When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Io9 article here

Anna lee Newitz, wrote a piece for IO9, a blog about sci fi, arguing that Avatar is the classic ‘White Guilt’ story about a white man throwing in his lot with the oppressed natives to overcome his ethnic guilt at being white. I haven't seen avatar, but she makes some pretty valid points, and lumps in a bunch of movies like 'The Last Samurai and Dances with Wolves' and alleges that basically every sci-fi book written by a white guy is about the white guilt of cultural colonization.

It's interesting that Anna Lee seems to associate conquest and the defiling of conquered natives with Caucasians. Specifically the British empire's expansion phase and it's impact on South Africa and North America.

The story of one culture invading and destroying another culture is as old as the concept of culture. Perhaps the concept of guilt over cultural destruction has come about post the British empire's expansion phase - but very few of China's expansionist emperors were Caucasian. Genghis Khan, not Caucasian. Italians? Generally not considered to be Caucasian anytime before the 1900s. The Persians? Not Caucasian. The Zulu's and their expansion through the tribes of southern Africa? Not a Caucasian in sight.

"going to a foreign culture and colonizing it" is a story as old as time. It extends beyond cultural boundaries. It extends beyond ethnic divisions. It defines human history. It defines human evolution. Fundamentally, since the dawn of time we have gone out, found life and used it. We domesticated dogs and cattle. We domesticated corn and rice. We have wiped out uncountable species of life in our cultural expansions.

It's not terribly interesting or engaging to write about going out and conquering non sentient life and it's cheaper on the special effects budget to do bipedal, roughly humanoid aliens. But thinking that it's a white guilt thing is an interpretation so rooted in the narcissism of the cliché American traveller who complains about Italian pizza being wrong that i can't help wondering if Anna lee was trying to get published at the Onion and ended up with IO9 picking it up instead.

The pundit pieces from non Caucasian writers bemoaning the whole arch type of going to another culture and conquering it in particular make me giggle. Especially when they’re coming from people who’s ethnic groups of origin are right now in the middle of cultural conflicts (Hello Israel! Hi India and Pakistan! And a big Howdy to everybody in the audience from an Islamic nation!) pointing the finger at whitey and saying we’re warmongers with a guilt complex is the kind of racism that usually gets labelled ‘reverse racism’ like there’s a discernable difference between it and normal every day racism.

At the end of the day – There’s no one alive today who’s not descended from someone who fucked someone else over for poor reasons. As a fiction writer – I write about characters who behave (I hope) like humans. If my human characters have gone forth to conquer another culture (and they have) – It wasn’t any kind of white guilt. It was my observation of how humans behave. Quite frankly – if I’m writing a conquering villain, basing my model on the British imperial expansion sounds terribly boring. There’s much more interesting character models in the Asian and middle eastern cultural groups, or in the more modern, multi cultural west. Unless we’re talking Pirate conquerors – in which case Western Europeans certainly had their share of awesome.

Ask a Pervert – Point of clarity

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Don’t get too excited. This isn’t a fun entry – although I’ll post one later today.

I’m going to continue to archive my posts from the Ask a Pervert thread here, along with the rest of my writing that I’m keeping archived somewhere because I like it. But fundamentally, this is my blog – and a large part of the awesome with the original ask a pervert thread, was my wife’s contributions.

As we get a bit more organized – we’re going to break up these posts into individual questions and answers, edit them a bit more coherently and include both my answers to questions, and my wife’s answers and publish them as a shared blog – so that she gets the credit she deserves without having to feel like she’s playing in my sand box. As that happens – I’ll post redirection links on these posts to the updated entries.

Thanks for all the awesome feedback that’s come through in the last few days as well. It means a lot to me.

As an update - http://askapervert.blogspot.com/

Ask a Pervert 4

Thursday, December 17, 2009

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - I did have some content up here, but there wasn't really due credit to my wife Nikki, who was at least as much a part of the original thread as I was. We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com with all due credit Nikki and some better editing hopefully to make it a bit easier to find stuff.

Ask a Pervert 3

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - I did have some content up here, but there wasn't really due credit to my wife Nikki, who was at least as much a part of the original thread as I was. We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com with all due credit Nikki and some better editing hopefully to make it a bit easier to find stuff.

Ask a Pervert – Gender preferences

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - I did have some content up here, but there wasn't really due credit to my wife Nikki, who was at least as much a part of the original thread as I was. We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com with all due credit Nikki and some better editing hopefully to make it a bit easier to find stuff.

Ask a Pervert – Divergence (a new question)

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - I did have some content up here, but there wasn't really due credit to my wife Nikki, who was at least as much a part of the original thread as I was. We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com with all due credit Nikki and some better editing hopefully to make it a bit easier to find stuff.

Oops

Monday, December 14, 2009

Comments were broken. They're now fixed. I don't think there's any other site bugs from my template tinkering, but if you find any - I'd really appreciate a note to scootah@gmail.com or something.

Ask a Pervert pt 2

Friday, December 11, 2009

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - I did have some content up here, but there wasn't really due credit to my wife Nikki, who was at least as much a part of the original thread as I was. We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com with all due credit Nikki and some better editing hopefully to make it a bit easier to find stuff.


Ask a pervert, Pt 1

 A while ago, I did an ‘Ask a Pervert’ thread on a forum that I frequented. After a few requests – I’m re-posting most of the questions and answers here now that the forum has gone away. I’ve filtered the names out from the people who were asking questions – but if they want credit, or want their questions removed so that their content isn’t here – drop me a line and I’m happy to do so. If you have questions that aren’t answered in the thread – leave a comment and I’ll answer it.

That said - We're now moving the Ask a Pervert stuff across to it's own blog - askapervert.blogspot.com

Focus

 

I was never diagnosed as having ADD or ADHD as a kid. Dad was a nurse with an intimate and very negative experience with the drugs they were giving kids when I was at the appropriate age and he always steered me away. In retrospect – I can see that my parents did all the things that you’re supposed to do with an ADD kid though, and I responded pretty well.

I still flunked year 12 because I was bored though. I wonder how I’d have done with the drugs?

A while ago, I noticed that I was having drug problems because I couldn’t pay attention worth a damn. Especially since the nature of the work I do means that I have unfiltered internet access… like right now. I struggled to focus and lost a job because of it. It contributed to my depression and anxiety problems for a while and eventually a psychologist had the idea to test me to see if maybe that was my problem.

So I jumped through all the hoops, and I’m now on Ritalin. I’ve had an amphetamine problem in the past – so I didn’t want Dexamphetamine. I’ve had suicidal impulses in the past so I didn’t want strattera, and I’ve read the components of Ritalin so I didn’t really fucking want that either. But unfortunately I was overruled. I’m still wondering why exactly it is that I can’t have fucking modafinil like I wanted, when all the literature a lay person can get hold of seems to indicate that it would be a much better targeted treatment for my symptom set, with a much less worrying side effect profile.

I’ve been on the shit for a week now and I’m seeing some changes to my behaviour – but nothing in the area that I wanted. I’m focused a bit more and I’m seeing a much smoother balance to my anti depressants. But I still can’t concentrate on boring things worth a damn. I still struggle to focus on anything that feels like work. And I can’t seem to convince myself that work is fun, no matter how hard I try. Unfortunately the more I talk to doctors about this, the more convinced I am that I know more about the drugs that they’re prescribing then they do – and that worries the shit out of me – because I really don’t know that much.

A friend told me ‘Dude, it just sounds like you’re a person to me’ and I wondered if I’m overanalysing this whole thing. Does everybody spend every day desperately trying to give a fuck long enough to get something productive done? Does everybody need a gun to their head to focus? It seems like the people I know who aren’t gulping down psychoactive prescriptions, trying to fix themselves have a much easier time doing boring things for money then I do.

Tell me a story?

Thursday, December 10, 2009

 

I’m trying to write a novel again. Or at least a decent length story. I feel like a complete hack though. It’s been in my head for weeks. I’ve seen scenes and character interactions play out in my mind. I’ve got some ideas that I really like.

But it’s a paranormal romance. Werewolves and vampires. I’m writing something significant that I might actually finish, and it’s for a genre so saturated and cliché that it’s fucking unbearable.

But I like the story. And my hero is so very much more impressive then Edward. My female lead is actually capable. I’ve got were-animals that aren’t completely boring. I’ve got motivations. I’ve got twists on the clichés! Unfortunately I still can’t convince myself that I’m not a hack.

I am however pondering what the reaction will be from one of my ex’s if I actually get published. She’s been trying to get her paranormal romance fiction published for 6 years, submitting story after story after story. It probably makes me a bad person that I want the story in my head to be good enough to sell, as much to see her reaction as for any financial rewards.

If writing cliché paranormal romance gets me into a creative industry though, I’ll be beyond delighted. Hell, if Harlequin’s bodice rippers with fangs division pays me something for the work I’ll be over the moon. I won’t tell anyone the name I’m publishing under. But I’ll be thrilled.

Which is better?

 

I got an email today with this question -

 

Hey Scootah. Would you mind answering a question I've always been curious about?
As a top, what's more attractive: someone who can handle a lot of pain and endure it, or someone who breaks and cries and squirms?
I realize that everybody has different limits and preferences, but the whole BDSM thing is essentially based on consent and trust - so which is the better scenario?

I answered the email to say that it's not an either or question. It's like asking if you prefer someone with a vice grip pussy or a vibrating tongue. Or a guy with an vibrating penis or a tongue that can reach his eyebrows and tie his shoelaces.

