A friend recently showed me a post by an underage camwhore about boozing up gummies and making them the stuff of nightmares. And if you’ve been following my blog long enough you know that I don’t bother making a point unless I mean to take it so far past its logical extreme that it leaves you awake at night, hugging your knees and shaking back and forth, wishing you were this amusing.

And unlike most of my drink posts, this isn’t waiting until the next Friday because you need time to prepare these if you’er going to be dealing with family this “festive*” season.

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It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the incidence of infidelity is rising in Australia. Be it part of mainstream culture becoming more sex obsessed (I don’t believe this is the case) or people are just getting horny from something in the water isn’t really the issue. The point is that monogamous relationships and marriages clearly aren’t working as a long term construct.

Predominantly there is the psychological component at play here. The fact is that everyone is a unique individual snowflake so we can basically break them down into a limited number of psychological typings, just like an emo. When it comes to experiencing love, John Lee¹ came up with six basic forms of love back in the 70s when that was all that was on anyone’s mind. It’s important to actually realise that there are different ways of loving someone romantically. We’re not talking about loving in a filial, platonic or bromantic way. Actual romance where it’s not creepy to have sex with. These different styles of love are after different things and are often grossly incompatible – he’s not the right guy, she’s just not that into, it’s not you it’s me. This is all directly from incompatibilities people experience between different styles of love.

Another part of this definitely comes down to biology. Till death do us part isn’t so hard when you’re meant to go off in battle and possibly die in your late teens/early 20s, and your life expectancy is barely 40. With the life spans of our generation having doubled over what they were a century ago, we have alot more time to grow bored with things, and we are nothing if not creatures of acclimatization. After all, it took less than a month for AshleyMadison, a website for people who are specifically looking to have a secret affair, to achieve 300,000 signups when it launched in Australia, well over a third of these were women².

So what’s my point?

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It’s been a while since I did an article series, so I thought I’d get back into it with something that’s been on my mind for a while now. One of the things about being somewhat, shall we call use a common term, voyeuristic is that I sit and I watch people. I do it all the time. It’s not a sexual thing, although it is enjoyable, exciting, and sometimes downright amusing, to watch other people engaged in sexual activities, it’s not always a sexual thing. I watch people at all times, observe, note, put it all down in a little book that I creepily file away when it’s complete and then judge you all in my mind… Ok, maybe not those last two parts. I’m rarely judgmental unless you happen to be a raving jizz-magician, and I certainly don’t keep track of everything in a little book, black or otherwise.

But I watch.

Ever since I watched the goth scene in Melbourne effectively start to implode due to internal politiking and little microfactions of people, I’ve been looking for somewhere else to hang out that still plays EBM, Industrial, etc. It’s why even when it was seemingly going strongly with 3-4 clubs per weekend I started to pull back from things. I found that new place inside the fetish clubbing community (although like all voyeuristic types, I still hang back and rarely directly engage… I should be a war journalist!), which in some ways has a large cross over within the goth community (fashion, music, dress aesthetic, insistence on drinking either absinthe or the cheapest shamppaggin), but more surprisingly has so few people in the actual cross over, socially. This is in direct contrast to something like the metal and the punk scenes where goths freely flow in and between them.

Observations about degrees of separation aside, one of the areas where the most basic cross overs seem to be are sexual mores. Areas such as:

• Bondage, Discipline, and who wears the pants;
• Sadomaschism, pain & angst;
• Sexual preferences vs sexual fetishes;
• Polyarmoury & Mahogany;
• Drawing the line and the people that Just Don’t Get It.

There are other subjects I’ll probably end up covering as the time goes by, but I’m just finding at an anecdotal level at the very least the interplay between people and their self ascribed, or 3rd party projected, sexuality, kinks and fetishes to be both an entirely engrossing thing as well as a breeding ground for the kind of drama that caused the initial fracture on the goth scene. The irony is that one supposes that so much of that drama doesn’t exist on the fetish scene, and in some ways it doesn’t… It’s simply replaced with an entirely different kind of drama. The flowchart of who’s slept with whom is on par, yet it doesn’t seem to be a cause of angst, unless you actually look at the ‘type’ of sleeping with.

And once again, it all come straight back down to communication.

No one ever seems to do it well.

So this series of articles is going to be an attempt at communicating what so few people manage to do on their own.

Ahh those wacky Germans and their wacky cannibals. They haven’t got anything on the latest in beauty treatments. Vampire Facelifts!

The latest fad in the extreme cosmetic beauty segment appears to not require that much slicing and dicing, but it does need a stronger stomach than most of the procedures thus far… It’s pretty safe to assume that regular readers (such as they are as this is the first new post in months) are probably young enough to not have ever had to bother with cosmetic surgery. So just to fill people in, generally speaking, a chemical (as opposed to surgical) facelift is usually done by pumping your face full of a “filler” compound that is basically a specifically rendered and patented set of fats, proteins and some amino-acids. These are usually derived from livestock offal and lards (mostly pig as they’re genetically similar to us) although there are a few operators out there that have used liposucked fat in the past.

And this is where the vampire facelift differs.

Hold up a second.  I should probably point out that “Vampire Facelift” is actually a specifically trademarked name for a platelet rich plasma matrix infusion, a technique that was originally developed to help burn victims recover their own skin. Rather than using a cow or even your own fat arse to plump up your face, it basically takes the platelets from your own blood to hijack your system into creating more regenerative cytokines (they’re basically the proteins that tell cells and microfauna in your body what to do)… It’s all rather scientific, but not in a way that common people shouldn’t be able to understand. If you paid attention in highscool biology, most of this should be known to you. It’s really basic life science.

Here is a doctor explaining why science is actually magic. Possibly a magic potion even!

 

Perhaps the most insulting thing about this entire fad, epitomised by this video “explanation”, is how pseudoscience is being used to sell people’s own fat arses right back to them. It’s exactly what Tyler Durden was going on about with his Paper Street Soap. There are three reasons why shit like this pisses me off.

1. This is an expensive process. A process that only people in upper classes can actually afford to get done on the kind of regular basis required for “rejuvenating” cosmetic surgery. Developing this process was expensive and time consuming. And the manufacture lab time required is being soaked up by people that don’t actually have anything wrong with them, while other people have to wait for skin to be grafted to their legs.
2. I truly wish to believe in a meritocracy, even though I know it’s bullshit.people with money can afford a decent education, so there’s no excuse for falling for this kind of pseudoscientific bullshit… Then again, a lot of highly intelligent people believe n the most ludicrous crap because they’ve used their own intellect to build rock solid arguments for whatever it is they’re wrong about. Intelligent people have a hard time admitting they’re wrong, after all.
3. Precisely what is vampiric about this process? Cannibalistic would be much more apt, but I get the feeling that the guys in marketing just went with the fact that vampires are as hot as Hansel right now. Either way, this kind of gives rise to the whole vampire poser image whole heartedly, which is possibly worse than my previous beefs.

At the end of the day, things like this shouldn’t bother me. But when you (over)hear people talking about it and how amazing they look and how expensive it was as they walk past beggars it kind of gets your goat. Especially when they wonder out loud precisely why people in London are rioting right now.

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