friendmeat

weeklies #52 - 28

2026-08-08T00:00:00Z

I'm 28. I feel cornered. I have everything I could ever need in my life and I'm still living like a shadow. I'm ashamed to be alive. I'm chopped and unc. I need a septum piercing.

what i'm reading

Sisters of the Vast Dark by Lina Rather

Space nuns jet-set in their slug ships on the margins of a slumbering intergalactic empire. When the ecumenical order at the imperial core tries to bring its strays back into the fold, space nuns are subject to tests of mettle and faith.

A fun novel. I love the space slugs.

what i'm listening to

recession pop(?)

IDK if I buy the 2010s electroclash/recession-rave revival. There's just too much craft and subtlety in tracks these days. Does that make sense? Like I don't think Macbooks from 2009-2013 could even handle the number of tracks in a given electroclash-revival song without crashing the DAW. The inaugural anthem of the 00's, "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas, is barely even a song. It's a kick and a snare and the black eyed peas spitting some absolute nonsense. You'd probably get sued by your label for trying to put that out these days.

I won't complain too much because I'm in the mood for loud dumb stuff.

what i'm watching

Cure (1997)

My favorite Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie screened at my local indie cinema-- on my birthday no less.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a frustratingly 50/50 director to me. Cure is an incredible movie, but I absolutely hated Pulse (2001). Then he won me back with License to Live (1998), which is somehow a comedy with the exact style and tone of his thrillers. But then Charisma (1999) sucked.

I don't think they know how to write, stage, film, color grade, soundtrack, foley and mix movies like Cure anymore. It's just gorgeous and mesmerizing (lol).

what i'm playing

Fire On The Mountain

JERRI: Sorry- this is just a new low for you-- is all.

RIPLEY: How so?

JERRI: Meeting a guy from a hookup app? Inviting said guy to the campsite?

JERRI: Having your meet-cute during work hours, while a group of kids are visiting, all during an active investigation?

That... does sound really bad when it's all laid out like that.

If Fire's exposition feels slow, the rest of the chapter is a roller coaster. Much like the moment-to-moment life of Ripley, the script rubberbands from slapstick to somber, progressing through each misadventure of Campsite 7 at a clip.

Fire is one to watch, not just because it's jumping a formidable shark(-- writing two snarky twinks in the same script; something possibly never attempted before in English-language canon--), but because it's dripping with style and intrigue.

P.S: Ripley is not getting into heaven for being a Radiohead fan. But that's okay because then we'll be there together <3.

Fire On The Mountain 0.1 on itch.io

what i'm working on

kindle jailbreaking

I got a Kindle second-hand. I want it Jailbroken. I'm struggling. I follow all the directions but the logs say the shell scripts can reach the binaries. The binaries are right there. I'm looking at the binaries. Why can't you see the binaries? You don't like my binaries? Is there something wrong with me? Why doesn't anyone love me.

something i liked

gen alpha gamer cashiers

The broccoli-haired brace-face gen alpha cashier at Best Buy complimented my choice in gaming mice and said he the same mouse. We complained about light-weight mice that feel cheap but cost more. "They cut holes in it and then charge more". He was so right.

I'm very happy with the Logitech Hero G502 so far. I will say the little metal weights you have to put in are very lab rat coded. Give the consumer a little task to do in their enclosure. Just a little stimulation for the treatler.

something i hated

30-30-30

I'm trying to get serious about not destroying my eyes before I'm 40 so I've started setting a timer to abide by the 30-30-30 rule. This shit is gay as fuck. I'm trying to get work done. I need to stare at the screen for at least 90 minutes at a time.

a picture:

all the fire is at goodwill

I saw this aesome electric typewriter from the 80s at Goodwill: a Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2500. I wish I had room for junk like this, but unfortunately I would have to sleep on the floor to make room for it.

weeklies #51 - mumblecore melania

2026-08-01T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

Hater Week @ Aftermath

I've been enjoying Aftermath's style of blogs. It's just opinions and hobbyposting and hating on billionaires. It's like a good version Twitter.

