Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

So many bastards, so little time.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Bark louder, little dog.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House" / Open Thread

Open Thread

by | 104 Comments

This post is in: 

Picked up some more discount flowers at the grocery today. I suck at arranging them but they are pretty anyway:

In site news, apparently one of the ads is going across the screen. That is not supposed to be happening and as soon as Alain is back, we’ll deal with it. We are looking into the annual site redesign (it’s been over a year I believe and Major and Alain are tired of patching shit and I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground), so maybe by next week or the week after we’ll have something.

All of my animals are snoring. Again.

Reader Interactions

104Comments

  1. 1.

    Mike J

    You say, ” I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground” and ” I suck at arranging them”.

    Maybe the two things are related.

  6. 6.

    EBT

    Wrote a short smut story last night. Just sex no plot, and entirely off the top of my head. It’s just about my most liked story.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    apparently one of the ads is going across the screen

    People have been mentioning it for like two months, particularly that it is all but impossible to close once it is there.

    @Major Major Major Major

    or which ad

    Fire up the site on a virgin browser (no add-ons, js enabled)? Remember seeing it when was using the Android tablet when in NY, until I reconfigured Firefox on it.

  12. 12.

    MagdaInBlack

    One day this last week, at lunch, I discovered a mexican ice cream shop, La Gran Michoacana, and had had a mangoneada, which may well be one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever had in my whole adult life ?

    Mangoneada or Chamango is a Mexican fruit drink. The drink is typically made with chamoy sauce, mangos, lime juice, and chili powder and is decorated with a tamarind straw.

    They made it with mango ice cream.
    Obviously the highlight of my week .

  13. 13.

    Jerzy Russian

    We are looking into the annual site redesign (it’s been over a year I believe and Major and Alain are tired of patching shit and I don’t know my ass from a hole in the ground),

    A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. Does this make it clear?

  17. 17.

    MomSense

    I just saw the best concert. It was a sendoff for one of the musicians my son plays with. My phone is crap and has no storage or I would have recorded it. Crazy good. The place was packed and none of us can believe they are not going out on tour.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    Had a lazy day re-reading a favorite book and generally just laying around the apartment. Moved a couple of things around in the craft room to make it easier to box things up.

    I discovered my spirit animal at Michael’s and bought All The Things that feature it. Here’s what someone far more talented than me created using the image. The only thing missing is the ice cream cone in her tiny T-Rex hand.

  23. 23.

    thalarctosMaritimus

    @Major Major Major Major: How come search works only for OPs, but not for comments?

    I noticed the other day that someone had asked MaryG how HBM is doing. When I wanted to go back later and see whether she’d answered, I’d forgotten who asked, when it was, and what post it was on. I tried searching, and it didn’t give me the comment.

    Is there a way to easily find things like that, or do I just have to hope someone else remembers and can point me to it?

    Thanks!

  25. 25.

    jl

    Beautiful flowers, and beautiful arrangement, Cole. Thanks for flowerpix.

    Thanks for the announcement on annual site redesign week.

    As for ads, I haven’t seen anything going across the screen. My ads seem especially confused right now. Credit repair ad, real estate flipping program for people with no cash, and pitches for luxury resort travel when money isn’t an issue ad at the same time. And somebody has been convinced that I really really want a Subaru for last few weeks.

    So, I have to go. I need to sign up for credit repair and make a reservation for the Presidential Suite someplace in the UAE, for the ultimate treatment.

  31. 31.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Major Major Major Major:
    I use that all the time when I search FF.net. Much better than their internal search and filter engine.

    In other news, I’m continuing to write that story I always talk about. I’m thinking of creating a covert US agency, like Section 31 from Deep Space Nine, that will act as antagonists to the protags, along with the FreeCorp CEO, founder, and scientist Scott Freeman.

    Apart of the MIC, they are dedicated to the cause of American national security and maintaining the status quo. Only the higher ups are aware of the Ivory Syndicate’s true goals to create a fascist and white supremacist world order; to turn back the clock of social and political progress in the Western world. The rank and file agents have no idea of any of this.