Ideally, I'm looking for a combination of the pain threshold and the great reactions. But it’s not like I make a decision one way or the other because of either characteristic. I just want to play with someone who’s fun and who’s there and in the scene with me.

One of our play partners is an absolute pain slut who completely gets off on lots and lots of pain, but squirms and dances and cries - it's fucking great fun. We do evil shit like put a nose hook in and tie the hook to the ceiling and tell him that if the nose hook comes out he’s fucking toast – just to make his dancing and squirming that little bit funnier.

Some people are very stoic about pain - we play with a guy who's really not submissive - he just really, really likes pain. So every now and then he and his girl come over and we beat the crap out of him - he goes home happy we all have a good time in the process. He doesn't move much and rarely makes a sound when we play with him - but there's an incredibly deep and rich sense of satisfaction in making him make a sound and getting the reaction. We've had him pass out from the endorphin high mid scene and the only sign he was having the time of his life (outwardly) was that he started to sway a bit right before he passed out. He is intensely ‘there’ in the scene and he’s incredibly in to what we do to him. There’s a connection as part of the play that’s really intense even though he’s stoic and reserved. And the after scene connections are really intimate and close in a way that’s really rare for two guys who aren’t fucking.

We also play with a girl who I've seen have an orgasm from having lemon juice squeezed over fresh needle piercing wounds in her nipple (shed just had a couple of dozen needle’s pushed through her nipples and pulled out, and needed the extra kick to get over the edge). She’s also one of those people will actively shit talk back to you during a scene - which is also lots of fun. Having someone look back over their shoulder as you're bringing up welts across their back and arse and ask if that's all you've got and telling you that you hit like a girl is pretty funny and really entertaining if you've got an audience and you get the satisfaction of shutting them the fuck up as well.

I couldn't say any of them are 'better' for scenes. I mean some people are complete starfish and put nothing back into the play. No emotion, no connection, no satisfaction from the whole deal. They just take what they want and walk away. And that’s not what I’m looking for when I play. But as long as there's something coming back from the person you're playing with – as long as you’re getting what you need everything can be fun if you do it right. Everybody’s kinks are different.

Hey man, can you get me a fix?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

 

If you’ve read my writing in any detail you know that I I know a bunch of weird people and I have a history of drug contacts and black market associations. I’ve been interested in black market economics for years and as a former recreational drug user – I know people who know people.

Obviously, this isn’t something I normally tell my co-workers about. I work in a reasonably respectable career in a pretty straight laced office in a very straight laced town. Out of the blue this morning, one of our senior sales guys, a very straight laced and by the book guy, formerly a military officer in South Africa comes up to me and beats around the bush for a second before asking if I could help him out. He wants to buy a medical grade oxygen supply for recreational purposes and his Doctor won’t help him out. Do I by any chance know anyone who could help?

It turns out, he’s a licensed glider pilot, and at altitude they often need an oxygen supply to improve the quality of the air that they’re breathing because of the low Oxygen supply. He knows about all the safety issues (like 40 minutes of breathing pure oxygen will be fatal for most people) and all that shit.

Also, as it happens – I know a guy who breeds tropical fish, who buys medical oxygen to pump in with the bags of fish when he sends them out – so I said sure, I’ll ask him where he gets his from, since I’m pretty sure he didn’t need a note from his doctor or anything. But still. WTF?

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that after less then 6 months on the job, without having told my co-workers any of the kind of stories that would peg me as the guy who can get medicinal supplies without a doctors note – I’m already tagged as the office fixer for that sort of thing.

Skin time

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

 

Recently I’ve had a lot of problems with my attention span. A lot of problems. I finally sucked it up and got tested and found out at 28 that I do indeed have ADD and ADHD. I started Ritalin late last week and had one day of intense focus and concentration. Since then? I’ve had about as much focus as a kitten with a coke habit in a room full of mirrors.

Consequently, my blog has now been re-skinned. Ritalin is not nearly as delicious as I had hoped and I have been massively unproductive lately. But hey, my blog is kinda pretty right?

I don’t want to mislead anyone – the art and the colour scheme were edited and bolted on to a freeware theme. I have no artistic talent at all. I wrote some CSS and did some image editing shenanigans – but the core artsy stuff is the result of a bunch of other people’s talent.

That said, I do like the end result. Even if I really wish I’d spent the time actually working.

On a side note – is anyone actually reading this? I should really install some kind of analytics. FUCK. No installing analytics. Actual work to do. Stupid brain.

Marriage, Partners and some more thoughts on non binary relationships.

 

I'm married and in a relationship that includes more then two people. I only have one partner - my wife means vastly more to me then anyone else in my life. I love with a little l all the people that we're involved with. I Love her with a big L and some implied exclamations at the end.


We use 'partner' as a word for the person that you're fucking all the time - and that works fine when you're introducing a fuck buddy at the office christmas party and you don't want that person to feel slighted. But we also use the word partner for our spouse and then get confused when the two ideas inter mingle.


But when I talk about my wife as my partner, I mean 'together, we're greater then the sum of our parts, she's the largest part of my life, part of my core, I'd be less then I am if she wasn't here, every day that I don't see her is a day wasted' sort of partner. She's not just the other half of my kinky sexual practices. She's not a friend who I live with. She's this incredibly connected part of my life. And I don't think I could have two of those - it'd be too hard to keep my sense of self stable if I shared this much with more then one person.


But the other people in our lives are sex partners or play partners - they're partners in the sense that the sex positions that we're doing wouldn't work without their involvement, they're great friends and people we love - but it's much more casual then a Marriage.


But fundamentally, it's about distinguishing emotion from physicality. Fundamentally - a large part of my motivations and my biology are pure instinct. Evolutionary sexuality where species proliferation relates to how many different people I can fuck. The species proliferation also to a large degree has depended on our ability to dispose of our poop in a sanitary fashion and piss somewhere where bears won't eat us while we're holding our dicks.

We enjoy eating red meat and being in the sunshine because we need iron and vitamin D to continue the species. The fact that I've overcome those biological impulses enough to wear sunscreen, eat the occasional salad and not do a spot check for bears before I take a piss doesn't change the fact that we've got a bunch of hard wired pleasure/discomfort responses that are based around species survival.


We can fuck without any intention of procreation. We can take contraceptive drugs, wear condoms or get surgical procedures to prevent us from being able to breed and still the pleasure response from fucking is there. We've evolved our culture to fit that social need. We came up with Monogamy to fit a bunch of social needs. The argument about what social need it fits varies from 'Because god willed it' to 'because all men are pigs who should be removed from the gene pool' - there are some arguments about family modelling and disease spread that hold varying amounts of water.

But either way - there are a bunch of modern social conditions where monogamy doesn't fill any social need other then maintaining the status quo and continuing our social programming (unless you believe that god really did will it, in which case there's not much point in having a discussion about the topic).


Continuing a status quo with a pre defined set of ideas just because that's the way it's always been done and that's the name for it that we already have isn't really my thing. I think words change their meaning over time (hands up, who hears faggot and things of a bundle of sticks intended for burning? Who here's nigger and things a person regardless of ethnicity who is ignorant and incapable of changing that status). I think Marriage is a word that's become almost as emotionally laden as faggot and nigger - and I wish it hadn't. Fundamentally - I think as a society we'd all be much better off if we moved Marriage back to a religious ceremony - like a Bar mitzvah - Nobody gives a shit when a Jewish thirteen year old becomes a man - he can't buy beer or smokes - but he's got all the rights and obligations of the ceremony and he has the ceremony and recognition of his family and friends agreeing that he’s now a man.


I think a Marriage should be the same deal. Fine you're married. Nobody gives a shit until you pass the tests to be considered common law spouses. File an application of intention to become common law spouses for immigration purposes - give out civil unions (or whatever the fuck you want to call them) to any group of two or more financial entities who meet the tests as defined by law. Marriage should just be something you do if you want a ceremony or an excuse for a party to for your friends/family/superstitious union of occultists to celebrate your relationship.

Dude, you're FUCKED UP - pt 2

Monday, December 7, 2009

I went through girlfriends, none of them lasted - but lots of them learned things and all of them taught me things. I suppose it says something abut me that losing my virginity is barely even an event in my head. It was with a girl on a park bench who had her hands tied behind her back with my belt. But I'd been through so much experimentation that it hardly stands out in my memory, despite the fact that it should. When I was 17 I went to my first public fetish event - a 'munch' - a social gathering of perverts in a public, non fetish location; at a coffee shop in the local entertainment district, a coffee shop I'd frequented with my friends from high school, although a few hours later then the usual high school gatherings.

I'd intended to go with a woman I'd met online, she was older then me and we'd fucked a few times. But she cancelled at the last minute and I went alone. There were other people who I'd talked to online at the munch who I made friends with fairly quickly and got along with well. When the social event was wrapping up - the crowd started moving towards a club that was on near by. A public venue held in the downstairs bar of a near-by club. I caught a ride with an older couple, a psychology professor and his partner. They hade to move the jelly sex toys from their back seat before I could get in.

I walked straight into the venue without being ID checked, but didn't have the nerve to buy alcohol from the bar, even though I'd drunk at bars before with my friends. I was too nervous about the consequences of getting caught out really. The couple I'd caught a ride with were doing a demo of an unusual toy. A Violet Wand - at the time they were rare in Australia. I'm not a bottom - I don't like people using toys on me, and I never have. But I was in love with the violet wand from that moment. It's a fetish that's lasted more then a decade now. I played with it for the better part of an hour before going to watch the other shows.

