Category: OCF

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

2024 Election Follies – The Recap

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Today was the first weekly zoom call I had with my work buddies since the election.  It goes without saying that high spirits and hilarity were the order of the day.  We compared the high we were getting from watching the compilation videos of despairing Kamala voters to the 2016 Hillary scream fests.  I think we agreed that the 2016 psychos were probably funnier but since we are more grateful in 2024 it was basically a wash.

We talked about some of the Trump cabinet picks and agreed that the panic and despair we had heard about inside the Deep State was a very good sign.  There was much schadenfreude expressed.

We compared notes on how things were going in our lives outside of politics and everyone seems excited about Thanksgiving this year.  Then we traded stories on “the Company” and how awful and woke it had become and how the stock price had dipped.  But even that hadn’t dampened our enthusiasm for the future.

I regaled them with stories about the elections here in Dunwich and they told me about the follies in their communities.  All very familiar.  One of the guys is an Indian American who used to be a Democrat.  So, we gave him a bunch of grief about how his relatives will now consider him a traitor for voting for Trump.  He told us the rationale that he uses to justify himself to his parents and other relatives and we hooted at how lame it all sounded.  We told him that as our official token POC and Indian American he must take all the blame for Trump winning and he must apologize to Kamala face to face.  He proceeded to say some very rude things in his best subcontinent English and that was that.

I had hoped this week would be a calm after the storm.  But commitments piled up and my first real breather doesn’t come until Thursday afternoon (I hope).  But from that point it should be clear sailing.  The last two years have been a kind of great experiment getting involved in elections and politics.  I’ve learned how it all works and now I know what is likely and what is unlikely with respect to election fraud.  What seems clearest is that mailing out absentee ballots and allowing “voters” to access ballot drop boxes is the weak link in election integrity.

There are well-documented cases of individuals stuffing drop boxes with dozens and even hundreds of ballots.  This is completely illegal and also extremely hard to prevent.  Other irregularities weren’t part of my experience.  I suppose if the ballot tabulators in some jurisdictions do not use paper ballots and are connected directly to the internet that any kind of skullduggery is possible.  I have to assume that any reasonably intelligent person would know that.  What happens going forward will depend completely on the state government in power.  Places like California and New England will allow whatever irregularities they deem helpful to the Democrats.  Hopefully, the red states will protect themselves from voter fraud and election fraud.  But many of the cities are run by Democrats and the state government will have to provide oversight to protect against it.  So, my great experiment has been somewhat successful.  Now how do I separate myself from this quite onerous responsibility?  Well, we’ll see.  The First Selectman doesn’t like to be disappointed.  To be continued.

Orange Man Good

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Even here in accursed Dunwich, Donald Trump’s victory has reverberated through the ether and shaken the very foundations of reality.  The First Selectman paused while gulping down a bus full of convention-bound orthodontists and was heard to say, “I like the cut of that orange-man’s jib!”

No fooling.  Regardless of political stripe, every non-leftist has been knocked for a loop by the enormity of Trump’s victory.  Even dyed in the wool voting deriders like the ZMan have acclaimed the power of Trump’s hold on more than half the country.  And even as the dissident right reasserts their conviction that “we can’t vote our way out of this,” nevertheless, they applaud his fearless crusade to wreak a terrible vengeance against his Deep State enemies and drive official Washington insane with fear and trepidation.

And my hat is off to him.  It’s not that I now believe he’ll be able to vanquish the managerial state, but I honor the courage of his attempt.  And the idealist side of me is galvanized by the prospect of Donald Trump firing the entire executive layers of the FBI, State Department and DOJ.  I’d give a whole lot to see all of those tin-pot Stalins crying on the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post about how unjustly they’ve been treated.  And I’d love to see Comey brought up on charges in front of a real grand jury from outside of DC.

But the realist side of me doesn’t think it’s going to happen.  I think Trump will make things somewhat better.  I don’t think he’ll drain the swamp.  What I hope he’ll do is pardon all the people who were persecuted during Biden’s term, deport the illegal immigrants and use executive orders to give the red states the breathing room they’ll need over the course of the next four years to start the difficult process of inoculating their states and citizens, as much as it is possible, from the non-constitutional interference of the federal government.

What would be fortuitous is if the Supreme Court strikes down the rest of the unconstitutional “rights” that the liberal majority discovered; homosexuality, gay marriage and affirmative action.  With those issues back in the purview of the states we would see conservative states restoring normalcy to their people while places like California and New York could enjoy all the incredible benefits of Kindergarten Drag Queen story hour, transgender girls’ sports supremacy and pediatric trans-affirming surgeries to their hearts’ content.

