Polishing A Turd: A Week Of Garfield NES ROM HACK

19 May a week of garfield
a week of garfield

The best thing about hacking a terrible game is that anything you do is an improvement. At least theoretically. At this point however I am not so sure.

A Week Of Garfield is a Japan-release only game by TOWA CHIKI Corp. The game was released in 1989, which makes it remarkably terrible considering that same year mind-blowing games like Ironsword, Castlevania II: Simons Quest and A Boy And His Blob were released. It feels like not so much of a coincidence that after A Week Of Garfield’s release in Japan, it never had an American release (despite being a popular American IP) because of “licensing issues” and NO OTHER GARFIELD GAME WAS RELEASED OR EVEN DEVELOPED ON THE SYSTEM.

So, the first thing I did was some palette work and redrew the sprites to actually look like Garfield. The original game’s character was a vaguely cat-shaped blob, colored an unsettling shade of peach rather than orange for some reason. Digging around in the graphics data, you can find truly hideous first-draft sketches of some of the enemies as well as even more off-model interpretations of Garfield himself.

The game also includes this cartoony font that I did some tweaking to standardize and actually make it look like all the letters were from the same font, which they definitely did not at first.

As far as coding goes, I did some really basic tweaks that are practically invisible but I will mention two in particular:

1) For some reason you originally didn’t start with a full health bar. That is stupid. The first stage of the game is where you should be most lenient with the player and give them a chance to screw up a couple times with little consequence to learn the game. So my hack starts you with a full health bar.

2) Screw those stupid keys. If you haven’t played the game before, at the end of every sub-stage is a door which you need a key to open. Thankfully all the keys are near the door, but they are invisible. You will notice this is not a gameplay feature that caught on, because it is stupid. I dug around to see if there was a flag I could set to make them visible at least. As far as I can tell, they are hard-coded so the game literally draws them when you jump over the spot where they are. Stupid. Garbage. So all the doors in my hack are unlocked.

All in all however, maybe I’m being hard on myself but this hack didn’t feel satisfying. Instead, I kinda feel like that lady who painted over the Jesus face in the cave. A Week Of Garfield was so terrible it was ART. Being hideous on top of unplayable really cements it as a special experience. The result of this hack is a game that is still pretty bad, but inoffensively so. If it was released like this, you couldn’t even get mad at it.

But I’m putting it out there so you can decide for yourself.

A WEEK OF GARFIELD REDUX

(This is not a game ROM, which I do not have the right to distribute. This is an IPS patch (created from A Week Of Garfield (Japan).nes) which entirely contains code and data I created. My preferred IPS patcher is Lunar IPS.)

HACK NOTES:

I would be willing to bet that creating a stage editor for this game would be incredibly easy. There’s no abstraction to any of the code, it’s incredibly straight-forward. Someone who cares way more than I do would have to take that on tho. Not sure how many people are dying to create an OC game using the legendary A Week Of Garfield platform game engine however.

Kinda curious how much of this game engine wound up in Dragon Fighter, tho. Might explore that in the future.

GAME GENIE CODES:

AXENLEZE – Start With A Full Health Bar

RAM ADDRESSES:

0x00D4: Keys
0x0311: Day Of The Week
0x0315: Time
0x0318: Health
0x0346: Jump Height
0x0349: Enemy Collision Flag
0x0358: Bones
0x0359: Burgers
0x035A: Cheese

The Economics Of Pac-Land (NES Hack)

29 Apr pac land nes hack
pac land nes hack

Pac-Land is Namco’s 1985 Japan-only Famicom port of their arcade game of the same name. It was the first home port of the game. The graphics were based off of the 1982 Hanna-Barbera Pac-Man cartoon, incorporating the theme music from the cartoon as well. The game itself is a rudimentary platformer, having Pac-Man leave home walking from his house through forest, city, desert, seaside and mountain terrain to return a lost fairy (hiding from the Ghost Monsters under his jaunty Alpine Fedora) to Fairy Land. Pac-Man can find power pellets in order to eat the Ghost Monsters, but that is the only mechanic preserved from the original Pac-Man game.

Not only being the first home port of the game, it is also an extremely early Famicom game in general. As such, it is a very tight, very economical, very tiny (40 kB) game. The CHR (graphics) data for the entire game: title screen, stages, font, intermissions and player and enemy sprites amounts to only 512 8×8 tiles.

Curiously enough, even among this small amount of tiles, there are unused graphics included. Some are broken, but there is a complete sprite to have the ghosts in cars that is unused. If one wanted, it would be possible to change one or more of the plane-based ghosts into car-based ghosts by limiting the y-position to stay on the ground. Otherwise the behavior would be identical, traveling in a straight line from one side of the screen to the other. A possible idea for a hack if one wanted.

