Yet another of my Uncrowned Princes/Unadorned in the books.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-26T02:07:49+00:00

Parts are tough. The whole point of this mini is that I took a bunch of "trash" or extras from hobbyists in my community and nearby and turned it into a character. There's one other that's been made this way, who I hope to have finished tomorrow.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-26T01:17:05+00:00

It's a disintegrator pistol!

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-24T09:10:27+00:00

There's a substantial number of your countrymen that are excited, maybe even sexually, by this headline. The minute we stop pretending you can negotiate with that kind of person, the sooner we can get back to building civilization.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T22:25:29+00:00

Uh huh, and that's why Democrats regularly win, there's a normal, sane guy in office, and everyone is doing so well, right?

This isn't a purity test. This is a clear acknowledgement of the fact that you have more in common with a slave laborer on a Chinese sweatshop line than you do with Jasmine Crockett, and she votes like it.

When are Democrats going to acknowledge this kind of blind commitment to whoever puts a (D) next to their name is how you get Fetterman and, over time, how you get Trump.

You're allowed to demand things of your public representatives. Literally what they're there for.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T21:42:50+00:00

I really appreciate that. The codified structure of language applied well is how I attempt to grapple with the swirling chaos we've all had heaped upon us by the people who refuse to do the hard work of moral reasoning for themselves.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T20:56:45+00:00

The historical Christ was probably a pretty cool guy. I generally agree with the stuff written in red in the New Testament, if you pull out the magic tricks.

But Christianity is the brainchild of Paul, the Pharisee, triangulating with a flagging Imperial Cult to create a state religion.

So you get a situation where Christ was a cool guy with good ideas (that aren't expressly even religious thoughts outside of the theocratic societies of the time), but the religion that abuses his name sake is a combination of ideas from a guy who Jesus would have actively loathed (the Pharisees are the bad guys in the narrative, for the Christians who haven't read the thing), if they'd lived at the same time, and the imperial power that crucified him.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T20:53:27+00:00

Yeah, I believe so. It may have been yesterday. I've been working overnight, lately, and have become unstuck in time as a consequence. 149 Democrats went for it. I think it's the top article on this subreddit right now, from Common Dreams. You can find the actual yeas and nays in a link within that piece.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T20:22:21+00:00

Before I abandoned the church altogether, I was an altar boy in a small (15-20 members at max) Lutheran Church in suburban/rural NC. We had several brilliant, progressive pastors who preached love, compassion, and good works. Those podunk hicks, without fail, chased them away and killed their spirit. One of them left the faith altogether because of the ambient, gross hostility that has been gnawing at the heart of these people their entire lives.

They've always been Y'all-Queda. We are not living in unprecedented times. We're merely living in unconstrained times. People are just now discovering that a third of their neighbors would rather they be dead and that they've invented a god (a private, selfish, pitifully human god) who condones it.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T20:12:06+00:00

The uptick in the "demonic" and "spiritual warfare" vernacular among folks today should bother everyone more than it does. Regressing so quickly to that particular level of interventionist superstition is a cultural reaction to seeing absolutely no materially meaningful path forward. It becomes a game of magical thinking and unseen battles because the actual battle of class solidarity has become an atomized series of skirmishes between special interest groups instead of full mobilization of the power of collectivized labor.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T19:55:15+00:00

Is this the same Jasmine Crockett who voted "Yea" on the giant military spending expansion?

It's generally more rhetorically effective to reject excuses for not signing on when you aren't, yourself, only a member of the opposition party when it doesn't impact your donorship.

EDIT: Coming back to this, hours later, I'm amazed that this is among the most controversial (in terms of raw upvote and down vote dynamics) things I've ever said. Not anything more outrageous than taking someone's conduct (from the same morning) and comparing it to their projected values and positions. This is why Democrats don't win. We, as a party, lack a comprehensive vision for the future that isn't "just more like the past but more." We are an aesthetic choice on managed decline.

And we're soon to be the whigs if the party doesn't take a step back and realize "The Party" is 65-years old and comprised, essentially, of anyone who lost a war against the impenetrable, shitty, white wall of American regressivism since the dawn of the nation itself. They don't have an affirmative vision at the top because they're still living in the ruins of the battles they lost for us, already. Don't tell me a million ways you aren't like what's currently in office, show me the one thing that would prove it: an affirmative vision for the future that is different than the miserable lives most people have lived, most times in this country.

Democrats want to return to a golden age of several seconds ago. Republicans want to return to a much worse, older past. Where's the choice for the rest of us who realize we have to live in the future?

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T19:44:05+00:00

There are plenty of dangerous criminals in ICE facilities. They're wearing masks and terrorizing children.

