This Guy Really Doesn't Seem to Like Baltimore

I'm tired of EC crowing about how much he's posting, so I'm throwing this sucker out here (it's NSFW, but if you're at work right now, quit your job, for God's sake):



All you suckers can leave a message with my assistant. I'm going to a party.

Immanuel Kant: We Just Can't Trust Him

Worth clicking in about a hundred different ways...

Happyholiday, Motherf-----r

Ho ho ho, now I have a machine gun.

Merry Christmas!!!

can someone get me this for xmas????

im drooling right now; this looks so awesome

look, i know ive been bitching about posting and certain people (me) have been pissed about it but whatever...i dont have time to write now, so all youre getting is the old cut and paste. its still a post so im doing better than the rest of you guys this month

me two - you zero

Films by Jove in association with SoyuzmultFilm Studios presents
ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA
FROM THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION To PERESTROIKA

A landmark four disc Box Set

Unearthed from Moscow's legendary Soyuzmultfilm Studios (est. 1935), the 41 films in ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA span sixty years of Soviet history (1924 - 1984), and have never been available before in the U.S.

The set is divided thematically into four discs, all dealing with different subjects of the Soviet propaganda machine.

AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS (disc 1) contains seven films, almost all of which are drawn from the Cold War era. The recurring image is of the money hungry industrialist self-destructing because of his greed.

FASCIST BARBARIANS (disc 2) is a 17 film reaction to the Nazi invasion of 1941. While Americans were mocked relentlessly, at least they remained human. After breaking the non-aggression pact and declaring war, the Nazis became animals in the propaganda films, turning into snarling warthogs and depraved vultures.

CAPITALIST SHARKS (disc 3) contains six films that take on the bourgeoisie the world over - and sometimes beyond. In INTERPLANTERY REVOLUTION (1924), capitalists escaping to Mars discover the revolution has spread throughout the galaxy.

ONWARD TO THE SHINING FUTURE: COMMUNISM (disc 4) contains 11 works, most of which mythologize the state and envision the inevitable utopias of the future. Dziga Vertov's SOVIET TOYS (1924), however, offers criticism of the state. Generally agreed to be the first Russian animated film, it satirizes the communist members who cashed in on Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced a limited form of capitalist enterprise.

hello?

i dont want to play mommy...but what gives? it's nearly christmas, and in three months of this blog, weve only got maybe a dozen posts. im not going to single out anybody because we ALL have slacked on this, but i rushed out a review and a 'mission statement' when we started, and then

...

nothing.

we had all this STATEMENT OF PURPOSE stuff at the beginning...we defined the mission...then we didnt do anything about the mission. ive seen this too many times not to notice the symptoms. it happens all the time wiht programmers...you shoot the shit and complain about how Software X doesnt do Thing Y, and so you brainstorm Software Z...then you and whoever you were talking to write up a big roadmap, maybe budget it, divvy up assignments, nail down each feature you want and then...poof.

the only work you wind up doing is planning the work you were going to do but never get around to. id hate to see that happen here, because i like talking to you guys, and not talking is getting on my nerves. dont get me wrong, though. I AM JUST AS MUCH TO BLAME. i noticed the problem and havent gotten off my ass to do anything about it either.

but i realize there might be other problems i havent noticed. so let me throw this out there:

what gives?

How Russian Hearts Are Heaving

"Moscow, 1947" gives an interesting glimpse of a Soviet culture that was probably already dead before its creators finished the animatic. Ostensibly celebrating the 800th anniversary of the city's founding, it is instead a propaganda film highlighting the city's recapture from Polish leadership in the Polish-Muscovite wars of the early 17th century and its withstanding Napoleon's siege of 1814. Then the video cuts off. I'd seen it years before on a bootleg VHS, but I can't remember if it went on to pay tribute to the WWII defense of Moscow, but even if it doesn't, the subtext of the rest of it clearly celebrates the recent WWII vitory.

You have to remember that prior to WWII, the internal structure of the Soviet Union was in turmoil. The Great Purge of 1937-1938 not only destroyed (probably) millions of lives, but also families, Soviet technological research and defense. Many able generals were sent to camps because, their devotion to bolshevism aside, their families had aristocratic lines pre-dating the regime.

