Happy XMas

Cynicism of the day

"No man can win an argument.
 Don't criticize, condemn, or complain."
 
    - Dale Carnegie

"It's just, all, completely useless."

    - Dabotz

The Farewell of Don Rosa to Creating Comics

The Second Coming of The Man of the Ducks

OK, I see your faces, a blank stare and a question printed in capital letters on your brow:

"Who the ... is Don Rosa?" 

Don Rosa is arguably the best creator of comics with Disney's Ducks Family, after Carl Barks.

Not the greatest artist to have drawn "The Ducks" after Barks - I think Giorgio Cavazzano is the one -
and maybe not the best writer - and here, I draw a blank -  but the best author.

He did both art and stories, with a meticulousness in the art that betrayed his origins as a fan of Carl Barks and a thoroughness in straightening up pending plot threads - left dangling from Carl Barks stories, usually - that betrayed his training as a civil engineer. Or the reverse.     

I discovered the guy only a few years ago, as I had stopped reading the Ducks - (I do not really care for Mickey Mouse, crypto-fascist law&order bastard that he is) - long years before his stories started filtering into Italian publications.

But my nephew was a huge fan and so I had occasion of reading some of Don's seminal "The Life And Times of Scrooge McDuck" - it is, indeed, a reading well worth its time (and, no, "Fifty shades" definitively IS NOT!).

Also, apparently, Don created the basic plot of Inception for one of his Ducks tales in the early '90s - no, he ain't got nor going to get a dime for it - he is that kind of good, as a storyteller. 

Anyway, Don Rosa is probably also the last great comic artist to have run all of his career inside the so-called "Disney System" -  read: slavery for artists. 

He knew he was surrendering a lot of money and some authorial control, to keep working with the characters he loves the most in the world, and over time that knowledge took its toll.

And yet it took something worse than that, to knock him off the drawing board...

Before leaving you to the man and his farewell words, one last note from yours truly:

Get it, boyo, Disney's ain't no "Rebel Alliance" -  it's the F...ing Empire.

Also, keep the Kleenex at hand - for one of their explicitly intended uses, for a change.  

And now, 


The Farewell of Don Rosa to Creating Comics


- sniff, I am crying again...

What We Are in the Dark

From "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", by Don Rosa

Here, Scrooge is still a duck in search of his luck, little more
than scraping by while he chases a "big affair" after the other.
He could just steal the opal and be rich
- nobody, but him, would know.

To troll or not to troll? - this is [not] a question.

On-line life [supposedly] allows for a fair amount of anonymity and, as a consequence, of freedom from social pressure.

Apparently, for some this means the freedom to troll, to be the jerks that they cannot fully be in their off-line life.

If that is the way in which you consistently use the freedom afforded you by the technological miracle of Internet - consistently; we all have our three minutes of jerkiness - then I refer you to the title of this.


We are what we are in the dark, where the power of social pressure does not reach us and, apparently, what you are is A Jerk.

F...book

A couple of days ago, one of my on-line friends has landed on this blog - he was struck by the fact that I tend to digress in a lot of odd directions, and to employ something that looks a lot like forthright honesty in doing so. *(I hope you do not mind, Dr. B.H. )*.

Essentially, he did not expect from me to wrote about "Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood" amidst post-human gods filling the universe with masochist lesbians, BDSM tarots and ternary counting system's foibles.

He knew I was complicated, but I think he hoped - being complicated not being a recipe for happiness, or for mechanical reliability for that matter - I was a little less twisty.

He is as dear a friend as one I can make on-line, i.e. someone with whom I can share some facets of myself that I dare not to share with my immediate social environment - because, you know, lynching mobs are always ready and eager to have fun.

To be honest, I also suspect that landing on the blog of someone you got to know through his drawings of - cough - pretty unrealistically extreme consensual SM porn, and discover that he can cry for a couple of days  because of a phrase from Mr. Rodgers, does not make the same effect as discovering that the principal of your daughter's kindergarten has the complete "No Fun Limits"  collection in his hard drive.

That said, "going out there and telling what I want to tell" is my main reason to be on-line (OK, the second -  the first is self-advertising for the aforementioned drawings).

If I have to beat around the bush, and construct a social façade to prompt up my ego - it simply isn't worth it.

No matter how much plaster you put on it, it doesn't really change the rotten below.

Trust me, I worked as a mason till I was 27 (and then went back to college because, uh, I was fed of my fellow masons calling me haughty for, well, using words like "haughty" - I know, I know).

So, I really do not get those that have a Facebook account with their name, "connected" to their off-line friends and who tend it with the same obsessive care many use in tending to their house gardens.

Trying to "impress their neighbours" - so to speak - with dazzling images of their magnificent successes, in order to project a calculated impression of happiness and personal fulfilment.

Why? Why do they bother?

We already have to go through life wearing masks, caving in to social pressures that require us to conform, perform and do our bit to uphold the status quo - I'd say, especially when said "status quo" is unfavourable to us; Of course, if it was favourable we would not need to be press-ganged into keeping it running, right?   

Why should we open a Facebook account, with our legal name?  - the wet dream of Facebook founder, and they push and push and push to get it at every occasion.

To keep doing the same stupid dance, only on a somewhat grander scale? Really?

Delenda Facebook!

If I go on-line, it is too enjoy some freedom from social pressure, not to participate to new and more pervasive forms of it (*).





Ceterum censeo Facebook esse delendam...



* By the way ,the first available studies on the matter seems to indicate that it is already  fucking up nicely with our youngest generations' mental health, developing social anxiety, depression and other nice idiosyncrasies; Old guys being old guys, we tend to say it is them kids being gutless, as our parents did with us and theirs with them and so forth ever since our species managed speech and to keep old people around.  

I like her

... sweet dreams are made of her ...

I like A.

She is a nice kid, solid with no wild dreams, but still with some dreams of a down-to-Earth nature - the salt of the Earth, they used to say in my language.

In my mind I can clearly see her in a takate kote, curled on the bed with the legs tied to the wall, high above her head, while I eat and frolick her cunt.

Unfortunately, I can also see her nice boobs well squeezed as she dangles from them, tied with ropes to another hook in the wall.

Much more unfortunately, I can't really see me asking her to play that way.

