cryptic pregnancy
Hey, I found another fetish! It's pretty rare for me to see a new one.
The term is normally used to describe people that don't know they're pregnant for a long time. It has nothing to do with what is described here. These people believe they have a 'slow growing' fetus that takes years to mature.
They like to get ultrasounds and then imagine they can see the fetus. This is very evangelical based.
The graveyard rats
We were watching the second episode of Guillerimo del Toros cabinet of curiosities when I realized I was familiar with the story it was based on. The Graveyard Rats is a short story by Henry Kuttner but I was pretty sure I hadn't read the original story. I suspected it was a comic book adaptation and that evening I managed to track it down.
The story (included below) was drawn by Jack Cole an artist with a promising career who committed suicide for mysterious reasons. Neither adaptation follows the short story which you can read in it's entirety here.
Twitter meltdown
I wish corporate malfeasance was discussed more often. Twitter gave us a brief window into this and it makes me sad it doesn't happen more often. I saw a good description of our billionaire problem.
He’s not stupid, he just isn’t as smart as he and all his sycophants think, and certainly not smart enough to overcome his myriad of personality and mental health disorders. Unfortunately for us, after ruining a perfectly fine company and damaging the lives of thousands of employees, he’ll loudly retreat to his lair to sit on his remaining mountain of gold, recharge his narcissistic tank, and then emerge to set something else ablaze. After all, this is what dragons do. And that’s how all of us should think of his ilk, as dragons. They don’t care a lick about who or what or they ruin in pursuit of an ever larger pile of gold.
Cleaning the house with a leaf blower
I live in a small apartment with no HVAC, wood floors, my partner, and a cat. I'm allergic to the cat and the dust that collects in the corners and seeps into the furniture. We live next to a highway which probably causes a continuous rain of carcinogenic micro particles over everything. After years of allergies I bought one of these:
It's great. Apart from seeing the amount of cat hair, dust, and filth it collects, my allergies have gotten much better. I make it a point to turn it on before sweeping and on cold winter days when the sun is low on the horizon and the sunbeams reach far into my living room it's gratifying to see the motes of dust marching towards the filter.
A year ago I noticed you could buy a corded electric leaf blower on amazon for $30. Setting aside the problem of shopping at amazon (which I do very reluctantly), I didn't need another device taking room in my limited space. I didn't buy it but it remained in my list and the next time I checked amazon I was notified that the price had gone up so I forgot about it. Then, more recently I had to make another amazon purchase and I saw the price had come down again. Reader, I bought it.
It was larger than I expected, noisier, it blows too hard to point at my books or counters, and it didn't come with a cord but it is satisfying. Pointed at the floor or the couch it raises the dust like a cloud of smoke in the winter sun. When I open the window and direct it outside it's like an explosion billowing out over my deck and into the trees beyond.
For all the dust is pushes outside, it redistributes the rest onto every other surface but I still think it's worth it. There is nothing more gratifying than seeing the dust billowing out the door. I don't even care what the neighbors think.
Independent wrestling
I subscribe to a lot of tumblr feeds. It's the one social network that's avoided selling out and is still filled with weirdos. I don't have a tumblr of my own (don't keep your stuff on other peoples computers kids) but I like that it's there. My list of subscribed tumblr feeds shrinks as sites are banned, abandoned, or grow too niche or too conventional and the list grows when I find other like-minded individuals.
A couple months ago I subscribed to a site titled from the rafters which would post independent wrestling gifs ~70 times a day. It was a strange window into the fandom and I started collecting images and videos from the site to do a post.
Two weeks ago the site went dark. I don't know what happened. The account owner posted so often and regularly I can't imagine he quit cold turkey and all I can think is he was banned due to a copyright complaint.
So now I have a bunch of gifs from a defunct website and a hole in my feed reader. I still want to do this post but I can't link to the primary source and I can't expand beyond the images I collected. Still, here is what I learned.
Like metal, wrestling is goofy live theater and should be appreciated in that light. As kids we often discussed whether wrestling was real. My own views matured from confusion to scoffing disdain. My views have continued to mature. There's no question these actors are athletes. You don't have to be gullible enough to believe in the theater to enjoy it, though I still wonder about some of the fans.
The mysterious guy behind my tumblr site was well aware it was theater. Here's a post showing a wrestler using a razor blade to cut his forehead to make the death match more convincing.
The author was impressed by the sight of people slammed into the ring, dropped on their heads, falling off of ladders, or thrown onto chairs or cinderblocks. He had a particular interest in death matches where the wrestlers used props to cause superficial bleeding.
I was surprised to see how often the show is overtly sexual, with women deliberately wearing thongs and men acting promiscuous. A few wrestlers use sexuality as their weapon. A wrestler (with the persona of a flamboyantly gay man) would turn around to present his bottom before being slammed, causing his opponent to veer away at the last second. The author mentioned off-hand being bisexual. It may have been a joke but it would explain things.
Mainly wrestling is silly. The costumes, bad acting, and ridiculous plots seem to be the primary draw for it's fans. People want to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all while at the same time marveling at the athleticism. I can appreciate it in that light but perhaps not with the same devotion of it's fans.
Because this author was interested in death matches I got to see a lot of the props used in matches. These primarily consist of fluorescent light bulbs which break in a cloud of phosphorus dust, and cause innumerable little cuts.
Piercing was another gimmick. I saw several videos of wrestlers having to hold still and act outraged as their opponent carefully pushed a metal skewer through their cheeks. They would also play on beds of thumb tacks, hammer vegetable skewers into their heads, or staple things to their foreheads.
You have to laugh at a death match ring strewn with legos.
Sometimes it's just inexplicable.
I have more wrestling gifs than I can reasonably post on my limited bandwidth blog. I just wish I could find out where this guy went.
Update (2023-02-08)
I think I may have found him. I randomly came across another tumblr wrestling blog called jaffa cakes that posts way too many gifs every day. It's possible it's someone else with a similar problem but the humor seems to be the same.
I tried to go to the archives and scroll back to see when the blog was started but tumblr defaults to loading every gif he posts and it saturated my internet connection.
So if you're interested in an extremely active feed full of burly men and women hitting each other check out jaffa cakes
The infrequently updated blog.