your boss has probably stalked you…

Here is a worrying fact, if you haven’t heard it already… Potential employers and recruiters will do background checks on you when considering hiring you. Sure most people expect there is some rooting around to check if you’ve ever committed a serious crime or not, but these days this background check includes your social media accounts.

These nosey potential employers go snooping through your facebook account and troll your tweets, foursquare and whatever people do on there, boring ass pinterest boards, your god damn tumblr with all your favourite boob photos, every little corner of the internet that you call your own. They then use what they find to discern what kind of person you are. They’ll even go through your contact list to see who you’re “friends” with… Some companies hire people based on their industry contacts. What high school level thinking bullshit is this? As if, who you know instead of what you know, is more important to the success of their business. Turth is, who you may know might be the only value you add to their company… Because you’re shit at your job.

Now if you’re anything like me, facebook and twitter are essentially where I put any and all disgusting thought, comment, action and image of myself. Mostly for my amusement and a little bit for the amusement of my friends and the few strangers that happen across it (And of course the few of my stalkers!).

My online “personality” is not meant to be a reflection of me as I am in the work environment. I would be arrested in most cases if I behaved as I do online. There isn’t much difference when I’m with my friends, of course, but they expect this kind of behaviour when I’m with them. Work on the other hand, I push “Pissing Blood” deep, deep down. I repress any impulse I have to start telling my superiors how much I want to fuck them, film it and then post online… I leave out sections of my weekend that include the part where I was naked, under an inappropriately aged teenage girl with sand up both our ass cracks. I sure as hell, keep my friends’ behaviour a dirty little secret. My boss doesn’t want to hear, how Fuego put his cock in my mo-hawk when I passed out that one time… Jesus.

So what exactly will my potential employers learn from being sneaky little rat-faced cunts, rifling through my online accounts? Nothing of use I assure you. Except maybe that I’ve written a lot of offensive stuff, and that sometimes I have disgusting urges to poor my heart out. I also used to party a lot. I have a few ex’s roaming around that don’t particularly like me. Is any of this that uncommon or relevant? The fact that I helped an agency win an account last month isn’t actually mentioned or that I dedicate more time than I should, trying to teach college kids – even though they don’t take me or the subjects seriously. No… none of what I say, do or post is actually an indicator of the kind of employee I am. So get your fucking nose out of my social media! Look at my website and LinkedIn account, and be satisfied that I’m giving you all the info that you need, motherfucker.

If you’re one of those people who might worry about what people looking at photos of you think – in your slut-gear on holiday drinking out of a stripper’s boot – then you should fiddle with your privacy settings and get one of those social accounts meant purely for your professional “image”… Which frankly is a bit shit and everyone knows is a complete web of lies. Truth is, social media is edited, de-contextualized snippets of your life. You present what you want, how you want. People looking in are never going to get the full picture. Our lives are far from as glamorous as we make out, and the shit parts are far worse than we would openly admit too. Employers should know that. Then they are the kind of idiots that think looking at facebook, they’ll find something even remotely true beyond what someone had for breakfast and if their pet cat died… No one said you have to be particularly smart to be in charge though, just good at sucking dick to get up the ladder. Fuck it though. What do I know… I’m no one’s boss. So if you’re unemployed and can’t seem to land a job no matter how many under-the-table hand jobs you dish out, maybe you need to check what exactly it is you’re putting out there.

people I know… #1

I know a lot of talented people… It’s almost frightening how talented some of them are. The really cool thing about genuinely talented people is that they aren’t arrogant about what they do. In fact I find most of them are supremely humble. I suspect it’s partly because they work really hard at being as good at what they do as they are. Maybe it’s just a flaw in people with artistic or creative abilities to see their work with a critical eye and never really be satisfied with what they produce… So while strangers may fan-boy or fan-girl over them and their work and put them on pedestals, their friends and people who get to know them a little more as people, just think of them as, “Oh yeah that’s so-and-so. Yeah they’re fucking good at what they do, they’re also just so-and-so…”   I sometimes wonder,  if all the creative talent that I know personally got together, the world would probably fall under their collective power and I could become supreme overlord. I would fuck shit up…

Anyway… One of my favourite humans happens to be a killer photographer, among other brilliant qualities, and never likely to show off her skills with a camera in any sort of overt way… So I’ll do it for her. Like bragging on her behalf. She sent me these pretty much as I was headed down the mental toilet. They gripped me then and I still look at them on almost a weekly basis – I still love them that much. You can agree or not, I don’t know much about photography other than some images are way better than others, and for some reason these blow me away every time.

An honoured and noble profession…

New development in my new life… I am now a shaper of young minds… Except young minds are a bit like runny porridge it turns out, so really all I’m doing is getting my hands dirty in a thankless pursuit of guiding younger people through the steps they need to take before they join the real world… Needless to say, I am not Robin Williams as John Keating, and this is not my personal version of Dead Poets Society.

