Satoko Shinashi!



[Apparently, InsaneJournal doesn't support embedded video yet. Woe, etc. Go here and watch.]


97 pounds of assbeatery in a 5 pound bag! For those too full of themselves to watch the clip, Satoko is a tiny lil' japanese mixed martial arts champeen. She's apparently combined judo, brazilian jiujitsu and sambo, and utter craziness into some kind of worldbeating kung foolery. Her general ring strategy looks like berserker punching frenzy until she can latch onto one of your extremities, which she then locks and dislocates, and then stomps you into weeeping mush as you roll around screaming in pain. Occasionally, she throws you around the ring for a bit first. I adore her.

See, the world is filled with grim sourness and suckitude, and I'm on kind of a downer at the moment. Mostly combo of personal finance woes, extreme tiredness and the ever increasing tsunami of worldly assness, but as long as bitty japanese girls can stomp seven kinds of hell out of each other, well, it's not all bad, is it? This was my unicorn chaser for the night.

And also this:



We took the monkey to the beach today. First time for her, first time for me in nearly a decade. Possibly more than that, actually. She had a blast, as did kisakat and I. Been too long, really. Kinda fried my ears and nose a bit; forgot to douse them with the sunblock. Night shift tends to remove a lot of sun resistance from your skin.

Back to school next week. All registered and everything; mostly grind classes this semester, stuff I shoulda taken before and stuff I need to retake to fix my GPA. Advanced Writing should be fun. The ride's gonna kill me, though. 50 mile ride, 25 to and from, twice a week. The bus/train combo's just too expensive, though. The bike's free, and it's not like I can't use the exercise.

Oh well. Either this or pump gas for the rest of my life.

Via Deb G

THE RULES:
1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions.


1. You're asked to write a piece of original fiction by a major publisher. Describe it. Novel, short story, play, what?

Novel. Gnuh, which one though? Probably Sacrifice. Devil-worshipping junkie serial killer and his hermaphrodite boy/girlfriend on the run from the Feds, the cops, and the not-quite-dead-enough ghosts of his past.

2. You hear from your bank that they've made a mistake, and they're putting an extra $25K into your account. How do you spend it?

$25K? Probably drop 10K into the credit cards, clear out the ones with the highest rates, drop 5K into the school loans, to give me enough loan space for the next couple of semesters, 5K on new computers for the wife and me, and 5K on a new car.

3. NASA rings you up - they want you aboard the next shuttle. Intensive training, rigorous work, giving up your life as you know it for many months. Do you accept?

Assuming I can arrange for support for the family during the training and trip, HELL YES.

4. Favourite internet or video game, ever?

Probably Planescape:Torment.

6. One place you've never been, that feels as if it has your name over the door?

Vancouver, BC. Perfect climate, cosmopolitan Pacific Rim culture, ace restaurants, just up the coast from all my Portland, Oregon occultnik/comic/gamer pals, and it's fucking CANADA. YAY CANADA!


Some rantishness coming later, so be warned and stuff.

On a less gloomy trip, neither of these results surprises me that much.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Betrayal wordcount. Slow going for some reason lately. Dunno if it's the general bummage, my story problems, or what.

2,816 / 10,000 (28.2%)

Just kinda gnaaaaaaah about everything lately. Dunno what it is; the financial doomishness, my impending return to academia, the cursed humidity, dunno. At least I'm getting a better picture of where I'm gonna hafta wrangle the story once it's outta my head. Assuming I can actually get the damn thing outta my head, that is. This one's a bit of a challenge, more then I thought it'd be.

Thinking about trying the ride to Salem thing again today, see if I can cut the time down. 'Course, that means I'm gonna be even more beat to hell tonight and tomorrow. Thing is, the bike ride thing's gonna be kinda necessary, coz otherwise I'm gonna have to come up with another $120 a month to cover bus and train travel. If I can get the bike time down to two and a half hours to get there, that'll make things a lot easier. The bus/train thing is a two hour trip anyway, having to take the bus to Newburyport and then the train down to Salem and all that.

Someday, I'd like to be able to wake up and not feel as tired as I was when I hit the sack.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/FOX_Did_Mr._Rogers_ruin_entire_0706.html

gakked from the illustrious NikChick, justifiably furious about it.

Apparently some halfwit professor put together a study claiming that the current generation of college students feel unjustifiably entitled to good grades and are more prone than previous generations to badger teachers to change their grades, and making a link between this false entitlement and the self-esteem promotion of Mr. Rogers. The idea seems to be that because Mr. Rogers told kids that they were special for being who they are, rather than telling them that they sucked and needed to work their asses off to be worthy of love and respect, he corrupted their minds into believing that they were better than they actually were.