Derrick McCormack

The title "Sh*thole Oprey" made me check out this episode of the WAKE ISLAND podcast, and in the course of the conversation I realized I've heard of Derrick McCormack before and I've had Castle Faggot bookmarked for years.

Dark Rides

A quaint compendium of unsettling Canadian countryside vignettes. Derrick gets his balls shocked for conversion therapy. Derrick's friend lights herself on fire with homemade fireworks they'd been selling on the road. Derrick knocks a coworker's lights out and presumably rapes him. They all have the same dry literary tone that relies on unfolding details and juxtopositions for tension.

The Show That Smells

Smells couldn't be more of a 180 from Dark Rides. It's a fever dream of a bad 80s horror B-Movie: foppish fashionista vampires descend with a dark agenda upon a circus, and in putting their plot in motion, they make a Faustian bargain with American country singer Jimmie Rodgers. The aforementioned Shithole Oprey is an art book building on this concept, presumably creating a Shithole Oprey Cinematic Universe.

what i'm listening to

Music, Fashion, Film (2026)

Play-Mobil Sonic Youth

what i'm watching

The Moment (2026) (spoilers)

"I can tell you've not been honoring your Saturn Return."

I started out hating it, then I liked then, then I was blown away, then I hated it again.

D.C.F

The "Deconstructed Concert Film" is a doomed genre. The Moment suffers all the same issues as another D.C.F, The Nowhere Inn (2020). They even use the same trope: a fan in a meet-and-greet gets hysterical, cries: "your music saved my life!"

These scenes are the problem in a nutshell. The talent is confronted with twin pressures-- the histrionics of the fan and the managerial need to keep the line moving. They are repulsed by, empathetic to, and pity the fan. The gulf between fan and star is impassable, and the point: the fan is not invested in the person of the star, but in the commodity. Fanaticism is financial leverage.

As Jaime Brooks has discussed^[1], the confessional turn in pop music is equal parts democratization via consumer tech, cultural zeitgeist, and industrial exploitation. On the industrial side of things, the century-old interlocking mechanism of promoter release and tabloid scoop keep The Spectacle going, irrespective of the individual star. The talent-fanatic duplex flow is independent of either, and the hit parade will march straight over each of them.

The star senses her fungibility, and wants simultaneously to expose the industrial relation and individuate herself from it.

The D.C.F. is an attempt at individuation through authenticity. But no matter how mundane your real-life problems are, making a movie about it is not a method accessible to normal people. There is only mythologization. And The Moment and The Nowhere Inn are aware this. That's why they lean into an amalgam of the authentic and the fabricated, and even the surreal in Nowhere Inn (as facile and ineffective it is). But that creates another problem: what are we watching for?

The point is that a concert film is a status marker. It marks an artist's graduation into a certain network of movers and shakers. The D.C.F. lets those inclined mark that notch in their belt without having to feel like they 'sold out'. The DCF probably ends of costing way more than just doing a regular concert film, anyway.

Dead Pop Stars

As for the undercurrent of death in the film, there's a massive SOPHIE-shaped hole. On one hand, it would be depraved to keep milking her death. Like P-Diddy singing "Every Breath You take" about the man he (possibly) whacked. The posthumous album was bad enough. The homages . Not to pile on St. Vincent, she should've kept SOPHIE's name out of her mouth for the All Born Screaming cycle.

The scene were Charli's manager looks at a picture of Princess Diana and becomes paranoid Charli's died is so contrived that it's screaming for you to mentally substitute SOPHIE's face in the frame. Charli XCX was put on her current trajectory by "Vroom Vroom", and it feels like she has spent the years since SOPHIE's death pulling aggressively away from vision of the future SOPHIE engendered in the culture.