She doesn't give me the vibe that it may be in her chords - no pun intended.

It's just shit going on in my head, and it would be impolite to laden her thoughts with some of it.


- Sigh 
                 (long and hard)

Carrot and Stick

You get why the donkey does not move?

 Everybody knows the tactic of "carrot and stick" - a carrot is tied to the point of a stick and dangled in front of a mule.

The mule pulls trying to reach the carrot.

When he misbehaves, a rapid motion of the wrist puts the carrot on a safe trajectory while the stick is used as a baton.

Simple and effective, we are inured to think. 

But, at times, the donkey stops seeing the carrot as a carrot - (s)he sees it as what it - all too often - really is.

A small-sized, pre-owned, not-well-washed dildo. 

The mule stops. 

Raise your head.

Look at the carrot they dangle in front of you - getting a degree, a good job, starting a family etc. 

Look at it long and hard.

Yes, it is a pre-owned, not-washed-at-all dildo. It was, it has always been, and it always will be one.

Now, it may be your thing.

In which case, feel free to pull long and hard - not that they are really ever going to let you get it, anyway.  If you did, you may declare yourself satisfied and stop anyway. 

If it is not your thing, though, it may be better for you to just stop now, lay down and think about what to do next.

Fear

Apparently, Trump's administration has a number of members trying to manage Trump behaviour through underhanded tactics, like hiding documents he asked to get readied to be signed, because they think that he is mercurial, unprepared, reckless and incapable and unwilling to learn.

Why they don't just step away from the guy and voice for invoking the 25th amendment?

Because they can use him as a tool to get what they want - the tax cut, repeal of anti-pollution rules, the dismantlement of the Financial consumer protection bureau etc.

Also, the 25th amendment takes time;  It is a slow process, who would not remove Trumps' powers for - likely - some months .

Trump still has unfettered access to the "nuclear football";  In four minutes, he can launch a massive nuclear attack and be rid of the judgement of history because - as you may know - history is written by humans that have the luxury items required to write on storable media.

A nuclear Armageddon should eliminate most of the firsts an virtually every of the seconds.

He seems like a raving lunatic in his best day, and has shown a morbid fascination for the USE of nukes as the last embodiment of macho swaggering.

- "Why can't we use them?" , he asked (three times) while they were briefing him on the nuclear attack procedures -

Now, imagine him looking down a removal from power for unfitness - humiliating - or a Clinton-esque impeachment process - more humiliating?- followed by a raft of civil and criminal trials of members of his administration - most of them seem as bent as a three dollars banknote - and staff of his private enterprise - it is not exactly a mystery that many foreign governments and political figures shovel money to Trump concerns as a way to mollify the big guy... efficacious for them, but does not really smell legal, right? - included, maybe, of some of his family.

"Après moi, le déluge" reads very Trumpian, I think. 

Now you feel it?

Fear.

Failed Bayesian Statistics Forever

Admit it: You wish I was making porn here, instead of talking about it, right now.

Consider, if you will, these two links:

All Men Watch Porn (spoiler alert: from when they are 10 onward, on average - bummer, I thought I was a precocious sod).   

Boys who watch porn think sexual harassment is acceptable

Now, raise his hand who, on the light of the first article, thinks that the authors of the second failed Bayesian statistics forever.

All of you? You are not as daft as them, then.

If the first statement/article is true, then it segues that

Every Boy That Thinks That Sexual Harassment Is Unacceptable Watches Porn.

and

[Some] Boys who watch porn do not think that sexual harassment is at all acceptable, in any circumstance. 

Or, in other words,

Watching porn is hardly much meaningful, when talking about men's views on sexuality. 

It is, really, just background noise.

Note that the same "reversed" statistic inference has been used to "prove" that anything with serious mass appeal was dangerous/damaging youths - almost every single kid in the 30s read comics, then they grew up and as some became criminals, Harry Wertham arrived and "discovered" that comics had a nefarious influence. Comes the '90s, it's videogames.


To be honest, I kind of suspected it.

We may still wish that porn was done better and more intelligently, possibly with more women and "minorities" (LGBTQSM) in directing/producing stuff because - being honest - the "heterosexual white man's gaze" prevalent in it at times feel a bit monomaniacal and boring. 

But it's exactly as we wish Sci-fi flicks were done better and more intelligently, possibly with more women and "minorities" (LGBTQSM, black, Asian, French and physicists) in directing/producing stuff because - being honest - the "white man's navel gaze" prevalent in it at times feel a bit monomaniacal and boring.

And I am back at equating porn and science fiction...  

Fred Rogers

For reasons known to no one but the squirrels in my head that spin the wheels and gears of my subconscious, I cry a couple of days like a 12 years old girl - one whose 13 years old cat has just died - every time I make the mistake of re-reading the page of Tvtropes.org about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

It is a mystery to me as, being an Italian that has never gone outside the EU, I also have never seen the program.

I suspect that it's that: - "I'm proud of you, just the way you are" - that he used to say, that punches me under the belt.

OK, I found my emergency stash of Kleenex - production of possibly under-age extreme gorn porn will resume momentarily.

I hope.

(Nope - it took a week more)

85%

OK, this is going to be just a fun little wank.

Do you know how speed limits are set, in civilized countries? Of course you do.

Traffic authorities place an "informal" speed detector, that measures the number and speeds of vehicles that passes on a given road.

Why did I write "informal"? For a number of reasons.

This detectors sensors are not invisible radars or infra-red beams, but usually  just two tubes laid on the road's mantel, in plain sight.

While their distance is set pretty much accurately, there is not need for it to be certified and checked by external authorities in cases of contested results, as they are not - can not - be used to issue tickets or the like. 

No matter what speed they may read, the sensors are not designed to record the vehicle that was running it - they have no cameras, nor do they have any mean to inform authorities of the fact.

They only read, and store in an internal memory of some type, the speed at which the two tubes are stepped-on by the first axle, and the number of vehicles.

(kind of... pretty sure there are plenty of technical details I do not know enough about).

The fact that these recorders are "informal" is important, as otherwise they would influence the behaviour of drivers on that road, which is what they are intended to record.

Once the recorder has accumulated enough data, this is examined and the speed limit of that road stretch is set as the one that is "respected" by a given percentage of the drivers.