Of course, the study got promoted all to hell on FauxNews, because when you have a message of absolute evil, lacking in any validity or ethical standard, FauxNews will of course grab it with both hands and beat their viewers over the head with it.

Miserable scumsucking pigfuckers.

Betrayal wordcount

1,377 / 10,000 (13.8%)

I am burnt like a match, y'all.

Took my bike from Haverhill to Salem, Mass. Trying to see if the bike's a feasible alternative to the bus/train combo that I'll have to do starting this fall, so's to avoid the $15 a day that'd cost. See, I did the math. I used to bike to Salem, NH on a fairly regular basis, and that's a 15 mile bit, and the Salem, Mass thing is only 25 miles, so I figured it wouldn 't be that bad. After all, the 15 mile bit only used to take me about an hour, so the 25 mile bit shouldn't be more than two hours, yeah?

Fat fucking chance. Forgot to take into account that the Salem, NH treks were about 10 years ago, when I was apparently in much better shape. Also, the weather folks who said it was gonna be cloudy and low 80s appear to have been lying, coz it was pretty sunny and in the mid 90s for most of the trip. Also, a sizable chunk of the trip is through Boxford, which is one of those rich folk suburb residential towns, where there's pretty much no actual commerce of any kind. So, no handy convenience stores to buy water, frex.

Anyway. Trip took about 3 hours one way. So, I'm sore, sunburned, and wicked tired. On the other hand, I did just bike 50 miles.

Betrayal.

1,068 / 10,000 (10.7%)

So, working on something new, sorta. The idea's been in my head for a while, and it's connected to other stuff I've been tinkering with forever, so I dunno how new it actually is, but the words are new. Short story, sword 'n sorcery (well, axe 'n sorcery, and there's no real onstage sorcery in it, but hey), set in the Jewel Cities world and starring Barak the Axe, early on in his career. Kind of an origin story, actually.

Barak's a guy I've had in my head for a while. Most of the stuff I've tinkered with has been him long after this point, but this is how he ended up as an independent mercenary thug and bandit. You know the evil sorcerer in all those stories, and how he's got some overmuscled thug standing behind him, ready to fight the hero while the sorcerer cackles and begins his Spell Of Doom? The last level boss before the final boss? That guy? Barak is that guy. He's not a particularly bad person, as such, he just kills people for money and he likes working for sorcerers because they always do interesting things and live in weird places and they pay well, as long as you get out before they blow up the tower or summon the demon or try to blot out the sun. And not a lot of warriors will work for them (what with the whole demon-summoning and sun-blotting and hero-fighting) so the minion-market's pretty good. Better than robbing travelers at axe-point, anyway, and better than tomb-robbing, most of the time.

I like Barak.

Once it's done, and I get it to a point where I'm not hating every single word (ahem), I might actually send this one out. Which is why it's under friends-lock, over at Crow Write. So, if you want to look at it, go friend up. Of course, it's pretty shit at this point, but at least it's being written. Which for me is kind of a triumph. Yay me!

Just finished Hunter's Web. Close to 26 thousand words, the longest bit of pure fiction I've written ...well, ever. Some of the game things were longer (I think Bloody Jack's Gold came out around that, but a sizable chunk of that was game stats) but I'm not sure if those count or not. Anyway, I'm not counting them.

So I put it up on my writing journal, Crow Write, but it's spread across about two and a half months of entries. Yipe. I are a slow, slow writer. If anybody wants to read it and doesn't feel like slogging backward through all those entries, I loaded it up on my website here:

Hunter's Web

So, there's that. It's game fic, for those who weren't paying attention the first time I talked about it, starring one of my NPCs from the Vampire: the Requiem game that I've been running for the last 3 years or so. This one was kind of a challenge, since it's mostly a retelling of the events from early in the game from his perspective instead of the players. Which, it turns out, is kinda limiting from a plotting POV. Who'da thunk. As an exercise, it has helped point out many grotesque flaws in my literary technique. So, yay for that.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

So, my friend Matt just came by a few hours ago and told me an old mutual friend of ours died last week. The friend in question was one of my oldest friends, one I haven't seen in well over a decade and a half. He's been going by Julian for most of that time, but I still think of him as Ken. He died of some kind of combo of stomach and brain cancer; apparently it showed up about 4 months ago. Which would apparently be halfway through his wife's second pregnancy. So there's that, too.

