Wings Over the Pyre - Urge to Rant ... Rising ...

11:21 pm - Urge to Rant ... Rising ...

Though not as much as you might think.

Why? Well, let's talk about Warriors for Innocence. Let's talk about Six Apart. Hell, let's even talk about Warren Ellis.

Don't bother going to the WfI site, incidentally. Aside from being possibly the worst designed website on the face of the Earth and possibly including orbital bases, it's about as useful as tits on a boar-hog, as my father might say. Even ignoring the swath of JavaCrud it attempts to spew on you.

Why would I want to talk about Warren Ellis, you might ask?

Warren, Hell love 'im, decided to post this in response the current tempest-in-a-teapot:

Until such time as LiveJournal/Six Apart work out how to tell the difference between fantasy fiction communities/support groups/fashion discussion communities/survivor histories and actual criminal use and traffic, and restore those fiction groups and survivor support teams to full working order, my own LiveJournal will become read-only, and I will produce no new content to be read on that system.

I do believe that some stupid people got what was coming to them today. But a lot more people have been mistreated by LiveJournal for no reason beyond blind panic. I see no reason to tacitly support that by continuing to write under a LiveJournal URL.

My main website, is, of course, warrenellis.com, and that already exists as LJ feed warrenelliscom.

No, Warren, buddy, if you really cared about the issue, you'd just yank your LJ wholly with just a forwarding message to your new home on, oh, any of the ten-thousand alternatives to LJ that exist (barring Vox, TypePad, or MovableType, since all of them are owned by Six Apart) with nothing but a charming forwarding-message left behind to quell the dust. That is, pointedly, not what you did. What you actually did was what pretty much evertyne else I see around is doing, scurrying about looking for the most wretched excuse for social posturing that is conceivable. You gave out what, at best, can be seen as a very low decible whine, and muttered, "I'm going to take my balls and go home!" while meaningfully stomping your feet.

This is not, let me be clear, to say that Six Apart has been behaving in anything more than the most boneheaded and incredibly stupid of manners in this context. Can SA truthfully do nothing more than rock back and forth like an autistic child and randomly blurt out names that someone's complained about before sending them off to the cornfield? We're not even talking about some kind of sustained suicide-bombing effort against the SA compounds, which we might actually accept as a poor-but-understandable motivation. We just have SA getting what appears to be an email flood from a given organization that has a site that's about as unprofessional as they come, has no official backing that folks can turn up (and which legitimate groups post clearly and frequently), and who doesn't even seem to have the basic underpinnings of anything more than a well-orchestrated hoax.

"Hoax?" I hear you saying. "What do you mean, man!? These kooks comvinced SA to shut down communities!"

Hoax is exactly what I mean. Did anyone but me notice the recent meme-exploit that moved across LJ in the guise of Yet Another Quiz? How about the revent Eve Online / Goonswarm situation, with all the Goon's "conveniently revealed" information coming just before a holiday period such that Eve couldn't respond for a crucial several day period?

At a certain point in every social group, the number of assholes becomes self-selecting and spontaneously-organizing in a self-supporting way. It appears the number of folks on the Net with factional agendas has reached such a point with various subcultures. Oh, joy. Moreover, the number of idiots in positions of decision-making power has always been unnaturally large, as a result of the rest of us promoting them just to keep them away from the things that really matter to keeping an organization running. Thus, SA's decision-making in this environment.

So, bottom-lining it, my take on this whole situation is that Warriors for Innocence is an elaborate hoax taking on the mantle of an anti-pedo front, but really just a few idiotic shit-stirrers with too much time on their hands. Compound this with Six Apart being suddenly paranoid about how things might be taken (despite the fact that in their own ToS, they disavow responsibility for things posted to LiveJournal) and the fact that a lot of the folks in the most-affected communities are the inhibitors of a universe which is constructed of two things, themselves and drama. The result is predictable: A chunk of stupid from the SA admin and a whole swath of hand-wringing from a whole lot of people no one would have given two-farts-in-a-whirlwind about two days ago ... and still don't.

I don't care if you think it's Confederate-flag-waving anti-UN Redneck Mafia members behind it. I don't care if you threaten to take 0.000000001% of the LJ population with you and go home. I really don't care if you think you need to change your interests and blog content for fear of being shut down, because that's just being a drama queen.

