Archive for July, 2008
16 items.
IS ARCHIVE
So I had somebody lined up to fill in for me yesterday (I was watching an exhibition football match involving Italians), but he ran into problems of his own. At any rate I have some catching up to get back to my five post per week average. With the week I’ve been having, that might be rough. Consider this dull self-referential piece my meeting you halfway.
So I’m reworking my style. This means a few changes. Firstly, and most noticeable, fuck all that illustrative fiction fluff shit about having a boat/airship/dirigible/whatever. That was an error. It brought up steampunk imagery and I’m getting fucking sick of steampunk arseholes. I’m still captain of the blog, and a majour source of surliness. That part – the, unfortunately, rather real me – won’t change. Secondly, writing in a humourous and mostly non-sequiturian manner isn’t really something I make a habit of. The problem with a blog is it’s fairly easy to maintain a voice through several updates and then feel compelled to remain in this style. However, fuck that.
Anyroad, this counts. My team lost 2-1 with one goal in the second half, so fuck your opinion if it’s not mine.
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
P.S.: Real post tomorrow. Probably short.
Controversy Tuesday: Same Dip, Different Shit
July 22nd, 2008 | by adminPosted In: Controversy Tuesdsay
IS ARCHIVE
Americans often find themselves on the business end of criticism over having very little knowledge or understanding of foreign nations, including the European continent to which many of them have fairly recent blood ties. They’re often accused of not having an accurate picture of the differences in culture between the myriad European states, or even being able to identify many of them. I’ve spent some time in Europe, in various places, and I have one feeling about this stereotype at this point. Good lord, do pots enjoy calling kettles black.
Complaining that Americans can’t tell the difference between Sweden and Norway is like complaining that Norwegians don’t know the difference between Texas and Oklahoma. I’ve met myriad Europeans who weren’t aware that the USA is split into several well defined regions, each with its own politcal and social preferences, not to mention local culture. I’ve heard a lot about double morality, a phrase that requires a scoff to correctly pronounce, but not so much about the differences in the North Eastern, North Central, Mid Western, and Northwestern accents. I’ve heard people complain about Madonna and Eminem invading European charts, but I haven’t found more than two people in Europe who’d even heard of artists like Jurassic 5 or the Reverend Horton Heat.
What bothers me is the acrimony with which these fucked up notions are brought out. There’s a pervasive sense of classism, even imperialism in these kinds of comments. They carry a sort of secret nationalism that’s a poison to the listener. Even the people most disatisfied with their home country manage it: “Well, I maybe be disaffected in a shitty nation of jerks, but at least I’m not American.”
The moral here? “Fuck you” is the same in every language. And if it’s not in your native language yet, don’t worry. It’s getting there.
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
Political Monday: DECISION 2008 – People Got Excited But Then Not Much Happened Or Did It?
July 21st, 2008 | by adminPosted In: Political Monday
IS ARCHIVE
Okay, so the 2008 USA presidential election is pretty close or actually like a long way off. But you’ve already made your mind up about that, haven’t you? Sure you have. Who do I support? Fuck you, that’s who. I don’t really know. Nobody I suppose. The funny thing about the system in the USA is that it’s supposed to be wide and multi-party, but it’s really more of a theoretical setup than a practical one. Kind of like wormholes?
The Washington Post is such a dick about pointing this out, that they want us to only consider the two majour parties. Excuse me, but…racism! Against politics! The worst kind. Anyway this is what I know about these two guys:
Barack Obama is curious to find out if college students vote. My advice: Hey your splash page sucks. More propellers would be good.
John McCaine believes he can scowl his way into America’s heart and build a house there. My advice: OH MY GOSH CAN YOU PLEASE NOT EAT THIS DARLING DELICIOUS HUMAN BABY?
And here’s some more:
Socialist Party Guy Brian Moore wasn’t memorable enough for me to remember. His platform: have hair, plan to continue hair.
Green Party Superpower Cynthia McKinney is featured on several websites, all of which load slowly. My advice to her is to swear during speaches?
