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here-there-were-dragons · 17 days ago

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my mother is absolutely convinced of some nonsense conspiracy theory that (in her words) "originally humanity lived in peaceful all-woman societies of goddess worshippers who took care of eachother and lived in harmony, while males were roving loners that had no society and never cooperated. that changed when the men banded together and overthrew the peaceful woman-dominated societies, and enslaved us all." and, according to her, this is proof that a woman-dominated world would be innately more peaceful, and that men are innately violent and evil and should be either barred from holding any legal power or leadership roles or at least should be (again in her words) "gelded like bulls" to remove their testosterone before even being considered for such a thing.

she also evidently believes that the problem with all religions today is primarily that they aren't "goddess worshippers", because she seems to think goddess religions are inherently peaceful and pure too and seems to be especially obsessed with "Isis" in particular. the very very few times she's openly considered it unambiguously bad for some population or another to have been exterminated (she's got a bad case of devil's advocating genocide brain), she's gone out of her way to make up some crap about how said people were a peaceful society of goddess-worshippers, almost always of isis. delusions of isis-worship seem to be the only thing that ever causes her to consider any arab or middle-eastern culture, society, or ethnicity to be relatively uncomplicatedly undeserving of extermination, in fact, because every fucking time she doesn't immediately start devils-advocating it and making remarks about how "the rest of the world should box them in and let them blow eachother up" it's when she's whinging on about how whatever specific micro-ethnicity she's thinking about are or were traditional persecuted isis-worshippers.

the sole major exception to her weird fixation on isis worship justifying worthiness of life is the whole israel thing going on, in which she has consistently made very obvious that literally the only reason she's against the genocide of palestine is because it gives her an excuse to even more openly hate jewish people than she already did. and honestly i'm not sure even that's true because i think she's made some offhand remarks about palestinians having probably been peaceful isis worshipers before the jews infected them with christianity or something anyway.

so for the last, however fucking long it's been i've been constantly having to listen to her go off about how this behavior is in the jew's blood or whatever and that they literally invented all genocide because somehow the concept didn't exist before them and wouldn't have ever been invented by the rest of humanity without those jewish aliens dropping it in i fucking guess apparently and she furthermore goes on about how every single genocide and mass-oppression movement in history is directly inspired by them, ESPECIALLY the nazis, and THEN i have to listen to her rant about how, basically, wwii was something they entirely brought on themselves by "dominating the economy and treating everyone not them like shit" and the nazis were just "using their own tactics back at them". and then she goes on a rant about how the people the original jews exterminated back in the day (aka the first ever genocide, which they invented, because jews invented genocide and hate according to her) in the middle east region were peaceful matriarchal isis-worshipers.

and then she starts making comments about arabs being backwards and palestinians either being mysogynist muslims that should be boxed in to blow eachother up with everyone else or secret peaceful isis worshippers corrupted by men's cruel hand, sometimes in the same sentence, entirely dependent on which group she's more in the mood to hate at the time.

it's exhausting. beyond exhausting. her sole purpose in existence seems to be to have the singularly most exhausting set of politics physically possible to fit into one person.

just, sometimes i think, if there really is anything at all to the incredibly stupid and inexplicably popular idea that anyone or anything has a Purpose tm to exist for, i feel like my mother's purpose is to be walking proof to me of a Type Of Guy That Is Real, cause i sure as fuck would have trouble inventing this mess if it wasn't standing right in front of me spewing confusingly bipartisan hate. all of her thoughts and opinions are these long winding nonsense chains that feel like if that man carrying thing sketch about the friend with confusing politics was a person. on meth.

