A Message from #Ukraine

One of my Youtube viewers from Ukraine left this comment on my Youtube video about the situation. I couldn’t possibly have covered the full nuance, so I felt this was worth giving some wider exposure.

Hey, Ukrainian here. From one of the bordering regions, no less; one of the locations where Russians tanks are now cruising the roads, and troops try to take over city administrations. Long time watching, first time writing, etc.

I don’t want to engage in a full-scale political discussion, not least because I’ve tried to avoid politics for a long time. This is just a perspective from a random guy whose home country is being invaded. First, Ukraine is not just “one of the ex-Soviet territories”. Kievan Rus dates back centuries, and actually predates Moscow and Russia. As time went on, our countries went our separate ways. Yes, there are similarities in cultures and languages, but by no means are we the same.

After the rise of the Russian Empire, Ukraine (or “Little Russia”, as it was known back then. A very pleasant term, right) has been suffering under its rule, with serfs being basically slaves to be re-sold and exploited to death. Granted, Russians wasn’t the only ones feeding off Ukrainian people, – Polish and Hungarian aristocrates were also living the dream at our expense; but I don’t see Poland invading us now, so, you know.

This stuff is reflected in a ton of our classic literature, it is taught in schools. Not in the way of “fuck those guys, they screwed us centuries ago”, more like “our people have been under the boot of assholes before, let’s not let that happen again, kids”. Fast forward to the USSR. Nothing special to mention here, it was the same as everywhere else in the Soviets: strong but messy totalitarian empire. From a personal perspective, my father did tell me stories of a few of his friends who were repressed and never seen again. However, both of my parents agreed that, when the system worked peacefully, it did work. And then Holodomor happens (literally “killing with starvation”), where, due to the ruling party’s miscalculations and deficits, tons and tons of food supplies were taken away from Ukraine, leaving people here to starve.

I cannot speak for other Soviet territories that suffered this fate; but I can tell you for a fact that thousands of Ukrainian people died because of something the Soviets did. When the USSR imploded, it sucked here as much as it did in other ex-Soviet countries. But we persevered, built up as much as we could, and took course for the brave new modern world.

Fast forward again, to more recent and pressing events. 2004, election year. Yushchenko (pro-Ukrainian, pro-Western candidate) versus Yanukovych (pro-Russian candidate, who never even bothered to learn the language properly). People expressed their dissatisfaction with the latter in a very clear and loud way, mocking him in memes and arranging rallys against him. Feel free to speculate just how much of a role propaganda served in this outcry, but the fact is, Yushchenko becomes president, and Ukrainians are excited for Western-oriented political moves.

This presidency was… fine, I guess? Not much happened, not much changed; it left people mostly dissatisfied, because the promised political course was not implemented. By the next elections, Yanukovych threw a massive propaganda campaign in some of our eastern regions (the separatist ones, yes), and there were no other prominent candidates, and he won.

2014. This is where shit hits the fan. President Yanukovych announces that trade and general help deals with Europe and the US will not be happening, and the general goal is instead to closely associate with Russia. People are PISSED: “we’ve JUST left the USSR, we want to be with the modern West, what the hell?!” There are protests all over the country, the most populated ones being held in the Kiev’s center, the Maidan (“public square”). Protests were peaceful, but intense, and at some point Yanukovych mobilizes defence forces to open fire at the protesters. And medics carrying wounded protesters away. And everyone in the vicinity. I know people who lost friends during those events. At this point folks realize that Yanukovych is a Russian puppet, and, not without losses, throw him out – he escapes to Russia begging for sanctuary.

This is the turning point, this is where Ukrainians fully get that Russia is not letting go of us. And then Russia takes Crimea, shouting “it’s not us, it’s their civil war” (a lot of Russian military guys later got medals for this war where they were technically not present. Weird). And then separatists in the East, who supported Yanukovych, form their pseudo-countries, and open their borders to Russian mercenaries.

