​This week has been a long year. I got high instead of watching the orange taint's inauguration, and then I got high the next day for good measure, and it was all downhill from there. The only part of the inauguration I've seen is the clip of President Musk giving two very obvious Nazi salutes. I'm old enough to remember when presidential inaugurations didn't include Nazi salutes. Anyone who says they weren't Nazi salutes knows they're lying. Anyone who says he didn't know better knows they're lying. I'm on the spectrum too, and I haven't given a Nazi salute since high school. The context was that I said "Guten Tag" to my Spanish teacher as a joke, and my hand just went up by itself, probably because I'd watched Indiana Jones too many times. I didn't realize it until she gasped in horror, but she hadn't even noticed the salute; she just thought I'd said a bad word.

I don't have the energy to recap everything the orange taint did this week to ruin people's lives, and if I make a habit of doing that, I'll never have time to write about anything else. My exhaustion is by design, of course. His blitzkrieg of executive orders was intended to overwhelm and demoralize people so they won't resist his administration. Many if not most of them will face legal action, which will slow them down for months or years and stop some of them altogether. Even the Supreme Court, with all its derangement and corruption, isn't guaranteed to rule in his favor every time because two of the conservative justices aren't complete pieces of shit. His absurd attempt to overrule the 14th Amendment with an executive order has already been halted. But legal processes take time, and he's trying to weaken the resistance up front. We just have to grit our teeth, remain optimistic, and keep resisting. It's inevitable that innocent people will suffer for the foreseeable future, and I won't downplay that, but things aren't hopeless in the long term.

I do want to highlight one egregiously stupid executive order from the Republicunt party's leg-humping obsession with making transgender people's lives miserable, though. It says that "'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," while "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell." So there you have it. Republicunts are so goddamn stupid that they think zygotes produce reproductive cells (and have more rights than actual people, but that's another story). This is yet another reason why I don't accept lectures on "basic biology" from people who believe our species descended from a man made out of dust who boinked a woman made from his own rib six thousand years ago. Some people suspect this text was written by AI, but the chatbots I work with for a living rarely make such stupid mistakes.

I said last week that religions shouldn't be politically neutral but rather should stand up for human rights and social justice. We saw a great example of that in Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who triggered the orange taint and countless other sociopaths this week by asking him to be nice to people. Let me be clear: if you found anything objectionable in her remarks, you are a piece of shit, and you would have been first in line to crucify Jesus. The stunning lack of self-awareness in people who call themselves Christians yet base their entire worldview on being assholes isn't funny anymore.

Here's a former Capitol police officer reacting to the orange taint pardoning the insurrectionists who assaulted him. I've said many harsh things about cops, and I apologize for none of them, but I've never supported assaulting cops who aren't doing anything wrong - or trying to overthrow the government because your candidate lost. Republicunts are rewriting history before our very eyes. Since January 7, 2021, they've been telling us that we didn't see what we saw on January 6. Kind of like they're doing now with President Musk's Nazi salutes.

Here's a fun and educational podcast interview between Jon Stewart and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I feel more hope for the future knowing that Jon is still doing his show and AOC is still in Congress. I wouldn't complain if they both ended up in the White House.

Here's a text my aunt sent me.

I could be much happier for the foreseeable future if I, like most of my family members, stopped caring about the people around me. I would still suffer a lot from the orange taint's policies, but I wouldn't feel pain for the marginalized groups he's deliberately targeting. But my principles are more important to me than happiness. This is my blog and I can virtue signal if I want, dang it. I've become closer with my aunt because I relate to her a lot more than most of my family. I certainly didn't learn this empathy from my parents. They taught me to be nice to people, of course, but they've spent my entire life demonstrating that they're incapable of empathy for anything they've never personally experienced. They couldn't comprehend that my brain worked differently than theirs, even after mental health professionals told them, so they responded aggressively and callously to my "negative attitude." My dad empathized with my inability to swim due to my low body fat because he had the same issue, but he never had chronic insomnia, so no matter how many times I explained that I did, he would judge me for not getting out of bed before 8:30. At the beginning of the orange taint's first term he mocked an NPR interview he heard with people who were afraid. My mom mocked me for having to talk to a suicide hotline after this last election night. And my parents don't even like him as a person, but they think they deserve gold stars for acknowledging that he's a piece of shit (my words) and then voting for him anyway. His overt bigotry and discrimination aren't dealbreakers for them because they aren't the targets. They would have voted for Hitler if he ran as a Republican and promised to secure the border (which, incidentally, has next to zero effect on their lives in the Midwest). They aren't hurting right now like I am, and of course they'll just see my current pain as another symptom of my "negative attitude." This is my blog and I can rant if I want, dang it.

