#they're basically accelerationists

[eowyntheavenger]

https://www.tumblr.com/themythicalcodfish/740908064020086784

Too many leftists act like evangelical Christians imo. All of this posturing about Biden boils down to people not being able to tolerate the idea of having to actually dirty their hands and accept moral compromises to actually achieve anything. Not even if it's literally the only thing standing between a chance to actually make some real change, vs outright destruction of democracy and sanity in the name of a dictatorship that will come after EVERYONE.

The Republicans, as vile as they are, understood this implicitly. They caterwauled and threw fits over their candidates when they weren't vile enough, but they still voted year after year, decade after decade to put their fascists into positions of power for over 5 decades. And now because of that work, they're on the cusp of possibly overthrowing democracy and destroying our world for their own hateful agenda.

Meanwhile, tell a supposed online leftist that they need to work for years to even see any chance of progress, especially given just how far behind we are and fighting against far Right oppressors all the way, and they'll throw in the towel and demand immediate fixes without any idea of HOW to even achieve that goal given how dysfunctional society is.

Or worse, basically advocate for a left wing version of a dictatorship, because their worldview is just as maddeningly black and white as the people they claim to oppose. All or Nothing, let the people they see as their enemies suffer, and demand absolutes from the people they see as lesser than themselves.

Very well said! I had a debate recently with one of these anti-voting people and they hit me with the usual arguments:

1) Voting "doesn't work" (idiotic).

2) Trump and Biden are the same (idiotic).

3) Not voting, or voting third party, constitutes a "protest" somehow (oh my god so idiotic).

We kept debating, and when I brought up the fact that Trump is a threat to democracy, they genuinely asked me why if Trump is such a threat Biden can't just "get rid of him." Just…WOW. As much as I want Trump gone, NO, we cannot just have the current president "get rid of" his main political opponent. Like do you support democracy or not? Well... in the case of these anti-voting freaks, the answer IS in fact no.

So this person, who’d been swearing up and down that voting for Biden = supporting genocide, actually turned around and said they’d support Biden if he could “get rid of Trump.” Which actually shows they KNOW Trump is worse. It’s exactly like you said, they don’t want to dirty their hands. If someone else would just get rid of Trump they’d support it, but they won’t lift a finger to do the one thing (voting blue) that has the best chance of keeping him out of office.

[qqueenofhades]

I also think leftists view liberals and centrists as worse than right wingers because liberals and centrists maintain the status quo, thus prolonging capitalism. In the case of accelerationists, they think a revolution is only possible if people are desperate enough to want one and so they often align themselves with right wingers who they know will make things worse (see MAGA communism as one example). To them it doesn't matter if the fascists will take power because they believe fascism always fails and communism will naturally follow. All the deaths will be worth it in the end.

I hit ask before I finished. I meant to add in parentheses that all of that is of course an oversimplification, but those are pretty much the arguments I saw in multiple leftists subreddit, on tumblr and twitter in the past few months. I know leftists irl are more normal.

See, this is what I mean when I point out that Online Leftists have become just as much of a zero-sum radicalized death cult as the MAGA Trumpists. They're willing to embrace any atrocity, global disaster, terrible people, and massive death toll as long as they think it'll bring their Shining Ideology (TM) to fruition, and then of course this will last a thousand years and never be changed and humans will bow down as a group to this Shining Ideology and destroying everything will be Worth It In The End. Apparently. This is complete ahistorical genocidal nihilistic gibberish, where any progress to fix the world and make a better future for the billions of people alive right now is actually Bad because What About the Glorious Revolution?!?! It is Totally Real! It Will Work! O Bow To Us Great Keyboard Warrior Dipshits! If You Don't Want to Violently Die With Everyone You Love, You Are Part of the Problem!!!!!

Now, I don't know about you, but I sure as fuck don't feel like sacrificing everyone and everything is a great tradeoff for whatever Communist Utopia these cosplaying pissbabies think would be the ultimate fruition of their labors. It's lazy, it's dangerous, it's stupid, it excuses them from ever having to do any effort to make the world better right now, and it feeds into the worst impulses and movements of humanity and the same mistakes that have been repeated in history over and over. This is basically what the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Communists thought: people would rise up in a Great Socialist Revolution, overthrow capitalism and fascism and every other bad thing in the world (which would somehow never ever come back, I guess) and then the future would be bright and shining forever. In practice, it resulted in tons of bloody and pointless deaths, a lot of failure, and some communist regimes that were absolutely zero improvement whatsoever on the oppressive systems they had replaced (and often were in fact MORE oppressive, but online leftists don't listen to people who actually grew up in these regimes and are not eager to see them come back). And guess what? Capitalism and fascism were not actually defeated Once and For All Time! Because yet again, you cannot just Violently Revolute your way to Ultimate Morally Pure Power once and for all, kill the Right People (aka everyone) and then everything is fixed forever. If it was ever going to work, it would have already done so. It has not. This fallacy is the cause of pretty much all the evil in human history. So. Yeah.