#and sometimes i feel like she just believes whatever will allow her to hate and feel innately superior to the most people #the fact that this woman considers herself a leftist #... well. given what this country just voted for it looks unfortunately likely that she IS in fact a fairly average example of a leftist #and therefore i have zero remaining hope for or particular desire to save humanity #actually it kind of feels like the only reason she really aligns herself with “the left” is because she's a female supremacist #and the left is the closest thing to a movement in that direction compared to the only current alternate party's “lets undo women's rights”#and also she inexplicably hates trump despite constantly devils-advocating for him and how he “has some good ideas”#and yes she does specifically mean about immigrants and the wall. one of her staunchest positions is pro-closed borders #honesty if trump was a woman and not a misogynist sex pest i think she would like him a lot. even despite his blatant ignorance of economic #she's also a big “anti-wokeist” type and we can barely watch any movies anymore without her whining about there being black people in them #and then she's like “PEOPLE ONLY DON'T WANT TO WATCH MOVIES WITH ME BECAUSE MY THEORIES ARE ALWAYS RIGHT AND THEY'RE JEALOUS OF HOW SMART”#she's nominally anti-corporation but in practice tends to come down on their side and is also staunchly against student loan forgiveness #because she thinks that “anyone who's stupid enough to do that deserves it”#and “it would be a slap in the face to ME and everyone else that had to pay”#and “kids these days don't want to develop healthy financial habits so they can SAVE for things. i SAVED for it and i know how HARD it is”#the way she often talks i also increasingly feel like the only actual reason she hates christianity is because she's a female supremacist #especially since she regularly goes on about biblical things as if they're real and complains that god either must be a woman #because “only women can create”#or that god CLEARLY is a man because he's destructive and evil and Destruction is a Man Thing That All Men And Only Men Innately Do #and likes to talk about how “jesus said he would come back as the least of us so he would be a woman”#and then goes on to describe a woman that sounds suspiciously like her. or at least her perception of herself #she's also said that if she wasn't straight she would be a political lesbian by choice because she hates men so much #and has tried repeatedly to bitch at me about men in an “eyyy amirite sister” kind of way #and got mad when i didn't fancy the idea of sitting there joking with her about half the species being barely-sentient cancer nodes #but she ALSO identifies as sapiosexual despite having the most vanilla housewife smut book taste ever #but ALSO she considers every single other sexuality aside from straight and gay to be made up woke mental illness nonsense!#so according to her the only orientations are “normal”. gay. and sapiosexual. and SOMETIMES bi (but no pan or poly).#i'm fairly sure she's convinced asexuality isn't real and is just repression. she certainly acts like i never said anything every time.#unless she's explosively yelling at me for “always bringing it up” when i tell her to stop making jokes about me being attracted to things #and she thinks anything other than monogamy is “selfish” and “exists only for men to abuse women”. especially muslim and arab men.

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weaselle · 3 months ago

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i want to talk about real life villains

Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.

Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.

I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"

I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.

And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.

He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.

John Hammond.

probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.

If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.

book spoilers below.

In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.

He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.

In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.

THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.

I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.

In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.

I think it is really important to see and understand this kind of villainy in fiction, so you can recognize it in real life.

Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.

And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.

I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.

Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.

#villains #my life

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gallusrostromegalus · 3 months ago

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Move To A Darker Place

This is a story of Man Vs. Machine.

---

Last March, my father attempted to file his Taxes.

My beloved father is a Boomer. Unlike most Boomers, my father is rather handy with technology because he was one of the people that had a not-insignificant hand in Developing a hell of a lot of it. He was studying Computer Science at Cal Poly before the computer science degree existed. I have many fond childhood memories of skipping through the aisles of various electronic and computer part warehouses while Dad described something that either terrified the staff or made them worship him as a God. He taught himself how to use his smartphone. Internationally.

So when he saw the option to file digitally with the IRS through the “ID.me” program, he leapt at the chance to celebrate the Federal Government finally entering the Digital Age.

It was all going swimmingly for about six hours, until he was ready to file and the system told him that it needed to verify his identity.

“Very Well.” said my father, a man unafraid of talking to himself and getting something out of the conversation. “It wouldn’t do for me to get someone else’s return.”

The System told him that it needed him to take a “Digital Image ID”.

a.k.a: A Selfie.

“A-ha!” Dad beams. Dad is very good at taking selfies. He immediately pulled out his phone, snapped one, and tried to upload it.

Please log into your Id.me Account and use the provided app to submit your Digital Image ID. The System clarified.

