Oh shit, is it “tell stories about the fights you’ve been in” day? I’ve got a great one. It’s kind of long, because it’s got a bajillion digressions, but they’re all worth it.

So this is back in LA. It’s the only bar fight I’ve ever been directly involved in (I broke up a few others), it started with getting suckerpunched and ended in total victory, I absolutely fucking had it coming, and I’m proud as hell of it.

So two things first to establish some context. First, at this point I had been training in an MMA-style dojo for two years. The sensei had been raised into fighting the same way that the Williams sisters had been raised into tennis, by his USMC boxing instructor dad. Then he did BJJ under Royce Gracie down around Long Beach when MMA was first becoming a thing, but realized that all the other guys were a few years younger and didn’t have bad knees from high school football, so he decided to go into training instead, though first he studied American Kempo under this guy from Pasadena (a kind of glory hog who might have been the inspiration for the Cobra Kai sensei, though a serious master who had, in turn, studied under Ed Parker, the founder of the school and popularizer of karate in America). So he’d not only picked up from these three masters a lot about fighting, but a lot about training, and he was the best sensei you could ask for. I’d been realizing I needed to take up some physical activity to get fit when he moved into a storefront dojo just down the street in Echo Park. Went to one session and he worked me so hard I had to go outside and vomit in the gutter, and then I kept coming back three or four times a week until I left LA (with the exception of a few weeks after a particularly devastating punch broke, or at least cracked, one of my ribs).

The second thing is I’ve had wicked insomnia that comes and goes and it had finally gotten so bad I went to a doctor and got put on Lexapro, which is an antidepressant SSRI. Well, it worked I suppose - I was sleeping 14 hours a day, and when I was awake I was completely disinhibited. Always been kind of reclusive and socially anxious, but I became outgoing as all fuck, starting conversations with complete strangers and quickly turning them into friends (or enemies - during this period I pulled more tail than I ever have, but I also got slapped in the face several times). It’s weird, antidepressants really do change your personality. My sexual tastes changed, even. I could never talk dirty before but now I could do it like R. Lee Ermey’s audition tape, nonstop for minutes at a time without repeating myself. Which was nice, because that was now the only way I could get off. Also on top of this the drug and alcohol amplified each others’ effects several times over - I had used to be a kind of quiet, maudlin drunk - which was particularly interesting since this new personality had a taste for straight brown liquor.

OK.

So my friend was moving to Hawaii, so we all piled in a car and went up to this house up on Red Hill for a party, I brought a bottle of Jack and drank at least half of it there. Then we got in a cab to go down to Mountain Bar in Chinatown for a pre-party for FYF Fest. This was I think the first year they changed the name from “Fuck Yeah Fest”, to make it easier to get media I guess? Which is weird because an alt-weekly that won’t print the word “fuck” really defeats the point and why would you want to cater to people that get their information from people who suck, but then I suppose people who value pride and integrity over fame and money don’t long last in LA; for example me.

So Mountain Bar. I think there was maybe a bar on the first floor but the dance floor and another bar were on the second floor up a narrow flight of stairs, and oh before this I should talk about my hat. I was wearing a leather hat - I don’t know what style it is, people just call it my “Indiana Jones hat” which is pretty correct. Got it from a Russian leathercrafter on Melrose. Went into his shop one day and he’s working in the back on these big old ‘60s machines, KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK, and he stops and comes out.

“What you want?”

“I’m just looking.”

“Okay.”

KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK KA-CHUNK and I try on some hats he has on a rack, look in the mirror, settle on this one.

“What you doing, you say you just looking.”

“Well, I like this one.”

“Ooooh. You like that hat, maybe you like this hat.” I try it on.

“I hate this hat. I want THAT hat.”

He quotes me 60 dollars, I get the sense he’s Old Country enough to haggle, I walk out with it for 40.

Anyway so I’m wearing this hat, I’m drunk, I’m on Lexapro, the dance floor is crowded, the temporary bar is at the far end, and I just swim through the crowd with a breast stroke - hands forward through the crowd, shove people aside to force an opening, if one of the people I was pushing was a cute girl, grab her ass on the return.

Which was a thing I’d been doing. You wondered how I was getting slapped in the face? You wonder how I was pulling so much tail? That’s one of the things that really shocked me about the whole disinhibited experience - I grabbed a lot of random asses in bars those two or three months, and the ratio of positive to neutral to negative responses was like 2:3:1.

