Tyson Vs. Paul Youtuber Is The Future Of Football

So, it finally happened. The high-price-tag, cheap-content spectacle game of professional boxing cranked out its biggest dancing bear circus act to date. Mike Tyson lumbered out of retirement to patronize a rich boy bankrolling his own make-believe sports career. And why not? The same combat sports enthusiasts who used whine about Mayweather contemptuously putting up points, or a bored Brock Lesner putting outclassed opponents on the ground and mashing their faces into pudding, are the same dickheads watching deluded junkies give each other brain damage on Power Slap. ‘Fake’ or ‘dishonorable’ are irrelevant adjectives when the subject is less professional than someone turning tricks at a truck stop for booze.

The Youtube Kid fits the industry perfectly. No notes. Unironic congratulations to him, Mike Tyson, and all their fat stacks of Netflix cash. He’s not just what the sport deserves, but what it seeks. If you don’t like him, then what even attracts you about boxing in 2024?

The problem here is that all sports are starting to ape this shitshow. Football, for instance, is much harder to fix and remains largely skill-based, but we all knew the erosion would start the very moment the gambling gold rush started. It’s a very European road we turned on.

That stacks with the (illusory) streaming gold rush, and now Netflix snagged the rights to two NFL games next year. The days where we could turn on the TV and watch football are long gone, and now we live in the end of streaming packages’ first stage.

Next is football’s boxing era. They used to sell games to the stations, and make more money off ads. Now they’ll make money off ads, selling the games to streamers, and take a cut off our dumb asses when they inevitably sell us individual games. The prices for sports packages will become unfeasible, and we’ll be lured back to bars and restaurants to watch regular games and pay obscene prices for important games to watch at home. Hope you’ll enjoy paying through the nose to watch the Super Bowl.

There are reassuring precedents, of course. If I gave a damn about pro wrestling, for instance, I could pay 9.99 per month for access to all Pay Per View Events. But that’s niche. The NFL and NBA are much worse, right now. If I want to watch football through Amazon on any day other than Thursday, I need to pay for Prime, Hulu, then another Hulu upgrade just to access the option to pay more money for fucking football. If I pay to watch NBA games, I have to pay more to watch the WNBA– what a deal. The future here is bleak. Stupid gimmick shit on a stupid line-item pay plan that cannot be seen as lucrative unless it’s deliberately unethical. And what is America gonna do, stop watching sports?

The NFL was scared– terrified— that its viewers would boycott if they saw black players peacefully protesting on the field. They’re not worried at all about viewers boycotting after a nonconsensual assfucking. Boy, they got our number all right. Now they’re taking notes from more successful hustlers.

Can’t wait for 2030!

Weird Jitterings in the AI Wasteland

FROM THE DESK OF RHL

AI web scraping kicks up strange results for artists online, no matter how obscure. I’m no exception– so much so that it feels necessary to make a public service announcement of sorts. Despite being almost allergic to any personal online presence, I’ve received some emails in the past year from collectors regarding artworks and galleries I haven’t thought of in years. They seem to have been compiled in various themed AI-generated articles and caught some attention. Delving deep into the matter, I found odd results regarding the above artwork.

“Do You Read Sutter Cane?” was painted for a John Carpenter group show in– Jesus– 2012? 2013? I don’t recall exactly. It’s still (somehow?!) available for purchase from Hero Complex’s website for $30.00, which hasn’t stopped resellers from pricing copies at $70.00. It’s reasonable to assume that anyone looking me up will find this website, so I’m begging you to please not waste money buying this off Ebay. You can find it here;

"Do You Read Sutter Cane?" by Rhys Livingstone

While I didn’t submit to too many Hero Complex shows, I did enough times to know that everyone liked Tim and Soua very much. Not only would you be saving over 50%, you’d be supporting some very cool people.

