Woden's Day Thing 12/14/22

I don't even fucking know anymore.

Trivial Bullshit - Personal

• I haven’t been able to do as much so I’ve been watching a lot more video than usual. Boy, is that a depressing slide into sloth and self-loathing.

  • Brothermouth and I finally got around to seeing Bullet Train (Maria Beetle). I wish we had seen it in theatres, because it’s mostly visual fun. While it’s definitely an American adaptation of a Japanese thing, I saw a lot of DNA from the classic yakuza genre stuff that I love (Yakuza Paper movies, etc.), like the absurdism and exploitation. It made me want to go read the Hit Man books (the second of which Bullet Train is based on), even though it managed to end up just being one big COVID allegory.

• I’ve also been watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. Like most stuff on mainstream entertainment channels, I only heard about it because it apparently became super controversial and lots of people started bitching about it as “anti-science” and so forth, in the vein of all the UFO stuff on the History channel. I didn’t see what the big deal was, but strains of Streisand wafted through my brain and I felt compelled to see why what looked like a relatively obscure but good-production-value anthropology docuseries was such a big deal and being coded as science denier tinfoil fodder.

  • One episode in, I got quite excited, as its thesis is nearly precisely a theory I’ve held since getting really into anthropology as a teen- that the VERY long gap of geological time between Ice Ages could very easily have allowed for a complex, even global human civilization to rise and fall with almost no forensic trace, and that much of foundational human culture is based on the extremely distant echoes of whatever this original civilization was doing. (Even if you think this is a nutty idea, the theory is solid: check out the thoroughly uncontroversial speculative Life After People from 2010-ish, which explores the science of how long it takes for man-made things to disintegrate without a trace.)

  • As far as I’ve seen so far, Apocalypse isn’t saying anything terribly weird or edgy, but it may be getting its rap entirely from writer Hancock’s reputation for “pseudoscience” for- again, as far as I can tell- not really saying anything terribly fantastic or crazy, simply forwarding and exploring unconventional theories that aren’t immediately disprovable. Apparently- yet again, for reasons I really don’t understand- Hancock has been called a “white supremacist” and “science denier” and various conspiracy-theorist-related slurs for his entire career by the media.

  • Anyway, the series is solid, has a good budget, Hancock brings in lots of local experts as he trots the globe searching for evidence, and the science is explained quite nicely, with his superculture theories explained in plenty of context. I can understand it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I really don’t understand the outsized amount of hate- if someone can, please do explain it to me.

• Brothermouth and I watched 1883 earlier this year and somehow missed the final episode and thought there was going to be another season. We found out we were dumbasses and he grabbed the last ep for us last week and I’M FINE REALLY I’M FUCKING FINE I’M NOT CRYING YOU ARE. There is supposedly a subsequent prequel limited series taking place in the 1920s but I am honestly a lot less interested- 1883 grabbed me significantly more than Yellowstone itself and I have busted it out around a dozen times in the past year to illustrate to people why I love, love, love Westerns. Since it’s evidently over, the writers should be kidnapped and cloned and no one else ever allowed to imitate it because this is how we get True Detective seasons 2 and however many other ones there were. You caught lightning in a fucking bottle. Don’t be an idiot and call Thor and ask him if he wants to come pick it up at the lost and found.

We are in the land of no mercy now.

• Husbandmouth still doesn’t have a job, but continues searching reasonably hard, and I am continuously worried about the money running out. Plans to Get A Baby Somehow are on indefinite hold because we’re broke, and as we all “celebrate” birthdays and get older and a year approaches its end I become increasingly despondent that it is not my fate, and exactly where I intend to find purpose in building anything at all becomes increasingly in question.

  • Fortunately, work has suddenly picked up dramatically so I expect to be earning better going into the new year, but I’m nowhere near the kind of well-paid professional that we could survive on a single income (nor would I really like that kind of relationship with H-mouth).

• My leg has good days and bad days. I continue to race through milestones in rehab and am down to one PT session a week with exercises at home. I have random “bad days” of incredible pain but am assured over and over again that 90% of the time this is due to overexertion the previous day and I have not, in fact, done structural damage or destroyed anything. I’m a lot more tired than I was, which makes me feel more hours of the day are wasted, which further depresses me.