[naradreamscape]

Hey um. I have a theory about why far-right and accelerationist Christians are so in support of the colonization of Palestine, especially with the statement, "Israel is our ally/friend". In short, filling "Israel" with mostly White and White-passing settlers means a televangelist can point to a person with Eurocentric features, and say, "He's descended from Jesus!" to a child who's only seen Jesus looking like Obi Wan Kenobi.

I don't wanna throw this onto peoples' dashes with the safety off, so further exploration under the cut:

Deep down, non-Jewish zionists are basically following the "Palestinians are just people who wandered into OUR houses" sentiment of Kahanism, but in a way that "protects" the Evangelical & pay-to-pray Christian subsets' perception of a White Jesus. The mass murders of innocent civilians is then shrugged off, believing "they're just invaders".

For years, people have scoffed at the White Jesus depictions, since there are actual reconstructions of the body wrapped in the Shroud of Turin - but since that's the only physical artifact we have of what Jesus the Man looked like, some have been trying to debunk its authenticity as a death cloth. Beyond that, the Levant and its political history are well-documented, so we know what communities lived in that territory, from the Romans to the different local Jewish Palestinian communities - where Yeshua ben-Yosef was born, so we know historically he was a Palestinian.

Palestine is one of the oldest cultures on earth, and one of the fewest that hasn't been Americanized to any extent. The Palestinian Jesus grew up in Palestinian culture - which doesn't match the tourist-friendly ideal of Americans standing around in tunics, quoting the New Testament. It's hard to sell hotel and theme park packages in Jesus's hometown when the local population doesn't want that at all and just wants to live on their own - and they're serious enough about it to take up arms against this.

In Short: I very sincerely think far right American religious organizations are encouraging the Palestinian genocide because the Israel Colony Project will provide them with a White Jesus. The IOF is being encouraged to be as destructive as possible so more landmarks and traces of ancient Palestinian culture cannot be used to debunk the existence of Americanized Jesus, after which, they will be "rebuilt" by the colony according to whatever their own designs may be. In the meantime, far right Christians - and to an extent, Mormons too - are funding the genocide under the guise of "Israel is our ally".

It's white supremacy being purported by two far right religious factions. I'm ashamed of all the people who claim to share my religion, still thinking they've gotten this far because they're correct. They're running on the money of white supremacists. I am ashamed to be Jewish most days, but I refuse to abandon my faith. I will not let this mutated version of Judaism represent us any longer.

[colorisbyshe]

Yeah not entirely sure how the ‘both parties are the same’ thing took off among leftists for an election like this, in the context of the party’s potential for hurting marginalized americans. When it’s clear that this country is NOT a democracy bc of the electoral college and rampant corruption- acting like “dems have to win my vote” uh what a cop out when this is not a leftist party and has Never won a leftist’s vote based on policy. But people i had respected were screaming these slogans from the rooftops, meanwhile serious activists always vote alongside activism, because with voting we’re trying to **keep as much momentum going as possible,** dems wouldn’t have passed a bill like this. I don’t Like the dems At All but fewer people die under them, and we want fewer people to die while organizing, that’s all. This basic logic got completely lost last year, and now look where we are.

I mean, I do have theories about what happened to the left this election (like quite a few people seem to be accelerationists), but that doesn’t really matter anymore. I think I’m in the same state as you and will also be losing my insurance. Will be tied up trying to survive (even more than before) now over trying to pitch in. Also feel like they’ll be sending ICE into blue states like crazy now, so. Fuck. I at least appreciate you saying something about this elephant in the room, that so many are conveniently ignoring.

“I did a protest vote-“ concentration camps are popping up like daisies now and there probably won’t be another election- an american leftist’s dilemma solved!!! /s

Yeah, tbh, at this point I think anyone who still trots out "both parties are the same" instead of "these parties are not different enough, which means we need to keep fighting even when democrats are in office and perhaps need to fight even harder because that's when the window of potential change is even SLIGHTLY cracked" is just... not dealing with reality.

It gives "I've read Karl Marx but I refuse to read a newspaper."

Like we are dealing with ideology, not reality. Because the reality is even if democrats "win" the midterms, gobble up the next presidential election (god willing that happen because i DO think that's in jeopardy, not even in an alarmist way just like... I have eyes)... people are going to feel so fucking exhausting from this administration that they aren't going to do shit. They're going to hope the dems just clean shit up and that's not what dems do. Dems need pressure but who the fuck is going to be up for that after this?

If any of these leftists actually did the work with local orgs, they'd vote. Local orgs promote voting and want to have the path of least resistance for their work.

But I don't think it's ~accelarationism or whatever driving people to pretend that voting has zero value while ignoring how hard republicans try to make it hard/impossible for peopel to vote (which makes it very clear that voting IS power).

I think it's simple: people don't want to feel complicit. If you opt out of voting, it's not your fault when Kamala continues to bomb Palestine. YOU didn't vote for Trump, so the Big Beautiful Bill isn't your responsibility. You criticized them both! So you can't be at fault for both.

