Zero Stack UBI; Kiss My Ass

Once upon a long ago, we had a writer signed up here at this rag who was supposed to write, ya know, like, what we do and shit. But he never posted a thing. He had told me once upon that long ago, that he was going to post something about fapping to some cutesy femboys on the internets and then questioning his actions. But his browser crashed. Go figure. He isn’t signed up anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.

So this quarter-mast, zero stack (more on that here) was also a video game developer. Was. I saw a small build for an 16-bit game and recolored a sprite for him. I also made motion graphic shots for a trailer for a seemingly revolutionary concept for a game-ified online school program. None of these have gone anywhere. The bits of work I did were for free.

A while ago, like maybe a month at this point, Quarter-mast had a pathetically small meet-up at a friend’s coffee shop to discuss the potential for a UBI program in Oregon. He printed a commemorative “banner” on individual pieces of paper and stapled them together. Not only do I understand that at this point, there’s no practical way to support UBI, but I know that at the point where UBI must be necessitated due to automation, UBI could be outmoded by a conceptual Resource Allocation Metric. When nobody is earning money, do you need it, or the meritocratic allocation of resource allotments? Which is what currency is supposed to stand in place of.

If this chuckle-fuck had any balls or brains, he’d have used his game dev knowledge to create a game wherein the players earn cryptocurrency through their actions sort of like that new thing Crytek is doing but with the main goal of the player’s actions in the game entirely contributing to the mining of the currency. You couldn’t do that? You couldn’t talk to somebody about game-ifying some blockchain shit and an economist? You couldn’t do that? You who complained about living in Lake Oswego….

Hey Crytek, can I work for you? I’m an amateur writer, director, and graphic designer – so pretty all-around useless. But, seriously, “Crycash?” And if I’m being honest, I don’t know if you can earn Crycash by playing the game but I don’t really think it’s the sort of game that can hold my attention long enough to commit to such a task as earning money from it.

What if this is what Death Stranding is? What if, with the help of Sony, Kojima is gonna give us this transcendent experience and opportunity? One can only dream….

Merry Crushmush, and Happy New Year

The Grand (and somewhat bland) Appearance

On the 9th of June, fellow writer Funky Mannequin and I left our home in La Grande, Oregon. The goal was to travel the length of the state and return to Portland (where we first met), and travel we did; through incredible heat, scrotal ticks, the corpses of decaying roadside house-cats, and the backs of vans owned by religious meth-head couples, we pressed onward. However, this story is about none of those things (though you can bet there will be more on such escapades later).

For now, let’s focus on The Grand (and somewhat bland) Appearance.

Upon reentering Portland, Funky and I were greeted by a typhoon of litter and profoundly retarded transit system. The destination was across town (the apartment of a dear friend Garrett), so we got change from a local barkeep and his transvestite girlfriend, seating ourselves at the nearest stop and checking the schedule. It read eight minutes – five minutes later, it read nine.

When the vehicle at last greeted us, it did so with an overweight woman screeching into a speaker-phone and a coughing man who would have shamed victims of the bubonic plague.

We were up to our taints in boozy broads and gutter condoms. We were home indeed.

Once freed of the public access vehicle, we promptly located Garrett’s building and illegally tailed a resident through the safety-locked doors. Instead of the stairs, we took a dangerous-looking elevator up a single story and reached the room in minutes, ushered in by a middle-eastern man bearing a plate of assorted fruits. “For you,” he spoke smoothly, presenting the organized dish of succulent offerings.

We took the juicy gift and rested upon a crimson sofa, breathing in the sheer emptiness of the apartment’s space. “Where’s Garrett?” we asked, slightly unnerved.

“He went to get you,” the man responded, producing a smoke and heading for the balcony.

“Of course.”

Eerie music filled the air. No, there is truly no joke or metaphor to be found here; there was suspenseful music quite literally flooding the room around us, echoing from somewhere within the walls (from which room we did not yet know).

On the coffee table before the couch, a sculpture of a pirate skull glowered at our knees (“I dug that out of the trash!” our friend would soon proclaim with an appropriately dramatic gesture).

When Garrett finally did arrive, he did so with a homeless companion named Jeremy (known to Garrett as “Gregory” for absolutely no reason at all). Jeremy talked about an ideal world on acid, grew offended when asked to play a love song, refused to shower, then gave everybody his filthy, filthy lice (they filled all of the hand towels, so cleaning oneself was deeply counter-productive). Levi cooked us delicious salmon to rectify these things.