Russia, again, shouts “it’s not us, it’s them”, but the weaponry used, the prisoners of war taken, and the social pages info of Russian vatniks (jingos and Russian nationalists) speak otherwise. Ever since, the Russian propaganda has been painting Ukraine as basically nazi bastads who took what they didn’t own (which is… our own country? wat?), who oppress the Russian-speaking population (which is thoroughly untrue. My parents barely know the Ukrainian language, and never have they seen any oppression. As for the laws stipulating Ukrainian as the national language, and not Russian… well, it is our language. Of this here our country), who take arms against Russia along with the West, which is “THE ENEMY” (this Cold War-era shit still very much flies there).

They say that our country exists only because the Soviets have allowed it. That our language is not real, it’s a sad parody of the Russian language. (Let’s not also forget the trolls, who are all to eager to tell you exactly what they intend to do to your girlfriends and daughters.) All of this is fucking bullshit, and they know it, and they still perpetuate it.

All we want is to join the modern times and be left alone. Look, regarding the point about Ukrainian nationalists. First, I’m pretty sure there are assholes and idiots everywhere; we never had any more of them than other places. BUT, Russia did a lot of bad shit to our people, keeps painting us as either “allies of THE ENEMY” or “lost sheep to be led back to the flock”. And then there’s all the military shit, which has now escalated to the point of actual fucking war. Putin himself forces us to hate him and Russia. Not all Russians, but the ones who support his regime – most definitely.

It’s not nationalism, it’s a desire to be our own country. Don’t see anything wrong with that. If anything, Russian rhetoric to the point of “your country is not a country, your nation is not a nation, your language is not a language; you are all just a big misunderstanding, which we simply must correct”.. This is actual fascism, innit? Putin, or Putler, if you will, is a fascist. Or ruscist, if you will. As are those who support him (including Lukashenko of Belarus, who is Putin’s slut at this point, and Kadyrov of Chechnya, who is a goddamn animal believing he’s still in the Middle Ages).

Anyway… People are dying all over Ukraine, there are bombings and shootouts. there is either panic or somber waiting among the civilians. There are invaders, with tanks and guns, in my city. We expect the Internet, power, and utilities to go down at any moment, we prepare supplies and look for bomb shelters. Russia is sanctioned to all hell (though not nearly enough, I say), everyone hates it, but they just keep going. All because Putler can’t let go of his dictatorial fever dreams. It is not our fault, it is not our military storming us. It is all Putin’s doing. It fucking sucks, man.

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#History #Futurism – Popularization of the Outsider – From Usenet to Discord to Yacht Clubs

By Rachel Haywire

Postmortem Studios will try dabbling in a few other things over the next couple of years, amongst them collecting essays and stories. Rachel Haywire is a futurist, former presidential candidate and Philosopher Queen. We’ll be gathering together some of her writings in a book in the near future. If you want more Rachel, you can check out her Substack.

Outsiders are a demographic, and a very particular one at that. Foot soldiers of history who are used as crash test dummies for the future, their moves are mapped into more extensive templates that serve as blueprints for product development. The boom of Web3, now referred to as the decentralized web, is the latest example of outsider culture bleeding into the mainstream. 

Tracing the evolution of the web in its infantile state to this recent explosion, it is undeniable that there are specific patterns that have appeared in each iteration of the web, regardless of which generation holds tickets to the peep show. From text-based strategy games to low-fi social networks to alternative message board culture, the online universe has a history of gathering outsiders into communities that evolve into the fabric of mainstream technology.

Is calling the latest decentralized madness “Web3” sufficient in making sense of this new chaos and its millions of intersecting nodes? How did we get from Usenet to Discord to Bored Ape Yacht Club? Who are the users, and what are our experiences? Let’s investigate. 

A Brief History of the (Anti)social Web

Starting with Text

The Internet was initially text-based, and you would need to head over to your local library to access it unless you were some kind of government contractor. Naturally, this was how outsiders started to find each other around the world and set the stage for digital history. The Internet, first read-only (Web1), was small and secretive and profoundly uncool. With the exception of psychedelic gurus like Timothy Leary and cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, few people understood how this tool was on the way to becoming the standard operating protocol of the future. 

AOL was soon to burst onto the scene, and much like early online service Prodigy (no resemblance to the industrial-metal MTV band founded around the same time), it produced a flashy yet simple walled garden that upgraded the text-based Web1 experience into the beginning of Web2. Read/write. You’ve got mail.