I'd heard (through a mass email his wife sent out a month ago) that he was doing the chemo thing, but she was about to go into labor, so I figured I'd email her back once things settled down and ask what was going on, but looks like that'll be kinda pointless now.

He and I emailed back and forth a bit a few years ago, just after his first kid was born, but we lost touch again after that. Dunno what it was, maybe we just didn't have much to say to each other or something, or maybe we just didn't know how to say it.

He and I were best friends in high school, and for a few years afterwards. We were the only people we know who liked the same wierd stuff; the same wierd music, the same scifi and horror books, the same occultnik books, all that stuff. We started hanging around with Matt and his band a few years after we left school. At the time, Matt's band was changing from the mid-eighties gutter-punk band Kid Stiff to a wierd semi-cabaret gay-bar-band whose name I can't remember. The lead singer chick kinda took over the band and Matt was really unhappy with how the band was changing. Things ended up with Ken taking Matt's place in the band playing bass and getting absorbed into the whole egotrip thing the singer had going, and he and Matt fell out over it. I tried to stay out of their thing and be friends with them both, but Ken ended up moving to Manchester to live with the singer and her husband and we kinda drifted apart, and I fell into Matt's social orbit, doing band stuff with him as he was putting together a new band. I did road work, booking, and that kind of thing, and that was my schtick for about 4 years or so, by which time Ken had changed his name to Julian and vanished pretty much completely. I heard from him a few years later when he called me out of the blue and tried to convince me to give him back a guitar he'd bought for me back in high school so he could sell it and get a new amp. Unfortunately, I'd already traded it for another guitar and wasn't going to give it back anyway, so that was pretty much that.

I was never able to find him after that, until I gave my email address to his aunt a few years ago and she eventually got it to him and he emailed me. By then he'd settled down in New Haven and gotten married and all that. I never found out what happened with the band or any of that, and now I guess I'll never get the chance. He had no web presence at all, outside of a few of those MeetUp social networking sites that never got updated, and a brief mention of the "Baby Story" episode he and his wife did when their first kid was born. And now this.

Fuck.

I always thought I'd have more time to catch up with him, y'know?

I don't know who I'd be if I hadn't had him around to talk to back then, to let me know that I wasn't the only freak in the world.



Ave et vale, man.

To be perfectly honest, there are some days when I'm pretty sure that if I didn't have kisakat and the kid in my life, I'd be sitting in a basement somewhere building explosive devices and stockpiling ammo for a secret war on pretty much everybody making more than a million a year.

So, you folks should probably thank her for that.




Maybe I should stop reading political sites for a bit again.

Hunh. Oddly blasé about finally getting my (re)admissions letter from Salem State. Dunno why.

Possibly some sort of nutritional depletion resulting from the fucking sweltering heat. Weather gnomes claim that the temps'll break sometime today or tonight, but that's what they were saying yesterday too, so...

Anyway. Just hadda shell out $225 from our med account to cover the admissions deposit. Fucking pain in the ass, that, but they're claiming that there's bunches of folks vying for the admission spots and I gotta pony up or they'll sell my slot to somebody else. I'd no idea SSC was becoming so popular.

So, assuming I can get some financial aid (more loans, most likely), I'ma be back in harness come fall, drudging away on my history BA. w00t for me, I guess?

So, just finished almost 4000 words of vampire porn, a somewhat belated birthday present for my lurvely wife kisakat. And I do mean porn. This is not your Standard Issue Vampyre Erotica, swanning languidly about in lace shirts, gently sipping crimson nectar from diffident Goff Weenies. This is unrepentant pornography, kids. Bloody monster porn, featuring an ancient inhuman monstrous deathmachine and his painfreak tweaker blood sorceress girlfriend having grotesque bloody monster sex on the roof. Just so's you know.

Anyway, anybody who wants to check it out, here: Part 1, Part 2, (and here's where the pr0n starts) Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. For the folks who just walked in, Spider (the inhuman deathmachine mentioned above) is an NPC in a Vampire: the Requiem chronicle I've been running for the last several years, and Cass (the blood sorceress painfreak) is a PC in the same game, played by my beloved kisakat. They're both vampires, and they've been lovers for about a year. He's over 200 years old, and has never been human in any realistic sense, and she's been a vamp for about a year and a half.

I'm fairly happy with how it came out, actually. Still hating my stiff sentence structure and gawdawful repetitive word selection, and clumsy phrasing, and... oh god, I suck so bad! but it's not as bad as some other stuff I've put out. [ahem] Yeah, so there's that.