I chose to only do a graphics hack and palette hack. Chose a color set that was more cartoony and a deeper yellow color for Pac-Man himself. Did a massive overhaul of the title screen. I also edited the front of house screen to include Mrs. Pac-Man to make it closer to the arcade game. Player and background titles were edited.

I wanted to add the ability in my hack to do mid-air jumps, an ability unlocked by a pair of magic boots found at the end of every stage. You can make the boots permanent by changing RAM address 0x0030 to 40. However, you can’t separate the multi-jump ability of the magic boots from the stage behavior while you wear them. The entrance and exit of the stage are reversed, and “completing” the stage (exiting on the left instead of the right) initiates a “Minus World” with glitched maps and pointers. Seemed too unstable to include in a hack.

My graphics hack for the game is below:

PAC-LAND REDUX

(This is not a game ROM, which I do not have the right to distribute. This is an IPS patch (created from Pac-Land (Japan).nes) which entirely contains code and data I created. My preferred IPS patcher is Lunar IPS.)

HACK NOTES:

RAM ADDRESSES:

Magic Boots /Multi-Jump/Minus World Flag: 0x0030 (Set to 40).

GUEVARA WAR (NES Hack) And Death Flags.

29 Apr Guerilla War NES Hack
Guevara War NES Hack

Guerrilla War is the 1988 NES port by SNK of their arcade run-and-gun title. Superficially it has a lot of similarities with their other overhead run-and-gun titles like the Ikari Warriors franchise. Interestingly the original game, Guevara (“ゲバラ”), follows the path of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro liberating Batista’s Cuba. The text of this plotline was naturally removed in North American localization in Reagan’s America, but otherwise the map and plot was the same.

This is my first NES ROM hack, a graphic and text hack restoring the original plot in the English version. I replaced the pixel art image of the Cuban revolutionary with a digitized photo as well as changing the text. I restored the player names to GUEVARA and CASTRO as in the original. I also replaced the in-game font with one that is more military looking. This also included a full overhaul of the title screen with a chibi anime Che Guevara I designed.

I wanted to add a couple actual game mechanic hacks, specifically the ability to keep the player’s score and weapon after death, but that proved much more complicated than initially. Tracking down where the score and weapon are stored in the RAM was the easy part (see notes below). Interrupting the routine after death that initializes the weapon (and the score after continue) is much more problematic because the address for the flag is reused for multiple functions in the overall game program. In the notes below there is a superficial Game Genie code that allows the player to keep the weapon after death, but it leads to many undesired effects elsewhere in the game code. In the end it didn’t seem like a good hack with so much potential instability. The IPS patch for the graphics hack is below:

GUEVARA WAR

(This is not a game ROM, which I do not have the right to distribute. This is an IPS patch (created from Guerrilla War (USA).nes) which entirely contains code and data I created. My preferred IPS patcher is Lunar IPS.)

HACK NOTES:

The 8×16 font is treated as metatiles and the text using it in the ROM is stored in plaintext ASCII.

RAM ADDRESSES:
Player 1 Lives: 0x0028
Player 2 Lives: 0x0029
Next Stage: 0x0039
Player 1 Score: 0x0190, 0x0191, 0x0192
Player 2 Score: 0x0193, 0x0194, 0x0195
High Score: 0x0196, 0x0197, 0x0198
Timer For Tank: 0x04C2
Player 1 Weapon: 0x0600
Player 2 Weapon: 0x0601

WEAPONS:

000 – Normal Gun/Normal Bombs
001 – Spread Gun/Normal Bomb
002 – Laser+Spread Gun/Normal Bomb
003 – Flamethrower Gun/Normal Bomb
004 – Laser Gun/Normal Bomb
024 – Normal Bomb/Powered Bomb
025 – Powered Bomb/Powered Bomb
026 – Destruction Bomb/Powered Bomb
028 – Rescue Whip/Powered Bomb
032 – Normal Gun/Destruction Bomb
033 – Spread Gun/Destruction Bomb
034 – Laser+Spread Gun/Destruction Bomb
035 – Flamethrower Gun/Destruction Bomb
036 – Laser Gun/Destruction Bomb
073 – Powered Bomb/Rescue Whip
074 – Destruction Bomb/Rescue Whip
076 – Rescue Whip/Rescue Whip

GAME GENIE CODES:

SXUTEUSO – Keep Weapon After Death. Replaces the ASM opcode at line 0xEBB0 (the death flag routine mentioned above) which is originally set at $9D (STA: Store Accumulator) with $AD (LDA: Load Accumulator). Essentially it replaces the code that changes the weapon variable with a different command that dumps the zero value into the accumulator (a set aside register of RAM addresses where intermediate values used in arithmetic routines wind up; a sort of junk drawer in the RAM). This also affects several animation timers in the game, leading to softlocks and ghost animations.

AYSVOGEI – One Hit Kills (including bosses). Sets address 0xEC59 to 70. Can be changed to EASVOGEI, which causes bosses to have significantly reduced hit points, taking two to five hits instead of just one.