So, I’ll finish by saluting the Orange Man for being a phenomenon that has transformed conservative politics definitively.  His exposure of the phoniness of all the establishment Republicans opened millions of people’s eyes to reality and banished those craven losers to the ash heap of history.  The Bushes, Cheneys, Romneys and all their ilk.  And all the “conservative” journalist grifters whom he relegated to cesspools like the Bulwark.  He has done a tremendous service for this country.  And I believe we are responsible for using the knowledge he gave us wisely.  Never allow yourself to be frightened into thinking you have to say things you don’t believe in.  Never try to convince yourself that something that is nonsense should be accepted because otherwise someone’s feelings might be hurt.  Never entertain the idea that there might be a conservative case for castrating children.  Use the knowledge he has given us as a tool for navigating the dangerous waters we find ourselves in.

All That Jazz

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So, it turns out I should be a plotter.  Looking at my story from the point of view of character arcs it became obvious that I haven’t even decided on several characters’ outcomes that are pivotal to a satisfying resolution to the plot.  Put succinctly, somebody’s got to die.  And maybe that’s part of the reason why I haven’t moved those character arcs along.  I’ve grown fond of all my main characters and deciding which of them has to die and then writing that outcome is disturbing.  But I do see it has to be done and I’ve begun working out the scenario.

So now I understand why just drifting along on plot can be very problematic for anything more complicated than a short story.  If you have six or eight main characters and another dozen secondary characters, not mapping out what ends up happening to them risks all kinds of conflicts or worse; wasted opportunities for adding interesting content to the story.

I said that writing a death scene was disturbing.  And it is but at the same time it’s interesting to plan how this event will impact each of the adjacent characters.  For instance, it’s not too challenging to have associates and even friends react to a death.  But one of the most likely “victims” has a parent/child relationship with one of the other characters.  That will have to be a developed carefully to produce a satisfactory effect.  So now all of a sudden, my simple dystopian sci-fi book has emotional states like bereavement and anguish.  Who knew?

And a much bigger consideration for being a plotter versus a pantser is how much more important it is if your story is part of a larger series of stories.  If the story doesn’t end with the end of a stand-alone book, then things like killing off characters, even killing off antagonists is much more serious.  If you invest an enormous amount of effort into building up a really wonderful villain then you’d be crazy to kill him off in book one.  Sure, kill off his henchmen; Helmuth and the Tyrant of Thrale by all means.  But Gharlane of Eddore has to last through six or seven books.

And that’s just one aspect of what needs to be coordinated between a series of stories.  Doing that without a map would be very difficult.  And I see that now.  So, I’ll be heading down the path of plotting an outline for the whole story first and then a detailed outline for the first book.  It’ll take a little longer but in the long run it’ll save me a lot of time and it’ll make for better stories.

And on a completely unrelated topic, today I reduced the number of videos I watched of Kamala voters barking at the moon to three.  Well, everything’s relative and I think that’s pretty good progress in kicking the habit.  I remember in 2016 I watched the Hilary shriekers all the way through December and still couldn’t get enough of it.  Now it’s starting to get boring.  Maybe with Trump in the White House we’re all ready to move on from all of this jazz.

Plotter and Pantsers

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Here on the other side of the bright line of demarcation that is the post-2024 election decision I selected outlining the plot of my poor neglected novel “Sniper” as this morning’s project.  Last night was a long planned and greatly enjoyed family party celebrating Princess Sack of Potatoes’ sixth birthday.  It was a good-sized gathering of about thirty people and featured the Princess’s food of choice; multiple versions of pizza.  Now I personally do not believe that something called “mac and cheese” pizza could actually be considered pizza.  It is an abomination in the same league as anything called pizza that contains pineapple.  But I am a tolerant man.  If the children demand mac and cheese pizza then so be it.  I found a giant box that contained something that was garnished with sausage and pepperoni on it and so I was content.  And I even managed to introduce the grandchildren to a small snippet of the classic W.C. Fields movie “It’s a Gift” before it was drowned out by the torrent of talking that erupted when their parents followed us upstairs after the majority of the guests left.  Well, I’ll just have to wait for an opportunity during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to screen that cinematic gem for their viewing pleasure.

And because that gathering ended late, I had no time to look around for a theme for last night’s post.  And honestly, I was exhausted.  And if I had tried to post something in that state it would have been stale and derivative and a waste of everybody’s time.  And in this new regimen of mine that is anathema.  I’ll write when I have something I want to say.  And when I don’t, I’ll work on my projects.

And getting back to the theme of this post, my project for today is to review “The Sniper” holistically and identify plot line and character development and quality issues that need to be worked on.  And come up with an outline for the whole story and an outline for the series of stories in this “universe” and then a plan for completing this novel this winter. And then scheduling this work to be finished by some reasonable date.