To publically answer the most common attached query in these emails– no, I don’t sell prints online myself. Or even really show my work at all. Even before the current chatbot nonsense people were stealing work like crazy. It’s true that we sell some print inventory in person, at cons and The Secret Art Show. I’ve also donated a few books and zines to the Outer Freakwave cause, and they’re available in the READ OUR STUFF section of the site, but largely keep my visual arts portfolio to myself. For those interested, a cut-out book of various horror movie posters I’ve made over the years (including the above poster) will be released on here as soon I stop screaming internally and kicking my feet at the minor inconvenience of formatting the damned thing. But it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a direct online print store only to get swarmed by scrapers and scumbags fradulently claiming other people’s work as their own.

Best,

Rhys

Please Watch Anything Other Than Megalopolis

You remember Branded?

Probably not. It felt like more of a hallucination than a movie. It was a 2012 release featuring Max Von Sydow, and played like a Eurojank fusion of Paprika and They Live. Perfectly mental. It was a tentpole event for connoisseurs of misguided magical misfires, a raving screed of Russian eccentrism strewn across the big screen to provoke stupefied glee and bewilderment. Branded was not good, or coherent, or functional in any capacity.

But it was inspired. Truly, verily, deeply inspired.

By what, who can even fucking say? Not the generic themes, setting, ideas, or tired politics in play. But some kind of undeniable energy possessed a couple of would-be Strugatsky brothers to tell America what they thought of it, and produced a most baffling royal delight to reign unchallenged until A Winter’s Tale dropped two years later.

Since then, it’s been an era of mediocrity. A long age of mainstream tentpole movies whose silliness barely manages to provoke an eyeroll. How can anyone possibly manage to critique an SFF movie in the time of Super Heroes? Wakanda is the most dizzying advanced technological utopia in the multiverse, but its entire national might can’t manage to guard a waterway more effectively than three Coast Guard cutters and a single drone. They stick thirty people on a barge and push it out to sea when roused to nautical war. When defending their sovereign territory against a land invasion, they all just kind of stand around outside and hope for the best. What’s the point of mocking it? That’s not a story, that’s a quick excuse for a fireworks display. There’s no intent, drive or dreaming. Alternatively mocking and appreciating bad cinema requires an earnest target. That’s something which seems sorely missed in the big budget filmmaking world currently.

So naturally, all us crap cinema afficionados got very excited when we saw the trailer for Megalopolis. It looked inspired. It looked earnest. And it looked absolutely awful, the kind of hideously bloody trainwreck that can only go off the rails when unbelievably talented artists are involved. Megalopolis looked like a reason to go to the movie theatre drunk in a suit. Something as wretched as Cats and as lofty as Heaven’s Gate. Our first perfectly– and I do mean perfectly– bad English-language film of the twenty first century.

It’s not.

I’m sorry to report that it’s just the new Showgirls. A boring soap opera elevated by goofy moments, whose delusions of granduer are destined to be defended as masterful by very boring people who think of themselves as cinephiles. It’s not inspired at all. If you’re reading this, you probably won’t be convinced, but at least you’ve gotten your fair warning. “Francis Ford Coppola’s ludicrous SFF vanity project” sounds so appealing on paper, I know. Then you watch it and realize that it’s the film equivalent of a NaNoWriMo novel. Coppola wanted to make a Big Important Thing but didn’t have any ideas. You, a discerning viewer of taste, want something like Branded, are willing to downgrade to Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, would settle for Jupiter Ascending, or even just another measly John Carter or Avatar 2, but get Megalopolis instead.

When the late great Tobe Hooper’s career melted, he eventually admitted that he no longer cared whether his films were bad, or even worth watching at all. He just wanted to make movies and considered the results of that process to be irrelevant at best. He retained some visual inventiveness but had no spirit left. His last directorial efforts were just an old man taking a walk. That’s the same energy that Francis Ford Coppola brings here. For all the bombast and posturing, it’s just an old man fucking around on the Bocce Ball court. Leave him to his fun and go do something more important with your day.