In the U.S. and other countries where this system is used, the percentage chosen is usually 85%.

Long and windy preamble, I know - bear with me.

Seeing things as they go, here in Spain, I would say that the locally used threshold seems to be well-chosen: I have seen few places where the speed limit was ludicrously low (when I used to live and drive in the North of Italy, there were a lot more places with oddily low limits, as they were selected pretty randomly and often lowered in response to a single accident, as a way to "placate the populace").

However, here is the funny part:

Once the vast majority of cars will have adaptive cruise controls able to read speed limits cartels (and maybe check their readings against Google maps or something, just to stay safe; a DMV-MOT service for this would be pretty nice), and most people will use them (limiter function on by default? why not... who wants a speeding ticket if it can be easily avoided?), will this system still have a meaning?

What when - if - autonomous drive will become the normal one?

Probably not (unless the threshold climbs to, say, 95%), yet I can clearly see some authorities take their sweet time recognizing it, and pretty much arbitrarily lowering limits more and more till reaching "arbitrarily absurd" values, and grumbling protests will start.

I forecast funnily annoying times for drivers in, say, 15 years.


  

Pills

Some people own what they possess, others are possessed by what they owns - and it does not get really any better when the "what" is a "who".

---

Avita Ronell's case shows us that some "feminists" are in that ride as their way to attain a position of supremacy - once they obtain it, they see no reason why they should not reap the kind of prizes that Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes gained from the exercise of their own power.

---

It is a bit ridiculous that the U.S.A., a country that has spent most of the last century influencing the elections of its neighbours when they did not supported a  military coup or something else but  alike, acts all outraged facing the reality of Russia's meddling in their democratic processes.

What goes around...

---

55 years ago, a young president was jeopardizing the work of decades of U.S. intelligence agencies and military. As a result, the "deep state" found in its core the resources to eliminate the bothersome brat, in Dallas.

The fact that DJT is still alive after having done - possibly - worse can be understood, only, remembering that the VP is Pence, and that almost every person in the succession line is worse than Trump himself.

Which, I must say, reminds me very much Berlusconi and the Italian situation .

Mixed Feelings

OK, I admit it:  I have mixed feelings about myself.

What Trump does not get... is that I can't take any more of his crap.

When I draw this, he still hadn't worn me down.

 I think that the biggest problem for Trump is his very experience as an entrepreneur...
He is used to operate in a big market, with thousands of operators, where news of his bad habits can get lost in the noise, and in a structured society with rule of the law, where using superior lawyers firepower can effectively intimidate most counterparts.
He seems to think that the same tactics and strategies that he used in his career as a real estate mogul can be translated effectively in international diplomacy.
He misses some fundamental differences between the two markets...
On Earth, there are less than 200 sovereign nations.

The "big ones" that counts for most of, well, everything and anything are a maybe a quarter of that number, and each has a professional community dedicated to track what the others do.
Trinidad y Tobago may get away with something, Iceland would already have problems, and every fart of the U.S. is analyzed, dissected and extrapolated by every other government on the planet.
In his private and professional life, Trump has always used lawyers and lawsuits as threats, especially to control the narrative about his endeavors. Needless to say, nothing even remotely similar is possible for the president of the U.S. - the other international players have their own information systems which routinely flaunt little details like the treasonous behaviors required to their sources, and decades worth of information on any associate of a target government.
Also, lawyers are not really that much of a threat in and by themselves - the result of trials must be enforced, and in a rule of law state there is a whole sector of the government that is dedicated to this.
Now, imagine to live in a society that had no police forces whatsoever.Would suing and winning in courts of law mean much? No, right.
While the U.S. may have prided themselves to act as the world's policeman, there is really no such thing as a world's policeman.
Imagine a village populated by two or three hundred thugs, each one more than willing to cut someone else throat at the smallest slight, and many of them organized in small crime families, more or less secret.
Now, take a breath, and consider this - that is the world, seen at the level of governments and other international policies actors.
A village of thugs, each knowing to the number of panties in the closet the affairs of the other, each ready to cut the necessary throats for reasons of "national security" that, by the way, they devise themselves.
If the "thugs" images seems excessive to someone, consider that here is virtually no government on the planet that does not disregard some individual rights of their own citizens when it suits its needs, starting with the usual host of discrimination policies against this or that undesired minority, and up to the occasional secret assassination. As for the non-citizens, they are usually seen as non-entities whose extermination is avoided just because they usually are citizens of other thugs, and bad P.R. is bad P.R..
It is a far cry from the Manhattan where Trump grew up, and a lot more akin to Corleone or Casal di Principe... (famous Italian mafia towns).
In the last 70 years, the U.S. has tried to inject a bit of rationality in this otherwise deplorable state of affairs, fostering a host of international organizations created to act as mediators among the various thugs - pardon, governments - so that there was some intermediate steps to try, before cutting each other's throat - go to war.
Contrarily to Donal's vision of things, the U.S. has managed to steer the rules of these organizations so that they were slightly favorable to them, and thus rip their share of benefits - not an excessive one, of course, as that would have provoked the widespread resistance of the other thugs.
Let's say, the "right" one - organizing things costs effort and produce value, so it is only right that it is rewarded, even though a number of players have gone along rather grudgingly.
Of course, a disproportionate part of said profits has been gobbled up by the country's ruling class, leaving the underclasses more or less destitute, but that is mostly a problem of internal policies of the U.S. being excessively biased toward the improvement of The Weatlhy's lot in life. 
But it rests that the US profited of the erstwhile world order that it had built - any other government on Earth would likely have crumbled by now, under a spiraling exterior debt, for example.
In little more than a year, Trump has more or less undone it.
And he is not going to replace it with any "new system", simply because he has thrown away an awful lot of political capital and demonstrated that he is not a reliable partner.
From now on, even when the U.S.A. will manage to get to some kind of negotiating table, it is going to be for show - because tomorrow the Dude can wake up and undo everything. Al the while, the thugs are going back to their old habits... which include chronic backstabbing disorder, trade war, war war and other fun pastimes.    
The question is now not whether China will overtake the U.S. as hegemonic super-power before crumbling under the burden of its own set of internal problems (not the least of which is Xi Jinping's authoritarian instincts already schlerotizing its policy discourse - Xi, China needs good ideas, not more censors), but when it will do.