It's not ideologically pure to vote for an evil person. Which they both are. Every US president was, is, and will be evil.

But abstaining from voting, voting outside the system for Jill Stein or whomsteverthefuck doesn't make you less culpable.

If you are an American, you benefit from American imperialism on some level. Even as an oppressed American, your life is still made easier by people in other nations being subjugated in other nations. Your gas is cheaper, your goods are cheaper because of American imperialism. Benefitting makes you culpable.

So, actually, it's your job to try to make things less awful.

Less people suffer, more people suffer less intensely under the less evil party.

And it is an ideological stain on my soul to say that. I am a bad person for shilling for people who would let me die if they could get awya with it.

My eyes are wide open.

I am aware that it is easier to fight when less people are suffering less intensely. The Work is easier, safer, more effective under democratic adminstrations.

It is not easy, it is not safe, it is not very effective. But it is more of those things.

And that difference does matter.

The fight is easier under democrats.

But I imagine most people who say shit like "both sides are identical" aren't participating much in the longterm fight, just short term shit like "yay Luigi" (whose political violence was great but did not save us from this bill, whose violence didn't move the needle, at all) or going to A Singular Protest while calling everyone else at the protest lame.

Food banks, hospitals running on charity funds, foreign aid, LGBT and women's health programs are all worse off now.

People are gonna die.

And, yes, it could've been prevented by people voting differently, voting at all.

People would still die under Kamala. Objectively true and a tragedy all the same. But more people are dying now, under this adminstration, and those lives should weigh heavily on anyone who thought themselves above settling for less evil. Cause I doubt their lives were on the line when they made the proper moral choice for themselves.

[gargamelldansen]

I study AI in uni rn, it’s a pretty interesting subject. There are plenty of people in this field that are genuinely passionate about the potentials of this technology and have real plans about how to use it to make disability aids or do archaeological surveys or identify melanomas or whatever. This post is not about them.

I noticed that especially on tumblr there’s a lot of people that have this idea that the average AI enthusiast is either a rabid accelerationist or just someone extremely lazy who doesn’t value creativity or process, only product. Now that's not everyone, there are a lot of people working on generative AI who think it can be used to do amazing things and want to see them realized. But holy shit, those are accurate descriptions far more often than I would have expected. We’re so fucked.

It will surprise no one that the amount of AI used in assignments is staggering. Give half a dozen students three months to work on a project and it’ll be >50% ChatGPT-generated code, >80% if you include the report they have to write on it. If you’ve been praying on the downfall of the AI industry, just know that in about 2 years they’re gonna be staffed by people who relied entirely on AI to get their degrees and they're not profitable _now_, let alone then.

My uni is one of many that have basically given up on enforcement. There’s no way to prove that an assignment was generated by AI so they often either don’t enforce it or grit their teeth and allow it. This is extremely frustrating if you’re trying to work in a group project. In the time I’ve been here, I have seen my groupmates:

On the day it was assigned, paste the entire 6-week 6-person assignment into ChatGPT, copy the code it generated without running it and immediately try to submit it on behalf of the group

get frustrated that ChatGPT wasn’t making usable code, I go help by giving them the exact solution to their problem, and then complain a few minutes later that it doesn’t work. I go check and they had pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to add the next functionality, which then didn’t work

find a similar assignment on github, ask AI to “rephrase” it, and try to convince me to submit it

use AI to generate citations for the claims they just asked it to generate. this goes as well as you think

use Stable Diffusion to make a storyboard for a hypothetical product instead of drawing one. The people in the pictures were all busty anime women

take two pages of a report that I had carefully written over the weekend, ask ChatGPT to rephrase it, then replaced those pages with the AI versions to “make the writing style consistent”

tell professors to their face that they used ChatGPT to do most of the assignment while asking for help or clarification on their grades

pitch ridiculous business ideas to one another where the gimmick is always a type of AI slop that already exists. An AI newspaper, AI therapy, AI web designer, and like any good compsci genius, a stock-predicting bot

take an assignment where we had to gather a bunch of data, and ask ChatGPT to generate the data instead. Their datapoint distribution was insane but we were graded separately on that section so I have no idea how they justified it to the examiners

spend 3 hours of a 4 hour group meeting making Joe Rogan’s voice repeat things we said or explain parts of the assignment. Two people did this and we gave up on getting them to stop

get some genuinely laughable summaries of articles about AI safety and ethics, and then parrot them back to the tutor

a million billion gazillion times they wait til the last minute and then submit their part as a fully AI-generated script that they apparently didn’t even run to check if it worked. I eventually had to change gitlab permissions so no one can merge unless I personally review it first

display an extreme willingness to flaunt any and all data security protocols. We had classes on how to Not Do Illegal Things With Personal Data and still I end up fielding suggestions to just take a dataset from a country with less protections or (in hypothetical scenarios we had to write about) find loopholes in laws. I end up in the back of the group looking like I’ve been poorly taxidermied while I watch someone use ChatGPT to summarize the EU AI Act.