On a happier note, "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" is a fun show. It's about a group of kids who have an adventure with space pirates. Watch it before the anti-DEI fuckwits ban it for having a Black lead character.

I was finally motivated to get my phone screen fixed (again) so I could get the selfie camera cleaned so I could verify my age for OnlyFans. The next day, my little cousins called me on Facebook Messenger, and because I'd gotten the camera cleaned, I was able to entertain them by using the things that turn my face into a cat or Santa Claus. If I were still Mormon, I could share this story in testimony meeting as an example of how God orchestrates the little details of our lives.

I tried OnlyFans out of curiosity, not sure if I'd spend any money on it. Living through years of poverty and facing the prospect of more poverty after Trump's trade war and mass deportation increase the price of everything I need to survive (which most of my family members voted for, but whatever) has made me not like spending money. There are OnlyFans profiles that you can subscribe to for free, which seem to post pretty tame stuff. But I didn't expect that as soon as I subscribed to each one, I received automated messages from them, which turned into conversations geared toward persuading me to give them tips or purchase their less tame stuff.

Some of the messages were copy-pasted at the very least. Maybe all of them were AI-generated. It does seem odd for women in Serbia, Italy, and Ukraine to message me around four in the morning local time. The woman in Serbia said it was evening there, but I can give her the benefit of the doubt that she meant night. I can give her less benefit of the doubt for saying she'd been thinking about me all day. The woman in Ukraine didn't react at all to me saying that I hope she stays safe and her country wins the war soon, which I thought odd. The woman from Italy, at least, had an excuse for being up so late/early, and I could be wrong, but I work with AI for a living, and I don't think it's advanced enough yet to emulate the cadence and vocabulary she had from speaking English as a second language. To be clear, I know these are all real women, but I'm not confident that they spend their own time writing messages to nobodies like me.

Still, the attention was unexpected and pretty awesome. Even if they just want money, at least they want something from me, which is an unfamiliar feeling. I'm most inclined to give it to the Italian woman because she did the best job of pretending to care about me as a person. She said she does OnlyFans to supplement her income as a horse riding instructor and pay for her horses' vet bills. I respect that. Anyone who thinks this platform is immoral or exploitative or whatever should direct their outrage at the forces that have made it impossible for millions of people to live on one income. Attractive women are lucky that they have this option. Men do OnlyFans too, but obviously in much smaller numbers to meet a much smaller demand, and I'm clearly not attractive enough anyway. Years ago I actually did research on the porn industry (which was less fun than it sounds) and learned that here, the gender wage gap is reversed. Hooray, I guess.

Jokes aside, my former religion would shame me for talking to these women or their chatbots. My current religion couldn't care less. It doesn't try to regulate my behavior. It just encourages me to care for the planet and love everyone. Granted, I'm failing at even that much. I'm sorry, but it feels really, really, really good to tell a transphobic bully that nobody would miss him if he got hit by a truck, and I'm not sorry, so I lied just now when I said I was sorry. Anyway, this is a contrived attempt to segue into the next thing I wanted to mention, which is another difference between my former and current religions. Today, most of our meeting was devoted to commiseration over the shitty reality we're going to find ourselves in for the next four years (at least) and advice on how to endure it and keep hope alive. My chances of getting that from a Mormon congregation would be close to zero. The LDS Church only gets involved in politics when it's supporting legislation to force its beliefs on other people or exempt itself from child abuse reporting requirements, and I know if I were to attend a random congregation in Utah, I would be surrounded by idiots who are overjoyed that they elected the opposite of literally everything Jesus stood for.

I don't think religions should be politically neutral. They should stand up for human rights and social justice. Their teachings are just empty platitudes if they don't. In theory, they shouldn't speak for or against specific parties or candidates, but when specific parties or candidates are objectively evil, that's a dumb principle to maintain (except to the extent that they must, of course, to avoid losing their tax-exempt status). The LDS Church's partisan neutrality extended to appeasing the Nazi regime while some other churches opposed it. Anyway, I'm not looking forward to the next four years (at least), I don't know if I'll ever forgive my family members who voted for this because they have no principles and don't care if people who are different from them get hurt, and I'm definitely getting high tomorrow. But that doesn't mean I'm giving up. Here are two positive notes to end on.