    I guess this would be more of a question for Adam, but could such an agency have been created in the US? That exists largely outside constitutional limits?

  33. 33.

    RedDirtGirl

    Heading home from a bluegrass jam in Red Hook, bklyn. Beautiful night, crisp, clear. Tomorrow swimming in the local outdoor pool. It’s supposed to rain, but as long as there are no rumbles or flashes, they let us swim.

  34. 34.

    jl

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: The Milky Way pic was nice. Thank you for that. But the Micky Mouse pic was sinister and scary. Now I expect you to spring some clown pix on us.

    You should make some nice pretty flower pix like the Cole boy.

  35. 35.

    L85NJGT

    Trump’s EPA coal reg rollbacks won’t make a damn bit of difference to a market that has transitioned to NG, but will allow for the continued fisting of communities like Letcher County KY – he got 80% of the vote there, and his coal industry cronies are going to transfer every bit of their sunk costs back on to the marks.

  45. 45.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Eh, perhaps. I was following the “Lexcorp” convention in that Freeman is a narcisstic sociopath with a messiah/god complex. So of course his name would be in the company he founded. Personally, I thought FreeCorp was a funny way to reference the “freikorps” of Weimar Germany; a clue that Scott Freeman isn’t the well-meaning tech visionary he portrays himself as to the public

  46. 46.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    Have you seen Sorry To Bother You? Armie Hammer plays a great techbro with bad motives. I’ll tell you up front, it’s a pretty bonkers movie, but I enjoyed it. Just keep in mind that it’s near-future sci-fi, not a realistic movie.

  48. 48.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    Why are you obsessing about (basically) “could this agency be realistic?”

    Your job as a fiction writer is to make it “realistic,” i.e., plausible, within the world that you are building in your book. That’s all there is.

  50. 50.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Steeplejack (phone):
    Because that’s what I do as a reader. I like to question things a lot and I care about realism and plausibility. I like detailed and realistic stories. Realistic in the sense that fantastical elements pop up but the reactions and operations of authorities need to be what they would be in RL.

    For example, I Iike to read stories that have fantastical elements meeting the mundane and the ordinary and seeing what happens. How society and ordinary people react to the appearance of beings of power and what that says about the human condition.

    The story I’m writing is fundamentally about power and how the existence of magical superpowers in our world would be a danger to society as we know it. That no one should hold absolute power.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    Heh. You sound like Damon Suede, the author of the writing craft book I’m currently reading, Verbalize! One of his pet peeves is when people tell writers they need to be “realistic” when they actually mean “plausible,” because IT’S FICTION FER CHRISSAKES! IT’S NOT “REAL” BY DEFINITION!

  53. 53.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    To answer your original question, the “secret government agency” has been a trope in science fiction and dystopian fiction for decades, so nobody is going to question it or ask for a full explanation of why and how it exists.

  56. 56.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Major Major Major Major:
    I could always change the name. My tone is definitely not going for camp.

    @Mnemosyne: That sounds cool and I’ve heard about it. My story is set in an alternate mid-1980s. However, there’s a sort of dissonance in that everything else culturally, politically, technologically about the decade is supposed to be like it was historically yet there exists advanced tech that not even we have today and I guess I’m having a hard time justifying this. Stuff like an Iron Man-like suit. It clashes with my desire for the story to be a period piece.

  58. 58.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:
    To add to the themes of the story, it is also about the importance of agency and free will to the human condition. That without choice, to be reduced to something akin to NPCs in a video game would destroy humanity rather than protect it because it would change us into something else. The villain is an arrogant, bigoted man who believes he knows best and thinks that free will is the source of all human misery; that to remove it would create a utopia under his supreme leadership, and that humanity would spread throughout the cosmos, wiping out inferior alien life to ensure he would remain on top forever.