So, yeah. Porn. Gentleman Pornographer, that's me. Me mum would be so proud.

If you're maybe noticing that you're older than you used to be, and are feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that you haven't accomplished as much as you/other people in your present or past/annoyingly critical voices inside your head think you should have, and if you're maybe feeling something like "I'm not a real grownup like everyone else," and if you're maybe also feeling sad/angry/confused/worried/frustrated that your body isn't working the way it used to, and you're maybe thinking, "if that's true then how am I going to DO all those accomplishments that I/other people/voices in my head think I ought or want to do?", and maybe you're also wondering how are you going to dig out from under the accumulation of habit and procrastination and self-doubt to some sense of satisfaction in your life again, then post this same sentence in your journal. (via matociquala>)


Ain't that the fucking truth.

Speaking of fucking truth, something occurred to me a while ago. Something that the progressive movement has had a longterm problem dealing with is that they really don't get working class/peasantry type folks. By and large, the theoreticians and leaders of the progressive movement are urban middle and (outer tier) upper class folks. As such, they've got very little connection to/experience with the interests and culture of the lower orders. As a result, they tend to patronize them, idealize them and/or reject them (often at the same time) as potential allies in attempting to advance civilisation beyond our current state.

This misunderstanding extends beyond the progs' relations with folks in their own country. The irritating patronization and idealization of oppressed folks worldwide by the progs tends to be rooted in the same sort of misunderstanding, and the multiple problems that progs encounter when working directly with these oppressed folks are most often rooted in their lack of understanding of one fundamental fact. Most of the oppressed folks around the world are, for all intents and purposes, fucking rednecks. They may be listening to romantic furrin music instead of recycled New Country, they may wear turbans or handwoven shawls instead of Skynyrd tshirts and gimme caps, they may eat spicy rice and veggie dishes instead of chitlins and twinkies, but inside they're rednecks.

They depend on fairly traditional family structures and sexual roles, they're socially and culturally conservative, they identify strongly with their ethnicity and religion in a noncritical way that's extremely difficult for the rootless progs to understand. The misunderstandings that arise from these fundamental differences in outlook are a critical problem for the few progs who bother to try and include these folks in the movement. And hell, if the progs can't even convince the middle classes to support their program (which, for the most part, they fail to do except in the most superficial manner), how are they gonna get these utter aliens to do so?

This is, of course, symply a diagnosis. I'm still trying to figure out what the solution to the problem is, or even if there is one.


And then there was meme:

So, joecrow, your LiveJournal reveals...



You are... 5% unique
(blame, for example, your interest in zeelist)
and 9% herdlike
(partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy writing).
When it comes to friends you are a total whore. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please.

Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is intellectual.

Your overall weirdness is: 43

(The average level of weirdness is: 28.
You are weirder than 83% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

Mingle² - Online Dating

Now that kicked some ass. I saw the theatrical version a few years ago on cable. Not a horrible movie, kinda standard revengey tough guy Mel Gibson flick. Found out later that that version had been substantially revised and reshot after the studio (and, to a certain extent, Mel) got really uncomfortable with the seriously dark tone that the director, Brian Helgeland, had created. Since the movie's about a sociopathic criminal going after the money his wife and former partner stole from him after leaving him for dead with two bullets in his back and killing anybody who gets in his way, I'm not sure exactly how light-hearted and family-friendly they expected it to be, but y'know, it's Hollywood. Also, I think Mel and his folks mighta been a bit uncomfortable with his character beating the crap outta his wife and beating up hobos for coffee money and, y'know, being a sociopathic criminal. Also, the original ending was apparently kind of a downer.

This version, on the other hand, was recut and edited and whatnot about 8 years after the original release, after Helgeland washed his hands of the film and left it to the studio to chop up and make Mel a bit warmer (and indulge his fetish for having his characters get tortured by the bad guys. Seriously, have you ever noticed how often that happens to the guys he plays? All the fucking time, man. It's kinda creepy.) Helgeland somehow convinced the studio to let him do a director's cut, and got access to the negatives and whatnot, and essentially remade the film. New score, more ambiguous ending, different tint, studio's remade third act booted and replaced with his original footage; essentially it's a whole different movie. Also, No Fucking Voiceover! Yay for No Fucking Voiceover!!

Much closer to the book it's based on, The Hunter by Richard Stark/Donald Westlake. Really good work from everybody involved. Maria Bello's in it, too. (I like her.) You guys should check it out.

Well, that was fucking grim.

