#but like PEOPLE HAVE KNOWN EXCLUSION & WHITE SUPREMACISTS ARE REAL AND FUCKED UP FOR FOREVER

[viiridiangreen]

Pintor, nacido en mi tierra Painter, born in my country Con el pincel extranjero With the foreign paintbrush Pintor, que sigues el rumbo Painter, following the path De tantos pintores viejos Of so many old painters

Aunque la virgen sea blanca Even if the virgin is white Píntame angelitos negros Paint little black angels for me Que también se van al cielo Because all of us who are good Todos los que somos buenos Can reach heaven too

Pintor, si pintas con amor Painter, if you paint with love Por qué desprecias su color Why do you despise their colour Si sabes que en el cielo If you know that in heaven También los quiere Dios God loves them too

Pintor de santos de alcoba Painter of bedroom saints Si tienes alma en el cuerpo If there's a soul in your body Por qué al pintar en tus cuadros Why have you in painting your paintings Te olvidaste de los negros Forgotten black people

Siempre que pintas iglesias Every time you paint churches Pintas angelitos bellos You paint beautiful angels Pero nunca te acordaste But you never remembered De pintar un ángel negro To paint a black angel Siempre que pintas iglesias Every time you paint churches Pintas angelitos bellos You paint beautiful angels Pero nunca te acordaste But you never remembered De pintar un ángel negro To paint a black angel

#THERE'S AN EARTHA KITT VERSION TOO #she was fluent in 4 languages apparently #also i bet this song is like. common knowledge here the most widely known version is by fucking Pedro Infante #but altho my family is mexican they're also very white and racist and hate fun so music was. limited. back then #but like GOD. i've spent the past few days (very unwisely) verbally wrestling with idiots on facebook over 'forced inclusion' #bc of rings of power & the little mermaid & such #but like PEOPLE HAVE KNOWN EXCLUSION & WHITE SUPREMACISTS ARE REAL AND FUCKED UP FOR FOREVER #the poem they adapted the lyrics from is by a venezuelan poet who wrote it before 1940 #im just. head in hands. why are they so fucking obtuse #so many of the people arguing that 'black little mermaid = evil' are racialised themselves too ://////////////// #like WOW internalised hatred is a hell of a thing #like The Mouse™ isn't radical at all the execs are just signing off on inclusive projects now bc other people did the hard work of- #making that acceptable and profitable first #but like. that doesn't make it HORRIBLE and an OFFENSE to the FANS and DISRESPECTFUL to the ORIGINAL to cast a black actress as a princess #who was white in the previous adaptation #which was itself the furthest thing from faithful to Andersen's original Little Mermaid #which is itself based on Undine from a few years prior #which is also based on previous stuff all the way back to grecorroman water nymphs and THOSE were also surely inspired by earlier shit #like. stories change. that's what they've always done #your childhood isn't ruined by diverse adaptations #you're just an aging racist & terrified of newer generations being better at *checks notes*- #not losing their shit over how other humans are slightly different from them #OR you're young & aping older racists for approval which is sadder #they're the worstttttt #viitalks #ñposting #lindo y jodido #oh also there are Religious Trauma Feelings Here. just. as a note lmao

[occupyscifi]

late review of 2016

most people agree that 2016 was  terrible year, what with lots of death of both well loved celebrities and innocent civilians, the worst possible person elected to be US president and Britain leaving the EU so that it can spend more time in terminal decline. However to avoid abyss gazing it is always best to pull back and take an SF view at what this means for the near future and beyond. There are some things that were obvious and other developments that were not. I will also be playing the fool’s game of prediction, not necessarily because i think these things will happen but because they might be interesting if they do. that after all is what SF is about, asking ‘what if this happens?’ - which is not the same as ‘this is what will happen’.

Pokemon go and AR

Big techno development that everyone saw coming was the popularity of AR and Pokemon go, which shows the fruition of two things. The first is AR itself which is where the internet, which formerly lived on computers, is now not just mobile but sits between us and reality through our smart phones. The logical continuation of this is the layering of AR over reality itself, both obscuring and revealing the real world. i’ve written many stories about this, and this short film does it way better than i ever could:

The second is the development of gamification over reality, with the fact that people were willing to spend time and money and energy running around after small imaginary creatures. The next step from this is to transfer every mundane task we do into a game - as i write about here. What with the decline of most intellectually engaging jobs and the stubborn reality that robots will not do menial jobs like catering and, delivery or international assassination the future is clear. the Mcjob of the 20th century will be played like a game, and what is worse people might pay to play it..

