Unwanted Richard: Life Coaching for the Modern Age

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I had a brief conversation with an old friend of mine yesterday evening, revolving around the topic of unsolicited dick pics and determining what suitable responses might be. This blog post is emerging from that bit of conversation. The trigger was a suggestion that the recipient reply with a text saying, “That looks like a child’s penis. I’m reporting this.”

A few years back, when my 16-year-old daughter was around 12 or 13, the topic of boys sending pictures of their dicks came up in the car. I don’t recall precisely how the subject was broached, but there’s a fair-to-middling chance that I’d randomly tossed the topic out there for no apparent reason and with nothing that could be interpreted as an antecedent. Anyone who has known me for any length of time probably isn’t terribly surprised by that.

Perhaps to the chagrin of my adolescent daughter–and also my girlfriend, who was in the car with us–I began spouting off things I considered appropriate responses, if (and more likely when) she received her first unsolicited dick pic. It’s an unpleasant thought, knowing that the odds are high that my daughter(s) are subject to that sort of tacky, uncouth, and disgusting behavior from boys or even adult men (since we clearly seem to be incapable of growing up beyond a certain point in many cases)…but I sincerely believe it’s a conversation a parent probably needs to be having with their children.

These suggested responses are mostly geared toward young girls who receive unsolicited dick pics, but some of them are certainly appropriate for adult women as well (including transwomen, as a dear friend of mine has seen a massive uptick in men sliding into her DMs since she began transitioning). I felt it was my responsibility to share these suggestions with any other parents who might end up reading this blog.

Here’s a short list:

“My dad says you might want to have that checked out by a doctor.” — This one is lovely, in part because it implies the recipient shared the offending picture with her father and that the father felt like there was something wrong with the penis in question. It’s both emasculating and potentially paranoia-inducing.

“Why did you just send me a picture of an overcooked hot dog.” — Because it’s just objectively funny.

“I just showed that picture to my mom, and now she won’t stop laughing. I don’t know what’s so funny.” — This one is predicated on the assumption that the individual sending the pictures is perhaps suffering from a bit of fragile masculinity. The thought of being laughed at by an adult female, and the mother of the recipient, should be suitably discouraging.

“That is way smaller than mine.” — I suspect there’s a bit of latent homophobia lurking not far from the surface inside of anyone who’s inclined to send unsolicited dick pics. It’s an assumption, but I’m willing to stand by that assumption.

“Hey! I know this penis! I saw this one on that gay porn site.” — Again, assuming a certain amount of homophobia that accompanies that sort of toxic masculinity.

“My dad took my phone after I showed him the picture, and he just finally gave it back. He’s all flushed and sweaty and he changed clothes.” — This one plays on both the emasculation of the recipient’s father seeing the image and also on the suspected latent homophobia.

“That sort of looks like a penis, just really tiny. Is it a scale model?” — There is no harm in body shaming someone who’s sending you unsolicited dick pics. Die mad about it!

“Hey! That reminds me of giving my baby brother a bath.” — Again, there’s no harm in body shaming the penis of someone with that sort of toxic masculinity.

“Did you just send me a picture of your dog’s penis?” — Red Rocket! Red Rocket! Oh, come on…that’s just funny.

I think it’s important to force some humor and amusement into these sorts of situations, by whatever means necessary. Riff off of these suggestions, or find your own. Whether you’re a pre-teen or middle-aged, there’s a greater than 0 chance you’ve received an unsolicited dick pic…you may as well have some fun with it. Save screen caps and laugh about it with your friends (or even your family, if they’re not too uncomfortable with the subject).

Night Worms Pack: February 2021

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I decided to give the Night Worms subscription box a shot, because it’s appealed to me for quite some time and I couldn’t think of a good reason not to try it out.
Unfortunately, one of the worries I had in signing up came to fruition. I am now the proud owner of a second copy of Jessica Leonard’s Antioch (complete with a signed bookplate). I’m sure I will be able to find her terrific book a good home, though. This was always going to be a very real concern, with the sheer number of books I own and the regularity with which I purchase new additions to my library.
The other two books are new to my collection, which is certainly nice. I was sort of concerned that everything contained in the Night Worms pack would be things I already had, now that I’d opted to try it out. Murphy’s Law is something that can’t be disregarded.
The milk chocolate and cinnamon hot cocoa mix seems like it will be promising.
The bookmarks will come in handy…around here, they always do.
The little voodoo doll sticker is adorable.

https://nightworms.com/

Synchronic (2020)

