Two weeks out of the game... I may as well be starting from scratch. So here I am, born again, lacquered in amniotic paste, near-blind, near-deaf, and dumb as shit.
There are at least 3 baits-and-switches discussed in here. That seems like the modus operandi of everything today.
what i'm reading§
bait & switch # 1: betty hammerschlag is a middle aged man§
I had a musician friend in high school who joked about starting a career putting out trap music to get an audience and then bait-and-switching to prog rock. It was an a repulsive, cynical, 4chan-brained idea. Before I stopped hearing from them they told me they'd bought a gun.
It's a great pleasure to LARP as a scenester of a maligned niche. The LARPer wants to exhibit mastery over a 'low' art form with a similarly low barrier to entry. To make the art as a private joke isn't enough: it must be part of a public grift.
If the LARP goes undetected by the scene and is interpreted as an earnest effort, the basis of the scene's legitimacy-- skill, talent meaningfulness-- is overthrown by the LARP's eventual reveal. See Sokal Squared. In this way the LARPer achieves both the pleasure receiving praise from their chosen marks and the pleasure of wielding their mastery over sheeple. With the eventual disclosure of the hoax, the LARPer cops to their exceptional taste and reintegrates their ego.
https://firstfloor.substack.com/p/betty-hammerschlag-is-a-middle-aged
what i'm listening to§
Amyl and the Sniffers§
I love Amy Taylor's stage persona as a manic 70s valley girl-- the big feathered hair, the electric blue eye-liner, all combined with the crassness, jerky dance moves, enormous swagger and big facial expression. Though it seems like a 180, the disheveled chanteuse she portrays in this live version of "Chewing Gum" does the same subversion of the misogynistic double-bind imposed on women for both 'being too girly' and 'not being feminine enough'.
what i'm watching§
bait & switch #2: 8mm (1999)§
The text of 8mm is supposedly about how corruption breed corruption. But I think it's really about othering the freaks.
The soundtrack heavily features vaguely oriental vocalizations that are so on-brand for a 00's terror-sploitation flic I actually forgot this was pre-9/11. It's a seemingly odd choice since the entire film is about white Americans doing American things, but the ethnic signaling is meant to reassure viewers of the foreignness of, if not the physical setting, then the psychological territory. The depravity is further othered by setting the extreme porn markets in smoky stonework alleys (as if it were an open-air souk "somewhere in the Middle East") and warehouses of VHSs guarded by gun-toting Hispanics.
We're meant to find a parallel between the Nicolas Cage at the other end of the rabbit hole of desensitizing violence and the antagonists portrayed by Peter Stromare's amoral art-house director and James Gandolfini's sleazy pornographer (with absolutely diabolical facial hair). When the snuff-film actor (Chris Bauer) tells Cage that there's no root trauma or meaning motivating the on-film killings, that he does it "because he likes it", we're meant to identify that unmoored pleasure with Cage's own newfound depths of depravity. But that depravity reads ultimately as reparative: Cage takes revenge in service of the status quo, for a justice that means nothing to the victims but reassures us of a moral universe where evil men are killed by good men.
It has the typical 90s attitude toward not just fetish porn, but pornography in general: that it's the realm of madness, poverty, coercion, and abuse-- inherently corrupting.
There's also the oversimplification of the snuff-film supply chain. The titular 8mm reel that motivates the movie is created at the express request of a wealthy commissioner a mere two degrees removed from its creation, which we're reassured is an aberration. There's no suggestion of the much more unsettling reality we've seen play out in the wake of Epstein, or from the Franklin affair (currently being covered in the Raising Hell series by Cursed Media), or the pre-internet web of pedophiles linked by John David Norman: that the abuse and violence doesn't happen under extreme circumstances, but with approval both tacit and active of the most powerful people in the world.
Why am I so miserable all the time.
So essentially, the film promises us a romp through depravity and filth, but gives us nothing but yet another reification of the moral superiority of 2.5 white picket heterofences.
Easy Rider§
In 8mm, a young Norman Reedus appears who looks like a toddler cosplaying as Norman Reedus. He's just always looked like that. The opposite is true of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. He is unrecognizable as the avatar of madness he'd come to embody through his roles in The Shining, Batman, and @dril's profile picture.
what i'm playing§
bait & switch #3: Mini Mini Golf Golf§
I wouldn't have done this for humanity, but I would have done it for the memory of a single person.
A completely normal mini golf game that also happens to be about mass extinction and post-human love. (bait & switch #3)
what i'm working on§
a routine§
06:00-07:30 - wake up, hit snooze 2-3 times, oversleep
07:30-07:45 - scramble, go to work
09:00-12:00 - crave
12:00-13:00 - eat lunch
13:00-14:00 - return from lunch, read emails
14:00-17:00 - suicidal ideation
17:00-18:00 - go to the gym (m/w/f) or home (t/t)
18:00-19:00 - make dinner, eat dinner, watch King of the Hill
19:00-20:00 - sit on fire escape, write
21:00-22:00 - play TF2
22:00-24:00 - read Tom's Crossing
24:00-06:00 - sleep
I wake up every day exhausted and I curse being alive.
something i liked§
stir-fry§
I learned to do it from a fucking WikiHow article. I threw some bell peppers and onions in with some white wine and soy sauce, stir-fried those, put it over some couscous and naan. It's like reading philosophy for the first time. It made me briefly excited to be alive.
something i hated§
Quadruple-factor Authentication§
Through no fault of my company's own, I'm in a situation where I have to authenticate four times on two different devices to log in to Microsoft Intune.
Here's my process:
- Open an Incognito window (So my normal account cookies don't mess up the log-in process for a separate, administrative account)
- Sign in to Microsoft Intune
- Get forwarded to my org's 2FA page
- Use a TOTP because my phone hasn't been able to connect to the Wi-Fi at work for 2 years, so I can't approve push notifications.
- Get forwarded to Microsoft's 2FA
- Start a mobile hotspot on my desktop because I always forget that Microsoft uses mandatory push notifications instead of generic TOTP, so I have to be connected to the internet.
- Key my PIN in to my phone to open Microsoft Authenticator
- Key in the confirmation number generated by Microsoft
- Key my PIN in again to authenticate the sign-in
- I'm in.
a picture:§
cattlefish§
Some kind of funky new graffiti on the decrepit bus stop I go by every day.