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4 Weird Things That Happen To You When A Love(d) One Kills Themselves

4 Sep chloe sagal suicide

chloe sagal suicide

Someone I used to be in love with and lived with for two years took her life. Depending on the sort of story you were expecting, this could be seen as a beginning or ending. For me it still seems like some sort of limbo, moments and feelings trapped in amber that I can see but not touch. Hopefully writing about it will help me move forward.

This isn’t news to anyone that follows me online through either my own social media and posts, or filtered through your favorite online stalking/roasting site/FB group. From Fall 2014 to Fall 2016 I was in a tumultuous relationship with video game designer Chloe Sagal, and we lived together for much of that time. We separated during a particularly tense eviction, where I moved to downtown Portland to prepare for an impending surgery and she moved elsewhere with another of her partners. I ceased contact shortly afterward, and heard little from or about her until she hobbled into a downtown Portland park and set herself on fire to protest her lifetime struggle with inadequate and unsympathetic mental health care.

And then things got weird.

I found myself lamenting that there really isn’t a whole lot of advice out there for this sort of situation. What do you do with yourself and your thoughts and your pain? Everyone has hot takes about why this happened, but you don’t hear many stories from/about those left behind. So here we are.

I figure this could be a good resource for a lot of people, even if you don’t literally have Washington Times journalists openly wishing on Twitter that you would also commit suicide.

chloe sagal suicide

1) Your Memories Are A Fuck

I mean, this isn’t the first time I lost an ex. A guy I used to date when I was much younger drank himself to death around his 30th birthday. Another ex of mine (another trans woman in the video game industry) passed away peacefully during a camping trip. This isn’t even the first time I lost a loved one to suicide; I’ve brought up more than once on this blog my uncle that killed himself when I was a pre-teen over his inability to reconcile being gay with his Christian faith. It’s not like I don’t still have unprocessed and complicated feelings about them all, most of all about never being able to say goodbye.

This one is different, because my relationship with Chloe was… not great a lot of the time. She screamed and hit walls and could be very threatening. She broke a lot of my stuff, specifically targeting things she knew had sentimental value like childhood possessions. She would send harassing messages to people I cared about and in the end was sending nasty messages my way as well. It got to where I woke up in a panic when I heard her typing in the wee hours of the morning creating a new manifesto. I wondered who was targeted next, what damage control would I have to devote my day to rather than my own life.

But she also wrote songs about me. Not just full romantic ballads, but little ditties she would make up while I was cooking dinner or cleaning the room. She would riff off of themes songs of shows we watched together, cuddled under the covers, when things were good. We had a whole language of in-jokes and references. She always looked better in my clothes than I did. I still remain convinced she was one of the most effortlessly brilliant artistic minds I was ever blessed to spend time with and be inspired by.

I fell in love with her while she sung “The Calendar Hung Itself” by Bright Eyes to me. Honestly that should have been a red flag this would not end well, but I was starry eyed. This shit is complex.

I don’t think she was a bad person, or a martyr. I think she got so accustomed to online abuse from the fallout from her GoFundMe incident that she compulsively sought out negative attention over positive. She was so terrified of ever completing a project because of anticipated backlash she just devoured herself like a snake eating its tail.

2) People Show Up Out Of Fucking Nowhere

chloe sagal suicide

I found out what happened on my birthday, when a reporter contacted me for a statement. I was on my way to a date with a guy at a club so I said I would give a statement first thing tomorrow. He got me so drunk I overslept and never contacted the reporter.

I got an email from him the next day giving his condolences. I hadn’t told him during the date, he had Googled me and found mention of it on a roasting site. He concluded by admitting he had a wife he didn’t tell me about. That meant, he insisted, that future dates would have to be more discreet since he was now aware of people watching my social media. I deleted his number from my phone.

Happy Birthday To Me.

Those first few days I got messages from probably a thousand people. Limiting it to supportive messages, it was still broad swaths of individuals with widely varying connection to me. People I was on good and bad terms with. People I hadn’t spoken to in months or years, and some I honestly never wanted to speak to again well before this.

The messages came so frequently I barely had time to formulate how I was feeling, much less summarize it. A lot of vague offers of “support” “if I needed anything” that I had no idea how to respond to. Even a handful of folks that genuinely seemed to be looking for an odd sort of absolution. Like I could pat them on the head and be like “well fine I forgive you,” and give them closure.

Fuck that, when do I get closure?

3) The Narrative Becomes A Disaster

People are still actively talking about her on Twitter. Everyone has their pet story about what happened. I see articles written in like Portuguese that have photos of a completely different ex of mine in them because a right-wing blogger fucked up the Google Image Search for her in a hitpiece. People use her death to make a point scolding other people using her death to make a completely different point.