That night, we watched a television of static. The channels wouldn’t change unless we were using the remote. When the remote eventually stopped working (no big deal, all of the channels were static anyway), Garrett opened the battery compartment and two small pieces of aluminum foil fell from the device. We were all dumbfounded.

On the television (or rather, within the static on the television), we saw intergalactic travel, spiraling serpents, parting seas, and a vigorously dancing man. The dancing man was so horrendously funny, we all laughed for a good five minutes (five minutes is an absurdly long and painful amount of time when you can only laugh). This television, like the pirate skull, was obtained from a dumpster.

The following day, Funky and Garrett made Jeremy the Louse King collect all of his shit and throw it into a sack, putting him on the bus and taking him to a tax-evading semi-cult otherwise known as The Boneyard (read: Road Trip Through Purgatory, My Accidental Life As A Full-Time Meth Peddler: Part One, and Bags Of Flesh, Bottles Of Urine – all appropriately titled entries in the world of Boneyard lore).

“It’s a commune of artists,” they misinformed the Louse King.

He looked very worried, as he should have been. When they were traveling via the TriMet streetcar, he spent the ride face-down in his guitar. He knew they were stretching the truth.

When they reached the communal settlement of degenerate scum, the landowner was evicting a local junkie (Fini, Lord of Ice-Cold Milk). All of his greasy belongings had been tossed onto the lawn.

The Louse King was abandoned there, yet to be seen again.

So we made a safe return and lead normal lives, right?

Well, unbeknownst to my shitty little heart, this was but the beginning of a new breed of adventure – an adventure so lethargic, pasty, and unexciting that it would be a crime to shove it all into one post.

In stories to come: handguns, familial alienation, bloody intercourse, parolee sex-changes, cancer, long-lost siblings, and open relationships. Yeah, yeah, don’t get your hopes up.

Garrett, whose face is scribbled out because he doesn’t want any photos on the internet because he’s fucking insane.

Next Up: The Gland Incoherence

And Then: The Unplanned Interference

And Eventually Someday: Seven Sinks And The Bridge Of Despair

And Then Eventually Someday Somehow After All That: 260 Miles: The Borderline Homoerotic Tales Of Traveling Way Too Far On Foot And Getting Ticks On Your Nutsack

Introducing Our New Shill Page!

Do you like cool shit? Do you like cool shit that you can wear? Do you like cool shit that you can’t wear?

Well, mighty fuck, you’re in luck!

Introducing our new “Shill” page, where my crazy mongoloids and I can huck our wares for you all to buy because some of us don’t wanna entertain the notion of sleeping on the sidewalk!

Feel free to peruse our wares and throw money over our bodies as we gyrate and moan lasciviously for your artistic pleasure. Yes, oh yes, right there. Oh, baby. Don’t stop. I’m almost ther-

So what are you waiting for? That disposable income ain’t gonna dispose of itself!

Once Upon A Quarter-Stack

Though planet Earth may be overflowing with a plethora of personality types, I like to think that a majority of folks can be properly categorized into one of five basic categories; the primary four sets are Quarter, Half, Three-Fourths, and Full “Stack” (or “Mast,” whichever terminology you prefer). At the bottom of the pile lies the “Zero Stack,” the absolutely abysmal antithesis of productivity and worth as a human being (but we’ll get to this one later).

As you may have already guessed, this is a measurement system for the value of one’s character, entirely based upon the visualization of a male erection.

A Full-Stack individual is well-to-do, though not indefinitely at the top of their game. This is to say, one achieves what they are able to, and offer no petty excuses otherwise – though Full-Mast can represent a brand of subjective “perfection,” it is also applicable to any case in which you “rise to the occasion.” Though not always achievable, it can almost always be reached if you’re willing to put in the effort. When one is at Full-Stack, they are anywhere between “good enough” and the absolute peak of their abilities. Their work is of quality, their health is generally in check, and their shits are smooth and leave minimal residue. They are capable of inspiring greatness in others, and stand as an almost casual testament to the complete and bursting quality of their proverbial personality boner.