    Basically, it’s an allegory for the dangers of totalitarianism and white supremacy

  60. 60.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    My story is set in an alternate mid-1980s. However, there’s a sort of dissonance in that everything else culturally, politically, technologically about the decade is supposed to be like it was historically yet there exists advanced tech that not even we have today and I guess I’m having a hard time justifying this.

    Please don’t feel like I’m putting you down when I say that what alternative history is a very, very common trope — not specifically the 80s thing, but doing an alternative history where X happens and disrupts everything. It’s pretty much the entire basis of steampunk. There are a lot of comic books that play with ideas like What if Batman was a vampire? or What if Superman’s rocket from Krypton had landed in Stalinist Russia instead of America?

    All you really need to do is establish your X and then tell the story from there. Think of The Stars My Destination, where he tells you how jaunting was discovered, and then goes on to tell the story.

    Also, you’re definitely going to want to have a few older beta readers to tell you what the 80s was really like. It wasn’t all John Hughes movies, or even Michael Moore documentaries.

  61. 61.

    opiejeanne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Depends on the clown.
    One year we took the girls to a hotel on Mission Bay for a week. There was a clown convention in the hotel that week, and they were the only kids in the hotel. It was an interesting little vacation. They weren’t scared of the clowns but they did get tired of all the attention. I think they were 10 and 6.

  65. 65.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @NotMax: More like this guy.

    In a sense, this is what my villain aspires to be, minus the medieval motifs. He tells himself he’s doing this for the greater good and has absolute contempt for democratic ideals but at his core is a controlling narcissist obsessed with power who wants to be worshipped by everyone

  68. 68.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @NotMax:
    I definitely want to capture that. The growing inequality, the Moral Majority bullshit and the AIDS crisis. I’d also like to show sexism in the workplace since the aunt of one of the central characters is a reporter who works for the SF Sentinel, a mid-tier metropolitan daily, and aspires to work at the WaPo. A muckraker, she has difficulty being taken seriously by her male peers.

    She has an adversarial relationship with Scott Freeman and doesn’t believe his benevolent schtick. She starts poking her nose where it doesn’t belong and has to be saved by her niece and her dimensionally displaced pony friends frequently.

  73. 73.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Yeah, this is intended to be a G1 and G4 MLP crossover. Didn’t I mention it? Megan from the Rescue at Midnight Castle film is the niece, except a few years older. I thought it would be entirely fitting for someone who has saved others’ worlds all the time to have to finally save her own.

    For the record, I’m not a huge fan of the show. It’s a little too cutesy for my tastes most of the time, even G4.

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    The sad paradox of the AIDS crisis is that it accelerated GLBT rights in a way that would not have been possible without such an urgent need. The idea that gay people would actually be able to legally marry each other was laughable as recently as 15 years ago.

  76. 76.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    Okay, if you’re putting magical ponies into it, you’ll have to dial WAY back on the murder and mayhem. Sorry. And there will be a fair number of people who will be quite offended that you’re going to fix white supremacism with magic ponies. You may have to go a bit more metaphorical.

    Also, your villain is the hero of his own story. He’s doing all of this stuff because he loves everyone and only wants the best for them, which is why he’s going to make all of their lives better. They just need to trust him and do what he says.

  77. 77.