The principle for which they were banished was Stalin's version of communism, which had become one-statist and self-interested. International communist struggles could go hang themselves so long as Russia survived. While initially this self-interest led to the necessary Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the foolhardy belief that it would spare Russia from war, it ultimately came to save Russia. Humiliated by literally millions of men encircled by (and surrendering to) German forces, Stalin was forced to re-build his military hierarchy on the fly. Old generals and colonels were rescued from the camps, told all was forgiven and asked to save the Motherland. Stalin's vision of "Communism in One Country" (i.e. "Russia First," for lack of a better term) immediately transformed into basic bourgeois patriotism. WWII was recast as "The Great Patriotic War." This film represents the last gasp of this liberalization of thought.

The video opens with soaring invocations of the city's name: MOSCOW! Quotes from Pushkin overlay images of patriotic medals, as animated WWII-era bombers fly out from behind them, taking flight over the Motherland. Bombers swoop and open their bay doors, dropping out thousands of love letters written to the city. But evidence of the erosion of the all-for-Russia spirit accompanying WWII can be seen in the video itself.

It's tough to argue that part of the motivation for Stalin's purges wasn't racial. There's a classic element in the Russian psyche, going back to Pushkin and Tolstoy at least, where almond-shaped eyes and yellow skin and the chaos of the east represents a kind of menace that, while not maliciously racist, nonetheless "others" easternness. But during the Great Patriotic War, much of that got set aside. Commissars — Russian political officers — even propagandized for racial diversity within units. E.g. "this commander is Tartar, and his adjutant is Russian, and these officers are Georgian, and this one's a Pole."

Yet, by 4:29 in the video, we already have the narrator invoking the "Tartar's yoke!" in talking about the periodic rule of parts of Russia by the mongol hordes. Worse, by 4:40 you have a kind of Punch and Judy Minstrel Show, with the white Russian puppet beating the crap out of the "BLACK FOREIGNER" Tartar. Already, that need to band together that WWII brought seems to be spooling apart.

Probably what's most interesting though is how by 1947 all this "Russia Only" Stalinism was being overcome by the ambition to push the Iron Curtain out to the fullest boundaries of Eastern Europe. While it might be all well and good to return to a racist mentality about Eastern peoples, Communism In One Country wasn't a doctrine that could bear up to scrutiny when more and more countries were coming under Soviet hegemony. By 1947, the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Hungary were communist client states.

The Great Patriotic War attitude that this film celebrates was already over and done with probably by the time any average citizen saw it. Truman had already promulgated his Truman Doctrine, fighting to contain communism on every front. American and Soviet proxies faced off in Greece. The next year, Berlin would be cordoned off Czechoslovakia absorbed into the Iron Curtain. Already the message was transitioning to the harmony and prosperity of many nations, sharing in communism, outside the boundaries of any one state. And the propaganda for that would have to be very delicate indeed, because it sounded like the multinational war for communism that all the Trotskyists had been militating for in 1937 and 1938, before they were shot and shipped east to starve to death or die of exposure.

In the end, this film is interesting because of the rarity of what it has to say. Years later, watching it is like looking at a miraculously clear shapshot taken from a moving train: unless you time it just right — just blink — that tiny era of postwar Russian nationalism and brotherhood is gone. I wish I could say the same for the print quality though. Nighttime and forest scenes are almost totally dark. A bear and an owl are virtually invisible against a dark background. I get the sense this was improperly stored in an archive for four decades. I'd be really excited to see a cleaned-up copy, if one is out there.

Found a super8 film with a miniature steam train...

remember back here i was bitching about bargain hunting with the gf?? anyway, i finally go around to uploading this film junk i got at a garage sale



pretty basic stuff like i usually find...family picnics, etc...but this one has the granfather (i guess) giving everyone rides on a miniature steam engine...there was a photo of the train in a box of photos i got with the films too... 3 bucks, not bad.



