buzzdixonwriter

[buzzdixonwriter]

Buried [FICTOID]

The pirates weighed anchor in the isolated cove, their sails shredded, their hull riddled with cannonballs. 

They managed to escape the pursuing flotilla by blind luck – literally.  A thick flog a thick fog bank enabled them to escape. 

While the flotilla searched the seas, they made their way to the island.

“Which island is this?” the captain asked.

The first mate shrugged.  The navigator lay dead, the ship's compass and sextant obliterated by the same cannonball. 

“Put a party ashore,” said the captain.  “Look for trees we can use to make repairs, fresh water and food to restock our supplies.

“And find a suitable site to bury our dead.”

For the next three days the surviving pirates labored to repair and replenish their ship.

The bodies – one in three of the crew -- they dumped in a common unmarked grave.

“Why should the land be any different from the sea?” the captain asked.

On the fourth day a crewman turned up missing.

At first they assumed he just wandered off but a search of the island showed no sign of him.

“A deserter,” the captain said.  “Coward!  So be it.  Leave him to die alone on this miserable rock.”

The next day two prates went missing.

“Something on this island is taking them,” said the captain.  He armed the entire crew, leaving only two wounded men on board, then set off to search the island. 

The pirates did a far more thorough job than before but found no sign of their missing crewmates.

But when they returned to the cove they felt dismayed to see their ship vanished.  

“How could two wounded men sail that ship by themselves? the captain said.

“Perhaps the flotilla found them,” said the first mate.

“Impossible!  Had they done so they would simply lay an ambush for us, not simply sail off!”

Improvising shelter, the remaining pirates slept on the island.

The next morning the captain and first made awoke.  The shelters sat empty, the fire pit cold, the rest of the crew gone.  

“They must be somewhere on the island,” said the captain.

“Where? asked the first mate.  “We searched every place.”

“Every place except one,” said the captain.

They began digging up the mass grave.

They found the initial casualties they buried then they found the first missing sailor, then the two after that, then the two left on the ship.

Horrified yet driven by a frantic compulsion, the captain and first mate kept digging.

One by one they uncovered the rest of the crew.

“What's the meaning of this?” the first mate wailed.

“Shut up and keep digging!” said the captain.

The captain’s spade struck something.

He squatted down and brushed the sand away to uncover the face of the new corpse.

The face was that of the first mate. 

Knowing what he would find yet no more able to avoid it than a mouse could avoid a snake, the captain kept digging.  He found another corpse; the face, his. 

The pirates weighed anchor in the isolated cove…

 © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Ed_Emshwiller_art #Im_a_scifi_kinda_guy

[buzzdixonwriter]

What’s The Deal, Neil?

We cancel Cosby, we cancel Rowlings, we cancel Allen, we cancel Savile, we cancel Allen.

We do not cancel Curtiz or Hitchcock or Mozart.

Why?

There is a reason, and a valid one at that.  Michael Curtiz and Alfred Hitchcock and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart never set themselves up as moral exemplars, publicly proclaiming their righteous acts while hiding their unrighteous deeds.

Quite the contrary.

Their sleazy behavior is often shrugged off with “Well, what did you expect?” as we continue to enjoy their works.

We do not feel betrayed by them, we have not invested in admiring them not just for their artistic works but the causes they championed as well.

Gaiman, Rowling, Cosby, Savile, Allen et al presented a highly moral / ethical face to the world yet they conducted themselves privately in a wholly contrary manner.

We don’t object to scoundrels behaving like scoundrels; if we did Donald Trump would have landed in jail long before running for president.

We do object to those who say one thing yet do another – and this is why those cancelled richly deserve their cancellation.

They betrayed us not by merely demonstrating feet of excrement, but by undermining the very things they urged us to aspire to.

Like religious leaders who can’t imagine why people flee their congregations, they fail to grasp that their predatory actions and unsavory behavior destroys the trust others once placed in what they taught.

Gaiman et al make us look askance at all their works we once adored and legitimately admired, causing us to wonder if those works are somehow as tainted as their creators.

And if so tainted, then what about the ideas and ideals contained within?