Wondering who I’m supporting? Why, whoever promises the highest cannoneering subsidies, you impossible dickhead!
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants
IS ARCHIVE
When I was pretty young I was usually interested in owning things. Especially I’d look forward to owning Nintendo games, books, VHS cassettes, and DAT cassettes and eventually CDs and things like that. Then one day the internet became a pretty common part of my daily life, and everybody else’s. Not much happened back then, except that information was passed around on the web, UseNet, and Gofer to a lesser extent. Eventually and sometimes people would pass around porn this way. This was when storage and graphical capacities had developed to the point where porn was interesting on a computer. This was the first example of not owning something. Previously people had owned porn on VHS cassette and most commonly magazine format. However now that it was being transmitted as information which a computer could decipher it no longer really existed. But people still wanted to own a lot of it.
Several years later audio and video compression and a whole host of other funny ways of shrinking information and removing ideas from their physical concepts of storage started to happen. Suddenly it was simple to transmit music, movies, or even NES ROMs around the world as ideas. So people started collecting these too, trying to own more of them. But the problem here is that none of these objects actually existed. They’re simply ideas ripped free of the only thing that gave them any objective real world presence and concept of possessability: their distribution media.
While it was once certainly possible to own a record that contained a physical representation of a song, now the song was amorphous in its sense of tangibility. While this is not much of a problem with music, as songs are temporary broadcastings of information encoded in pressure waves produced by sounding instruments, it’s more troubling regarding photographs and optical data. Photographs are recordings of the travel of paths of light in a very simple and narrow path. Once a photograph is scanned into a computer it’s deconstructed in a sense, and the image created and hurried along on electron streams to various email addresses is an entirely different image. This is somehow more troubling to me than the concept of dot printing in a newspaper or magazine or comic book, which is fundamentally altered from the image it maintains likeness to.
The grand effect of all this information being removed of its earthly shell is probably a decrease of the understanding of copyright laws, particularly among the youth of today (in the parts of the world that have electricity and computer network access). It becomes difficult to attach a sense of ownership to something that doesn’t tangibly exist and is freely and easily cloned and passed along or otherwise shared and/or deconstructed partially or fully. While the progenitors of these sources of information could be imagined to be the ultimate authority on the needs and necessities of copyright laws and how they should function, the former group composes the audiences of these “artists,” if you will. This gets harder when you consider that information is only completely of value when it is transferred – when it has an audience. Information is integral to one’s survival and daily life. So I haven’t got an answer here.
So is this information even finding anybody? What the fuck is an audience?
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
IS ARCHIVE
Way back when Animal Crossing first came out, Nintendo chose to advertise it in the USA by parodying MTV’s the Real World in their commercials. This was pretty funny and shit, but I was a bit left going “what the fuck?” Reason? Season: Autumn 20something, and the mention that one of the Real Crossing housemates was spending his days fishing instead of helping out around the village. For those who care, this is basically what I did once I actually had Animal Crossing, and basically what I heard from my girlfriend at the time. Nevermind, right? She’s in the past, and the past is shit. The past is shit! Hooray the shit past!
Alright. Got me to thinking, once I played the game – this isn’t so great. Sure, Tom Nook needs things and um…fish or…seashells. Hang on, I could sell him fruit or whatever…uh…furniture maybe. What’s this currency? Bells? You want HOW much for a punching bag? Fuck you, I’ll go down to the…there’s only one shop in town. That was the experience.
Thusly I present my new game idea: Do Some Shit. It’s a “sandbox” game in which you, true to the title, do shit. And things. And also stuff. In my ideal game of Do Some Shit, my character waddles down to the river, equips his iron boots, and fishes a la the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. There’s no Hylian Loach, sure, but maybe there’s a loach of some sort? How about garbage eels? Maybe catfish. The point is that I don’t just have to hit A when my controller has a fit. My character spends all day fishing loaches of a non-Hylian nature and drinking Strongbow. If you don’t dig that, then maybe you can dance or something? You can arrange furniture as well. If that’s your thing, do that. But if you move my guy’s loach tanks, he’ll probably come back home and punch you in your cartoony nose. You’d pay a subscription for that feature. Admit it. And just remember, while you’re playing, Do Some Shit is free minus the one time fee of $49.95 you pay me on purchase. Also maybe there’s sex?