sorry for spacing on this one so long guys...you know how it goes, life and work get in the way...two tears in the bucket, motherfuckit

i got older family in the area though. around the holidays it sort of sucks...maybe you want to stay in with the gf on thanksgiving and have turkey sandwiches and just make love three or four times and watch football and get fucked up...but instead youve got to drive out to uncle andys place and deal with rugrats and stuffing and toasts and drama. and FUCK...you cant drink a bunch of wine and go out behind the shed and maybe do a little petting out there, because those rugrats will FIND you

me and the gf actually DID try that one REALLY boring birthday get together out there. we were groping around behind the shed a bit one time and heard someone chunk-chunk-chunking out on the gravel and managed to straighten ourselves out at the last second, and good thing because it was my little cousin who's maybe five. we had to bluff what we were doing, so the gf started dropping gardening science...we wound up showing him how to care for rosebushes and identify weeds and teaching him how to garden, and showing him the irrigation system andy put in. it actually worked out and was a lot of fun...we felt proud to be the cool relatives who give it to the kid straight, saying "this is a chore a lot of the time, but plants are cool, and i bet your dad will like it if you help him out sometime," but obviously on the other hand i wouldve been just as happy if the gf and i had just been making out the whole time

i dont dislike my family at all, and thank fuck the gf thinks theyre pretty cool, but going there can suck because of family drama and because you cant really unwind...someone will always blow up about something or needle someone else and make you grind some fucking teeth because you have to be more mature than they are and just not make a scene. going there for one night of your weekend can be pretty draining and unfun...sort of like your gf waking you up early on saturday to to hunt bargains...unsexy

not that that has anything to do with anything right now

i swung by andys place this weekend because i know he has a good video camera (and i dont) and also because hes sort of OCD and has all the old family film projector stuff going on. if youve got an old reel of your cousin naked in a playing pool and eating grass and want to embarrass her in front of her fiancee, andys usually got something to play it on

i raided his upstairs closet and got out the projector and this weird collapsable podium or whatever, and he let me use a super8 to film what we projected. good times. as OCD as he is, hes always been cool with me...i think he knows that i might be sloppy about me but will never be sloppy about someone else's stuff...especially not with a favor. i keep a favor, i pay it back

like i said, i promised this...here it is a little late...but its cute and sort of nice to watch. i made the effort so DIG IT

Democratic Party Killjoys End Colbert Campaign

NudeYorkTimes:

GREENVILLE, S.C., Nov. 1 — Stephen Colbert’s nascent and satirical presidential campaign came to an abrupt end on Thursday when the Democratic Party in South Carolina decided he was not serious and turned down his application to get his name on the primary ballot.

I can see where they're coming from. Of course, every election is important, but this one has generational significance. As much as I'd love to see Colbert do a performance-art satire of campaigns while conducting one, I understand the worry the democrats would have. Now, if he could run as a republican somehow...

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox

for winning the World Series.

Also congrats to you, GFK.

You dick.

Here's a joke:

Q: What's the difference between Red Sox and Yankee fans?

A: Nothing. Everyone else in the world thinks you're both assholes.

Okay, that's not very funny. Here's another one.

Q: What's the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox?

A: The Yankees spent $140,805.545 more on payroll than the Rockies, and the Red Sox only spent $89,102.214 more.

You might not laugh at that one either. Sorry. But at least you guys are a true baseball team, unlike those evil Yankees who just buy championships. You had a lot of home grown talent. You had Youkilis, Pedroia, Ellsbury and Lester. You only ran out and bought:

Manny Ramirez

David Ortiz

Jason Varitek

Coco Crisp

J.D. Drew

Julio Lugo

Mike Lowell

Curt Schilling

Josh Beckett

and

Daisuke Matsuzaka.

And you only had to spend $51,111,111.11 just to get the rights to offer him a contract! (That's more than the total payrolls of four different teams.) Then you only spent $52 million ON his contract. (That's also more than the total payrolls of four different teams.) Combined, that's more money on one pitcher than 24 other teams spend on their whole rosters in a year!

You guys are such lovable losers!

(Two WS in three years)

(Fuck you.)

so i got this film canister and a boring weekend

the gf is stubborn. way more stubborn than me, if you can believe it. the weathers been pretty good lately, so she made me go out both days this weekend looking for "bargains"

i fucking hate every part of this

first things first: you cant get drunk if youre bargain hunting. theres no staying up late with her and hoping she gets a little drunk and slutty and willing to let you do it real nasty together. none of that...just straight to bed...uggggh

second things second: forget drinking alone and playing some video games. because she wants to get up early, that means YOU get up early...its like no weekend at all. you cant open a sixpack and just let er rip. yeah ok, im cool with doing something sunday morning, but at least leave me friday night to get fucked up and play some madden and maybe do some shots and call my friends a little too late and go "yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" into the phone or something. no dice. MUST. BE. AWAKE. EARLY. BOTH. DAYS. like i said, not even a weekend at all