At this point I’m considering shifting my entire course of study towards AI safety and ethics. It’s difficult not to associate the development of GenAI with this sort of slow capitalist collapse of labor where actual creatives get pushed out by this sort of AI-driven parasitoid middleman class, that then just cannibalizes itself as tech improves.

I’ll probably save the ethics rant about the tech itself for another post but for now it’s worth keeping in mind that a lot of the people talking about how you losing your livelihood to AI is a necessary step for progress don’t really care about the tech — at least not enough to learn anything about it — they’re excited because they think they’ll be able to get rich quick grifting their bosses by automating their jobs.

[rumpocky]

Reading that duty to warn letter is making my head spin about how obvious it is to any professional something skeevy happened. Do you think you could elaborate on why biden and co don’t come out and say they’re investigating it? Is it just retaliation from russia he needs to worry about, or is it more about trying to keep the peace on US soil and keep faith in the government/elections? Or do they just point blank need more time to investigate and don’t want to come out with an accusation of something so massive without proof? While I understand that logic, it’s difficult to rationalize putting so many lives in danger in the meantime by just handing trump a presidency he didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, and there’s no way in hell trump (or vance) wouldn’t use the opportunity the presidency gave him to rig more elections going forward and further divide the country with misinfo. Very frustrating situation all around, I don’t envy biden or others for having to make such difficult choices, but i really don’t see the reasoning behind the accelerationist/fafo/let things be approach if it’s going to result in far less peace in the long run.

Alright kids, here's where I'm about to blow your heads up.

Fuck the whole system. Fuck everything. Fuck your idea of sovereign nations. America isn't just picked apart by Russia and Israel, but there is basically The Silent Rome Of Capitalism or some shit.

So I'm gonna need you to follow along on some weird datapoints.

Per my one post, Biden didn't even really declare the strike, a bunch of semi-retired politicians, and banking and warfare institutions did, including Blackrock. Blackrock, summarily, was among the deciding factors to not just allow it, but message about it, to burn out this war economy.

At the same time, Blackrock is summarily moving to take over the Labour party in the UK, and others. That is to say, companies like Blackrock, Lockheed Martin, and all of it are at least sort of temporarily disinvesting from the US after a blowout, intending to counteract Russia separately and smother them, as well as hope to hold out their invasion of other countries. Follow my new-no-US-nato-NWO jabber.

So right now a lot of these signals are based on global combat in that kind of capacity. I could not speak their reasons, but I'mcertain they're there, and incredibly complicated.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary577

5/1/25

thursday

went outside today!

unexpectedly, our friend came over, his glasses had just broken, and i was able to fix them with this repair kit we had laying around. it was just that the arm had come off so i was able to put it back on. after that we went to this place that used to sell korean corn dogs... but... it's changed, the menu? it's not a big deal at all, or not meaningful, really, it's just strange, now it's just regular hotdogs and then the other side has mochi donuts still, and this one matcha thing i like basically. but it sucks, that it's, i don't know, it seems like someone bought it and changed it into something more 'general' that people will be into even though like, korean corn dogs are the most approachable food of all time almost. they're like hyperamerican. it's like scary to americans i guess i don't know, that they're better at that or something almost. or it's too foreign seeming somehow. maybe it's tariffs but it's like... corn dog batter, maybe thicker, i know there was mochi involved as well in the k-dog, at this place, which is why it's so good, but they still have the mochi donuts available. and those didn't taste any different. i mean the tariffs are scary for most of the places we like to eat, and the food i like to buy/cook with. like rice wine/vinegar/mirin etc, the huge tub of gochujang. it's not really exciting. it's also worrying because it seems like a bunch of places that are like, imported foods and things for groceries will probably die or something too. it's such a baffling handling of things, what's going on. i mean i guess everyone knows, or gets the gist that there is the psychotic/hallucinatory dream of america producing the world, basically, rebuilding its industry to wield some kind of material hard power, standing apart and self sufficient, and then, i don't know, from there, probably weaseling itself back into the financialized world/period we occupy now. some weird desire to make oneself the underdog so as to dominate again. i don't grasp how it could work, obviously industry will not reappear here, if one imagines trump is not acting out of senility (which he most likely is, it just feels like a worthy exercise), what value does this act hold, an immediate effect might be more animosity towards anything foreign from americans, but this is the problem with me/the lines of reasoning i tend towards and tend to find interesting, it's much easier to read a kind of ideological goal into some acts, that the economic situation might produce a way of thinking and that is the goal. but really that could be secondary, is it simply just to make countries feel a burn of america not trading with them to once again lower prices? what sense does it make to do that. i don't know enough to even understand if that's something that would appear in the mind of someone doing something like this. suffice to say i'm too stupid to begin to theorize, really. i do not enjoy accelerationist lines of thought, and find them to be really lacking, i don't think this is some kind of moment where america has hung itself and by speeding this along we might see opportunity for liberation. i mean, that opportunity might appear for all kinds of reasons, but i don't think this is the destruction of the empire, at least from the perspective of the proletariat or anything. this is just another disaster that will represent catastrophe for the poor.

