RKNet Blog... Thing

Simple links that summarize my feelings for this particular pseudo holiday that inspires more jealousy, depression, and ill-will than possibly even Christmas!

• Wordlab - $122.98 Says I Love You In which the spending habits of the besotted and pussywhipped are discussed.
• Ectomo - Lupercalia: Happy Fucking Valentine’s Day In which the dubious history of the holiday’s Christian/pagan associations is discussed.
• The Sherman Foundation - New Word Order: Honey Trapper In which the definition of a newer phrase says a lot about modern relationships.

Enjoy tomorrow’s discount candy!

Let it never be said that I throw complete disfavor upon arbitrary, stupid holidays based around the martyrdom of one of three possible guys in order to overwrite pagan tradition. Far from it, any excuse to get more color in my dreary winter, and of course free candy, is a good excuse.

That said I have prepared a lovely little something to give to the one you’d like to get all cuddly-wuddly with for this (contrived, commercialised) Valentine’s Day. It works well as a wallpaper for 1600×1200 displays. I may edit this later to include other, more common screen sizes, so be on the lookout.

Please enjoy! The majority of this was constructed using photoshop brushes located over at brusheezy. They’re absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend checking them out at your next earliest convenience.

Into every life, a little ridiculous, standardized bureaucracy must fall. In the case of mine, I have encountered the insurmountable juggernaut that is “Dress Code”. This has come up about five or six times in my time here, but never really stuck before. Thank goodness. Working for an Internet company who doesn’t really handle walk-in business (with rare exception), I’m stunned and frustrated by this repeated insistence upon doing things the “meatspace” way. I’ve never been the best at maintaining a budget, a laundry schedule, or a steady weight. These powers combine to create a condition by which I rarely, if ever, have anything that will pass for “Business Appropriate”, whatever that means. As a result I typically make-do with jeans and some kind of shirt that doesn’t look too grubby or trashy. So far so good I wager.

Yet I digress. Dress Code Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, has descended upon our merry band of rascals to lay some foxes in otherwise rather content hen houses. A condensed beam of sunlight seeking out worker ants whose exoskeleton is improperly decorated by worker ant standards as set out in Tomes of Olde. Presumably the goal is something of a mimicry of those who came before us. Even Jack Parsons wore a suit to work, and he was some kind of crazy-ass pagan/rocket scientist who did a lot of field work (in both areas of his life).

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty. The actual body of this extremely local legislation.

“Please use Dress Code Common Sense Law; If you aren’t sure, then don’t wear it!”
What if you’re a self-conscious person, or a fashion hound, or it’s early and you’re hung over and easily confused? Any of those three means that the odds are pretty good you aren’t sure about what you’re wearing for the day. What if you can’t decide what shirt to wear? Does that mean go without one? Technically that would follow that law to the letter. It’s a logistics nightmare. There’s also the believe that “common” sense is by no means common at all, but that’s another discussion altogether.

There’s a statement against wrinkles too. Wrinkles? Wear clothes without wrinkles? Whoever first decided that that was important needs to go right to hell. The individual who first decided that wrinkles were a detriment to one’s business ability doesn’t live in any reality I’ve ever been privy to where people wear clothes and they get wrinkled.

Casual Friday’s entry isn’t even complete in this official document. It’s both curious and a little frightening. As if to suggest the robot overlords terminated the author prior to their completion of the thought.

With the idea appearance directly affecting one’s worthiness as a business associate, or affecting the opinion of visitors so negatively as to be disgusted, I have come to the conclusion that the comedians are right: Business office atmospheres should be soul-crushing places, brimful of quiet desperation.
All employees should wear gray from fear of being offensive, except for the one guy whose wife makes him wear the pink shirt because Marie Claire Magazine told her that it would help him boost his confidence.
Everyone will spend all day whispering about him in lieu of anything worthwhile going on in their miserable lives, and smile really nicely when he shows up at the coffee pot to get his 80th cup of the morning.
In truth, this is just another way of burying his frustration at his utterly failed marriage, and dead-end job.
By the end of the week, he will be found hanging from his belt in the men’s room. No one will ever use the big stall ever again out of discomfort rather than respect and all silently curse their own fates, but express their misery just a little more openly.
But hey, at least they look business appropriate.

Why is this machination - this plot to undermine people’s abilities by overwhelming them with trivial appearance issues - desirable? I’m at an utter loss. Explain please!

“The belief that “order is true” and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.”

~ Principia Discordia

Jezebel’s got the pics to prove that in the September issue of the French edition of Vogue, they’ve apparently decided “Devil Worship is the New Black”.

The pagan/satanist/wiccan references seem unresearched and over-the-top in a hokey to me, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it offensive. I can’t help but wonder if this shoot will make it to the good old USA. I have serious suspicions that as tame as this spread is, it may cause a row among any fundamentalist Christian readership in the US.
Anyone with the September issue of Vogue US care to confirm whether or not the same story is present? I realize each of the Vogue editions is technically its own thing, but I’m so curious.

They may do this - or something like it - for the US October magazine. That would be more timely, given the long time association of “witches” with Halloween, the history of all 3 practices in this country (sporadic fads producing popularity that dies out, but almost always a few constant practitioners) and the legit holiday(s) which falls around Halloween.

If this is the way fashion’s going to run, then bust out the black, the ouija board, the absinthe and the chickens: It’s gonna get freaky up in here.