There are many capable of separating the art from the artist, to continue to enjoy the work -- Casablanca in Curtiz’ case, to name one example -- while righteously denouncing the creator of the work for egregious bad behavior.

Some creators -- such as Mozart -- manage to link outrageous personal behavior with breathtaking beauty by taking unrestrained joy in both, never denying their baseness but never letting it sully their sublimity.

The line that cannot be crossed, the unpardonable atrocity, the literally unforgiveable sin found in the gospels is to blaspheme the holy. 

To set up an ideal, to fire people’s imagination, to urge them to cling to that ideal, to present oneself as a living embodiment -- however imperfect -- of that ideal is to create something holy, regardless of one’s formal beliefs or disbeliefs.

And to undermine that through bad behavior is to hew away the foundations of other people’s lives and identities.

Some things can’t be forgiven…

…nor should they.

  © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

Bumpers [FICTOID]

“What are you insinuating?”

“Insinuating?  Moi?”

“Vous.  What the hell did you mean I ‘might know how it feels now’?”

“You said your car was damaged by a hit and run driver, didn’t you?  All I said was if you never caused a hit and run accident, I commiserated with you, but if you had, now you know what it feels like.”

“You’re saying I was in a hit and run accident?”

“No such thing.  I said if you were in one.”

“Same thing!”

“Not at all.  Now, have you caused a hit and run accident?”

“Never!”

“Well, that’s good, but you are acting just like someone who caused a fatal hit and run accident would act, throwing your weight around trying to get what you want.”

“That’s because you falsely accused me!”

“I did no such thing.  I merely pointed out that if you had, you now felt what it would be like to be the victim.”

“I am the victim!”

“In this case, yes.  But what about other cases?  Hypothetical, of course.”

“There are no hypotheticals!”

“Oh, so now you’re admitting you caused a hit and run accident?”

“Stop twisting my words around!”

“I’m just parroting back what you say.  Want a cracker?”

  © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Walter_Molino_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

Turdpolishers & Paint-By-Numbers

“Are you working on your novel?  Write it carefully: shit us some good shit.” – Gustave Flaubert

My mom once tried a landscape paint-by-numbers kit.  Took her more than two years to complete it; fortunately back in the 1950s they offered oil based paints so they didn’t dry out sitting in their capped little cups.

Being a housewife consumed most of her time in the 1950s to early 60s so she rarely had the opportunity to work on it.

If she had the energy, she didn’t have the time; if she had the time, she didn’t have the energy.

But finish it she did eventually, more a sense of relief than accomplishment.  I recall we all congratulated her on it but even at that tender age I could tell it really didn’t look as good as what real artists painted.

Mom talked about framing it once it dried thoroughly but I can’t remember ever seeing it after she finally completed it.

Mind you, I deny no one their pleasure.  If you like paint-by-numbers projects, you go right ahead and enjoy yourself!

Likewise if you enjoy adult coloring books* you go right ahead and color them.

I occasionally print out black and white comics art and sci-fi illustrations to color in with markers and color pencils.  It’s fun, it’s relaxing, and there’s a certain bare minimum amount of creativity involved in my choosing how to color it as well as trying to improve my skill level re color pencils.

Is it art?  Only by the lowest bar imaginable, but yeah, since a human’s involved, we can call it art.

I think of the equivalent of this with AI as turdpolishing.

The defeatist acceptance of AI in creative endeavors is dispiriting to me.

I concede AI is good for crunching huge numbers and finding patterns we humans might easily overlook -- and even there you need to take care about AI “hallucinating” (i.e., making stuff up).

In creative areas — art / music / writing — there is no art to what AI spews out unless there is a human to interpret it.

Like Rorschach blots, AI “creations” are actually more or less random conglomerations.

Sure, you can give them detailed prompts ///but they will never respond to the prompts exactly the same way twice///.

This is why grotesqueries -- sci-fi / fantasy / horror / surrealist – prompts produce the most satisfying results to humans.

What we’re looking at is supposed to be weird, so we overlook / forgive all the numerous flaws in it.