i'm just stupid and quibbling over the stupid uncertainty i feel. it's not that i'm in any position of losing a lot. i just don't want things to become so bad, or, i feel so useless in the face of it. i am pregnant with incapacity.

i feel like this painting from usuno taro, partially. i really love the black tears, same color as what looks like a nosebleed, emanating void, nothing left to bleed or cry, almost. or maybe leaking in a terribly abject way. that painting in general makes me think a lot of things, clutching a friend/lover who is going away, ill, or seeing something terrible with someone and having no escape, two abject figures comfort one another at the bottom of the wastebin of the world. etc.

today i sang along with this, for practice. i did vocals for 2 songs!! one was a lot of re-recording, which is good. i didn't feel up to the task of working lyrics out for a song, but i got a lot down for 2 songs, one needs some stuff to close it out, actually, both do. they're a little empty towards their back halves. so i need to do that. but i recorded vocals today, in the afternoon, in the morning, i cut up chicken to prepare either tomorrow night or the night after, and then another breast for cooking another time. so it was productive in that way. i feel good about that.

oh, i came out to my mom too, i did chicken and came out before noon. for some reason i am more pleased by that, than the coming out itself. all i said was i'm not male and showed my mom me and she said she's on my side no matter what and didn't as a lot of questions, which i feel happy about.

something in me though is screaming about it. it makes me feel like when i was a kid and didn't have a door on my room, just a curtain, or how they'd just barge in any time even when i did have a door, or how i only used the computer in the family dining room. i don't know why it feels like giving up a secret, and why that makes me feel kind of sick. i love my mom, but this does bring forth something that will always probably make me feel something complicated and unpleasant. it's a bunch of words that clog my throat, and make me incapable of speaking. i would always end up so mute around her on some days, when she was mad, and would ask me what my problems were, and i couldn't speak at all, and she'd just stare and get angrier, which made me quieter. it felt like that was happening about the me not being visible to her at all. so that's defused at least. is that just how things are when you're an adult? i mean, giving things up, is that what life is. i don't want to phrase it that way, it sounds so negative. when it's with my girlfriend it feels very okay, to explain things to her. other people too. admitting when you're wrong, it's something you have to do. but, portions of your life, must they always be exposed, is everything subject to sight at some point? it's not skeletons in my closet, so much as... i don't know, not secrets, but thoughts. the my thoughts my gender are complex, or maybe, just very stupid and a snake eating itself, in either case, it feels like another thing i might think of as gestating within me, and never fully formed. i don't want to admit it to anyone. i just want to express it. it's a body thing, and i'm here with it, cooperating with it, i have been since i was a kid, i am now articulating it by being my self, myself, so the elaboration is in my posture and how i smile and how i try to shape my body. it might be hormones, next, i hope it is, hormones next. and it's in that i'll never tuck and that i will let people use my name which is julien which is arguably a boy name but to me it isn't because i'm not a boy, because i'm nothing (but especially not a man). and it's okay to put this all here, because it's confused, and i can articulate it differently or the same tomorrow. and i can say things, ugly nasty stuff, like, i won't tuck. or it's not ugly. it's just how i feel. this is maybe too much. but the politeness of a parental relationship means the scope is impossible, or something. am i pretentious. i just don't like... i don't want this to be something i feel like i need to back away from, or make some kind of concession about. or... be asked stuff that feels embarrassing but how is anyone really supposed to know what that means even, people just mean well. sometimes meaning well hurts in ways that are so stupid you can't voice them. maybe everyone dies because all the well-meaning little paper cuts add up into a grave.

laughing through it though. haw haw haw. like a dumb animal.

i had a strange dream today, i wrote most of it:

