If I had a bead on what I need to make the moment last I just might try I just might try. I just might try.

  Anyone who's spent any time on Twitter knows that every other day or so, one person's tweet blows up beyond what they expected. The reason it blows up is usually because it lays out some trite "common sense wisdom" from someone who doesn't really need to go there and isn't bringing anything useful to the discussion. Half of Twitter tells them what kind of damnfool peckerhead they are while the other half argues for the same trite horseshit. Something about "not being the star of Twitter" goes in here but I forget how it goes.

 Anyhow, yesterday the big to-do was some woman who works for the NFL Network saying only hard-work and grind will bring success, she appreciates the time she worked for around 16 grand a year and has no time for those who won't put in the effort. What she neglected to add is that she's the heiress to some rich chili concern out of Texas, and was able to live at one of the three homes her parents owned while grinding it out at poverty wages. You never hear that part of the story yet it always comes up, and generally, the right-on's are one dropped spinning play away from bankruptcy at the best.

 Before we get too deep into this, I should note that I am extremely lazy. I might be the laziest person in Northeast Mississippi, which is saying something. I come by my laziness honestly. My momma was lazy and her daddy was lazy. Laziness is my heritage. When I'm on the job, I put in the work expected for the compensation promised. But if I ain't getting paid, I'm not going to bust my ass. You can hustle your way to the grave, I'd rather sit on my porch and pick my guitar while getting stoned.

 This has influenced my life. I busted my ass trying to "make it" as some sort of a journalist until around 27 or so, when I realized I was really no better off in the decade-plus of trying and was probably in worse shape. Maybe it was a lack of talent and skill. Maybe it was a lack of effort and gumption. Maybe it was bad luck, but whatever it was, the end result was killing me while breaking my heart.

 Part of the problem was that it's goddamn near impossible to make it as a freelancer unless someone else pays the bills until the ship comes in. This really didn't settle in until I read Hunter Thompson's first book of letters, The Proud Highway. Basically, he had to scrimp, save, borrow, and steal when he wasn't living off his wife, and this went on until basically, he got a big check for Where The Buffalo Roam. This was a double-edged sword because he became too famous to do his type of journalism. He's said he could've either gone back to being poor and hungry or just give in and play the role, and we all know how that turned out.

 I digress. Reading that, however, lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. Unfortunately, it came too late to do anything about the absolute burnout I had from trying to make a living as a freelancer while having to hold down kitchen and bar jobs just to be able to eat, much less afford what I needed to do the job. I wasn't having any fun and I see no point in not having fun. It broke my heart when I realized all this, and the pain was only topped by the deaths of my father and maternal grandmother.

 Now, I said all that to say all this. Work and grind are fine and there is something to paying your dues in any business. But unpaid internships, especially, are bullshit and you are due proper compensation for your labor. You should have the right to tell anyone who wants you to work for "exposure" to piss off because anyone who expects you to work for free doesn't have your best interests at heart. They will screw you over, and as likely as not, people arguing for "the grind" have someone else paying the bills.

 Okay, so much for all that. The situation in Jackson is finally getting more attention, though I'm still a bit stunned none of the lefty alt-news websites like Mother Jones or Alternet are doing anything about it. Common Dreams does have a nice piece on the situation published today, so do check it out.

 I still haven't got my chromatic harmonica. I went ahead and ordered another one off of eBay from a place called dreamharmonica. Another cheap one, of course, but the first one was a 10-hole and 12-hole or better harps are the ones to get, apparently. And, yes, I would rather Buy American but that wasn't in the cards.

 I started a nifty book. It's another short-story collection of people writing Sherlock Holmes fanfiction but the twist is the authors are teaming the Great Detective with Occult Detectives. Some are classic characters, like John Silence, while some are original creations. The first story has Mary Marston, the future Mrs. John Watson, as Holmes' partner. The really nice thing is they're portraying Holmes as someone who knows he doesn't get magic but doesn't shut down completely when faced with it because of logic or some such nonsense. There was a Doctor Who book with that premise and it always irritated me. It was especially irritating because another Doctor Who book had the Fourth Doctor team up with Arthur Conan Doyle in the Watson role. Those Doctor Who books between the end of the series and the Fox TV movie really weren't that good, generally.

 All right then.