    opiejeanne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??: the AIDS crisis was a puzzle at first. There was this ailment with no name that made it hard for some people to recover from simple ailments and infections, and there was a sudden uptick in the number of cases of the very rare Kaposi Sarcoma. Not too long after that it seemed to be afflicting gay men a lot, so it was called The Gay Cancer. They didn’t connect the two for a while, and the immune deficiency issue was affecting children and women, but mostly men. Mostly gay men.
    I remember being very confused about how Kaposi’s Carcinoma could suddenly afflict that many men, and mainly gay men. It made no sense to me or probably to any other layman.
    I had a hysterectomy in 1985 and nearly died when I hemorrhaged, but they gave me four pints of blood and fixed the leak. The next day I had a roommate because the hospital was overloaded and she was an emergency with what they thought was an ectopic pregnancy. A young black woman. She was very sweet, and when it ruptured she was crying that she didn’t want blood from a stranger, and couldn’t they wait until one of her brothers could get there and donate to her. She was in agony but so terrified of catching AIDS that she was willing to wait in that condition. The nurses, also African American, weren’t having her die while they waited for someone to find her brothers, and off she went to surgery.
    I think this was between the two attempts to filter the donor blood to preclude the virus, but it was not possible to create a filter capable of that. I had to be tested for AIDS several times after the operation, at my doctors’ insistence. That was a scary idea. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been tested so I went to Planned Parenthood, but about 6 months later I found out that most of the women I knew had been tested.
    I watched a friend die of AIDS. He was forced to move back home to his parents’ house and his dad never spoke to him again in those two years. His mother dragged him to every fucking Fundamentalist church/meeting/convention she could and tried to cut him off from all of his friends. The last time I saw him he was coming out of a revival meeting in a convention center where we were holding a flower show (I knew him from garden clubs and rose society). when I saw him I went to give him a hug but he held up his hands and wouldn’t let me, saying he didn’t want me to get sick. It broke my heart. He died a couple of weeks later but I didn’t find out for nearly a month.
    We found out from some random strangers that a cousin had died of AIDS. The family hadn’t told us because it would upset Grandpa. I think he went to his grave wondering why his namesake nephew didn’t come and visit him any more

  78. 78.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    I didn’t say white supremacy was going to be magiked away or something. The main villain and the assorted antagonists are ordinary people (as ordinary as a super-genius can be) who grasp at the chance for reality warping power that Equestria’s magic can bring. And the main villain certainly believes what he is doing is right.

    And there would be no explicit murder. Attemps yes, but nothing graphic. Fighting for sure and there would be general mayham. Nothing more graphic than what was on any of the DCAU cartoons.

  80. 80.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Well, this was originally inspired as a reaction against the Humans are Superior group on FIMfiction, where a lot of members are assorted right wingers who believe that Warhammer 40k’s IOM is something to be emulated.

  82. 82.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    original inspiration is not destiny

    Dittoing this by, like, 100.

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    It’s very, very tough to mix real-life bigotry with magic, especially relatively light-hearted magic. Since MLP is originally a product of the 80s (yes, I’m old enough to remember when the toys first started being sold), I don’t hate the idea of mixing those characters (or your own take on similar characters à la Fifty Shades of Grey) with the reality of 1980s culture and politics, but if you’re not careful, it can look like you’re handwaving the reality of white supremacy away with magic. Not good.

    For some reason, this idea is making me think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which did manage to balance very serious subjects (including blackmail and murder) and lighthearted characters. The “high concept” pitch fpr that movie would be “Chinatown where cartoon characters are real.” What would the high-concept pitch for your story be?

  84. 84.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @NotMax:
    What if I left all the stupid shit out and focused on the parts that people liked? That has potential as an original story? Would you still be interested?

  86. 86.

    NotMax

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    What’s important is that you attend to your muse. Not mine, not anyone else’s.

    It’s not my cup of tea. Not a big deal (nor even a small deal) and absolutely not a metric that invalidates anything. Follow your pen wheresoever it may lead.

  87. 87.

    NotMax

    @NotMax – @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    And realize had evaded your question. Frankly, based on your descriptions on previous threads and this one, I think that absent the “silly sh*t” that a story is too small a stage and it carries potential as a novel.

    Outside of staying true to the times, if I may be so bold, will venture to say it is walking a fine line to have the protagonist (as I perceive her from the hints you’ve dropped) play both the parts of an ardent feminist and a damsel in distress. Not to say that it can’t be pulled off.

    My 2¢.

  88. 88.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @NotMax:
    Honestly, it’s for the best since I probably couldn’t capture the existing characters very well. And I’d like to maybe make money on it if it’s any good.

  89. 89.

    evodevo

    @opiejeanne: Yes. I lucked out by a hair’s breadth. I had a C-section in 1979, in Lexington Ky, when the blood supply was probably contaminated but no one would have really known. I had a postpartum hemorrhage incident, and they nearly had to transfuse me, but didn’t. Later, when the extent of the contamination problem was more public, I thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t have to have those pints…

  91. 91.