I only remember the rest of the night in flashes. An unsuccessful attempt to hit on a woman a decade my senior. A dominant woman enjoying my awkwardness as I turned down her offer of a beating and her amusement at my awkward offer of the same for her. Watching a stage show of wax and impact play, as a short Hispanic man in a trench coat next to me growled under his breath 'Yeah, Yeah, Hurt her, Hurt her' and trying to edge away from his creepy sketchiness. Watching a couple after playing retreat to the darkness in the corner of one of the side rooms for one of the most intense blowjobs i'd ever seen. In retrospect, what I was seeing was my first real external view of subspace and topspace meshing sexually. I'd glimpsed that sort of thing as a participant. But never as a voyeur, and never on the level that they were connected. Seeing that shared high, being part of that shared high is an addiction that I've never been able to kick.

There are a lot more stories that go into why I'm so fucked up. But fundamentally - that night set my path in stone. I was hooked. And while there was fall out from being underage at an event and more fall out from being an idiot teenager in a grownup culture. I never lost the jones for fetish nights after that first addictive taste.

Dude. You're FUCKED UP.

This whole beginnings thing is really fucking me up. Figuring out what to write about and what Nikki is going to write about is hard. Figuring out how to go about telling stories about my friends on a blog for entertainment is insanely brain twisting and figuring out what parts of my life are worth writing about and what parts of my life are just emo crap is confusing the shit out of me. I wouldn't even try this if there wasn't someone (good looking, talented, patient, insightful) else to bounce ideas off and get editorial feedback from.

I'm an odd duck, and lots of things don't make sense without explaining some of that oddness, so vanity seems like the answer for what to write about next to bring you up to speed. I'm an odd duck. I was a child prodigy. Growing up I aced everything. I had reading and comprehension scores off the charts - I was topping out at maximum for post graduate college students when I was 8. I was always good at Maths and had a natural affinity for computers from the time I first learned to read. But I have no artistic talent at all. I can't play an instrument to save myself. I can't read sheet music. I can barely handwrite even. I'm ambidextrous with some things and I can juggle and do all sorts of things that are hard for everyone else - but I suck at throwing a ball or catching like a normal person. I had a speech impediment as a kid that made me seem that little bit more odd and I grew up untill I started school in a community where I was the only european kid.

Even though i had a bunch of aboriginal play mates - none of them lived close. In the bush - everything spreads out. My parents were caretakers for a camping ground that was owned by a drug dealer before they took it over. So big dogs and guns were around from as early as I can remember. All the isolation of farms - but none of the live stock. I remember my mum loading the gun while she was on the phone to the cops, and firing a warning shot to convince the police that they should get off their asses and clear the car full of strangers, looking for a drug dealer out of our yard.

I remember our German Shepard dragging me away from a billabong full of crocadiles by the diaper.

I've seen photos of myself in a backpack, with the sleeping bag and the saucepans, on my mothers back as she abseiled down a waterfall face, leading a tour.

When I was old enough to start noticing things about our family and other peoples families, I first noticed that I was an only child - which was rare where we lived. Then I noticed that my mum was about 12 years older then my dad, which was way weird where we lived.

My dad was a heavy drinker, but not a mean drunk - just the life of the party. I have pictures of my dad stuffing me down the barrel of a bronzed naval cannon and that sort of gag was very typical of my dad. We used to go out on the weekend to the beach with dad's mates - we'd fill the back of a pickup with beers and then top the load with a half tonne of ice from the ice factory, then buy morton bay bugs (like lobster, expensive and trendy now, but they used to be waste catch that was just thrown away) - by the 44 gallon drum and then split the drums, fill them with salt water and barbeque them on the beach while the adults drank beers and the kids played in the sand.

Untill I was about 6 - my social interactions were primarily with adults. Thomas was my best friend, an aboriginal kid from around the corner who didn't talk. His parents were always drunk or huffing petrol. Thomas came to our house to play, which as an adult I recognise is probably another way of saying to avoid being beaten or raped. Aboriginal kids have it rough up north.

But my dad worked for a youth support service, and we always had a house full of kids in their late teens and early 20's who dad was counselling or helping through random stuff. So my real friends were at least 12 or 13 years older then me and really just tolerating me because I was cute (it faded). I remember playing transformers and watching simba the white lion with hung over bush teenagers who'd been drinking at our house the night before. My real friends were troubled, alcoholic young adults who I think needed me to be their friend more then the other way around.

Through all of my young life there was a pattern of kids who needed me more then I needed them. My friends were all fucked up. ADD kids, kids who'd stabbed people. Kids who were named after candy bars and were violent about being teased. I don't think any of my early childhood friends finished highschool. A few of them got equivalencies in their early 20's - they were the odd ones. One friend got onto the Australian under 17's soccer team and got a contract in the UK - the rest of them are now either labourers, addicts, petty criminals or in the armed forces as far as I know.

I'm digressing I know. But I'm trying to establish that I'm socially not normal. I probably have some condition on the Autism spectrum. We think Aspergers (heh, Ass Burgers) but it's not a confirmed diagnosis. I also have Dysgraphia which affects my handwriting and drawing as well as fucking with my social behaviours a little. Whatever it is that makes me weird, it makes me noticably weird. I know more then any normal human about a few isolated topics - computers and kinky sex being the primary ones. A few obscure genre's of fiction following closely.

Some of my clearest memories are things like the smell of a leather handbag my mother owned. A scene in a movie where the male lead orders the female lead to strip naked and swim. Playing doctor with a girl I knew and having to hold her down for a proceedure. Games where one person was in control and everyone else was an Animal who had to do what the person in control said.

My dad fell into the IT industry through a job fluke (from nurse to ambulance driver to cab driver to piano salesman to youth councillor to demolitions instructor to IT guy, perfectly natural progression right?) and as a result we had computers around the house from the early 80's onwards. Being a child prodigy - I knew almost as much about computers as he did by the time I was 8. We had modems and access to Fidonets and BBS systems - the antique precursor to the internet. I knew more about sex by the time I hit highschool then the average 40 year old hooker. I was interested in fetishes early.

I took martial arts for several years, Judo and later Jujitsu. In Jujitsu I made a lot of older friends. 16 and 17 year old friends when I was 14. I was big for my age. I always looked older then I was. All my older friends as a kid and my social weirdness made me pass for older then I was. I got invited to a party and lied to my parents that I was sleeping over at a friends. It was my first teen party. My first party with more girls then parents. My first party with alcohol. I had no idea about the many powers of alcohol when mixed with teenager hormones. I nursed a beer the entire night and had half of it left when well into the night, sitting and laughing with a group of 20 or so kids, a very drunk girl who'd been drinking straight from the bottle of vodka slurred out 'Who wants a blowie?' - half a beer had my courage up and I thought it was just a joke anyway, so I volunteered. She crawled across to me, pulled me out of my pants and gave me my first orgasm in front of 20 cheering, drunken teens.

The word got around to some kids my own age and grew teeth, ears and extra legs. The fact that I'd been answering questions about sex for years anyway thanks to my hard earned knowledge of pornography added to the legend and I was rapidly elevated into a sex god in my own lifetime. It's a remarkable quirk of fate when an Aspie kid gets laid before he can afford to go to bars. When an Aspie kid gets my highschool sex life it's a goddamn miracle. I had a series of girlriends, none of them ever lasted long but almost all of them were experimental. Hands tied to the bed. Spankings. Hair pulling and control games. When I was not quite 16, still not legal, I lied about my age to some people I met online, lied to my parents about where I was going, took a bus 2 hours west of my house and met a strange older man at the bus stop and rode out to his farm with him. I spent the weekend with him and his 'slaves' - an older woman and a younger woman - in her mid 20's. I beat her with a paddle, ordered her around all night and she statutorily raped me several times later that night.... while tied up.

It's a miracle that I lived through that even really, much less that nobody got charged or caught an STI as a result really.

Homophobia costs you more then it saves.

Before I met my wife, I used to frequent gay bars and backpackers bars. I have always maintained that if you are a straight man, and living in a town with no backpacker traffic, gay bars will be the easiest place in town to get a quick, no strings shag.

Obviously, this advice requires that your chosen gay bar not be men only. If the bar has a name like 'The Mine Shaft' and a 'No Women Allowed' sign by the door - you might want to try and find an alternate location to apply this advice. But if your gay bar is, like the majority of gay bars I've been too - open and friendly to anyone who is not an asshole, and probably playing really bad dance music, it will be full of women.

Obviously, many of those women are there to look for other women. Most towns just don't have a big enough gay community to have a really good lesbian club in addition to a really good general club. But don't give up hope. Bisexuality is ripping through the female population of the western first world like HIV through San francisco in the 80's. Everybodies got it and at least half the women in any popular gay bar are bisexual. They may not admit it infront of the other lesbians, and they may not ever go home with a guy from a bar (and they'll probably send me hatemail if they ever read this) - but deep down, a lot of those women have no particular objection to sex with guys. Add to that the inevitable hordes of fag hags who infest those bars and you have a target rich environment. Fag hags spend all their time around hot guys, drink heavily and never get laid. Their gay boyfriends will pimp them out like a used car salesman with 3 ex wives. The bisexual women who were out to find women? They might like dick - but they're not content with dick - or they wouldn't be hanging out in gay bars - they'll go away in short order to find a woman. Fag hags are all essentially in love with their boyfriend and will bugger off in fairly short order as well.