rolling world/place of green hills, sharp cliffs, how ireland is in a dream, roving some massive distance, headed someplace, a girl sits alone, jilted and ruminating in a single-car freight train as a passenger train, huge and grey severe things speeding along and the world still seems so slow, the sky is blue and white sand the clouds are that sun eaten flat kind. a ship's body, hull of a white plane the train passes by, all things she begs to bring to her lover, trinkets too massive. elden ring map screen briefly, cursors moves somewhere north, the island she's at corresponds somewhere on the map, somewhere no one has ever been, in the game or in the real world, a new land mass. at a house party at night where streetlights twinkle as tea candles and the night is a reflective oily thing or is the sea at night repeating the stars and comets back up at itself, a shivering echo. the girl in false-ireland recalls katamari rainbows across the sky, super 2d emanations from nowhere, shot with an old camcorder now, seems so distant and i stand on a driveway talking with a man about how hard it is, he says, to be a man with a vagina. i listen closely, i am nodding, holding nothing. houses go into nowhere forever, the driveway is the kind we have out here, all the same as the other, a total suburb. i listen and feel sorry, he has sideswept bangs and is skinny. he makes me think he's from another time, that makes him comfortable to be around. a car comes, he goes inside. the person gets out, the character from the green hills, she is irish and distant. she says she knows him from the internet and says he is weird, goes inside. it is day, a friend from online is at the house, we all want to go swimming. i swim to the bottom and sit there for a second or two, letting the water pressure press on my sinuses, clearing them. i surface and my online friend asks if that's good, i say i don't know but it's nice and feels helpful. she says she'll try. she wears goggles, she goes underwater, i go underwater. we sit next to each other. i feel as if i could breathe underwater, scared by that feeling, i surface earlier than necessary. it is so blue under the water, the color of summer cooling, clear blue sky occupied and chlorinated, dragged to earth and repeated in a backyard, a sad feeling for a captured thing. i see she hasn't surfaced, go back underwater, retrieve her, when she surfaces, i laugh about her going longer than me. i fly back to vegas from wherever that is. two more internet friends arrive, my friend from saudi arabia and my friend from chicago. i point out things on the way home from the airport. the sky is grey, they laugh at the mess, the city is clustered together and denser than before, my saudi friend finds everything hysterical, my chicago friend finds everything worrying and still laughs. a store for coke themed / logo bearing leather goods built into a clusterfuck building downtown. the entire region resembles a katamari popped before becoming a star, spread all things before ascent. the city is loosely organized pieces of trash. a building set into the ground, we pass overhead, on the freeway, a campus for the 'painter's union' who paint sets in films. vegas is becoming la. we get home. i say bye to my friends, i fly somewhere else waiting for my gf in an old hotel. the room feels similar to a grandparent's house, old and dim and beautiful and safe feeling, a luxurious hole carved into the world over some years. small and huge simultaneously. i check a cabinet and closet, find mothballs, search for insects, find none. i walk forwards, a sheer curtain of droplets of ink suspended in air rises slow and undulant into heaven, a strange and squat crt tv. i leave the room. my friend from online, a different one, this one is from the uk, says they are coming. i don't know where we are, somewhere cold, how colorado is, and somewhere old, as if it were some point between the sprawl of colorado and cobbled streets of europe. they arrive, i stand at an exit, see a shop and want to buy something and cannot.

they are before me, i say hi. i realize i have left my fake glasses in vegas. feel a need to go through time and do things over again. i am thinking of the need to buy in my heart, embarrassed by it. i lead them through the hotel to room 121 where i am staying. i show them the crt, they laugh, i find it's attached to some weird virtual console. we play some old game that basically plays itself until the second stage, where it briefly turns into a 3d running game, but mostly it's a game like abstracted pinball through stages. the game is almost ugly because it's in a too cartoony western style but it's also charming and i am quiet staring at the pixel art in the crt, they wonder why i'm so quiet, i say, i just like seeing the pixel art shimmer in the crt. we wonder what console it came from. i ruminate on a particular sense of loss of something pointless and small, or the momentary loss, and worry about not having enough of something without knowing what that is.

i like how much katamari appears in it, as an image. i guess thinking about it more, the disjunct happy apocalypse of garbage and small things feels like a shared theme. maybe my dream is less happy. well, katamari is really just less happy than it seems, it's more tearful and loving and laughing through some intense feeling.

everyone alive, on earth, would like this song. i think it could make everyone cry.

i submitted my writing some place. i wouldn't expect to get in but it'd be an honor. it's a new magazine/e-publication. it's off to a really strong start i'd say, with the 2 of the first 4 publications on it, it's new as of today/ 5/1.

this one by b.r. yeager, is really really excellent.

before i write about it, after writing about gender and that dream, i feel something, as if it were in my arms and throat. so i am going to try and articulate this feeling. i don't know what it is. maybe i'm just feeling the sense of having released it here. but i'd like to turn it to something else. so i will follow that, briefly.

something strange came out. i will try to work on it. there is something of a character and situation here. i will hopefully grow it into something. it might absorb some poetry, who knows.

but this story, by yeager.

i love this line describing vomiting:

Dogs with lava-filled maws tearing me up from inside.

it's so vivid and odd and the image of the knife firing up from the garbage disposal is also beautiful and strange, and the speaker leaning over and aiming to have it fire up into their head, and it not. the disappointment, it's so so excellent. i am tired now so i have not much to say but i would like to, if i remember, come back to it tomorrow.

similarly excellent:

Embalming: the monument was an exact replica of her house as she had last rushed from it, every and each detail exact. The way the wind troubled the curtains, the precise quality of light. Stockpot on the stove, small stewing bones, extraction of gelatin; half-solved crossword; laundry still-damp and tumbling, that horrible buzz the dryer made.

once again, really vivid and amazing stuff i think. i love the way this oscillates between more standard prose, almost gesturing towards narrative, dissolving back into poetry... it makes me feel a:

yes!

in my heart.