Chances are the world is going to be stupendously interesting and exciting, when I'll be old.

I love boredom... please, world, let me be bored to my heart's content.

You know what? I do not care about the guy any more.

I just hope that the "deep state" manages to keep it [sic] from tumbling the world fully into 1932-like chaos.

The limits of the narrative mind

There is an old joke about having one million monkeys punching keys on typewriters for a hundred years.

They wouldn't be able to create the works of Shakespeare.

It is used by critics of the evolution theory to showcase what they see as the folly of it: how could something so perfect (... sorry, I lost some minutes laughing my ass out) and beautiful (I agree, as far as some specimen goes like, say, Natalie Portman, Constance Wu and Tyra Banks or Ajang Majok, as for the rest - I need some more minutes) as humanity have been created by randomness.

The joke is, of course, more than a bit inaccurate...

A more accurate depiction of evolution in action, would be something like this:

Imagine having a hundred billion thrillion monkeys, punching keys on typewriters for seven hundred million years.

Every monkey has an implacable editor that revise his work, throw away the lines that makes no sense or are unfit for the gig at hand (without this, without a selection function of some kind we'd be back to the one million monkey joke - but Darwin' theory has precisely that, an implacable, inflexible editor prone to kill the monkey that fails to perform: it's called nature).

Any line that is good is conserved and assigned a key or a macro in the monkey typewriter... over time the monkeys will stop "reinventing the wheels", and will simply play combinations with already edited and accepted blocks (beyond the little required by the code used to synthesize proteins - the edited and tested blocks - much of  evolved species DNA is regulating and designs hints that operate on a "higher logical level"...)

The lines written by "good" monkeys  are dispersed among the writers, the monkeys that consistently fail to deliver are eliminated and the libraries of their phrases is destroyed.

One hundred billion trillion monkeys, for seven hundred million years - represents well the initial stages of life's evolution, when the biochemical basic tricks have been evolved; at the level of complex organisms, the "game" changes and a better metaphor would be "imagine a billion programmers stitching together randomly functions and libraries, with project managers ruthlessly firing all hose that do not deliver - ah, that sounds like a scaled-up Microsoft?... I see.

The question is: would they create a set of stories comparable to those written by Shakespeare?


The real answer is no.

They would end up writing something so good that Shakespeare himself could hardly understand how it "works" or what it really means, beyond seeing that it makes people weep, laugh and get passionate about it, or whatever was inside the selection parameters that were assigned to the editors.

Shakespeare would read them, and conclude that they are the creation of a God(*). 

Which brings me to the point for which I titled this piece.

The rational mind as we typically identify it - the mind that sees the universe as a set of processes that can be analysed, i.e. described in a more or less linear tale - is a severely limited instrument.

In the real world, almost everything happens at the same time (by definition) and almost everything influences anything else.

When we analyse natural processes, we divide them into steps in a sequence and we deal with their close interactions by devising feedback loops.

It is a remarkably successful strategy, a "Divide et Impera" even more powerful than the one devised by the ancient Romans to keep under control the conquered barbarians at the borders of their empire.

It has helped us understanding a great deal of the physical world that we inhabit (maybe - we can only suspect what we do not know, and yet we suspect there is much, much, much more to know... just the fact that the Standard Model and General Relativity tries to snuff each other is a nice clue about us knowing "jack"), to the point that many laymen feel ill at ease with the ever growing power of science.

However, the strategy cannot hide the fact that we are using a tool that works at most in three dimensions - more likely, just in two.

Consider how our minds handle plots in a story... there is one thread, a second thread, they intertwine.... how many dimensions are required to represent them?

Two? That's right... narrative plots need at most two dimensions to be represented, and I suspect not just because often writers simply draw them on a sheet to navigate them.

When a scientific theory is explained, it is usually written down in a short piece of narrative.

So, our descriptions of an extremely interconnected, multi-dimensional reality is always bound to be, in ultimate analysis, a bi-dimensional representation of some kind.

It is inevitable that these will ultimately lack precision and only approximate somewhat the real thing.

It is also inevitable that at some point this fundamental inability of the rational mind to see the universe as it is  - a free for all multidimensional chasm, ordered beyond its apparent chaos - but only as a collection of separated aspects of it, will present limits to our ability to understand our reality.

It seems only inevitable that this inability will resurface even when facing those artificial systems that we create mimicking the way nature works, like many AI projects or even just a simple tone detector created through "evolutionary algorithms".

I think that in the long term, this will prove a fundamental limit to our capacity to improve our understanding, i.e. to improve science.

And I am not completely sure that there is any real way to address the issue, at least none that is meaningful to us humans.

__________________________________________________

(By the way, if you believe in a God that is not as much as powerful as clever, it may as well be... the hundred billion trillion monkeys being just the tool he decided to use for this specific bit of creation, and yes, He would hide any possible clue of him ever having been around - complaining about scientists refusing to see the necessity of God is, really, wishing Him to be sloppy; Don't worry, we'll be in hell together, me for what I draw, you for having tried to lessen God to a stature you could understand)

"Why do you choose to draw random people?"

She is a random woman, for you.

She is a friend, for me.

Admittedly, one that takes solace in me not
buying a plane ticket to Japan any soon...
But I will, some day, Miyu-chan.
Muahahahahahahahahahaha!

Recently, I stumbled upon this question:

I wanted to ask. why do you choose to draw random people in your pics and not characters from films?

Short answer: 

Because I see no difference between abusing of my power as an author to rape a character or forcing it into acting in a way inconsistent with his psychology, and abusing my physical power as a male to rape a real woman or my eventual economic power/social clout to force one to acquiesce to my desires against her better self. 

I am a sexual sadist of the SSC/RACK BDSM tribe, not a rapist nor a bully.

Even shorter answer: I seldom if ever encountered a movie [female... they tell me there are plenty of guys in those things, too, but I forget them] character that I could imagine as a willing companion in my sex-capades. 

The random people in my drawings are just "actors" engaged in giving life to characters of my own, that do enjoy being part of my shows (or loudly complaining about their part, when their parts require it). Characters from existing material come with their baggage.