Social Mythmaking Stops People From Understanding Art

Came across an interesting study here– not because it’s useful in any way, but due to its connection with some pretty common Western-world fallacies about ‘creative thinking’.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-94704-001

In an oblique way, it brings to mind the groan-inducing “A.I.” fad of the last few years. While the rapid advancement of chatbot technology is intellectually exciting, people are too insufferable to have nice things. The previous wonderful promise of artificial intelligence has been reduced to a simulated cognitive cul-de-sac– paltry, pathetic, suburban, and no potential for meaningful further development. Its goalposts have moved to suit the needs of Silicon Valley dreamers whose ambitions exceeded their capability. The Social functions of automated services which used to be described in the common parlance as “algorithms” is now described as “A.I,” and what used to be discussed as Artificial Intelligence is now clarified as Artificial General Intelligence. Technically correct, but quite a smug sidestep to take in service of misleading the public. The first instance of Chatbot errors being designated as “hallucinations” instead of “pain-in-the-ass fucking glitches” was a knowing act of duplicity designed to imply that THE SCI-FI POSITRONIC BRAINS OF TOMORROW ARE HERE TODAY; INVEST NOW! Net financial-loss advanced autocorrect software that churns out acceptable images and (usually correct, maybe) answers to your homework wouldn’t entice investors. Breathless, panting, semi-orgasmic marketing blitzes for “the greatest technological advancement since electricity” and “THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CREATIVITY” were necessary to obtain funding, and a gullible populace swalled the whole hook.

Yes, the creativity part was important to push the product. You can be creative! Yes, you! No longer will your potential genius be stolen by those damned gatekeeping artists who tell you that you need to “draw” or “paint” in order to “draw” or “paint” things. Now, you can commission a mindless piece of inconsistent software to churn out an image that you had the idea for! If you paid an artist to make your idea real then you’d just be a sucker, a dupe, a non-artist, but when this magical machine does it for you?! That turns you into an artist like the full moon turns a cursed human into a werewolf! Never before in history has any non-artist been able to be creative in any capacity! BUT NOW, THANKS TO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WONDERTECH, YOU TOO CAN NOW BE CREATIVE! THE FIRE OF THE GODS IS YOURS!

People believe this shit because pop-cultural osmosis deludes them into thinking there’s something uniquely special about an artist’s aptitude, instead of their motivation. This isn’t just a viewpoint pushed by some shallow zeitgeist– its propped up by actual scientific fucking literature, just like the study linked to above.

Imagine if researchers tested the football IQ of first-year college ball players versus people who’d never even watched football, in order to find out how football players’ brains differed from “normal” people and whether or not it was because they were all autistic. At no point is it considered whether the ball players’ brains had previously experienced high school football. Wait. You don’t have to imagine anything, just play ad libs-scramble with some nouns and you’ll find that the paper above fits the bill. Researchers can hide behind the cover of data accumulation all they want, sometimes the data collected is poisoned at the outset by the woefully inaccurate and indefensible worldviews of the researchers.

In any field of human endeavour, it is generally understood that skill-based achievement is based on skills. Skills which were developed in as a result of practicing and pursuing those skills. “Art” is an outlier viewed as special and magical, the result of something inherently exceptional and different in the psyche and physiology of its practitioners. This misconception is in our fucking way, feeds an inescapable culture of grift, and dissuades “non-artists” from realizing thst they can be “creative” in any way they want, right now, quite easily and without obstruction. Doodling on a napkin is creative. So is whistling. Or journaling, or working on a car, or fucking around in a woodshop or experimenting with ingredients in mashed potatoes. And as for capital-A “ART,” anyone can make it. Let’s imagine someone’s non-artist Uncle. He works with furniture for a living. One day, he has an idea of decorating his house with an image from inside of his head. He thinks about a fish swimming in a martini glass. His own thought amuses him. He can’t draw or paint, but he just has this urge to make it. So be goes down to the dollar and hardware store, buys a cheap clear plastic glass, a little toy fish, and resin. He fills the glass with resin, sticks the toy fish in it, lets it dry, and suddenly the idea from his head exists in physical space. He has a fun little curio now.