Rise of the Old School Hackers

Between Web1 (read) and Web2 (read/write), there was a period that could be viewed through the lens of a director creating an action sequence that marked the transition from Web1 to Web2 as official. Think of early Nine Inch Nails playing in the background with a David Lynch cast of characters in perpetual motion. Rather than calling it Web1.5 and becoming the subject of a hate campaign, let me go ahead and call it the Rise of the Old School Hackers so everyone else who was online this early will understand what is being referenced. Here, I speak of 90’s message board culture, where many of us were exposed to the digital environment for the first time. During this era, pretty much everyone who used the Internet was a troll or a sociopath, and you’d be sure to find someone who would claim that this was the entire point of the Internet. Bug-as-feature.

During the Rise of the Old School Hackers, you could hang out on text-based forums like alt.sex and alt.drugs and alt.magic, all of which started on Usenet. There was an alt for everything, as Usenet was a decentralized conglomeration of news servers that acted as portals to information outside the mainstream narrative. Blockchain technology had yet to become official, yet decentralization was already taking shape. This was the beginning of the web transforming into an interactive medium. 

What if decentralization was the friends we made back in the day?

It wasn’t just that everyone was a troll or sociopath during this era. Everyone was an influencer because, during the Rise of the Old School Hackers, so few people were online, to begin with. Most users resembled video game characters that would only pop up during the final boss levels. All users were participating in some way another, as you had to be nerdy and weird enough to understand how this iteration of the social web even worked. Either you owned a domain (this was not as easy as registering one on GoDaddy) or hosted a BBS. Everyone was on stage.

A Bulletin Board System was a hub of online activity, in which people would chat about their specialized interests in ASCII text. Many refer to this period as “the BBS days” with a fair amount of nostalgia, speaking about it much like they talk about the “old days” of IRL hacker conference Defcon. Mirroring these Usenet servers that attracted outsiders from across the world to congregate, BBSes had the same sort of ‘flock-of-outsiders’ dynamic. They later evolved into colourful forums called Ultimate Bulletin Boards, coded in notepad HTML with a tiny drop of CSS. Despite UBBs getting a low-fi high-af style upgrade from BBSes, the scene of these forums remained one of rebels and loners. Literal cyberpunks.

With this action sequence film bit in motion, social architects set the stage for MUDs. Multi-User Domains, where game developers produced and played text-based strategy games that moonlighted as alternative universes hidden in far-out corners of the web. As digitally immersive RPGs, they carried the torch for gamers who followed in their footsteps, both online and off. The social web was beginning to onboard new users, and most of them had nobody to socialize with IRL.

4Chan/Trolling/Chilling IRL

A few years later, a wild 4chan appeared, becoming the designated seat at the opposition table. Founded by Christopher Poole in 2003 and taking much of its ideas from Usenet/the BBS days/MUDs, 4chan was an anything-goes platform that resembled the Wild West before digital black market Silk Road came into being. It marked the dawn of a new turning, in which old school hackers were beginning to notice a crude migration onto their territory.

4chan was additionally an imageboard that acted strictly as a home to user-generated content, which included crass and vulgar explorations of everything from far-right ideologies to anime porn. This policy of total user freedom was also what made 4chan a vehicle for far-left activism and raids against the power elite of its time. Anti-Scientology protests that originated on 4chan began making their way onto major news networks like CNN.

Transforming into an IRL subculture in which people could match faces to (fake) names, 4chan marked a distinct point in time where the digital and physical were merging into a hybrid prototype. The online world and “real life” were mixed like songs on a pirated MP3 player, and DJs were everywhere.

There were now hackers meeting up at the Defcon conference in Las Vegas while 4chan raids were hitting the streets of major cities. You could go to a 4chan protest IRL and protest the incarceration of rockstar whistleblowers or simply smoke a joint and talk shit with a schizophrenic moderator. People would wear Guy Fawkes masks and hold up signs that read “I am from the Internet.” It was a theatre of the absurd and the surreal, beckoning to Antonin Artaud. Nerds were taking over the streets of hip urban centres.

