Last week (the days prior to this being written), Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air. This is noteworthy because it was a transparent attempt by the owners of the ABC network to appease the current US government, and Trump in particular who has long held a grudge against the late-night host. Kimmel made some innocuous comments about the death of Charlie Kirk, nothing that could be, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as making light of the far-right provocateur/gun-rights activist ‘s death. Despite that, adding to the growing unreality of an already difficult-to-believe week, the administration claimed that this was just one more “liberal” celebrating Kirk’s death and threaten to revoke ABC’s broacasting license if the network didn’t do something about Kimmel. ABC buckled as expected since it is clear that no corporation is going to stand up to Trump, and immediately the public began to mobilize. Calls for a boycott sprang up from several different corners of the internet and various celebrities also began to cry fowl. After all, this is a blatantly unconstitutional act and as clear-cut a violation of our First Amendment rights as any other thing that’s happened in the last two years since Biden’s government began cracking down on protests against the genocide in Palestine. What made it different is that this was something that couldn’t be written off. There was no way to describe this as being anti-semetic somehow, no way for people to open up a harmful “we should debate the rights/existence of this minority” discussion, no way for ANY kind of spin since Kimmel’s remarks were public record and the Trump administration has repeatedly proven that they will lash out at anyone who pisses them off for no reason at all.
Continue readingSpeaking Up
I’m Gonna Make It Through This Month If It Kills Me
In the last five days, multiple news anchors have called for the death of homeless people and they all still have their jobs. Other people have stated, with no spin or hyperbole, the beliefs of a man who was killed in the middle of making excuses for mass shootings being an acceptable loss for the right to have guns and gotten themselves fired, doxed, or stuck on administrative leave as a result. People have come out of the woodwork to praise a man who spoke only hate merely because he was killed. An entire factory of temporary workers were abducted by ICE and had their human rights violated while imprisoned, which isn’t even the worst thing that happened that week. The president of the United States of America has called on the various executive powers of the government to start investigating anyone who has spoken ill of him publicly (culminating in Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air for incredibly innocuous comments, but that seems to have broken through to the general public in a way nothing else has so far, which feels both horrendous and mildly relieving–horrendous because so much worse has happened already and mildly relieving because finally, something broke through to the public). A man going about his day-to-day life was killed by ICE agents who lied about what happened and will likely face no real consequences because there’s no way to know for sure who did what because they’re going around with their faces hidden and all identifying information removed from what can’t even be called their uniforms. All of this, and so much more I can’t bear to write about (or don’t dare to write about) has happened in the first half of the month (September, 2025).
Continue readingA Whole Lot Of Maybes
I wish there had been a call to action and a rise to meet that call like there often is in stories. A moment of clarity, of undeniable need, that drove the hero/community/leader to action against the foe that had appeared on the horizon. A series of events that would create a moment to inspire a movement. A tipping point where the imbalance was so undeniable that it inspired a mad scramble to fix the scale. Reality isn’t like that, unfortunately. Calls to action are usually ignored, excused, or defused, preventing the necessary rise in response in order to preserve the status quo. We’re all too tired, too poor, too scattered, to divided to respond to a call, for the most part. There’s so much between the people who need to rise and the thing they’re rising to meet that it often feels impossible to ever effect change. I know I often feel that way, like I’m fighting for a hopeless cause or that there’s no reason in putting up a fight because I’ll never gain ground, let alone win. Too much bad stuff keeps happening in the US unopposed by those who were supposed to safeguard against this kind of fascism and consolidation of power for me to seriously believe the idea that our current leaders will ever take meaningful action of any kind. It’s kind of devastating, to be honest, because of the things I was raised to believe about this country and people in general that I somehow still clung to after all these years. I don’t know what I’m going to do about these large scale things as they break beyond repair (but hopefully not beyond replacement).
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
Continue readingBlogging Through The Horrors
I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingUnmasking Heroes And Tearing Down Pedestals
Content Warning for mentions of accused abuser and sexual-assaulter Neil Gaiman, non-specific mentions of the allegations against him, and the discussion of other figures in the public eye who have also been revealed to be terrible people (ex. Rowling, Musk).
Continue readingThe Harmful Continued Cultural Relevance of Dune
I don’t like Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about the movies or my previous post about disliking Dune, you know this already. In fact, if you just want my general thoughts about the book, you should read my post about my dislike for Herbert’s first novel and leave it at that. This post is a much more specific discussion of what I disliked, why I disliked it, and why I think Dune should be left to collect dust in the period of history in which it was first published.
Continue readingThe Creeping Death Of Public Creativity
Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
Continue readingI’m Choosing To Hold A Grudge This Time
While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
Continue readingThe Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
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