Then as it sits on his shelf, he has more ideas. He thinks about bubbles, food coloring, a tiny little paper umbrella. He thinks about some varnish he just put on a chair at work, and thinks about how he could simulate a cold, sweaty glass with fake ‘salt’ on the rim. He thinks about how it would be easier to see through a glass container instead of a plastic one. So he makes a second little fish-in-a-glass curio. It’s better, more polished. It’s fun and people like it. So does the Uncle.

That’s art. It’s a sculpture. It nourishes his soul. But ‘normal’ people are tricked into thinking that they somehow just can’t “do” art. They’re socially-engineered into depriving themselves just because they didn’t take to a niche interest in childhood. It’s brutal, leads to exploitation, and all the absolute shame in the world on ‘scientific’ researchers who deliberately set out to reinforce this drivelling nonsense.

No, Prometheus isn’t ‘Crucial’.

https://www.slashfilm.com/1644193/prometheus-crucial-to-ridley-scott-alien-franchise

Oh, they always come back. 

Another year, another would-be contrarian defending a dully normal movie like Prometheus, Transformers, or a Star Wars prequel or something. That’s understandable to a point. Those movies were expensive, fun, and stupid– you know, enjoyable. People enjoy talking about what they enjoy. This would be fine were it not..  just… pointedly irritating to see so many champions raising the battle-ragged flag for preposterously profitable movies that everyone watched. That is, of course, the point. People who enjoyed Shakes The Clown way back in 1991 don’t bother anyone in 2024, yet advocates for widely-disliked Ehren Krueger projects never seem to go away. 

There’s normally little to be said about this, but Prometheus is an interesting case. It’s a science fiction film with undeniable production skills visible onscreen, directed by a wildly inconsistent legend with masterpieces and trash alike, which precisely replicates the appeal of some elaborate genre classics. It’s worth admiring if you can admit what it truly is.

Prometheus is just Planet Of The Vampires given a proper budget and the wonderful pretensions of Forbidden Planet– not to mention a complex riff on the latter’s robot character. Mario Bava didn’t have access to the resources Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer pumped into Forbidden Planet, so he made up for it with Planet Of The Vampire’s sheer style. Under Ridley Scott, Jon Spaihts and that Lost guy combined the differing strengths of both earlier movies in a modern product. 

Great! It’s fine that it’s dumb! No serious SFF fan is going into a movie expecting Stand on Zanzibar or Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Science Fiction films don’t have to be great or even good, they just need to scratch an itch not satisfied by the written word. Intelligent films like Primer, Gattaca, or Neptune Frost, succeeding both as SFF and as cinematic offerings, are appreciated but never expected. Yes, Prometheus accomplished what it set out to do. And yes, I’ll even admit that it was bullied unfairly– Interstellar came out two years later, just as brainless and critically beloved.

That’s the caveat concluded. People pretending that Ridley Scott’s unfocused indulgence was anything more than an enjoyable and pretty mess of a big old monster movie is dishonest. Stupid characters stumbling vaguely through an incohesive attempt at a franchise prequel plot isn’t an actual problem for Prometheus, because none of that gets in the way of its existence as entertaining schlock. If it were defended as such, all would be well. Unfortunately its apologists are full of themselves. They make hay out of its themes and attempts at deeper meaning. They’re very impressed that a movie would have themes. This seems novel to them. They say words like “mythology” and puff their feathers. That it’s nothing more than a Big Stompy Monster Message movie on par with a Godzilla flick seems to elude them. The fictional Garth Marenghi once said, “I’ve met writers who used subtext, and they were all cowards.” Prometheus tuned into this ethos fully. Enter; the only interesting character in the whole moving picture facing a metaphorical god, presenting audience-redundant information to it under the mysterious guise of an untranslated alien language, and getting his head twisted off right before a big ole slam-bang Hollywood action ending. Yes, we get it. The space jockey from the (fantastic) opening sequence was Prometheus stealing the fire of life from the other Olympians and bringing it to the world, resulting in an Age Of Humanity. Cue a very impressed reaction from everyone who somehow didn’t catch it immediately. Metaphorical layers turn the paper-thin Hostile Alien Species out to Destroy The Earth and Kill All Humans into a very intellectual exercise, you see. It’s true that this is squares with 1979’s Alien hinting at an unknowable giant corpse as belonging to some alien bomber pilot (a delicious idea from Dan O’Bannon) with the titular ‘alien’ being mere payload from his hangar bay. This also flies in the face at everything the 2012 film grandly fumbled at for its preceding runtime.