The filter bubble

This links in a horrible way with AR, and combines to form my current feared dystopia - which i write about here. in short we learned in 2016 what everyone knew all along, that most people not only seek out what they believe and ignore the inconvenient facts. It is the technology we have today which actively enables people to confirm their prejudices and believe outright lies in places of  truths they don’t like the look of. in terms of future developments this leads to a world where fake news is king, people in power can openly and brazenly lie and large enough corporations and the wealthy can pay to have their own truth broadcast over everyone else. However as this has been happening ever since the rise of the tabloid press in the late 19th century and in the US has been championed by Cable TV this was not much of a surprise.

The Russians are coming

This is prone to hyperbole, as the US has just cottoned on to what the Russians have been saying for years - namely that the cold war is not over and will never be over. however the simple fact is that in 2016 Russia was the biggest winner, securing the election of their favoured US candidate (something even the Soviets, though they might have watched the Manchurian candidate, could never have dreamed of) intimidated the hell out of Europe and finally got back into the middle east after two decades of exclusion. not bad for a country whose economy is tanking and whose people are still poorer and have a lower life expectancy now than they did in the 1980′s.

Whether this will continue or whether  Putin’s peak has come is open to debate. several prominent western generals have spoken of the likelihood of war with Russia, so SF fans you can dust off those post nuclear apocalypse SF tales and we can start watching Threads and the War Game and being really scared again. 2017 does look like it could go Putin’s way as well, with him pouring cash into European elections and getting his hacker minions to cause the sort of chaos that worked so well in the US. Of course Russia’s role in the US election is nowhere near as big as he would like to have it known, because to be honest what got Trump elected was the inadequacies of the US electoral college system and a long running collapse of the US working class.

whatever happens though it opens the way for lot of cold war style techno intrigue, and for Americans to wonder why it is that the Russians, using US hardware and software, are beating them in the cyber war. no doubt the US is already coming up with the cyberwar equivalent of the atomic bomb, which is certainly troubling. in an internet wired world the power to infect everything from a toaster to a fridge to a hospital with malware is bad. the power to switch it off completely or destroy it is infinitely worse. it is not to hard to imagine a cyber attack that rather than infecting the electricity grid or nuclear power stations in fact completely bricks them.

on the Russian side of course there is the question - that can be applied to far more nations that is comfortable thinking about - that what happens when a country stops being a democracy? what about the swathe of territories that are following the Putinesque lead? who are electing rich, telegenic strongmen who can shape the media narrative the way they chose? who needs dystopia when you have Duterte in the Philippnes who admits to personally killing suspects in his custody? or a range of openly Fascist parties running across Europe? one can easily see a future where rather than liberal nation states it is oligarchs running countries for their own ends, aristocracies who pass on their wealth and power to their children - like the Murdochs and the Putins of this world. Not to get all Dune but the idea of great houses jostling for commercial gain at the expense of each other and humankind in general seems to get closer all the time.

The rise of the Manbaby

Of course the most depressing outcome of 20126 was the rise of the facist incline, internet dwelling thin skinned manbaby. this species of monster first peopped up during the gamergate shitsroem, where menthought women were playing with their toys so sent them death and rape threats. the gamergate man with his whinging self entitlement and raging mysogyny should have withered in the popular gaze and scuttled of shame faced to grow the fuck up. But 2016 saw a manbaby elected to be US president, and manbabies across the internet harass innocent women, post openly Nazi screeds online and generally be the worst possible example not only of manhood but also humankind. 

it is hard to rationally get one’s head around the fact that in 2016 it was not only common but expected that a black woman actress would be harassed in shameful ways not seen since the 1970′s. Then to see the candidate for US president openly court white supremacist and Neo Nazi voters was even more horrifying. that the selfsame whining thin skinned woman hating openly racist gleefully ignorant man should then be elected is something i don’t think i will ever get over. that there seems to be a whole tide of people willing to embrace the worst of humanity, to reject basic science and rationality in favour of hatred does not bode well for 2017. the short, and hopefully wrong, answer is that we are living in the 1930′s again. certainly a hefty chunk of trump supporters would have been keen supporters of the brownshirts back in the day, and the worst thing about 2016 was that they were no longer afraid to declare it. it shouldn’t be forgotten that Nazism in Germany was first seen as a joke, then with bemusement and finally in horror.