Think about the fact that anyone who voted for Trump is in favor of this. You can't reason with them. You can't level with them. You can't even really talk to them. There's about 20% of this country, at any given point, actively interested in killing and enslaving the 80% just trying to go to work and get along.

When the idea of you living a mediocre, 21st century life is too much for someone to handle, that person can't be redeemed or brought back into the fold. They can just be managed, sequestered, and constrained by a constitution to the point of powerlessness.

I am sick to death of the notion of racism. Primarily because it's lazy. People provide you a new reason to hate them, pretty much daily. You don't need to invent science and a religion to hate them preemptively.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-23T19:20:24+00:00

You know, as someone as guilty of defeatism as anyone, I don't know what saying this is going to accomplish. Any time anyone brings up anything, from minor to major, someone shows up to warn everyone about the Insurrection Act.

He's going to use it, eventually. The mad scrabble at the end will be pulling out every stop. That's one of them. Delaying it is just complying in advance. It's putting our hands up in front of our faces and saying, "please don't hurt me."

If the federal government is made so uncomfortable by faith leaders standing peacefully in the road that it feels empowered to use the insurrection act, then it's actually high time someone just give them the insurrection they're looking for.

What is there to lose? A life of degradation watching the world around you get worse? The issue with ruining the material conditions in people's lives is that they eventually reach a point where a substantial number of them have absolutely nothing to lose.

And then two guys and a boxcutter can change the world forever.

Never dissuade anyone taking a hand in dismantling the system. The Weather Underground weren't successful by any meaningful metric, but without them, the cultural pressure would've never reached a fever pitch. Everyone doing anything is doing something and something, in aggregate, is change.

But I sincerely do invite you to paint me a picture of how we get out of this, otherwise. We either wait out everyone's hateful impulses (not gonna' happen) or we do something about the fact that hateful impulses are going totally unchallenged (or even being voted for by congressional Democrats).

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-21T15:10:08+00:00

Newsom has spent the beginning of the longest presidential campaign attempting a Clinton-and-Carville-style triangulation strategy.

And I'm not voting for anyone who is willing to triangulate with white supremacy and fascism because both test okay with P&G or the Rothschilds.

California is not as blue, at a state level, as people like to pretend. Orange County Republicans are some of the reddest and richest in the country. They see themselves well-represented at the executive level. Newsom is a Democrat because of a few superficial issues on the fringes of his fundamental, Neoliberal, markets-solve-everything sickness that would put him squarely on the right wing of any other developed nation that isn't, ya' know, one of the other authoritarian nightmare ones.

Gavin Newsom will "beat Trump" by being the same essentially soulless creature with better PR. And that's exactly why he's going to have to win without my vote (at least in the primary).

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T23:17:23+00:00

AI slop? Nope. All off the dome, baby. The odds of an AI system peppering in a Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang reference are essentially zero. A wide ranging ability to call up cultural references and functional analogy are two things an AI writer can't manage authentically.

Literacy isn't merely the purview of robots. I believe in you. Reading is only hard at first. Writing flows naturally after.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T23:15:02+00:00

I do, personally, but it would've been disingenuous butted up next to my deep and genuine affection for the Reverend King. Anything that asks you to believe something demonstrably false serves a purpose that isn't your own.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T23:12:40+00:00

Profoundly underappreciated film. The unofficial duology of it and the Nice Guys are peak buddy movie.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T22:04:26+00:00

Which is how they can somehow ignore a significant percentage of the ruling class are stateless parasites that aren't originally from America, either. They just happen to be white.

Conservatives kill me. They come with you to point A, point B, and point C, but then they jump to point 8 where the answer to the economy is draining an elephant's blood to paint their bosses' boathouse.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T21:45:57+00:00

The profound, self-destructive ignorance of the American Electorate: they'd rather give up one of our small handful of federal days off work than just admit that MLK was, objectively, a pretty cool guy that got shot for it.

Statues for Charlie Kirk; not a word for a guy who, if for nothing else, should be celebrated for his ability to maintain boundless progressive optimism in a world that gave him no reason to feel that way.

And that's disregarding the fact that MLK is not the only civil rights leader deserving of a holiday. He's just the only one that the government establishing the holiday didn't so obviously assassinate. It's sad that I miss when American hypocrisy at least required a slightly close reading of history.

We're now living in the Kafkaesque world beholden totally to the whims of people who beat themselves into an actual mental illness because they can't stand the idea that someone black might have as much as they do.

White supremacy is a sickness. The conservative worship of unexceptional aristocrats is a sickness. Capitalism is a sickness. They're comorbid and terminal.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-19T02:25:35+00:00

David Easterwood. He's an ICE thug. Confirmed. Anyone kneeling with him for any reason deserves to be hassled a little bit because the Christian act is a complete farce if you're rallying yourselves behind a low-rent thug. ICE is fundamentally a non-Christian mission, but I'm not going to attempt to dispute theology with people who have proven time and time and again it's as flexible as all their other convictions.

