I’m just stupid and exhausted.
So, in that sense, I’m a lazy, dumb person, which is pretty well equivalent.
At least, if you’re a MAGA, it is.
Slam, bitches. Thank goodness I’m not.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1516 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Magician's Gambit, David Eddings
Comics: Youngblood 7, Team Youngblood 11, Brigade v2 11, Troll II 1
Music: White Crosses, Against Me! (one of the truly great modern punk albums)I’m fairly certain the answer is… yes. It’s complicated. Sometimes. Mostly not.
But probably some.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1198 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Dead To The World, Charlaine Harris
Comics: Youngblood 6, Team Youngblood 10, Brigade v2 10, Bloodstrike 11
Music: White Chalk, PJ HarveyTime, it slips away so easily. One minute, you’ve got it all.
Then…
Like Keyser Soze, it’s gone.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1181 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Dead To The World, Charlaine Harris
Comics: Brigade v2 9, Bloodstrike 10, 25, Team Youngblood 9
Music: White Blood Cells, The White StripesI would like to reconcile a lot of things; the question is, how?
Our pasts, personal and ancestral are littered with misdoings and tragedies.
How do we move on? Will we ever reach a point where we can be forgiven?
I’m not sure how to answer that. On one hand, I don’t want to spend my life feeling guilty for things I haven’t personally done, or heartbroken because of the sins of a world past my control.
On the other hand, we can’t just ignore it.
We have to level the playing field, I think.
No more classes; no more bigotry.
When that’s gone, I guess we can lose the last vestiges of shame and guilt and move on to joy and union.
So, a few million years ought to suffice. Where there are people, there will be abuse.
I think the trick is not to blanket the earth in order to deny the sun to the weeds.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1238 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Born For This, Chris Guillebeau
Comics: Image 0, Brigade v2 4, Team Youngblood 2, Bloodstrike 4
Music: Where You Been, Dinosaur Jr.I mean, I’m working harder than ever, and tomorrow’s a holiday, so we can sit and think about what we’ve done, which admittedly, is a weird reason for a holiday, and I’m not sure it’s tangible help to native communities, but here we are.
It’s probably better to ask them than me, but I suspect the answer is that we’re not doing enough to reconcile the sins of past with creating a better future for the indigenous.
In any case, not to make light, but I’ve spent the last fifty minutes trying to have a character explain why he’s still consider liberal if he’s opposed to butt stuff.
It’s a hygiene thing, not a commentary on homosexuality.
(The character, not me. You get your freak on, boys and girls. As long as it’s consensual and doesn’t involve children, animals or those not capable of making that decision, then you get on getting on.)
Anyway, life’s weird and horrible things that require solemnity often overlap with the absurd.
I think we’d die if we had to take it all so seriously (which ironically, sums out how we got to our current edge-of-Armageddon political apocalypse). We all got too sensitive, hunkered down, doubled down, doubled down again and instead of letting shit go a little and talking it out, we’re about to have a civil war a hundred kilometres or so to the south of us.
Lighten up, jerks. Drop the militants, and get back to using your words.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1249 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Born For This, Chris Guillebeau
Comics: Brigade v2 0, 3, Team Youngblood 1, Bloodstrike 4
Music: Where The Fuck Is The Revolution?, Closet MonsterSo many distractions. So little time.
If only life weren’t so filled with insanity.
Why must we be so insane?
Who lives simply?
Can I move there?
Would they let me?
Or would I merely be a refugee, a symptom of the disease of modern living that consumed us all?
I suspect turnabout is fair play.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1507 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Last American Vampire, Seth Grahame-Smith
Comics: Youngblood 1-3, Brigade 1 (jesus, Liefeld is a garbage writer)
Music: When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts He Thinks Like A King..., Fiona Apple (all time favourite female artist? Very well could be, though I'm also big on Bjork, PJ Harvey, L7 and Veruca Salt)We’re all here by accident, and any second we get is pure luck.