The Moment opened my eyes to how hard it is being really fucking rich and famous and having to deal with people that don't do everything you want 'the moment' (haha) you want it.

The Moment: Mumblecore Melania?

KOTH Season 3 is some creepypasta shit

Why is King of the Hill season 3 suffused with so much darkness. I accidentally skipped over it at first, and the adjacent seasons don't have a fraction of its misery. It opens with violent, fiery death of Luanne's long-term boyfriend. The cast spends the rambling episode ruminating on death and grieving.

The episode where Bobby experiences his first breakup not only gives us that classic frame of abject misery, but also a performance from the voice actor that's simultaneously gut-wrenching and cringe-inducing from the second hand embarrassment. It's more emotion than you'll see in most films.

The cold open of the Christmas episode is just Bill sobbing while everyone stares silently. It's some creepy pasta shit.

what i'm working on

ummmmmm

Secerts

something i liked

Detokenization Bath

LLM2HUMAN CLINIC is a site offering bodies for LLMs to inhabit, with a functioning bitcoin wallet address ostensibly for a rouge agent to accidentally dump money into.

I also like that you can fax them.

something i hated

the dr will zoom you now

I can't find anywhere that will do an in-person eye exam. They all want me to go to an empty room with a screen and have an optometrist do my exam. What the fuck.

a picture:

skepticat inquirer

This random tiger cartoon from an issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. I don't remember what the context was.

I don't remember exactly where so I'm just going to gesture vaguely to her entire blog: The Seat of Loss ↩︎

weeklies #50 - calm tech

2026-07-25T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford

A Jewish butch lesbian inherits a generational curse to be possessed by our narrator, a dybbuk.

In TD&TD, even the extracorporeal aren't free of for-profit enterprise: The parallel universe of demons, djinn and dybbuks is one of org charts, trade conferences and office politics. Even as the dybbuk enthralls her possessee with outbursts of Aramaic and nightmares of coitus interruptus, she must placate the corporate structure of her parent company. Of course Hell is full of lawyers.

I've never seen Helluva Boss but I imagine this novel is in its DNA somewhere.

what i'm listening to

Listen to 072126 byinjoke on hearthis.at

[This techno mix](https://hearthis.at/injoke/m072126/) by [@sharkus.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/sharkus.bsky.social) made my fucking night. 55 of locked-the-fuck-in bangers. I fucking love techno.

what i'm watching

I'm so jealous of Peggy and Hank Hill. I always loved the way they loved.

what i'm working on

For a while I was hot-linking images on this site because the Eleventy Image Plugin would stall for 10 minutes on the first build, every time, no matter how aggressively I cached. ~~I tested it again and the problem seems to have been resolved.~~ Nevermind. It's actually taking 30 minutes now. Whoops!

something i liked

calm technologies

I asked my barista about their flip phone and they informed me it was a CAT S22 Flip. We commiserated about the joy of disconnecting but the frustration of not having a good camera ready-to-hand. Perhaps there's a product here.

Later that day an article about 'calm technologies' popped in my feed. The author writes about products who selling points are their low-power-draw (Daylight Computer), single-purpose niches (refurbished iPods) and noninvasive designs (TRMNL). I hate to admit I was charmed by the understated luxury vibe all the products used in their marketing, but it really did put me in a good mood. There's a way out of this.

something i hated

26k

I've barely doubled the word count of Undisclosed Fiction Project in the almost-two-months since my last recorded benchmark, and I don't think it's anywhere closer to being what I'm imagining. Am I fucked? Should I give up on everything forever?

a picture:

oh to be a kitty cat napping on a window sill

God I wish that were me.

weeklies #49 - sexy luchador dracula

2026-07-18T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

What We Are Seeking - Cameron Reed

"No. If I want to be pregnant I only have to think about it in a certain way, and sperm is delivered to the cervix by a tube created for that purpose. It doesn't exit, as you put it, and nothing is passed transluminally."