i would also like to try and explore this one more deeply tomorrow as well, but we'll see where the music stuff takes me. or the writing, or if errands leave me too tired. or if errands inspire something else.

i'm really excited about this site generally. and if the other 2 are nearly as good, well, if i'm rejected that's fine, i have a website putting out new writing i'm really excited about and the editorial voice here is strong enough to know what's good, and selects writers who produce work that goes well with what feels like the goal here, to explore what language can really accomplish, to make efforts to deal with difficult thoughts and ways of thinking. not transgression for its own sake. not shying away from things that are pretty or moving. i don't know... i just feel very excited. so if it's good, then that's enough. if i am involved in any way, even being able to submit, it makes me feel a little honored. i am really bad about knowing what to put in my emails for submissions if not a lot is listed. so i probably shot my foot there by being rather... not rather, excessively, maybe, minimal and only saying 'urine related' about my story. but it's true. it is urine related.

but a publication i'm eager to see more from. maybe it will be short lived. we will see. i hope it's not though. i hope it gets the eyes it is worth. it's maybe too early to be so excited but david c porter is a good guy, i should reacquaint myself with his writing as it has been a while i feel like.

posting him earlier made me want to post more... he is such a good artist. i love him so much, i'm sad he either doesn't post the work like this that he does so much anymore or he's less active or just doing his bl stuff. which seems to get people interested. still... i want him to draw more strange nightmare things. that work means so much to me.

his posts lately with the doll are funny, at least.

tomorrow is going to be a long day probably. we are going to try and go to the new h-mart but probably not get in, there's a huge line daily still. but we're also getting groceries and i am going to eat a hamburger maybe.

so,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[theninjazebra]

(Written September last year, and I did chuck the diaries in the end.)

Weird thoughts on memory, self, and digital life that I'm putting behind a read more because oh God emma shut the fuck up

I think i might burn my journals. I think forgetting is good. Not everything, not all the time, not as an institution or nation, but individuals you can forget shit, let it go.

I used to to journal every day. It started as an extension of religious practice, but grew into a sort of weird venting. Rarely it covered what I actually did in life and more just a way of offloading brain space. I'm guessing I stopped around 2016? I dropped it because what was meant as spiritual reflection had become a hollow ritual.

I also grew up online. We had a home computer of some description since I was six, and I had internet access (tho limited, because dial up and religious household) since... 11? 12?

The internet has been an extremely mixed influence on my life. An escape and also the means for my isolated and depressed parent to access a world of weird conspiracy. It's unfiltered noise, a hundred whispers and diaries and weirdos, tiny ephemeral moments recorded thoughtlessly, forever.

Memory is impermanent. It changes, softened, drops things for 20 years and then throws these weird details out. The past becomes a reflection of the present filtered by fears and hopes of the future.

People have always had a fraught relationship with history and memory and how's and whys of recording their experiences. A million ways to say This Was Important, I Don't Want To Forget.

And now a generation of internet kids have unprecedented access to their past selves. Not just the important stuff, everything. Preserved in a way that no other generation could have.

Again, this is not about historians. This is about people, and me specifically.

I think, personally, that it's very bad for people to live in a world that is entirely about them. Same as its bad to live in a world that entirely removes their sense of self. Extremes, as a rule, are unhealthy. Perspective and a good mix are important.

So I'm going to ditch these diaries. They contain nothing, just pages and pages and pages of self, a sad weird warped self. A past i don't need anymore, that takes up space, that documents nothing special. I'll keep the travel diaries, they had notes and sketches, and are markedly slimmer. But all the dreck, all the dead skin, can be shed. Transformation is a part of life, as is the permanent scars and changes, the hard code that never changes.

I just wish my digital life could do the same. Not forgetting the important stuff (like all the fuckin logins) but all the bitty crap. And being surrounded by everyone else, also trapped in amber.

And I get it, the present sucks complete and total ass. A shit world of diminishing returns, a generation left holding the bag for the 20th century prosperity, all looking in the windows of the past.

From the most absolute basic stuff like how poorly made clothes are, even high end clothes (the y2k fashion is wild to me - seeing the same design but in vastly inferior material), to the big stuff like educational inflation and housing costs.

And the apocalypse, the doomers, the accelerationists, they're used car salesmen. They're selling a get out of the future free card. If there's one thing I learnt in Depressed Isolated Person Teaches/Doesn't Teach Children At Home School it's that the Apocalypse is a just way of not dealing with reality.

Not to say the future is roses. It's not. But it's not hellfire either. It will be harder, hotter, leaner. But you will have to live through it, and so will every child, and all their children.

Shedding skin, shedding the small dead stuff, letting a hundred thoughtless comments and dumb bullshit and detritus. That's what I want.

