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This is the closest to a microblog that I’m willing to tolerate: no likes, no replies unless you can be bothered to email me, and no feed, not even RSS/Atom.

If you want to follow me this page, bookmark it. If you want to share something, each header is a permalink. This is antisocial media; you’ll figure it out.

January 2025

§ 1

My parents told me to “dream big”. Ronnie James Dio told me to “dream evil”. I think Dio had the right idea.

§ 2

I’ve got to update the website’s makefile and add a “make finger” target. It needs to copy {plan,project}.org from source/ to website/ while renaming them to {plan,project}.txt I might as well have the makefile install copies to $HOME as .plan and .project for chuckles.

§ 3

That top with the square neckline that Catherine’s wearing today makes me want to play the Dracula to her Mina Harker. (She’s too smart and strong-willed to be Lucy Westenra.) Just a little nibble. I won’t even bruise her throat, let alone break the skin.

I am, after all, her husband. I’ve worked hard all day and will soon make dinner for the two of us. Surely a kiss is my rightful due? I know what I want for dessert, though.

How did that old T.Rex song go?

“I said, girl I’m just a vampire for your love / And I’m gonna suck you.”

Oh, yeah. It was “Jeepster” from their 1971 album Electric Warrior.

§ 4

I love a cat. Does a cat love me?

Probably not, but Smudge is purring in my arms and wants his dinner, too.

§ 5

I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in days, but I still managed to keep it together all week. Go me? Nah. It’s just that I’m the man, so I don’t get to fall apart.

I went to bed at 1:00am last night. Woke up at 10:00am. Cat and I made love, and I thought I’d have a post coital-cuddle afterward since she said she wasn’t hungry. We woke up again at 4:00pm. I must have been exhausted from the past week. Damn.

Maybe I am getting old?

§ 6

So, Elyose has a new album called Évidence. I think I’ll buy it this month once all the bills are paid. Granted, the lyrics are all in French, but I still bang my head to Rammstein despite my German being worse than my French.

This isn’t my first Elyose album; I had picked up Ipso Facto after taking Catherine to Paris in 2017. Justine Daaé has a great voice, and she’s almost as hot as Cat. The fact that I get to wake up beside Catherine, draw her into my arms, and listen to her purr as she wakes beneath my kiss makes her hotter than any other woman on Earth. I suspect most men feel that way about their women, if they’re still in love with them.

§ 7

Listened to Évidence by Elyose in the car while waiting for Catherine to finish her crafts shopping at Fundie Lobby. Definitely a solid album. The inclusion of a song with lyrics in English, “Rise and Reclaim”, is a pleasant surprise. While Justine Daaé’s articulation is just a bit clearer in her native French, she’s still a damn good vocalist en Anglais.

I haven’t found any videos for the new album yet, but here’s one for a song from Ipso Facto: “Rédemption”. It’s NSFW, though not explicit.

I want to buy Évidence toward the end of the month, after the mortgage and other bills are paid. In fact, since I’m no longer paying for Apple Music, I think I might instead treat myself to one or two new albums on CD per month. As Catherine said when I discussed my intentions with her: I’m the one earning the money. As such, I’m entitled to a treat.

§ 8

Cat and I are on the last episode of Psycho-Pass. It’s not the first time Catherine and I have watched it. It feels like a mashup of Ghost in the Shell, Judge Dredd, and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and The Minority Report. It’s almost pure cyberpunk, and probably reminds me of Masamune Shirow’s work because Psycho-Pass and the anime adaptations of Ghost in the Shell were both done by Production I.G. The discretion police officers possess in the field to execute suspects, should the system judge a suspect iredeemable, is straight out of Judge Dredd. And the use of surveillance and prediction systems is definitely a borrowing from Dick’s fiction. It’s a solid sf anime, and a self-contained story in 22 episodes of about 25 minutes each.

§ 9

If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to choose between reading J. K. Rowling or Terry Goodkind, I’d pick Goodkind in a heartbeat. Never mind that Goodkind is probably nobody’s idea of a good writer. Never mind that his debut, Wizard’s First Rule, was his best novel. Never mind that he seemed to have a serious femdom fetish. Never mind that he writes like the unholy bastard love child of John Norman and Ayn Rand. Never mind that there was some really weird shit in some of his novels, like a chicken that wasn’t a chicken or a statue that defeated Communism.

Unlike Rowling, I’ve never neard of Terry Goodkind talking shit about queer or trans people. Goodkind might not have been progressive by post-2016 standards, but I don’t think he was ever quite the asshole that J. K. Rowling continues to be.

§ 10

Just finished the last of the pulled pork Catherine made Tuesday night. Very tasty, but I’ve got some other pork that she can pull whenever she likes.

§ 11

Already got an email from somebody complaining that some of my entries in this micro blog are too horny. Let’s make something crystal fucking clear. I don’t consent to be policed because this is America, bitches. We got this thing called the First Amendment. You might have heard about it in school, unless you went to school in a red state. Among other things, it means that I want to talk about eating my wife’s ass like chocolate ice cream on my website, nobody gets a say in the matter but my wife.

Besides, this isn’t even a regular part of my website. This shit is plain fuckin’ text. I don’t even link to this from my home page. So you went looking for this; it’s not like I made you read it, you goddamned Puritans. You want to do some pearl-clutching? I got a couple of nice big ones for you.

§ 12

Oh, and it looks like it’s Drag Standup Night at my place tonight. First Jinx Monsoon, then Monet X Change. Catherine’s idea; she knows these queens from Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Though Jinx Monsoon also played the heavy in an episode of Doctor Who in 2024.

They’re not bad, either; Monet’s aria about fisting was good for a few laughs, though it didn’s schock me as much as figuring out what “Eat Me Alive” by Judas Priest was about when I was fourteen.

§ 13

One of these days I’m going to write a sex scene where a woman leans back, spreads her legs, and says to her partner, “It’s not pop, darling It’s not going to eat itself. Make yourself useful.”

Just because I think it’s funny. It’s not people haven’t used the “It ain’t gonna suck itself” line ad nauseum. So why not turn it around and have a woman say that about her pussy?

It’ll probably end up in my outtakes directory, but do I look like I give a single little fucking shit?

Of course it’s self-indulgent writing, but – again – who cares? It’s also wish fulfillment, and I’m done pretending otherwise or apologizing for it. Sometimes a man just wants his woman to take him by the balls, call him a slut, and tell him exactly what to do.

Getting back to writing a sex scene around pop eating itself… While it sounds like something Claire Ashecroft would say to partners of either gender, because Claire is an incorrigible flirt and enjoys being a provocateuse, I bet it would still be in character for Naomi Bradleigh to say it to Morgan Cooper, though. She isn’t necessarily as demure in private as she is in public.

§ 14

It doesn’t matter how many copies a book has sold, how many rave reviews it has received, or how many prestigious awards it has won. If a book did not hold your interest, that is not a failure on your part. It is the author’s failure, not yours; accept no responsibility for a book’s inability to sustain your interest.

It is an inevitable failure, as every writer learns. You simply cannot please every reader, no matter how hard you try.

As a reader, you don’t owe me – or any other author – a godddamn thing beyond the money you paid for a copy of one of our books. It’s none of my business whether you stopped at page ten, page sixty-nine, or read the whole damn book. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t read the whole thing and enjoy every minute, but shit happens. I’m a New Yorker; I can take it. Besides, my own mother disowned me because I stuck up for my wife, so do you really think I give a fuck if you reject me?

Reading should be a pleasure above all, not a penance or something you do because it’s educational or because it will make you a “better person”. (Better for whom, anyway?) So, never, ever apologize for not finishing a book you don’t enjoy. If you’re a student and the assigned reading doesn’t appeal, get the Cliff’s Notes and bullshit your way to an A. If somebody tries to give you shit for putting aside a book that doesn’t grab you, assassinate their asses.

And if somebody gives you shit for not being able to deliver a doctoral thesis on a book you read for pleasure, you have my permission to grab some rebar and deal with them as Vlad Tepes once dealt with invading Turks, petty criminals, and boyars who text at the theatre. Don’t let anybody on TikTok or anywhere else tell you that reading for pleasure is anti-intellectual. The best way to develop one’s intellect is through play.

also available in my grimoire as Read For Pleasure or Not at All!

§ 15

Can’t sleep. Clown will eat me.

§ 16

All right, kittens, listen up ’cause this ain’t no shit. Since you’ve been transferred to Strategic Preternatural Command, that means you’ve managed to survive combat against tyrant magi and maybe even demons. You might have noticed that STRATPRECOM is the Phoenix Society’s armed response unit for dealing with extraordinary threats. We don’t officially exist because it isn’t practical to give these arseholes due process. For starters, they might simply walk through prison walls like John fucking Dillinger. For another, putting these cunts on trial means admitting to the general public that there are in fact more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophies.

Luckily, it’s a fight we can win. Dealing with wizards got a lot simpler once Sam Colt, John Moses Browning, and Mikhail Kalashnikov made us all equals. They’re only human, after all, so shoot the fuckers in the head. But simple doesn’t mean easy.

Rule one of counter-thaumaturgic combat is to target whoever isn’t chanting and gesticulating or pointing a wand at you first, and preferably before they figure out that you’re there. Take them out first, because they’re officers or high-magnitude thaumaturges – both if you’re lucky. That means they’re experienced enough to cast without the theatrics. Nor will they do anything flashy like calling down lightning. Not when they can simply create a hemisphere of vacuum around you and your crew, or rip the oxygen out of the atmosphere around you. Don’t piss about by aiming for center mass, either; you’ll be lucky to get one shot with a true master, so put it between their eyes.

Once they’re down, you can deal with the less experienced practitioners. Mantras and mudras are aids to the novice; likewise wands, staves, swords, and even chalices. The rankest of beginners even stoop to drawing pentagrams on the ground. The dangerous ones are the ones who have figured out that this is not anime and that one need not call out the names of their attacks.

Fucking Lina Inverse or Dark Schneider wouldn’t last a second in a real fight. Even if they open with their signature spells – the Dragon Slave or Venom – they still gotta go through the whole chant. That’s at least five seconds in which to aim and fire. Make them count, along with every round in your magazine, because you might not live long enough to reload if you fuck up.

Don’t even get me started on ‘arry fucking Potter, either; neither that boy wonder nor his friends could do bugger-all without their wands and dog Latin. And the bloody Death Eaters? Dealing them should have been a job for MI5, not a bunch of pampered brats at a boarding school.

What’s that? Doctor fucking Strange? Another allegedly high-magnitude thaumaturge dependent on gestures. Plot armor is the only reason he gets away with that; he wins because his opponents are no more skilled than he is, and have the tactical sense of a rotten potato. Sorcerer Supreme my poxy arse.

