WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
15d ago
The details of H.P. Lovecraft's life never bothered me. Probably because I never admired him as a human being or public persona the way I admired Harlan. So I can sit back and intellectually register that the existential dread he conjures up in so many of his stories just wouldn't hit the way it hits if the man wasn't constantly terrified of the mongrelization of his nation.
Also, well, my stance on what I believe to be the future of my nation is on record here. But it's enough to say I don't even necessarily find those stances to be offensive, and perhaps even somewhat prescient after the irrefutable evidence of the failures of multiculturalism we've all been subjected to in the countries or localities tipping white minority in the western world. But that's a separate topic.
No, my heart break with Ellison is from the fact that as a kid, I didn't love him for his work, but for his public persona. I came to his work much after the fact, and if anything, it's working backwards. I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is. Then I go back to the fiction and my heart sinks at another autobiographicalish story venting his spleen about how much he hates me.
WhiningCoil
15d ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
I don't think that's what originalism is. Every time I've seen people argue, claiming originalist bona fides, they bring up the surrounding context. The debates, the letters, the journals, and any other written record they can find from the founding fathers. They aren't considering the words on the page in a vacuum. If anything, that's what the "living document" people do. They ignore all the context around around the founding documents, squint, abuse semantics, and decide the words on the page mean whatever they want them to mean.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
Otherwise known as it's meaning.
Like, is this guy not worried at all about his future employment prospects?
He's a straight white male. What employment prospects? Every day I see a new headline about a massive fortune 500 company, academy or other bedrock institution nakedly discriminating against straight white males. And I've seen first hand even if you find a company that hires straight white males, guess what? You can't get contracts because you aren't "diverse" enough.
WhiningCoil
17d ago
I constantly see adds for these cute little pocket emulators, but when I see what is obviously the same hardware showing up again and again and again by different companies with sketchy websites, I nope out hard.
But a part of me is very tempted to take something like a MiSTer FPGA system at the high end, or a Retron 5 at the low end, and put them inside a case inspire by old wooden transistor radios. But that is a project for a distant day.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
You know, that is true, but also, when you watch Sam & IDubbz competing documentaries, one of the things that jumps out in IDubbz trying to encourage Sam to be more genuine and less of a character. Sam, understandably, believes if he ever did that he'd get deleted off the internet and unpersoned entirely.
One 'uge election victory later, and Sam does appear to be letting his true self come out at least a little bit more. His open letter to Elon was probably as close to an unironic manifesto for what he actually believes as we've ever seen, and is arguably responsible for his resurgence in fame/notoriety/attention.
So, not only did Sam try to pull IDubbz off the path, and IDubbz has proceeded to ignore all his advice and ruin his life, but Sam may have taken IDubbz advice and prospered enormously?
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Man, different strokes, different folks. I positively loathed Final Fantasy 10. I hated it's VO, I hated it's world, numerous boss fights sent me through the roof with frustration (Yunalesca in particular). I think what frustrated me most, especially towards the end game, was how insanely wasteful with my time the game got. You die in a boss fight, and you are committed to 5-15 minutes of unskippable cutscenes every attempt. It was excruciating. I found Tidus an infinitely more annoying character than Vaan, but that could have had more to do with the VO.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
This is straining my memory some, but I recall the gambit system in the original game being much more finely tuned than Zodiac Age. It only gave you the option of automating poisona for instance, after you'd spent a dungeon manually curing poison in combat. In Zodiac Age you can purchase all the gambits right from the jump, letting you automate everything immediately. I recall the original had this effect of, as soon as a task got tedious, the option was available to automate it. In Zodiac Age the game feels like it's playing itself more.
I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.
I donno, I think some of the quality of life features in Zodiac Age actually made the game worse in ways that are counter intuitive.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
What these platforms give you is simple setup and a quantifiable number of where you stand. When you contribute to an OS project you're trying to determine the starting quality of the project, how much "cache" it has, the value of your contribution.... much more complex.
I don't do any of that shit. I use OS software, and occasionally, when I have an excess of free time, I fix bugs and add features that I personally care about. Sometimes I even get them merged back in. I'm not resume building explicitly (but maybe, I donno), but it's great for my confidence. Getting anybody to accept code you wrote is great for confidence.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
So I got a Switch 2. Because I'll always be a Nintendo kid at heart.