A month ago, a Canadian balladeer I hadn’t heard of previously wrote a song with her name in the title and I realize this is bigger than I can comprehend. Like, she’s not the person I lived with and woke up next to and she’s not the person I had to separate myself from. This whole thing is bigger, even to people that never even met her. She’s now a symbol, a metaphor. A horrible, grisly death turned to legend that means whatever anyone wants it to mean.

In a way, kinda got what she wanted; people talking about what she went through. People taking it seriously. For the rest of us, however,

4) You Never Stop Wondering What This Means

chloe sagal suicide

Stories have a beginning, a middle, and end. Something bad happens, and you learn something and grow stronger. Ghosts haunt you, and you put them to rest and you both benefit.

Otherwise you just… sit there.

Do you let go? What does “letting go” mean? Is it better, is it required of me, to preserve the good she has done over the bad? How much responsibility do I have for sustaining her legacy?

Why did this happen? What’s the lesson here? What’s the next step? How do I put this ghost to rest?

Do you ever get to find out?

Does this story ever actually end?

Article Feature Image: Tristen, Flickr

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I Don’t Care About That TERF Pussy Church And Neither Should You

23 Aug

There’s been a bit of a hub-bub lately over the IRS granting non-profit status/recognition to an anti-trans Pussy Church of Final Judgement or whatever. On the surface, this definitely seems like some seriously bad news.

On one hand, the Trump administration has displayed a growing commitment to redefine anti-LGBT discrimination as a matter of “Religious Freedom/Expression.” On the other hand, TERFs and other typically secular anti-trans movements are increasingly adapting the playbooks and accepting funding from the anti-LGBT Religious Right. Advocacy and acceptance of trans rights and visibility of our needs has been a largely recent thing, and the current political climate has seen increasing hostility and the looming threat of losing what small gains that have been made.

People have been asked my opinion on this, because I’ve had a reputation for dunking TERFs that goes back years before I got a pussy myself. It would be remiss of me to not put something out there regarding The Psychic Temple of Pussy Youth or whatever. So I thought for a bit over what I wanted to write. However, honestly this doesn’t seem quite so dire when you take a minute or two to think about it. I mean –

Okay First Of All That Fucking Name

There was a real opportunity here for TERFs. They could have formalized an organized sect of Dianic Wicca for instance. Called it “The Sisters Of Mary Daly” or something with similar gravitas and sense of reverence. But no, TERFs gotta be oh so clever with everything they do, so now it’s the Super Special Pussy Power No Penis Boys Allowed Church. This is not going to work out well for them in the long run.

I literally cannot wait for a case against this group to go to court. I cannot wait to see a representative of this group argue to a crusty elderly ninth circuit court judge that they have a First Amendment right to discriminate against trans people because they “worship at the altar of pussy” or whatever. That’s practically begging for a contempt of court verdict, no matter how many tax forms you filled out.

You want to see how well this will turn out? Look up any number of cases regarding the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and driver license photos. There’s a handful of wins here and there, but largely it’s a disaster and considered an embarrassing joke. There’s a certain decorum expected when making claims or appeals towards upholding your deeply-held religious belief and expression, and claiming membership in a Holey Pussy Church isn’t gonna win anyone over in that regard.

It Couldn’t Be A More Transparent Honey Trap

So like, at this point it’s pretty well known who is behind this thing. If you don’t know, ask around about it on Twitter. I’m kind of thinking a certain someone must have fallen off the wagon because this scheme is a bit harebrained even for them. But anyway, despite being off the grid for a bit, they seem to be back to their old playbook.

It’s an old, tired playbook, y’all. We should all be familiar with it by now. Can we not be stupid about it this time? They want you to grouse and be upset by their existence and create screen-cappable posts they can claim are “threats” for the sake of their persecution complex and recruitment appeals. You’ve seen blogs compiling these posts, many of which go back to like 2010. Once they find a post they hold onto it forever. It’s not a type of fame you want.

If they can’t find anything they’ll just make stuff up, so why hand them ammo? Even now on r/GenderCritical or whatever they are going over this post with a fine-tooth comb for something to sob over…

“HE… HE SAID DUNKING! DUNKING LIKE IN WITCH TRIALS! THAT IS CLEARLY WHAT IS MEANT BY THAT! TAPPING INTO THE UMPTY THOUSAND YEARS OPPRESSION OF WOMEN BY PENISMALES IN DRESSES! THE USE OF SUCH DELIBERATELY CRUEL LANGUAGE IS PROOF THAT MISTER RANI IS AND FOREVER WILL BE, ON A SPIRITUAL LEVEL, A MALE PENISMAN!”
– somebody on r/GenderCritical probably

The Endgame Is Sort Of Obvious, And Kinda Sad

I know these people aren’t stupid.

The likelihood of this church being used to facilitate workplace or housing discrimination is pretty slim. The idea that they will join forces with the Religious Right to sponsor some sort of Holy Bathroom Police Militia is unlikely. Hell, the idea that they are going to actually find anything more than token lipservice support from the Dark Web Free Speech Vanguard is practically non-existent.

