The last word on Gamergate

… or at least the last word that isn’t from a “slopebrowed weaseldick”

The shrill conspiracy mongering and toxic threats of Gamergate [sic] are the side effects of Western culture, and US culture in particular, finally getting around to saying out loud to a certain type of obsolete man that the rest of us have come to a consensus in which degrading women and denying the rights of sexual or ethnic minorities to equal treatment is not acceptable. Nor should anybody have to endure constant insults and discrimination because of what they are or how they choose to live, or have to see constant, unrelenting and unapologetic images of people like themselves being treated as subhuman. Anyone who thinks that “social justice”– to use the Gamergoatfuckers favourite insult apart from saying they’ll rape or kill you– is a bad thing needs to sit down and shut the fuck up. It’s over, you lost, your time is coming to an end. You just don’t know it yet.

(Incidentally, this article by Arthur Chu intelligently traces back from the current debacle to one of recent history’s other big moments of raging, irrational masculine backlash against uppity minorities seen as threatening to the belief of certain straight white males that they have inalienable rights to the entirety of culture and society revolving around them and their interests; the disco backlash of the late 70s.)

All that said, it is with great pleasure that I present a link to a magnificent diatribe against this rabble of imbeciles/nacent terrorist group by former (American) footballer Chris Kluwe. I know! Not only is it a great piece of prose in its own right, being well structured and cogently argued despite his apparently incandescent anger, it also contains some beautifully vivid insults aimed at anybody who thinks a petty spat about reviews on a gaming site or merely pointing out examples of misogyny in a game you like justifies women (or anyone) being threatened with rape and death, or having to leave their home in fear for their safety. Read the article for context, obviously, but I couldn’t resist making a little shrine to such a delightful explosion of invective. I know nothing else about him but I love this man.

A tabulation of the insults in ‘Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off‘

• “A blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought.”
• “… makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet”
• “Angry neckbeards”
• “Little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny.”
• “Paint-huffing shitgoblins”
• “Slopebrowed weaseldicks”
• “Basement-dwelling, cheetos-huffing, poopsock-sniffing douchepistol”
• “Slackjawed pickletits”
• “Hemorrhoidal gunt stains”
• “It makes me want to pick you all up collectively and shake you until your rectum leaks out what little brains you possess because YOU’RE SO FUCKING DUMB.”
• “For some reason you think sharing your toys with others is going to make the world explode.”
• “Social ineptitude and too much time spent picturing yourself as the only creature that matters in the universe.”
• “… the mouthvomits you like to pretend are logical trains of thought.”
• “… some script-kiddie /b/tards and conspiracy-nut celebrities gleefully using you as a smokescreen for misogynistic hate.”
• “… apparently you pestilent little toads can’t imagine the concept of friendship.”
• “You don’t even see the complete idiocy of this idea because you’re too busy wargleblargling your face into your keyboard.”
• “Feel free to direct some of that naivete at the actual media, whose job is to cover things that actually matter.”
• “Misogynistic mouthbreathers who get off on making rape threats”
• “Misogynistic creeps”
• “Misogynistic cretins in all their mouthbreathing glory.”
• “Basement-dwelling sweatbeast”
• “I hope you all, every #Gamergater, picks up a debilitating case of genital warts.”

One, two, you’re coming for Freddy

Mr. Krueger’s got two new weapons

If you ever watched horror films in the 1980s or 1990s and thought to yourself “Freddy Krueger’s OK, but what this keloid-deformed, ultraviolent, serial killing child molester really needs is fishnet stockings and a massive rack”, then today you have finally hit the jackpot, my friend. A Japanese company is now offering this bishoujo Freddy statue, or “stuatue” as they have it on their site. I know by now it almost goes without saying that if we discover a highly inappropriate item has been sexualised, then somebody Japanese will probably be responsible. I take a glass-half-full attitude towards this fact, though. These figures are very, very wrong but bless your filthy, weird, perverted Japanese minds.