And this is exciting for me.  It’s an intellectually interesting process that I’ve never tried before.  Up until now I’ve been what’s called a discovery writer or more colloquially a “seat of the pantser” or just a pantser.   This is the opposite of an “outliner” or a plotter.  A discovery writer just sits down and starts writing based on some idea or even just a gestalt of a story and keeps writing and let’s the story write itself without any direction from the author’s conscious mind.  I’ve always done this.  The positive side of this process is that the author’s natural creative instincts are in control and many exciting characters and plot events bubble up.  It is the natural method for producing realistic dialog and emotional insight into the characters.  The negative side is that the story direction is kind of random and you very easily can paint your story into a corner that can only be fixed by a massive re-write which is lethal for story-telling and for the morale of the writer.

And as someone who has run up against this dead-end scenario several times, I have decided to make the effort to do a formal outline and learn the skills it takes to plan my story in a disciplined way so that it won’t fly off the rails at the end and cause me massive mental anguish and confusion.  If I find that working on this outline is interesting, I’ll probably write more about and might even consult some of the sci-fi fans in the audience for their opinions on some of my story choices.

So here I go.

New Media Buries the MSM

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I think this may be the most interesting analysis of the media battle for the 2024 election,  He says the MSM was the voice of the Deep State and this time America stopped listening to them.  Trump is a fascist.  Trump is literally Hitler.  Trump will personally rape all of America’s cat ladies.  It didn’t work.

And even as I get out of the business of being a voice of the great right-wing conspiracy I’ll take my tiny bit of credit for making the MSM a spent force.

Three cheers for us.

Segueing Into a Brilliant Future

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So, the fireworks are finished and now we go a couple of months until Trump enters the White House.  In the meantime, the Deep State tries to figure out how to destroy his presidency.  And they’ll also try to save the Ukraine misadventure.  Although I can’t see that working.  Without tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and support Ukraine is going to collapse.

But from our point of view there’s really not much to talk about.  Whether the Republicans have a three or a four man lead in the Senate or Mike Johnson has a ten or eleven man lead in the House isn’t all that important.  The fact that Mike Johnson isn’t Paul Ryan is somewhat significant.  But all of the action starts happening in January.  And really, we won’t know anything right away because it will take a bunch of weeks for Trump to get his Cabinet sworn in.

My point is that there’s really not much of substance to say.  Basically, Joe Biden destroyed the country and Kamala Harris was his Vice President.  And on top of that she is a terrible candidate.  So, Americans rejected both of them and hired Donald Trump to fix the country.  Yay, for our side.

So now I have to figure out a new tack for my writing and my on-line existence.  I can’t see the need to document the Trump/Washington war on a day-to-day basis.  Undoubtedly there will be events that will inspire me to write at length.  But a daily journal of that will be excessive.  Instead, I want to spend the majority of my writing time on fiction.  Also, photography is the other focus I want to feature on the site.  And of course I’ll provide reviews of books, movies and music as I find it.

So, let’s see how all this goes.  Probably the difference will be hardly noticeable to the casual reader.  And the extra time for writing will allow me to finish my first book and see how that works out.  I’m of course expecting at least a ten million books sold in the first year and then up from there.  I’ll probably be asked by the Trump administration to become a key advisor to the President on all cultural matters.  I suppose that goes without saying.  But it won’t affect my trademark humility and love for the common man.  My only extravagance will be an exact replica of a Packard Eight constructed almost entirely of tantalum.  Well, maybe I’ll get Camera Girl a Dyson vacuum cleaner too.  She’s been good.

So, the future is upon us and it’s all sunshine and sharkskin suits as far as the eye can see.  We all will march into this bright future thanks to the final humiliation and banishment of Biden and Harris and the ascension to the throne of the once and future king; Donald J. Trump.  Long may he mock our enemies and exaggerate his accomplishments.  Let’s just his (and our) luck holds out long enough to staunch the bleeding of this once great land.  We really could use a break.

A Modern Prometheus

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Got home real late but have tomorrow off so I’m cudgeling my brains for a good topic.  And since I’ve been running my series of horror movie reviews for October, I considered finishing off the Universal monster movie triumvirate by reviewing Frankenstein.

But Camera Girl was watching the Yankees World Series game and since they were down 0-3 in the series and would be eliminated if they lost tonight, I didn’t have the heart to refuse her control of the tv.  As it worked out, New York had an orgy of hitting including a grand slam to take the game 11-4.  There was much rejoicing by Camera Girl but I think she understands that no team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit to win the Series.  But let her enjoy the moment.