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Though Synchronic is not the eagerly anticipated follow-up to Resolution and The Endless that I’ve been hoping for from the writing/directing duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, there’s absolutely no way to consider this movie a disappointment as a fan of their previous work.
It’s refreshing to see this movie was shot and edited with the same blend of hyperreal cinematography and surreal ambiance one might expect from previous work like Spring, Resolution, and The Endless. The ever-improving technical skills and artistic flourishes of Benson/Moorhead and the crews they assemble are readily on display.
Telling the strangely coherent tale of a designer drug that has the capability of transporting users through points in time through influence on the pineal gland could hardly be considered a simple task, but Benson and Moorhead have never shied away from challenging stories and non-linear progressions in the past. Their risk has paid off once again, sharing a story that’s as much a dizzying science fiction narrative as it is an intimate portrait of a man coming to terms with death, the different paths one’s life might take, the lengths one might go to in order to save a friend, and the strain extreme circumstances can take on all types of relationship (specifically friendship, romantic, and working). In short, this movie (like any of their work in the past) succeeds in being simultaneously a perfect combination of its components and more than the sum of its own parts.
This movie nails every conceivable element I could hope for; complete with fantastic performances by Anthony Mackie, Ramiz Monsef, Ally Ioannides, and Jamie Dornan, beautiful choices for filming locations, and a terrific score that reinforces but doesn’t overpower.
The only thing I might have changed is in the writing. I don’t know that I could have avoided shoehorning in just one extra pill for Mackie’s character Steve…because of Hawking.

Red Station by Kenzie Jennings

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While Red Station by Kenzie Jennings lacks something of the authentic tone of pulp westerns Christine Morgan’s The Night Silver River Run Red captured with such surprising grace, it never feels inauthentic in its period depiction.
We join four travelers in a stagecoach, crossing countless miles of prairie as they arrive to find shelter and sustenance for the night in an isolated manor serving as a waystation. Unfortunately for the passengers, the family residing in this waystation is more sinister and unsettling than they seem, harboring awful, bloody secrets. They aren’t the only ones with a secret, however. As these various mysteries unfold within the story, we bear witness to increasingly violent confrontations and satisfying moments of surprising action.
To call Red Station a thrilling read is a bit of an understatement. It’s suspenseful, action-packed, and populated with fascinating characters…a must-read for anyone looking for bloodshed and cruelty in the untamed American West, with a delightful dose of vengeance.

https://www.deathsheadpress.com/2021/01/18/red-station-splatter-western-7/

Black Planet: Books 1-4 by Nikki Noir

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Nikki Noir’s Black Planet: Books 1-4 collects together in one volume a sequence of novellas and short stories introducing us to a handful of residents of a Northern Arizona town and the sinister events corrupting and controlling those people, brought about by a mysterious, otherworldly object and the black goo that seems to be spreading through the North Woods.
Alternating between perverse sexual depravity, brooding cosmic horror, occult fanaticism, murder, and family drama, Noir manages to avoid missing a beat as she weaves a tale that keeps the reader begging for more…and then the final page arrives, and you can only hope for more to come.
She paints a portrait with the delicacy of a scalpel while utilizing a pallet produced by a hammer blow to the head and the arterial flow of a severed penis as she draws you into this world she’s created. If that description doesn’t make you want to read this book, I really don’t know what else I can say. Spoiling this particular story would be virtually impossible without dragging you, kicking and screaming all the way through the narrative itself, it’s such a feverish and surreal experience.
Keep in mind, as you read…the owls are not what they seem, a statement somehow more true in this novel than in Twin Peaks.

https://www.bloodgutsandstory.com/product-page/black-planet

On Reading & Re-Reading

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This post was written in response to a number of posts I’ve seen within a specific community surrounding the writing of one fairly popular (though still independent) author. I’m not going to mention the name or anything, but it is an author I happen to enjoy…though seemingly not to the same extent as others.

I love books.

I have loved books since I was a little kid, a love further nurtured by certain members of my family. My mother had a pretty sizeable collection of paperbacks available for me to pilfer and my father had a nice assortment as well. Horror and mystery were my first loves, to some extent because those were the things most readily available to me and most likely to capture my interest.

It started simpler than that, of course. Book fairs at my elementary school always left me disappointed, because there were always more books that I wanted but that we couldn’t afford. I, at a more naive time, honestly believed that it was reasonable to expect that I could collect all of the books from The Hardy Boys series as a child.

It grew and expanded from there.

I was devouring books by Dean Koontz and Stephen King with regularity before I’d even reached middle school.

Hell, I received multiple personal pan pizzas from Pizza Hut just by reading The Stand (unabridged) when I was in 6th grade, and that was only one of many books I read that year.

In 8th grade, I was introduced to H.P. Lovecraft by a friend who was also on the football team with me. It was that same year when I started reading the fantasy novels from Terry Brooks. Not much later than that, I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, inspired by recollections of seeing the movie when I was much younger.

I guess I mostly just wanted to point out that reading has always been one of my greatest joys. It was important to get that part out of the way.