What more and more human creators do is use AI to block out what they want -- be it sight / song / story -- that they then refine and hone into something more personal and genuinely artistic.

I’ve posted elsewhere there are things AI can do in creative fields that I find helpful:

Creative prompts that a human builds a personal work off Preliminary copy editing in text to speed up the rewriting process Summaries of existing work to speed up research

But others are using AI to create rough first drafts they will subsequently rewrite and polish and edit into a somewhat more personal work.

It’s like paint-by-numbers:  Some practitioners will do it far more skillfully that others and have a far more polished looking final work…

…but it’s still paint-by-numbers.

And you’ll never see it in a museum.

You can polish a turd to a bright, brilliant sheen but all you get is a polished turd.

   © Buzz Dixon

  *  Adult as in grownup, not pornographic, you sick little monkeys…

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Coby_Whitmore_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

Hambuggery [FICTOID]

Hamburgers!  There were never enough hamburgers for Leon Skum. 

The multi-gazillionaire obsessed over hamburgers, all kinds of hamburgers:  Those little sliders with the grilled onions from White Castle, the wrapped lettuce protein-style burger at In-N-Out, the veggie burger at Hooks, even those tiny dried cow patties they sell at McDonald's.

If it was:

[ ] Round [ ] Made of meat [ ] Between two slices of bread

Skum obsessed over it.

You only needed to check two of the boxes to win his approval.

But here's the thing: Leon Skum didn't like hamburgers! 

Rather what he liked was the feeling of power and control he could inflict on others.

That’s why his life goal was / is / always shall be the acquisition of every damn hamburger on the planet.

Call it a strategy of denial.

What did Skum do with his collection of hamburgers?

Nothing!

Oh, he stored them in desert warehouses where they rotted and stank (all except the Mickey D selections; read into that what you will).

People traveling across country would roll up their windows and hit the gas.  Sheriffs and Highway Patrol officers in gas masks would wave them through, fully understanding why no one wanted to be downwind from one of Skum’s abattoirs.

Air travel increased dramatically in that part of the country, an unintended benefit of Skum’s obsession with burgers.

So what did Skum do with these burgers?

At first he acted like Scrooge McDuck only instead of diving into a giant money bin and letting the coins clunk on his head, Skum let the burgers cascade on him.

This of course proved a colossally bad idea.  The burgers fell apart in midair not to mention the problem of oil / grease / fat setting getting on everything.

So again, why did Leon Skum want hamburgers?

He wanted them just because, just so he could say “I've got all of them!”

Eventually one of the brighter persons in Skum’s vast domain (and let's be honest everybody who worked for Leon Skum was smarter than him, even the drooling social hire in the wheelchair down in shipping whose sole job was to push the button that opened the door) pointed out Skum didn't actually need to buy the physical hamburgers but rather the concept of hamburgers.

Skum soon owned vast tracts of land in the desert filled with empty warehouses full of nonexistent hypothetical hamburgers.

Since these proved no problem re oil / grease / fat, the fastidious come Skum couldn't wait to dive into them.

He did and that was when there was an oil / grease / fat problem on the concrete floor of the warehouse but no longer any problems for anyone else.

  © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Walter_Martin_Baumhofer_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

Cyrus

Christian nationalists point to Cyrus the Great as a template for Trump, saying just as God sent Cyrus to free the Jews from Babylonian captivity, so did He send Trump to…uh…free?...no, lead Christian nationalists into dominion over the Earth.

This is flaming feculent bull sh!t.

Cyrus was operating on his own agenda when he attacked Babylon, neither God nor the Jews voted for him.  The famous Bible prophecy against Babylon’s King Belshazzar “mene mene tekel upharsin” is translated today in truncated form as “you’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting” leaving off the crucial last part:  “by the Persians.”

The “prophecy” was not so much divine judgement against immortality but an objective appraisal of Babylon’s military and political decline.  The Jews Cyrus released from captivity were hardcore monotheists who didn’t assimilate into Babylonian culture.  He probably thought they’d prove more trouble than they were worth so he let them go.