(faint spoilers in next paragraph, avoid if that bugs you, obvs)

Pretty though. A lot like Brazil, in that, actually. A LOT. Beauty and magic, shot in the gut and left to die. Thanks, Guillermo. Way to cheer my ass up, man. Yeah, there's the happybunnyland "...and she lived happily ever after, no really we promise" bit, but I dunno. Bandaid on a gut wound, for me. Also, for fuck's sake, if you've got your mortal enemy wounded and with your knife at his throat, just fucking CUT IT, willya? Save yourself and everybody else a fuckload of trouble, really. Common sense, people.

(spoilers gone, what there were)

So, what's up with y'all?

T'was kisakat's birthday yesterday. My mom and her mom came over and we had some cake and whatnot. Los kid painted her a picture of, hell I dunno, some kinda brownish-reddish blob of something or other. She's kinda abstract right now, as you'd kinda expect a 3 year old artisté to be. I, because I am the MASTER of original giftery, bought her some books from her Amazon list. Yay me!

In other news, I made a new journal over at InsaneJournal.com, at http://joecrow.insanejournal.com/. kisakat's fault, really. Pretty much dupes of my LJ entries, in case fucking SixApart flips out and everybody's got to make a runner. Y'all oughtta join me. Handy to have an alternate, and Insane Journal's pretty much LJ pre-Six Apart, and much friendlier. I'm still on a free account, but I may actually drop the $30 for a permanent account. I dunno.

Summer Solstice today. We're gonna try and do something with the kid around noon or so. She's really getting into the nightly devotionals she's been doing with kisakat; she's even built her own little altar next to the big one, with some of her toys on it and one of her books that she pretends to read her little rituals from. She sez she's doing a chocolate devotional, and talks about doing an ice cream devotional later. Makes sense, I spoze. Worship the important things in your life, yeah? She's such a cutie.

L8r, sk8rz

Mass Legislators vote down gay marriage ban ballot question.

Nice to see them do something useful. They been dicking around about this for a while now, and hopefully this'll make it that much harder for the hateful scumbags who keep trying to slip this in to do it next time around. Which will be 2012. By then, there will be 8 years worth of gay marriages that these bastards will be trying to invalidate, and I don't think the folks hereabouts are quite so loathesome as to tell that many people that their marriages no longer count.

There's a lot of things I dislike about living in Mass, but I've gotta say that I really do like living in the only state in the DisUnion that's got a civilized attitude about this.

Customers stupider than usual, lately.

Hadda build a barricade outta the cars in the lot around the station. Left one entrance open so wanderers could come in and get gas, while we still have some left. Stopped taking cash, though. Just trading for supplies. Think I'm pretty set for a while, but keep letting them in just to stock up.

They're still all panicky and shit, though. Always with the screaming and freaking out.

"It's the end of the world!"

"We're all gonna die!"

"Aiiieeeeeeegghhh!"

Dumbasses. The world doesn't end.

It just keeps shambling along. Just like us.

Hey, here comes another customer.

Time for lunch. Mmm.

Tasty.

Sadly, I have little to say, really.

This is one of the alternate journalling accounts I set up after the great Fandom Banhammer of '07. I dunno what I'm gonna do with it yet, though.

That's from this Sunday. We hadda punt the Mage game, coz Jay's car shit the bed. So, we did the Mom's Day thing at my mother-in-law's friend/boyfriend/i-got-no-idea's house.

Just thought I'd share some cuteness with y'all.



Am oddly conflicted about Jerry Falwell kacking it. The meaner side is doing a happy dance, but there's something to be said for the more merciful perspective that mourns the loss of the chance to find a way to change his mind. Y'gotta hope that there's a way to do that for everybody, that nobody's irredeemably broken or evil or crazy, that there's a way for folks who disagree to live in at least mutual not-killingness, if not harmony. Coz, otherwise, it's really easy to become the monsters we fight.

I feel that urge in me every day, to reduce everything to us-vs-them, friends and enemies, the world as life or death struggle. But that's what they see too and that's what makes them afraid. I don't think fear is the best tool for the situation. After all, look how it's failing them. But it's hard to look past that fear, especially when things seem so dark most of the time.

Y'just gotta hope that there's another way, because bomb throwing and killing rich folks didn't work any of the other times we tried it. Now maybe we just didn't do it hard enough, but I dunno. The Machine seems to exist at least partly independently of the cogs in it, even the ones at the top. The Sovs ended up with apparatchiks and presidents and whatnot even after they purged the hell out of their elites. Hierarchy is wired into us now, and until we can debug our heads, anything we build is gonna have that urge to follow hidden in it somewhere.