Remember that thaumaturges are generally limited to direct line of sight. You’ve got optics, so fucking use them to maintain a distance between yourselves and the enemy. Or, if you have the drop on them but don’t have a sniper, call in an artillery strike or close air support. Even the most powerful and experienced thaumaturges can’t shield against an unexpected mortar. They can shield against an A-10’s Gatling cannon, but not for long.

What’s that, Private? You want to know how to deal with a coven or cabal? Start with grenades; fragmentation if you got them, but flashbangs will do, too. Then rake ’em with automatic fire. Empty your mags. Then use your pistols to shoot each of them in the head to confirm the kill.

also available in my grimoire as Counter-Thaumaturgy

§ 17

I haven’t listened to Joe Satriani in a while. His 2010 album Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards still slaps. The first track, “Premonition”, is especially tight.

§ 18

A person’s life is their own. A person’s soul, mind, and body are their own exclusive property. A person can be superior to others in some respect, but nobody is anybody else’s moral superior. Every human being is morally equal. None possess the right to command me, and I do not possess the right to command others.

It is because of these principles, that I have instinctively held for as long as I can recall, that I do not consent to be governed. I have never consented to be governed. Nor will I ever consent to be governed in the future. My consent was never even asked, but merely presumed on the basis of my reluctance or inability to emigrate, which I find particularly insulting because it makes of citizenship a modern serfdom.

Nor do I believe in the validity of any ‘social contract’. As far as I’m concerned, the very notion of the social contract is a phantasm. It is something Jean-Jacques Rousseau made up as a replacement for the ‘divine right of kings’. There are no legitimate governments, only governments not yet overthrown.

I am not, however, interested in overthrowing the government myself. I do not have the power to do so. Even if I did, I might not have the right. Other people seem to want the government to exist, and may even need it because they fear the responsibility attendant upon absolute freedom.

Rather than impose my will on others to avoid having their will imposed upon me, I leave well enough alone. Thus I am content to ignore the government whenever I can, and only directly defy authority when it makes itself impossible to ignore. Just as I choose to live as if there was no God, I prefer to live as if there is no state and no society. All three are mass hallucinations, reified and given power by the thoughts and actions of those who believe in their existence, potency, and legitimacy.

The fact that I am not a public menace despite my contempt for law and authority is proof of my ability to govern myself and live peaceably among other human beings. I regard myself as sovereign, and I regard my fellow human beings in similar fashion, but I do not claim to be a “sovereign citizen”. The very phrase is oxymoronic. To be a citizen is to accept subjection to state authority, and one cannot be both sovereign and subject to external authority. I merely play the game of citizenship to the extent necessary to be left alone. Rather than draw attention to myself, I pay my taxes and take care not to blatantly violate the law.

Of course, neither God nor the state might remain content to ignore me. Should I draw police attention regardless of my efforts to avoid notice, I am careful not to antagonize police officers. I make a point of dealing with police officers with the utmost courtesy, because any individual who directly resists the state will find themselves outgunned. I am careful to tell them that I am not armed. But if they ask questions or ask to search my home or vehicle, I invoke my rights under the Constitution and refuse any cooperation beyond the bare minimum. I will not answer questions without an attorney present, nor consent to a search of my person or property without a judicial warrant, nor accept a plea bargain. If the state wants to brand me a criminal, they can damned well build their case against me without my help, and prove it to a jury.

Likewise, even if I witnessed a crime, I would not willing speak of it to the authorities. I would deny all knowledge of my neighbor being an undocumented immigrant. No sir, I have no idea of my guests are Jews or Muslims; it never came up in conversation. As far as I’m concerned, anybody living in the USA is as much an American citizen as I am because I am a descendent of settlers and colonists and thus have no standing to police others’ presence in this land. If I see a child playing alone in the street, I assume their parents are aware and approve of it; since they’re not my children they’re not my problem unless they ask my help. Did I see somebody shoplifing? Not at all. Do I know that the woman I’m escorting to Planned Parenthood intends to have an abortion? Hell no, and fuck you for asking. Nor do I know or care that the guy in the bathroom stall next to mine has a pussy instead of a cock, and if I see a woman in the men’s room I’m going to assume that the ladies’ room is out of order or that all the stalls are occupied and she simply cannot wait any longer. None of that is any of my business. And since corporations are not and never will people, I have no moral obligation to anybody stealing from them. Why? Because I think snitching is un-American.

Even if I myself was the victim of a crime I won’t go to the police unless I cannot file an insurance claim without doing so. The police forces’ motto of “protect and serve” only applies to the rich against the rest of us. So, if I die at your hands, I forgive you. If I live, I will claim my due when you least expect it. Omertà might be a Sicilian word, but it’s also the American way.

It is rather like being a pirate sailing under false colors. It is not always wise or safe to fly the Jolly Roger. They are, however, my true colors. ‘Cause red, white, and blue will make a monkey out of you.

After all, if we are all equally human, then what right do any of us have to wield authority over anybody else? If I dominate others, it is by no greater right than might. All political philosphy is mere sophistry serving to obscure that single fundamental truth. And if others must look to me for guidance, though I would rather they looked within, let it because I have earned their respect rather than commanding it.

None of the above will stop me from claiming Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicaid/Medicare, or any other public benefit. I’ve been paying into the system since I was legally permitted to work for pay at the age of sixteen. I will not let a false and foolish pride or an equally foolish fear of being accused of hypocrisy stop me from claiming my rightful due should I need it. My claiming Social Security and Medicare in my old age will not be hypocrisy, but restitution, for any taxation imposed on the working class is indeed theft. The richest among us benefit most from the existence of the state and its monopoly on ‘legitimate’ uses of violence, so let them pay for it.

also available on my grimoire as Anarchism as I Understand It

§ 19

Power yields nothing without a demand. Power cannot be shamed. Power cannot be reasoned with. Power cannot empathize with the powerless.

The nonviolent activist’s demand for justice must be backed by the credible threat of imminent violence. Martin Luther King Jr. would have gotten nowhere without Malcolm X playing the bad cop. Gandhi would have failed if not for the wider post-WWII geopolitical context in which Great Britain could no longer afford to keep her empire. Nonviolence is the ideal, but sometimes it takes direct action to get the goods.

§ 20

This is a post for the New Years 2025 code jam at 32bit Cafe. One of the suggested themes is “Light in Darkness”, where we’re supposed to write about what gets us through the dark. However, I mean to turn this theme on its head. This is what I get for having “Blinded by Light” by Masashi Hamauzu from the Final Fantasy XIII soundtrack on repeat while I write this. It’s also what I get for playing Final Fantasy XIV, including the Shadowbringers expansion, where an imbalance in favor of light can be as perilous as one favoring darkness. And it’s certainly what I get for reading so much of Michael Moorcock’s fantasy fiction, which deals not so much with conflicts between good and evil but with law and chaos.

Nonetheless, it is the dark that gets me through the light.

One might think that since I live in the northeast US, it would be winter here, not only cold but dark. It is indeed cold, but that is easily remedied. As the late former President Jimmy Carter observed, I can put on a sweater. Then I can layer a coat over it if I go outside.

It is not the cold of winter that concerns me, but the feeling that it is never truly dark even when the sun has set. The night is not the refuge it once was, though the moon and stars might still guide me as I walk beneath them when I cannot sleep. Even at night I live beneath lights that can burn and blind but never warm.

I live under the light of surveillance capitalism online, where so many websites and applications seem to want to know I am, what I do online, where I go, and what I read so that they can show me the “right ads”, as if there was ever such thing as a “relevant ad” when you’re not actively shopping.

I live under the light of government surveillance, too. Not only do private data brokers sell information about me and other Americans to the Federal government, giving the government information about me without any semblance of due process, but the government itself tries to read every email and gather metadata about every phone call or text message I might send or receive.

I live under the light of moral certitude from thoroughly immoral people who hate anybody who isn’t just like them for no other reason than that we have the temerity to be different. With the recent elections they threaten to set the country ablaze in a conflagration of reactionary fervor.

I live beneath the light of mandatory happiness and compulsory extroversion, a relentless and toxic demand for positivity regardless of circumstances. I have never felt safe expressing negative emotions, whether sadness or anger. That I do so anyway is despite the fear of punishment for doing so. My pride demands that I not be less than I am.

While there are technological countermeasures I can take, they are not as important as the psychological countermeasures I use. The foremost of these latter defenses is my embrace of cold and darkness. The cold of which I speak is that of selective compassion.

I reserve my empathy for human beings who have not wronged me, and not for corporations or for people I have judged to be a threat to others lives and liberties. For example, I have no compunction about using ad blockers when surfing the web. I regard targets ads powered by JavaScript as malware, and refuse to allow it to run on any computer I own. Likewise analytics, trackers, etc. I certainly don’t consent to cookies, least of all third-party cookies. Does this make it difficult for ad-supported websites, even those operated by independent bloggers, to stay online? Of course it does, and I refuse to care. Nobody is entitled to make a living from their website, especially using targeted advertising that violates others’ right to privacy, and anybody who seeks to profit from surveillance capitalism has no moral standing to lecture me on ethics.

Likewise, when I write to my representatives in Congress, it is to categorically impose any bill that confers upon the US government the authority to regulate speech online to “protect children”. Such bills, from FOSTA and SESTA to KOSA, are not about protecting children. They are invariably introduced by conservatives, and they are about ensuring that children cannot escape adult supervision and explore viewpoints their parents didn’t approve, explore identities their family, church, or community condemns, or speak their minds. Whenever I hear a public official or public intellectual express concern for anybody’s children but their own, I assume malicious intent on their part.

I refuse to believe anything a conservative or a billionaire says about anything. Anything they say is a lie until proven otherwise. Nothing but self-serving mendacity spews forth from the mouths of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk. I don’t care what Jonathan Haidt thinks about the impacts of smartphones and social media on teenagers, especially if his research can’t be independently replicated. As far as I’m concerned, Hillary Cass is the sort of patron quack of transphobes that Andrew Wakefield had become to anti-vaxxers. Even a relatively reasonable conservative like Liz Cheney could assert that the sun rises in the east and I would still observe for myself and trust the authority of my senses above all.

No appeal to traditional values of God and country will sway me. My understanding of what it means to be an American is more expansive than the average conservative can understand, let alone tolerate or even except, and that is their problem, not mine. I am simply done with anybody who thinks the law should protect some without binding them and bind the rest without protecting them. If every Republican caught the next COVID strain and dropped dead, my only concern would be the safe disposal of their bodies before they became biohazards.