Cyrus went on to become the chief architect of the Achaemenid Empire, kicking ass all over Central and Western Asia.  The historical record gets a little vague and contradictory, with one account saying her retired to his capital, another that he got killed by a rebel tribe, and a third that he ended up beheaded by Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae people who took umbrage at Cyrus proposal to marry her so he could acquire her kingdom.

Cyrus’ two sons ruled the empire briefly (Cambyses II for eight years, Bardiya for less than a year) then Darius the Great took over and ran it effectively for 36 years.

Christian nationalist now wish to conflate Trump with a combo of Cyrus and Darius in order to justify their belief that they should rule the world forever, but conveniently overlook there’s a 33% chance Cyrus got killed by a woman but in any case left two idiot sons behind who mucked things up royally and eventually got replaced by somebody else.

I leave it to the reader to ascertain the mental acuity of Trump’s sons.

It should be also noted that Darius reportedly became king by cheating at a contest.

Jes’ sayin’…

If there is a literal hellfire awaiting blasphemers, every Christian who subscribes to the perverted Cyrus doctrine has damned themselves for eternity.

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.  And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come. “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit. “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” -- Matthew 12: 31-34

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.  Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?  Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.  A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.  Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.  Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.  Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?  And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” -- Matthew 7:15-23

  © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoids #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Austin_Briggs_art 

[buzzdixonwriter]

Hundred Yard Dash [FICTOID]

“It's not fair!  They're cheating!” 

“How are they cheating?” 

“You took the balls and chains off their ankles!”  

“So?  They're still starting twenty yards behind you.  They need to run a hundred and twenty yards while you only run a hundred.” 

“Yeah, but in the past I ran against them when they wore balls and chains on their legs.  This is changing the rules, making it unfair.” 

“Unfair?  Take a look ahead of you.  See those people at the fifty yard mark?  That's where they got to start the race.”

“…yeah…well…their parents paid for them to be there so that's okay.  They're entitled to win the race.”

“They aren't going to win.”  

“They aren't?  You mean I got a chance?” 

“Ha-ha!  No, of course not!  What I meant is those people at the fifty yard mark aren't going to win, they're not even going to come in second or third.  At best they'll get honorable mention certificates but the real winners aren't even running.  In fact for the real winners the race was already run and they declared the winners long before their birth.  They'll be lauded in the media and awarded huge endorsement contracts for winning when they never even set foot on the course.”  

“You mean they're the winners already and even the people ahead of me don't stand a chance?” 

“None at all.  Remember what I said about those at the fifty yard mark, that they get honorable mention certificates?  You'll be lucky to get a star for participating.” 

“A gold one?”  

“Why?  No sense wasting money on the likes of you, is there?”  

“Yeah, I guess you're right.  Still, at least the guys twenty yards behind me don't get any unfair advantage.”

 © Buzz Dixon

[buzzdixonwriter]

In volume 9 of Serenity, there is a scene where Eddie mentions he was traumatized by a babysitter molesting him, and Serenity's insensitive response is to callously brush it off by saying "every guy is obsessed with sex", what was the intention of writing this part?

Yes. The arc of the series was to show Serenity gradually improving in her outlook on life thanx to positive influences from her friends. Her attitude would change over time to reflect this. While she's a better person in vol. 9 than vol. 1, she still has a lot of growing to do.

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Im_a_scifi_kinda_guy #Virgil_Finlay_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Coby_Whitmore_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

#fictoid #humor_pitiful_stabs_at #Erte_art

[buzzdixonwriter]

Bilious Bogus Billionaires

Although she created it with good intentions, Elizabeth J. Magie royally screwed over American economic culture with her creation, The Landlord’s Game.

Her intention in 1904 was to create a game that could demonstrate the inherent failings of capitalism by allowing players to play the game under two different sets of rules:  One that provided for capitalist monopolies, the other that allowed for cooperation and mutual benefit.

People -- especially Americans -- being people, the version favored most by consumers was the one where a single player drives all the others into bankruptcy because that what there’s a clear-cut winner and the game could offer a sense of closure even if it meant disappointment for most people playing it.