Cats and kittens, I missed a post this week. I’ll make up for it this weekend. No violence related excuses this time. I was just lazy. Also the new bosun is REALLY easy to beat.
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
Controversy Tuesday: The Trashiest Environment!
July 15th, 2008 | by adminPosted In: Controversy Tuesdsay
IS ARCHIVE
It’s populare these days to take a proactive stance regarding the pollution and/or alteration of the natural environment, as well as to adopt so-called sustainability practices into one’s everyday life. Many people take this to the furthest extreme they feel is possible, having a strong emotive context inspiring their actions. Common steps taken are regular recycling, purchasing organic foods and ethanol based vehicles, and using “natural” products.
The problems here are many. As far as recycling goes, it seems to serve the same purpose confession does to a not-so-devout Catholic. Recycling is comparably simpler to do than many other “green” activites, and has an immediate and observable result – all your cans are out there in a tub by the street. The breakdown occurs in what actually happens to that sorted material. Does any of it actually make it back into new products? Does it even make it past the waste collection centre? Do you even bother to check that you’re buying new products produced from recycled materials? Few people bother to answer any of these questions.
Organic foods and ethanol or other pure petroleum-alternative fueled vehicles take another direction. In the case of organics, an often overlooked point is the origin of the foods. Not all states have regulations defining the term “organic.” The regulations that do exist may vary from region to region. This has many effects; the term itself breaks down in meaning, and organic foods are more likely to be produced in states with well known standards (Oregon, California) and shipped by conventional means, which requires fossil fuels. This brings me to petroleum alternatives. Hybrid cars are merely a stopgap in truth, whereas electric cars most likely still depend on fossil fuels being burnt at the generator, as is often the case. A popular and fairly recent third choice is E-85 ethanol burning vehicles. While ethanol burns “cleanly” in comparison with petroleum distillate, it doesn’t come from out of nowhere. The corn that is required to make it must be grown like any other commodity, requiring machine tending and harvesting in today’s modern agriculture, then shipping and processing, all of which require energy in the form of electricity and/or the burning of fuels. Another dent in the “green” efficiency of ethanol is its production requires an increase of corn crops, which requires expansion of farmlands, displacing some farms into new, more poorly equipped areas, or just outright farming on new, undomesticated land.
The last concept I find ridiculous: that of consuming “natural” products. This is an idea that some clever marketeer dreamed up and was made king of Advertoria for. There seems to be a persistant belief that natural things are somehow better. The problem is, nothing that claims to be natural on the package can back up that claim to any point of satisfaction. One example is a fruit salad. All the individual fruits in the salad can be naturally, but pineapples don’t naturally come in small wedges, bereft of seed and skin and tree, nestled closely to orange sections. At best, the salad can claim to be a collection of natural things, but they’ve all already lost that distinction by being modified by human hands. The fact of it is that something is natural when it occurs in nature. Even the natural tomatoes you purchase cannot claim to have originated in the area they were grown. Furthermore, tomatoes and all other commodity crops have been selectively bred and hybridised over years by humans to improve flavour, size, productivity, uniformity, and a dozen other traits. The only way you can hope to really eat naturally is if you run freely in the woods and take bites out of birches and deer.
Why the fuck do you feel so good about being “green?”
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants
IS ARCHIVE
One thing I find terribly bothersome about the 2008 USA Presidential races and upcoming election is the question of whether or not the American people are ready for a potential president of some sort or another.
Racism!
It was a popular racism last year to suggest people may be poorly equipped to handle the emotional carnage electing a person in possession of functional amounts of ovaries and/or melanin could unleash on the country. This “unreadiness,” as they called it, was supposedly showing an effect on various numbers. Therefore I imagine unreadiness causes a vise like grip on several two- and a few three-digit numbers, many of which are important to pollsters.