Wave that flag, hoss, wave it high. Do you know what it means? Do you know why?

 It was cold, grey, and rainy today, so I shut down and decided to ignore it. So I did. And, of course, not only did I pay attention such days make my brain a bit mushy. With that in mind, we'll just fiddle around until we hit word count.

 I did have something bubbling under but I don't think I should waste it here. It's fairly universal, though, so it won't hurt to sit on it. In short, there's a reason knowing how American politics actually useful and just hoping for a savior never, ever works. Getting stuff done actually takes a lot of work. In short, it's outlined on Twitter here.

 This is why I have such frustration with the American left. That is politics to the left of, say, Joe Biden but would be relatively moderate elsewhere. Instead of understanding what it will take to actually get stuff done - mainly, time and effort - they seem content to piss and whine that they're not given the keys to the kingdom based on their moral superiority alone. It's not all that different from the current temper tantrum thrown by Trumpists, actually, infuriated that the People would have the gall to think someone else should be president rather than Father Trump.

 Speaking of which, by this time tomorrow evening - hopefully as you're reading The News of that day - Donald Trump will no longer be president. He will be on his way to doing whatever the hell he does for the rest of his wretched existence. I personally don't care if he's held accountable for his actions. This is, after all, America and we do not hold the rich and powerful accountable for shit. I just never want to hear his opinion on anything ever again. It's embarrassing we had to for so long.

 Granted, I'm sure we're looking at at least four years of the sour losers whining that they didn't get their way and, no doubt, a certain amount of petulant violence from clowns who don't get the president isn't and can't be a king. Fuck 'em. The Klan once held outsized pull in the country, not just the South. Now they're considered a national shame and participants are considered worse for having even the briefest association with them. It'll be like that for MAGAs one day, hopefully, and sooner than later.

 Moving on. I've been digging back into the Ultima games, particularly the ones I haven't played (IX and the Underworld games) as well as the mods for the Dungeon Siege games. They turn the original into updated versions of V and VI. They're pretty neat if goddamn hard. Of course, V was pretty hard all on its own, but this is something else. At the same time, the mods expand the stories of both. For example, in VI the war with the gargoyles was sort of a background thing. In the mod, it's an ongoing thing you have to deal with along with everything else. At least at the beginning, anyway. They're a little on the buggy side but a hoot for long-time fans. Here are the links, Ultima V: Lazarus and The Ultima VI Project.

 Granted, that's fairly niche even though there's a strong community that still reveres the games. I never got into Ultima Online because I refuse to keep paying for a game after I bought it once. There's a spiritual sequel called Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, but I haven't been able to get into that, either. It's a MMPORG like Elder Scrolls Online, and those things just don't move me. For one, two dozen random yay-hoos with ridiculous names all jumping around trying to do the same quest as you are takes me out of the game. I'm not one for "emersion" but I do prefer my games self-contained.

 Okay, that's good enough for now. We'll see how tomorrow goes tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be interesting.

One more reason for my mama's hungry eyes.

  Undoubtedly meant to take the sting off his comment about how "suburban housewives" will "get over" his dismissiveness, Trump decided to pardon suffrage pioneer Susan B. Anthony for her arrest in 1872 for trying to vote. I'm not sure what this was supposed to accomplish - beyond the sad political trick, of course - but there were plenty of living women Trump could've pardoned. Reality Winner, just one example. Besides, Anthony never fought the arrest because that was sort of the whole point and the law in her hometown of Rochester didn't pursue it.

 This was early in the Suffrage Movement, where Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Staton and others were gearing up to shake the world and expose the outright hypocrisy of the U.S. government denying the vote to fully one-half the population. The fight was long and hard - and if anyone tells you Joe Sixpack was on their side, even secretly, they're lying - but by 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and a person's gender no longer prevented the vote.

 All fine and good, of course. However, in response to Trump's goofy pardon, a number of people pointed out, truthfully, that Anthony was a pretty nasty racist. Famously she said she'd rather cut off her right arm if the black man got the vote before the white woman, referring to the Fifteenth Amendment. And, yes, it's okay to take this as racist because she went on to talk about virtuous white women and degraded black men, and the Suffrage Movement was pretty dismissive of black women the whole time through.