Bishoujo or bishōjo (美少女) means “beautiful young girl”, and is usually taken to mean a woman younger than university age. Given the obvious intent behind this item, it’s reasonable to translate the figure’s Japanese name into English as Barely Legal Freddy Krueger. Their tagline plays on the Krueger playground rhyme heard in the films (i.e. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…”): 1つ、2つ、フレディが来るよ・・・美少女になって！ My Japanese isn’t great, but I think this could be translated idiomatically as “One, two, Freddy’s coming… and becoming a girl!”

They also point out that she’s standing in a pool of blood– which is always good fun, isn’t it?– and furthermore she has a “nice chest” and a “thigh gap”, i.e. the tops of her inner thighs wouldn’t touch each other even when she’s standing with her feet together. For those fortunate enough not to know already, it is my sad duty to report that this latter fetish item is the most recent body dysmorphic, mostly impossible beauty ideal being pushed by the fashion world and its related fucking-with-the-minds-of-women and normality-pathologising industries. It’s also worth noting that Freddy has used her trademark murder weapons to cut herself on the shoulder and thigh, because there’s nothing sexier than self-harming anorexic teenage girls, right?

Jailbait Jason Voorhees (from the interminable Friday the 13th series) is also available, and she too seems to have experienced some difficulty in dressing herself sensibly. Doesn’t she get chilly dressed like this, hiding in the bushes and spending ages inside cupboards or under floorboards preparing for that perfect kill? This relentless, remorseless killing machine has an axe, a machete, the iconic hockey mask, “powerful sixpack abs” and, most crucially of all, large breasts.

Oh, Japan.

“F-3, Passport, page 2, title 4”

Brace yourselves, nerds. This week it’s an onslaught of vintage computer images from Computers: An Illustrated History by Christian Wurster, published by Taschen. Honestly it’s so interesting and visually arresting (and virtually wordless, as the title suggests) that I could scan almost every page of it, but I’m not going to. I strongly recommend that you buy this splendid book if you like the images I’m posting, just as I suggest you do for the work of any other authors, artists, musicians, or film makers whose efforts I feature here or that you see on other blogs, and just as I also gently suggest that you support me in a small way by buying one of my books if you enjoy this blog.

Anyway, commercial message over, here’s an inexplicable image from a 1984 German ad for the Atari 800 XL.

Caption: “Wow! I just said ‘Man in the Mirror’ and it replied ‘F-3, Passport, page 2, title 4’.”

The text on the screen describes what I initially assumed must be a fictional album, since the details seemed so daft: it says the genre is “jazzrock” and the songs have stupid titles like Mango Tango. Passport was, however, a real German prog rock and (shudder) jazz rock band who did indeed release an LP called Man in the Mirror in 1983. This confirms that the gentleman pictured here really is DJing at one of the shittiest discos ever. Probably best not to even try working out what narrative we’re meant to glean from this photo. Miss Average in Pink getting short shrift and a lecture on Hawkwind when she complains that nobody wants to hear prog and jazzrock at a disco?

Interesting with hindsight that actually playing a whole song as a file directly from a digitised playlist was still far beyond the capabilities of a home computer.

Some frightful, eldritch poetry by EP Dickcraft

A PS to yesterday’s post about Emily Dickinson and some noxious jelly that came out of a meteorite at Amherst, Massachusetts in 1819. I mentioned HP Lovecraft and Emily Dickinson: I have now mashed up HP Lovecraft and Emily Dickinson. I also mentioned Morrissey. PRAY I DO NOT MASH UP HP LOVECRAFT AND MORRISSEY.

I started Late – Killed my Dog

And visited Arkham –

The Shoggoths in the Cellars

Oozed out – To my alarm –

And in the Upper Floors

Folk with mien of Frog

Extended Rugose Hands –

Presuming me to be their Dinner

Sent over – to be devoured

Delivered – in Butcher’s paper

To a Color out of Space –

Frightful messenger

From Unformed Realms –

Of Infinity beyond all Nature –

Whose mere existence

Stuns the Brain –

Numbs us with the Black Gulfs

It throws open

Before our Frenzied eyes.