However, it wasn’t asked if America was “ready” for a President made of human babies! That’s right! I am announcing my racism against the race of people who eat human babies! I am also racist against electing former prisoners?
IS ARCHIVE
What follows is a further attempt at normalcy, as dictated during a particularly furious cannon battle between the good lady Sturmkrieg and a well-laden FFA craft, which, when wounded, chose to shower Our Lady of the Storm with a considerable volume of grapeshot. Our captain was, noteably, not disturbed in the least by the volleys.
Frank Sinatra was a singer! He sang many songs, many of which were only good because Dean Martin was there too! Dean Martin was a clever alcoholic who made jokes about it, and thusly hurt both Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Juniour through words! There were two other guys as well, but Frank Sinatra was important because he got laid and had a daughter!
This daughter was none other than Nancy Sinatra!
You may very well remember the young Miss Sinatra for recording a particularly clever and delicious cover of These Boots. It has become an anthem for young women and lesbians everywhere, due to the iconographic lyrical depictions of having a woman step on a man and potentially a man’s gonads as well, said gonads being expressed in the male of the human species as testicles. And gosh! it hurts when something crushes a male’s testicles.
What I would like to address is the simple fact that Nancy Sinatra, despite all emasculating and/or “ball breaking” tendacies was a sex goddes to belong to. It would have given many quality young soliders in her time and yours and mine a great satisfaction to be sacrificed before an idol bearing her likeness. This isn’t a twenty seven virgins situation – this is a Nancy fucking Sinatra equation!
I can therefore elucidate from this past behaviour that Nancy was, in fact, a sex goddess. She was, perhaps, the proverbial swanness seducing the humanoid. It would not be going very far past this understanding to suggest a statue or two be erected in a hall of monument for her, and that laurels and paisley wreaths be brought before her likeness to gain favour in all things bouncey-bouncey.
Herein lies my point, somewhere. What the fuck, Cap? What the fuck with this shit, Cussy? I’ll tell you what the fuck. I’m suggesting a return to all things sexy. I’m suggesting a fucking revival of the right to fuck.
I am suggesting you – you lovely womens out there – I’m suggesting you try out Nancy’s tried-and-true brilliance for yourselves. I’ve been known to say, “Miniskirts and go-go boots – the trouble today is there are no Nancy Sinatras!” I was right when I was known to be right about saying that. And things.
Here’s my suggestions, womens. Get a lovely pair of go-go boots. You don’t have to call them go-go boots, it’s a bit pants name, but just get knee high or almost knee high boots with proper heels. You can also wear miniskirts – wear some fucking miniskirts. You have the legs for it – fucking show that shit off. Beehives? Yes, they’re sexy. It’s time you took back your sexuality. It’s time you used yourself like a fucking weapon. You deserve it. You worked hard for that body; make it work for you.
It’s time to make it work for you.
Remember, ladies: Nancy Sinatra. And don’t forget to email me your digits, lovely.
IS ARCHIVE
Due to an unforseen incident involving a number of FFA (Federal Floatship Administration) and PGDB (Provisional Government Duties Board) craft flying in close proximity to the Sturmkrieg, Captain Cussy Pants, Esq. has been unable to actively update his logs for a time. What follows is a backdated attempt at a return to normality.
Women! What the fuck? Am I right? They’re all, holy shit I care about things and can you buy me a drink and I totally have a vagina and are you sure you know where the clitoris is and let’s go out for dinner you buy and I seriously think you should consider my boobs before you decide whether or not to ask me out am I right? Am I fucking right? Men in the place! How seriously common is this shit? You know I’m right, don’t you?
Well fuck you. Fuck you and your dipshit gendre roles for life and living. Fuck you and everything you fucking stand for. Fuck your dumbass fringe as well. You don’t know fucking shit about anything. Women aren’t that fucking different, you dumbass cocksucking bitch-cock. You’ve just been looking at it wrong.