“Oh. You should have said so.” Dad pouted, but used his phone to log onto the ID.me account, do the six security verification steps and double-checked that the filing looked the same as it did on the desktop, gave the IRS like nine permissions on his phone, and held up the camera to take his Federal Privacy Invasion Selfie.

Please align your face to the indicated grid. Said The System, pulling up a futuristic green-web-of-polygons approximation.

“Ooh, very Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would HATE this!” Dad said cheerfully, aligning his face to the grid. My father is a bit… cavalier, when it comes to matters of personal information and federal government, because he’s been on FBI watchlists since the late 60’s when he was protesting The Vietnam War and Ronald Regan before he’d broken containment. Alas.

Anyway, there is very little information the federal government does not have on him already, but he’s as good at stalking the FBI as they are at stalking him, and had worked out a solution: He has something approaching a friendship with the local Federal Agent (Some guy named “Larry”. Allegedly), and got Larry hooked on Alternative Histories and Dad’s collection of carefully-researched “there is very likely buried treasure here” stories, and Larry is loath to bother his favorite Historical Fanfiction author too much.

But I digress.

After thinking for a minute, The System came back with an Error Message. Please remove glasses or other facial obstructions.

And here is where the real trouble began.

See, my father wears glasses that do substantially warp the appearance of his face, because he is so nearsighted that he is legally blind without them. His natural focal point is about 4 inches in front of his nose. While Dad can still take a selfie because he (approximately) knows where his phone is if it’s in his hand, he cannot see the alignment grid.

He should ask someone to take it for him! I hear the audience say. Yes, that would be the sane and reasonable thing to do, but Dad was attempting to do taxes at his residence in Fort Collins, while his immediate family was respectively in Denver, Texas and Canada. He tried calling our neighbors, who turned out to be in Uganda.

He looked down at the dog, Arwen, and her little criminal paws that can open doorknobs, but not operate cell phones.

She looked back at him, and farted.

“Well, I’ll give it a try, but if it gives me too much trouble, I’ll call Larry, and Larry can call the IRS about it.” Dad told her.

She continued to watch him. Arwen is an Australian Kelpie (a type of cattle-herding dog), going on 14 years old, deaf as a post and suffering from canine dementia now, but she still retains her natural instinct to Micromanage. She was also trained as a therapy dog, and even if she can’t hear my dad, still recognizes the body language of a man setting himself up for catastrophe.

So, squinting in the late afternoon light next to the back door, Dad attempted to line his face up with a grid he could only sort-of see, and took A Federal Selfie.

The System thought about it for a few moments.

Image Capture Failed: Insufficient Contrast. The System replied. Please move to a darker place.

“...Huh.” Dad frowned. “Alright.”

He moved to the middle of his office, away from the back door, lit only by the house lighting and indirect sunlight, and tried again.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“What?” Dad asked the universe in general.

“Whuff.” Arwen warned him against sunk costs.

Dad ignored her and went into the bathroom, the natural habitat of the selfie. Surely, only being lit by a light fixture that hadn’t been changed since Dad was attempting to warn everyone about Regan would be suitably insufficient lighting for The System. It took some negotiating, because that bathroom is “Standing Room Only” not “Standing And Holding Your Arms Out In Front Of You Room”. He ended up taking the selfie in the shower stall.

As The System mulled over the latest attempt, Arwen shuffled over and kicked open the door to watch.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move to a Darker Place.

“Do you mean Spiritually?” Dad demanded.

“Whuff.” Arwen cautioned him again.

Determined to succeed, or at least get a different error message that may give him more information, Dad entered The Downstairs Guest Room. It is the darkest room in the house, as it is in the basement, and only has one legally-mandated-fire-escape window, which has blinds. Dad drew those blinds, turned off the lights and tried AGAIN.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move To A Darker Place.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO PHOTOGRAPH MYSELF INSIDE OF A CAVE??” Dad howled.

“WHUFF!” Arwen reprimanded him from under the pull-out bed in the room. It’s where she attempts to herd everyone when it’s thundering outside, so the space is called her ‘Safety Cave’.