• Fathermouth is tough to deal with for no reason other than we’ve all been sharing space for too long and he is dealing with 3 people half his age who are watching, doing, and talking about things he is completely unable to understand- completely adrift from current events, anything resembling popular culture, our hobbies, games, etc., he finds us frustrating and confusing through no fault of his own. He has difficulty maintaining focus and short-term memory which frustrates him, further, because the core of him strives to intellectually engage what’s around him. His legs are in greater pain than mine, now, as old injuries (the car accident I’ve alluded to previously) are reaching their apex and he is looking at full knee replacements in the new year sometime. In the short term he is getting surgery on his one remaining eye very soon (again, from the car accident) as he is rapidly losing vision in it due to cataract, which if you’ve done your math will leave him with zero functioning eyes. All this adds to his frustration too.

  • Which, of course, all adds to my frustration as I try to get things done, find peace and quiet, or be left alone to focus on things. I’ve recently tried addressing it by understanding that Fathermouth pesters me mainly because he’s lonely and bored, and that fundamentally is seeking attention, and so when I’m not able to explain things or make the time to listen to a long pointless story about driving to CVS, I have been trying to greatly increase physical affection (which I believe is, really, the fundamental currency of interpersonal ‘attention’) instead, and give him lots of hugs and touches over the course of trying to gently get him off my back. It has helped.

  • Most of this will get better eventually, after he has his house and the endless laundry list of surgeries are over, but Caregiving While Limited is a really shitty test of patience.

Trivial Shit - Farm

• Not much to say right now with winter, such as it is. We’ve continued having frequent rain and occasional brief freezes so lots of the property is wet and swampy WHILE being windy and cold, so everything is getting twice as dirty and wet, all the animals are twice as hungry, and mostly a lot less happy because they mostly want to huddle in shelter. The most recent generation of chickens is like 50% roosters so I have way too much slaughtering to get done that I haven’t found the time or energy for yet. With everything dead, we’re burning through hay, which makes me worry about money more. We have maybe a month of silage built up from this year (which will get started earlier and better next year) which will stretch that a bit. I suspect about a third of my experiments in the greenhouse- specifically the coffee and avocado and probably the tea plants- will be dead before spring. There’s very little that can productively be done and it’s depressing.

• I’m not a full-time commercial farm but I’m very worried about the “carbon market” green bullshit that is creeping its way into local agriculture. Outside of its blue cities, PA is an aggressively farm-friendly state but cracks are starting to show. It also looks like, rather than going in the “right to food” direction of independent sales of homegrown meats and foods, bullshit safetyism will be making a renewed assault in the coming year as incoming Governor Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein and Senator Frankenstein’s Monster will be doing whatever their federal puppetmasters tell them in exchange for promises of power and/or bologna sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

  

Trivial Shit - The World

• The Twitter Files are such an ostensibly (more on that in a moment) gigantic story that I’m not sure what to contribute to the discourse without being white noise. Some thoughts:

  • I’m becoming annoyed with it being trickled out in these carefully-wrapped packages which are airdropped to three chosen elect journalists. I have nothing super specific of Weiss or Taibbi (I have criticisms of both but eh whatever, neither of them really boil my blood), but why- if this is meant to be the disruptive bombshell to shatter the Matrix of the last few years of covert media authoritarianism- does it still all feel like a very curated, composed, choreographed dance among a very small chosen few?

    • If I were the iconoclast that lots of people projectively wish Musk is, I’d pull a Wikileaks and drop as much raw material on the ecosystem as possible- eliminating my individual value as a target to be crushed for anything beyond retribution and thereby ensuring the information will be combed over by as many eyes as possible, as aggressively as possible- and let it be done. Doing anything else demonstrates (to me) other motives.

  • The predictable response to everything so far is exactly like COVID: lame, weak, mumbled (and half-hearted, because frankly, why should I even have to explain myself to you?) excuses will be made. No one will leap to their feet and do a single thing. Progressives will repeat verbatim talking points that were already crafted before the releases 1,000 times, almost no one’s opinions of any of the actors will shift. Yes, it’s a gigantic story, but shows no sign of moving anything, anywhere.