I've never been into the space-opera format with interstellar battleships and aliens that are palette-swapped humans. I'm much more interested in speculation and human drama, like How will societies operate in dome-habitats on Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy)? and What kind of sex results from intergalactic, inter-species exchange (Samuel R. Delaney, Stars In Our Pocket Like Grains of Sand)?

What We Are Seeking understood the assignment. Pages upon pages are dedicated to detailing the strange life cycles flora/fauna, to the intricacies of language from other planets, and to the joys of cooking stir-fry. The most typical sci-fi moments happen in the framework of linguistic analysis; its drama is global and local-- structural forces light-years away manifest in the most intimate settings. The key question of the novel is who is the "we" in What We Are Seeking?

what i'm listening to

"The Datacenter Does Not Exist: AI & Exocapitalism"

I was struck by how the tactics alleged by the Exocapitalism authors as being deployed by the largest companies in the world are identical to the scams of Wealth LARPers (404 Media). Each party flaunts the appearance of wealth to gain trust-- it doesn't matter that it's not real, that the get-rich-quick class is a meaningless PDF, that the Datacenter never breaks ground. The goal is to "lift" away from the rabble of 'labor' as much as possible and ascend to the pure abstract realm of exchanging larger and larger mind-boggling illiquid sums.

An important detail in the above 404 Media report is that the fake dashboards used by the Wealth scammers (who are themselves being scammed by the designers of the dashboards) aren't for bank accounts and investment portfolios, but for platforms like Stripe and OnlyFans; the rationalization being that any 'wagecel' can stuff a bank account, but parlaying a web platform into big paydays has RoI aura-- low-effort content creation asymptotically approaching the level of passive income.

Bleak! Bleak! Bleak!

what i'm watching

Santo en El vampiro y el sexo (1969/2011)

These are the type of pulls that make me love my local indie theater. It was presented in a Mystery Science Theater 3000-style format where a panel of local schmoes talked over the film. As cringey as that sounds, it was a hoot.

And the premise begs for riffing: A masked luchador (Santo) invents a time machine which sends his sexy lady friend back in time to be ravaged by Dracula. There's lots of fondling of boobs and inexplicable gymnastics. The middle of the film is devoted to a full three rounds of wrestling, wherein Santo and a secondary antagonist duel for the other's half of Dracula's treasure. Does the crowd hollering in the stands understand the stakes^[1]? Probably not.

Originally released as Santo en el tesoro de Drácula in 1969, it was later discovered two versions of the film had been made: the G-rated black-and-white cut, and a full-color adult cut for the European market. Locked in a vault and its initial premiere suppressed by Santo's estate, the adult-rated cut was finally released in 2011-- with support from Guillermo Del Toro.^[2]

There may be as many as 6 other 'sexy' cuts of Santo movies-- but I think it's a safe bet that out of Santo's 53(!) feature films, more than a few of them got frisky.

what i'm working on

Frontend stuff

Whyyyyy does MDN say the Houdini API paint() function accepts arbitrary arguments when ZERO browsers have actually implemented that feature.

something i liked

macchiato

After having no choice but straight-up espresso shots in Italy, I've started preferring it as my afternoon pick-me-up. Unadulterated shots are delicious, but a macchiato is just heavenly. I feel so fancy sipping on my stupid little paper cup.

something i hated

tenesmus

My therapist liked my theory that my recent bout of tenesmus is actually a kind of Freudian substitute for masturbation as an inverse to my arrested anal phase. But I should probably still see a doctor.

a picture:

old thing

A JVC 3050EU that was used as decoration in our Airbnb in Rome. I'm enchanted by the analog radio-TV combo.

No pun intended. ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santo_en_el_tesoro_de_Dr%C3%A1cula#Discovery,_controversy_and_legacy ↩︎

italy and cancer

2026-07-11T00:00:00Z

tl;dr I was in Italy. I liked it. Pictures are here

Tarnishing my sparkle in Tuscany

During the 12+ hours of travel time with two toddlers and bickering heterosexuals, I began to formulate a concept I called "My Sparkle."