(Eventually I decided to go off Lexapro because in my more introspective moments I realized this shit was fucking ridiculous and not really in keeping with my sense of self. That’s one of the reasons I’ve self-diagnosed as type II bipolar - apparently if you give us antidepressants it doesn’t level things out but makes us flat ridiculous. Never bothered to get an official diagnosis ‘cause what’s the point? Not like I want to treat it. Like so many creative geniuses, I find the hypomania very useful [how do you think I’ve been churning out quality posts these past few days?] and I can structure my life to deal with the downswings.)

Okay, so do that a bit, get a few more drinks, and then someone taps me on the shoulder, and I think it’s one of my friends so I turn around and woo, punches coming at my face. Right hook and left hook and right hook, and the guy’s only really punching with his arms and maybe his shoulders so he’s clearly not a trained fighter, I instinctively start blocking and I stop a bunch of them but then he gets one around and lands a good one, hitting my nose, upper teeth, and cheekbone all at once.

The first time, back in the dojo, I took a hook to the face I literally spun around like a tornado and fell down flat on the floor. The second time I just fell down. After that I learned to keep my head. It was a good hit and staggered me, knocked the hat off my head and one of my contacts out of my eyes, but I caught myself, bent over at the waist. I looked up and saw the guy clear for the first time. Very post-frat boy, he literally had an open striped shirt over a pink polo with a popped collar, gym muscles, already confident in his victory, turning away from me to brag to his girl.

Man, I love fighting guys who lift. They all think they can fight. They’d come into the dojo every so often and sensei would invite them to go through the program - maybe 40 minutes of exercise, 20 of technique, an hour of sparring - and they’d never come back. There were still a bunch of locals around from when the neighborhood had been rougher who’d had a bunch of streetfighting experience and they’d put up a better show but even then training won out. If they really needed to be humbled sensei could have them spar against Emma, who was a small 12 year old girl, but was also a genius child of JPL rocket scientists who’d been training basically since she could walk and could beat the shit out of any of us - she actually got her second degree black belt this past weekend. But I digress.

Anyway, my nose felt runny so I wiped it with the back of my hand and looked down, there was blood on it. I looked up at the guy. I’m a very wordy person, I think in words. I remember this is when I thought the only word I thought during the whole fight.

“Alright.”

I launched myself at the guy. I only remember going straight into an uppercut, but I tried reenacting the memory once and the blocking is all wrong for that, maybe I did a 1-2 jab first. I caught him off guard but he started to put his hands up to block. Time slowed down, this is the only time I’ve actually experienced that and it works just like they depict it. I could tell I didn’t have a clean shot anymore, so I brought my right fist back to my left collarbone, turned the uppercut instead into a right elbow cross, uncoiled on the guy and connected with his jaw.

He spun around and fell down flat on the floor. I guess he didn’t have much practice fighting.

I looked around for my hat, picked it up off the floor, shook it off, and put it back on, keeping an eye on the guy ‘cause it would be really embarrassing if he caught me out the same way I just had him. He was writhing a little but not getting up, and at this point I see two guys coming through the crowd of hipsters - big, 350 pound dudes, black pants, black turtlenecks, black knit caps, black skin, clearly the bouncers, heading this way and I’m like

“Welll, fuck, they saw that and they’re gonna be pissed, aren’t they.”

And they walk up, and one dude lays a meaty hand on my upper arm, and I’m like

“Welll, fuck.”

And he looks at me, and in retrospect he probably saw my bloody nose, and he says, in this real deep voice,

“Was that dude fuckin’ with you?”

And I’m shocked for a quarter second but you know what, okay, yeah.

“That dude was fuckin’ with me.”

“Aight, we got this. Go get yourself a drink.”

And they walk over to him, still on the ground with his girl hovering over, and each grab one of his arms, pick him up, and frog-walk him to the exit.

And I’m standing there, adrenaline wearing off, thinking “man, I don’t know how all those guys are going to fit down that stairway”, and they just get to the top, line him up, and each kind of toss him down and I put my hand to my mouth, like ohhh, shit. All that just happened.