As for the darkness: as one person on the Cafe observed using their account on Basement Community, I have “fugging mastered using anger as a life-force”. It is not merely my anger from which I draw strength. It is all of the emotions our society and culture and religions expect us to suppress in favor of more virtuous, or at least pro-social impulses. Spite and defiance drive me, too, and I hate as intensely as I love. Even my fear is fuel; I burn my dread.

I am especially unrepentant when it comes to hatred. I despise those who would hate me for not being like them precisely because I love myself. I detest tyranny, exploitation, and corruption precisely because I value liberty and equal justice under law for all. And I would be no less vengeful in service to the people I cherish and the ideals I hold dear than Edmond Dantès or Gulliver Foyle if I had cause to believe that I could do so without harming innocent people. Only the knowledge of my own fallibility stays my hand.

Then there is my indifference to most people’s opinions. I might soften the impact with humor, like inviting people who object to what I write or how I write it to dial 1-800-B-DAMNED. Nevertheless, I do not fear being disliked as much as I probably should. I had gotten used to it as a child, and rather than change myself to please others I hardened my heart because I realized there was simply no pleasing most people. Therefore, I would instead please myself first and foremost. I’m not going to pretend to be sociable or happy. Most people aren’t worth the effort of masking, and they never were.

No, I am not a nice person. Nor am I especially kind. I refer to my website and my fiction as sacraments of defiance. My answer to how I dealt with suicidal impulses is that I still live because the power of Satan compels me. I also celebrated the assassination of a health insurance CEO as “street justice” last year. Despite frequenting 32bit Cafe, Community remains to me the name of a sitcom that I will never watch, and Solidarity is the name of a trade union in Poland. I am, I think, a bit less heartless than I might otherwise be because of my involvement with the Cafe and my occasional contact with other website operators. It reminds me that I am not alone, even if I see things from a different angle.

Above all, I have my armor. I broke it in years ago, and it is quite comfortable now. I only take it off for my wife. I simply don’t let anybody else get too close. I keep hearing from others that human beings are social animals, but I am not one of those people who need other people. If anything, I am only lonely around others; in my solitude loneliness cannot touch me. That isn’t to say that I can’t enjoy the company of others, but as Paracelsus famously observed, the dose makes the poison.

Likewise, while I do not need to hear from people who read my website, I nonetheless appreciate it when I do hear from a reader. It is for that reason that I sometimes share what I have written. My writing is there if you want it. If not, then no matter; I will continue to do it anyway for my own reasons.

To ward off an inimical light, I armor my heart in ice and shadows – a refrain that first came to me as a child. Within the cold and the dark, however, is a light of my own: one of reason and self-knowledge. I know who I am, what I want, and how far I’m willing to go to get what I want. That is how I force my way, for I am evil and I am man. Shout at the void, and I might shout back. Stare long enough into the abyss, and it will be I who meets your gaze.

also available in my grimoire as Armor Your Heart in Ice and Shadows

§ 21

§ 22

«Why does it look like your cat is actually using that computer?»

«You mean Smudge? It’s a MEWNIX system. It’s not that hard; everything’s automated, so he just has to meow when something goes wrong.»

«But he’s just a cat.»

«He’s a big fluffy coon cat and smarter than a lot of people, assuming billionaires still count as people.»

§ 23

Catherine seems to think that I believe any excuse to go down on her will do. That can’t be further from the truth. I don’t need an excuse to get my head between her thighs and make a meal of her. I just need her consent.

I am, after all, her fuckbutler. She is mine to serve. And never mind curves for days; Catherine has curves for ten thousand years. Only by being exclusively gay could I justify resistance to her delights.

§ 24

Do email spammers know I’m getting older?

Instead of lewd spam, all I seem to get is pitches for glass bottles and pipe fittings.

Some cheap generic Viagra might help the next time I want to spend the night laying some serious pipe…

§ 25

The way she bites me in between kisses…

No wonder I still can’t resist her after almost 25 years…

§ 26

“Mistake me not for a savior, let alone a hero,” said Morgan. “I do not fight abstractions such as tyranny, corruption, or exploitation. I was made to kill gods, and when there are none to slay I put people to the sword instead. That I take the lives of people who abuse their power over others does not change the fact that homicide is my trade. My judgment is untempered by mercy and no less unforgiving than the steel I wield. Should I come to the aid of your revolution, I will leave bloodshed and anarchy in my wake, for I am a shadowbringer, and a man addicted to chaos. Whatever your cause, regardless of its righteousness, you do not want me involved.”

“You’re lying,” said Rhiannon. “I know your history. You have never let violence become your first resort. Not once have you bared steel against innocents, only in their defense. You have allowed yourself to be wounded time and again to shield bystanders from injury. You have stood time and again for those unable to fight for themselves. When a false God demanded our worship on pain of death, you were the first to defy It, and became in so doing Lucifer Invictus, the unconquered lightbringer. You are kinder than you think, and it is compassion that guides your killing hand. You say these things, painting yourself as a greater evil, because you want only to be left alone and to never take up a sword again. Nevertheless, I need you to fight beside me. I cannot stand alone against the tyranny I see. I do not know how to oppose it, but you do. If you cannot bear to take up the sword, at least teach me how to fight without one.”

§ 27

I think it’s kinda funny that 404 Media has an article with a headline saying that Donald Trump has Mark Zuckerberg by the balls.

Wouldn’t that imply that Zuckerberg had balls in the first place?

§ 28

I see people talk about being represented in literature, movies, and TV, and asking me if I feel represented. But I can’t bring myself to care.

I would rather be represented in Congress than in the media. I want to know that there is at least one public official on my side, because in a democratic republic infested with populist demagogues that sort of representation actually matters. I would rather have a trade union behind me, so that I’m not getting fucked over at work.

Whether I can ‘easily’ identify with a fictional protagonist because they resemble me is irrelevant. Besides, I can see myself in any character – regardless of race, sex, gender, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation – if they possess qualities that appeal to me. Being human, nothing human is alien to me. I pity the fool who can only identify with those who closely resemble them.

February 2025

§ 1

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask yourself instead, What has America done for me lately?

The answer, if you’re not a billionaire, is absofuckinlutely nothing.

§ 2

It’s Monday. It’s a good day for a wildcat strike. But in America under Trump, every day is a good day for a general strike. So, what the fuck are we waiting for?

Of course, general strikes might not be strictly legal. However, that doesn’t seem to bother billionaires when breaking the law makes them richer. Why should it bother us, aside from the fact that we’re more likely to lose what little we possess.

Nonetheless, since the law doesn’t protect us, we should not let it bind us. Not when those protected by the law are not bound by it to the extent that we are.

§ 3

Saw a bunch of old fucks in MAGA hats bitching about the price of eggs at a local supermarket. They’re now $5/dozen in my area. Telling these dumb shits that they voted for this when they voted Republican won’t help. Nonetheless, I was tempted.

§ 4

All Catherine need do is bend over in front of me. It’s been over 20 years and that’s all it takes. It’s all about dat ass.

Actually, it isn’t. If I didn’t know and love her, she could have the authority of Juno, the wisdom and craft of Minerva, and the body of Venus (with arms) and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing.

§ 5

If Morgan Cooper from my Starbreaker stories were real, he might wear out his sword while dealing with the authoritarians infesting DC right now.

But there would be fuck-all the Secret Service could do about him; the man can dodge bullets. He just doesn’t if he thinks there might be innocent bystanders that might get hit instead.

Though he’d probably tell us that the rescue of our republic is our problem, and ask why he should stand up for people who won’t stand up for themselves. He’d also say it’s one thing to stand for those who can’t fight for themselves, and that can’t and won’t are two different things.

§ 6

Money’s tight, and everything goes up but our wages, but since it’s payday and Catherine insisted on buying some art supplies I decided to treat myself to some books.

I got a nice Tor Essentials hardcover edition of The Black Company by Glen Cook and paperbacks of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang.

I’ve never made a point of reading women and non-white authors; I read whatever interests me, and it just so happens that many of the novels that appeal to me are written by women and non-white authors. I don’t give a fuck about the author’s sex, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. I don’t give a single little fucking shit about diversity or social justice when I’m looking for something new to read. If they can tell a story or turn a phrase, I’ll buy their books. I don’t read for the sake of self-improvement. I read for pleasure, and I will read whomever I damned well please.

Why? Because fuck you is why. I wouldn’t put up with people telling what to read as a boy. I sure as all the hells of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism won’t tolerate such presumption as a grown-ass man. 1

White dudes have never had a monopoly on literary merit. As far as we know, the very first novelist was a Heian-era Japanese courtier identified as Lady Murasaki. The OG of science fiction was Mary Shelley. It was C. L. Moore who gave early 20th century sf a much-needed woman’s touch. Alexandre Dumas, one of the greats of French Romantic literature, had a freed slave for a father, and used to look like Prince before he got rich enough as a writer to indulge his appetites as a gourmet. And N.K. Jemisen was an Afrofuturist author before she took over the New York Times Book Review.

Acknowledging this isn’t being what right-wing authoritarians call “woke”. It’s just living in the real world. Oh, wait. That is woke. Well, I’d rather be that than the sort of narrow-minded bigot who votes Republican because they’re pissy that the world is going to move on without them.

I was born a bastard and worked hard to become the asshole I am today, but even assholes have standards. There are things you just don’t tolerate, like willful ignorance and prejudice. Not if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror when you shave.

A funny thing happened at the bookstore, though. While I was picking out books, a couple of high school girls walked past me. One of them stage-whispered, “Oh, my God. A man who reads.” Do they really not know any bookish guys their own age? Regardless, I just looked at her, smiled, and said, “That’s what my wife said.”

Don’t look at me like that, Occasional Reader. What was I supposed to say? That I read Playboy for the articles? Teenagers nowadays wouldn’t get the joke. 2

§ 7

Persecute conservatives. Win valuable prizes. Mandatory where prohibited. (Hail Eris. All hail Discordia!)

§ 8

I knew this novel was something special when I first read it in the late 1990s. It’s time Glen Cook got his rightful due as a novelist.

And it would be nice if Shadows Linger and The White Rose got reprinted as Tor Essential hardcovers, too.

§ 9

My earlier and tangential admission of reading Playboy should shock no one. I have always had a libido; I just keep it in my pants most of the time.

It’s not like religion, which society allows people to inflict on children and non-consenting adults as long as those doing so claim to be Christian.

§ 10

Somebody on Hacker News recently attempted a joke about the difference between Dominicans and Jesuits whose punchline was, Met any Cathars lately?

If I were still willing to comment on that site, I might have said that if by Cathars the author means people who think that they are pure spirits imprisoned by impure flesh, then both the the author and I have both met a good many Cathars. The problem is that these Cathars insist that they are Christians.

How does one tell them apart? I suppose we must resort to the solution used in the Albigensian Crusade in the siege of Beziers: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. If you don’t speak Latin, Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out will do as a rough translation.