First, MAGA Republicans, who are now mainstream Republicans, are the stupidest and most self-absorbed people on Earth. Trump and his cabinet picks are almost universally evil, but they're also so unqualified and have so many competing agendas that they may be unable to accomplish much at all. A total fustercluck of incompetence and infighting is the best-case scenario at this point. Elongated Muskrat has already backtracked on his pledge to cut a bunch of "wasteful" spending on programs that people need to survive, and MAGAts have already turned against him over a disagreement on H1B visas - he favors exploiting foreign workers for cheap labor, while they favor not letting any brown people into the country. Fuck both sides, but more power to them as long as they're fighting each other.

Second, the United States honestly deserves to lose a lot of its global power and influence. It's used those to do terrible things and ruin millions of lives, from its war crimes in Vietnam, to its installation of the theocracy that abuses women in Iran, to its recent funding of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Individual citizens who didn't vote for Trump don't deserve to suffer, but on a larger scale, it will be good if the country loses some of its ability to mess around in everyone else's business. And that's why I'm not even mad about Russia interfering in our elections. It's 100% karma. I'm sure the United States has interfered in more foreign elections than it's even admitted to. I know, I know, I'm an evil liberal who hates America just because I hold it to the most basic standards of right and wrong instead of worshiping it for no reason. 

My message to both of the people reading this is don't give up and don't give dictatorships more power by obeying them in advance like the media are. I've been criticizing the orange taint since 2015, and I'm not going to stop just because he might throw me in a concentration camp if he runs out of talk show hosts to persecute. I wish I had a wider audience and more influence, but this is what I get for choosing not to be a billionaire.

PSA: Here's a recent example I observed firsthand of how Russian trolls and bots manipulate millions of Americans who should have been declared mentally unfit to vote.

Reminder that my new memoir is out as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble. I want to talk some more about how much I love the cover. I was very disappointed with the cover for my first book. The artist ghosted me for weeks at a time and then turned in a half-assed job at the last minute. I can barely think about it, let alone look at it without getting depressed, and I'm not very sad about the possibility of AI crushing his dreams. This cover, on the other hand, is one that I'm actually excited to show people. It was created by my transgender ex-Mormon brother, the only member of my immediate family who won't be upset that this book exists. (On the other hand, my genderfluid ex-Mormon cousin was the first person who bought it.)

It's primarily based on a nightmare I had after reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos at the height of my existential crisis, which I describe in the book. It gave me an unsubtle visual representation of how much I didn't matter and almost brought me to tears. The Milky Way in the background is a touch I didn't request, yet it fortuitously happens to align with another bit that I mention in the book - namely, the time I was in Logan Canyon with friends looking at the Milky Way and thinking deep thoughts, and thanks to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, I was able to tell them that it's called the Milky Way because it came from the goddess Hera's breast.

We wouldn't have been able to put that on the cover anyway. The Milky Way looks, rather, like it's coming from Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, the exalted heterosexual couple that rules the universe in Mormonism. Heavenly Mother is cut off a little to subtly indicate her inferior status. She's not worshipped or prayed to, she's rarely talked about, and nothing is known about what she actually does. They're looking at me with disappointment, which is self-explanatory. It occurred to me just this week that they could also be considered a representation of my real parents. The latter respected my decision to apostatize (which I appreciate) and have never wanted to talk about it at all (which I don't appreciate), but I know they can't be happy about it because their lives revolve around Mormonism. I remember my dad's annoyance when his sister and brother-in-law left it, and I have no reason to think he's changed since then. "I thought they got it," he said. I feel the same way about my parents voting for a fascist with dementia who embodies the opposite of every virtue they ever taught me, so we're even.

The flying saucer is there because I wanted a flying saucer there. I have no real justification. I like science fiction. There's a chapter in the book about aliens, but it has little to do with anything else.

I've never felt less happy about the New Year. My country is almost certainly about to enter its darkest hour since the Civil War for no reason except that a majority of its voting citizens have no principles and are easier to brainwash than first graders. At this point, I sincerely believe the best-case scenario would be a bird flu pandemic disrupting President Musk's government and naturally selecting a big chunk of stupid out of the population. I'd rather not have a pandemic every five years, but oh well, at least I already have a remote job this time.

On the plus side, I beat the odds by living long enough to experience my country's death by suicide in the first place.

I published my new book on the last day of last year. I don't know how long I'll keep up publishing a book every year, but two is two more than I had two years ago. I could say a lot about this book, but there's no point because it's all in the introduction that you can read in the free sample.