I know lots of straight men have an idea that you're either gay or your straight, that bisexuality is a myth perpetuated by girly gay men, and that a single crossing into the notion of same gender sensuality will send them crashing down into pink and mauve shirts and cocktails at a bar named after a bette middler character. But honestly, that's fucking retarded. The Kinsey scale, a basic education in biology and having once read a reasonably well laid out magazine article on child physcology, combined a functional intellect should really be enough to grasp at least in broad terms, how human sexuality works. Clearly however, for most men, it's not, but hey, as far as I'm concerned, it's their loss.

Case in point, we went out the other night, the venue was packed to the rafters with lesbians, mostly aged between 18 and 30, mostly good looking, all dressed in fetish wear, half of them a piece of string and some wishful thinking away from topless, and half of the remainder actually topless, I considered for a moment how awesome it is to be a straight man who goes to gay bars.

The club bills itself as a fetish club, but really, maybe a dozen people out of the 150 through the door actually played - and most of those are only doing light scenes. A little slap and tickle. For most of the crowd - it's just about a chance to dress up and been seen in the scene.

This particular club is run by lesbians. Hot lesbians. Not John Goodman lesbians. The type of lesbians who ride harleys around suburbia on weekdays, looking for bored housewives. And finding them. In droves. Of the 150-200 people in the club, I was probably one of the three or four most attractive men present. I'm 20lbs over weight, pasty as only a computer nerd can be, and bald. The standard for the evening was NOT high. There were only maybe 20 guys in attendance, most of them were well over 50, or looked like they'd seen the rough side of every branch on the ugly tree... and a good number of the roots.

The remaining 130-180 people in the club were women. Mostly hot women in their mid 20's and at least half of them single, and all of them at a club devoted to rough and kinky sex.

I pause now for the guys reading this to stop drooling and refocus their attention. While a good number of those women were clearly not into men, and an equally good number of them were just not looking to pick up last night - there were probably 40 or 50 good looking, kinky, dirty, bisexual women looking for somebody to fuck in that room - and maybe 5 guys who'd pass for human in the room. If a single, decent looking guy who knew how to be cool in a pansexual bar had been present - there would have been a fucking impromptu naked jelly wrestling tournament thrown open to determine which three women would get to fuck him.

I watched as my friend Mistress Rojo did a wussy scene with her boy Lucas. Rojo is one of the most interesting people I've ever met, and an absolutely lovely person as well, I'll tell her story some other time. She is normally quite an intense player - but given the tame vibe and the license requirements of the venue, it was a pretty mild scene. Mostly just to entertain the punters.

Stories from the Big House

Despite a long history of petty theft, vandalism of state property, substance abuse, bar fights involving antagonizing bouncers or the NZ Navy, buying large quantities of narcotics, making and selling illegal weapons (or fetish toys if you aren't a cop) and sexual assault (You can't consent to Assault here, it doesn't matter if she asked you to flog her ass or not) and miscellaneous assorted stupidity; I never got caught. Never got sent up. I talked my way out of a bunch of things. I knew the right words to say, the right names to drop to make rent-a-cops forget they saw me. I knew how to convince the nice officers that I was a good kid was the wrong kind of friends.

But for a while I volunteered (when you get paid to go to a volunteer gig, it should tell you something about how fucked the environment is), at Juvie. My roommate was a teacher and he was doing some shit there. They needed some help with computer stuff, and I thought 'How bad can it be? Its only fuckin juvie'. I was wrong.

The first three or four days were pseudo-normal. The kids were rough and arrogant little fuckers - but I went to a pretty ghetto high school, it didn't seem that bad to me. The computers were all locked down in cages so the kids couldn't actually touch them to break or steal anything. The monitors were built into the desks and they had to use track balls instead of real mice - I thought it was ridiculous over kill. They were just fucking kids. Other staff told me a bunch of stories that I thought were just standard 'scare the new guy' stories. I was wrong. Then came Friday, about 11 o’clock I heard a scream from the next classroom, I recognized the voice. It was a teacher screaming. Not an angry scream either - it was an 'oh shit, somebody just slammed a pencil through my fucking hand and is twisting it right now' scream. I ran out the door and in my only vaguely sensible moment in the incident slammed the door behind me (that locks the doors so the kids can't run wild) - I should have called for security. I didn't. I charged into the room and saw a very large Maori kid (16, 6'5, 275lbs of steroid muscle) with a pencil stabbed through the teacher’s hand, grinding it around in circles widening the circle while the teacher screamed. He was in so much pain he couldn't even respond properly. He'd lost motor functions and pissed himself from the pain. He passed out while I was watching. The kid howled a fucked up victory call, pulling these demented faces (Its a Maori thing). I shouldn't have been in the room at all. Security should have been doing this shit. Even if I should have been intervening, I should have been putting him into a restraint hold. I certainly shouldn't have uppercut him hard enough dislocate his jaw and knock him onto his back, I probably should have then dropped a knee into his upper pelvic region (just above the balls, instant bladder release reaction and lots of pain, often better then a direct shot to the balls for someone who's had a long career of substance abuse) and then dislocated his shoulder putting him into a hold.

I should have been gang beaten by the rest of the class. I should have been fired. I should have been charged and I probably should have gone to jail. But juvie responds very well to kicking someone's ass. For the hour after you beat the shit out of someone - you're a fucking demi god. Nobody will say shit to you. Security arrived in what felt like an hour, but was probably like 10 - 15 minutes. I should have gone to jail - but fortunately for me - the kid was too stupid to stick to the events. He tried to convince the principal (Read Warden) that I had held him down and raped him in front of the class and beaten him with a weapon and all sorts of shit. His story changed every time he opened his mouth. Then warden was also a bitter old alcoholic and hated the fucking kids. He'd spent 35 years working with them and didn't believe a word they said. He tossed the complaint and it never saw a courtroom.

I got in a lot more trouble for leaving my classroom. I got back and the kids had trashed every monitor in the room. They had used shiv's or random shit to smash the monitors through the bars. They had kicked the cages in until they had trashed half the actual computers and none of them would confess and none of them knew who did it (naturally). I got chewed out for an hour, over that, and only the fact that I hadn't had proper security training before they dumped me in the class saved me from getting fired (which was bullshit, I totally knew not to leave my classroom and forgot, but I needed the extra cash).

About a week went by after that, where nothing normal happened, and then I came in on a Monday and noticed one of the kids I hadn't seen before who had a pretty fucking horrific looking injury. It had been patched up - but you could tell he'd had his face ripped open from just below his ear to the corner of his mouth. I asked one of the guards what had happened. Turned out that the kid was in for beating his mother and his stepfather half to death. His stepfather had been sexually abusing him when the kid snapped and in the middle of the night took a pick handle to the fuck, did the same to his mother. He was just in juvie until a spot in a corrective psyche opened up. But he was in juvie long enough to get initiated (gang raped), and predictably he didn't handle that well - he bit some guy's cock hard enough that it needed post event stitches  (I hear in real jail, they're smart enough to punch out your front teeth before orally raping you, kids aren't that bright). There was a pretty big fight after that, that resulted in donkey (I'd never thought to ask why the kid was nicknamed donkey before I heard this story) knocking the kid unconscious - and fucking his face hard enough to rip open his cheek, among other assorted injuries.

About a week after that I got an offer to help a friend out with some shit elsewhere that paid the same money and didn't have the same high stabbing risk. Only time in my life I've quit without giving notice.

Non Binary Relationships

 

In response to Dr Rob

I'm not sure if this is masturbatory - but just to establish where I'm coming from, I'm currently in a long term (12 months+) relationship, which has included sex, sexual contact and cohabitation with my wife and a third party. We have a variety of play relationships with people outside of our dynamic. We self define as a 'Leather Family' due to the BDSM/Fetish connotations with our relationship and we are closely involved as friends, family and former lovers of a large number of people in varying types of open relationships. My wife and I have been together for more then 5 years, but we've also both been involved in a variety of way, with a significant number of open relationships prior to our own relationship.

Fundamentally, the thing I see that builds the most resentment and the most unhealthy interaction in open/poly/non binary relationships is the lack of equality or the lack of fairness. There needs to be a pre-negotiated set of rules for any poly relationship, like there are for a standard binary relationship. The thing is - a binary relationship has rules that were debated and defined by dozens of generations of western culture, Dr Phil, Oprah, Cleo Magazine and hair dressers around the world.

In a non binary relationship, the framework for those rules isn't so pre defined. There's no clarity about 'Cleo says going to a strip bar isn't cheating unless there's touching' - it's all about what the two of you want and can make work. The problem is - a lot of non binary relationships occur between people who don't have a good grasp of what challenges they're likely to come up against. They don't have a lifetime of tested self assessment of what they personally can tolerate and what crosses their boundaries. And fundamentally - it's much more common to want to be in a poly relationship then to want your partners to be in a poly relationship. Greed and lust are a pairing that almost everyone is tuned to understand. Lust and sharing is much less culturally prevalent.

When the rules get set up - there's almost never real reciprocity. One partner is willing to share more then the other. One partner wants more security then the other. One partner wants their cookies but is still too culturally influenced to see their partner get cookies from elsewhere. And envy and a sense of unfairness kills poly relationships in a slow, painful way.