So what are they up to? This may be premature of me to guess, but given what I know about who and what is involved with this organization, I have a pretty good idea. I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts the endgame of this group is to use it as a base to form a new trans-excluding women’s festival around. Yeah, like Michfest, remember ever caring about that? Seems like a century ago.

But anyway, if this turns out to be the case oh my god can we let these people have their sad stinky hippie festival full of terrible music now? Trump is literally going to kill us all and these clowns have made it more than clear they are willing to burn down everything and help erect a Gilead 2.0 if they can at least guarantee making a few trans women’s lives harder along the way.

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A Cannibalistic Dissection Of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

28 Oct Rocky Horror Picture Show

rockyhorror0

A week before the writing of this, FOX aired a remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, subtitled Let’s Do The Time Warp Again. I’m not averse to the idea of seeing it, but I’m not going to go out of my way either. Not for any particular reason politically, just simply because the original is so clearly and deeply rooted to a particular time period it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to update it. I’ll have more on that in a moment.

The main (and only) thing I need to know about the remake is that it showcased front and center a black trans woman, on the same channel FOX News is broadcast from, during a time when the right wing has dedicated themselves to a war against trans bodies. Regardless of any other merits or flaws in the project, I still find that deliciously subversive in a way the original never dared.

If you were hoping for more talk about the remake, I do apologize. There are plenty of other people talking about it, I swear. I’m not writing yet another thinkpiece about how problematic or transphobic or whatever the movie is. Plenty of other folks covering that ground. I’m not interested in RHPS creator Richard O’Brien’s bizarre and absurd notion that he can decide how much of a woman he is but nobody else can. Just yet another tired old has-been queen desperate for attention and latching onto trendy notions of “edginess” and “anti-political-correctness” as far as I’m concerned. The fact that he hates the remake makes me want to enjoy it out of spite tho.

What will I be talking about then?

Well lets start by talking about the Hays Code (and later rating systems) and the role of pulp sci-fi on queerness. Stories of alternate sexualities and gender explorations were all over the place in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but due to publisher restrictions had to be formatted in a certain way. It was honestly surprising how far they were capable of going, as long as they didn’t directly show intimacy and all queer characters were punished at the end for their transgression from conservative mores. Here’s a sex-change sci-fi story from a 1953 comic book that covers the bases pretty well, with an exception I will elaborate on in a moment.

Rocky Horror Picture show even opens with the song “Science Fiction/Double Feature” which waxes nostalgic about shiny underwear and phallic Triffids, name-checking classic titles and names from films that would have been staples of a sci-fi obsessed 1975 audience’s childhood. Self-aware nods to these tropes echo throughout the film.

Lets line them up and see how the beats play out, shall we? We have aw shucks traditional protagonist(s), an audience insert for voyeuristic heterosexuals or questioning/curious queer folk:

rockyhorror3

The protagonists find themselves stranded from the values and culture they took for granted, in a lawless anything goes environment:

rockyhorror4

This leads to an awakening where deep, transgressive desires are brought to light and actualized… but at what cost?

rockyhorror5

And at the end all transgressions are punished and the moral is driven home that some doors should never be opened:

rockyhorror6

The spectre of conservative Americana glares disapprovingly at the dissolution of traditional values throughout the film. Not just figuratively, but directly and literally symbolized by multiple repeated vignettes evoking the sullen stoic gaze of the iconic Grant Wood painting American Gothic (a now campy and frequently satirized artwork that history forgets incited Rural Iowans to send the painter threats of violence).

rockyhorror2

However, you will note that there is something missing from this one-to-one comparison between the sex-change comic book and Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is because in sex-change stories, the antagonist is the clothes or the transformation itself. This is as true in Glen Or Glenda in the 1950s as it was in The Danish Girl in 2015. This story has an antagonist with a distinctly more visceral presence, a hyperqueered fantasy to Brokeback their mountains and tempt them away from their traditional lives.

Enter Frank.

Frank is a transgressive nightmare, a culmination of everything feared about the sexual awakenings of the late 1960s/early 1970s. It goes well beyond the crossdressing and sexualization; Frank was meticulously designed to provoke. He literally hunts down, murders and later cannibalistically devours Eddie, a symbol of naive notions of 1950s “safe rebellion”. Eddie’s entrance, to the song “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul“, reflects an entirely different sort of nostalgia filled with sock hops instead of gruesome horror movies. Frank nonchalantly eulogizes Eddies murder by his hand as “a mercy killing! He had a certain naive charm, but no… muscle.”

Indeed.