The author of the Slashfilm article at the beginning of this op-ed reaches some different conclusions. They heard Weyland mention “stealing fire” and assumed this thematic cue meant that he was the Promethean connection, no further questions to precede more shaky interpretations. Xenomorphs are metaphorically a bunch of liver-eating eagles, apparently. I suppose Weyland-Yutani’s profit margins represent the chains and the big rock. The author also cites another Slashfilm article from 2017, titled “Prometheus Is One Of The Boldest Science Fiction Films In Recent Memory.”

You might recall that– flawed as it was– Arrival had been released one year earlier. Seven years earlier, you had Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. Six years earlier, Attack The Block. Five years earlier, Chronicle. Four years, the remake of Hard To Be A God. Three years, The Signal. Two years? Ridley Scott redeemed his entire whole-ass reputation with The Martian.

10 Goddamn Cloverfield Lane was more narratively imaginative and bolder as SFF than Prometheus. The former was experimental, and the latter was expensive. Yet here we are in 2024, with another all-time cinema hero doubling down on an earlier argument that– out of all these early-tens films– it’s the poor, helpless, titanically popular AAA IP franchise reboot that needs a fresh look. Excellent Science Fiction Film? Mandatory viewing? Come on.

The original Alien was a stompy monster movie. An absolutely excellent one, but still stompy and monstrous. You may recall that the Xenomorph was called ‘The Big Chap’ in production. Aliens was an even faster and stompier monster movie with a big stompy ending fight between the biggest and stompiest of monsters, and a big stompy robot. Alien 3 tried a thousand ways in a thousand scripts to be something else and failed, with dignity, in a state of heroism. Resurrection was a big stompy monster movie from someone who wanted to make Firefly instead. Prometheus, finally, was just one more big stompy monster movie in the same vein. It’s not great, it can be happily ignored, it’s a sidenote doomed to eventual excommunication from the franchise canon, and that’s okay. Knock it off with the defensive silliness already.

I’d beg people to just like whatever they want and be honest, but that calling seems to disinterest folks. Is what it is, I guess; the next one will pop up soon.

And The Digitizing Continues

Well, our old workhorse is finally up in digital and print formats via amazon! And no longer under a pseudonym.Wow! And to think it only took a thousand years. In Warm Shallow Waters will be available in hardcover within the next couple of days, included in The Outer Freakwave Collection series. We’d prefer using another service for online distribution, but the overhead is so low that it’s the best route for our energy and resources at this time.

As far as new releases go, Transgalactic Thunderhead and TRLR 8 are still cooking away. You know how it goes with edits and revisions. We’re very excited about this one, and hope to debut Thunderhead very soon.

Building The Outlaw Timberlands

from the desk of icicleteeth

https://mobile.twitter.com/icicleteeth

“Dimnonqua is a dirty place. What kind of dirty? Any definition that comes to mind is true, but none of them are said as an insult. Yes, it is dirty– in the way a scrapped-up and destroyed husk of a car is dirty… yet fascinating. It has character, a story to it. The bedrock of that story all lies in the writing, in tales of dirty people with dirty wants and desires. All wicked and gritty, with a rawness to the tone of the narrative, as well as the characters and their outlook on life. This reflects the rawness (the way a decayed corpse is “raw”) of Dimnonqua, from top to bottom. The lowest slums and bandit-ridden territories of the Timberlands and Lowlands are no more welcoming than the warring factions of the most powerful in the land, such as the Anointed Divine or Gan Jurus– and no less bloody, either. Filthy politics and good old fashioned bloodspilling are one and the same.