[beesmygod]

The attitude you talk abt alienated me out of art scenes/online years ago, and only been thinking about sharing art with ppl again after finding ppl who DO talk about this kinda thing, but they're rarely other artists. It's becoming a crisis to me, because it's not just about moral responsibility as it is the complete disinterest in artists examining their (massive) role in maintaining cultural hegemony, part being the obscuring of working class' self-determination by replacing our supposed leisure time with a specialized market that reinforces the status quo (sry lol). Like this cannot be done without artists as willing collaborators. But the same time artists like to (especially now) assume art has some categorical leftist position while being completely at odds with over a century of leftist art theory or what their art practise functionaly does. It's demoralizing that basically no one wants to imagine any other way of creating or engaging in art/entertainment. I'm gonna become a fucking AI-art accelerationist

lmfao fuck at the end. this is really well said. i make a dumb shit web comic about morons so im not under any delusions that im making any kind of tangible change in the world let alone a positive or negative one. but i cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance of artists both demanding to be taken seriously as performing leftist action by creating (often spoken about as if art is an inherently leftist act? its a human behavior) and then undercutting themselves by insisting what they do doesnt matter. pick one bitch!

[rumpocky]

Harris campaign has been spectacular, organized and aggressive. They knew about the Russia threat, but they wanted to win (of course). So, if there was fraud, they have to ask for a recount now, or whatever they need. Other countries are at risk, if Musk manipulates other elections. I hope they wait till the last moment and then make the announcement, when all the West countries and their allies have made it clear that it's not just the US. They all are done with Putin's BS

I have two perspectives here.

My personal one would agree with you. This, I find, is actually actively interfering, putting my ego in the way of playing the game to try to specifically attain that goal.

My zoomed out weird one?

Nah.

That's anxiety talking.

Even with Putin in America's pocket, Trump and Elon will be destabilizing the US so proactively, our ability to contribute will be broken at the kneecaps for several years.

Also, guys, it's like everyone's having a stroke and forgetting the US is an imperialist shitbag too, and has been funding wars around the world since fucking forever.

While I agree we need to support Ukraine, I also believe the rest of the world needs to begin picking up the slack, because no matter which war handout america cuts, it's at least pulling its dick out of one fucking pie. Israel, Gaza, fuckin. Fucking everywhere guys. All of it, the whole fucking thing.

America has refused to stop pissing in corners of the world paying into war since forever now, and it has to fucking stop. I'm no accelerationist, but if this is the way to make it stop, then shatter this old fucking babylon so we don't all fucking die, fucking thanks.

Putin will try to play robber baron, but only once the union really fractures officially over this. His only real gain is Trump cutting funding to Ukraine, and maybe a few trade deals.

Trump is also not generally long for this world, and Vance lacks the cult dedication. By the time he dies, his own people will start eating Vance's bones. Hell, the votes aren't even certified yet and they're all eating each other publicly already, what do you think happens when their false prophet superstar goes in the dirt?

Even that might be a better long term resolution; it would be far easier for military generals to push back against Vance once the obsessive sands of Trumpism have to break, even if that means the feds like, installing some fucking martial law and us ending up under some holding pattern override, functionally stopping what we know as democracy until all other prosecutions, investigations, recounts, or whatever the fuck else.

-- long term, this is ironically a resolution democrats supposedly want: A breakup of american imperialism and war funding, cornering Russia trapped upon itself with us, rattling the financial institutions, and basically removing the US as a primary world power to be replaced by a new-kinda NATO without reliance on us. A New World Order, if you will.

It involves accelerationism, which I'm not an inherent fan of; I believe in protecting people at all costs, caring for the poor and such. But if the accelerationists are here, definitionally hellbent on their path, it is far better to turn them against each other than to keep kicking water uphill eternally while internally rotting our institutions, society, and cultural mental stability.

Like we're here, it's been us trying to jam the door for election after election, and stalling really isn't saving our asses.

So just... breathe. Plan. Put up some basic supplies, build your coalitions and communities and communals, and keep your heads down for a few years. I hate to say it, take down your pride flags and things like that, undye your hair, start living like we're in Nazi Germany because, for a short time at least, we are. Don't self identify yourself as a target more than you have to.

Anyway. I think I'm doing pretty good at this for falling in backwards 20 years ago and just now realizing, what do you guys think

[glitchlight]

imo radical centrism's obsession with moral purity literally nobody follows is a secondary manifestation of the american state worship that they uphold. cursing is basically universal regardless of profession or class, but you can't do it on tv!! you can't call your "opponent" a fascist if they're polite!! we must venerate the nice republicans even if there's essentially no policy difference between the fascist accelerationist republican party platform and the non-Trump outliers!! The american public wants bipartisanship even though it hasn't existed in literally 30 years-- all our surveys say so, and you can't bias a survey at all!!

It's all tenor. It's all tone. They don't believe in anything beyond decorum. When nothing means anything, it's all in how you say it.

civilty in US politics is fu*cking bonkers man you can have a preacher at a town hall calmly calling for gays to be publicly executed but if a politician responds to him “FUCK YOU” that politician would be the subject of a week-long tirade about some bullshit “this is a dark day in american history. i cannot believe a politician would say the f word. we are a country of people who respect others’ opinions uwu”