When Frank displayed a pink triangle on his labcoat, the symbol was still viscerally shocking and radical. The book The Men With The Pink Triangle, documenting homosexual men’s experience in Nazi concentration camps, had only come out a couple years before. The infamous Paragraph 175 of German Law under which those men had been imprisoned was still on the books.

rockyhorror1

Frank also dons a Lewis Leathers Aviakit Plainsman biker jacket adorned with badges from the Hell’s Angels and other recognizable biker gangs (including patches with the distinct Nazi Deaths Head and Eagle iconography of the Angels). This wasn’t the “making toy runs for sick kids” Hell’s Angels, this was the “locked Hunter S Thompson in the trunk of a car for several days” Hells Angels. This also presents contrast to Eddie’s sanitized pompadour-and-motorcycle schtick as the corny posturing it was.

rockyhorror7

Frank’s fawning over his Frankenstein Atlas, Rocky, was another uncomfortable tribute/unmasking to the underlying homoeroticism in body-building culture, a subtext simultaneously acknowledged yet dismissed within said subculture. With Rocky as the dense and sweetly naive foil to Frank’s sexual innuendo, it’s presented as yet another affront to the values of yesteryear.

rockyhorror8

Enabled through Frank’s brazen transgressions, the protagonists find themselves freed from convention to explore their own desires. This is illustrated in the floor show scene where the players vocalize their inner conflicts onstage. Columbia is full of regret and heartbreak, Rocky and Brad have newfound sexual urges that neither can quite figure out, and Janet feels empowered by the whole experience. Shortly afterwards, Riff-Raff and Magenta stage a mutiny to topple Frank as leader. Riff-Raff’s accusation says it all:

Frank-N-Furter, it’s all over
your mission is a failure
your lifestyle’s too extreme

Ironically, after forty years of cultural advance, a film that sought to deconstruct stifling tropes and liberate expectations has for the most part been relegated to yet another formulaic exploitation. It has a historical place, as a love-letter to the queer-coded villains of Hollywood’s golden age, but at this point Frank has joined them. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a fun ritual for voyeuristic straights, closeted drama club queers and assorted connoisseurs of camp and kitsch and likely will be for at long as movie theaters continue to exist. However, the cultural critique is a bit toothless and obvious now, the references collecting dust, and subtext lost under performative rote.

And maybe the ritual is the point now, a sort of mystery cult initiation for average folks looking for an excuse to buy a corset. But I believe an occasional reminder of what it all means couldn’t hurt either.

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#Wikileaks And #AltRight Annouce Plans To Build Reaganbook 2.0

21 Jul

reaganbook0

It gets boring hiding in a foreign embassy all day, I’d imagine. Not exactly sure what crawled up the ass of rapist/webhost Julian Assange this morning, but he decided to throw one of his periodic racist tantrums on the Wikileaks twitter. Previous tantrums he’s thrown mostly involved piss-crying everywhere about Black Lives Matter, but this time he had a martyr. Twitter’s permabanning of some white supremacist twink well past his use-by date has got a lot of the most repulsive creatures on the internet bothered, Assange is no exception. After pestering the CEO of the company over it, because disallowing private companies the ability to refuse service is a libertarian cornerstone all of a sudden, he made a proclamation of “creating a new service”. Cool, go for it.

reaganbook1

Wait a minute. A far-right anti-gay racist-friendly cesspool social media site with administration that is absent and/or incapable to handle trolls and other internet dregs? Turns out one of those already happened; it was called Reaganbook. And it burned to the ground within a week of launch almost exactly two years ago.

reaganbook2

To be fair, Reaganbook was just the latest in a line of similar experiments. Preceding it were sites you’ve totally heard of like Tea Party Community, Social Postup, and FreedomTorch. Reaganbook was founded by Ohio Republican Janet Porter, from the activist group Faith2Action, in protest of Facebook’s acceptance of the gay community. Steeped in Republican Christian persecution complexes, she considered her rights violates somehow and strove to create a safe space for conservatives to gather.

To make sure things were as free as possible, there was no moderation to be seen and no verification for new accounts. Because freedom. A lot of folks found this hilarious and decided to join and watch the trainwreck, myself included.

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reaganbook4

It started out mildly entertaining for the first couple sessions. Lots of ironic usernames and groups and folks taking the piss out of each other. And watching the actual conservatives trying to use the site and getting flustered was amusing.

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Before long the feed was swamped with beastiality porn, surgery videos and photos of gore. Just trying to make funny posts seemed pointless so I logged off for good. Within a couple days the website shut down completely.

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They’ve later relaunched as Freedombook, but that site hasn’t exactly been booming. Interested in seeing how this new far-right troll coddling site turns out. Maybe it’ll last two weeks? Anyone wanna start a betting pool?

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Who Owns Queer Culture? Not Exclusively Cis Gay Dudes.

14 Apr

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I will admit to a difficult, but not entirely negative, relationship to the nihilistic queer media of my youth in the 90s.