4chan was, in all its grotesque self-expression, the zeitgeist in action. The outsider was becoming a little more popular by the day, which compelled the founders of Web2 to start corporations that served as safe spaces for outsiders seeking to get inside the gates. You are the product. Giving birth to early social networking outfits such as LiveJournal and Myspace, this phenomenon would herald in the centralized monoliths today known as FaceBook/Meta and Twitter. Silk Road would lead to IRL events such as Blockchain Expo and Crypto Base following this same trajectory.

The Future of the Digital Outside

Hubs and Squads and Cults and Private Access 

Let us now flash forward to the modern-day in which Discord has become a popular communication tool. Online culture has shifted onto this anarchic piece of gaming software, which has been recently adopted by the finance community. While Discord started out with a small group of gamers just doing their thing, it is also a playground for budding investors and venture capitalists. VC firm a16z invested billions into crypto and started their own DAO Initiative. Digital Autonomous Organizations are what’s hot and propose to be the evolution of communities themselves; democratic forms of governance based on digital ownership, social tokens, and voting. Discord is the primary hub in which DAOs are formed. It is also a centre point for squads to congregate, collaborate, and conspire.

The IRL to online pipeline is strong here. Anyone who attended the tech-influenced/tech-influencer Burning Man festival remembers how tokens and pendants were awarded to members of theme camps. You could participate in numerous theme camps while holding all of their tokens simultaneously, symbolizing your membership in these fun little fringe groups. You could create tokens for your theme camp and hand them out to your curated friends list, giving them a social stake in your fantasy-come-to-life. While the technology of communities may have changed, the underlying structure in which they have evolved remains. Access is the key to the castle, and access is everything. 

You are Here

With record numbers of people currently heading over Discord to participate in the DAO rush or simply to keep up with their friends across the world, we are witnessing the popularization of the outsider yet again. This concept initially seems oxymoronic, like Zarathustra going to the marketplace to seek approval, yet the happening is nothing more than the way things work on a cultural level. Every small group on the Internet becomes populated with a new force that completely takes it over, catapulting it into the mainstream. The masses are coming! The masses are coming! Politics are not only downstream from culture but are calling from inside the house. “The culture industry,” a term popularized by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is not just postmodern hyperbole. You’re living in it, Neo. 

We are experiencing a moment of mass decentralization, mirroring the 90’s Internet in its chaotic infinitude, with its very own invasion-of-the-normies subplot. We went from Revenge of the Nerds to Napoleon Dynamite to Big Bang Theory. History has always been written this way. The popularization of the outsider has existed since the beginning of time. Jesus was just some hippie philosopher who got famous. Many would call Revenge of the Nerds a type of “nerdsploitation”, while Napoleon Dynamite could be viewed as the Sundance version of Revenge of the Nerds. Yet compared to Big Bang Theory, wasn’t Revenge of the Nerds authentic? Is Discord Napoleon Dynamite? What software will be the next Silicon Valley?

Ethereum, the cryptocurrency powering many Digital Autonomous Organizations, evolved from the “build your own nation” culture of Burning Man and Ephemerisle. The Seasteading Institute, seeking to create floating ocean cities away from centralized society, was founded by Burning Man and Ephemerisle veteran Patri Friedman. Now what we have = a thousand DAOs blooming. A thousand nations forming. Virtual real estate. Digital assets. Web3. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has been talking a lot about crypto cities. Can this all be traced back to one time at Burning Man? One time on 4chan? One party at Defcon? One conversation on Usenet?

One Time at Burning Man

When contrasting 4chan culture with Burning Man culture, observing how nerds and outsiders meet IRL and start going popular, we witness how the early foundation of the decentralized web turned into what is now being referred to as Web3. Every town has its alienated group of rebels that can only relate to each other online, and their greatest will meet in person and build new institutions in urban hubs. Well, at least they did before COVID. Now I guess they are moving to farms and popping out fertility influencers? Anyway, these clusters of misfits that started on Usenet resemble the users of Discord crypto communities who signal their affiliations with NFT avatars. Has something been lost in translation? Ask every generation this question. 

