to move, still seeing most of reality. On the bright side, if I stay in Michigan long enough to see my doctor, it's an easy and cheap fix as far as surgeries go. There is a possible future where I become as productive again as I was when I was 17, and that is a bright future indeed. And no longer turning that alarming, blotchy red color I did earlier today.

Besides all that though? It turns out the food we eat is becoming more poisonous by the day. There's lead in the water half the places you go, if not worse shit. So yes: I smoke. I smoke to keep my intestines anchored on the inside, apparently to keep my body and mind from collapsing under thyrotoxicosis, and because when it comes right down to it, the chances I'll live long enough to die of lung cancer are growing smaller by the day, through no fault of my own. So yes, I beg a friend with the cash to spare for ten bucks once or twice a week, and I spend it on something that's ripping me apart from the inside. Yeah, I could spend it on food and not leech "as much" money off the system by way of food stamps. Or I could just not beg my friend for money that I haven't "earned". Whatever. It's not your business and you should fuck off.



One day, if this keeps on repeating, inevitably there won't be a "next spot" to jump. One day, I will have reached the end of the line. This is a mathematical certainty. There are only so many people in a position to help out there, and I try not to burn bridges but it turns out it ain't me with the butane, the flamethrower, the acetylene cutting torch, the thermite charges and demolition cranes, oh no. And more and more often it doesn't matter if the bridge burns or not, because soon there's two of us, both hoping there's another stop on this crazy ride. I sure hope I find a safe landing spot before the last car on this train derails. I hope everyone else out there, all the people cast out like me into the cold, living unbound and untethered and uncared for, I hope they can find shelter, an address, some warm food and some human comfort and dignity, someday soon, too.



And I hope one day I won't be staining the screen with this disconnected word salad bullshit, yelling from the gutter surrounded by rotten wood and old McDonald's sandwich wrappers, trying to let out 29 years of being stepped on, making my self small so others can pretend not to notice me when they pass, being turned away because someone read a book or saw a movie once where the bad guy smelled like me kinda, getting thrown down the mountain, a shadow of Sisyphus, every time I get the strength to try again to claw myself up another inch. I hope one day I won't have to worry — is this too defeatist? Is this too sad emo kid? Am I just whining? Because I hope one day I'll have different stories to tell, stories of victory and progress and improvement.

And really, above all, more than anything, ultimately, I hope one day I can look back and, if nothing else, see that I didn't make the world any worse as I passed through it. If I get one wish in this life, let it be that one. If I can't stop the tide of bullshit, just let me not have contributed. I don't care if people /think/ I did or not. I don't care how or if history views me. Just don't let my final karmic balance, so to speak, be negative.

Finally ditched the IRC for good. As soon as white boys started telling me that we should just wait for the fash to go away because they won't win I was through with that shit.

I'm in Arizona right now, passing through by bus on my way to LA. Holbrook is colder than parts of Canada, and I hear the temperature madness extends nearly to Phoenix. What did you do for the powers that be to try and freeze Tucson over?