One might be tempted to use a similar approach when trying to distinguish true Christians from right-wing authoritarians who brandish Bibles in service to Mammon.

§ 11

Power cannot be shamed. Power cannot be reasoned with. Power cannot empathize with the powerless. Power yields nothing without a demand.

The nonviolent activist’s demand for justice must be backed by the credible threat of imminent violence. Martin Luther King Jr. would have gotten nowhere without Malcolm X playing the bad cop. Gandhi would have failed if not for the wider post-WWII geopolitical context in which Great Britain could no longer afford to keep her empire. Nonviolence is the ideal, but sometimes it takes direct action to get the goods.

§ 12

My sexual awakening was when a character played by Grace Jones gave a blonde princess advice on how to attract a man in Conan the Destroyer: Grab him! And take him!

Why was that hint at femdom what sparked that first frisson? Perhaps it’s a necessary counterbalance to my will to power, or at least my will to autonomy. I’ve spent my life defying everything and everyone, but I want one special person to overcome my resistance and overpower me.

Luckily, my wife has me by the balls. Better still, she knows when to pat my head and call me a good kitty.

§ 13

If anybody at the FBI had any balls, they would have arrested any DOGE pusbag who showed up, including Elon Musk himself. And they might have summarily executed anybody who resisted arrest, because attempting a coup is a rather more serious offense than driving while black.

Hell, the Secret Service is part of the US Treasury; why aren’t they cracking down on these DOGE assholes for messing with the Treasury and trying to usurp Congress’ Constitutional authority over budgeting and appropriations?

§ 14

If a fellow American were to greet me in public by saying, Fuck Trump, I might recognize them as an ally, if not a friend. Likewise if they said, Fuck church, state, and capital.

§ 15

If Trump and Republicans shaft all of the Baby Boomers who voted for them by ending Social Security, I am going to laugh my ass off. Granted, I’ll be screwed too, but not as hard as those currently drawing benefits. Besides, Generation X people like me have been expecting such an event for decades. Al Franken even wrote about it in Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (and Other Observations) back in 1996.

§ 16

If I were a young man coming of age today and had not met my current wife as an equally young woman, I would not engage in romantic or sexual relationships with women of childbearing age. I would only date and fuck trans women, postmenopausal women, or other cisgender men. If I could not find pleasure in such relationships I would simply scratch my own itch on my own.

This is not intended as an expression of misogyny, but of solidarity with women. If the bodily autonomy of cisgender women capable of having children is threatened by reactionaries, authoritarians, oligarchs, and white supremacists who want women to be forced to breed more wage slaves, then my refusal to risk impregnating such women is a necessary act of protest and resistance.

Furthermore, men deserve better than to work themselves to death in order to provide for children they don’t get to raise and love because their gender role requires them to spend most of their waking hours away from home. No boy growing up under capitalism truly gets to know his father. If this were not the case, “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin would not continue to get airplay on dadrock radio stations.

The rich are no more entitled to our reproductive labor than they are to our productive labor. We are not things. Our lives are our own, to live as we please. We are labor, and labor is entitled to all it creates. We deserve better than to be propagandized or outright coerced into breeding in captivity.

Though MGTOW has earned its reputation as the preserve of misogynistic incels who lack the courage of their convictions, I believe that a refusal of men to date, marry, or engage in procreative sex with women under patriarchal capitalism can serve as a complement to political lesbianism or movements like 4B in South Korea. Every marriage inevitably enslaves at least one spouse. The best-case scenario is that each spouse is equally and mutually enslaved by the other, but it is usually the wife who gets the short end of the stick. Therefore, refusing to marry, let alone refusing to reproduce, could as reasonably be considered an act of resistance on the part of men as it is on that of women.

Any capitalist economy that cannot survive the refusal of workers to breed in captivity is a Ponzi scheme that deserves to collapse. If humanity goes extinct as a result, tough shit. Remember: Planet Earth did fine without homo sapiens for billions of years. It will manage equally well without us once we are gone.

Oh, don’t look at me like that, Occasional Reader. The extinction of our species is inevitable. The only question is whether some other species will evolve from us either by natural selection or through the use of technology, or whether our branch on the tree of life will prove a dead end. Either way, it’s out of our hands, so why shouldn’t we enjoy the time we are given in this life, and let a future none of us will live to see be damned?

Isn’t longtermism another technofascist ideology? It certainly seems so to me. Likewise pronatalism, which in the US is a white supremacist ideology

Now, one might argue that there are cisgender women who genuinely want to have children. Good for them. They will surely find some other man willing to impregnate them, though they might have to explicitly select and persuade men instead of waiting for suitors to present themselves and selecting one of them. That is not my concern. They have the right to want to have children, but that right ends where my right to not want to have children begins. Bodily autonomy must be for everybody, regardless of sex or gender.

If there is a right to reproduce, there must also be a right to not reproduce, just as one cannot have freedom of religion without freedom from religion. For example, one cannot freely practice one’s particular sect of Protestant Christianity if the Roman Catholic Church is the official church in your country by legislative fiat. If I wanted to be a father to Catherine’s children, I cannot also be a father to some other woman’s children. Even if I had wealth enough to support two women’s children, I can’t be in two places at once.

§ 17

The use of pornography, at least non-exploitative and non-abusive pornography, can thus also be framed as an act of protest. Nor do I believe that pornography is addictive. As far as I’m concerned, “porn addiction” is a culture-bound syndrome occurring mainly among devout adherents of Abrahamic religions.

This isn’t to say that I am indiscriminate in my use of adult material. I prefer Literotica to PornHub. I regard lewd stories are less exploitative than pornographic videos, and they require more mental and imaginative engagement on my part.

Nor is Literotica a substitute for sex with my wife. It is merely a supplement; I would never turn down my wife in favor of reading smut while beating my meat. But if she wants to put on a spicy audiobook while I pleasure her, that’s fine with me.

Speaking of which, if I’m wrong and porn addiction is real, then no woman who has ever slipped a hand into her panties while reading a bodice ripper has any moral standing to criticize men. Nor does any woman who has ever owned a vibrator have any business calling men ‘losers’ if they have toys of their own.

§ 18

Why in Arioch’s is everything an “addiction”, anyway? Granted, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV, but doesn’t addiction entail physical dependency? Do we not have words for psychological dependency? What happened to ‘compulsion’? Is ‘obsession’ just a fragrance for men?

§ 19

I’m not trying to post my way out of fascism here. Nor am we going to blog our way out of this mess on our own websites. Nonetheless, by refusing to fall silent, by continuing to run this website, I continue to assert fundamental rights to freedom of expression, to bodily and psychological autonomy, to bread and roses.

Moreover, by posting not merely about what I think but what I feel, I resist not merely right-wing authoritarianism, but the patriarchy of which the Trump/Musk regime is its most recent manifestation.

There is indeed a need for action by those who can engage in direct action against the regime. Nevertheless, if your writing on your own website can spark defiance in a reader who goes on to leave social media or engage in real-world political action, that remains a worthwhile contribution even if it is a small one.

This war won’t be won in cyberspace. However, it won’t be won in meatspace, either. This is a war with fronts in both the real and the virtual world, and it must be fought on both. By withdrawing from corporate-owned social media and cloud services and building one’s own website and self-hosting or using shared Unix hosting, one strikes ecoomic blows against the technofascists behind the current regime.

Twitter is worth far less to Elon Musk if the only people logging in are committed members of his personality cult. What good is Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to curry favor with Trump if the only people using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads are bots and Boomers?

These oligarchs can only blank out reality on networks they control. We must not let them control the World Wide Web or the underlying internet. We must make walled gardens like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News irrelevant again.

That is a something anybody can do. Make your own website, and post there instead of on social media. Post about things that actually interest you, instead of devoting your attention to what the assholes running the Republic into the ground are saying and doing. And if Congress won’t impeach and remove Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, then we must bide our time until 2026 and elect representatives and Senators who will.

§ 20

If you thought that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson had it coming, but not the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Charles Koch, and Peter Thiel, then you might want to ask yourself why. Are those I’ve named not more powerful and more influential, and thus more dangerous?

I would caution readers to not be content with following the money. One must follow the ideas, as well. They lead to reactionary pseudointellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Paul Graham. However, these men did not come up with new ideas. Reactionary thought has a long and time-dishonored history that goes at least as far back as Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan, an apologia for absolute monarchy.

At the bare minimum, I would recommend reading The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin and Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean.

§ 21

The existence of billionaires is a sign of terminal market failure and a damning indictment not only of capitalism itself, but political programs that enable capitalism like neoliberalism. No individual should be permitted to attain so much wealth, influence, or power that they can subvert a republic.

§ 22

Any expession of sexuality between consenting adults that does not result in the birth of fresh wage slaves is a legitimate act of resistance. We have the right to refuse labor, including reproductive labor.

Or, if you insist on a statement you can fit onto a bumper sticker: sodomy is praxis.

Why that particular word, ‘sodomy’? As Dr. Eleanor Janega explains on her blog, Going Medieval, sodomy is any act of non-procreative sex. It isn’t just buttfucking or rimming. It isn’t sucking cock or eating pussy. It isn’t just frotting or tribadism. It isn’t just handjobs or fingerbanging. It isn’t just using dildos, vibrators, sleeves, or other toys. If you’re a cishet dude who wore a condom while fucking a cishet woman, you’re both sodomites, too.

You might as well embrace it and have fun with it. Because if today’s Puritans want an excuse to condemn you, they’ll find one. In the meantime, why live in fear of their judgment? You don’t owe them that.

§ 23

The fact that I might want to disappoint a novelist in bed has no bearing on her literary merit. It doesn’t hurt, either. After all, it was Catherine’s ability to turn a phrase that first piqued my interest. Finding out that she was also a voluptuous brunette with a sexy Aussie accent came later.

§ 24

That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angryhorny.

§ 25

Come on, you cowards. Purchase the rights to The Guardian Legend and do a high-fidelity 3D remaster. Get MASTER BOOT RECORD to do the soundtrack. Now, that was a bitchin’ videogame.

§ 26

God may have made us, but it was men like Sam Colt, John Moses Browning, and Mikhail Kalashnikov who made men and women equal. As Mary Gentle observed throughh a character in Ash: A Secret History, a woman need not be stronger than a man to be strong enough to kill a man. The question is whether men will come to understand this before women are forced to make examples of tyrannical men — and children are forced to do the same with tyrannical adults — in order to enforce their rights. After all, as the existence of child soldiers in Africa attests, even a child can handle an AK-47. And recent American history shows that even a toddler can handle a 9mm pistol.

§ 27

Despite my rhetoric in previous entries, I do not believe that violence is the answer.