It’s what I grew up on, and what I reciprocated in my own writings of the time. Despite the progressive, laid-back image, the 90s still had a lot to feel hopeless and pessimistic about as queer youth. My formative young adult sexual experiences began under both the continuing spectre of AIDS as well as under Texas sodomy laws. Not to mention, um, Texas. Matthew Sheppard was only a bit older than me, and a year later a drag queen/trans lady (like myself) in the same scene I performed in that was saving money for transition was stabbed 60 times and dumped in a ditch.

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So, I mean, I get the appeal of the medium. I also get the cheeky “scribble an anarchy symbol on your high school notebook and call it politics” attitude fuelling writer(?) Tomas Allende’s recent screed in some neo-reactionary buzzword factory imaginatively named “Trigger Warning”. Yawn. It’s a rambling, premise-less manifesto basically insisting that transgressive art, and thus “queer culture” is exclusively the realm of angry edgy gay boys that jerk off to anime. Double yawn.

That said, the article opens up promisingly enough. Allende describes the struggles of his closeted youth in Chile, a story I can deeply sympathise with, along with his awakening through discovering the Greg Araki film The Living End. A damn fine movie.

He then states:

“Queer cinema was not about married same-sex couples with a furry pet in the suburbs. It was the disenfranchised, the freaks, and the non-apologetic crowd of queers that served no purpose other than to be themselves. It was nihilistic, pointless, and fucking fabulous.”

And I’m inclined to agree.

I’m quite familiar with the films of Araki and Todd Haynes, as well as similarly bleak works like the short stories of Dennis Cooper and darkly humorous romps like I Shot Andy Warhol. I have a soft spot in my heart for all those tragic transsexual movies that I’m supposed to hate. If the story involved some nervous twenty-something trying butt stuff for the first time in the second act and then dying tragically in the third, I was probably all about it in the 90s.

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Strangely enough, this protest by Allende against banal gay assimilation just sort of hangs in the air, and is never elaborated on. In fact, things he says paragraphs later completely negate it.

Allende then begins gibbering the same sort of tired knee-jerk incomprehensible MRGay boilerplate about “third-wave feminism” you’d expect from the sort of chronic masturbator that would still have the Gamergate hashtag in his Twitter bio in 2016. Wait, holy shit he actually does. You can’t make this up.

It’s interesting, because second-wave feminism wasn’t exactly friendly to or inclusive of gay folks at the time. It took the intervention of a lot of folks now considered part of the core of the third-wave movement to reconcile the archaic racism and homophobia of the second wave.

Bringing up real history hardly means anything in this context, because Allende isn’t actually talking about culture. He talks about movies. He believes video games are a political movement. He admits the wild bareback fucking hard-partying boys in his cinema daydreams bear no reflection on his actual life. He exists in some reactionary simulacrum of the radical queer life he both idealizes and loathes.

I find it interesting that, despite claiming to be a fan of Greg Araki he spends two paragraphs railing against formation of sexual identity. Araki made A GODDAMN TRILOGY of movies about literally that. Totally Fucked Up is about exploring the boundaries of homosexuality, The Doom Generation is about exploring the boundaries of heterosexuality (literally billed as “A Heterosexual Movie by Greg Araki“), and Nowhere explores a sexual landscape akin to pansexuality. If you don’t believe that term existed back then, here’s queer actor Alan Cumming describing himself as such in gay magazine OUT in 1999.

Allende: “The characters in those films… would never attempt to garner pity”

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Even after denying that queer folks experience oppression (or something), Allende laments how “being gay meant abuse, rejection, and the possibility of contracting an incurable disease which could lead to a horrendous death”… in the past tense.

Newsflash: HIV is still around. It would take more fingers than I have to count off the number of folks I consider reasonably close that have to deal with it as an immediate medical reality. There are still a staggering amount of homeless queer youth, due to rejection and abuse at home.

In any case, while dudes like Tomas are sitting at home watching 20+ year old movies and harboring political views less radical than my grandparents, there are people actually living in queer culture. Working to develop and upkeep sustainable communities of support. Making our own art to communicate with each other.

Maybe we don’t need you or your tired-ass homocon opinions.

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Going Poly Made Having Sex With My Exes Partners Much Easier

1 Apr

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Yeah yeah yeah. It’s April 1st. Don’t get too mad at me. My first time doing this.

 

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Sissy Killer: Silence Of The Lambs’ “Good/Bad Queer” Dynamic

24 Mar Sissy Killers Queer Coding

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It’s been 25 years since Silence Of The Lambs was released, and there have already been plenty of hot takes to go around. Recently, Jos Truitt over at Feministing posted an unflinching and thorough deconstruction of what the character “Buffalo Bill” represents to the trans community. Naturally, cis people completely lost their shit.

“How could anyone identify with a serial killer?” they lamented. Good point, it’s not like Hannibal Lecter wound up in four novels, five films, and a television series currently on it’s third season where he is the protagonist. Oh wait.

sissykillers2Dinner’s Ready.