 NowThis News made this informative little video about why Anthony's history shouldn't be ignored and, indeed, maybe it's time to honor other women as well, like Ida B. Wells or Fannie Lou Hamer. Apparently, people put "I Voted" stickers on Anthony's tombstone, but that's a new one to me.

 And of course, Dudebro Twitter lost their shit and have spent the day howling about "cancel culture." It was pretty much across the board, as both soi-disant libertarians and socialists pointed out... what was their problem, anyway? This is recorded history, and frankly, I'm sort of amazed this is coming as a surprise to so many people. I thought it was common knowledge that a whole lot of folks in 19th-century American history did amazing things but were also racist as hell, either against black folks, Indigenous peoples, the Chinese, hell, the Irish and Italians before we decided they were properly white.

 I know no one likes to admit that we were a nation of Rotten Bastards built on the backs of people we wouldn't let fight back, but we're an old enough country to own the truth. And this isn't a case of "judging the past by our standards". There were people in the 1870s who thought Anthony was a bigotted jackass and, in any eve, wrong is still wrong.

 None of this soils the Suffrage Movement just like Margaret Sanger doesn't soil Planned Parenthood or Thomas Jefferson doesn't soil the ideals behind the U.S. Constitution. Nor is it "erasing history" to be blunt and coldly honest about the country's history, warts and all. That's called "being an adult," and maybe we as a culture should give it a shot.

 By the way. If you're the type of person who's getting bent out of shape over this or removal of the Confederate flag or toppling of statues of Confederate generals, you don't have to wonder "which side" you would've been on back in those days. You're pretty much staking out the claim without ambiguity.

If I come up with something clever or get inspired, maybe. Don't bet the farm on it, though.

 I haven't filed anything today if you're waiting. Someone's reading this, apparently, even if it's just the webcrawlers. Anyhow, straight talk is my mind's been on idle all day and I've been too lazy to knock it into gear. I'll get something before the day's out. Mahalo.

 It's an hour-and-a-half later. Me and my buddy Otis, the Jack Russell, took a brief constitutional. It didn't really help spark anything, though. We didn't get far, either. These hot, humid days aren't pleasant in the first place and he is getting older. I do think the "hot, humid" here is worse than the "hot, humid" in New Orleans. You weren't ever far from some serious body of water down there, between the Big River and the Old Pontchartrain. Some days felt like there was a breeze coming in off the Gulf, as well.

 Here it's just green and woods and swamp. Everything's closer together and it seems like the only breeze you get is cars passing. Or it's a lead up to a tornado, one or the other.

 Well, I've gone to staring off into space again. Looks like it's going to be one of those nights. I won't have any Actual Paying Work until next week sometime, either. So I'll keep this page open and blither on it until I reach word count.

 I really can't even get worked up about anything today. There's another round of conservative think-piece writers having a big conference so they can tell each other that they're being censored, but that's just tedious. It's the same whine over and over again, usually in publications and on platforms that the average person couldn't even think of having. And they usually get paid stupid amounts of money for their banal opinions and lack of insight. Every time David Brooks trends, I want to tell The New York Times that I can write 6,000 words of gibberish a week - and indeed, I do - and I wouldn't ask for the six-figure salary that lump of moldy bread brings down for some reason.

 Speaking of Twitter, none of the trending topics are really anything I can hang my hat on. The head of FedEx is encouraging Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder to change the team's name to something less egregiously racist, but that's nothing new. That being said, we are in the midst of a Thing and if you'd have told me the Mississippi flag would be lamped for a change and it'd happen as quick as it happened, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

I'll save any COVID-19 stuff for the News, but it's looking grim out there, folks. Numbers continue to rise, the federal government continues to sit on its thumbs, and far too many of Our Fellow Americans think they have the God-given Constitutional right to spit in your coffee if you ask them to wear a mask. I honestly do hate to be this way, but being a hermit that's walled himself off from human contact turned out to be a mighty shrewd move on my part.

Well, that's word count. I think I'll tie it off here, maybe come back to it later. Be honest, I've been giving Fallout: New Vegas another swing and would like to get back to it. I'd be hell on wheels if I could stick to one game long enough to finish it. In any event, there you go.

I don't need no proof, 'cause that's the truth, and I'll drink to that.