    • I admit it’s still very early in the story, here, and I’m not going to pretend to know how it all turns out, I’m just saying I wouldn’t find it a waste of money to drop a few Benjies on “Absolutely Nothing Happens.”

  • Some interesting observations, though: I was surprised to see just how much dissent there actually seemed to be within the ranks of Old Guard Twitter, even as they were willfully manipulating impressions with the express goal of social engineering and collaborating with government censorship missions. There’s a surprising amount of (ineffectual) jibes like, “hey, this doesn’t actually break any rules” or “I can’t actually find anything Trump said that actually calls for insurrection” or “hey this was really bad when China did it.” I wonder where all those people went?

• COVID. I complained on the cat’s stack, to uncontroversial applause, that we seem to have gotten stuck in a Groundhog Day-style time loop (which, suspiciously, seems to reset every winter LIKE GROUNDHOG DAY) of the same dead horses and robotic chants. We should mask up again, guys! EVERYONE’S DYING!

  

  • Did this maybe belong up in the “personal” section where I blathered about TV? Anyway, I saw Died Suddenly. Yes, the clots are real and are obviously from the vax and this is probably why people are dropping like flies of “SADS.” No, it isn’t a good movie- it unfortunately comes off as weird ranting from a crank, which is how the leftist Covidian Guard is only too happy to loudly portray it to everyone, and buries the important points in weird tangents, bad production, and tainted voices ensuring that absolutely no one’s mind will actually be CHANGED by it. I wish- like a lot of good ideas by unheard voices- it had been trusted to a team who could have produced it better, trimmed out the weird fat, found at least one mainstream mouthpiece, kept it on topic, and presented it in a way that would have accomplished more than red meat for people who already know the vax is poison and the deaths are murders.

    • Honestly, prove me wrong, I’d like to be wrong- give me one (verifiable) example of a Covidian seeing any amount of Died Suddenly and being redpilled by it. I’ve had better luck getting people to read Real Fauci.

  • I know nearly everything in this Thing has come across as pessimistic and hopeless, but that’s just because I’m depressed and am currently overwhelmed by my existential insignificance and powerlessness. Here’s a point that isn’t one of those things:

    • the only way out of Groundhog Day is to do something differently. We will be forced to relitigate this and every other authoritarian psychodrama dressed as progressive concern trolling forever, until we’re all dead or brainwiped, unless we alter the time loop somehow. If you didn’t resist, FULL ON- even at great personal inconvenience- the first time, now’s your chance. Do NOT wear the mask at any time, for any virus-related reason. Do NOT get the booster. Do NOT stay home. Do NOT get tested.

      • Yes, I know. Your job, your college education, your kids, your healthcare, your friends and family (whoever you’ve got left). Eventually, maybe we’ll all lose enough.

      • It is as likely that a sufficiently united act of defiance will succeed completely bloodlessly as it is likely that it will succeed after enough people have been arrested or hurt or destroyed. We don’t know, because we haven’t actually made a sufficiently united act of defiance. Isn’t it at least worth a try at this point?

• Ukraine. I have almost nothing to say about the war in Ukraine because I’m convinced at this point that I am not learning anything remotely accurate or even real from any source I have access to. For all I know, the war ended 6 months ago, Russia enclosed Ukraine in a time bubble, and it’s a weird utopian future in there with lots of pink neon and everyone talking like Buddhist monks and riding white horses. All I know is, anyone I’ve seen anywhere on the internet for months now with a Ukrainian virtue-flag somewhere on their person has the wrongest, stupidest, or otherwise shittiest take on everything else they open their mouth about, so I’ve come to accept that I’m not going to know anything useful about Ukraine for a while other than that Ukrainian flag tribalism is a really good diagnostic indicator for midwits that are probably progressive authoritarians in every other domain.

A parting thought about zombies unrelated to anything else

I’m immunocompromised and am the moral responsibility of you and your children.

Most of us are probably sick as shit of the cultural phenomenon of zombies. If you’re a gamer, like me, you’re even sicker of them, because they’ve been the sole creative foundation of at least 30% of every video game in the last decade or so and show no sign of going away, even if you shoot them in the face.