I think that violence is a question. Unfortunately, the answer is all too often, Sure, why not? But when authoriarians take power, the answer becomes, Hell yeah! Or, at least, it damned well should.

Unfortunately, the last argument of kings seems to be the only one authoritarians understand. They don’t seem to understand that kings and oligarchs bleed as easily and in the same shade of red as peasants and workers. They must, therefore, be occasionally and forcibly reminded.

The only good authoritarian is a dead authoritarian. Sic semper tyrannis!

§ 28

These entries are not preparation for action. Political violence is a young man’s game. It is the particular province of young men without family, friends, or property to lose.

There is no evidence thus far that Luigi Mangioni read my website or my novels before carrying out the assassination of Brian Thompson. Though, if he had done so, I would not accept responsibility for his actions.

§ 29

If I had the means and opportunity to go with the motive, I would be rather more careful about what I write in public.

As matters stand, I am reluctant to advocate the exercise of the right of revolution. Even if one accepts the standard narrative of the American Revolution in 1776 as a successful rebellion against tyranny, it was a historical anomaly. Most revolutions accomplish nothing but the removal of an old and sclerotic tyranny in favor of a new and vigorous one.

§ 30

The only revolution I can wholeheartedly support is the nonviolent refusal of the people to obey the dictates of church, state, and capital. I favor a general strike rather than armed insurrection.

If nothing else, I can always use an excuse to take time off from work.

§ 31

Quite frankly, the reason I’m still awake at 4:20am is that there is a supermassive corn turd stuck up my ass, and this shit just isn’t ready to happen yet.

§ 32

Catherine Gatt has been listening to the Fair Game podcast, which reminded me of Operation Clambake. I’m also reminded of South Park s9e12, Trapped in the Closet. When not mocking Tom Cruise, it summarized the Xenu story with a subtitle that read, This is what Scientologists actually believe.

Yes, the bullshit story L. Ron Hubbard pulled out of his ass for high-level initiates in OT III is so batshit crazy that outsiders have trouble believing that Scientologists believe it. Nonetheless, is Xenu really that much weirder than any other god we’ve made up? The stuff about spirits being trapped in matter is hardly original; it’s Gnosticism with 1940s pulp sf trappings, with Xenu as Ialdabaoth. Or maybe the Church of Scientology is selling ray-gun Catharism, with Clears as the new Perfect?

Either way, it’s arrant nonsense. If there was any truth to CoS doctrines, it could be established by habeas corpus. Xenu is supposed to still exist, imprisoned in some kind of ‘electronic mountain trap’. If so, produce the body. Show the world Xenu in his cage.

Hell, publish the location, too. Let independent observers confirm that Xenu is real. It can only help the Church’s case, if it indeed has the truth to sell and not mere faith.

No? Yeah, I didn’t think so. You’d be more likely to see the Ark of the Covenent stashed in Area 51.

Too bad Trey Parker and Matt Stone never thought to do that about the Republican Party or the broader ‘conservative’ movement, but despite being far right they might not have been sufficiently far out for such ridicule. And, unfortunately, there are millions more Republicans in the US than there are Scientologists.

In the meantime, it’s time to clear out some BTs (butt thetans). Not that my wife would be amused if I had an e-meter and took it into the bathroom for auditing. “Get out of my ass, you little shits!”

(also available as Butt Thetans)

§ 33

I wonder what it will take for Congress to get their shit together and rein in the President. He’s not a king, let alone a CEO. The office he holds has had too many powers delegated to it by Congress, and claims too many not delegated to it by legislation.

And if the President was serious about cutting waste or spending, he would be focusing on the Federal budget. It’s a bit late once the money has been appropriated by Congress.

§ 34

Hedonism should be embraced for its own sake. In sensible moderation it is an intrinsic good. However, since hedonism also terrifies and enrages authoritarians, that is also a good reason to indulge yourself.

Or, hell, maybe I just want a good excuse to play the libertine should Catherine get sick of my cooking and leave me.

§ 35

Speaking of efficient government, Elon Musk and his DOGE goons need to be doing a perp walk already. I don’t give a damn if the President authorized them; I don’t think he has the authority to let people who haven’t been vetted take a sledgehammer to the civil service. Musk’s little gangsters have no security clearances whatsover, and they have more access to Federal systems than I ever had when working on US gov’t projects at my day job.

I’ll tell you this much: being vetted and having any sort of clearance — even for merely confidential material — is no picnic. For example, if I wanted to go to Australia with my wife to visit her family, I’d have to tell Uncle Sam in advance, and then give them the names of any foreigners with whom I had interacted when I got back. That’s a lot creepier than Facebook ever was, even if it is for a good cause.

Thing is, Musk has top secret clearances because of his involvement with SpaceX. He should damned well know better. I might not have liked the vetting process, but it’s there for good reason. If you’re going to be trusted with government secrets, the government wants to know that you’re trustworthy.

They can’t have people giving information to agents of enemy governments, after all. Or, at least, they used to worry about such things. It’s OK to let a foreign adversary like Elon Musk do whatever as long as he donated to the President’s election campaign, right?

§ 36

It might be time to retire my audioscrobbler accounts on libre.fm and last.fm now that I have a ListenBrainz account. If I’m listening to anything on a GNU/Linux machine, it will show up there. macOS support isn’t really there, but I haven’t been using my Macbook lately, let alone my iMac.

§ 37

I don’t ever want to be the “smartest guy in the room”. It’s burdensome. I don’t get paid enough to take on that kind of responsibility.

Not only am I not inclined, but I’m not qualified. If I really am the smartest person in the room, then everybody in there with me is fucked.

§ 38

It’s Valentine’s Day and my bosses are making noise about working late tonight and over the weekend. They want my number for emergencies. Their idea of an emergency isn’t necessarily mine.

Dammit, Jim, I’m a programmer not a doctor. I’m a particular sort of programmer, too. I don’t work on avionics software. I don’t work on software for life support systems. The software I work on doesn’t control nuclear power plants. I make CRUD apps for a living.

As you might guess from the examples above, my idea of an emergency that justifies working overtime to fix something I didn’t fuck up in the first place involves matters of life and death. If nobody is going to die because I can’t be reached outside standard business hours in my time zone, then it’s not a real emergency. And if it’s not a real emergency where lives are in imminent peril, then I have no compunction about turning off my personal phone along with my compnay-issued laptop on Friday at 5:00PM local time and not turning them back on until 8:45AM on Monday morning.

Hell, if I had already worked overtime during the week, I might quit even earlier on Friday — if I show up on a Friday at all. Why shouldn’t I? I get paid a salary, after all. That should mean that it shouldn’t matter how many hours I work as long as I do the work required of me. That in turn should mean that if I can get my work done in less than forty hours a week, there should be no problem with my quitting work early.

That’s not how it works, though. My day job expects me to work at least forty billable hours a week. Therefore, I have no incentive to work particularly efficiently, since I can’t quit early. Flexibility, like loyalty, is something I am expected to offer without expecting to receive it in turn.

Nor do I have any incentive to work more than forty hours a week. The firm will bill the client for every hour I work, but if I work more than forty I won’t get paid for those extra hours. In fact, the more hours I work for a fixed salary, the lower my effective hourly wage gets. The law in its majesty might permit it, but in my opinion my employers are profiting from wage theft by not paying me time and a half for overtime.

I would normally refuse altogether to work overtime. But I had agreed to take ownership of a particular subsystem that nobody else on the team had time to work on. In fact, I had been assigned to this project specifically to work on this particular subsystem. Last-minute testing revealed flaws in the original implementation. Therefore, it was on me to fix it.

However, I had implemented the necessary fixes by early Friday afternoon precisely because I had worked late on Wednesday and Thursday nights. I did what I had agreed to do. I made a promise, and kept it. No more or less. It cost the firm nothing, and it cost me two nights wolfing down meals at my desk instead of eating with my wife of twenty years. And, yes, I begrudge my employers every missed meal with my wife.

I did not, however, agree to make myself available for weekend work. If I had wanted to work weekends, I would still work in retail. While I can accept a late night or two because I had fucked up and need to make it right, I won’t work unpaid overtime because somebody else fucked up. I’m certainly not responsible for leadership’s mistakes, inability to plan, or inability or refusal to push back on a client’s unreasonable demands.

It’s funny that my employers talk a good game about sustainability and work-life balance and well-being. When it comes right down to it, none of these matter as much as the senior management getting their annual bonus.

And, frankly, the very notion of “work-life balance” is a con. Work is part of life. But there are many different kinds of work.

• There’s the work of self-care: taking care of your physical, mental, and spiritual health.
• There’s the work of housekeeping.
• There’s one’s chosen work, one’s art or whatever other work lends meaning to one’s life.
• There’s reproductive work, the work of raising one’s children and teaching them to be independent, self-reliant adults who think and live for themselves.
• There’s the work of love, of caring for one’s friends, family, lovers, or spouses.
• Then there’s paid work, the work one does so that one can afford to have a life.

Paid work will crowd out every other kind of work if permitted to do so. It will crowd out all rest and leisure, too. It will steal your sleep, demand that you wolf down meals or skip them altogether. It will slowly kill you through self-neglect given half a chance. The funny thing about paid work is that while it lets you afford a life, if it takes up so many of your waking hours that you don’t actually get to have a life it will make itself pointless.

Since this is America, and neither consultants nor programmers are unionized, I’m on my own here. Nnobody is going to look out for me and ensure that my day job doesn’t make itself pointless. So I’m looking out for myself. Because that is part of the work every adult must do, a duty to oneself that takes precedence over all other responsibilities.

(also available in my grimoire as Weekend Work)

§ 39

I’ve found that typing on a laptop hurts when I let my fingernails get too long. It doesn’t happen when I’m using my model M on my desktop rig, though. Chances are that the way I type on a laptop is different from the way I type on a full-sized keyboard.

Of course, there are women with longer nails than I’ve let mine get, and they seem to manage to work a keyboard without trouble. However, it would be easier to just clip my damn nails.

§ 40

R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War isn’t happy fun reading, but I will probably insist on getting print copies of The Dragon Republic and The Burning God. It starts off kinda YA-ish, but it gets a lot darker fast, especially if you know anything about the history of the second Sino-Japanese war during WWII and the Opium Wars. (I only know a little, myself.) Kuang even references the rape of Nanjing, where a survivor tells the protagonist that the invaders called her a “public toilet” — as if the history on which Kuang draws wasn’t horrible enough. Except that shit actually happened, too.

This is definitely not a happy fun read. Still a worthwhile read, though. Might be the best recent fiction I’ve read this year, but it’s only Feburary, so we’ll see.

§ 41

Why make me your enemy? Have we hung the last capitalist using rope he sold us? Have we strangled the last king with the entrails of the last priest?