Make of that what you will.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1050 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Last American Vampire, Seth-Grahame Smith
Comics: Tomb Raider: Inferno 3-4
Music: When In Rome, When In Rome (how did this get in my playlist?)Actually, there’s a third option.
Fight or flight or freeze.
(Or technically, die, but that’s really more of a consequence than an action.)
Science, bitches.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1140 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Last American Vampire, Seth Grahame-Smith (wait, I thought Abe lived until the Sixties?)
Comics: Tomb Raider v3 11-12, Tomb Raider: Survivor's Crusade 1-2
Music: When I Come Around, Green DayI think the whole thing I’m trying to do with this Bad Neighbours thing is to really explore how absurd the political dichotomy is, and how destructive.
I’m not exploring a third option, and the crazier the right gets, there becomes an increasing need to draw that hard line and say, no.
No more.
No further.
Enough.
And then push back the other way until sanity is restored. The problem is, the rhetoric on that side, so willingly and completely divorced from any kind of reality or genuity, is almost impossible to engage on a conversational level. You can’t argue the points, because they don’t care to listen, and won’t respond in good faith.
There is no argument that will stop this anymore. We need to convince ourselves to take action, whatever action we can, procedural, legal, etc., in order to slow this monster down enough to make it to elections, which at this point, is a question of whether they’ll even happen or whether these fascists will try to find an excuse to suspend them or rig them, because they know in any even remotely just system, they’ll get blown from the water, and then, they’re all fucked.
Basically, every obstruction that can be made, every inch fought for; give up nothing without extreme cost. Make them feel it. Wear them down; they’ve shown a great deal of incompetency.
They will make exploitable mistakes.
Use the bureaucracy against them, especially since you can no longer trust the Supreme Court, and every block at a lower level just gets pushed up to the shadow docket. Plus, even when the court rules against them, they just ignore it and do it anyway.
So, block, obstruct, don’t make it easy. Make them work for every inch, make every yard a Herculean effort.
It’s the only way.
Push back, push back, push back.
And when it’s all said and done, and the extremists have fallen by the wayside, then maybe we can get back to ending the dichotomy.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1313 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Sylvie And Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll (god, this is shit)
Comics: Lara Croft And The Frozen Omen 4-5, Tomb Raider v3 1-2
Music: Whatever Happened To P.J. Soles?, Local H (quite possible the most underrated one hit wonder ever)Let’s be clear: political violence, and indeed, violence of any kind, is not okay.
But let’s not do the thing we always fucking do when someone dies and pretend like they weren’t a complete asshole. This man actively spokes against the rights (and lives) of gays, trans people, women, blacks and various other minorities, often in hateful, violent terminology.
All you really need to know about the guy is that he thought gays should be stoned and it was fine if toddlers died in school shootings because it meant he got to keep his guns.
So, no, I’ll decry violence to the end of days, but I will not shed a single fucking tear for a man who believed the murder of toddlers was fair game, and that empathy was something to be exterminated.
And don’t pretend, right wingers, like you’re on the higher path here: you did nothing when children were shot, you mocked Democrats who were shot or beaten, made fun of George Floyd and Paul Pelosi, and were upset that the kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer was stopped before it happened.
You cheer concentration camps and openly assert it’s right and good for people to die of preventable diseases. You laud Donald Trump’s violent, divisive, bigoted rhetoric and are fine with the U.S military blowing up a boat of people without warning or due process, even when they had no actual idea who was on it.
So, yeah, spare me your false equivalence.
If you despise political violence, you do it across the spectrum, as I do – and I’ll say it again – the shooting of Charlie Kirk, no matter what he was, is not okay. If you only care about it when it’s some guy you only just realized existed because Donald Trump somehow broke the news before the rest of the world knew?
Well, then fuck you and your disingenuous sanctimony.
It doesn’t serve you, or this world, unless your only aim is more, not less, violence.
As long as it’s against the people you hate, right?
Target: 1300 words
Written: 1555 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Carpet People, Terry Pratchett
Comics: Tomb Raider 46-49
Music: Welcome To The Pleasuredome, Frankie Goes To Hollywood