Now, to continue in a bit more extended form:

Some of the "random" people I use are actually friends. Some, real-life friends too - not just on-line acquaintances.

Needless to say, with them girls lies a more or less near possibility of some kind of encounter (OK, in a couple of case, the drawing was in effect done to "celebrate" a successful carnal intercourse).

I see these as "imaginary portraits" - << we both know, woman, that you won't be able to play this way [except for Jade, who usually does things like getting nailed to a plank by her nipples via a hammer and long steel nails] without risking a visit to the ER [which should lead to your partner being automatically arrested, given the fact that the local "Ley de violencia de genero" mandates medical personnel to notify the police any woman's lesion that is the likely product of abuse, and the police to stop and hold for at least 24h the suspected abuser], yet we both know that a corner of your soul would feel much better afterwards>>.

"Porn for human progress" - in a way.

And, by the way, one of my drawings did indeed manage to convince the GF of one of my model to do her dommely duty and spank the poor girl to her heart's content (it was just a couple of years that the poor woman asked her black lady to turn her buttocks violet, to no avail).

Not bad for a couple of hours of a middle aged, overweight white male wank.

Now, onto characters from films.

Why should I use them at all?

Because some professionally made comics do use actors as a base for their characters? Because plenty of hobbyist use them in their own wanks?

The main reasons why they are used as reference in professional comics are these:

The amount of material available about actors/actresses and movie characters make very easy to assemble an extensive database of movements and actions, which in turns makes much easier to "keep to the model" while drawing comics.

Secondarily, using a cast of actors may prompt some studio to buy the rights to the story (maybe just to block another studio from making it into a movie... studios routinely buy rights to about 10 times the amount of stories that they produce - it may seem costly, but the rights to the average comics are about the cost of a couple of script rewrites).

Now, the first is moot for me as I do almost exclusively single shot drawings... I do not need 124 iterations of the face of a character/actress to handle a story.

I just need one image that intrigues me.

The second is moot, because nobody wants to see picket holding forks and torches at the front gate of their studio - I see pretty hard that they will ever, ever approach me, even if I was to become famous in the "mainstream world".

As for the reason "hobbyist" often opt for characters out of movies it is simple:

The public has already been primed and educated about the character's psychology and habits by the marketing machinery of the studios, so using their likenesses makes for a narrative short-cut.

You do not have to describe your character to the public, or leave hints - just make it recognizable, and the public will know life, loves and deaths of it. In essence, they are "stealing" the PR work already don from the studios (and yet, somehow contributing).

Now, this is as much a liability as it is an asset.  

In most cases female characters in movies are not really inclined to voluntarily be in scenes like the ones that I draw, if their canon psychology is any respected  - simply because the masochist, willing slave woman makes the skin of far too many activists crawl - and yet I do not really care about non-consensual scenes - rape the hell out of character X in your stories, if you want, I am not that interested.

As a result, even if I were to use characters from movies, I would end with having some character of my invention that only shares the name, some background elements and the actress face with the movie one...

But I would also have to explicitly explain WHY he/she/it acts in a way that violates the original characterization, to make matters worse to a public that likely knows he/it/her better than me - which is possible but takes some effort and likely more than a few words of text.

At that point, a "clean" character has no notoriety of its own, but it also comes free of ties to an existing continuity or faithfuls to its lore - I don't even need to write "she likes to pin needles in her tits because she has become masochist to the bones after accident [z]" somewhere, it's enough for my lady-of-the-drawing to smile like in the pre-throbs of an orgasm for everybody to see it. I rather show and don't tell.

I feel I can use already existing characters when I think that in some way I would still respect their personality, and yet my creation was not a superfluous addendum to the original opera.

So, while I could draw the protagonist of Secretary - she indeed loves being dominated - it would feel a bit redundant, as the film was very good.

However, when conditions are met, I have no qualms using characters from existing mythologies... in fact, there is somewhere an "homage" of mines with Shadowcat fighting and losing an "ultimate surrender" fight with Mystique, under the eyes of Wolverine and Storm.

I felt no problem in doing it because both Chris Claremont (writer) and John Byrne (artist) were into slipping (well hidden, but not too much) BDSM themes into the stories when she appeared, in the '80s-90s (and they had her land in chains/collars/cuffs every time she did not started a relationship with an older man, old hag of 14 that she was - BDSM was not the only odd thing that got off those two authors, I think).

And I also have done a couple of Calvin, Hobbes and Susy Derkins playing in their adult age - simply because I  felt and  still, to date, feel that Calvin-Susy was a nice  S&M love relationship in the making. And if it is what would keep Calvin from becoming Tyler Durden, so be it! 

I could draw Motoko Kusanagi domming the crap out of a bunch of cyberpunk sex-slaves (something that she more or less does in the Manga - she moonlights in her own porn studio! A shout-out of Masamune Shirow to himself, as he too moonlighted drawing erotic stuff), but I feel ill at ease when I  am asked to make HER into a slave.

It makes no sense with the original characterization.

(For those not into anime or manga, Motoko Kusanagi is the female-shaped cyborg commanding the Squad 9 in the "Ghost in the Shell" franchise, and while prone to existentialist meditations in her low moods, her average mood makes Terminator look meek and tame.)And to me, the more I love the character, the more it is sacred.

So, the next one that asks a Scrooge McDuck / Daisy Duck scene , he or she is going in for some gruesome retaliation... as neither would want to damage Donald that way!

When Internet Was Just For Porn...

Enjoy these, as long as you can - it may be shorter than you fear.

After this year, we can clearly say:

When Internet Was Just For Porn, The World Was Much Better Off For It.

As Facebook sells access to foreign authoritarian countries and Google accumulates massive data on everybody and the AI technology to correlate it - read: your privacy has died some years ago and you didn't even realize it - the web is becoming increasingly hostile to those that used it to legally distribute their porn - porn that they made in a legal way and without selling their souls to evil forces, I might add.

The web is crammed with old, stolen porn, of course... but selling access to new one is becoming more and more of a problem, as it has been added to the list of the activities that finance terrorism around the world and credit card transaction processors tend to cut support to everybody that give space to an ever-growing list of "extreme" fetishes.