And so I get a drink and we stay another hour or two, and I end up leaving with the friend who’s going to Hawaii, and we decide not to wait for a cab and walk, which was kind of a mistake because you don’t realize how far distances in LA are until you try to walk them, but by the end of the night I’m almost wondering whether that actually happened or it was some sort of drug hallucination. When I wake up in the morning, though, it’s confirmed by the pain in my mouth and the bruises.

haanigram:

soundingonlyatnightasyousleep:

Hannibal is a gothic horror show about control, perception, abuse, mental illness and disability, the institution of psychiatry, and vengeance, frequently featuring terrifying scenes of violence and gore

and the fandom is comprised of teenage girls bedecking everyone in flowers and making cheesy puns

is this the actual reverse of the brony fandom

omg it is

I actually kind of like the “Ammosexual” thing liberal bloggers are starting to mock gun enthusiasts with. Not because like “yeah, suck it, stupid gun nuts” - I’m a (life) member of the NRA and OFF - but because it’s cute and clever and I appreciate good wordplay.

(Likewise, I found that MoveOn “Betrayus” ad incredibly offensive, not because I’m A Patriot and Honor and Respect or any shit like that but because I’m a humorist and “mocking name rhymes” are the lowest form of comedy)

That said, if for coalitional reasons alone, “Hey, let’s laugh at those guys! They’re like gays! And girls!” is a damn peculiar meme for liberals to start running with.

(Plus seriously, if they ever made it stick the insult would get “reclaimed” and embraced in like, 6 months tops.)

(Also, the correct joke here is clearly “molon labia”.)

Snapping someone’s neck is a euphemism.

The thing in movies, in games, where you sneak up behind someone and snap their neck and they’re dead and they were a person once and they grew up however many years until however old they were and they were a person and they knew other people and now they’re meat because you killed them by snapping their neck and now they’re dead, that’s a euphemism.

(And a play/plot mechanic.)

It’s a euphemism for the actual reliable, quiet method of killing someone from behind, or after you dominate them in a fight - choking them to death. The Vulcan Nerve Pinch was another euphemism, older and more delicate.

Choking people to death kills them just as much, but being sure about it involves being in intimate contact with someone’s body for say three minutes as it becomes a corpse.

Do you have a sense of how long three minutes is? Here.

I’ll wait.

There are two “chokes” that work the same way, by depriving the brain of oxygen. There’s the “air choke”, which is to block the flow of air into the lungs by constricting the windpipe. People will struggle a while because they’ll still be conscious as long as they can draw down the oxygen already in the bloodstream, but as long as you control the windpipe they can’t draw attention by vocalizing.

You can attack the windpipe by crushing it, or by cutting it open, but it’s got the best boneless armor on the body and unless you follow through lethality’s iffy. That thing on Xena where she chopped someone and they couldn’t breathe but then she could chop them again and they could? That was just a thing on Xena.

The second choke is the “blood choke”, where you constrict the carotid arteries of the neck, so blood can’t get to the brain to deliver oxygen. That causes unconsciousness quicker, but to implement it you’ve got to control both sides of the neck. Cutting works better here, even if you only get one you can drop blood pressure enough. Messy, though.

From there, it’s only three minutes.

theogblackjesus:

pussyclench:

quickweaves:

OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

OHMYGOD

IT SHOWS HOW LONG YOU WERE THERE TOO

booooooooooyyyyuuuuuuoooyyikv

KERMIT THE FEDS

American Twitter is disproportionately black, Vine seems even more so.

Give it a few years, we’ll work up the mythology by which brevity is an innately black thing. Like rhythm, or cool.

It’s commonly accepted that Reagan’s breaking the PATCO strike was a big deal, not for first-order reasons, as with Thatcher and the miners, but for the second-order effect of signaling that this was the new normal, and the private sector had the government’s blessing to break their own unions.

A parallel you don’t see mentioned often is the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher’s best known for her domestic policies, but I’d argue that her most important legacy is in finally halting the erosion of the empire. The Falklands yes, but also rejecting accomodationism in Northern Ireland.

Even some of her most significant “domestic” actions - crushing the miners’ strikes, taking funding streams from the hands of dissident local authorities and concentrating them in Westminster - were in part an attempt to check Scottish autonomy in the face of a very real threat that the United Kingdom might shrink to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales.

It’s not like the British had ever just accepted the postwar dissolution of their colonial empire in the first place. But American support for decolonization was a major check on British power in this regard, particularly in the tipping point of the Suez Crisis, where America wielded its financial influence to veto the attempt to retain control over the Suez Canal. (Some of the most important British colonies mattered less as sources of direct income than for the control they gave over strategically important naval choke points.)