Yet for SF fans rerunning the whole Nazi dystopia has been done, with everything from Star Wars to Hunger Games to the Lego movie riffing off some element of history’s greatest villains. what is interesting is the development of the manbaby, that there is suddenly a generation of men grown up, largely online, who are so insecure that they have to go to the most extreme exaggerated forms of hypermasculinity - the Nazi’s - and extreme forms of misogyny to make themselves feel secure. naturally Trump is their standard bearer, their worst example and a cartoon character as a man.

The end of US hegemony

Which leads us finally to the much predicted end of American dominance of the political and cultural landscape. of course everyone knows that nations rise and fall, and that the US could not last as number one forever. however the election of Trump and the rejection of globalism is an abdication of America role as world policeman. of course the people of Iraq might think that is more than a good thing, but what it gets replaced by are other countries with even less of a moral compass - Russia and China for example. in a world of drone wars, cyber wars and other forms of warfare not yet envisaged there are plenty of SF opportunities for fun new dystopias.

Now if you look at 2016 from the perspective of SF, everything looks much better. who knows what horrors 2017 will bring? so long as we look dispassionately at it, then it makes a great story.

[sumergosuigeneris]

June 10, 2019

Woke up thinking about not-great things from my life again. And thinking that I am repeating my mother’s patterns despite myself. Hell of a way to wake up. Probably need to go to therapy. Probably need to address issues in my life.

Yesterday ended up interesting.

Got confused about when I was gonna get in. Thought it was an hour later than I thought. When it turned out I was right, I decided to get food before heading to the club. The bar was closed and there was nowhere else nearby. Went back to train station and asked the guy sitting there to take me. Never doing that again. First of all, he only took cash (I technically didn’t have enough). I didn’t have enough to give him a tip, which is bad. But in a way, I felt it made us even because I was forced to make conversation. Hoo-eee is this guy loyal to the local university. I expressed my support for not-that-school and he proceeded to talk about how horrible another school was. I tried to say all schools do these things, not that it’s right but that they’re common. It went eh. Another guy that listens to his own opinion exclusively. And it cost me $40! Technically $42+tip, but I only had 40 in cash. How much would it have been if I took the deliberately underpriced car sharing service? Grrrrrr. But yay for supporting the beleaguered taxi drivers. Also, the Jus sie case came up. Of course. So I pointed out that celebs and rich people get away with the same shit all the time. I really really wanted to say if it was a yt person, you’d be fine with it, but I kept it together.

Get to the club....and no one was there. Not even Bob. I called him and somehow he thought I was coming in at 1am, so he gave up on me and went home. He lives about 45min away, esp because he’s a hypermiler, but he drove back for me. I was ambivalent b/c I wanted to shoot, and give him his stupid gifts, but I felt guilty for making him drive. Anyway, while waiting I discovered I’d left one of his gifts on the train. IDIOT! I spent twenty-five minutes total on several phone calls to am-not-track, only to be told to fill out a form online. So fucking stupid b/c I figured it out within an hour so that would have been perfect timing for the train staff (I’m blanking on everything except conductor) to find it and tag it for me. Fucking terrible customer service AGAIN! I was gonna complain on social media but it felt like all I was doing was complaining about companies and so companies would stop taking me seriously.

And of course, i couldn’t fill out the form b/c there was no internet at the club. Civil War Bob got there in time for me to be in a rage. I gave him the gifts I had, and told him (not asked him) that I was getting him an emergency cell phone. Fuck that shit. Our incident could have been avoided if I’d called him before he left for the club, but I forgot about the time change, and then despite that, if he’d had a fucking cell phone. He could have called me or I could have called him. Aggravating.

He took me to shoot pistols. I missed shooting rifles, but I’d never shot anything except black powder pistols before. It was fun. It was loud. Real hand guns, at least before these modern plastic models, are not like portrayed on tv/movies. Harder to aim. And very, very loud. Still throw gun powder depending on the model. But I can say I shot a Colt and a Smith&Wesson - quality American brands. I forgot my safety goggles, and all CWB had was prescription sunglasses. Whew that was hard. I made a few good shots but mostly bad, and I’m not sure how much of that is me being out of practice shooting new to me weapons, and how much was prescription sunglasses. Oh, and it’s really nice to take forever to load or clean. I like pistols.

