This isn’t particularly “novel”, I suppose, but it is… Interesting to see this trend borne out in real life…

The school I went to has a cluster of “folx” who have subsequently gone trans. Mostly in the year below me (three!!!), but also in my year. I have literally never heard of anyone in prior years having that happen. Mostly F2M (horrifyingly common, where I am), but there’s at least two M2Fs as well.

This individual is one of the F2Ms from the grade below. She (and I will insist on using that pronoun) was always odd, in any interactions I had with her. In school, she obviously never wore makeup, or bothered much with her hair, but nonetheless, never crossdressed (I doubt the school would have allowed it, in those days), and didn’t even cut her hair short. The only “trans” thing she did was shorten her name to a gender-neutral (uncommon, but not unique) version. Which I found odd, but not all that… Extreme.

In any normal, functional society, she probably would have just ended up as a lesbian. But no, not in “Current Year” in the West.

So now she’s late 20s, chopped off her tits, and has grown a fucking D’Artagnan beard, combined with early-onset male pattern baldness, and early-onset greying (she was naturally blonde, but dyed her hair black after “transitioning”, so it looks so much worse now)…

It is… Disgusting. As is the art that “he” makes. Yet “he” is being given a solo exhibition in the University-affiliated (surprise surprise) gallery here, along with fawning radio interviews talking about the “wonders of art school”, et al…

It makes my skin crawl. And yet pretty much everyone I know in the “arty” or “politically active” space, in this city, is falling all over it. Including extended family of mine…

Now, I’ve largely moved on from this place. My soul is no longer here, even if my body currently is. And yet, social media continues to remind me just how fucking loopy the middle class bubble of this shithole is…

All because the fucking internet, and “pop culture”, brainwashed these normies into mutilating their bodies, and dragging others into the “cause” with them.

Meanwhile there are people here who cannot even afford housing or healthcare, because we’ve fucked the entire system up by importing ever more third-world immigrants, most of whom would, privately at least, be hostile to woke bullshit like this…

Fuck this place. I’m done with it, and with these “folx”.

/Rant over.

I realize that the VMAs, and award shows in general, have largely lost relevance, and obviously none of us here are the target audience, but still…

For one thing, why is this thing held on September 11, in New York of all things..? That’s just bizarre timing to me, and surely it’s not coincidental.

Beyond that, though, they’ve shown a bunch of flashbacks to actually good performances from before everything turned to woke shit, and man, it’s like an entirely different world, in terms of quality…

Hard to believe that this is what passes for (extremely globalized - half of it is “Latin” and K-Pop) both “entertainment” and “pop culture” at this point.

It’s like a four-hour ghetto-worship ritual, lol.

Seeing/hearing them ruin fucking “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz, which was one of my favourite songs at one point, is pretty much the shit-cherry on the top of this pile of manure, I guess…

/endrant

I believe this just came out a couple of days ago. Much though I’m not a fan of Disney, or indeed the “live action” (in this case, that’s a lol in itself) remakes, at least this is an original story, even if it completely retcons the entire Lion King plot, lol…

I won’t spoil it, but, umm, I would say it is to The (original) Lion King what Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz. Very much the same concept. And doesn’t really make sense, if we’re taking the story from the original as being the (fictional) truth.

Anyway, it also features tribes of lions differentiated by fur colour (lol), quite a lot of the biblical story of Moses, and lions climbing snowy mountains (in Southern Africa??), so… Yeah.

Looks relatively okay though, all things considered. But I would be interested in hearing the thoughts of others on it.

This is not a particularly insightful observation, and I’m sure most of you are aware of this, but my god has that place ever good downhill, even compared to how it was before…

I only still have an account because some people (women, always women) seem to view it as an “acceptable” communication method for acquaintances. And if you meet one and you say “I don’t use Instagram” then that’s an immediate conversation-ended, lol. And admittedly it can be useful sometimes, for that purpose. Or to see what a select set of people are doing.

But man, for the majority of people I know, on there, whether I went to school with them, or Uni, or met them in some other way, it’s all become the same vacuous bullshit.

Girls LARPing the millionaire lifestyle despite being largely unemployed. Guys posing shirtless on treadmills or showing how “fit” both they and their partner are. All manner of pretentious, vacuous relationship bullshit.

Sure, Facebook is, and has always been, fucking terrible, but at least people are sometimes funny on there.

I can only think of one person on my Insta who ever posts anything particularly “amusing”, and I don’t even know her personally. The rest of it is utter, utter braggadocio shit.

/endrant

This shift seems to have happened from the mid-90s on, arguably, but it is very noticeable since maybe the mid-2000s. And you see it in everything, from kids’ shows to adult series to films.

What I mean is, in classical literature and fairy tales, generally supernatural beings want to become human. Gods and demigods don’t, I guess, but most other beings, and indeed most anthropomorphic animals, do.

This carries over into most early and mid-Disney stuff, from The Jungle Book through to Tarzan and The Little Mermaid. Obviously most of that is based on earlier stories. And then..? Shit went the opposite way.

First we had Felix the Cat and Brother Bear, and obviously “mutants” in comic series, and it seems to have ever-expanded from there, to the point where vampirism and lycanthropy for example are seen as less a curse or punishment, and more “a gaining of powers”…

One good example, perhaps, is to compare the original Grimm fairytales to the ridiculous tv show they made, supposedly “based” on those stories. Or Supernatural, similarly. Or Prometheus vs Alien. Or, for another slant, Bicentennial Man and AI vs something like Humans or Deus Ex Machina…

To me, at least, this is a very noticeable trend, across both fantasy (in particular) and sci fi, and it seems to carry with how obsessed people are now with mutilating their bodies, “transcending” gender and race and all that sort of shit…

Also noteworthy that we’ve gone from curing disabilities, in fiction, to portraying becoming disabled as a positive thing, and a form of “superpower”, rather than the thoroughly net-negative experience it usually is…

They even do that shit in kids’ programming, now, too…

So yeah, just something else be noticed and have been thinking about…

Bran Stoker be rolling in his grave…

I guess you could argue this all ties back in to our desire, now, as a society, to feel “special” and “different”, and to be “recognized”, but I do not see it as the sign of a healthy, self-respecting civilization, imho…

This is a legitimate, "mainstream" political party in Australia. They currently hold the balance of power in one state, and one territory. They also control a large number of local councils (counties, essentially, for the Americans) They're not the Communist party (though they do share many of the same beliefs), and they consistently take a significant proportion of votes at all levels.

You almost would not believe how wacky they've become. It's like they literally live in a fantasy land where everyone wears pronoun badges, where "acknowledgments of Country" are mandatory at all times, where people who don't vote the way they want them to would be excluded from politics, where all vaccines should be mandatory, and where "cis" white men should be excluded from all avenues of public life possible...

This, in a party now largely controlled by fucking Zoomers with no real experience, political or life-wise...

Like, they are actually fucking unhinged. Much more than I realized, and much more than they were 10 years ago (where one of them yelled at me, and then refused to talk to me afterwards, for simply saying "guys" to a room full of both men and women). It appalls me that this is the supposed "party of the youth", and that so many of my fellow countrymen and women (mostly women, lol) vote for these commie traitor fucks. Yes, the Overton window has shifted left, and they have shifted even further left in response, but I didn't realise they were quite this bad...

It's also worth mentioning that their ideological "fellow travellers" hold the balance of power in several German states, in parts of Sweden, and elsewhere.

We're always told how "frightening" the far right are (supposedly). Rarely are we ever exposed to just how crazy the far left are, at the same time...