No Figment of the Thing That dazzled, Yesterday

I made this picture of Emily Dickinson. I can only apologise.

In which I manage to discuss the poetry of Emily Dickinson, cosmic horror, Superman, Morrissey and Steve McQueen without exerting myself unduly.

Recently I was perusing a laughable book about- well, it’s hard to say exactly. Just sort of general things that might be called inexplicable or mysteries if anybody actually gave a shit about them or they weren’t clearly the result of somebody suffering from a bout of delirious, drunken stupidity or mental illness. Like Fortean Times, but even more random. Is there a turkey in the Bayeux Tapestry? It’s not really a mystery if nobody cares about the solution.

It’s the sort of book that usually costs a few pounds in a remainder shop, or is for sale in what my esteemed colleague Kid Carpet calls Mystical Shit shops (Seriously, I am a huge fan of Kid Carpet. Download his song Mystical Shit for a start), alongside dream catchers, rag rugs and crystals to unbung your chakras. My local library has loads of these books, for some reason. And a very comprehensive  but never used section on things like irritable bowel syndrome, drug induced psychosis, anorexia and whatnot. For obvious reasons I’ve never made any effort to befriend the librarians.

Anyway, there was one interesting thing in the aforementioned book: an account of some strange jelly that apparently fell out of space in 1819 and landed in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seems not to have occurred to the author that this (at the time very small) place was the lifelong home of the poet Emily Dickinson and her family, although she wasn’t born for another 11 years.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the NHS

British bureaucracy: it came, it saw, it founded an empire, it ripped off other people’s stuff and it made Europeans, Asians and Africans alike fill in stupid bloody forms. Not all of our bureaucracy is horrible though. Some of it is magnificent, even, and the National Health Service is one of those magnificent bureaucracies. The attacks on it by American plutocrats who think a government looking after its citizens is socialism (and that socialism is an insult), and the UK’s own traitorous Tory/Liberal Democrat government’s sly attempts to cut our hard-won NHS off at the knees are both the kinds of assault that perversely underline its value. If those selfish, silver spoon arseholes hate it so vehemently and feel threatened by it then it’s got to be a good thing.

For all of its many faults and failures, the NHS even makes an attempt to fit the most disenfranchised and disconnected members of our society into its bureaucratic framework with a view to getting them the free medical treatment that they’re (arguably) morally entitled to and definitely (in the UK, anyway) legally entitled to. How? Pretend postcodes.

Pull up to the pa-rappa-pum-pumper, baby

For those who thought Bing Crosby and David Bowie was a pairing of hallucinatory unlikeliness, a bit of Grace Jones + ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ + Pee-wee Herman + something that’s (ostensibly at least) a kids’ TV show= FULL NORMALITY INVERSION.

First thing of note: Jones has been wrongly delivered to Pee-wee, having been originally destined for the White House; in winter of 1988 the president of the United States was George Bush Senior. Do we really think that Bush deserves to get Grace Jones delivered to him in the mail at Christmas, or ever? We all know he wasn’t a good boy.

Mr Shape and Mr Pipes are keeping an eye on your children

A Halloween viewing of the notorious Ghostwatch set me thinking about the undercurrents of historical phobia that seemed to bubble up particularly strongly through British culture in the 1970s and 1980s. This in turn reminded me of the exceedingly cult show, Sapphire and Steel, which is still fondly remembered by many British people of a certain age and a particular bent (and also apparently in unexpected places like Peru) for moderately but permanently traumatising them when it was first shown in the early 80s. I recently watched this show again as well, including episodes that I’d never seen before either when they were first shown or when they were repeated in seemingly endless loops during the late 1990s and I evidently had little better to do than watch satellite television all night.

For those who don’t know or are young, the eponymous characters were played by two pretty big British stars of the time. I read somewhere that one of the reasons the show was relatively short-lived was that its stars had so many other jobs to do, although this also sounds like the kind of bullshit that agents put about as a kind of bargaining chip for their clients. Joanna Lumley and David McCallum play a pair with definite but asexual chemistry. They could loosely be described as psychic detectives who appear, sometimes literally out of nowhere, to deal with what are obliquely half-explained as incursions from time or dimensions beyond the ordinary. These may take the form of anachronisms, time slips or hauntings but the situations in which Sapphire and Steel find themselves invariably start out weird and then rapidly spiral into the incomprehensible. In a good way.