third things third: instead of driving around and going to a ballgame or going to look at something cool, we go look at where things arent. like HIGH PRICES!!!! fucking kill me

im not even making this up, she has a fucking MAP - like she GOOGLED OR MAPQUESTED ALL OF THIS - of all the different yard/garage/away/rummage/whatever sales everywhere...she wakes up at like 7 am and looks on craigslist and the newspaper and just finds all these things and puts together a trip-tik like AAA for how to get to all of them the fastest. we have to get to all of them before noon

i really hate doing this, not just because id rather drink UNTIL 7 am but because its creepy...i dont like looking through other peoples lives. the fuck they do to me? - nothing. i dont want to rummage through their happiness and take shit away...i dont want to be a part of it. i think it sucks that sometimes they have to sell it off, but leave me out of it...i dont need the connection. the gf doesnt worry about this. i think she just sees dollar signs, and thats weird because she doesnt care about money with me and has never complained about how we live

i just dont want to butt in on people...but between the economy sliding and property tax here and the senior citizens dying off naturally, there are a LOT of these kinds of sales. people either want to get out or they checked out, either way you get to flip through all this personal shit that someones family really should be taking instead...but clearly they dont really want it and want to make money off of it...so if you see some shit thats cool enough to make you kick some bucks back at them, i guess its ok

so like i said the gf dragged me to fucking a million of these this weekend, and i was at one of these sunday in a town called ruskin. it sounds like the outside of a weird vegetable...like, no you have to peel off the ruskin. thank god i have a dvr and there werent any football games on early in the day that i really gave a shit about, because i already wanted to kill someone. but it was ok for all that i guess

anyway i found a cool film canister labeled WH-TRAIN and there was this narrow drawer like an old card catalog filled with pictures, and there were a lot of train pictures in it. i think its just going to be family fun stuff, but ill post it and let you know as soon as i can transfer and upload this stuff

hope you guys had decent weekends

Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire

From EC:

now, 60 years later, we learned that we produced the same thing...as many lies as they sent to us, WE sent to US. we got a double dose of lies, and it turned out the one place we were looking for truth was double-dealing us too. now we have more than one enemy...there are enemies all over the globe...even maybe here...and they could be anyone or believe in anything. and how much can you trust what we hear about them? we used to have one enemy and got fed a batch of lies about it. how many more do we get from multiple enemies? multiply the doubt by hundreds, thousands...i dont know.

I read your "Why Kremlinology" post the other day, EC, and I guess I sort of felt like you were overloading the doubt at the end, like maybe you were playing up how much we don't know. Then someone sent me this link today:



I don't want to be one of those people still arguing LOL BUSH IS DUM, CHENEY EVILL!!!!!!!! for the next decade. I'm sick of it. It gets you nowhere. It doesn't make friends. It bores people. But compare his statements then to what he said on Meet The Press ("We will be greeted as liberators") and what Rumsfeld said about the duration of our commitment ("Six days, six weeks, six months"), and it's just unbelievable. Hell just look at this:



It's gotten to the point where there's almost no statement made by someone in our current government where you can't find them making the exact opposite statement on video. Then another statement contradicting both. Then another contradicting the contradiction. If you made it a math equation, it'd be something like

Untruth - [Untruth - (Untruth - Untruth)] = a steaming mound of pure bullshit.

At this point, there's no way to not go down the rabbit hole forever just searching for something basically decent, accurate and still-meant-later. It's like pulling the peel back on a banana to reveal an unpeeled banana underneath. Then peeling back that layer and finding another and another and another until you pull back that last layer of peels and there's nothing underneath.

Then try to take a step anywhere. You can't. Your government's littered the ground around you with so many untruths that there's no way you won't slip and fall and hurt and humiliate yourself. You look like a fucking clown.

Why 'Kremlinology'?

i realized i meant to get this post out before i started reviewing things and making comments, but i guess i got distracted by "Soft Rains" and just started in without thinking. GFK originally asked me to write something explaining the blog name, since i picked it, and i said i'd follow through...soooo...why the name?

kremlinology is a really cool term invented during the cold war to describe anyone who specialized in analyzing the soviet union. you think you know photoshop on the internet? shit, you dont even know who invented it. the soviets were so obsessed with wiping out party members whod said the wrong thing that theyd photoshop them out of thousands of official pictures...all before photoshop even existed. the thing was, with a country that never told the truth about ANYTHING, getting a hold of doctored photos was sometimes the only way americans and other NATO countries could ever figure out what was going on

"oh, this guy disappeared from photos...which one was he?"