Designing the world and its denizens always loop back into each other; no one aspect is designed without being inspired by the other. It all started with Rhys’ bestiary– it’s a bit like a food chain, you know. Humans and other intelligent life tend to be on the top of that chain, but they can’t exist without the lower links, which itself can’t exist without understanding the environment. Much of the basis for this is well established in the text, so for me, it all started with that bestiary, which itself started with…dinosaurs! Or, synapsids. Somewhat. Despite the initial groundwork that it’s a fantasy realm with your usual dragons and goblins and magical creatures…these dragons and goblins and magical creatures inhabit a hostile and primal land that ultimately influences how they all look. Tyrannosaurus-esque dragons (which funnily enough, I didn’t initially think to include were it not for a single line in Act 1 that described Thog Luc’s weapon to have a dragon inscribed into its design. How would a blacksmith know what it looked like if it didn’t exist?), riding terror birds blemished with crude spikes on their bills to swing around like morning stars, wagon-pulling beasts of burden with the build of a bear and goring claws of a sloth, and such. Admittedly most of it is designed off of the “This Is Kind Of Ridiculous, But It’s Cool Shit” clause, but that’s natural when you start from dinosaurs, I’d say.

The bestiary not only informs the biodiversity of the world, but loops into the design of other aspects of the world– even architecture. When compositing the initial look of the logistical nightmare of a city like High Kheldrada, all I knew going in was it was buildings stacked on top of buildings– a real mess, you know. I knew its ruler was a “Conjurer King” of course, but it wasn’t until I thought “Ah, I know I want to illustrate the scene of Hercutian investigating the late king’s quarters– and a magician’s quarters are known to be stuffed with crazy baubles and oddities– let’s do that!” and started blocking in all sorts of placeholder fantasy creature statues, one of which being a two headed chimera. That really clicked with the exact approach of “stacking buildings” I’d gone with. Which is to say, pieces of houses haphazardly piled onto one another, a lot like how your traditional illuminated manuscript chimera have their respective creature parts chaotically mashed together. It became a mascot of sorts for the city, hence a chimera gargoyle being the centerpiece of the Magician King’s quarters.

All of which loops back into the characters we meet that do speak to us (characters being the key word, not humans. It is fantasy after all). Humans are humans, and some humans are humanoids, and some humanoids would be (foolishly) classified as beasts by the people of the land, and some beasts… loop right back into having an innate human nature to them. The divisions between everything are never hard lines, but a blur. Men such as Gan Jurus, Setus Mata, and Argus Jaw are beastly in their cruelty and cold-blooded willingness to kill on a whim, while Thog Luc’s riding dromierre In-Riotous-Travails regails her rider as a helpless babe needing her protection. It’s a chaotic world that is a fantasy world, yes. But the only rule with fantasy is that there aren’t any rigid set rules. Up can be down, down can be up, and a middle-aged traveling outlaw can discover the fulfillment of giving a damn about someone else for once in his life. Maybe.”

*Addendum From The Commandant*

Out of all the artists to Understand The Damned Assignment, Megan has proved the best for for Mad Romance In The Outlaw Timberlands. She brings spark and verve to this Primeval swords-and-sorcery world. Much gratitude for her behind-the-scenes commentary here.

Horror Is A Go

Buy On Amazon

And, it’s up! For any of you who purchased the previous physical edition of this book, 52 West Cemetary Road and Calico Sway, Calico Roll were replaced by more thematically relevant stories. Eventually we plan on releasing these in Another Pocket Of Hauntings, but that will follow our older material being released on amazon under the banner of The Outer Freakwave Collection.

CyberLovecraft Fever Dream

Heya, folks! Do you like identities melting under the strain of waging endless war against repugnant horrors from beyond time and space, on behalf of dread unknown technomasters from which the only escape is your own ancient ancestral memories of sacrificial violence?

Who doesn’t?! Introducing the inaugural book to launch our Amazon store, Transgalactic Thunderhead. Dropping June 1st 2024, update with link to follow. Older works will (at last) be uploaded to the Amazon store throughout the remainder of 2024.