Holy shit, a woman shot me down when I asked to buy her a drink = FANNY.
Oh no why, I bought her a necklace and now she won’t answer my calls = SHIT FLAP.
Seriously, I can mortgage my car and still pay for expensive breakfasts when she won’t sleep with me = SPUNK JOCKEY.
Women are not that different. They want a shit tonne of dick just like you want a shit tonne of cock. They just don’t go around screaming about it most of the time. They like to sit back and consider the shit before they get the fuck involved.
Here’s a huge fucking myth: females do the selection in human society.
Huge fucking fact: It’s not the truths lezzers! Wake up and smell the tea. It’s not the women doing the choosing. It’s the men doing the choice to be chosen. And if you don’t get me, get to get me. You get me? I don’t think you do.
That’s all for now, shit bandits. Try not to fuck your lives up in the interim. I’ve got business; I’ve got a fucking anteroom full of government inspectors. I’ve also got left arm loaded with contact energy rounds. Wish me luck, lezzers. I haven’t got the money otherwise.
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
IS ARCHIVE
How many of you own or drive a car? So how many of you know how to change a tire? How about the oil? Windscreen fluid? Radiator? Not so many hands up now, huh?
So why don’t so many people know how to do these things? Why don’t YOU? Chances are, you either thought, “because I don’t care,” or, more likely, “because I get somebody to do it for me.” It costs a bit of money, but you can go to a fancy service station and get your fluids topped, oil changed, and your engine flushed and a hundred other things you don’t know how to do or even understand. Why do you do this? Maybe you read Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and felt it contained a life lesson. Probably you don’t feel like you should have to know how to do this shit.
Here’s something else. There’s a common misperception among people today that humans are a terminal point in evolution. This idea holds that humans have stopped evolving, being perfectly adapted for the habitat they’ve created for themselves. Others believe that humanity’s next evolutionary step is into robotics and artificial intelligence and downloading personalities and belfhekhgfkdljd. Of course, these ideas are both bullshit.
Which brings me back to your choice to take your car to a guy for maintenance. You make this choice because you don’t know how to yourself. You never bothered to learn because it didn’t seem important. There were more important things to learn – like law school, or computer science, or how to be REALLY good at compiling porn links on your blog. You’re good at your own things. You’re specialised. Welcome to a shit life.
Humans aren’t favouring mutations with dealy bops or extra toes. They’re favouring those who succeed at specialisation. With each generation, social and technological progress pushes us further and further in the direction of an ant colony. In said colonies, each individual fulfills a specific role. Among driver ants, there are three distinct worker classes, each with physiological adaptations to support the responsibilities within the class. Humans aren’t born blind if their role in society doesn’t require sight, or otherwise mutate to succeed in their job, but they instead get help from technology. With the advent and ubiquity of mobile phones, wireless networking, bluetooth, GSP, and internet connectivity, communication between individuals is wider and more instantaneous than ants could ever hope to achieve.
Sounds pretty great, right? You only have to be good at one difficult thing, and everybody else will pick up the slack. Woo specialised society! Life is so fucking hilarious and sexy all the time!
…Except when something goes wrong. The machine with the fewest moving parts is the least likely to break, and modern first world society is a machine with a shit tonne of parts. We combat this weakness by building in redundancy. Aeroplane manufacturers do the same thing, but then, it’s not like an aeroplane component has ever failed. The probabilities of that happening are insanely miniscule.
The things you give up when you let yourself be a part of this kind of system aren’t immediately obvious, especially to someone living inside of it, but they’re big. The foremost is adaptability. That might stick out in reference to what I said about evolution above. Another, more obvious, loss is self sufficiency, and, as a side note, the satisfaction it proivdes.
Everybody I meet these days seems frustrated at a lack of control over one’s own circumstances. It never occurs to anybody you can take that control for yourself. But it’s not easy. It’s hard work. Maybe that’s where the problem lies – maybe it’s just easier to get somebody else to take your control for you.
Personally, I think I’ll keep up the autodidactism.