    Suburban Mom

    @NotMax: As a woman who self-defined as a feminist and joined the workforce in 1979, it seems to me that the this is an opportunity for character development as a plot element. There weren’t many feminist role models in the workplace. Dilemmas came up all the time, such as “do I bite my tongue and listen to this misogynist joke to bond with management”? I was told by a manager two levels up that I could not have a sales career and have children. The media gave career advice about stuff like covering your throat with a scarf to appear less vulnerable and echo the ties worn by male colleagues. It sounds stupid now, but it is how it was. To me, the idea that a woman in the ’80’s would define as feminist, be challenged, and need to work through the challenge while figuring out what it means to be a feminist seems plausible, to use Mnem’s term.

  93. 93.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mnemosyne: Did it? My impression was that any acceleration was making up for time lost to the AIDS crisis itself. The expansion of gay rights we saw in the 2000s might have happened in the 1980s if people hadn’t suddenly seen gay men as plague carriers.

    If you look at the sudden acceptance of out gay characters in sitcoms, etc. a lot of it coincides with the spread of effective HIV treatments in the mid to late 1990s.

  94. 94.

    Gvg

    @opiejeanne: yes these are the kind of reasons I ended up “pro gay rights”. It didn’t directly impact me. It’s just my early teen years watching the news to find out gay people existed, were dying, and their parents were disowning them, shocked and hurt me. I still don’t understand how parents could do that. I was of an age where I was trying on roles mentally to decide what I wanted to do in life and parent was one of my mental roles…
    I encountered real gay people soon after and they were normal. Pretty much fixed my contempt for conservative fundamentalists. They make bad parents is a pretty serious put down in my head.

  95. 95.

    debbie

    In first grade, my mother cut flowers, put them in a vase, and told me to take them to my teacher. Only a couple blocks away from school, I managed to spill the whole thing. I gathered up the flowers and jammed them back into the vase, not wanting to be late. My teacher loved them and told me to tell my mother she was a wonderful arranger. I still can’t be sure the woman wasn’t bullshitting me.

  96. 96.

    WaterGirl

    Is the Sunday Morning Garden Chat hosed for anyone else?

    I tried to post a comment 5 or 10 or 15 minutes ago, and it’s still borked. Then I tried to open the thread in a new tab, and it can’t load, either.

  97. 97.

    opiejeanne

    @evodevo: I caught Hepatits C from one of those pints but it was 20 years before anyone checked. Treatment was a year of near-Hell, but I will not curse the person who donated that blood because they saved my life.

  99. 99.

    Brachiator

    @opiejeanne: Among the many things that stand out in your anecdote is this.

    I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been tested so I went to Planned Parenthood

    Bless that organization!

    It is still heartbreaking to remember all the AIDS sufferers whose families turned away from them when they most needed their support.

  100. 100.

    Mnemosyne

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I can’t remember if we’re the same age or not (I’m 49). My lived experience as a teenager was much more similar to Gvg’s — the AIDS crisis humanized gay men for a huge swath of people like me who didn’t think they knew any gay men. It also gave a whole generation of GLBT people a crash course in navigating politics and getting the attention of politicians.

  101. 101.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    This is apropos of the previous post, but as Trump marches jouralists to the guillotines, they’ll be muttering “yes but some Democrat somewhere did something I mildly disapprove of so BOTH SIDES ARE EQUALLY TO BLAME FOR THIS!”

  103. 103.

    Ken B

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:
    If you want to make money on it you need to drop the magic ponies, or at least make certain they aren’t characters from the setting.

    Using characters from somebody else’s setting without their permission is an excellent way to get sued. Any publisher or agent that recognizes characters from MLP is going to send your manuscript back, or throw it away, very quickly.

    Many (but not all) authors ignore fan fic so long as no one’s trying to make money on it. Once money’s involved, that changes quickly.

Comments are closed.