I've fallen for my share of rogues. Arguably Loki's put a good one over on us, especially—Loki's had their hooks into us for almost as long as we can remember anything at all, but it's taken us most of that time to work out that such things were even possible. Our journey towards belief and faith (not faith in the gods so much, but rather faith in our perceptions of them) has been an exceptionally rocky one.

I fell for Christianity and Catholicism! That one still astonishes me a bit. Even with considerable intellectual awareness of the motivating factors, it still seems like an absurdity. We can barely endure even the relative anonymity of a city crowd; how did we make ourselves endure a full-church baptism? And the process of falling into Catholicism meant falling for a lot of other plaster saints: C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, others. I except Dorothy Sayers, she feels like the real thing to me, and I don't think that Charles Williams ever rose to plaster-saint status in the first place. He's always been a touch disreputable and marginalized among the Christian right.

I can tell you this much about that decision to convert: I wouldn't have done it if I thought that anything else was possible. I was in a bad way at the time; my career had disintegrated, my one close relationship was disintegrating, I was struggling with addictions and I felt like I had no family. I'd run away from my parents and my older sibling, feeling like it was my only chance at independence, and I was therefore vulnerable to the notion that church and Catholicism would be like a new family. The Christians are big on that...they like to pretend that they're one big happy family and the only sort of happy family in fact, even though they're constantly at war with themselves. They're practically dependent upon the racism and the scapegoating now, to maintain even a semblance of a united front.

Hence I feel like I can sort of understand why someone might be desperate enough to believe in Elon Musk or $GME or any other weird technofascist idol. Elon Musk is by far the most visible such icons but there's so many of these ersatz religions. Why? Simple: there's nothing else to believe in.

Well...that's not quite true. Actually there's tons of things, good honest things, that a techbro or a SpaceX cultist could believe in. I believe in lots of them myself. But they've been conditioned to think of all these things as bad jokes, or worse. Hardly any such person would, for example, dare to consider a serious look at socialism, or Islam, or Camus's absurdism, or anything else that's been written off as "woke" or even diabolical. They tend to scoff at ethics in general, as if believing in ethical conduct were like believing in the tooth fairy, and they've long ago internalized such notions as "too much democracy is bad" and "some people are better off dead" and so forth. The propagandists have done their work too well. They've effectively erased most of human experience and human knowledge from the heads of the true believers, and replaced it with noise and bigotry.

No wonder Elon Musk looms large in their sight. More than two decades of relentless marketing and fawning treatment in the press have built Musk up to enormous heights. His legend towers above the high noise floor. Indeed he's the focus of much of the noise, and it gets louder and louder the closer you get to him. But if you take the plunge, if you decide that that the radioactive waters of the Elon Musk oasis look inviting—why then, suddenly all is calm, all is bright, everyone's smiling and saying "Good Morning" to each other. Oh, and one more thing: inside the oasis, Elon Musk's youth has been restored.

How on Earth can any of these people even imagine leaving again. About the only thing that seems to work—and that, rarely—is for the cultist to experience some massive personal catastrophe, something that breaks apart all their assumptions about the stability of their situation, all at once. A relationship suddenly exploding, say, or an abrupt collision with The Law, or indeed an abrupt collision with a parked car. But if they're deeply enough inculcated, they may simply turn even further inwards, doubling and trebling down on their loyalty and taking worse risks for their idol.

I don't suppose a miracle is too much to ask for? A visitation by ghosts? Alien intervention? Time travelling back to the time of Romulus and Remus and making sure they get adopted by a nice human family and never once dream of founding cities? They might even remain friends if that happened. I'm at a loss myself. ~Chara

so...I sort of remember seeing a piece of an episode of an animated Incredible Hulk series in the early to mid 1980s, and that could only be this cartoon show, but none of the episode descriptions I've looked up seem all that familiar.

anyway I'm amused to think that this might have been the first time I heard Stan Lee's voice.

~Chara

is there writing or media on Jack the Ripper that's not sensationalist true-crime garbage ~Chara

If there's any one personality in the entire Undertale / Deltarune canonical universe that's most grating upon us, the one who seems the most opaque and alien to any sort of thought processes we're used to having, it's undoubtedly Spamton G. Spamton. Gaster might be (from our perspective) not far off Dr. Mengele, but we can kinda understand someone like Dr. Mengele, sorry to say. Spamton G. Spamton is, by contrast, like someone from another planet.

And yet he's clearly typical. One runs into many Spamtons these days. I've even tried to talk to some of them on Twitter and so far it's been hopeless, though I admit that I've been in my snarky passer-by voice and not really expecting something back, although occasionally I get a nibble. But it's so hard to get a bearing on people whose online lives are about 100% sales talk, in some way or another. Even the pleasant courtesies they love to smother each other with, to reassure themselves they're with the Good Guys™, are in the nature of sales talk; every one of the grifters is trying to outsell the others in terms of optimism, i.e. relentless gladhandling and sunny reassurances. It's rare to see a genuine moment from these guys but sometimes one slips out, rather like Spamton breaking character long enough to slam his fist into a dumpster.

Obviously, I don't get these people, and when I don't understand people, my first thought is: maybe there's some good movies about them, ones with solid social commentary! I've got Glengarry Glen Ross cued up, but I've been very reluctant to watch that. Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh are good salesman plays and I've watched performances of both semi-recently. But what else is there? I know there's a lot. There's plenty of movies that comment at least indirectly on the high-pressure culture of hustling and grifting, like Sweet Smell of Success and Wolf of Wall Street.

Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy feels like a Spamton G. Spamton movie. The wannabe star comedian, Rupert Pupkin, isn't exactly a salesman but he's always overselling himself, that's for sure. He's got that same infuriating but somehow invincible attitude of always talking like he's already mastered the situation, brushing his way past dismissals and angry ripostes as if somehow they'd been aimed at someone else, that salespersons cultivate. Imagine the pushy used-car-salesman always chattering just a bit faster than their victim can handle—sure, the mark might get angry at you for pestering, but let them spend their anger uselessly and then you'll have worn them down and more likely to surrender to the sale.

Huh, Michael Mann's "Thief" is about a car salesman...sort of.

~Chara of Pnictogen