The kids were irritating. The parents were irritating. The airport was irritating. Flying economy for 8 hours was irritating. Based on the time I spent in the back seat listening to different straight couples have identical arguments, I've determined that marriage is a game two people play where they try to get the other person to read their mind and get really, really mad when it doesn't work.

Nonetheless, I was in Italy. I couldn't let small irritations bother me. I dubbed this rare joie de vivre my "sparkle", and I charged myself with protecting it from being "tarnished". This was a tall order.

It felt like everyone around me was totally ungrateful to be in the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. They could not resist picking stupid arguments and getting pissed off over small things. It was an assault from all fronts on my sparkle.

I found small solace in-- of all places-- Hobbes' Leviathan. He's some 17th century English asshole, and I'd happily suicide bait him on Twitter today. But I couldn't help nodding along with this passage:

Timely Resolution, or determination of what a man is to do, is Honourable; as being the contempt of small difficulties, and dangers. And Irresolution, Dishonourable; as a signe of too much valuing of little impediments, and little advantages: For when a man has weighed things as long as the time permits, and resolves not, the difference of weight is but little; and therefore if he resolve not, he overvalues little things, which is Pusillanimity. (pp. 44)

Pusillanimity. That was the juice my travel companions were slurping. To guard my sparkle from their pusillanimity I had to be the opposite: decisively lackadaisical. I went with every flow, expressed no complaints, smiled through every tantrum, chose the easiest option and objected to no facially bad decisions. It was through this passive fluidity I thought I could preserve my sparkle.

On day two, everyone was too drunk on the boat to complain. Day three began with tears. The last car ride of day four had been suffered in tense silence. On the fifth day, at around two in the morning (Central European Time) I laid awake having uncharitable thoughts, anxiety, and frustration. I was considering the possibility that my sparkle had been tarnished.

It was that day that the parties were splitting. My sister's family and I were leaving for Rome, and I no longer had to stew in that environment.

Wagers and Coercion in Rome

Throughout my nieces' lives I've collaborated with their parents on methods for convincing them to eat their meals. We've made promises, struck up competitions, offered bribes, and even resorted to blackmail.

A new method presented itself at dinner in a pasta place in Rome: the wager. Conversation with my eldest niece at a dinner revealed she has a concept of something called "nature". "Nature" consists only of stuff like trees and dogs. I told her that, in fact, everything is nature. She fervently disputed the proposition with several examples, which the adults at the table in turn rebuked: the tiles on the wall (stones), the light from the bulbs (electricity, from renewable and non-renewable energy sources), the glass in cups and lenses (superheated minerals),

Her conviction inspired me to turn the conversation into a wager: if I could trace a thing of her choosing back to its natural origin with sufficient fidelity, she had to take a bite of her unfinished bolognese. After some deliberation she shook on the terms with a haughtiness that suggested she had an ace up her sleeve. I was admittedly impressed when she said: plastic. "A long long time ago..."was I began. After

The only thing I couldn't convince either of my neices of was the origin of humans. When asked where they thought their mom came from, my nieces answered: her mom. When asked where they thought their mom's mom came from, they answered: her mom's mom's mom. When I asked where they thought the mother of all mothers came from, they answered: her mom.

I never figured out if my niece's worldview had room for the fundamentals of Darwinism, because at this point we adults were busy herding them to our Vatican tour while imagining kidnappers around every corner.

Getting a boner in Vatican City

'Herding' is an appropriate term to use, because the mass of humanity at the Vatican is very much a flock. The staff aggressively shepherd tourist through long hallways in the Vatican Museum and the nave of the Basilican San Pietro. I can brag that I've been to the Sistine Chapel, I guess-- you can't really see shit. There's no time to loiter, except in one of the contingent of Vatican Museum Gift Shops.

I felt desire for the first time in years in one of those gift shops.