My old Switch was dying. The fan in it was making a god awful racket. So I hadn't turned it on the last few months because I planned on just transferring everything to a Switch 2 anyways. I may replace the fan for fun and practice and sell it now that I'm not concerned about losing data.
First order of business was finally finishing the playthrough of Final Fantasy XII that had about 3 hours left to it. I fucking love this game. Favorite Final Fantasy by a country mile, and the only one I still fire up from time to time. Personally I preferred the original's license board over Zodiac Age's job system, but it is what it is. I generally always prefer things the way I first experienced them.
The game was still as obviously flawed as it was when I first played it in 2006. The first half of the game is way stronger than the back half. The entire plot seems to revolve around chasing McGuffin after McGuffin to no consequence what so ever. Every time you finally get a McGuffin, some cutscenes halfway across the world with characters you never meet happen which move the plot along independent of anything you did. That said, I still love the real time combat and gambit system, the localization is top notch and the accents they gave all the groups really heighten the expert world building that went into Ivalice. Ultimately it's a game that is a work of art despite itself.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
They were a protected species. I spent some time googling the name, all the news articles conspicuously avoided his picture, except a particularly spicy one with copious use of N-Bombs, and then this one that finally gave me a mugshot.
There was some random black podcast clip that went around a few months ago where one of the guys on there was talking about his community needing to clean up it's act. He said something along the lines of "We all know somebody that is fucking kids". Everyone went conspicuously silent and started sputtering denials. But if you've ever listened to any black comedy, the family/neighborhood pedophile in the ghetto is an oddly consistent bedrock of bits.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
I get that. I don't know how old Dane was. I guess that doesn't matter so much though. I suppose everyone we grew up with feels perpetually young to us anyways.
My cousin was 50, and I don't want to speak ill of the dead, so I won't. It doesn't feel right airing all his assorted personal struggles, and the ruins of a life he was struggling to be "ok" with. Instead, here's the ending monologue from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which feels appropriate.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Exercising via leetcode or codewars to see where you stack up
Listen, I know this is popular. I know leetcode bullshit comes up all the time in interviews. But IMHO, a better proxy for skill is open source contributions. Can you dive into a foreign code base and understand it? Can you code in the style/language already extant? Can you check out a project and have it compile?! I'd suggest using more open source software, and if something bothers you, fix/change it! Be the meme about the engineer who joins a company, fixes one bug that's been bothering him for 10 years, and then quits. Leetcode is a complementary skill, relevant 10-15% of the time at best, in actual day to day coding. Frankly if leetcode is all you can do, or all you enjoy, I wouldn't suggest sticking with it.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
I fucking love programming, and noodle around in random unprofessional bullshit all the time.
But i spent my childhood obsessed with computers. I also did Computer Engineering with a software focus versus straight comp sci. I felt it gave me a better perspective of how computers actually work.
What's been good for my confidence has been contributing to a smattering of open source projects I used, but which had bugs that annoyed me. Emulators, open source bios, etc. Jumping into foreign code bases is great for experience.
From where I sit, the industry is scary. My little corner in my small government contractor company is fine. But I do wonder if the ladder got pulled up behind me. Some of it is hardcore culture war material, so I have to leave it at that.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Man, late 20's huh? When I graduated in 2006 my starting pay as a programmer for the company I interned with was $65,000. I moved out, paid $1200 in rent to live 5 minutes from the office, and had more money than I thought I could ever spend. I was super confident, wading into code bases and fixing difficult to find memory leaks, or converting a small C++ code base for an ArcGIS extension into C# because that's what they converted the SDK to primarily support going forward.
In 2006.
Looking at the industry in 2025, making $45,000 and being lukewarm on the actual task of programming, I'd do trades, hands down. I mean, myself, right now, with 20 years experience, making what I make, no way. Though even still, if my industry exploded enough, it's a thing I'd consider, but it would be a downgrade. But it doesn't sound like that path is open to you. Don't worry about what vices other tradesmen end up developing. Plenty of software guys have self destructive habits too. Just look at WallStreetBets.