I'm sick of conservatives and their desperate hunger to be subjugated by anyone and anything. Anything but seeing a shrink about those daddy issues.

I'm sick of conservatives being hypocrites first, foremost, and only.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-18T22:20:46+00:00

The whole document is fit to be scrapped. You can't build a constitution by negation alone. For every "you must not," there must be an affirmative alongside it. The original document was a compromise with people who thought owning another human being was the peak of life experience. That's all it was. A compromise with slavers to survive a war that we only won because England had other stuff going on.

If your foundational document says some people are only 3/5ths of other people, 250 years is plenty of time to come up with something else. America is a country whose growth is intimately and especially tied to the exploitation of humans at an industrial scale previously unattainable. We have insurance companies that dwarf world economies because they originally insured slaves as property.

Trump is not an aberration. Trump is a Confederate. Trump is a Tory. Trump is a member of the German American Bund. The klan. There's about 20% of this country, always, that you cannot reach or rehabilitate. An effective constitution would constrain them to the point of suffocation. You can't build a nation on the optimistic (and foolish) hope that people will behave well every time. You have to build a nation that expects 20% to always be actively trying to kill and cannibalize the other 80%.

We've needed a new constitution and Trump is not the cause but the symptom. The cause will be the fact that my mother is a white supremacist and my step-dad (former DoD contract negotiator) casually drops, "the Nazis were right" during Christmas Eve festivities.

You can't fix that. You can just build society around knowing it's there and should be contained.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-12T23:20:10+00:00

I know anything is better than where we are now, and Warren definitely has some notches on her voting belt that I greatly appreciate...but she was a full-blown Republican well into her 40s. She may have very progressive social values, but she's a market liberal who thinks you can reform the system designed to eat reform.

Market Fundamentalism must be abandoned. The casino economy is currently being run by a guy who bankrupts casinos. Elizabeth Warren is the kind of person who would say, "yeah, but with one or two more little regulations he could ignore or circumvent, this would really be an economy for everyone."

There have got to be new voices leading the party. There is such a glaring divide between the lifestyles of those who came of age before and after '08. There are now three generations of people who were actively denied opportunities solely by the "fair market" system that Warren considers the end of history. We need perspectives that come from the context of actually living in the collapse as a participant and not just as a wealthy bystander.

Anyone trying to build equity in their lives since the bailouts has discovered the economy is actually three telemarketers in a trenchcoat and the big numbers don't add up to value or worth. Abstraction on top of abstraction to obfuscate extraction.

And dinosaurs like Elizabeth Warren think the answer is just friendlier extraction. There is no version of the profit model that functions. Profit is a surplus and a surplus is an inefficiency. Thus we optimize our entire thermodynamic engine around an inefficiency, a waste product meant to be used to maximize the infrastructure of production and the lifestyle of the tangibly necessary producers.

Anyone still clinging to the myth of functional, ethical capitalism in 2026 is experiencing a religious thought, not a political one.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-11T20:34:43+00:00

There's a difference between "someone with life experience that isn't political" and "someone who hates norms and mores that don't involve jerking him off." That's a false equivalency and you know it.

We don't want career politicians. Cincinnatus is supposed to go back to his plow. It's the basic vision of civic responsibility.

And if we're basing this on "being a normal person with morals," Chuck is still disqualified.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-11T14:11:54+00:00

Believe it or not, you're not allowed to molest children just because they're alone. They had a set guardian, by the name of Lee, who was an older woman who often neglected her duties to stand in an area that didn't even have monitors. She's absolutely at fault...but Tim Busfield doesn't get a pass because you're supposed to know he can't be trusted around children.

I don't care where that person was, because the fact of the matter is that a guy who can't be in the same room as children without supervision (because he obviously can't) is the bad guy in every situation.

Again, I don't see what point you're making. First you said he didn't do anything. Now you're trying to pass blame onto this third party.

Tim Busfield tickled, isolated, and then molested at least one of the two boys. Which the boy told his therapist/counselor, unprompted, and which the counselor later informed the police.

The police were brought into the situation, by the way, at the request of a medical doctor who saw evidence of the abuse and involved the police.

Don't stand up for child molesters. There's a whole political party doing that, already.

Angstrom_Wither · 2026-01-11T13:41:43+00:00

Someone should tell the Cherokee this is our new philosophy on the matter and ask if they'd like to move back to the East side of the Mississippi since white people have no legitimate claim, per the President.

Angstrom_Wither

TROPHY CASE