What I do care about is the fact that yet another tempest-in-a-teapot is exploding with much overwrought bullshit floating around and nothing at the root of it. Don't trust Six Apart anymore? Roll out and change your blogging site, it's not hard. "The Net recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it appropriately." If you don't decide to do that, then you really don't care enough to do something about it beyond a token amount.

Me? I don't care enough to do anything about it beyond a token. But I have a great token!

The phrase you're looking for here is "bring it."

Blasphemous Whispers
by Alexander Williams

Even after, she wasn't sure what was the worst of it.

At first, she thought it was the caress of his cold, dead hands, with nails chipped and slightly ragged. She could feel the trickle of blood where it stroked along her inner thigh, dragging a gash behind it like the wake of a dying fish.

Then, she considered whether it was the smell of his breath, that carrion odor like an open grave. There were many open graves on the outskirts of Vandread, some of the only open soil allowed to see the sky there, and she'd always connected the scent of freshly turned dirt and rotting flesh with a sort of freedom, with a release from concerns. But his breath just smelled like death, even if the clay of his body yet moved.

Finally, she decided it was the look of him. Pale, like a raw bone, and thin like one, too. His naked body stood in the center of the circle and writhed in a way that recalled serpents, or worms. His arms shifted with fluid grace along patterns of force only the blasphemous and the damned could see.

It occurred to her that she was starting to see them, undulating as if waves in the sea caught in lightning. This only slightly discomfited her.

Once, before the Lord's minions had descended on her clave and pointed her out, marked her for taking, dragged her away from family, friends, and servants, she was named Anise. Like the flower. Her hair had been black and rich, falling to her ankles in mahogany-black. Her eyes, too, were dark and deep, like her mind.

That mind, like her father before her, had led her to her researches, of course. She served the City of Thorns, the City of Iron, in a needed role: Public Necromancer. Theurgia Publicus. By the time she was thirteen, she had raised the dead, consulted the spirits, and sent demons screaming back to Hell wrapped in nothing but her ire. Demons from Hell didn't frighten her. The dead, walking or not, didn't frighten her.

The man who'd just turned toward her, one hand raised to the metal ceiling, encrusted with empty-eyed skulls, the other curled lightly about his phallus, stroking in time with the rhythm of the chant, he scared her. Terrified her, in fact. The knowledge that when she was thirteen and already conjuring fiends, he was a thousand years old, maybe more, and had not sent the fiends to Hell but bound them in cold iron, fused them with his body, made them serve him like dirty whores, that made her bones jelly and her knees sag and her wrists protest against the iron manacles that kept her nearly on tip-toe.

Anise was thirty now. Thirteen was long past. To him, the intervening time wasn't a lifetime, it was an eye blink.

As she watched him stroke his shaft, watched it grow hard and thick in his hand, she was both terrified and wonderfully excited.

This was Th'esus Hummel, Third Lord of Vandread.

He leaned in closer to her, his long dark hair nearly as long as hers, pulled back in a simple half-braid. The pinkness of his lips was stark on his pale face, and it added an extra fillip to his liquid expressions. It was lust there, now, but she wasn't sure if it was for her or the thing he was calling.

“Soon, little Anise, soon. I think we'll have what I'm looking for soon enough. I've already found part of it, no?” He paused, looked at her with a little moue of dissatisfaction. Some part of her shivered at the look, and that earned a bit of a quirk of the lip from him.

Something in Anise turned loose with a gush. “Haven't you had enough, Hummel? Haven't you --” and it stopped again as she felt him move around behind her, felt the coolness of his chest to her back.

The knife in his fist that came around from behind her drew her eyes more than the roiling in the circle. It was black and silver, obsidian-bladed.

It was a sacrificial knife. And it hovered over her breast, a hungry wasp.

The tip teased along under the nipple. “I never have enough, my pet,” whispered into her ear, and she imagined she could see it curling around in whorls of smoke. “I take what I want, and I want much.” Or – hadn't you noticed?”

The hard, sharp thrust upwards which sent his shaft into her came as less surprise than she wanted, much less surprise than the fact that her body had betrayed her and was ready for him, ready and wanton for him. Her fists rattled the chains as she tried, agonizingly, to drag herself away from him, but the demon he had bound into the iron made her sluggish, made the body like one at the bottom of the sea. Her intended hard pull away ended up like nothing so much as a sensuous writhe.