I don't know how many people I know who are in a poly relationship where one partner either doesn't have, or can break the rules - and the other partner is willing to let it slide, but if the willing and comfortable partner looks at one of those same rules funny - the relationship will explode.

I know a couple who devolved into a massive melt down and public explosion because the female partner of the couple sent an enticing email to the male partner and he responded positively. She knows his every trigger and button and wrote the email explicitly to appeal to him as a trap and their relationship went straight to hell because of it.

The same woman fucks on average a dozen different guys and a few girls in an average week. The male partner enjoys that dynamic and that play. But he's not allowed to fuck any of those people. Only she gets the window. Fundamentally - he's got no issues with her being physical with others - but he gets no reciprocation of that trust. He gets bear traps set for him instead.

I know another couple where the female partner set all the rules about no vaginal penetration and no kissing and no fluid exchange and etc, and ran the male partner ragged with her paranoia on the few occasions when he explored his options - then turned up pregnant to another man who she moved into the home. Her male partner has his own set of problems that motivate him to not leave despite the breech of rules and trust - but he's years into a passive aggressive dynamic that he never agreed to - where he scrubs the toilets with the other man's tooth brush and he's forced to be the provider for his wife and a man who he doesn't like. And he's still not allowed to kiss another woman.

I know DOZENS of couples where 'Open Relationship' is another word for 'We're fuck buddies, but you're only allowed to fuck me while I fuck anyone I want, and you get none of the consideration that you'd expect from a relationship while having all the obligations' - usually with a man controlling the relationship.

I watch so many of these relationships where I can only wonder if the guy involved has a vibrating dick made out of chocolate? If the self esteem issues of the involved parties are what drives the continued participation and how they'd react if they actually had a positive self image? I don't believe anything more then a fractional minority of those sort of massively unbalanced relationships are healthy.

I think that fractional minority are almost universally made up of relationships that are balanced in other ways. I don’t think relationships that are fundamentally unfair can ever really work.

--

Oof

I just found a thread about this topic on a forum that I go to sometimes and I thought a few comments there warranted a response.

--

So to sum up my question is, What are the effects, if any, on children and the relationship between partners in raising children during an open marriage or relationship?

I don't have kids. I don't particularly like kids. That said, my wife raised a niece from infancy to about 10 years old, while in an open relationship. That kid is now 20 and I know her pretty well and some of my friends who are in open relationships have kids.

The answer is I don't think it has less impact on a kid then say being raised by two mommies or two daddies. Ideally - your kids just don't know that fucking much about your sex life and if they do know too much - then you give them the very watered down version so it seems mundane and boring. It only starts to impact kids when you involve them in it - which is fucked up.

I've done workshops at fetish events to teach people how to shelter their kids from the digital side of their kinks. I've help people lock their kids out of shit. I've helped build the 'store rooms' where mommy goes with guests when the kids are at sleep over's. Most parents keep their kids from being too exposed to the whole deal because kids shouldn't know that much about their parents sex lives. That said, I have friends who's teenage children know WAY too much. I have friends who's pre-teen kids know way, way, way too much. That's nothing to do with the fact that mommy and daddy occasionally fuck Aunt Susan - that's a parenting decision where they've dramatically over educated their children at a very young age (in my incredibly biased, having never raised a child view). But they've consciously made the decision to let their children have that information.

There's certainly an impact from teaching your kids too much about the birds and the bees and the inserting peeled ginger into someone's urethra. But that's not an open marriage thing.

There are some things you can't hide from your kids though - like if one of your partners wears a collar all the time, and obviously isn't Goth or anything - the kids will catch on. If you have a live in third party who is intimate with you in front of the kids - that has to be explained. And how you handle that has to be tailored to the kids in question and how you want to raise them. My friends who I think do that well explain it in a very telly stubbies sort of way with lots of focus on 'different but ok' and 'consenting adults who've all knowingly chosen to love each other' and no details of how the mechanics of the sex works.

From what I've observed from friends, a SUCCESSFUL open relationship takes at least one of two things;
1. Not truly loving the other person. Being fond and kind towards them sure, but not true love.
2. Having a twisted and unusual psychology.

It's already been said in the thread, but this is nonsense. Fundamentally - there are millions of tribes in Africa and through the pacific islands (and Utah) where non binary relationships are working very well. Monogamy is a cultural expectation and the only thing required to not have monogamy in a healthy relationship is a personality that can function outside of cultural presets.

That might arguably be considered an unusual psychology - but I have personally met and know well enough to say 'their relationship works pretty well and isn't a negative part of the lives of anyone involved' despite being non binary - a few hundred people at least. That's not bumped into at a party or met at a conference - that's people I've spent time with and got to know them pretty well
Most of those people aren't standard thinkers, it's true. But Twisted? There's a lot of bias in that phrase that I don't think is warranted.

I'm of the opinion that while there is nothing wrong with an open relationship, it's something at upwards of 90% of the human population is not emotionally equipped to deal with.

This is why the rest of the world makes fun of Americans. I mean really. I know puritans founded your country, but lets try and keep up with some shit - like the fact that you aren't a majority of the worlds population. Through a lot of Asia - polyandrous relationships aren't a big deal, they're not idealized, but they're also not something most people give a shit about. Basically all of Africa's indigenous populations that haven't been converted by catholic missionaries (who coincidentally, have all the food) have non binary relationships.

One of the more interesting theories on why Suicide bombers became prevalent was the lack of available women in societies that prized sons above daughters where food was limited, and engaged in polyandrous relationship models. If you talk about the Christian Western World - maybe your 90% hold water. Maybe. But in the real world - that's not a majority share of the worlds population. Hell, even the very religious Scandinavians almost universally don't give a shit about people cheating in their marriages as long as the core family unit still comes first.

The only way that doesn't hurt is if you don't care

I disagree with the entire point that the person who posted this was trying to make - but this bit is true, to a point. You can't make an open or a poly relationship work if you can't get past the idea that Sex means EVERYTHING the way the Catholics have always told us it does. But not treating sex as an overwhelmingly gigantic sign of undying love is very different from not caring.

And? The only human societies throughout history that have had widespread polygamy (which was usually the men having harems, and women being stoned to death if anyone so much as accused them of infidelity) were ones where women had virtually no rights and were looked upon as mostly chattel. In other words, where no true love existed.

I'm not sure if you had shitty teachers, or what the deal is. But that's just not a true reflection of gender dynamics in a lot of polyandrous relationships - even where wives were bought with cattle, that's just not an accurate reflection. Sharia law can give that impression where it's implemented by fundamentalists - but in terms of the bulk population of Islam, that's not a realistic reflection of the culture or the power dynamics.

Can true love really exist between people who don't see themselves as equals? I love my pets, but I don't respect them as I've respected the women I've been in love with.

If you love your cat like you love your women, you'll run up a fortune in vet bills. I'm just saying - they're smaller animals and lube only goes so far.

In terms of people seeing themselves as equals - This diverges from Poly and moves to BDSM - but I know a lot of people who will actively fight to prevent the ones they love from seeing them as equals and would be very offended if you suggested that it in any way diminished the truth of their love.

Hetero-normative Judeo-Christian, post second wave feminist egalitarian relationships might be very politically correct. They might even be what the majority of the first world is looking for - but it's not the only way for two or more people to get down. And it certainly doesn't have a corner on the True Love market.

Tech Support Syndrome and a last Reply to Ryan for a while

 

Started here.

I've never seen Ryan refuse to engage with his readers, I know Ryan has never refused to engage with me even when I disagree with him. There's a firm difference between refusing to engage, and discouraging stupidity.

That said, I think there's certainly value in Ryan being called on his shit occasionally. Cause the dude is 20 - and while he is unquestionably smart and 'gets it' - at 20, he's still going to get caught in his own arrogance, he's still going to misjudge things, and he's still going to fuck things up and need to be called on it before he'll get it. You can't be 20 and smart without being arrogant. You can't be told that you 'get it' by miscellaneous smart people (and morons from the internet) at 20 without starting to scorn the morons who don't get it.

Ryan has what I describe as Tech Support syndrome - he constantly deals with complicated concepts that relate to the lives of everybody he encounters, and he, and those around him, have internalized those ideas so soundly, that the people who can't follow those concepts through in a logical and sensible way, seem like fucking retards.

Tech support monkeys get shot down by a smart customer, college prodigies tend to be humbled by a professor they idolize or something. Or the lesson comes from parents or an employer or something.

Ryan's stepped away from his parents, and I don't think Tucker is the sort of person to demonstrate the lesson. I don't know where Ryan's going to get the right sort of experience to cure him of that experience and give him perspective - but I'll be interested to read the story when it happens.

Anger management

 

My paternal lineage is quite interesting for anger management.

My grandfather came back from Kokoda with PTSD that was never diagnosed or treated. We're fairly sure he's repressed strong homosexuality. He's spent his entire life in a storm of fear and anger, making every person he meets miserable so that he won't be alone is his depression.

My father is the life of the party and generally very nice guy. He taught for years and was favourite teacher and later lecturer to thousands and thousands of students. He is a fantastic speaker and does radio and television bytes on a regular basis and his audience loves him. His temper is almost invisible until it flares.