In the long term, crypto-currencies may be a solution to it but, of course, the idea of making them illegal is already around (and unless they find a way to collect taxes on the trade done in cryptos, it IS going to happen). 

Of course, the terrorism thing used to be bollocks but, as soon as authorities make hard for legal operators to fill a market, illegal operators - by definition - step in, to create a quite smaller but usually much more lucrative market.

If these trends continue, one day we may have to say:

"I remember the good old days, when Internet was for porn and not just to keep us under control to the point of bowl movement detection"... 

Ite, Missa Finita Est.

It is hard to say this - but I wrote it anyway.

Don't wring my neck, kid - I had to say it.

The Irish people voted  for the repeal of Ireland infamous 1983 virtually total ban on abortions. 

On one side, I tend to think that it was somehow overdue.

When a country is willing to force 12 y.o. carry to term the result of an incest rape , and let women die of septicaemia to respect the right of an ectopic pregnancy - no, it won't ever become a live child, sorry - then the law is a bit on the fucked-up side of things.   

At the same time, I recently came to the conclusion that the abortion discourse should be more "symmetrical".

Right now if, be it by way of bad chance or guile, a man incurs in the mistake of fathering a child that he does not want to have, he finds himself rather at the mercy of  the woman.

She may acquiesce and go for an abortion, or carry the pregnancy to term and then demand the clueless "father" for support till the undesired offspring is adult.

Women wants to be able to get rid of unwanted, accidental pregnancies and go on with their life?

OK. I am positively convinced that it is in their rights. Also, they would find a way to do it anyway, so why bother criminalizing it? It's just another "war on" something, and we've seen how well they work.

But it should be in men's right to disown their accidental offspring, too.

Having the right to ask for the abortion of the accidental product of one's  misguided copulation, request to whom the mother may refuse - it is her body, after all - but that would anyway signal the cessation of every legal tie between the father and the future born.

It seems fishy?

OK - we know ourselves, men.

Plenty of asses would exploit it to have sex without rubber, no matter if they trust the woman or not, just because it is more fun.

Some would maybe even argue that these are a kind of men whose reproduction should rather be avoided ...

Leaving aside the vague smell of eugenics emanating from this latter argument - and you may know how much I like eugenic... let's direct our species evolution, because our little brains clearly know which conditions will be around in 25000 years, right? Come on -  I really think that we've all done it, at least once.

Yes, even me... and my list of dalliances can be counted on one hand. 


Let's put some constraints to it, thus - So that the serial philanderers would still get stuffed in the end - what is a reasonable number of abortions, one that covers 99% of women's lives in countries where it is allowed? 3, 4? Sounds about right; let's give men 3 scot-free cards - and make these requests public acts, with information freely available on them.

No no-disclosures agreements, or other such poppicock on this. Let it be publicly known that you are an ass that abuses his reproductive ability.

But I do not see a reason why a 19 y.o. girl that had a fling with a manipulative ass-hole can avoid having her life destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy, and a 19 y.o. boy can't.

Do you? You do? Really? Genderist much, I'd say.

Harsh?

If us men can't have it both way, so shouldn't you, ladies.

If you really care for parity, that is, and that's not just an excuse for some power grab.

Because if it is, then you can't complain that the Trumps of this world get elected.

It is kind of a bad period, for me.

As it says on the tin - these last few weeks, I have been constantly angry, when not depressed or both things at once.

In the pauses, I just cry.

The old joke about getting rich, to buy enough Russian nuclear waste to build a dirty bomb and turn my home-town in a radioactive wasteland for a decade or so, feels much more appealing these days... as a life project.

OK, OK, I know - I won't ever do that.

I am not that.

At the same time, I see the alt-right ass-holes, the Islamic fundamentalist, the neo-fascists and all the other idiots trying to piss against the wind of history and I feel that I get why they do the shit that they do.

Mark my words - it is and will forever be pretty useless in the long run, or worse damaging, but I get why they do it.

In the worse case scenario, they'll manage to snug some power, make a mess of some pretty ugly kind (let's hope, not as ugly as WWII) which will only manage to accelerate the transition to a post-males society that I fear is inevitable.

Fear, or hope - because, if I am right, the inevitable evolution of modern society toward a massively concentrated, hyper-specialized structure will dole higher and higher stresses on the human male, for ever-shrinking rewards.

As I wrote somewhere in this blog, I think that the all-conquering, all-destroying, all-raping and everything-pillaging barbarian horde is the embodiment of the "male biologic imperative" as it can be seen by young, testosterone-filled men.

On the other hand, modern society tends - by necessity - more and more toward a hive-like structure that has little to no relationships with young men core drives (but rewards handsomely the old ones in positions of power... a pity that they can't get the young trouble ones to die in droves during wars, like it was done in the old days, without risking to wipe away the whole shebang).

By the way, here is where the white supremacists and the ISIS idiots delude themselves.

They believe that the evolution of society[ies] toward more inclusive practices is the product of some ideological cabal luring the masses away from a supposedly more moral, older set of ideals and values.

Alas, the reason is probably a much more pragmatic one - nowadays, economy rides on applied talents, and on the occasional moment of brilliance that produces a process improvement, or an entirely new product.

As talent is casually distributed, and the capacity to have a brand new idea probably even more so, the "traditional" society is really one that throws away half - or more - of the goods.

If this is accepted as true(1), then the inevitability of the process toward the post-maleness is total- at best, it can be delayed, and by not much either.

At worst, it can be precipitated, by showing how much of the still existing vantages enjoyed by men are more a feature of cultural inertia than anything worth keeping.



(1) Even giving for sure that men and women have different brain architectures, these seems to matter very little on intelligence and may at most tweak inclinations one direction or the other; As far as ethnic differences go, inter-ethnic genetic difference is actually much less than internal groups variability - ethnicity is little more than culture and maybe a bit of melanin, the first being enormously more significant than the second. So, ideas just pop up in whomever they want, and society needs them.  

Note: I realize that I am not particularly original... much of the same can be found in Aldous Huxley "Brave New World" and in his successive collection of essays, "Return To Brave New World" - which was even more male-oriented than this little piece of mines.

Externalities

It is not true that I hate pregnant women

I read an article on the Irish referendum on abortion.