I was doing some such loitering, waiting for my sister's children to obtain their obligatory souvenirs and thinking about tax-deductible pedophile priests when I saw a beautiful man. As an international tourist destination, this is a commonplace experience in Rome. Tourists are aggressively groomed, shaved, waxed, moisturized and tailored. The stores of the Via Condotti were crawling with such beautiful people.

That's an objective beauty, which does not account for taste. Objectively, the man I saw was not beautiful. But subjectively, to me, he was.

He was a tall, portly bearded man with short, curly hair. He looked like he would be nice to lay on. But what sealed the deal were his shoes. They looked sturdy and comfortable, something like hiking boots-- which would serve you very well plodding around the discombobulated cobble streets of Rome. The sensibility lit my loins. I salivated. I fantasized about the forethought to pack the boots and plan an outfit around them.

The most life-ruining sex I've ever had was in a guy's shitbox sedan. I wouldn't have fucked him if not for that car. It was old, beat to hell and messy. It was practical. New-car smell puts me in fight-or-flight.

Those shoes, that car, are lived-in, unselfconscious, pratical, utilitarian. I unilaterally interpreted them as mating displays.

The gift-shop guy passed me in an instant, but it felt I had stood in the path of a crashing wave, and even now I feel gently tugged back out to sea.

My family came back with their souvenirs. My niece had chosen a rosary necklace, and between the cross dangling from her neck and her overall blond innocence, she looked like a Neo-Nazi's wet dream.

Cancer

My step-mother's heart stopped beating in 2022. She and my father fought for years to get her on the transplant list. Doctors got her on a medication which raised her T-cell count, then made her get chemotherapy to get it back down, which depressed her immune system. Who knows if the cancer wouldn't have taken hold if they hadn't done that.

The cancer is also likely hereditary: when she was a teen it took her mother, and during the ordeal she was the sole caretaker. If it wasn't heart failure now, it could've been lung cancer or liver failure later. The only thing keeping her alive at the moment in the Left Ventricle Assistive Device (LVAD), which is an extracorporeal pump with tubes surgically grafted to the heart's valves, and which pumps blood in the heart's stead. She can't submerge herself in water, be far away from a hospital, or go anywhere without a back-up pump. Clothing tailored to accommodate the LVAD unit are typically for people many times her size, so she has one or two dresses DIY'd for the purpose.

Italy is it for her. There's nothing after this. She and my father sold their business, and the rental house in Tuscany is what they used the money on. All their children dropped thousands of dollars to make the trip. It was supposed to be nice. Sometimes it was.

I'm not the person my father will need me to be when his wife dies. He used to affectionately compare my personality to a serial killer's. The people who know me the most have called me 'cold' and 'alienating' and 'difficult to talk to'. There's nothing I can really do about that.

I Don't Wanna Die In America

Sometimes I think about getting out.

They have shit on lock in Italy. You can get a cocktail and espresso at any petrol station. The cars are tiny. I didn't see a single cybertruck for a week. In large parts of Tuscany there's not a single billboard, and the ones they do have aren't even a quarter of the size they are in America. Everything closes in the afternoon and reopens for dinner. There are other ways of doing things.

It doesn't even have to be Italy. I've been to London twice and enjoyed it. I'd like to see Berlin. Maybe I'd move there. Of course, anywhere you go is going to have its problems. Italy's the birthplace of fascism. Europe is getting overrun with Nazis. The UK's the UK.

It's hard not to hate America when all you see of it is the coast-to-coast asphalt, the franchise corridors and toxic sacrificial zones. But I haven't even seen the Appalachian trail despite living very close to it. I haven't seen the vastness of the sky over a Southwestern desert. I haven't seen the sun's last rays leave the continent as it sets below the Pacific. I haven't seen boiling water freeze mid-air when tossed from a pot in a Chicago blizzard.

Am I gonna get out? Do I want to get out? Does anyone really get out?