Rain Dog @Leucrotta@awoo.space

current mood; listening to Kool and the Gang's "Get Down On It" and suddenly stumbling into something which comes damn close to setting off a crying jag.

I used to support being able to use "fictional identities" instead of your wallet/deadname for ethical reasons, but as companies strive to make the internet about as exciting as my last trip to Target, I welcome anything that preserves a sense of joy.

I feel terrible for Russians who *aren't* happy to go along with this. Something I know real well is how it feels to watch my country sliding into crap while feeling surrounded by people eagerly cheering that crappiness. What it's like to watch protesters get brutalized and then be told they're wingnut lefties not anything like a mainstream opinion. The part I don't know is living in a broadly sanctioned country.

it's an tribute to how completely I've been trained that adulthood is about being miserable that "walking several miles in sunlight," "flagging stuff I want to try in a cookbook, and using that to compile a shopping list," and "cooking" don't ping as "responsible adulthood."

now I'm imagining an alternative Rise of Skywalker which still has the Rey-as-Palpatine's-granddaughter angle, but Kylo never turns good, he joins forces with Rey b/c as a Sith he's supposed to kill his master, and Sheeve trying to live forever as god-emperor isn't very Sithy. At the end he'd leave Rey and travel beyond the Rim, leaving potential sequels open.

Finally looked at my used copy of American Journal of Anthropomorphics. Very 90s. I gotta admit the end of the issue being them promoting their upcoming Gor comic, and promoting their wholesome fox themed cookbook, was cognitive whiplash.

*Where Is My Mind? comes on the speakers*
Oh yeah I know this one! “Stacey’s Mom has got it going on!”

Walked from Lake Forest Park very nearly to downtown Bothell before cyclists had me hating humanity as a whole and turned around. I also noticed I was incredibly hungry and have stopped for burger & stuff. Haven’t been to Kidd Valley in a year plus! Can mushrooms straight out of the fryer melt steel beams?

There isn’t a straightforward pros and cons comparison between;
* lower middle class from dumping my life into stuff I’m not really interested in making other people rich
* poor and dumping my life into stuff I find vitality interesting working for myself

Worse, I’m easily spooked about money *and* internalized negativity(either “I’m not good enough to do this” or I am good enough but I will lose out anyway”) doesn’t help making informed decisions.

Theoretically I want to put in for a batch of jobs but in actuality time spent cleaning and doing taxes yesterday just ate all my resources for doing useful adult stuff with my weekend (instead of “wasting my time” on drawing related stuff).

okay I can tell the edible's kicked in because apparently I lost interest in Hellboy four hours ago. So probably 7 minutes ago. Anyway I'm now on Instagram and everybody's art is just amazing. Hopefully I can learn stuff from them.

the following motion picture does NOT reflect the opinion of Columbia Tristar, so they are not liable if you summon Ahnung un Rama, the Hand of Destruction, and use him to free the Seven Gods of Chaos from their crystalline tomb beyond the stars. That wasn't their idea at all.

I feel like when ugly events happen abroad, our media gleefully hypes a noble good guys/despicable bad guys narrative to reassure Americans that we care while maintaining our own double standards, and to shift blame from right wing policies to xenophobia and straight up racism.

This doesn't mean the behavior abroad is excusable or justified, it's just that Americans do the same damn stuff, and I intensely dislike the hypocrisy (and racism).

Americans have strong opinions about the war in Ukraine. It seems custom made for American worldview; innocent defender attacked by an overwhelmingly malevolent aggressor who we can also diss as incompetent, and best of all for us, the noble defenders are WASPs like Americans (pay no attention to the dark skinned folks intentionally stranded in inclement weather low on food, etc). And, while stuff like PayPal pulling support hurts ordinary Russians, we'll gladly cheer them protesting their evil government, right?

A little like how in Hong Kong, the noble protesters were oppressed by our vicious police. Or how Arab-Israeli conflict is decontextualized and simplified to evil colonial honkies oppressing the noble local brown people. The good guys prevail, the bad guys lose right? And meanwhile, here in *America*, land of invading or occasionally bombing the third world, police murder African Americans, ICE does horrific things to Latinos, protests are put down with a self righteously sadistic show of force.

I feel there's an element of straight up racism here - I mean the bad guys are what, they couldn't possibly be us, they're *Eastern* possibly commie Russians (how many Americans think Putin's government is still somehow communist?), scheming Jews who control everything, East Asians with no regard for individuality and human life, right? In contrast when was the last time you heard about Basque or Catalonian independence, maybe it's just that we aren't supposed to hate Spain the same way (and could that be due to who *won* the Spanish Civil War)?

But what's under that?

I don't think there's a functional difference between Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Trump, Biden, or any of these other guys. Conservatives throughout the world are pretty much the same damn thing; and similarly, a policeman probably packs the same fuckton of munitions and lack of accountability regardless of his origin and language.

I think our media keeps hyping these terrible actions by other countries so that we don't question the USA, how we work, what we do to the rest of the world. Gotta keep to the narrative that only the wingnut far left is concerned about this stuff and *normal centrist moderates* clearly care about what's going on - for after all they're upset about whatever latest dickwaving episode in Ukraine, Gaza, Hong Kong?

hey, my radish pickles turned out pretty good!

A conclusion I reached about gender while hiking;

It’s not fun. There’s no element of play. I have a penis, testicles and body hair so I can’t *play* with makeup or skirts, but masculinity too is stripped of fun. I can’t go to the range, or have a beer and watch basketball, or drive a huge truck without it coming dangerously close to deadly serious presentation. Assumed defaults by definition aren’t fun.

Whatever my gender actually is, I’d like performing it to be FUN, please.

There’s a giant angry rant building up, but it’s hard to imagine it being *cathartic* or *persuasive*.

Since nobody’s staging a Marxist revolution and I’d probably be too chickenshit or caught up in my day job to fight in it anyway, I can watch cat videos and people brushing chinchillas, and maybe that’ll help me cope with living in a country that doesn’t want or value me.

I have now done my civic duty and paid more taxes than Donald Trump, to fund our lack of healthcare, lack of high speed rail, lack of college debt relief, tampered EPA and CDC, and our very important viciousness towards harmless Latinos. Therefore for a bit, I can’t donate to the NAACP, ACLU, Earthjustice, GoFundMes or anything else actually helping people to make up for a government which largely has left us to die. Sorry about that.

I rediscovered this old drawing of Star Wars bounty hunters just now looking for old art showing kinda what the game store looked like, and I still think it's hilarious so everyone gets to deal with it now.