Dad frowned at the large blurry shape that was The Safety Cave.

“Why not?” he asked, the prelude to many a Terrible Plan. With no small amount of spiteful and manic glee, Dad got down onto the floor, and army-crawled under the bed with Arwen to try One Last Time. Now in near-total darkness, he rolled on his side to be able to stretch his arms out, Arwen slobber-panting in his ear, and waited for the vague green blob of the Facial grid to appear.

This time, when he tapped the button, the flash cctivated.

“GOD DAMN IT!” Dad shouted, dropping the phone and rubbing his eyes and cursing to alleviate the pain of accidentally flash-banging himself. Arwen shuffled away from him under the bed, huffing sarcastically at him.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“MOTHERFU- hang on.” Dad squinted. The System sounded strange. Distant and slightly muffled.

Dad squinted really hard, and saw the movement of Arwen crawling out from under the bed along the phone’s last known trajectory.

“ARWEN!” Dad shouted, awkwardly reverse-army crawling out from under the bed, using it to get to his feet and searching for his glasses, which had fallen out of his pocket under the bed, so by the time he was sighted again, Arwen had had ample time to remove The Offending Device.

He found her out in the middle of the back yard, the satisfied look of a Job Well Done on her face. She did not have the phone.

“Arwen.” Dad glared. It’s a very good glare. Dad was a teacher for many years and used it to keep his class in order with sheer telepathically induced embarrassment, and his father once glared a peach tree into fecundity.

Arwen regarded him with the casual interest a hurricane might regard a sailboat tumbling out of its wake. She is a force of nature unto herself and not about to be intimidated by a half-blind house ape. She also has cataracts and might not be able to make out the glare.

“I GIVE UP!” Dad shouted, throwing his hands in the air and returning to the office to write to the IRS that their selfie software sucks ass. Pleased that she had gotten her desired result, Arwen followed him in.

To Dad’s immense surprise, the computer cheerfully informed him that his Federally Secure Selfie had been accepted, and that they had received and were now processing his return!

“What the FUCK?” Dad glared. “Oh well. If I’ve screwed it up, Larry can call me.”

---

I bring this up because recently, Dad received an interesting piece of mail.

It was a letter from the IRS, addressed to him, a nerve-wracking thing to recessive at the best of times. Instead of a complaint about Dad’s Selfie Skills, it was a letter congratulating him on using the new ID.me System. It thanked him for his help and expressed hopes he would use it again next year, and included the selfie that The System had finally decided to accept.

“You know, my dad used to complain about automation.” Dad sighed, staring at the image. “Incidentals my boy! My secretary saves the state of California millions of dollars a year catching small errors before they become massive ones! He’d say. Fought the human resources board about her pay every year. I used to think he was overestimating how bad machines were and underestimating human error, but you know? He was right.”

He handed me the image.

My father was, technically, in the image. A significant amount of the bottom right corner is taken up by the top of his forehead and silver hair. Most of the image, the part with the facial-recognition markers on it, was composed of Arwen’s Alarmed and Disgusted Doggy face.

“Oh no!” I cackled. “Crap, does this mean you have to call the IRS and tell them you’re not a dog?”

“Probably.” Dad sighed. “I know who I’m gonna bother first though.” he said, taking out his phone (Dad did find his phone a few hours after Arwen absconded with it when mom called and the early spinach started ringing).

“Hey Larry!” Dad announced to the local federal agent. “You’re never gonna believe this. My dog filed my taxes!”

Larry considered this for a moment. “Is this the dog that stole my sandwich? Out of my locked car?” he asked suspiciously.

“The very same.” Dad grinned.

“Hm. Clever Girl.” Federal Agent Larry sighed. “I figured it was only a matter of time before she got into tax fraud.”

---

I'm a disabled artist making my living writing these stories. If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or Pre-ordering my Family Lore Book on Patreon. Thank you!

#Family Lore #Dogs #arwen #Arwen the Crime Dog #Taxes #Ronald Regan mention (derogatory)#long post under the cut #this one is funny this time #I could really use some extra tip money this month

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