In keeping with all British television of that time, they were probably given about £10 to spend on making it and it looks like they blew £5 of that budget down the pub before they even started filming.  It’s incredibly stagey and untelevisual in its execution, and often they don’t make the best use even of the limited sets they’ve been able to bodge up. But anyone (or rather, any team of people) who can create even a handful of chilling, iconic and never to be forgotten scenes or images within such restrictions… well, I think they deserve a lot of credit.

All of the “Assignments” (in total six stories consisting of varying numbers of weekly episodes) except one were written by P.J. Hammond. He clearly had issues with history and the persistence of the past, turning domestic staircases, bedsits, train stations and even a petrol station into ominous facilitators of incidents that often amount to temporal rapes; modern people transformed or disappeared or imprisoned in loops of time or battered by echoes of past atrocities. These aggressions are, moreover, apparently instigated by the malignancy of Time itself. It slowly becomes as clear as anything ever does in the series (i.e. not very clear at all) that Sapphire and Steel are interlopers too, perhaps merely humanoid or passengers riding in human forms rather than truly human. Despite being firmly of the (then) present and emphatically not time travellers, Steel in particular has odd gaps in his knowledge such as being unsure of the difference between World Wars I and II. Sapphire sometimes speaks disparagingly of “humans.”

Of course in support of this historophobia theme I could also go to Hammer and to Doctor Who’s Tom Baker gothic horror/Victoriana period, but if you think I’m walking into that minefield you’ve got another think coming, my friend. There’ll be absolutely no discussion of Doctor Who here. It’s more than my job’s worth, mate. You know, health and safety.

I’ve spoken to you all sternly about spoilers before, but again I’ll say that if you’re the kind of big baby who whines about spoilers for things that were on television thirty years ago then you’d better go and do something else.

Shii ChiKiN

Let’s shower off the stench of nerve gas and madness from that last post about Aum Shinrikyo by spending thirty seconds with the benign form of Japanese insanity known as “advertising”. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Princess Leia is a ballerina with a face like a blow-up sex doll, and she is totally cockblocking Luke and Han’s attempt to hook up with each other. Han is in panto as Peter Pan this Christmas. In this quadrant of the galaxy, tinned mandarin slices and pallid pineapple halves go great with Sea Chicken. Darth Vader wears all of his bicycle reflectors at once because he’s totally sick of near misses, then drivers have the audacity to shout at him for riding in the dark in a black cloak: luckily Stormtroopers never really hit anything, not even a seven foot tall man with a bucket on his head and riding a wobbly bicycle. C-3PO got the gender re-assigment he always wanted (swapped his legs and then he was a she, to paraphrase Lou Reed): now she’s rocking the gold sweatpants and disco heels.  Next week she’s doing a bit of modelling for American Apparel. Meanwhile it’s Bears & Uniforms night at the local gay bar and She-3PO is celebrating her sex change by serving the boys Sea Chicken snacks that look like tits.

“Sea Chicken” is canned tuna, in case you still can’t tell what the hell this is advertising. I hereby dub chicken “Land Tuna”.

Anthrax N Murder N Nerve Gas

EDIT: original video went away due to a copyright claim from Sony. Bizarre. I know Sony is very controlling and often makes batshit crazy decisions, but surely they don’t hold the copyright over all crazy products resulting from batshit crazy decisions? Anyway, the new link works for now.

Anime recruitment video (actually two of them spliced together I think, hence the seemingly random post-credit rocking astral powers montage at 13:20)  for Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous Japanese cult who were in the habit of whacking detractors or defectors and who finally went truly apocalyptic with their random sarin nerve gas attacks in Matsumoto in 1994 and on the Tokyo metro system in 1995. You don’t need to speak Japanese to know that the narrative being presented here is totally mental.