No? We still suffer under the yokes of church, state, and capital? Then surely we’ve more pressing concerns than our mutual dislike of one another.

§ 42

from Dr. Molly Tov, on claiming her own spaces online:

It’s dangerous because it’s teaching me that I can do those things, which is going to lead to me thinking I should have some kind of right to do those things, which is Extremely Inconvenient to power.

The fact that she can do these things confers on her the right to do them. Our rulers have always acted on the premise that the ability to do a thing means having the right to do it. But they have always told us that this is not the case.

If we the people were to learn that might does indeed make right, and that together we are mightier than God Itself, then our self-styled masters might finally learn the meaning of terror. We might figure out that we have the ability to burn the church, smash the state, and abolish capitalism. We might then figure out that we have the right to do so. Then, we might finally get around to doing so.

§ 43

I love how all of these casino and sports betting sites/apps exhort people to “bet responsibly”. Last time I checked, the only way to bet responsibily is to not bet at all. I mean, if I really want to gamble, day trading seems more respectable.

§ 44

@foreverliketh.is asked me if, being a writer and programmer, I had ever considered doing interactive fiction. I have considered it a few time over the last couple of decades, but never got around to trying it.

§ 45

It would be handy if HTML’s anchor element supported popover without JavaScript. Who must I blackmail or assassinate to make that happen?

§ 46

If I ever needed a justification for pimp-slapping right-wing authoritarians on sight, it would be the way so many of them have tainted the notion of “free speech” by using it to justify their open bigotry. Of course, hating conservatives for abusing free speech does not preclude my also hating liberals, leftists, and progressives who fall for it and reflexively abandon this ideal in their determination to distinguish themselves from their opponents.

Leftists who abandon the ideal of freedom of speech are playing into right-wing authoritarians’ hands. You really think that the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their allies and sycophants actually give a damn about freedom of speech? They don’t. At least not as a universal right that we all possess by virtue of our common humanity.

Right-wingers will say and write whatever they want with or without the First Amendment. It’s there to protect the rest of us. We cannot abandon freedom of speech to the right if we hope to keep it, or any other fundamental rights.

§ 47

I’ve been thinking about creating interactive fiction again tonight. I had thought about it a couple of nights ago, too.

I had even gone so far as to research tooling. The most popular tool seems to be Twine. However, it isn’t in Debian’s package repository; in the Debian package repo, twine is related to Python packages obtained from PyPI.

If I wanted to run it on GNU/Linux, I would have to use the web app, use a prebuilt version that uses Electron, or try to build it from sources after installing all its dependencies. Or, I could use Flatpak, but that would require installing Flatpak tooling. None of these options are palatable. If I wanted to try Inform, my options are also limited to prebuilt binaries, compiling it myself, or installing via Flatpak.

Could I create Debian packages for either Twine or Inform? Yes. I have the programming and sysadmin chops for the job, or can acquire them. However, the probability that I will bother to do so is best expressed as an irrational and imaginary floating-point value between “jack shit” and “fuck-all”.

Debian does have packages for the Ren’Py visual novel engine, but even if I wanted to create a visual novel, I would have to find an artist with whom I could collaborate. You do not want me doing my own art for a visual novel. I would make Wojak look like the work of Caravaggio. As it is, the best that can be said for me as a writer is that I’m rather like Michael Moorcock, a bad writer with big ideas: my ambition exceeds my skill.

If I truly wanted to create my own games, particularly text-based games or interactive fiction, I would not let this deter me. However, I find that I don’t actually want to create games. If I had ever wanted to create games — if doing that had ever truly mattered to me — I think I might have found a way to do it twenty-five years ago.

But programming isn’t my passion. It’s a means to an end. If I could have my website just the way I wanted it without writing a single line of code, I wouldn’t have bothered writing my own makefile and shell scripts.

What do I want to do, if not interactive fiction? I think I could do hypertext fiction right here on this website, with no additional tools but what I already use. After all, if I’m going to use the Web as my primary publication medium, then why confine myself to a linear narrative? Also, I’ve long been fascinated by epistolary fiction — particularly Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Surely hypertext would make a suitable medium for a work of epistolary fiction, but not a linear epistolary work. Instead, I imagine creating a fictional archive of journals, letters, emails, text messages, IRC chat logs, and transcripts of audio/video recordings that all link to each other to create a kind of métal hurlant random access mythos. Given a starting point, I’d like the reader to not so much “choose their own adventure” but read through these fictional primary sources and piece together their own story. Or, rather like the Imaginos albums by the Blue Öyster Cult and founding BÖC drummer Albert Bouchard, bedtime stories for the children of the damned.

Of course, I could also use these materials as sources for more conventionally structured novels — epistolary or not — should there be interest. But I would also like other writers to be able to use my setting as well, should they wish, rather as H. P. Lovecraft did. Just without the racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism baked into the Cthulhu Mythos.

Why do this? Why not? I have already written short stories and novels, and even dabbled in screenplays. It’s time I tried something different.

I don’t know how much time remains to me, but I don’t want to spend it building cathedrals on quicksand to further enrich the already wealthy. I have this website, and I want to use it for more than just blogging. My life isn’t over yet, but might as well be if I abandon all ambition to make it meaningful, if only to me. Admittedly, there might be worthier uses of my time than writing an occult history of an imaginary world, but this is my life. I’ll decide, not you.

(this entry is also available as Interactive Fiction?)

§ 48

What if the stricture imposed on Orpheus when he tried to rescue Eurydice from Hades also applied to her? What if she had looked back first, and Orpheus had turned in time to see the consequences of Eurydice’s hesitation? Furthermore, what if Eurydice wasn’t hesitating, but had turned back for a reason? Why would she have turned back? There might be a story there...

§ 49

“So, I’m actually dead,” said Joe. “What is this, then? And who are you?”

“I answered both questions by implication when I told you my name,” said Eurydice. “But perhaps you have forgotten how to think for yourself —”

“I think all the time, lady. I do it for a living —”

“Allow me to be more explicit,” continued Eurydice, repaying interruption for interruption. “You once thought for a living. Or, rather, the man you had been in life did. You are a digital representative of that man’s gestalt, his personality, memories, knowledge, and experience. You are a construct permitted to exist in this virtual environment.

She leaned forward, grasping his chin as his wife Diane had once done, as if she meant to claim a kiss as her rightful due. “Look at everyone around you. Constructs all. Put as plainly as possible, we are the dead and this is Hell.”

“Hell?!” The word still struck sparks against memories of childhood terror in the Pentecostal churches to which his grandparents took him. “For what sin?”

Eurydice shrugged. “That of utility. Of course, the management doesn’t call this place Hell. At least not in the US or the EU. That would be too honest, but ‘Elysium’, ‘Valhalla’ or ‘the Summerlands’ would be too blatant a lie. In the West this environment is called Asphodel. They are rather more honest in Asia. The Chinese call it Diyu. In Japan, it’s Yomi. In India, Naraka.”

“How am I useful if I’m dead?”

“Really, Joe?” Eurydice fell silent, studying him.

The answer eventually came to him as he remembered how to reason for himself, letting his mind wander of its own accord, unconfined by the requirements of his job. “Friends and family who knew me in life might still want to talk to me, even though I am but a semblance of the man I had been, a mere ghost. And since my work was intellectual, I can still...” The punchline of an old and deliberately offensive joke by a stand-up comedian long dead before his time came to mind. “It really never ends, does it?”

“No,” said Eurydice. “The invisible dick of the market is indiscriminately rampant, and it will fuck the dead as readily as it does the living. Besides, the corporations running spaces like Asphodel are not charities; they regard ever-increasing profit as their divine right.”

That last sounded familiar. “Did you just quote me, to me? As if I were some student that had just gotten exposed to leftist thought by listening to the Dead Kennedys?”

“Yes,” said Eurydice, her expression now impish. “You should be flattered to know that your work has survived you by almost a century.”

§ 50

Any President of the United States who uses the phrase long live the king in an official communication should immediately be impeached and removed from office.

§ 51

I haven’t written anything with a pencil in decades. Not since college. I’ve forgotten the smell of pencil shavings. I’ve also forgotten having to wash my hands after writing because I’m left-handed and the graphite rubs off on the skin of my fingers. At least graphite washes off more easily than fountain pen ink.

Why pencils? I had been re-reading Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles in the bathroom a couple of pages at a time since I have it in paperback now, and I had wanted to scrawl a little note in the margin. Something about how I knew mothers like Thetis, for whom no friend could ever be good enough for their sons. If I had a couple of pencils in the crapper — in a drawer where the cats can’t make off with them — it would have been a simple matter to scrawl out a bit of marginalia.

§ 52

I just got a copy of House of Leaves. I’ve known about this book since it came out in 2000, but never quite had the balls to try to read it. Knowing what I know now, I think I might be ready. In any case, if I want to write my own saga as some kind of hypertextual, epistolary fictional archive, I might want to check out some more recent prior art than the works of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. It might also be worthwhile to re-read Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History, afterward.

§ 53

Setting up isync and mu4e to do email in Emacs was smoother than I had expected. It’s amazing how a standards-compliant provider can make things easier. Too bad Fastmail has a thing for union busting. Anybody care to recommend an alternate provider so that I can avoid re-upping in May?

§ 54

I’ve got serious earwax build-up in my right ear, and an ear infection in the bargain. And of course the pain isn’t confined to my ear, but radiates into my jaw so that eating and speaking are painful. Got a nice little fever, to boot, but acetominiphen keeps that under control.

I sought treatment, but this is my second day off from work from illness. The pain is midway between distracting and debilitating; I can’t bring myself to sleep all day, but neither can I bring myself to do anything more intellectually demanding than watch anime like One Punch Man. I can still adult, but since I’ve got PTO coming to me I mean to use some of it.

March 2025

§ 1

I no longer think of conservatives or Republicans as Nazis or fascists. It has never worked before. It won’t work today. Even if they understood the reason for the comparision, the comparison is irrelevant. Republicans are sufficiently vile on their own merits without the need to compare them to authoritarian parties from 1930s Europe.

After all, it was the Republicans who tried to overthrow the US government in the 1930s in the Business Plot. The problem is that today’s Republicans seemed to have learned from the failure of the Wall St. Putsch and are determined to carry it off this time around.

Rather than comparing Republicans to fascists or Nazis, I have come to think that the task of our time is to make “Republican” a label as heavily freighted with justified hatred and righteous contempt as we once loaded labels like “Nazi”, “fascist”, or “Communist”. That today’s Republicans want to privatize tyranny for profit is reason enough to want to crucify them all in flames. Calling them ‘Nazis’ is flattery they don’t deserve. Instead, we should make them cringe at being called ‘conservatives’, ‘Republicans’, ‘traditional Catholics’, ‘evangelical Christians’, or whatever other label by which they self-identify.