In it, the writer notes that the current state of abortion in the country - more or less, illegal no matter what - does not produce the outcomes usually predicted by the proponents of its legalization.

While it is true that hardly any Irish woman dies in back-alley abortions, it is a bit of a disingenuous argument in that they simply take a plane, and move to the nearest country where it is legal to have it.

However, the article also notices that the Irish government does something more than just prohibit the medical procedure, in its efforts to convince women to keep their babies - it reaches into its dilapidated pockets and manages to fork out some benefits, a well as some helping labor rules, to try to offset the burden that represents bringing a pregnancy to term.

The Irish government, and the conservative forces driving its policies on reproductive issues, seem to be open to the incontrovertible fact that one can't have something for nothing.

It is a bummer, as it really botches the vision of conservatives as I know them.

As far as I can see in the U.S.A and other  countries , most often than not the same ones  that would punish women for doing the financially sensible thing - cut their losses and move on with their life - are usually also the ones that press to reduce "entitlement programs" like the one that helps cover health care for poor children.

They want women to keep their children - sometimes adducing truly honorable reasons like "we need them kids to work and pay for our retirements" (1)  - yet they refuse to help in the upkeep of the produced offspring.

I realize that wanting the barrel full and the wife drunk is an integral and basic human characteristic, but a bunch that usually complains about the financial unrealism of wild-eyed progressives should really know better.

They want women to have babies - maybe just to put them up for adoption once delivered? (2)

Let's pay them their time and pain, generously - I suspect it would tip the scales in the right direction more than the kind of draconian laws that most conservatives favor.

If they do not want to sacrifice any sizable portion of their wallets for the cause of life - which I suspect accurately describe an awful portion of GOP supporters, even among the fervent pro-life evangelicals - then they should just shut the fuck up.

(1) Which kind of conflicts with the "in the next ten years, as much as 30% of U.S. workforce will be made redundant by automation" - after which, chances are the tech will really improve and all bets are off. If by the mid of the century all but a fraction of the general population is going to be jobless, having more kids to jail for being vagrants is not going to improve things..

(2) That was the way in Causescu's Romania, and the effect of being reared that way isn't exactly genial... a study found that - on average - it resulted in 20 I.Q. points less, when compared to siblings who were raised normally, for those unfortunate enough to receive no maternal cares in their fist three years. It beats the alternative, until you factor in the content of note 1 here above, which leads to a " we could as well enroll them in jails as they are born, it would be more earnest" kind of illumination. .  

Incel

The True Form Of My Mind
And of Toyota's on-board computer code, 
as it transpired from the Bookout case.

Dear Incel,
 
First of all, you should really drop the "in".

You are voluntarily celibate.

In the [western] world we live in, the ones that really can't get any tail are indeed many - usually, persons with physical or mental handicaps that go well beyond being overweight or a mild depression.

And of them, a not small number are women.

If you do not fit this bill, if you have all your limbs and can keep a job for any sizeable amount of time, you are likely able to get laid. If you want.

OK, your most probable partners aren't going to be fashion mannequins or cheerleaders, but that is not a reason to avoid them.

Truth be told, a 40 years old, overweight housewife - one that is looking for a last cock to shag before menopause sets in - may be not a person you would brag about to your pals at the pub - [by the way, you shouldn't - even when the partner was a young Natalie Portman and it is the only thing you did, in the last six months, that proved to yourself that you are alive], but she is also likely to be ten times the sexual prowess of the average model starving on the catwalk.

I cannot quantify with reference to cheerleaders as I have never met one in a biblical way, but chances are they have other priorities beyond sex - alas, that's just being healthy young women in our society - so I would guesstimate a factor 3.

She is also someone that is all too easy to encounter, in our time - they haunt almost every corner of the web, the bars  in downtown, and your church's choir. They are ubiquitous, and ravenous - just give them a chance to prove it, and you'll see.

So, if getting laid was as fundamental for you as you weep that it is, you'd found a way to.

Recognizing that your celibate status is really a choice is a freeing moment, that allows one to ask himself a first question:

"Why do I not care that much to have sex?"

This may have many answers, often more than one at a time.

Some of them could be potentially irksome - "My idea of a fun afternoon could end with her dead, me with a 25 to life without parole, if I manage to avoid insanity [in which case, they may as well throw the key of my padded cell away, as NO psychiatrist will ever stake is or her professional reputation on me being cured], and leave me also unable to look at my face in the mirror".

Some scarier thus - "I do not trust anyone to enter that most vulnerable zone that I call my intimacy".

Some understandable - "I do not have tat much of a sex drive" [unless a board, hammer, nails and a woman's nipples are involved; Too much information, reader? My bad.]

Some may even be almost sweet - " My mother is alone, old, deaf and near blind and she hates the guts of any woman that comes nearer than a mile from me, so any medium to long term relationship I have ever had pained her. Yet I need more than a quickie, to understand and appreciate having sex with a woman!"

Some bring on other questions - "They always tell me that I have to change myself, to get this or that. Change myself into what they want from me, to get a speckle of happiness. Why can't I be accepted and loved as I am?" (Because humans are ass-holes - all of us, that why).

Infinite possible answers, only you know the ones you have to give yourself.

Then you can tackle the other question, the one that has way less numerous answers.

"Why I was so bothered by it, to tell myself that I was alone because women are cruel? Women are no better nor worse than men, each gender has its set of priorities - that changes over time - and that's all".

Why were so bothered? You could stole a page from the pick-up artists - possibly, not one that was cited in Cosmo, be smart - if you really cared about getting laid.

You don't.

And it is your right to not care.

Even when the whole of our culture seems set out to convince you that it is fundamental to your status as a human being - it is not.

That it is central to your worth as a person - it is not.

That good people have good sex - this contrasts with the experience of almost everybody.

That a great man should have a good job and get the high school Prom Queen - Why should he? The job, maybe, but the Prom Queen may as well be asexual and into dragster racing... which would make her a hell of a friend to discuss mechanics with. 

It is time to recognize that, if societal changes affected the rules by which women were expected to live their life, the same must apply to men.

Do not see your celibate state as an external imposition.

See it for what it is: the refusal to commit to your required role in a social order that does not recognize you as more than a cog in the machine - if you are lucky enough to have a place in it at all, which is something we are told that increasingly less of us will have in the future.