That being established, I cannot wrap my head around seeing literally dozens of people talking about reading the same series of books for the third or fourth time (or being on their third or fourth listen to the audiobooks of the same series). That’s almost cult-like to me, when that is time I could spend reading a new and different book (or listening to the same). No one author has written anything so spectacular that I would read the same book from them multiple times within a four or five year period. Most books I can’t even bring myself to read a second time at all.

Am I the weird one here?

Is it normal to just devote oneself to a particular series of books and repeatedly immerse yourself into those books at the exclusion of others?

Even as an author, I actively promote and encourage the reading of other authors I enjoy and admire. I wouldn’t want people sitting around and reading my books over and over again when they could be exploring other stories, maybe even stories that I found a great deal of pleasure in reading.

I guess I just don’t get it.

I can’t understand it at all.

There are movies and television series that I’ve watched numerous times, but most of those later viewings are just to have something on that I enjoy for background noise while I work on something else (often reading a book)…or to share the experience with someone else who hasn’t previously experienced the same pleasure I have, and I’m hoping to capture some of that initial joy vicariously through their experience. There is also the fact that a movie only eats up a chunk of a couple hours while (at least for me) reading even a moderately-sized book can take four times that long.

It feels weird to me, interacting with members of a literary appreciation community who repeatedly brag about being on this number of read-throughs and so on. I feel like I’m losing the capacity to relate to these folks beyond a very limited scope.

Extinction Peak by Lucas Mangum

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Lucas Mangum’s Extinction Peak borrows heavily from themes familiar to fans of Jurassic Park/World franchise, Dino Crisis, and Land Of The Lost while painting a dizzying portrait of an apocalypse no one could have seen coming (except for those who made it happen, but that’s a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that).
We’re first introduced to Deandra and her brother, Johnny, as they plan to leave the basement they’ve been sheltering in as the world outside descends into a carnage-filled nightmare Michael Crichton wouldn’t have dared explore, even in writing. Children of a deceased drug lord, neither Deandra nor Johnny are well adjusted or particularly sympathetic characters, particularly Johnny. I found myself wanting both of them to be devoured by dinosaurs almost immediately but knowing there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if that were how it played out.
As we follow those two (and other characters we encounter along the way, many of them equally flawed and broken), we see far more detail of just how terrible and dangerous the world has become as these beasts emerged, seemingly from Hell, through the sinkholes around the world. As with most monster-themed horror, we soon find that the worst monsters aren’t the obvious ones, that it’s other people we really need to worry about. Fueled by greed, contempt derived from old world biases, and sadistic impulses that shouldn’t surprise any of us (but somehow always do), the story continues its fast-paced and character-driven journey through an increasingly unreal end to the world as we know it.
In all honesty, I would love to see Mangum explore this particular apocalypse in greater depth and detail, through the struggles of other people in other places, but this book is so detailed as to make it simple to close our eyes and imagine precisely what it might be like for others, even ourselves when the holes in the Earth begin opening up.
This book is filled with graphic violence, gruesome deaths, and subject matter that absolutely nudges it into splatterpunk territory…be warned that this is not a book for your dinosaur-loving children…unless you parent the way I would…and did.

Extinction Peak

The Land: Swarm: Chaos Seeds Book V by Aleron Kong

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This installment is primarily focused on Richter deciding to be more actively involved in the day-to-day life of the mist village. This book is largely dedicated to self-improvement and the development of skills and abilities. There are some major events included, just the same, and the battle that concludes the story is intense and well-written.
As with all of the other books in the series, I’ve listened to this on Audible. The narration is terrific and it flows perfectly with the story being shared. The first three books have been my favorites in the series, but this book and the fourth are still well-worth listening to or reading.

The Land: Catacombs: Chaos Seeds Book IV by Aleron Kong

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With a title of Catacombs, I suspected that we would be exploring deeper into the tunnels beyond the Great Seal. There are definitely tunnels and subterranean adventures, but not the ones I went into this anticipating. With the pace we’re addressing some of the things I expected to see explored further, it seems like we’ll never get there in four more volumes in the series.
There’s nothing disappointing about the book or the narration for the audiobook, but I’m starting to worry that we’ll never see some of the adventures I’ve been waiting to witness.
I’m currently listening to the fifth audiobook in the series and I will absolutely still be picking up the remaining three books of this series.

The Land: Alliances: Chaos Seeds Book III

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The title seems a bit misleading, knowing that we were expecting Richter to develop an alliance with the dwarves (as had been discussed in the previous volume in this series)…beyond that, it’s an excellent addition to Richter’s adventure in The Land.
As with the previous book, this one begins with another hint of a deeper tale and huge things looming on the horizon before it picks up where we left off.
As with the other books, I’m listening to these as audiobooks. The writing and narration are such a perfect complement to one another and I find myself listening with greater frequency the further I get into the series.