We are witnessing an underworld of very online people becoming the overworld. Some of them are hedge fund managers, while others are electronic musicians in their mom’s basement holding millions in ETH. Get that bag. WAGMI. The old school hackers are mostly dead now, and that is just what it means to be hardcore. Christopher Poole, the founder of anti-woke 4chan, eventually became what The Right (TM) dubbed a “social justice warrior.” The irony here is tasty, especially when you observe how most social justice warriors of the Obama era are now cosplaying as reactionary trad wives after getting exiled from The Left. (TM)

Yet enough about politics. Let’s talk about science! (enthusiastic voice) People are basically just animals searching for communities where they can find people who think like they do. Where are all the people who think like us? The answer is simple: everywhere. A digital anthropologist might even point out how some of the early incels had a lot in common with 90’s teenage girls who were posted about committing suicide online, but that is just Usenet evolving into LiveJournal. Most of us aren’t ready to have this conversation.

It’s a Crazy World Out There 

Despite this somewhat-but-not-really insider take, Discord is currently ripe for evolution and not entirely user-friendly. It is still the unpolished Internet, and not everyone can navigate it. We are assigning moderator privileges to one another like governments in their infancy. If everybody is just forming their own community and doing their own thing, will future numerical iterations of the web be any different from one another at their core? Any subculture will become an institutional organization on a long enough timeline.

As for the people, they will literally just sit around building the infrastructure for the next generation. Maybe it’s trolls all the way down who have matured into crypto investors.

The feeling of being on the outside remains unless you are at some yacht party holding a Bored Ape. Nevertheless, the outsider feeling comes back when you notice the music on the yacht is really bad. Naked emperors are both over and under-sexualized. The outsider is the worlds most popular demographic, and the Internet magnifies this fact.

Read/Write/Own/Party

The theatre of outsiders becoming the starting point for a new era is captured throughout time. By engineering the groundwork for independent weirdos to come together via intersecting nodes, the platforms of tomorrow are built. We live in a society composed of a million micro-societies competing for your attention, all waiting for the next user to join their religion/community/blockchain/cult/channel. Whether Web3 will bring ownership to creators or a new group of uncreative elites is a topic up for debate, and the answer to these sorts of questions is always why not both. The outsider drifts further and further from the outside until a new exterior is formed. The inside of the moment then becomes the Schelling Point of a generation. 

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And a Crappy New Year

TL;DR – Not a well bunny (brainworms), but coping. Sorry for being short/grumpy etc, but probably not that sorry because you likely deserved it if I was short/grumpy etc with you. Genuinely sorry for not being better about keeping in touch with people this year and for my output sliding.

I’m not very well.

I haven’t felt very well for over a month now, I think.

I haven’t felt able to open up to anyone because some people overreact, and some have accused me of performatively sympathy seeking.

Overreacting the other way, if you will.

Bringing people down at Christmas also kinda sucks, and everyone has their own problems at the moment.

Lockdown hasn’t been much of an issue for me, not that different to normal life to be honest, but now that we have a vaccine it feels a lot more restricting. Mentally at least, if not otherwise.

I’m fairly high risk, due to my low lung capacity from childhood asthma, amongst other issues. It has been hard to see so many people, people I know, buying into conspiracy theories, minimising the danger and even playing fast and loose with people’s lives.

My life.

Similarly, a depressing number of people seem to have bought into the big political boondoggles of our time, and the conspiracy gibberish around them, whether it’s anti-lockdown hysteria, stolen US election hysteria or any of many others.

There’s Brexit, which is now, finally, at the end of its beginning, if only the beginning of the end. That, if anything, is even more stifling a feeling than lockdown. I see the harm it’s doing to so many lives and yet we’re all so helpless in the face of its mass stupidity.

I have my little dedicated band of haters who, again, are sabotaging every effort I make to try and do some good in the world. No amount of good I do seems to make any difference to this, no amount of effort, explanation, confrontation or defence. There’s no discussion, no conversation, no attempt to take anything said or done in anything but the worst faith and the worst interpretation.

I’m politically and socially ‘homeless’ in a way I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. Every voice of reason turns out to be a prick, and every self-styled progressive is a bonsai Stalin in waiting, contradicting everything they claim to stand for.

And I’m getting old, and like anyone getting older, you can’t help but wonder why you’re not where you thought – or hoped – you’d be.