And corporations being corporations -- especially American corporations -- the big game companies immediately began ripping off Ms Magie’s work, for the most part chucking out her cooperative rules to focus on a game of complete economic dominance, i.e., Monopoly.

This has directly or indirectly screwed over hundreds of millions of Americans as well as countless billions in other countries by teaching them -- or rather, by reinforcing capitalist propaganda -- that there is no possible economic system for the betterment of the planet and its people than the capitalist system, and that economic dominance in the hands of a tiny few is the optimum socioeconomic system.

Exactly the opposite of what Ms Magie demonstrated with The Landlord’s Game but wot da hey, right?

Instead of learning the lesson that a fair and equitable system could exist for the benefit of all, we’ve had the social Darwinism of Monopoly drilled into us.

We can’t see how we could do things differently.

And we can’t see how the current oligarchy is racing to economic disaster because they don’t recognize they’ve ginned up the game of Monopoly in the real world with cheat codes that make it unsustainable.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell:  Most billionaires are wealthy only in the imagination of others.

I’m not talking about some moralistic relativism here, I’m being quite literal:  Most of what billionaires brag of as wealth doesn’t exist in any real form.

Rather, it’s a perceived wealth, a belief wealth, a purely imaginary wealth that has little if any basis in reality.

Lets say billionaire Leon Skum owns a gazillion shares of stock in Twaddle, a social media company.  If other people are buying and selling the stock among themselves at twenty dollars a share, he “owns” twenty gazillion dollars worth of stock.

But if Twaddle takes a sudden downturn -- even if it still functions as it had previously -- and fickle stockholders abandon it by selling shares at ten dollars each, then Skum has “lost” half his “wealth and is now worth only ten gazillion dollars instead of twenty gazillion through no fault or effort of his own.

How does this play out on the Monopoly board?

It doesn’t.

In Monopoly all the properties have fixed prices.  It is possible for a player desperate for cash to sell property they own at less than face value or for another player to jack up the price of a piece if property in order to sell it to another player seeking to build houses and hotels --

-- but the real prices remain immutable!

And the rents are anchored in the rules of the game, unchanging and consistent.

You can’t double the rent on Baltic by claiming its been gentrified and therefore worth more, you can’t slash the rent on Boardwalk if players landing on it now think it’s unfashionable.

Billionaires almost never make their personal money -- the money they buy personal property and yachts and private jets and willing sex partners with -- through the sale of actual goods or by providing an actual service.

Rather, they ask banks to pretend along with them that their gazillion shares of stock are worth so many dollars a share.  And the banks -- pretending along with them -- loan them money (which as a loan need not be reported as actual income) to indulge all their personal whims with.

And how do the billionaires pay off these loans?

Why, by increasing the value of their stock through any means available so they can borrow more to pay off the previous loans.

This is why capitalism resembles cancer:  It must continually grow even at the cost of destroying the host.

It can’t be a symbiotic relationship where all parties benefit, it must be a parasitic one.

All these techbros who like to fancy themselves alpha male predators, no, they ain’t.

At best they’re tapeworms.

So when you read about Leon Skum being worth hundreds of billions of dollars, just remember it’s all bullshit.

He is high atop a shaky pyramid of ladders, and the only want he can keep climbing is by pulling loose ladders from the bottom and moving them up to the top.

Sooner or later he runs out of ladders and the whole Rube Goldberg edifice comes tumbling down…

  © Buzz Dixon

 P.S.:  You want a really good, fun socialist game?  Baseball!  Baseball needs individual players to hit the ball and run bases, a wonderful opportunity for individuals to show what they can do and be rewarded for their individual efforts.

But it also needs all the members of the team helping one another in a variety of specialized positions to see to it that the team as a whole comes out ahead.  A person who isn’t a good hitter can still be of value to the team and contribute to victory by being a reliable component.

The problem we face today is that the Leon Skums of the world think that just because they got on base a few timers, they don’t need those plebian players who shag fly balls, pitch strikes, or pick off opposing team runners.

They think that if they get a walk and reach first base, then the next three players all hit singles, that they themselves are solely responsible for scoring the winning run and therefor all glory and gain should go to them.