Reagan’s said to have considered exerting a similar pressure on Thatcher. But he didn’t, the war went ahead. Thatcher couldn’t muster the support to go up against China so Hong Kong eventually slipped through Brittania’s fingers, but since then nothing else.

(Scotland’s holding a secession referendum soon, and as of now the result is anyone’s guess. I dunno though, a lot of the motivation seems to come from the fact that the north of Great Britain’s got a stronger leftist tradition than the south, and the expectation that independence would mean trading Tory austerity for social democratic bounty. Though without an empire at its back, the ability to milk The City - the British metonymic equivalent of “Wall Street” - for cash or favorable bond market terms, or even a strong enough navy to enforce claims on maritime resources, I don’t see where they expect to find the money from.)

See what I was saying?

piusxijinping:

i stole this post from etienne but for the love of fuck look what molly crabapple has been up to lately 

I went to one of the sessions of the local branch of her empire once. I’d only once done any life drawing since Risley but I’d enjoyed it, and there was an event happening at the gaming store where I’d played some L5R sealed deck tournaments. There were props - cloaks and fur mantles, staves, lanterns. It was fantasy-themed, of course. D&D themed, specifically, some of the models cited the specifics of the characters they were portraying. (“I’m not just someone who enjoys getting naked for strangers, I also know my 6th-level wizard spells” is a very Portland sentiment.)

Some of the stuff was a little gratuitously sexual, but all well within the Frazetta/Vallejo tradition, and it’s churlish to complain about tits at a life drawing session. Race didn’t really come into it, being that everyone was thoroughly white, being that Portland. Well, I guess the Howardian notion of the barbarian. Okay, yeah, race came into it.

My main issue was that as a beginner, and for a session with such interesting props, the poses were awful short. By the time they changed I’d still be trying to get the torso proportions right, but the attendees on either side of me would have done some really beautiful, shaded work, in that volumetric sketchy style, lines wandering away like curly hair on a humid day, that you’d expect from acolytes of Molly Crabapple.

It was fun though, and afterwards I checked their website for more, maybe one without props. There was a session near my neighborhood, though on examination it was a steampunk-themed session in a kink-oriented coffeeshop/gallery, the day after a recycling event for wax fetishists where they could bring their candle stumps in to be melted down and recast.

(edit: this was all actually more recent than that link, dunno what terms you’re using that 2009 counts as “lately”)

riseofthecommonwoodpile:

davvvd:

do you all remember the most vaporwave educational videos to ever exist

holy shit this is a nostalgia I never expected to feel again

luxobscuraxx:

fuck yo peace

Oh shit, wait, you want to talk vaporwave?

Beyond the Mind’s Eye. 45 minutes of computer animation scored by Miami Vice composer Jan Hammer, released in 1992.

National Republican leaders are toasting primary season as a smashing success over activist conservatives that has put the hard right on the ropes and given the Washington GOP the slate of candidates it wanted for 2014. Those victories, however, have come at a staggering cost — and Republicans are painfully aware of the price of putting down…

$23 million for two years worth of control of one of the two parties of the world-empire, my my.

The Avengers had a $100 million marketing budget.

I was kicked out of three preschools, asked not to come back to a diocesan school after kindergarden, asked not to come back to that same diocesan school’s CCD program after First Communion but before Confirmation.

My favorite story (actually not even, but it is a good story) is from the second preschool, a nominally Presbyterian one (my mother’s nominal sect), located dug into the side of a steepish hill under the church itself. Some nice maybe 23-year-old girl was in charge of all of us, trying to herd us inside this long hall and said “now stay here, ‘cause in the middle of this hall there’s an invisible force field that’ll zap you if you cross it”.

And I immediately thought

1) I’ve never heard of such a thing

2) I suppose it’s possible but

3) If such a thing existed this would not be the first place I encountered it.

So I took off booking down the hall. She didn’t chase me, 'cause she needed to keep all the other kids in check I suppose. I passed the halfway point, got to the other end, and yelled back at the other kids,

“SHE’S LYING TO YOU!”

If anyone can tell me how to match an audio track and a picture better than that, I’m all ears.

kane52630:

Beware the Gray Ghost

Batman: The Animated Series