There’s also been a few cases lately of people I thought I knew, or tried to help, turning out to be Very Bad People. You can’t help but wonder what more you could have done and how that might have prevented these things from happening.

Ultimately though, depression doesn’t have to have a reason, it just is. It’s not like any of these are things that I can do much about in any case.

It’s taking all that I have to meet my regular commitments, and I’m conscious of my abraisiveness and exhaustion, so not as communicative with my friends as I’d like to be. Less able to get organised or enthusiastic.

Hopefully this will wear off soon enough, though these bouts can go on for months.

I have an arsenal of coping mechanisms, it’ll be fine. Just… hypocritical to sit on this any more, given how much I encourage people to speak up and to try and be honest and authentic in their own lives, and how willing I am to listen to them.

It’s just yeah, people do get tired of listening. It does take effort to be there for someone, to listen to their gripes and moaning, and it’s tough if – as with depression – there’s no real solution to offer. People often say they want to listen and be there for you, but as the days become months and years that’s just not true, however true the intention is.

So yeah, there you go. I’m not myself, not sure how long it will last.

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Cats Have Many Names

We lost our cat Charlie today. He was an amazing, irreplacable, cat.
I wrote a thing.

Tails high brothers, a warrior joins you in Cat-Halla.

Life-Saver

Litter-Runt

Named in dream and loved in flesh.

Mole Hunter.

Mouse Catcher.

He who made a house a home.

Vole-Killer.

Partridge-Bane.

Who slew a pigeon when but a kit.

Strong-Claw.

Snaggle-Tooth.

Who hid in a drawer and fit in my hand.

Wither-Paw.

Frame-Gouger

Who ran like the wind and climbed like ivy.

Coffee-Chin

Crooked-Nose

Who warmed our bed and watched us work.

White-Belly

Pink-Beaned.

Who saved my life and kept me sane.

Round-Belly

Wall-Walker

A hearth waits for you, warm and bright.

Where a Valkyrie will scratch your chin.

Where the bowls are full of fish.

Where milk doesn’t make you sick.

Where No-Tail and your Huntress wait for you.

Where you will wait for me.

Tail high to greet me.

When my time comes.

And our spirits join again.

My familiar, my Charlie cat.

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New Year 2019 Whisky-Induced Rambling

I’m tired.

More than anything else, that is the feeling I take with me from 2018. It has been an exhausting year.

Most of that year I’ve been fighting for and fretting over getting assistance with my depression and anxiety; this has meant wrangling with the Department of Work and Pensions and ATOS (Independent Assessment Services). A pair of organisations for whom the terms ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Kafkaesque’ were seemingly invented. I’d call them ‘Gilliamesque’ in a nod to Brazil, but there’s no humour in this system successive governments have created. Not even black humour.

In my professional life it has been a struggle to produce anything, and as a result, I’ve offloaded some work to others to get it done. Perversely, I feel bad not necessarily because I haven’t been producing much, but because -as a result – I haven’t been able to give other people as much work. People who need it, and who I get a kick out of boosting and helping out.

Personally as well as professionally, I am also exhausted. In this ongoing culture war, it takes so much effort to tread water and stay in place, let alone to make any progress. So many people mistake change for growth, not understanding that the direction of travel can be backward as well as forward. Year on year it seems things continue to get worse. People I love, people I used to respect, excusing the worst, most censorious social and even legal acts of suppression the modern west has seen in generations. It’s shocking in anyone, but it’s especially surprising – at least to me – when it comes from the political left and the creative community.

I am tired of that constant fight, just to stay still.

I am tired of being called things I am not, simply because I don’t sing the unholy hymnal in the same key as the approved choir.

I am tired of holding my tongue, swallowing back my anger and ignoring people’s political and historical illiteracy in a vain attempt to reach them.

I am tired of waiting for being principled and consistent, for working hard, to pay off.
I am so very tired of being mentally ill, but that’s my life now, and I have to adjust to it.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to abandon those principles and that consistency, just for a more comfortable life. I’ve realised, however, this year that I am just intrinsically incapable of being that kind of person.

I am tired of the repeated realisation that I’m a rare bird indeed, because of that.