"he was the guy who talked peace and openness"

"i guess the peace party isnt coming to the negotiating table anymore."

the thing is, i didnt pick the name because of that. it just came to me because we all like cool soviet propaganda stuff. we dont like it because we love communism: honestly it just looks cool as shit most of the time. we were all in a chat at the time though, and after i typed the name out, i thought, "damn, that makes so much sense"

like GFK said in his earlier post, we got booted from another board for being "problem kids" or whatever, but i think a better word for it is "doubters." i dont like the term "skeptics" because that makes us sound eggheaded when we arent...im not like "hmmm...does the data correlate???" i think its a gut feel, like something is wrong here. like "i cant even be sure about this data in the first place."

maybe that comes from digging old soviet posters and writing and movies. you look at them, and theyre really beautiful and sometimes just really well made, and you appreciate them for that...but you also laugh at how many lies are in there. then...in that laughter somewhere...you remember, someone believed this with his heart. someone died believing this. someone cried to his kids telling them about this because he believed it so much...and it just breaks your heart

because then you think about your dads or uncles or friends of the family who died on the other side for the same bullshit. "russian communists have an interest in vietnam." fuck no they didnt. nobody gave a fuck about vietnam except the vietnamese who just wanted their own fucking country and everyone else to fuck off. my mom still gets tears in her eyes talking about kennedy sometimes, and he lied about a missile gap...there wasnt one! we had so many more fucking nukes than the russians it was SICK. my older brother gets more misty-eyed about fucking REAGAN than our own grandpa, and he lied too. contras, iran, russia, fucking pick one

thats where the name started to sink in with me. because look at the last five years. WMDs that never existed. yellowcake uranium that might as well of been fucking angelfood cake. Osama and Saddam are buddies...oops! they never talked at all. iraq did 9/11 --- ha! we send people out to die based on info, and the more i think about it, the more i wouldnt even go to the corner store based on it

so i immed everybody, "why not kremlinology?" and it turned out someone already had that blog. but LS said "new kremlinology isnt taken," and i said "take it." because honestly that makes even more sense. 60 years ago, all anyone knew was that the soviet union was our enemy. we had to read into it and figure it out and try to guess what to do next...because everything that came out of it was lies and misinformation.

now, 60 years later, we learned that we produced the same thing...as many lies as they sent to us, WE sent to US. we got a double dose of lies, and it turned out the one place we were looking for truth was double-dealing us too. now we have more than one enemy...there are enemies all over the globe...even maybe here...and they could be anyone or believe in anything. and how much can you trust what we hear about them? we used to have one enemy and got fed a batch of lies about it. how many more do we get from multiple enemies? multiply the doubt by hundreds, thousands...i dont know. i want to be like that poor russian guy who cried to his kids telling them a lie he believed so hard, instead of sitting here wanting to cry because i cant believe anything

we picked the blog as a place to shoot the shit and figure out life and have fun like anyone else. with a little help from your friends and with a little help from effort. it seems like it takes a lot more effort these days, or maybe a lot more friends to divide up the reading just to figure shit out. i didnt want this to be depressing. the name might be right, and its right to doubt, and maybe we find something true along the way. i just hope its fun.

There Will Come Soft Rains

i dont handle the review thing as well as GFK does, but i saw this first, so i figured id be the one to write something up about it.

apologies ahead of time for the writing...ive been using all-lowercase and no apostrophes for so long in inter-office im and email for so long that i actually take twice as long to write if i stop to put in the right punctuation. my brain doesn't even understand it anymore. i sent out two pages to a buddy on my team the other day, and it took me about 20 minutes to write, but when i got home and started writing an email to my mom (which i always dress up like adult writing) i swear it took me something like an hour to write the same amount. i actually have to stop and think about every word, and then i wind up doing that thing you do when you overthink a word, like, "lamp? lamp? is that really how its spelled? god, that doesn't look right...it's got to be something else...no, wait, spellchecker thinks its ok."