 Man, it has been a day, hasn't it? Protests and riots across the country, the president trying to bring the government hammer down on a private company because his feelings are hurt, and the sneaking suspicion that "reopening the country" this soon wasn't a great idea. One upside is the forces of old and evil are sounding dumber than shit in trying to defend what obviously isn't going to work anymore.

 I really don't know where to start. Momma and I had a rather heavy discussion about the George Floyd murder and the resulting chaos that's popped up as a result. Make no mistake, Momma is Mississippi through and through, and one thing about Mississippi is this state digs on some authority. Look at that walking thumb that's the mayor of Petal for another example. Regardless, she's heartsick over this man's murder and understands the rage and anger behind the rioters. She doesn't understand why they would destroy businesses that employ them, but she also doesn't grok that most of those businesses don't pay them enough to live on anyway.

 What she had problems with, however, was my stance that the cops in general don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I won't budge on that. They do not. They've spent the last 20 years militarizing and deciding we were the enemy, telling us their safety is more important than our lives, and claiming that they don't even need to know the law. All body cameras and social media has done up until now is show how guilty they are and how little they care about how their actions affect the communities they're supposed to "protect and serve," especially when those communities are black.

 For me, it's like that old Chris Rock bit. I ain't saying people burning down a Target is right. I'm just saying I understand where that anger and frustration is coming from. If nothing else - nothing else - the recent COVID-19 business should have shown us that, without any sort of doubt, the Powers That Be do not care if the people that make their wealth live or die, nor do they care how healthy or happy those folks are. Target pays starvation wages and the owners are billionaires many times over. If the people in that community thought it was worth something, maybe they wouldn't have pulled it down.

 I do think there's something different about this one, especially coming so soon after the egregious subverting of the law we're supposed to follow in the Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor situations. In both cases, the murders were ignored by the legal establishment of the respective areas, almost to the point where they condoned it. Both took months of screaming in the faces of authority to make anyone even look ashamed. This one, well... the guy having his hands in his pockets while kneeling on Floyd's neck as someone filmed him, he had to know that wouldn't go well.

 Protests are popping up all over the country. Someone in Denver actively tried to run some dude over, and people on Twitter are trying to defend it. I do wonder, however, if we're not seeing how the whole "Twitter isn't real life" thing plays out. The mayor of Petal got his ass nailed to the wall by his townsfolk and trying to claim they're all AntiFa. Y'all, there is no AntiFa in a Mississippi town of 10,000. There just isn't.

 Maybe a little more ambiguous is this bit about Trump trying to use government muscle to censor Twitter because they had the audacity to add a link to one of his wacky claims. They didn't even fact check him, much less censor him. They added a link that said "for more information". It was the very least they could do, and he throws the biggest fit we've seen yet. A hundred thousand dead, 40 million on unemployment, and he doesn't budge. Twitter doesn't kiss his ass and he's ready to rain down hell.

 The conservative argument is, apparently, that Twitter shouldn't be considered a publisher rather than a platform and what they did was censorship. The latter argument is obviously stupid and silly, nothing more than another example of Trump's persecution complex and the reason conservatives worship the ground he walks on. The former, though, I wonder.

 I really don't see Twitter as a publisher any more than the telephone line is. It is true, however, that technology has moved too fast for the law to keep up on this note and there are serious questions to be asked. That being said, since the death of Net Neutrality - another thing conservatives have a boner for - it was probably inevitable that things were headed this way. Above all else, Twitter is a profit-oriented business, and anyone who's trying to assign noble intentions to it is whistling Dixie writ large.

 One of the running tropes of cyberpunk is that in a world where corporations control all government, official press and whatall, there's always an underground sort of internet that's For The People. What a lot of science fiction writers never assumed, though, was that the Harvard-educated trust fund squirts who have the cash to develop this sort of technology would be interested in anything but getting their hands on more filthy lucre.

 You'd think after watching Bill Gates for the past 40 years, we'd learn. But no, that's not how it works. Here we are.

Sunday, November 3, 2019

 Well, the dad-blamed kitten is still on the Hill. Otis has been barking at him all day, and as soon as Otis leaves the yard, the kitten walks right in. That means I've had to pull Otis off him at least once and the day's not done yet.

Monday, October 7, 2019

 I've decided to quit using the ampersand. Ticks and quirks are fine, but when the text is copy-and-paste to anything else, it gets screwy. I'm not trying to conserve space, anyway.