Dad has what he describes as 'Joan moments' - they're called Joan moments because when Joan of Arc was on the cross, about to be burned, they said to her 'Say you're sorry, and we'll let you live' and Joan looked at them and said 'Fuck you. Somebody's going to die, it might be me, but somebody's going to die'. When dad's temper flares - he has no sense of self preservation - something gets destroyed - no matter the cost.

I once saw dad raise the height of a doorway in our house, with a chainsaw. He'd hit his head three times in a row on the door frame, the third time hard enough to put himself on his knees. He didn't say a word as he stormed out to the yard, grabbed the chainsaw and extended the door frame. My mother was standing near by, trying to convince him to check if there were any electrical cables in that wall, or if that wall was perhaps structural. He didn't pause.

On one hand, that anger makes him one of the most ruthlessly effective people I have ever known. As a manager - he is stunningly effective as a head kicker and change motivator - and he has some surreal gift that still makes people love him even after working for him.

On the other hand - I've seen his temper cost him tens of thousands of dollars, over the most retarded matters of principle.

My temper is a long, slow fuse. I am incredibly patient with people I like. But my anger is the biggest driving force behind my creativity. Rage has inspired every really great piece of writing I've ever produced. Rage has been the main motivator behind some of the proudest moments of my life. Rage has given me clarity when everyone around me was blind.

I think Anger is like any emotion - it makes fools of the foolish, but it's still a perfectly useful tool if you can make it work for you.

Replying to Ryan – Lose-Lose

 

Another reply to Ryan Holiday that I kind of like -

it's very easy to lump yourself into the intellectual elite, or the moral elite. Or any other kind of elite really.

Finding flaws in the way that others behave is at it's core - a really easy thing to do. Declaring your way of doing things 'better' is equally easy.

What you're viewing as an oblivious asshole acting without thought to annoy you needlessly is in all probability a guy who can't afford another speeding fine or he'll lose his licence and his job. What you see as geezers stopping whippersnappers from speeding because they're old and shit, they see as stopping another moron from killing themselves or innocents - a part of their civic duty with an infinite reward of good karma.

I think it's probably solid advice to look around you when either you, or other people are upset - and figure out if you're the source of the problem and then figure out if what you're doing is worth the goddamn problem.

I've recently said some things in a public venue that have made life difficult, awkward and uncomfortable for a number of people. Several people who I would have described as friends prior to the incident would now probably spit on me for calling attention to their flaws and raising issues that they didn't want discussed.

I could have much more easily shut up and stood out of the way. I could have looked at the conflict and stopped being it's source - but I felt (and still feel) that they were doing something dangerous and fundamentally wrong - so I took the action available to me to reduce some of that harm.

I also routinely drive at the speed limit even though people are honking and trying to go past me. Even when there's no lane available for them to go around. Fuck them. I'm one ticket away from a suspended licence that will cost me a hefty chunk of income. I don't care how unlikely it is that I'll get caught. Them getting home 6 minutes faster isn't worth the risk.

Rules for life

 

[1] – No Cunts in my life.

 

I stole this rule from my father, which is funnier when he says it then when I do, because he’s a homosexual mysogynist. But it’s still at it’s core a solid codification of one of my my firmly held principles for life.

Admittedly, I don't have to live in LA with this this rule... but I'm yet to find anything but positives in refusing to have any involvement with any person who I consider a cunt. I don't do business with them, I won't work for them, I won't hire them, I won't socialize with them, I wont even call them a cunt - in my private little world, they only exist in the sense that a dog turd on the pavement exists - to be stepped around and forgotten.

Replying to Ryan – Essence vs Efficiency

If an automated process response is indistinguishable from a conversation with a human, either the human or the judge has failed.

But arguing against automation in general, or even arguing against the idea that Automation in general is a good thing is a a flawed argument. Throwing in the emotional reference to outsourcing is also an association fallacy to begin with, outsourcing can be a by-product of some automation - but the fundamental goal of all Automation is to reduce busy work and produce a purely creative environment.

The purpose of Automation is to take a task that currently requires a human that can be distilled into a standard function, document and detail that function and then replace the human time with an automated system.

A failure to review and constantly improve automated functions is a Monkeys in a cage issue, (http://freekvermeulen.blogspot.com/2008/08/monkey-story-experiment-involved-5.html), not a fault with automation. Part of any decently implemented automation process is a review and improvement process

Fundamentally - review of the system can't be completed by anything less then a creative intelligence - which for at least the next 15 years means a human. Even 15 years from now, it's pure speculation that computers will ever be capable of creative tasks like true process improvement.

In the ideal of an automated society, the only tasks that required human attention would be the creative - Coming up with and implementing ideas. Finding ways to make things happen. Reviewing ideas and improving them.

Every time you do something that requires more interaction then being creative - you're doing something that you shouldn't need to do. Why is technique a part of art? What if we could automate the process between thinking of something and sharing it with others? Why does the speed and accuracy of our typing or enunciation make or break communicators instead of what they're trying to communicate?

Hell, in a more pure business context - while Automation sometimes costs jobs through outsourcing and mechanical automation - it's a mechanism that's intended to free human time for more important tasks then whatever it is that's being automated. If I automate 50% of my day, and then assign 2% of my day, or 3 hours a month to review of those automated tasks - that gives me almost a thousand hours a year that I can spend doing something productive, something that can't be automated by a computer.

Automation sucks if you're building your career around being a drone who does something simple and repetitive over and over again. Automation sucks if you're a monkey in a cage who lacks the basic ability to overcome the way it was done and find new ways. Automation sucks if you're a cost center in the business and bring no inherent value to the business proposition.

Automation is a blessed godsend to anyone who's value to the business proposition is more then knowledge of a tool and time availability.

This is a reply to This Post over at RyanHoliday.net that I kind of liked

Scootah's law of self assessment on the internet

 

The more extreme somebody's assessment of their own qualities is when reported on the internet, the more probable it is that the exact opposite of this assessment is true.

IE somebody who tells you that they're Elle McPherson, Claudia Schaffer and Angelina Joelie all wrapped up into one is probably a 5'1, 700 lb hose beast who hasn't been outside since 1997. The more somebody tells you that they're the bastard love child of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, the more likely it is that they're too stupid to tie their own shoes and too spineless to try bending over anyway.

The reverse also usually holds true. The more people depreciate themselves the less likely the depreciation is warranted. The Bunny is fucking smokin.

Talent and perception

 

Originally from here

My dad is a painter. He thinks' he's not a painter because he was 45 before he took it up as a hobby, and he's never really satisfied with a piece and it's only paint on canvas that's not worth anything.

Strangely, everyone, and I do mean every single person, who knows my dad, asks him for one of his paintings for birthdays/Christmas/etc. He is fucking amazing. We started the trend when we asked for one painting that we loved, and he was stunned that someone would want his worthless piece of trash. He was stunned when 2/3rds of the trash in his house was snapped up by the first people to ask for it when the realised that asking might be possible.

He still insists that his art is worthless and won't give it as a gift unless he's giving something else that's worth while with it.

I'd rather have one of his paintings then almost anything he could conceivably buy me. I think just about everyone else who knows him feels the same way.

On a similar note - I think I would do many, many bad things to own a Bunny original. I can't think of many conceivable Christmas presents that would be better then that card.

Consolidation

So I’m in a period of Consolidation in my life. My finances are fucked, the forums I’ve used as my default excuse to not work for 5 years are closed. I’m on a cocktail of psychoactives to make me a functional kind of crazy and I’ve moved twice in less then a year.

Everything in my life needs to get simpler. To be more defined. Everything needs clarity and review.

So I’m going through 3000 posts from the aforementioned forums, 500+ blog entries from different blogs I’ve started and ignored and various other bits of writing around the place and I’m consolidating them to this blog. I’m using the Windows Live Writer to have access to almost all of those blogs from a single resource and to update things as I go from that same single resource.

I’ve got pretty much every piece of recreational reading on the internet that I engage in tuned down to an RSS feed list and set up in a spiffy program called Feed Demon, sorted by groups and regularly updated.

I’ve got my IM accounts, email accounts and social networking accounts all hooked into a program called Digsby so I can monitor and update them all (as much as I ever update any of that crap) from a single interface.

I’m working through my bookmarks – and I’m still trying to find a way to consolidate them into a single useful format – if anybody has a good way to import and auto-tag from Delicious to say Mozilla Weave – I’d love to hear it.

I’ve sorted 500gb of Movies and television shows into suitable folders and pruned things down. I’ve still got 100gb of music that is desperately in need of sorting and god knows how many documents that are in varying stages of clarity.

I’ve got a list of reading material, reference material and training material that’s going to take me a decade to sort through. But it’s progressing.

I’ve thrown out pretty much everything I don’t value any more. Someday soon – maybe I’ll have what’s left sorted and clarified.

I’m not sure where this drive for organisation comes from. But if I can just manage to get on top of my to-do list for work – I’ll be golden.

Snickers, really satisfies

My friend Snickers got married a few years ago to the Princess. Their wedding still resounds with me as one of the top five most surreal, relatively sober occasions in my life.

Snickers is a weird guy. He's very religious, but he firmly believes that you should never share your religious opinions with anyone who hasn't asked about them. He grew up poor, Middle child in a family of 15. His dad was an Irish born Lay Preacher and itinerant missionary/alcoholic and His mother was a housewife before she died in childbirth with the last kid.