ANYWAY, i ran across "There Will Come Soft Rains" the other day on youtube. the film is a soviet adaptation of a ray bradbury short story, whose title came from this classic anti-war poem by sara teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

the premise is pretty basic (spoilers ahead!). in the year 2026, automated robots tend to a family, making food, waking them, playing phonograph records and broadcasting beautiful images of the outdoors on telescreens. the gotcha! part is that the family is dead...annihilated by a nuclear war. by 1:54, you see the robots lifting sleep pods up to start the day, only to see the dark figures inside crumble and spill out on the floor...they are piles of ash.

the most chilling moments come after the 6:15 mark. a pure white dove (what could that represent???) appears at an open window. the robots that automate the dead victims' lives asks for a password. since a dove cant, like talk, the robot goes berserk trying to destroy the intruder...it converts its normal seeing/manipulating appendage (which sort of looks like a face) to a big stabby thing. it keeps trying to stab the bird, missing, destroying the inside of the house, stabbing a crucifix, creating more holes in the wall..and eventually blinding itself.

the imagery and atmosphere is very effective. the robot is conditioned to protect, but it does it without thinking or weighing threats it detects...it treats them all like crises and in the end destroys itself for lack of perspective. there is no mercy (stabbed christ), and the uberprotectiveness just weakens the whole more than a lowered guard (putting more holes in the wall). the worst thing is, if you're committed blindly to a program (like fearing everything from outside), youll eventually blind and destroy yourself following it.

the cartoon is really effective and pretty to watch, and sad. too bad it's a modern piece. "There Will Come Soft Rains" was made in 1984, so theres less of the sinister stuff that makes for good soviet propaganda films. its also probably not a rarity since its current enough that there are probably multiple clean copies out there. still, given the good story, it's probably a must-own for a good cold war buff

Why here?

Those friends of ours who (we hope) will stop by might wonder, "Why here? Why blogger?" Other people probably just wonder, "Who are you dudes?" My response would be, "Who are you and why would you even care? We're all idiots."

The story is a pretty simple one. We're all guys who met in our 20s a couple years ago on a message board and discovered we shared a lot of interests. Sports, politics, history, activism, collecting. We eventually got banned for "causing trouble," which is shorthand for "being irritating to mods who didn't have a reasonable explanation for banning us."

The shorthand version for why we were irritating was "our politics."

The better explanation is: we don't fall easily into groups of liberal or conservative, anarchist or socialist. We distrust, but we're not paranoids (except for maybe one of us *wink*), and we love our country, but we're not patriots. At least not in the "owning a lot of guns kind of way." (Except for one of us. Don't kill me please, EC) For most people, this living outside labels is really really annoying. They don't want to listen to what you have to say: they want to listen until they find something juicy enough to sink teeth into and disagree with.

So when you act like you don't trust your government but also think socialism's not a bad idea, people don't know whether to write you off as a Milita Man Gun Nut or a social revolutionary. They just know they want to write you off. That creates a lot of flame wars and a lot of enemies. People like being able to dismiss you because it makes it easier to reinforce what they think of themselves if they can make you their yin while jerking their own yang.

Eventually, the mods at the board got rid of us. Banning a couple hundred other people who weren't adult enough to have a conversation without freaking out would have been a lot harder than banning the few of us, who were grown up enough to walk away.

Maybe you think that people like us would go apeshit about FREE SPEECH and be outraged at being banned, but those are the breaks. Websites are private things. People pay to put them up and run them; they don't have to pay attention to you. If I ran those websites, I might have banned us too, just because I already have enough headaches.

We thought about starting our own board, but that would have been gay. It's only a few of us, so we could just talk on IM or myspace blogs. That's what we did for a while, but then weird members of the old board tracked down our myspaces and were generally being assholes playing "internet sleuth." It got so we couldn't post a new blog for our friends and comment back and forth on it without seeing a mirror of it appear on the old site, with people tweaking the language and rewriting things to win a flame war we didn't care about anymore.

Because of this, we wanted to talk openly to our friends and allow strangers to read what we had to say (but it's any guess why they'd want to), but we also didn't want to do it with our own names attached anymore. Some people online are malicious, and we all started to worry about maybe losing a job opportunity down the road because somewhere someone was spamming a website with copy-and-paste jobs of our myspace discussions, tweaking the language, making up other stuff and attaching our names to it to make us sound like kooks.

Hence the blogspot. Here we can be anonymous to strangers but also show our friends whatever weird thing is on our minds. Here we can get our ideas out without the burdens of real names and worrying about any consequences. Here we can have fun. We don't expect anyone else to really care about this junk, but if you've stumbled across it, we hope you have fun too.

Thanks!