I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”
Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:
This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.
I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.
In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.
I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.
In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.
Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.
I just witnessed someone asserting, with no apparent irony, that Abraham Lincoln had non-violent alternatives available to him to end the Civil War. I mean, if I want to be charitable for some misbegotten fucking reason I suppose he didn’t actually append “and win” to the word “end,” but Christ and fuck, how does just existing keep getting dumber?
Yesterday I had another, different human explain to me with no small amount of exasperation that just because I had lived through the thing he was talking about, a thing that happened before he was born, it didn’t mean I knew anything about it. Not even “knew more than he did”! Knew anything at all.
The older I get, the more I want to roll all technology back to somewhere between 1998 and 2005. Actually, hell, I can give you a date: let’s say back to November 6, 2000 and just erase every single Goddamned thing that’s happened since then and start over again. That was when the world went off the fucking rails, right?
I have said this, or variations on this, before. But this is the type of message that bears repeating.
No human being is illegal.
I favor completely unrestricted immigration to the United States. I don’t care if you get here on a private jet or by walking across the border. I don’t care if you have “papers” or not. If you think a better life can be had by coming to America, I think you should be allowed to live here.
Immigrants are not taking anyone’s jobs. The way I know this is the kinds of jobs immigrants work are always hiring, and I don’t see anybody lining up to work them.
Immigrants are significantly less likely to be criminals than US citizens, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if we end up bringing a statistically insignificant handful of criminals along with all of the honest immigrants. We have plenty of home-grown assholes and criminals as is, and I’ll happily trade that Nazi trash creature Stephen Miller for a dozen Mexican murderers anyway. They can move into my fucking neighborhood. We’re still better off. This is the “poisoned M&M” question all over again. If the M&Ms represent human lives, I’ll eat the whole fucking bowl. I don’t give a shit.
ICE should be abolished immediately, and anyone who still works for that agency could be dropped into an active volcano with no actual loss to humanity.
Let anyone who wants to come here in, and give them a path to citizenship. If they break the law along the way treat them like anyone else who broke the law.
Immigration is an unconditional societal good. We are better off because of these people, and the people most opposed to immigration are reliably the worst among us.
I know who I stand with, and I will not apologize.
This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker:Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.
(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?
My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.
This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.
I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?
FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.
SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?
THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.
…
Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.
Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.
I am fully fucking aware that, lead times being what they are on comic books, this was definitely written, if perhaps not completely drawn, before the Current Unpleasantness actually began. But once we realized we were going to publish it during the Current Unpleasantness, and that it scans as really fucking unsubtle given the Current Unpleasantness, maybe we reconsider the entire fucking thing? Because I don’t need this shit in my life at all, much less in a medium that’s supposed to be fucking escapism:
And fuck me dead if this very same Fantastic Four comic book doesn’t use vampires as a persecuted minority that Doom is scapegoating later on in the damn issue. Using Doom as a stand-in for the shitgibbon is one thing. Using vampires as a stand-in for trans people is deeply fucked up.
I recognize that there is literally no way that Marvel is gonna reconsider or reschedule any of this, but I wanted to register my protest anyway.
The election is in … nine days? I suppose it depends on how you count, and I think the fact that Nuremberg II is happening in New York City right now is probably a reason to start severely restricting my internet intake for a while. I will probably fail, because I always fail when I try to do shit like this, but … Jesus, enough. He’s a fucking Nazi, people. Republicans are Nazis. Point blank. No exceptions. If you are a Republican or you are willing to vote for them, you are a Nazi. Yes, that means “nice people,” yes, that means your neighbors, yes, that means your family members.
Donald Trump is a Nazi. If you don’t want to be called a Nazi, you need to vote for Kamala Harris. I will not be debating this topic.
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