The purpose of this parting thought isn’t to bitch about the ubiquity of zombies or even to read into that ubiquity too deeply- I think it’s just, like a lot of things these days, the tendency of every single consumer industry now to beat mediocre ideas to death and beyond if they can be reliably cranked out to a nonzero ROI. I expect Star Wars Zombie Drag Queen Avengers by next year.

Zombies as literary devices actually served a purpose, once. They were symbolic of a few different things, and some of the best examples of the genre used them appropriately: they’ve been symbols of the mindless, unpredictable and usually destructive force of mob psychology, they’ve been the human locust swarm of ‘useless eater’ lumpenproletariat who, if kept unchecked, will simply devour everything in their path, they’ve been metaphors for alienation from people that used to be just like us, etc.

One of the most repeated tropes of the zombie genre is the drama of a protagonist- usually a not-at-all hardened combatant, but sometimes a tough guy for the inversion pathos- encountering the slavering zombie form of someone they knew before: coming face-to-face with Zombie Neighbor/Co-worker/Boss (whose subsequent execution is usually played for laughs with a “sorry Bob! *blam*”) or, more significantly, the monstrous form of a former loved one- a wife, child, or best friend, possibly even as a recently-turned fellow survivor. The narrative usually shows us that the Correct Choice is to regretfully shoot the former loved one in the head, however emotionally traumatizing this may be, and be consoled by one’s fellow survivors later; the story invariably punishes anyone who tries to keep Zombie Husband locked in the basement to hope against hope for a cure one day or because “I just can’t do it”- the prisoner invariably gets loose eventually, usually punishing the well-intended loved one first. The Rules of zombie stories are that there is a point at which someone dear to you cannot be saved and that, simultaneously, you always have the moral prerogative to protect yourself from being violently murdered, no matter who the perpetrator.

Ok, enough zombies. How about pedophiles? Everyone’s enjoying talking about pedos these days. Did you know the majority of convicted pedophiles were sexually assaulted themselves, sometimes as prolifically as in their own criminal offenses? Yes, you probably did. Does that abate your disgust and probably hatred for them and the desire for them to be purged from society? Probably not.

It wasn’t the zombie’s fault they were turned into a zombie. It wasn’t the pedophile’s fault they were molested in childhood. But we have no trouble caring very hard about that, in our cultural narrative, because our survival (or that of our children’s innocence) is on the line. We regret shooting Zombie Dad in the head, but he’s going to rip us to shreds and we’re going to die a violent, purposeless death (and, depending on your canon, become a zombie/pedophile ourselves).

Now that it’s the holy season of the Covidian Church again and despite Fauci’s retirement he is still somehow, in an offense against all decency, still breathing air, let alone still constantly TALKING, I find myself feeling all the same emotions I did in 2020 and 2021, the same anger, the same desperate hunger and thirst for justice and vengeance in equal measures, haunted by the same memories of my deep despair and horror and betrayal and all the madness around me. And I see the same bug-eyed faces behind masks on tweets and Tiktoks and every goddamn where else saying the same exact shit except the tweets are new and the dates are current.

I’m sorry about all the memes today. This is the last one, I promise.

I’m not going to argue a single position here- I’m not attempting to generalize attitudes about zombies or pedophiles to anything else (you’re welcome to, as a thought exercise). But I find myself- like the Covidians- going back over a thought that filled my brain for two recent years, beating a tattoo that echoed daily: at what point do we get past our pity or empathy or whatever for people who have been “brainwashed” or “taken in” or “lied to” or “tricked” (or “bitten” or “molested”) when they want to tear us apart? And how can we be sure we’re even on the best philosophical or moral ground when we follow the rule of the zombie movie?

What do we owe genuine threats to us when those threats are human? What’s a “threat” when it becomes more nuanced than wanting to directly assault us? I know where I stand on it- but I also know that it’s because a large part of me has decided the dilemma is irreconcilable, found a position that doesn’t bother me too much, and stick to it. I don’t assume I’m right- I just morally console myself that I did all the homework before giving up on arriving at a final answer.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Since it’s been a while, here’s a picture of poop.

It’s not a meme. It’s a running joke. It’s different.