So today has been re-affirmed as “Loyalty Day” by our current Commander in Chief. Well… okay, fine, whatever. It’s not as though we don’t already have a number of patriotic-themed holidays that we thoroughly ignore despite these types of reminders. What’s one more?

The whole thing smacks of Orwellian doublespeak, to be sure, but any propganda is bound to display the characteristics of its nature, afterall.

That aside, I think it is a good idea to keep in mind the history on which this country was founded and maintained; that habit, in addition to tracking the most recent ways the nation is being run, should provide us with more ways to keep the BS down to a bare minimum. Granted, “A bare minimum” will undoubtedly still be a very large amount, but that is the issue with democracy in the first place: it requires many people to get together in the attempt to reach an agreement on which policies will work out the best for the most people at once. But I digress.
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The Table of Malcontents crew put forth a new header challenge to their readers: Take a famous Russian communist propaganda poster and turn it into another fantastic ToM header!

I seriously went crazy on this because I adored the concept and I already had the propaganda font Worker Poster, and they were kind enough to put not one but three of my revisions into the voting pool! GOGOGO VOTE! (And remember, in communist Russia, header votes YOU!)

Truth be told, conceptually I like #5 from Matt Jordan the best. He fits key elements from the original poster AND managed to work some tentacles for the cephalophiliacs in the ToM pool! (I also think the tentacles look like muscle car flames which is just plain cool.)

If you aren't already a ToM reader, and you enjoy things like: steampunk, weird science, weirder art, Lovecraft, and sometimes making fun of people who deserve it… Then I pretty much guarantee you'll enjoy ToM. I'd recommend signing up for the RSS. 9 times out of 10 those ToMcats keep the place hopping and RSS is the only way to keep up with all the pure, unadulterated awesome.

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/

I stumbled across this link earlier. Now, I’ve seen a few PETA-based propaganda booths in my day. Much like the “Truth” campaign, they’re big fans of large, symbolic, sometimes angry displays of protest against things they believe are wrong. While they might be passionate about what they do, and may be - in most cases - correct in their statements, I personally don’t react well to the types of conversion methods used.

PETA Kills Animals seemed sort of suspicious to me based on that. Any form of extreme activism is bound to engender some kind of extreme activism from the opposite camp, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure who would want to be seen as being opposed to the ethical treatment of animals. So I did a little bit of Google news searching on one particular claim made over at PETA Kills Animals. PETA Animal-Cruelty Trial Date Finally Set I gotta say looking up anything with “peta” in the Google News section only turned up other organizations that PETA has attacked, rather than the law coming down on anyone who works for PETA.

A regular Google search did pull up a matching local news story, however. http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=93730&ran=57036

So that story is at least legit. Still, one has to wonder what is the agenda there? The About page at petakillsanimals.com marks them as being associated with the Center for Consumer Freedom. A quick search for these guys brings the following items up:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Consumer_Freedom
These guys say that the CCF is a sit and spin for all the things that organizations like PETA fight against. I’d be willing to believe that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Consumer_Freedom
Then there’s the wiki entry, which confirms sourcewatch’s assertion that this organization is paid to support the interests of a few very large industries which aren’t renown for their regard for health or moral practices.

I’ll also say that the couple reviews at Alexa aren’t very encouraging either. One response is a vauge “lol itz teh interestingz cause animul pplz gots teh sekrits!” and the other is a direct slam.

I’m all for public reminders that no organization is without it’s flaws, it helps prevent types prone to holier-than-thou behavior from appearing infallible. I’m all for the promotion of personal responsibility. I’m not real keen on someone trying to douse me in false activism, or in this case I guess you could say anti-activism. All in all? This was a pretty disappointing, but unsurprising, discovery.

What are your thoughts on activism? How far does a person or a group have to go before they are considered “extreme”? Are there any groups that personally get your goat that deserve exposing?

Thanks to the magic of RSS, and the writings of Wired’s copy chief, Tony Long (aka The Luddite), I’ve discovered a major media political analyst whose statements I actually find worthwhile during this time of discussion on the events of September 11th 2001.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC news of all places, has a few articles up right now that really impressed me. I tend to dodge the news, as it’s typically rather depressing, highly skewed in ways I have to question, and generally not useful. While these articles are undoubtedly skewed, they are skewed with the air of human opinion, instead of reeking of propaganda. While these are depressing, they are also hopeful, because they’re written with the idea that Americans are not the sheep we’re being made out to be. The usefulness is dependant wholly upon the impact and reach of the article. It reached me, and I’m spreading it. The impact on me was immediate and profound.

A lot of people have been writing about the anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, and the planes which were destroyed during this series of attacks. Mostly, where they were on the day. I know right where I was. I can’t forget, it was a huge event that no one in America could realistically avoid.

In the article “This hole in the ground”, Olbermann addresses not so much the event but the national progress since then. In our dedication to the adage-nouveau “Never Forget” some of us - a lot of us - have elected to focus solely on the event. Which is understandable to a degree, it was horrific, it hurt a lot of people directly and indirectly. The circles of effect that radiate out from that series of assaults runs far and fierce, there’s no question there. However, the history of what has occured as a result of these particular incidents is just as important to address - if not more so - than the original events themselves. I recommend reading beyond that particular article as well; it illustrates my point better than I probably could myself.

Where are we going?
What are we doing?
Who is driving?
What do they want?
What do WE want?
Who among us will stand/are standing for the desires of the majority?
What is accomplished by fear?