RE: Family, never say never. Just, plan as though you might. Don't go full hedonist and spend every penny you earn, or wreck your health
WhiningCoil
20d ago
We'll have to compare notes on who's approach is better/worse. I'm just stubbornly sticking to my program, working through the injuries with extra stretching and warmup, instead of trying to change programs. Because I've more or less accepted, though I hate it, that something is gonna hurt. Avoidance of pain and injury is a myth.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.
Because I can!
Snatches can be difficult on hands. But I've refined my technique to the point where they aren't for me. Or at least drastically less so. Basically at the top when you punch through there is a moment of weightlessness. This is the easy part for most people. I've seen a lot of people do different things on the way down. Some drop it straight down, some kind of unwind around the side like they are coming down from a press but then let it keep falling. I pull my wrist out of the handle as quickly as possible, back tracking the punch through movement. It recreates the moment of weightlessness from the punch through, and saves my palms a lot of wear and tear.
You just need to work on your pull out game.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Progress continues on my 200 snatch goal. I carved out some headroom above 130 reps. But man, it sucks getting old. First something in my mid right back tweaked the fuck out. Sprained or knotted something so fierce I could barely get out of bed the next day. Eventually stretched/massaged that out. Then something in my right shoulder hurt so fucking bad I couldn't reach behind myself to wipe my own ass with my right hand. And more or less only that movement in specific caused problems. I could actually still do tons and tons of snatches no problem. Lots of stretching and massage for that too. Both those problems have gone away and don't seem to be coming back. But now my fucking fifth metacarpal on my right hand, which I broke in my 20's, has decided to ache for days every time I do my 100+ snatch reps.
Fucking why?!
On a sadder note. We lost my cousin last month. The funeral was last week, and I found out he committed suicide. We weren't especially close growing up, but we had reconnected a few years ago, and unfortunately lost touch when I moved away. He was a good guy, struggling with what remained of a life of poor choices and core traits he couldn't reform, despite solid success breaking some of their more destructive manifestations. There was always such a tone of regret when we'd catch up, and he'd ask how the wife and kid were doing. He clearly wanted those things, he'd had chances, but he couldn't stop himself from fumbling them, badly.
I miss you cous'. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're at peace now.
WhiningCoil
20d ago
Long distance relationships aren't real, without a concrete plan to become a short distance relationship. Preferably you've at least traveled to meet this person already?
I made the terrible mistake of getting into a LDR as an early 20's super nerd who'd barely interacted with women, at least not successfully. The novelty of "Somebody likes me!" was nice, but actually meeting torpedo'd it so fucking hard. Granted, this was the mid 00's and things were a little bit different socio-culturally. But it turns out, the sort of woman who is desperate enough to latch onto a long distance relationship is even worse than the sort of man who does. Consider all your flaws, and reasons you can't find a real relationship near you, and understand that along axis you don't even realize exist, she's probably worse.
That said, the strategy I pursued after that might not even be available anymore, so who knows.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
What then?
The existential dread that you've truly wasted the one life you were given on this Earth, and there is no going back. Then you die. Or at least many do.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
That being said, and I mean this genuinely, but your posting style seems very uhhh cynical for someone who believes in Christ? If you genuinely believe in the Christian tradition, shouldn't you be more joyous? Christ won!
Yes. I am a lifeline cynic/edgy internet atheist trying to change my ways. It's not moving in a straight line.
WhiningCoil
22d ago
At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week. Was the Minnesota shooter a D or an R? Will I ever really know? We still don't know shit about the Butler PA Trump Assassin. Or the motives of the Vegas shooter. I've utterly given up concern over whether the truth of the Christian tradition is 100% literally exactly what happened. Probably 75% of what I hold to be true about history, or the active state of my own country, is a lie. Lies I will never have the ability or opportunity to correct. Shit, people get wrong the truth of things they saw with their own damned eyes. Eye witness testimony is famously among the worst forms of evidence. I get all the nitpicking about the game of telephone/oral tradition that eventually got put down in the bible, and then translation after translation etc. I just no longer see how that same argument isn't a fully generalized destructor for any concept of truth.