As for Frankenstein, at its core Mary Shelley’s book is another meditation on the Renaissance civilization in Europe substituting science for God.  Well, since Renaissance civilization lately seems to be in full retreat, maybe God is sending his reply.

But properly considered, the idea that Man has replaced God with human intelligence is sort of laughably ridiculous.  Every time we are told that biologists have cracked the code that will allow us to cure cancer or reverse aging or turn men into women and vice versa, our efforts are shown to be abysmally inadequate.  We talk about uploading our consciousness into the internet to allow us to live forever but we don’t even know what consciousness is or for instance, how a memory from our childhood persists throughout our lives, or even whether it exists in one brain cell or many.

And when we consider the unimaginable size of even the portion of the known universe that we’ve already observed, the idea that we can become like God should quickly evaporate from our minds.  From my point of view, the fact that we exist separated from even the nearest star by about twenty-four trillion miles of empty space make me feel like we are an experiment locked into a terrarium that we can’t escape from.

Of course, maybe escaping from our ant farm is part of our testing.  Maybe on one of the planets in the Centauri system is a message in English or Proto-Indo-European saying, “Well done.  Now here is a clue to get you to level three.”  Maybe God has a sense of humor and he wants to let us in on the joke.  Maybe some day he’ll give us a book that explains why we can’t avoid childhood cancer, endless war, telemarketers and Joy Reid.  Maybe after we die suddenly everything will make sense and we can stop worrying about the war between men and women, type two diabetes and the national debt.

Well, tomorrow is my last chance to review Frankenstein.  I better get some sleep so I’ll be ready to report truthfully on the incomparable acting skills and technique of Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.  On second thought maybe I should just concentrate on the cool noises and flashing lights in Henry Frankenstein’s electrical glassware display in Germany (I mean Hollywood).

Adapt and Thrive

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Sunday, I head back to the salt mines to dig out that salt.  I get back onto the galley and start rowing that oar.  I return to the mill and push that millstone round and round.  The mind deadening drudgery looms before me like towering wave that will roll over me and drown me in its awful size.  So let it be written, so shall it be done.

But for tonight I’m content.  I got plenty of sleep last night and I only had a couple of hours of lousy work today and even that was tolerable and unavoidable.  So good enough.

What I was thinking about today is that it’s time to move beyond the election and all of that way of thinking.  All of this anxiety over whether Trump will win or Kamala.  Living in a blue state it really hardly matters.  I already live under a woke communist regime.  Really, all that is necessary is to start thinking about what things I can control and what I cannot.  And just looking at things through that lens clarifies  my thinking and removes a lot of the anxiety that comes from depending on “magical” processes.

For instance, I supposedly have to vote for Trump.  Well, I have to vote anyway because there are local races that I can influence the outcome of.  So not voting for Trump would be kind of silly, so I will.  But I don’t imagine I’m making any difference by voting for him.  And whether he wins or not, my life won’t change very much at all, at least not for quite a while.  If Trump wins and a Republican Congress passes legislation that allows Trump to deport the millions of illegal aliens beyond partisan judges’ ability to block him, then eventually after several years I will notice some improvements in my quality of life.  And if he balances the budget and on-shores the jobs that were sent to Asia then I will see America start to revive.  But that’s a long time from now and I have a limited span on this planet.  So, this election is almost an academic exercise in political philosophy.

Instead, what will be interesting and useful is to try and find private endeavors and resources that individuals can utilize and patronize either collectively or individually.  For instance, if I ever finish my never-ending science fiction novel, I might decide to market it and advertise it by starting a go-fund-me page.  Well, even selecting something as ordinary as that is fraught with challenges because many of these crowd-funding companies are either run by or strongly influenced by left-wing zealots who police these sites looking to cancel anyone who doesn’t share their convictions.  So, researching the activities and tendencies of these types of sites is important if you want to avoid a potentially disastrous launch for a creative work like a book.

And the same applies for other commercial or cultural organization.  Especially if Harris is installed in the White House, I’m hoping that various enterprises will spring up to service an audience from our side of the political spectrum who need everything from entertainment, to news, to snacks, to educational services, to dating services, to you name it.  With the government monolithically leftist it will behoove us to become entrepreneurs and connoisseurs with respect to the things that will be unavailable from official sources.  And we’ll have to become very creative at avoiding government interference, which means we’ll have to become adept at camouflage and subterfuge.  And even that secrecy sounds like fun to me.  Belonging to a private club has its own pleasures.

So, as the election date approaches, I have a new attitude about the future and I think it will serve me better than what happened after the last presidential election in 2020.  In fact, it can’t help but be better, no matter who wins.