She couldn't tell then if the chains forced her to that – or simply let her. A hundred nights nor a hundred years later, she still didn't know.

All she remembered was his laugh.

“Good, good!” he murmured after the chuckle had flown by, as sharp as the knife cutting its way across her breasts. “That's a good little girl, yes. Just what you needed, hmm? And what I needed.” Another thrust speared up into her, as he murmured, not to her but the chains and they fell a foot or so, enough to leave her hanging forward just a bit.

All the better for his pleasure.

“I hate you,” Anise spit at the floor. “I hate you, hate all of you. The rotting stench of you sickens me. You're dead inside.” She tried to turn her mind toward the circle, tried to ignore the violation she was experiencing but had no control over. She even thought of the knife, and how the lazy gestures it was making on her chest reminded her of certain rune-marks she'd seen in the Deep City. Her body, though, betrayed her at the end, slipping out a groan to punctuate her hate.

Part of her loved him.

The wicked smile he wore radiated against her back. The thickness of him made her thighs quiver, and her sex ache. It wasn't the first time she'd been taken (not even the first time by something arguably utterly inhuman), but it was the first time she'd been used without her consent. She could feel the degradation dripping down her inner thighs.

“Oh, but you're so alive inside.” A thrust. Another. There was no real rhythm, no real time, except – there was. It matched the beating of the Black Heart of Hell, the screams of the dying.

He dropped the knife. In a sense, she felt relieved and in another she was more sickened than ever. Now both his hands were free.

Both of his hands went to her breasts, jerking her upright, pulling her back so his manhood pushed against the underside of her clit with the force of another blade. She screamed, wordless and high.

His scream joined hers, curled around it, mocked and echoed it. His nails dug hard, hard into her breasts, teasing the nipples, bruised and bloodied already, to a higher heat. Her sex answered, clenching tight around the white-hot iron inside, buckling and suckling.

Hair thrashing, she was wordless. Nothing sufficed to verbalize how much she hated him, and hated being so helpless. Words paled. Only the Hell Speech answered, and it came like a whipcord.

The language of demons and the dead is a potent thing, and he answered it in kind. Marks appeared on her skin, branded by the force of it, his name repeated in the script of the Book of Black Law, in her secret places, on her flesh like burns, everywhere. Her hatred and filth made manifest insects which burned in the air and bit them both.

It only seemed to spur him on. His hands dropped to her hips, his hard length from her hungry slit to her untainted ass. When he pushed within, she wasn't sure if the scream was from the pain or from the suddenly empty gaping void which drooled juice and blood from between her thighs.

A word whispered upwards and the chains dropped her to the floor, just within the circle, thrown roughly forward so the cold granite bloodied her nose, turned it into a gruesome flower to mock her name. Anise was caught beneath the weight of the dark man, the empty man, and enjoyed it.

Looking up and forward, her hair caught in hands like claws, dragged back until her neck ached, she gazed directly into the heart of the maelstrom that circled the ceiling above, felt her body reaching the point of absence, mingling unconsciousness and a lesser death, and could not close her eyes against the onrushing horror.

When she came, it was without a sound. Only the storm answered her, and that only by reaching out and down.

Th'esus Hummel withdrew from her violated ass, turned her to face him, and looked into her eyes. The coldness inside made him smile. The cold, hard hands that guided her to take his blooded shaft in her mouth and suckle her own ruin from it, hungrily, greedily, even, made her shudder because she remembered those hands.

When he came, she swallowed every drop. In no way would she let even the slightest fraction of him escape.

The slap across her face that drove her on her back into the center of the circle dropped like lightning. Anise's black eyes met those of Th'esus Hummel.

“I hate you, father.”

“Good, my pet. This will serve you well.”

And then the demon was on her, it was in her, and she was made into the thing of her father, his pet, his soldier, and if desired, his sacrifice. She died as her blood crept out on the floor, while Th'esus violated his daughter, took her, ass and cunt and soul, ravaged and raped her, and the body he tossed casually into the circle was made to receive the beast that descended.

A hundred years later, in her father's bed, having watched him fall asleep, she still hated him. A hundred years later, watching the sleeping man who was nothing less than her father, she loved him. A hundred years later, she was still his toy, his thing.

Anise Hummel would have it no other way.

Current Mood: annoyed