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history." It goes back to the constant arguments about how much of what we know about, say, Alexander the Great was real, how much was propaganda, and how much was apocryphal nonsense? But at the same time, you can't go full retard and claim Alexander the Great never existed. Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
How important is it really if I choose to believe that 2000 years ago God manifested as a human on Earth? More over, as I go down the rabbit hole, and try to intellectualize that belief, I can still make it work, literally. If I really want to.
I guess if I had to try to put a point on this, it's that everything may be lies and nonsense. The fog of war isn't some vague concept in distant operations. It exists inside our brains far closer to the source than we'd like to believe. Not unlike LLMs have done more to degrade my estimation of people than raise my estimation of AI, arguments against the Christian Tradition have ultimately eroded my ability to believe anything more than they "disproved" Christianity in specific. So fuck it, why not return to the belief system my ancestors had for over 1000 years? They had a pretty good run during that time.
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-difficulty-in-dating-good-men
Another stream of consciousness essay from a town bike describing (probably without meaning to) how all men just blur together and cease being distinct human beings you could bond with anymore after being run through enough? You don't say?!
It's fascinating reading something like that, where the front half is just a pastiche of the ways men are objects to her, scarcely individualized. Then the back half comes up with about a dozen potential reasons she can't seem to bond with anyone... except the correct one. Alas.
Edit: You know what, let me elaborate. I knew a guy who knew a guy who used to be hooked on heroin. The guy I knew was too, but he was telling me about another junkie he met in NA. One addict to another he told him, being slightly older and along his path of recovery, that nothing he did in life ever felt as good as being on heroin. Not meeting the love of his life, not getting married, not even the birth of his first child. They all felt good, sure. But man... nothing topped heroin. Luckily for him, support groups like NA exist to keep him from succumbing to that eternal lure. I know their failure rates are high, but I like to think, like the guy I know and still see regularly, he's chugging along on the relatively straight and narrow.
Aella has spent the better part of her life smashing her moral compass with a blunt rock in a petty act of rebellion. The single piece of human machinery that gives us feedback when we are moving along a proper path of human fulfillment. And now she's complaining that nothing feels right when she attempts to return to the path, so she gives up. Maybe there is money to be made in a "Narcissistic Internet Whores Anonymous".
WhiningCoil
26d ago
Confused further by the fact that the pointing out essentially IS the consequence here.
Strong disagree. Like, I get that people believe everything is a social construct and thus all consequences are socially imposed. Or that what matters is not having done the thing, but people finding out you did the thing. But I'm not a blank slatist, I think certain behaviors actually do damage the human animal mentally, emotionally and physically beyond "social constructs", and I think someone looking for a mother of their children should have a right to know that a woman is a proud e-prostitute.
It almost gives me hope yet that no poor schmuck has ruined his life with her in the gravest fashion possible.
I feel like this would be different if Ellison had any sort of coherent views aside from being loud and angry. What did he stand for that could outlive him? Following along with the civil rights movement? Earning a few attaboys along the way? He mostly just spilled hate across countless pages.
Like I said below, I fell in love with the man's TV persona. And I greatly enjoyed many of his non-autobiographical stories. But undergoing this deep dive into the person has been a journey into the horror of the man. Where as I naively assumed before that the TV persona was the real Ellison because it was so much more impactful than Ellison on the page, and so I assumed written Ellison to be schtick, it turns out the TV Ellison was the schtick, and the written Ellison was the genuine article.
I can only describe it like this. There is a horror film coming out called "Cannibals Rape, Murder and Consume College Coeds 3". You watch all the press junkets and the actors seem very charming and likable. You know when you see the film you'll see some shocking stuff, but you know it's not real. There are no actual cannibals eating anyone.
Then 2 months later Italian authorities arrest the cast and crew because they did in fact rape, murder and consume one of the extras when they were filming in Sicily. Do you still separate the artist from the art? I mean, it was the most amazing cannibal film you've ever seen.
Possibly the only defining feature of Ellison's entire body of work is the hate. It used to exist in a box with suspension of disbelief applied. They were just words on a page. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that more likely than not, the hate was the realest part of him he ever put out there, and it's just sad. Not fun and edgy anymore.
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