Oh, and I found out that some guns have serial numbers already. They’ve been having serial numbers. Like a car vin. Although now that I’m writing this, I feel like I did know that a while ago, b/c on tv they’d talk about filing off the number. Dummy. Anyway, the point is guns could be registered to owners like cars are. Not like permits for carrying or safety (although a safety permit would be nice) but for gun policy level safety. Although, as with other things on guns, the people who would follow it wouldn’t be the problems but they’d be mouthy about how it was infringing on their rights.

The one thing was he started making political comments, about how someone shot up a place or people and was theoretically sympathetic to IS IS so CWB thinks of IS IS as terr orists. Oh no. I was not gonna have that. You’re going to ignore all the white supremacists? And also fo x was probably lying, but I’m not sure b/c I don’t know who he was talking about. We only do well when we don’t acknowledge his ignorant views, so I decided to shut that shit down. I told him I think of Tr ump supporters that way (re: ter ror ism). Shut him the fuck up.

We had fun. He gave me a tshift he’s been hanging on to. It’s orange, which is fine. But he said I like to wear loud colors. Which is not true. I will wear them, like I had an orange hooded jacket for a few years, but that’s me trying to expand beyond my mostly black, and brown and green and red. Anyway.

I didn’t tell him I was staying overnight. 2 1/2 hours is pretty good for me hanging out with CWB. 4 1/2 is the limit.

At this point, it was 5-ish, and I’d only had 1/2 a coffee and a terrible blueberry muffin. i was starving. i asked him to drop me off at a location that seemed like i was  going to the bus station but was close enough to walk to the hotel. I passed restaurants. It was so hard not to just stop at one of them, but I was determined to address my longing for pizza from here.

Also, while I feel I only had to talk about school once, it was extremely uncomfortable. Why *do* we always ask people what they do, or if they’re in school? Social media says it’s so we can judge people and how much respect to give them.

Got to the hotel and was excited b/c my room unexpectedly had a jacuzzi. Which doesn’t work. There were hardly any working lamps, basically one plug for me to plug things in. Very few channels and most of them were terribly staticy. I went to the pool and there was a family monopolizing it. They’d have made room for me, but it would have curtailed them a bit, and not really given me room to do anything besides sit there, so I went to go to the hot tub. Which wasn’t working and looked yucky. This hotel actually kind of sucks. Because the coup d’grace? The internet is *atrocious*! So I couldn’t do online instead of real life. I ended up going to bed pretty early. Which I needed.

But I ordered my pizzas. I ordered two. I wonder what the front desk person thought of that. I ordered one from the place that I’d found is closest to real pizza but was expensive and didn’t deliver as far away as i lived before I moved. And I ordered one from my favorite local chain.

As I was afraid of, both were disappointing. They weren’t as good as I’d built them up to be in my memory. The one was about as good as I think it was the last time I’d gotten it several years ago. The thing is, when I ran away to this particular state, the pizza was really really decent, but it changed a few years after that.To be less good. Which was a reason I hardly ever ordered the expensive stuff. The chain one was good for itself, but there was too much dough. Not sure if the recipe changed or the location made a mistake or b/c it was a medium. But it tasted yummy. Really the issue is with pizza in general. To make good pizza, you need to do the whole dough tossing thing. It’s not just for show, or to make a lump of dough spread out. It does something with air bubbles or whatever. And no one does that anymore. Almost no one. Because making pizza properly takes too long.

So anyway, now I can let that go for a while. And I’m taking home at least 3 meals worth of pizza. Yay!

All in all, I think I spent significantly too much on this trip (and I’m not home yet). I won’t do this again. It’s only renting a car, and only a one day thing (so get up ungodly early in the morning). I’m nervous about taking the bus. I’ve never had a problem, but the company itself has a reputation. Anyway, $120 ish for transpo and hotel. $80 for taxis. $50 ish for pizza. Well, as I type it out, only the car/taxi nonsense was unexpectedly high. Still, I need to take the bus to the bus pickup. Grab coffee, etc.. take the bus back to my city...take the train or bus home. Then, I’ll know. And feel safe lol.

And the bus isn’t known for having good internet. Here’s crossing my fingers.

Boy, I’m gonna sleep well tonight.