Not as a disgrace imposed upon you from the outside, but as a supreme act of civil disobedience.

The definitive form of non-violent resistance to the status quo:

The refusal of participating in its renewal, and the will to let it crumble by old age.
 

A Tarot Card

It's hard to stand tall, with so many out to rape you.

It is not without misgivings that I used The Donald face - I usually stay away from politicians and other similar figures, in that they are temporary fixtures of our culture, destined to fade away.

Raise his hand who could recognize a cartoon of Henry Kissinger, nowadays...


But the Donald?

Even if he would manage to be impeached, he is the man that single-handedly terminated seventy years of "Pax Americana", and the tradition of U.S. " 'benevolent' rule" in the international arena (predicated and practiced on the base of US' own enlightened self-interest, of course, and only as benevolent as long as nobody was so daft as to pick a bunch of commies for government).

I think that there are quite some chances for him to become an iconic allegorical figure.

The very image of the angry, little, privileged white man, deaf to history and reality, more than willing to break the very social order that allowed it to keep afloat - just for the sake of shoring up the perception of his own "virility".

Story repeats itself - first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally then as burlesque.

No, not finally, because history never ends - sorry, F.F., you were wrong.

Every form of art...

Yesterday, I was listening  to the radio, I heard this phrase:

"Every form of art is a form of Literature".

On the face of it, it seems like a nice and sensible enough proposition... only problem, it is NOT actually TRUE.

Personally, I think that there are two fundamental ways to perceive reality, influenced by the nature of their main sensorial vectors, which in turn spawn two approaches to analyzing and reproducing it  - and, by extension, creating un-realities - and, thus , two extremely broad classes of arts.

The first one is "sequential" perception - its basic sense is hearing and its main art product is literature.

Its most important non-artistic product is... science. Science is, almost inevitably, a reconstruction of the universe in terms of a collection of narrations - the theories and laws found in schoolbooks, as well as every single article published by any researcher, are all small tokens of narrative literature. 

For the very physical nature of sound, its perception is based on sequences of events, that the mechanics of human auditory system makes it to be discrete in nature - notes in music, letters , pauses and stresses in language.

So, my idea is that  "Every form of sequential art is equivalent to every other form of sequential art". 

The other type of perception is "holistic", the object of which is perceived as a whole without a decomposition of it in a sequence of elements.

 Its sensory vehicle is sight but, as far as I can tell, the human mind as we know it is not really able to handle this type of perception any well.

Nor our sensory system is really designed for it - when we look at something, the cone of focused vision we have is about 30º wide.

If the object of our contemplation occupies a visual space any larger, we are forced to move our gaze along its area, creating a mental sequence of something that has no defined sequence of its own.

The object may thus exist as a static image, but we are finally forced to perceive it as a sequence of partial impressions - this objective difficulty is such that we all but forget that things may simply... be.

Be, without an inherent dynamic of discrete elements susceptible of being aligned in a narrative thread. 

More than forget, we are so inured into narration that, when we cross something that could be perceived in a holistic way, we still analyze it through a decomposition into its formative elements - decomposition that may be completely arbitrary - and an argumentative discourse - i.e. a narration - about them.

I think that arts whose inherent vehicle is sight - paint, graphics, sculpture -  are not really bound to incorporate a definite sequential nature, though they may acquire it if so the artist desires.
Which artists all too often do, lest their public bemoans that the piece "does not say anything".
 
Language being the glue that keeps together human societies, and the most important tool available to gain and exert power in them, the arts based around its manipulation have always manifested a disproportionate influence - hence the prestige of  literature, that is at their roots, and the desire for practitioners of arts that are not inherently sequential to emulate the control that writers have over their readers through narration.

In the history of figurative arts, in much of the world, such a control has been produced manipulating the elusive quality called "composition", which essentially means exploiting assumptions and empiric observations about the psychology of viewers to guide the path of their eyes as they explore the piece.

But not all figurative arts are obsessed with it - many forms of sculpture live well beyond its reach, especially those related to product design, like much of pottery, some architecture and many car shapes.

Similarly, a good portion of Islamic art is as oblivious to narration as is it is to the reproduction of the human figure - Possibly because no lay narration should contend the primate of the Holy Book.

All these forms of art are not, really, forms of literature.

Yet they still are, most surely, art.

Excerpt

"constant social surveillance is the norm in 2018."

- Excerpt from the article "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/technology/future-cameras-ai-brains.html" 

The fact that it is so, and that it can be noted simply "en passant" by a journalist trying to sell how nice are new smart cameras with incorporated AI abilities, should be enormously upsetting.

The fact that is not - that we all know and accept that we are under surveillance, usually aimed at selling us crap but still surveillance - really means that we are totally and royally screwed. 

Midsomer Forgeries

I was looking an episode of Midsomer Murders (series 12, episode 3, "The Black Book"), where  a series of quite gruesome deaths

                              Note: from here onward, spoilers on that episode may appear.

are caused by the possession of a book detailing the small "errors" that a forger intentionally added to a series of paintings attributed to a 18th century painter.

At some point, a character destroys one of the forged paintings - and I felt it jarring.

The late Federico Zeri maintained that he was opposed to the destruction of forgeries, even in those cases in which these are recognizable as such - without any possible doubt - simply by stylistic analysis (i.e. the ones that suck).

He thought that they were worthy of conservation as forgeries, too, are part of art history.
In each era, he argued, the choices of the forgers are clues to read the tastes of the public.

As for the forgeries that are so good that they cannot be recognized without "external" documentary proofs - like the ones at the core of that Midsomer's episode - or forensic science, and fool experts for years or decades... well, I think that these are pieces of art, although maybe "minor".

Over the rest of the episode it is discovered that the author of the forgery was a renowned, local artist that had begun the "forging" with a simple study of the style of the old master, made with the honest intent of learning the essence of the work of a revered predecessor, and that his forgeries are remarkably model-free.
 
Seeing the (rather crass) character of the duped owner destroying the piece, I felt a pang - not "original", maybe, but still a piece of art, that painting ought not have been destroyed.

Aphorism

Behind every great man there is a great woman.

Behind many a broken man, there is also a woman.