At 14 or 15 snickers left home to travel with a touring ethnic boxing troupe as the only Caucasian in the troupe, doing shows at outback rodeo's and shit, sending all his money back to his ridiculous family so they could eat while his sisters raised his Siblings and his brothers who were old enough ran off to join outlaw motorcycle gangs. After he got his teaching degree through external study (while working two full time jobs to help his ghetto ass family) he started working in youth shelters and teaching at Juvie hall.

The Princess is from an old money family. Apart from intermittent stints in Academia, nobody in the last three generations of the Princess' family has actually worked. The last person in the family that actually worked was the guy who ran a bank in Europe somewhere. Before that her family owned a big chunk of the Dutch east India company. the Princess had poor little rich girl guilt and did volunteer work at youth shelters where she met and fell for Snickers.

The marriage was naturally on the Princess’ family estate (a huge acreage with full time butlers and shit where the families staff raises race horses). Her parents built a Chapel specifically for the event and catered the whole huge fairy tale style wedding, with some of the richest and most influential people in the country in attendance on the brides side. The ceremony itself was fairly tame, but kind of tense. On the brides side was the upper crust of White Australia's snobbery. On the grooms side was a fine collection of unwashed, toothless rednecks, outlaw bikers, native aboriginals who had literally NEVER seen so many people gathered before.

Highlights of the wedding reception included a 16 piece orchestra and 12 part choir, the impromptu boxing display featuring the former members of the grooms youth boxing troupe, the bride's 125lb upper crust father getting wasted on red wine and getting into a political argument and resulting brawl with the groom's father and oldest brother (who were both over 200lbs) and winning. The groom getting hammered on red wine and punching a federal member of parliament who drunkenly felt up the bride. The second eldest brother of the groom doing burnouts on his Harley on the immaculately landscaped front lawn of the brides family estate, including burning the initials of the bridge and groom in 10' letters inside a giant heart.

The police arrived towards the end of the festivities to arrest 3 members of the groom's family on outstanding warrants (including 2 counts of murder against the brother who did the burn outs). The Bride's mother had to be restrained and temporarily handcuffed when she tried to prevent the police from “takin’ little wuzzhisface because he's sush a nihce boy who couldn'a possibee ha dun whut theysa said he dun did!”

The Bride's father declared it to be 'the best party we've ever had' extended a general invitation to the Groom's family to come and visit any time. They bring their trailers and motor homes down every summer since and camp out on the lawns and get wasted on red wine with the bride's family for a month or so.

Chemical Reminiscence

This is one of many of my recollections about my sordid history of drug use. I think they get more coherent as the drug use gets to be further into the past tense.

--

I have talked more then one person down from trying to jump off something while high, and given thanks to Bill every time. 'Dude, Why don't you try it out from the ground first? Check this shit it out slowly'. I have had many experiences that should have scared me away from drugs. I had an amphetamine habit.

For a year and a half, 3 weekends out of four, from Friday night to Monday morning I was fucked up. I have a high tolerance to begin with, so 78 hour benders were expensive, and fucked up my universe in a pretty intense way. But the first series of moments when I should have quit came when I was doing a one night party on one pill only. The first moment was one of my first few times doing drugs, fourth of fifth I guess?

I was at a friends house. There were maybe 50 of us in a smallish house. It was one of those weird 3 story town house deals, where's there's like 2 rooms on each floor. Late in the night, around four in the morning, we had discovered that nobody had actual beds, just mattresses on the floor. So we had piled a couple of queen sized mattresses on top of each other in the master bedroom, and we were running down the hall way, and diving across the room to bounce off the bed - it was fucking awesome. Until one girl bounced off the bed and through the curtains, knocking the screen off the window and going straight out the window.

It suddenly struck us all that we were three floors up, and below that window was a basement car park - so a four story drop onto solid concrete. It was this intensely surreal moment as she just vanished through the curtains, the laughing stopped and it was dead silent as we contemplated the drop in that intense moment before complete panic sets in. We were all realising that a girl had probably died and shit the house was full of drugs and we were all going to jail. Then her head appears through the curtains like something out of a bad television magic special. Apparently there was a balcony outside of that window that we'd all forgotten about. It was easily the most panicked 15 seconds of my life.

The other incident that really stands out took place at another party, my second drop (I had an interesting first few times), I was spitting e-tarded game at this very hot girl and going nicely when she goes to the bathroom. Both of us were new to the scene and had dropped like one pill. I had a second one I was planning to split with her later to seal the deal, I'd heard drug sex is amazing (I later found out that it is, if you can actually get it up) and I was trying to keep my shit together while she was in the bathroom when I realised she'd been gone for a while. Somebody else went to use the bathroom and when it wasn't locked, assumed nobody was in there and went right in. Hot girl is on the floor, unconscious.

Most of the people at the party are hardcore. they've been doing this shit for years. Yet I'm the only person who can get it together enough to check her breathing and her pulse. Nada. I start CPR while screaming for somebody to call an ambulance, everybody is freaking out about the house full of drugs, I'm trying to tell them that they just need to call an ambulance, not the cops, and tell them it was a drink spike. Finally somebody calls the ambulance and babbles bullshit at them. I'm screaming 'Drink spike, no pulse, ambulance here NOW' in the background to try and clarify the situation for emergency, as they get the address out of the fucked up freak on the phone.

what felt like hours later (but was probably only a minute or so), the girl's pulse restarted. As I'm giving her mouth to mouth. Her gag reflex kicks in again and she projectile vomits, into my mouth. All over my face and my clothes. I reflex vomit into her mouth, and all over her face, other people vomit over us. It is highly romantic. I pull it together enough to help her clear her airways and put her into a recovery position, sweeping away the vomit from under her face with my hand and trying not to vomit more. More people are vomiting outside from the smell. The ambulance guys arrive and I tell them the story, they laugh at me when they hear the vomit part and tell me that that happens.

They write it up as a drink spike despite the drug paraphernalia all over the house and the entire room full of obviously fucked up junkies. She never sleeps with me. Next weekend I wanted more drugs. A few years later I eventually quit after one of my famous 72 hour + benders. A bottle of absolute, half a dozen top shelf pills, a gram of speed, 3 cartons of bulbs, some marijuana, some meth, some ice (like meth but more fucked up), some GBH and some coke. I come down and hit a huge depression cycle. I spend the week depressed and next weekend get fucked up to make myself feel better, spend hours making out with some ancient, fugly crone. I get home, still fucked in half and have all sorts of intense hallucinations and panic attacks and decide to quit.

I hold my resolve until the next party where my friends hustle me out of a party before I get my ass kicked for pissing all over the bathroom. I get massive depression and shame issues on the come down and go clean for about 6 months. I partied a few times after that, but completely sober but for the occasional beer (no more then 3 at a time) or vodka shot (no more then 2 in a session) since Easter last year. (this was written in early 2005)I never believed the ‘drugs make you stupid’ shit when I was on. But I took a few tests while I was partying - aptitude tests for jobs and shit. I scored mid-average at best. I've taken some pretty heavy aptitude testing for law school since I quit and scored in the top percentile for the country on the nationally assessed shit. That’s probably the biggest persuader against starting up again, that and the post party depression.

My how things change

Friday, December 4, 2009

 

I wrote this not long after NYE 04/05 – It’s funny thinking about how much shit has changed. It wasn’t like either of us were new to BDSM then – but I feel so much more jaded about the whole thing now.

The house described belongs to people who are now really great friends of ours. Several of the people described as strangers being observed in this story are now among our best friends.

--

After writing this, and replaying the nights events in my head - it does feel pretty goddamn surreal. And its a more then a little disconcerting that none of this seemed particularly odd to me at the time.

For NYE my wife and I went to a fetish party. We arrived a little late, so the party was good and started by the time we got there. The venue was just some couple's house - we'd never been there before, all we had was an address. I'd met a few of the people at the party before, but only in passing.

Maybe half a dozen of the people in attendance we (my wife and I) had met through a friend at a party just before Christmas. The house itself was interesting. The last house on quite a long, dead end street, it was pretty isolated to begin with. But the driveway was huge, pitch black, and at least a 400'-500' walk from where we parked (at one end of the driveway) to the house. The house was big and quite nice, with a large pool, a dozen or so naked people in it. At the back of the house is what can best be described as a stone igloo. It was maybe 20' across and a circular base with a lockable door. But it was essentially a stone fucking igloo, there were maybe a hundred assorted floggers and paddles, a couple of benches, a 50's era gynaecologists table, and every available surface was lined with Eye bolts, heavy eye bolts, the sort of shit you could safely hang a fridge from, or a couple of people if you were that way inclined.

Outside in the main party area, there was somewhere between 75 and 150 people wandering around at various stages of the night, mostly dressed in black, a few French maids outfits (mostly on guys). We sat down and got drinks and started chatting to a few people we'd met at the last party when a Dominatrix sat down next to my wife, with a strap on dildo attached to her thigh. She had some guy (not her submissive, just some guy who was there) sit on it, I sculled my drink. The pool was starting to fill up, maybe 20 people were in there. Mostly naked. Around the corner from us there was a pretty heavy needle play scene going on (various gauge needles are inserted into someone, either temporary piercing style, or like a way more painful sort of acupuncture.) And next to us a naked girl was tied to a table while some dominatrix dripped hot wax to her.

