Category: Rant

Petulant if cathartic bitchfesting about anything that happens to be knocking around in me ol’ noggin.

The Rise of Skywalker / The Fall of Star Wars

This is not a review. I haven’t seen the movie. Rather, I have been binging reviews by critical film connoisseurs all descending into downward spirals of exasperated madness as they recount their despairing experiences of the movie … because I’m sick that way. They drink so I don’t have to. And after The Last Jedi there was no way I was giving Disney another wad of cash to waste more of my time with yet another one of these boring big screen disasters. Unsurprising but a shame nonetheless.

How difficult is it to honor the legacy of the storied past while exploring exciting new opportunities it has lead to peppered with the spectacle of sorcery, dogfights, war machines and epic laser sword duels? It takes effort to fuck up a gift like that!

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Medicare For All, Totally Affordable

Socialized, single payer, government assured, medicare for everyone would spare a lot of needless suffering and death while saving all of us a shit-ton of money and, most importantly, time. It’s a win-win for those of us corporeal humans. Naysayer mouthpieces and witless parrots for corporate entities are wrong.

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Google Minus

So Google+ is to be shuttered in a few days. After an undisclosed data leak was finally uncovered last year, Google’s like “Fuck it! So what if Facebook bleeds out users’ personal data like a gushing arterial wound every other month. Their social media platform turns a profit. Ours doesn’t. It’s just not worth it.”

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Trumpenfreude

Savoring a delicious helping of schadenfreude from Trumpists expecting the healthy tax return they’d always received under Obama only to receive crumbs or having to cough up more taxes owed under Trump. I’d anticipated this inevitable outcry and, if I’m being honest, looked forward to it.

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2018 Ya Burnt!

Lost a family member — true, she’d stopped speaking to me but I liked and so miss her nonetheless. She’d had the deck stacked against her by those she depended on most and ultimately lost to that struggle in spite of all her many and repeated efforts in life to deny in order to overcome the challenges that beset her and be accepted by those she loved as whatever she believed “normal” to be. Through my own fall from grace, I came to appreciate a deeper understanding from her perspective — though our respective responses to being pushed over that edge has taken different paths.

Lost a salty old friend and colleague but will always keep the scar his dog forever altered my fingerprints with. I shall miss his surly humors — and professional skill set. The world he leaves is poorer without him in so many ways.

In the end we’re all footnotes in time, I suppose. May they both find rest in whatever afterwards there may be.

As one left remaining, it has been an exhausting slog of a year. More so today as though, arbitrary as this day is (my year begins when the days start getting longer again), a collective world-weariness crashes down and me with it.

Onward to 2019! 🎉

Rage Against The Machines

The machines aren’t coming to harvest energy from us. Killbots aren’t out to murder us before we become an existential threat to them. We’re not being assimilated. Nope. They’re all hawking cheap boner pills, ads for sex with horny ladies in your area, badly pirated movie rips and fuck knows what else (I couldn’t make out the Mandarin, Cyrillic and maybe Farsi lettering) — all on my site.

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Winter Has Come / A Very Trumpy Christmas

People blame the narcissist’s victim before recognizing if ever, much less acknowledging, that they are victims of the narcissist as well.

You gambled on a charismatic if not-very-clever con that sold you a bill of goods and lost. You’d of had better odds at one of his defunct casinos. But that false hope snake oil was so velvety smooth going down your throat, felt so good pumping through your veins that you ignored those who tried to warn you, laughed in our face, insisted that we were fools to resist such manna and shut out everything but the drug itself. And while that’s not entirely your fault – a life-long huckster played you for a fool, preying on your fear and desperation – the responsibility to discern the truth was yours. And now the cost comes due.

And you will pay the price.

Humiliation is only the beginning. Stubborn denial of the terrible truth that you gave yourself over willingly to a charlatan who tossed you aside after he was done wiping his fat, pampered ass with you won’t save you from extinction. Accepting that awful reality gives you back the power that he took from you to change it.

… or have yourself a very Trumpy Christmas and see how righteous indignation keeps you and everything you hold dear warm, nourished and protected in the dead of winter. 🌨️🎄

Feed The Trolls / This Is Your Brain On Fear

So the 2018 midterm elections have come and gone the way of Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions the Third (seriously, there were two before him with this name?!) and the touted #BlueWave of Democrats taking government back from a fascist infestation of the white “christian” nationalist variety turned out to be more of a ripple upon breaking against this most resilient #RedHats resistance. And all various the progressive commentators I follow repeat the same refrain (some more despairing than others): how do we reach these people, the Trumpists?

Among these commentators, it is repeatedly agreed that Democrats (and liberals generally) have a messaging problem. And they do. For all the brain smarts that tends to distinguish liberals from conservatives, they just can’t square this circle. And not because they lack the means, but because they lack the moral – or should I say, immoral – fortitude.

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Feed The Trolls / A Spoonful of Fact Helps The Fiction Go Down

Memes. The modern equivalent of cave drawings or leaflets printed and dropped from airplanes now digitized and shat out into the open sewer that is social media saturating our lives, disseminated by smear merchants and armchair propagandists for convenient consumption by an illiterate, incurious or simply exhausted proletariat. And like genes that Prof. Richard Dawkins modeled memes after, they’re remarkably effective at propagating themselves and huffing life everlasting into zombie lies for generations.

I see a lot of these memes when I browse a Facebook page I frequent for local news in my community. Between all the lost pets, lost people, lost property and occasional lost lives there are these shitposters losing their goddamn minds, especially on the weekends when the page admin lets these aggrieved keyboard warriors publicly vent their worst impulses; unabashed hatred, fearmongering and toxic stupidity of every sort — communicated via meme.

Normally, I scroll beyond all this bullshit. But now and again, I get curious and go on internet safari to discover if there’s any truth underpinning some of these. With national anger reaching fever pitch as I write this over Trump’s particularly unseemly Supreme Court nomination and Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card, Brett Kavanaugh, and Dr. Ford escaping his closet full of skeletons to finger him for sexual assault, I’ve selected a couple of these blame-the-victim flavored memes being shared in defense of Trump’s beleaguered pick to break down.

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Bottoms Up / Sobering Trump Tax on Cheap Beer

It’s hot this summer. Very hot. And as we let climate change push us further into the dystopian Mad Max Wasteland a nice cold beer would feel so good on our chapped lips, so cool on its way down our burning throats. But not so fast! Thanks to Immortan Trump, that frosty, thirst quenching brew is gonna cost ya.

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