I don’t know how to be happy.

I only know how to be authentic.

A ‘new year’ is an illusory and arbitrary break in time. Nothing is new; nothing changes immediately when that clock ticks past midnight. Still, I want this next year to ‘pay off’. I want to do more than survive. I want to do more than exist. I want being a ‘good man’ to finally reap some of that positive karma I’ve heard so much about.

Whoever you are out there reading this, I want the best for you. Friend or foe, stranger or intimate. I hope everyone does better, and if I can’t get what I want, I hope you get your heart’s desire.

Raise a glass and watch that clock tick down.

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ECHO, Echo, echo

I am in the business of communication. I write, I make videos, I record audio. I communicate with the people I work with for art, design and writing and it is essential that I adequately express my ideas to do so.

One of the most painful things for me, then, is when I fail to make myself understood, and my tendency when that happens is to blame myself. Since I am a professional communicator, it seems to me that the blame must be mine.

I was given cause to revisit these thoughts recently. I don’t have the time or mental energy to engage in much self-promotion, nor do I especially have the temperament for it. To solve this problem I’ve hired someone – part-time – to do some promotion for me.

They had posted but a single promotion, in an appropriate subsection on a notorious forum on my behalf, when they were summarily banned. This gave me cause to investigate and to try and find out why this should be so. Guilt by association for my presumed ‘crimes’ perhaps? Hard to tell.

Still, in investigating it was made depressingly apparent to me that in my absence from most of these people’s discussion about me, in this and other places, that the echo chamber has had its effect. People’s ideas have gotten wildly out of hand, the accusations and assumptions over my politics and numerous other issues are wildly out of step with reality and yet there’s no way to answer back.

This, I think, is a goodly demonstration as to the hows and whys of the necessity of a right of reply, of being willing to engage with people and to listen to their explanations and words straight from the horse’s mouth. Without that, without bursting these bubbles, nonsense gets profoundly out of hand – even to the extent that questioning the fictions themselves becomes an act of unforgivable transgression.

It bothers me in the personal sense because it’s untrue and I feel that I must have somehow miscommunicated my beliefs and stances. It bothers me in the more significant, overall sense because I think this is an endemic problem in the modern west — self-imposed echo chambers of extremism and ideological purity, feeding incestuously on their internal mythology.

Some of this is top-down censorship, but a lot of it is self-imposed, and that’s even harder to change. We can’t even get social media companies to abide by their own professed ideals. Let alone get users to be willing to face discomfort or to question their assumptions.

I don’t see a way out.

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Inktober – Breakable

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Inktober – Bottle

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#RPG – Roll Up! Roll Up! Welcome to The Carnival of Grimness!

Postmortem Studios

Genties, Ladymen and children of all genders!

Cast your functioning sensory organs in something approximating this direction and gaze in awe and wonder at the cavalcade of entertainment and dysfunction on show!

Step this way, and for the low, low fee of your attention you will find diversions most deviant, entertainments most exciting and writings most wicked. We practically (but not actually) guarantee your satisfaction and amusement!

Behold, the hall of Social Media! What distractions and horrors may lie inside these darkened halls?

Perhaps you seek the cheap thrill of voyeurism to be found in the unblinking gaze of Madam Narcissist!

Will you test your mettle and your patience in the Blue Bird Arena?

Perhaps one of our fabulous freaks, Bookface will entertain you with his mind reading tricks, targeted advertising andmostdivertinggroups?

There are new attractions too, wild and untamed creatures from the furthest…

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#Writing – Lovecraft After Dark

I had forgotten I contributed to this and that it was out. So, yeah!

Go look.

“Lovecraft After Dark,” a is new collection of erotic horror from JWK Fiction, edited by James Ward Kirk and Roger Cowin. We offer short fiction and poetry blending erotica with the Mythos. Erotic encounters, forbidden romances between humans and the gods and demons of Lovecraft’s world. Ever wonder what obscene romance produced the human / elder god hybrid, Wilbur Whateley? How did the Black Goat of the Wood come to have a thousand young? These are just a few of the ideas explored in “Lovecraft After Dark.” Explore what Lovecraft only hinted at. Let your imagination go wild. We did.

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