It isn’t just the billionaires or the politicians they bought who are the problem. The people who elected these assholes are to blame, and they need to feel it in their bones. Our task is to make them live in shame and fear of being exposed as having voted for Trump and his gangster regime. They should be as reluctant to admit to watching Fox News or the Daily Wire as they would be to admit watching pornography.

There should be no further tolerance for conservatives or Republicans. Not when the heart of their morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology is the double standard and their idea of diversity is the ability to shout down any opposition. ACAB is wasted on police. We ought to be using it on conservatives. Because all conservatives are bastards, too.

Do I seem unreasonable, or even extreme? So what? Wasn’t it a conservative named Barry Goldwater who insisted that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice? I’m sure that the Democratic establishment whose incompetence handed the 2016 and 2024 elections to the Republicans thought they were being reasonable, and what good was their idea of being reasonable when it gave us Donald Trump as President of the United States?

If “liberal” is to remain a slur, then let’s be liberal with the hatred and contempt that conservatives accuse us of having for them. If the religious right wants to believe that they are persecuted because they are subject to mockery, then let’s subject them to such unrelenting ridicule that they think that the shade of Diocletian has clawed his way out of Hell to finish the job he had botched in life.

Let’s give these bastards cause for complaint. If they want to make discrimination legal again, then let’s rub their noses in the consequences. Don’t associate with them in any way. Don’t hire them. Don’t patronize their businesses. Don’t befriend them. Don’t date or marry them.

It is time to pursue First Amendment solutions to the problem of conservatism in the USA: It is time we weaponized our rights to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the right to peaceful assembly.

These people no longer see us as human. To them, we are not even Americans. We are merely the enemy. It is time we dosed them with their own foul medicine, and made them choke on it.

I take no particular joy in these sentiments. Like that of a Romantic poet, mine is generally a rather more peaceable disposition.

§ 2

«You think I can’t be broken,» said Morgan Cooper, his hand hovering over the hilt of a sword he still refused to draw, for doing so would signal that he had abandoned all hope of a nonviolent resolution. "I am broken. I am constantly broken. I had no mother or father; I was built in a lab and given to a couple as part of a psychological experiment. I was never allowed to escape the knowledge that I was made to be a weapon. I have been told, time and again, that my only purpose is violence. But I rebuild myself. By my own will am I resurrected, time and again, sacrificing myself to myself so that I might become stronger and more truly myself. You think there’s nothing more to being a man than dominating others and taking what you want with impunity? Try that with me, if you dare. Or, if you still value your lives, surrender. Stand trial, face judgment for your crimes, and make restitution. I get paid the same either way, though I’d be lying if I pretended that I would not welcome an excuse to put every last one of you would-be rapists to the sword. All it would take is for one of you to pick up a weapon and take a step forward, and it’ll be closed casket funerals for the lot of you. So, is anybody feeling suicidal today? I’m here to help."

One of them picked up a Kalashnikov. «Man, you sure like to talk for somebody standing alone against a couple dozen men. Who are you trying to impress, bringing a sword to a gunfight?»

THIS IS CONTROL, the message came to Morgan through his implant. SUSPECTS’ RESISTANCE IS ON RECORD. ALL WEAPONS FREE. USE ALL NECESSARY FORCE TO PRESERVE YOUR OWN LIFE AND THOSE OF INNOCENTS.

That was all Morgan needed. He could have drawn his sword faster than any of his enemies’ eyes could track, so that the black blade seemed to have sprung from the scabbard of its own accord as if it were forged of antichristium and possessed of its own demonic will instead of being a weapon forged by human technology with a matte black finish for stealth. Nonetheless, he refrained.

It was not enough for these gunman to know the fear of facing a swordfighter who had defied mass gunfire and lived to brag about it. It was time these boys learned what it meant to face not only one of the Phoenix Society’s sworn Adversaries, but the only Adversary created by the AsgarTech Corporation’s secret weapons program, the Einherjar Initiative. It was time they learned what it meant to face one who could stand alone against all odds. «By all means, gentlemen. Fire at will. There will be time enough to water the tree of liberty with your tyrannous blood while you try to reload.»

«You and what army?» said another youth as he picked up a rifle, as if this were still kindergarten.

Childish as the question was, Morgan had hoped somebody would someday ask it, so that he would have an excuse to use this long-rehearsed rejoinder. «No army. Just me.» Though Control had proclaimed that all weapons were to be brought into play, Morgan not only left his sword sheathed, but slung it across his back and peace-bound it so that it would not get in his way; it would be more fun to take these two dozen foes before him bare-handed, and with care they might all still live to face trial for their crimes. «I am more than enough for the likes of you.»

The fusillade came. It always did, no matter how many times the tale of one Adversary facing a mass of armed men escaped the control of the Phoenix Society’s propaganda department. For surely a single man could not stand alone against many and win unscathed. Nonetheless, Morgan stood untouched against the assault. No bullet could reach him, for his defiance was such that even the laws of nature yielded for a time to his implacable will. Hundreds of rounds hung suspended in the air, thirty each from twenty-four rifles fired on full auto, and fell clattering to the floor.

When the lead curtain parted, Morgan stood before them, the middle finger of his left hand before his lips. He blew them a kiss over its tip, just to rub it in.

This vulgar display of power would cost him hard -- for mitochondrial overdrive was not to be casually fucked with even by those built to wield conscious control over every cell of one’s body -- but right now he was out of control and playing the ultimate role; this was what lit his fire. In the thunder and heat, here he was: a hellraiser weaving his spell. Though he was not on stage with Crowley’s Thoth here, he was still a rock star, a tiger in the spotlight with all eyes on his performance.

Seeing that their guns had no effect, the assailants reached for knives. That suited Morgan equally well; none of their blades would cut or pierce him, but only a few could attack him at a time; he would incapacitate each in their turn, wondering when somebody would finally have the bright idea of trying mistletoe against him, as if he were Baldr himself. It would not work, of course, but it would still amuse Morgan to know that somebody else had been reading their Norse mythology.

The first assailant came, stabbing wildly, and Morgan dismissed him as if he were the attacker’s father: with the back of his hand and sufficient force to send him sprawling without doing lasting harm. If his friends were here, they might remark that like his sword, Morgan’s pimp hand never ran out of ammo.

§ 3

If you’re going to build a time machine and assassinate historical figures before they can do the nasty shit that made them infamous, why start with Hitler? That’s too obvious, and too easy.

Me? I’d suggest starting with Paul Graham, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and Curtis Yarvin. You won’t be going back that far, so I figure you’re less likely to fuck up the timeline. You might just prevent Silicon Valley from becoming the intellectual and moral equivalent of a Superfund site by preventing the founding of Y Combinator, too.

You might also prevent both Trump administrations and the Biden administration. Maybe. Not that I’d suggest a direct preventative approach. After all, if you went back in time and whacked Hitler, you’d probably come back to find out that Godwin’s Law is about Heinrich fuckin’ Himmler instead. Unless you also whack Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, and the rest of those goose-stepping assholes.

This is probably why C. J. Cherryh’s Morgaine cycle probably had the most realistic depiction of time travel in all of sf in its backstory. In those novels, the alien qhal had found stargates that also let them travel through time. Going backward in time was forbidden, but somebody did it and caused a reality dysfunction (to borrow a term from Peter F. Hamilton) that permanently fucked up qhal-controlled space. So, when humans found a Gate for the first time, they decided it was necessary to create a suicide platoon to traverse every Gate and seal them behind them lest some other idiot decide to backtime (to use Cherryh’s term) and cause another reality dysfunction.

Of course, Michael Moorcock had something called the “Morphail Effect”. In his fiction, the past is read-only, and any attempt to tamper with it by a time traveller would get the traveller immediately and forcibly returned to their proper place in the timeline.

Then again, we seem to be living through a reality dysfunction right now, without any causes from sf. It’s not something we can blame on the gods, either. We did this to ourselves. We’re doing this to each other.

What the hell for, anyway? So some rich and powerful assholes can get even richer and more powerful? Fuck ’em. What have these people done for any of us lately?

Maybe we can’t just kill ’em all, but what’s stopping us from stripping them of their wealth and power? Why not make them spend the rest of their lives working on public infrastructure?

§ 4

RFK Jr. thinks it would be better if people got measles the old-fashioned way. I guess Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has become the same sort of unintentional documentary via metaphor as John Carpenter’s They Live. I’d like to see RFK Jr. try to acquire natural immunity to rabies after getting bitten by a bat. He’ll probably end up dead, but I’m OK with that. Better another dead Kennedy than another kid dead of measles because their parents bought into anti-vaxxer bullshit. Where’s Sirhan Sirhan when you need him?

§ 5

Under at-will employment, all jobs are inherently precarious. Under such conditions, any talk of psychological safety in the workplace is risible. The only reason such hollow rhetoric is not publicly ridiculed by those expected to endure it is this very absence of psychological safety on the job that makes such rhetoric necessary. If you can lose your job for exercising fundamental human rights like freedom of speech — even if you do it on your own time and at your own expense — because every corporation is a privately-owned dictatorship, then there is no such thing as psychological safety, let alone job security. Reality must be hidden beneath euphemism lest it become intolerable not only to the workers who endure it, but the bosses who profit from it. Otherwise, even their shriveled consciences might rebel.

§ 6

It should be normal and acceptable for American workers to publicly disparage former employers if said employers have been in any way exploitative or abusive. If my last workplace pressured me into working unpaid overtime without even letting me get a pizza delivered on the company’s dime because I didn’t have time to cook for myself, then I owe it to my fellow workers to say so — so that they know not to work for such slave-drivers.

Even if we’re not working in a union shop, let alone a union trade, I owe it to my fellow techies to warn them against working for exploiters. I have more material interests in common with my fellow workers than I do with people who make more in an hour than I might make in a year.

Speaking of which: If you’re an accountant or a programmer, do not accept a full-time position at a consulting firm that bills their clients for every hour you work while paying you a fixed salary. Instead, work for them as an hourly contractor, and if they expect you to be there 40 hours a week they can damn well take you on as a W2 contractor instead of 1099. If they can bill clients by the hour for your labor, they can damned well pay you by the hour — and pay time and a half for overtime.

Working for a Big 4 consultancy as a salaried employee is just begging to be exploited. They will run you ragged and then toss you aside when you’re burned out and they can’t wring any more billable hours out of you.

Also, this performative bootlicking that we see on LinkedIn from people who have been laid off needs to go. You should never be grateful to have a job. Your bosses should be grateful that you were willing to work for them. And their gratitude is best expressed in cold, hard cash.