Three-Fourths-Stack is but a smidge below this, commonly falling into the “mildly disappointing” crowd. Though being only Three-Fourths is nothing to cry about, it won’t quite get the job done. If you could grip this personality type in your fist, it would feel fleshy yet flaccid, almost there but missing the mark. And of the five classifications, it can be safely assumed that Three-Fourths is the least occupied. If one is not doing well (or exceptionally well, as both fall under Full), they are oftentimes dragged into the substantially lower subsections. Depression can be a beast, and doesn’t normally make pit-stops on the way to Rock Bottom (a zone that spans from Zero Stack to Quarter-Mast).

Half-Stack is where things start to become sketchy. This is the realm of true disappointment, letting others down, “dropping the ball.” When a fellow finds themselves at Half-Stack, they are probably not the first to see these flaws within their integrity.  Unlike Three-Fourths, it is usually very difficult to conceal the rickety standing of your behavior. In this sense, you are limp and unimpressive, incapable of penetrating the moist, mysterious, dangerous, and cavernous cooter that is life. Many other terms have already existed for this mentality, such as Half-Assed, Half-Baked, Half-Hearted, and Lackadaisical. If you could grip this personality type in your fist, its mass would hardly feel present against your palm.

Then there is Quarter-Mast. If the shameful grouping of Zero Stack were not to exist, this would be the most loathsome of mindsets. The individual who finds themselves caught in the world of Quarter-Mast is most likely delusional off the fumes of their own bullshit. All work is sloppy, all promises broken, all opportunities passed with no intention of ever fulfilling them. Strange and unfathomably ridiculous excuses are made to avoid responsibility, and livelihood becomes secondary to outdoing your last record of proximity to Rock Bottom. You will throw pizzas inside of your car and not know why. More often than not, each potential “plan” becomes side-tracked by another, increasingly unattainable plan, slowly working the victim into a position in which no goal is truly attainable. Every aspect of Quarter-Stack is comparable to hot, liquescent diarrhea. If you could grip this personality type in your fist, you would be crying.

And now, alas, we arrive at Zero Stack. This is absolute Rock Bottom. This is nearly going out of your way to be a person of the most garbage tier. The word “abysmal” hardly begins to describe the borderline malevolence lurking behind this outlook. A “work-night” would become a George Lopez marathon; children would become toothless welfare machines; charity money would become a private whiskey fund; the food pantry would become additional diaper storage. If you could grip Zero Stack in your fist, you would not be holding a penis. You would be holding next-to-nothing. It would be like aged menstrual blood and cornstarch had an illegitimate child with soggy sausage.

But let’s stop before we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s just take a break and boil down the point of this entire article, the heart and soul of what I am trying to communicate.

Franz.

Franz the Fool.

You’ve been displayed as an author on this website for a long fucking time, man. For the love of sweet baby Jesus Christ’s divine ejaculate, write a goddamn Gripe already, you subhuman Quarter-Stack fuck. I am sick as shit of looking at that un-clickable not-so-hyperlink that is your ridiculous fucking pen name. In the name of Christopher Walken’s left testicle, get some words on this page before I get my Full-Mast in your asshole.

And that goes for you as well, Austin (the unregistered, bitch-ass bitch who also signed up for this blog).

I’ll take this post down when the two of you get some shit up on here (or dip out), because I am tired of your procrastinating trash.

 

[UPDATE (1/11/15 4:12 AM) – Editor’s Note: Back when this digital rag was first created, I signed on a mongoloid who went by the handle of “Franz the Fool.” He was quite the fool. He had promised a rip-roaring post about a strange dude calling him and asking to have sex. This would’ve made for a great Gripe. And it almost happened (the Gripe, not the steamy dude-on-dude sex). But it didn’t (neither happened). Apparently, after writing about 80% of the Gripe, he adjourned for a fap, then closed the browser. Since he was using the “blue editor,” he lost the entire post. Rather than get saved as a draft like with the “classic editor,” it was supposed to have been saved as some sort of browser cache/cookie/wizardry, which is how the blue editor do. Apparently. BUT IT DIDN’T. It was gone. He didn’t write the Gripe again. Or anything else for that matter.

I also signed on another author, the Austin named briefly in Mack’s Gripe above, yet he never even signed on/set up his profile. I had poked and prodded at both of them to write something, anything, everything. It never happened. So now they’re gone. The Quarter-Stacks are gone, I repeat, the Quarter-Stacks are gone.

Even though Van Lobster had intended to take this post down, I deemed it too funny to just get rid of. SO IT STAYS.]