Outcast on Main

- the night before your birthday

- late summer evenings

Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”

But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.

stubby

In all fairness, it was organized to your standards.

Now everything has a label and a place. This extends to your home. Underwear? Labeled. Craft supplies? Labeled. Astartes? Labeled.

I saw a woman proudly say she refuses to take her husband’s last name because she does not want to carry “a man’s legacy.”

Interesting.

Whose last name are you using now?

Your father’s?

Your grandfather’s?

Some dead man in the family tree whose name survived long enough to sit on your driver’s license?

Oh.

So the problem is not carrying a man’s legacy.

The problem is carrying his.

The man you claim to love.

The man you married.

The man expected to build with you, sacrifice with you, protect the household, and attach his future to yours.

His name is oppression.

Your father’s name is identity.

His family line is patriarchy.

Your family line is heritage.

That is not liberation.

That is selective loyalty wearing a revolution costume.

A surname is not just paperwork.

It is legacy.

It is house.

It is banner.

It is the public symbol of what family you belong to and what future you are helping build.

So when a wife rejects her husband’s name on ideological grounds while proudly keeping another man’s inherited name, the message is obvious:

The men I came from deserve honor.

The man I chose does not.

That is not empowerment.

That is dishonor.

And modern society claps because it has been trained to mistake disrespect for freedom.

If male legacy is the problem, your father’s name should bother you too.

If surnames are oppression, granddad’s name should not get a free pass just because he came through your side of the bloodline.

But he does.

Because the rebellion was never against male legacy.

It was against honoring the man chosen in marriage.

That is the ugly part.

You cannot claim unity while treating his name like contamination.

You cannot build a house with someone whose house embarrasses you.

You cannot demand the benefits of marriage while sneering at the legacy attached to it.

Patriarchy did not collapse.

The husband did not lose to feminism.

He lost to granddad.

A grandfather who was once probably so misogynistic your ovaries would drop, salute the flag, and ask permission to speak.

But his name?

Heritage.

Your husband’s name?

Oppression.

Modern logic is bimbo math in a haunted carnival.

https://linktr.ee/ObeyMyCadence

wings: “humans don’t like things they can’t understand, so if we’re going to levitate we should have wings. in fact we should probably have lots of wings, since we’re so big and impressive. humans like wings”

loud, booming voices: “fuck off Azrael the humans needs to be able to hear us.”

glowing: “no no no, it’s about visibility, right? the main human sensory organ works by detecting light, so if we emit light…” 

wheels: “why the hell are you shaped like that?” “piss off, the humans are really proud of this invention”

multiple faces/eyes: “it makes me relatable” “i swear to God it doesn’t–” “i need to see in every direction” “ Azrael you are a supernatural messenger of god you do not need–” “THE HUMANS NEED TO KNOW I’M WATCHING”

multiple limbs: “humans have lots of limbs! they like limbs” “look i let you keep the wings but–” “how do you expect me to walk?” “70,000 feet is not a reasonable number of feet, Azrael!” “fuck off i’m ENORMOUS” 

Old Testament Angels look like that because life in the ocean outnumbered life on land, so naturally when they visited earth they modeled their appearance on the most common lifeforms. Hench you get things like

radial symmetry (i.e. angels shaped like spheres) which is objectively cooler than bilateral symmetry (starfish understand this)

Very Numerous Limbs (2 is not the average number of arms in the ocean)

random glowing (bioluminescence)

just generally being objects of Absolute Terror to land dwellers

a thousand eyeballs being the Norm (have you seen scallops)

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.

[ID: Photos of an oxidized copper plate, an oxidized copper pipe, and oxidized pennies. End ID]