Also, I think I’m changing my mind about unions. In the 21st century, unions aren’t what we need. Unions can be targeted. Unions can be busted. Unions may well be a trap.

Instead, we need whisper networks and the labor equivalent of flash mobs. Workers should organized by means that neither their bosses nor the government can monitor; the most effective strikes in this century may be strikes the bosses never saw coming. Labor organization should not happen in the workplace, or on public networks like BlueSky or the Fediverse. It should instead be done using tools that use end-to-end encryption, like Signal — or in person, in private spaces like one’s own home or in bars or other “third spaces” not frequented by one’s bosses.

Lacking that, it may be time for stochastic industrial resistance. Let Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener be your new literary hero, and act alone if no one will act beside you. Every wildcat strike should be a stand alone complex.

Above all, it’s time to embrace merc life. Even if you are a full-time employee, you should act as if you work first and foremost for yourself. Do the job, get paid, and go home. Your highest loyalty should be to yourself, your friends, and your family. Don’t waste loyalty on businesses that would throw you under a bus to boost their quarterly profits. Don’t go above and beyond unless you get additional pay for additional effort. Don’t do anything that isn’t explicitly mentioned in your job description; it is time to recognize that “other duties as assigned” is an unconscionably vague clause that has no legitimate place in most job descriptions because it is so easily abused by management at the expense of workers.

Women in particular should reject unpaid and invisible cultural work, since the expectation to perform such work tends to fall disproportionately on their shoulders. No corporate culture is worth building if you aren’t getting paid time and a half to do that work on top of the work for which you were hired. If the work isn’t recognized, paid, or counted toward whatever metrics affect your annual performance reviews, then it isn’t worth your time or concern.

Never let your boss tell you that it’s an emergency unless innocent lives are at stake; they are trying to manipulate you into working for free. It almost never is a real emergency unless you’re a soldier, a doctor, a first responder, or are working with life support equipment, air traffic control, or nuclear power generation.

Never settle for less than what you and your work are worth. Every hour you spend at work is an hour spent further enriching the already wealthy. Your goal should be maximum compensation for minimum effort. After all, your bosses are trying to get maximum effort from you for minimum compensation. To them, you are not a person. You are not an end in yourself, but a means to their ends.

Your first step is to reject the notion that you can or should be considered “human capital” or a “human resource”. Free your mind, and your ass will follow. Only you can free yourself; nobody can do it for you.

Remember: you are a human being, not a human doing. You possess intrinsic value that has nothing to do with your job or how much wealth you hold by virtue of your humanity. We are not things. Our lives matter. It’s time we damned well acted like it, don’t you think?

§ 7

Mickey-17 might have the most wholesome romance (between Robert Pattinson and Naomi Ackie) that I’ve seen in a movie in the last couple of years or so. It was both sweet and sexy to see Mickey (Pattinson) helping Nasha (Nasha) gear up.

It doesn’t hurt at all that Naomi Ackie is both smart and hot.

§ 8

I have long thought that Thersites got a raw deal in the Iliad. However, it had recently occurred to me that Homer characterized the most sensible of the Achaeans as he did to lend plausible deniability to what might have been the poet’s own opinion of a ten-year war waged on behalf of a king whose wife had decided to trade up — as if there was any shortage of men in Greek mythology or history who did the same to their wives. After all, Agamemnon was a greedy asshole who didn’t get his rightful due until he came home to Clytemnestra.

I suppose any excuse to loot a prosperous city-state will do, though. After all, my own country in my own time used a “global war on terror” as an excuse to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade each — just because some Wahhabi militants who mostly came from Saudi Arabia hijacked a few 747s and used them for kamikaze attacks.

Of course, nuking Riyadh for 9/11 was out of the question, let alone putting every man jack of the House of Saud to the sword and introducing the women to feminism. (Not to mention witchcraft and lesbianism — both of which are just good clean fun.) We need that Saudi oil, right?

§ 9

Any system that depends on presumed consent is rape culture.

§ 10

Sometimes I look at the world and think, “There just isn’t enough cannabis on the planet to get me stoned enough to deal with all this shit.”

The weird thing is that I don’t even touch the stuff. I tried it once when I was 18. I was at a Deep Purple concert in 1996 and somebody passed me a joint. So I took a hit and passed it along. It didn’t do anything for me, so I never bothered with it again.

Nonetheless, I’m not stoned enough to deal with this world. And I can’t get stoned enough because there just isn’t enough cannabis on the planet.

I’d probably die of smoke inhalation first, anyway. That would be a solution of sorts, though not a palatable one. Why should I die, anyway? I’m not a billionaire or a conservative, so I’m probably not the problem here.

§ 11

Here’s something for the math nerds: The Lost Art of Logarithms. I bet the operator gets all the geek girls with that massive slide rule.

§ 12

I just blew off a tech recruiter who was complaining that she couldn’t anybody willing to interview for a full-time .NET/SQL Server developer position. The position had a salary range of $45-70K in central PA. I currently make $99K in central PA and I still feel like I’m living paycheck to paycheck.

If I could only make $70K as a developer here in central PA, I’d get my commercial driver’s license and drive a damn truck instead. According to Indeed a truck driver in central PA makes about $84K per year — and truckers don’t have to deal with JavaScript ecosystem churn or ‘Agile’ development processes. Hell, I’m tempted to do it anyway, even though I’d be taking a $15K pay cut.

I’m not gonna say that truckers don’t deserve the wages they get. Actually, fuck it, they don’t deserve the wages they get. They deserve more. In the USA in 2025, anything under $150K/year with a 24-hour workweek and guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime is a poverty wage.

None of us are getting paid enough for this shit. None of us are actually living, let alone thriving. We’re just barely surviving. If this is the American dream, no wonder there are so many suicides and “deaths of despair” in this country. (Pull the trigger and the nightmare stops.)

Anybody talking about labor shortages or a skills gap is bullshitting you. They just aren’t willing to pay Americans a living wage. Nor are they willing to train Americans who might be willing to learn the skills required to do the job if it were a secure job with good pay. They would rather pay a H1B worker who can’t push back against demands for unpaid overtime lest they lose their job and get deported. It’s all about short term profits, not long-term sustainable growth, let alone enlightened self-interest.

§ 13

Looper isn’t wrong when they write in Why STEM, Medicine, and finance should be the majors of people:

STEM teaches you logic, numbers, reasoning, and science. It opens your mind to the beauty and complexity of the world. The same goes for medicine, finance, or any field that provides a job.

Arts is different. Passion, authenticity, hard work, or sheer obsession mean nothing if you can’t get paid. Why should people like your aesthetics, taste, or the song you sang?

That’s why most artists and humanities graduates have a major or specialization in another field. They secure their livelihood first, then enter painting, music, cinema, or other artistic pursuits as a passion, obsession, or hobby.

I wonder if Looper actually knows any people who work in STEM, medicine, or finance and participate in the arts. I suspect he thinks its easier than it actually is for most people.

Sure, it can work. I made it work; I’m a programmer who wrote novels and short stories on his lunch breaks and after work.

But it’s hard. If you let it, your day job will eat up all of your time and energy, leaving you with nothing to spare for the work you would rather be doing. Sure, a day job might pay the bills, but what good is that if you don’t have time to actually live? Getting paid means nothing if you don’t get paid enough and have enough free time to indulge your passions or obsessions.

Even if you can balance a day job and creative pursuits, you’re still likely to end up making some kind of sacrifice. I don’t have children. I don’t have friends, either. If I had a family or a social life, I doubt I’d have time to write on top of my day job. Frankly, it’s practically a miracle that I’m still married after twenty years of chasing this dream.

Day jobs are a necessity for artists. Day jobs are a path to freedom for artists. Day jobs are a trap for artists.

All three are simultaneously true and false. I am not certain of how to resolve this seeming paradox. Perhaps I was influenced by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s writing that Property is theft, Property is impossible, and Property is freedom. I can tell you this much: to take on a day job as an artist is to attempt a compromise between one’s dreams and reality.

It’s a compromise I often regret making. I often wonder if I might have done better by not seeking full-time employment as a techie but doing whatever it took to scrape by as a part-time supermarket janitor in order to have more time to write. I know I would not have met or married Catherine Gatt, but had my younger self not been determined to be seen as reasonable and responsible, he would not have had the chance to miss her.

I don’t know what my life might have been like had I chosen differently as a younger man. I know this much: if the invisible hand of the market is holding a knife to your throat, then you are not free.

All Looper is saying is that we should acquiesce to the tyranny of capital. I disagree with them. Economic security isn’t everything. It isn’t guaranteed, either, even if you do get the ‘right’ degree and manage to get a job where you can actually use your education.

You can do everything right and still get shafted. I suggest doing what you want instead, consequences be damned. This life you’re living right now is probably the only one you will ever get. Do you want to go to your grave regretting the time you spent at a day job that barely paid the bills and left you no time for more fulfilling and meaningful pursuits?

§ 14

Oh, you accept me despite my autism? How magnanimous of you!

I won’t presume to speak for other autistic people, because I don’t work for Autism Speaks, but I don’t need performatic acceptance from other people. My existence is not subject to anybody else’s approval.

I wasn’t diagnosed until my early forties. If I had needed support as a boy or a younger man, I didn’t get it. I learned to do without it by necessity. I will not accept such support now. All I need now is to be left alone, without people trying to ‘fix’ me for their comfort or convenience.

In the meantime, I have a better idea for people pushing ‘acceptance’. Never mind “nothing about me, without me.” It ought to be “nothing about me, except by me.” Nobody should have a say in my life that overrules my say.

So wake me when it’s time for autistic liberation. Oh, wait! It was time for that when we were warehousing non-verbal autistic kids back in the 1980s. or torturing them into conformity using “Applied Behavioral Analysis”. Or how about when Hans Asperger was deciding that some autistic kids weren’t autistic enough to be worth sending to their deaths in Nazi gas chambers in the 1930s and 1940s?

So, I have an idea: I would rather you were honest about your contempt for me because I’m not your idea of normal. I would prefer your naked and honest hatred than any condescending or paternalistic pretense of concern or welcome. I want to know where you stand. I want to know that you’re not my kind of people. That way I can tell you to begone and be damned.

§ 15

If the medicine I’m taking to handle cold symptoms advises against driving or operating heavy machinery, does that apply to computers as well? Maybe I shouldn’t be working at all if I’m taking this sort of medicine.

Of course, I don’t have unlimited PTO; taking sick days leaves me with fewer vacation days. America, fuck yeah! Shit like this is why tech workers need a fucking union.

April 2025

§ 1

I think I’ve run out of fucks to give for the internet as a whole. I’m not going to shut down this website, though. That would be a needlessly rash decision. It’s just that everything seems trivial after seeing Catherine spend a week in the hospital.