An older lady was talking to us and telling us that she wasn't allowed to play because she was 'So Drunk!' (she was) while the dominatrix was still bouncing this guy on her knee. She had random other people pushing him up and down to add to the flavour. Some tall (like 6'6 and wearing stiletto's) guy in a French maids outfit was being bent over an old gurney (wheeled hospital table I guess the house owners had a thing for medical scenes) when we decided to head over to the dungeon (all the play that was described above was happening on the veranda of the house not actually in the dungeon). In the dungeon I played with my wife.

The standard flogging/cane/clamps/hair pulling that's at every fetish party. We also have a thing called a violet wand that is cool as shit. By far my favourite toy. Basically you plug it into a power point and it produces a high voltage unbroken supply of static electricity. There's a bunch of wand attachments for zapping people with but you can also make yourself a conductor so that when you touch/kiss/etc people they get shocked. Hours of entertainment and always draws a crowd.

When the countdown came she was naked but for panties and boots bent over a spanking bench. I was conducting large amounts of electricity through my body and into hers for the midnight kiss. We played with the wand for a while after that and had a bunch of people ask us to use the wand on them next time we were out. We watched some girl who had never been to a party before get beaten. It was her first time she worked with one of the party regulars who was playing with her. Girl on Girl beating always look kind of wussy but they're still hot. When you play with someone its a pretty intense adrenaline/endorphin rush. Its like a drug. So after a hot scene you usually spend a while cuddling/chilling out while you 'come down'.

We were watching other scene's and chilling out when a fun thing started. A guy was hooded and put in a lycra sort of straight jacket deal - no buckles or anything but a bitch to get out of without help. Then they stood him on a stool with his back to a pole and started wrapping saran wrap around him from his shoulders to his ankles. Constant wraps around the pole. Then they started duct taping him in place. He was mummified in duct tape and saran wrap by the time they were done. I went over to help then. He was a big guy and they weren't sure the restraints would hold him when they pulled the stool away so a couple of us had to be there to catch him just in case. They pulled the stool away and we stepped back and he was suspended there 2 feet above the ground mummified in saran wrap and duct taped to a pole. We watched them do all sorts of evil shit to him while he was stuck there and then helped them cut him down before we decided to go home and fuck.

Post scene sex is always mind blowing. Its an intense prolonged and massive turn on to do that sort of scene and your body is hyper sensitized by the rush from the scene - My wife announced afterwards that she had no idea what the fuck I had done to her but she owed me forty hundred blow jobs to compensate for the intensity of her orgasms. 39 hundred and 96 to go."

I’m Special.


This was written in late 2004. It’s still a good story though.

I am currently taking ice skating lessons. I was a childhood klutz. I fucked up my leg while riding my bike when I was 6 and was always kind of nervous about anything involving me on wheels afterwards(strangely, I could rock climb/abseil/skydive with no fear at all, but anything involving me on wheels and I turned into a pussy) - and as such never learned to skate.

So now at age 24, I resolve to confront my fear, unable to find rollerblading lessons, I started taking ice skating lessons (yes I'm aware of the stupidity inherent, scared of wheels so I strap knives to my feet). The last time I tried to ice skate, I was 15. I managed to fall and shred my jeans with my own skate, actually splitting the skin on my nuts and down the inside of my leg with my own skate - almost no blood - but never the less, almost cutting off my own nuts with my ice skate.

And yet, I'm voluntarily trying this shit again. When wife and I saw ice skating lessons at the rink near us we decided to try it out - we rang and asked, they said lots of adults do it. They also said everybody on the ice must wear a helmet. We showed up first week, including the instructors, not a soul over 16 on the ice. Even the people teaching the classes were still in fucking high school. And nobody else has a helmet. (adult instructors arrived later, I am not in adult instructors class, I am being taught by 15 year old, fuck). We start the lessons. I am unco as fuck. I get relegated to the tiny totts class.

I am so bad, they put me in a group composed kids who are 5 year olds and under. They are better then me. I am too stubborn to let 5 year olds beat me, I keep going to weekly lessons. My wife starts skipping lessons because she is tired, or so I can catch up to her skill level. This means I am the only adult in a class full of 5 year olds, being taught by someone who is too young to drive. I remain too stubborn to quit. 10 year olds come up during lessons and give me encouragement. 10 year olds are too nice to laugh in my face, and apologize for making fun of me. 5 year olds however freely mock me - because they can skate away faster then I can lunge after them to beat them. Bastards. I remain too stubborn to quit. Various parents and other adults begin to join in classes, inspired by my stubborn yet dorky example. I am the spiritual leader of  geriatric dork klutzes. fucking perfect.

Boom.

This is the first of a bunch of posts that are just reposts of things I said on  a message board once. These are not well edited and I don’t care.

When I was a bit younger, my Dad was an instructor at an Agricultural college in butt fuck nowhere (technically a place called Burdekin Australia, which is in the north east part of the country) - A redneck hell hole. They fairly regularly did 2 week short courses on various stuff farmers might need to know. Butchery, cattle midwifery, small motor repair, sheep shearing, and of course - demolitions (and a bunch of other shit I don't remember). Its more or less standard that pranks will occur when you gather a large number of yokels into a relatively small space with lots of high explosives and large stupid animals. One year the butchery instructors had played a prank on the demolitions guys - by stuffing several car exhaust pipes with sections of cow intestine, fresh from the cow. So the demolitions guys got a little revenge - they threaded about 240' of cow intestine with det cord (courses on rendering a live cow into steaks produces a lot of excess offal), and strung it in the tree line, about 25 feet up surrounding the butchery instruction area (Classes were done outdoors mostly - no indoor space). During the classes lunch break - they detonated the cord sequence. If you've ever played with det cord - you can set timing and direction of the blast when you detonate. The blast was directed down and towards the middle of the very large instruction area. The contents of 240' of cow intestines, and the majority of the intestine tissue covered literally everything, and everyone in the immediate area. I cannot describe the horrific nature of 20 or so guys, holding sandwiches and cups of coffee, surrounded by tables and butchers saws and knives and shit - covered in half cooked, half digested cow shit and cow intestine. When you make farmers on a butchery course puke - you know you've done well.

“Rage, Loathing and Discontent”

Thursday, December 3, 2009

 

I’m an aging hippy railing against kids in designer flairs. A middle aged punk, scorning kids who pay a small fortune for a hair cut that looks like it was done with spray paint and super glue. I’m the saddest cliche of an angry youth – I’m old and watching the things that I was angry about taken away, washed out, made lame and corporate by hipster douche bags.

 

A friend made a post in his blog, suggesting that Loathing was a product of Fear and Ignorance. I protested – I loathe most the things I know best. Anger and powerlessness, the inability to influence the things that make us angry – that’s where loathing comes from.

 

I feel antique talking about my generation in the past tense. I’m not even thirty yet. I’m on the bleeding edge of technology. I have so much counter culture that it’s leaking out of my ears. But apparently it’s time to start chasing kids off my lawn or something. Because kids wearing baseball caps with the brims flat and stickers still on them infuriates me – that’s how kids with downs syndrome wore their hats back in my day. How am I supposed to know which kids can’t get out of the way when I try and run them down with my car now? Fuck!

 

My generation doesn’t have a name. We’re the bleeding edge between Gen X and Gen Y – We grew up with the internet and learned about biology with highly pornographic learning aides. Our major pop culture influences started when Kurt Cobain died and ended when My Chemical Romance weren’t laughed off the stage.

My generation was characterized by anger, at the world and everything that was wrong with it. Sarcasm, Irony, loathing, apathy and rage were our club membership badges. Bill Hicks was our prophet. Nivana, Nine Inch Nails, Rage against the Machine and Tool wrote our protest songs. There was a swell of anger against the world and everything that was wrong it. Racism, sexism, reverse sexism, stupid political correctness that gave us nonsense phrases like reverse racism and reverse sexism, homophobia, all these social wrongs that we were trying to change.

Now I see those same hall marks of association, sarcasm, irony, loathing, the humour and the musical styles parroted and parodied by hipster douche bags. But when I look through their anger and see them wearing slogans coined by my heroes, on fucking t-shirts and baseball caps that they bought from mass marketers, I don’t see anything directed towards the world at large. I don’t see any altruism or any selflessness in the motives. All I see is bitterness and longing. Self deception and dellusion.

 

An actor I heard give an interview once said that in the old days, you were famous because you were special. The most remarkable people were heroes to the world, everyone knew them and wanted to know what they were doing because they were special. Children idolized them and strove to be like them because they wanted to be special as well.

Now the world has changed and people are special because they’re famous. The world treats famous people like they’re special and now instead of seeing children idolizing the qualities that made someone famous – we’ve learned that you don’t need to do anything in particular to be special. You just need to be famous. If your daddy is rich enough and you stop mid fellatio to answer the phone, and then let the video leak – you can make yourself one of the most famous people in the world. You can be paid millions just to go to parties. You can get a record deal even though you can’t sing. You can be in movies even though you can’t act.

All the echoes of my heroes, all the secondary characteristics of the people I admired and respected, all the secondary characteristics of my own youth are being adopted and perverted now by people with none of the primary characteristics. Their rage at the world is all about unfulfilled narcissistic fantasies. The only thing they want to change is how much attention everyone will pay to them.

Maybe I’m just romanticising my own faded memories. Maybe I’m just another bitter old man, waving my cane at the whipper snappers on my lawn. Maybe my anger and my inability to change the direction that the world seems to be moving will just lead into loathing.

Maybe I’ll dress like I’ve got downs syndrome and go fit in with the crowd.