Why is it considered ok to empathize with Lecter and not Jame Gumb? Both were brutal mass murderers known for short tempers and for mutilating their victims. Gumb was a gender dysphoric survivor of child abuse and neglect, and Hannibal Lecter was a calculating abusive manipulator that shut her off from medical care and murdered her boyfriend. So why do people root for Gumb getting gunned down yet also for Lecter’s escape and promise to kill again?

Seriously, check out the last couple minutes of Silence Of The Lambs again. Lecter all decked out like Truman Fuckin Capote bragging about “having an old friend for dinner”. He’s a triumphant anti-hero rather than a villain. And it gets worse with each subsequent film/tv depiction.

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The answer is simple: Lecter represents the “good kind” of queer, and Bill represents the “bad kind”.

While I don’t share Truitt’s particular tattoo choice (although I have seriously considered both the spear wound and the “LOVE” hand tattoo), I do have a tramp stamp of “In Voluptas Mors”, and yes it is a reference to Silence Of The Lambs. I, also, have a bit of a soft spot for the movie. A particularly fascinating element of the movie is that it features two queer coded “sissy villains”, but coded in different ways and pitted against each other.

What’s that? Hannibal Lecter isn’t actually gay? That’s ok, because Jame Gumb “isn’t actually transgender”, right?

sissykillers3Meanwhile, the only definitely gay person in the movie is dead.

In the book, the infamous “tucking scene” also invites the reader to voyeuristically review Gumb’s hormone regimen, thinning body hair, voice training, electrolysis and even passing mention of breast development. This is presented with both a clinical air and a sense of disdain at the progress. But this is ok because Gumb is not “really transgender”, right?

Later in the book Agent Crawford threatens to have federal funding cut from the Johns Hopkins sex-reassignment wing and have the surgery re-classified as of non-medical necessity. There’s no telling how many transsexuals ongoing medical treatment were effectively being held hostage as an afterthought in this power-play. But this is ok because Gumb is not “really transgender”, right?

I’m sure there is also something to be said about namechecking the Johns Hopkins Trans Surgery wing as a plot point in the book, considering the actual one was shut down a decade before.

And even as Ted Levine’s lumbering, gangly tr*nny monster performance is frequently superimposed over depictions of the lives of trans folks, and the spectre of which haunts discussions of everything from “bathroom bills” to TSA clearances, Lecter represents the opposite of this stereotype. Lecter is theatrical without camp. He is effette but not effeminate. He drips with sarcasm and is impeccably refined and cultural and worldly.

The comparisons don’t stop there. In the novel, through Agent Starling’s feminist hero eyes she recognizes Lecter as “small, sleek, and in his hands and arms she saw wiry strength like her own” in contrast to Gumb’s frequently referenced large hefty frame. In the film, Lecter is depicted as deliberately clinical and meticulously clean, a contrast to the squalor of Gumb’s living area and poor hygiene and posture. Anthony Hopkins came up with the idea of having Lecter dressed in white in order to invoke imagery of doctors and dentists and peoples instinctive unease around them. But it also positions him yet again as an virtous-appearing authority figure. Perhaps this is why we are expected to continue to take Lecter’s gatekeeping of Gumb’s dysphoria at face value, despite the fact that it’s coming from a man restrained in a strait jacket and spitter’s mask.

“He’s not a transsexual, Clarice. He just thinks he is, and he’s puzzled and angry because they won’t help him.”

There’s almost definitely a “high/low functioning” mental illness dynamic going on as well that someone may choose to explore further down the line. How does nobody ever question Lecter’s capacity to make psychological diagnoses not only without clinical observation but while also himself deemed in a dangerous enough capacity mentally to warrant institutionalization?

sissykillers4Definitely someone with authority’s best interest in mind – Everyone Somehow

It’s not like positioning the audience to arbiter Lecter as a gatekeeper of queer sexuality is limited to his interaction with Jame Gumb. I mentioned earlier his murder of Gumb’s boyfriend, named after a leftist French intellectual. In the opening to the movie Red Dragon Lecter is literally shown in judgement of Raspail’s performativity, and Jesus Christ as Lecter scowls at Raspail’s unsatisfactory ability to blow the flute I’m sure Freud was doing cartwheels in his grave. And then, in the following scene, a bunch of progressive intellectuals giggle over Raspail’s missing status and subsequently nonperson him based on the same inadequate perfomativity Lecter judged him worthy of death over.

sissykillers5He’s either decided to kill a man or poop himself.

This sort of gatekeeping, this arbitration of judgement over folks less desirable is clearly the role the unexamined audience wants from Lecter. He returns to this role over and over and over, evolving from a useful monster to a justified protagonist in his own universe, while his gruesome body count silently grows.

Maybe y’all should re-evaluate what you consider so identifiable in Hannibal Lecter.

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