I don’t know if this is true of all teachers, tutors, lecturers and instructors but I take the role of lecturer rather seriously. Or more accurately, I take it personally. I think of my students as partly reflections on or of me. If they aren’t confident and knowledgeable in the subjects that I teach them, it would mean that I failed. Failure is not something I do well or with any kind of dignity… This quirk has carried through to lecturing as well.

The day I explode at students who I feel aren’t trying or putting the work in is soon at hand. These are college kids. Most of who only do the bare minimum to pass and spend most of their time partying their tits off. Not doing something as sane and responsible as actual college work. This is the natural behaviour of a college student, I suppose. College years are meant for wild parties, wild self-exploration and wilder exploration of others. For me though it’s as much as becoming the future professional you see yourself as, which means milking the chance to study, learn and practise your trade or craft, as much as possible…

Also I put a lot of personal time, energy and thought into my lectures. I read through the prescribed textbook (which turns out to be put together by obnoxious, contrived wankers), make notes, break down the ideas and information so it’s easier to understand and then put together, what I hope, is an entertaining presentation. I want the class to understand the concepts and get excited about the possibilities of what they could do with this new knowledge… Alas… I think I am the only excited person in the lecture room…

I’m usually faced with blank stares for an hour and a half. 11 gormless people sitting through my choreographed song and dance at the front of the room. They aren’t taking notes, most of them aren’t really listening to what I’m saying, they’re not reading or looking at what’s in my presentation. I sometimes wonder if some of them are even still awake. I’m sure there are a few that have mastered sleeping with their eyes open. They stay motionless and expressionless until people around them start moving to leave. Then they move like someone has set their asses on fire. As soon as I say, “…and now we’re done for the day.” The room erupts into activity as they all rush for the door, with the hiss of quietly whispered, “Yesssss…” in celebration.

I do fucking apologize that I’m not some fucking E! Channel – reality show, fringe-celebrity for getting fucked on handy cam in night-vision mode – calibre entertainment. Surely though, you could try not blatantly celebrating – because you’re not hiding it at all – the fact that I have stopped trying my hardest to share what I know with you… Honestly, I feel bad for every teacher and lecturer that I ever disrespected by not doing my best in their class… It is probably one of the most disheartening things when your students seemingly couldn’t give the tiniest of fucks.

There are a few students though who are taxing in another way altogether. For whatever reason, I suspect it is because of my age (I am only 28 this year), some students think they can challenge and pull apart my explanations… These students are worse than the deadpan corpses occupying seats in the class! They’re engaging me, and the subject (kind of), but it’s not genuine. They’re doing it to test my patience or my knowledge about what I’m teaching, all in some attempt to embarrass me in front of their peers. They are, of course, never successful because they don’t know what they’re talking about and it starts to sound like they have a serious learning disability by purposefully trying to twist my explanations around and try trap me in them. I get inches away from screaming, “Stop acting like a fucking retard!!!” almost every lecture.

The irony of it all is that throughout high school and, only at times, while I was studying – I was the perfect example of a crap student. So the steep learning curve I’ve gone through this week is that, lecturing is rewarding in a lot of small ways, but ultimately a thankless job where you’rere probably mocked and berated mercilessly behind your back despite all your good intentions and hard work… As a new lecturer, I have a new-found respect for the profession and those that make it their lives to educate, contribute to the future success of others and overall improve society in their own small way. It truly is a noble and fine thing that they do. If I don’t say so myself…

Valentines Day: venereal diseases and varying depression

Awe, Valentines Day… Are you one of those unlucky people in a relationship and have ended up forking out more money than you ever wanted to on flowers, chocolates, jewellery and condoms, because of some pagan festival? This particular pagan festival started with priestly types sacrificing goats and dogs and then running through the streets slapping fair maidens and wheat with the blood soaked strips of hide. Makes you wonder why they put those cute photos of puppies on “Be My Valentine” cards. Anyway, like modern Valentine’s Day, the pagans also ended the day with all the blood smeared single ladies gathering together with the single guys and pairing off for the next year by sheer pot-luck… Which is almost identical to the sad display I’ve seen play out at Valentine’s Day parties when the booze and desperation overpower any sense of pride or better judgement, the single, lonely and whorishly dressed resort to hooking up with whatever dregs are still on the dance floor.

It’s all true, pretty far from the commercialized day of romantic love exploited by card companies, chocolate manufacturers, florists (I just have to interject here that arranging and selling flowers could be rated as one of the most useless and, unskilled professions I can think of. Get a real fucking job!), restaurants and those guys on the side of the road selling various cheap and nasty last-minute gifts.

I don’t pity you at all you, couples, you needy two person hybrid motherfuckers. You’re smug as fuck on the day, safe in knowledge that there is someone other than your mother who loves you. You’ll likely end the day in some kind of carnal act. Even if it’s just a lazy, short obligatory bashing of bits. Everyone can smell the superiority you feel to every unattached person everywhere. Fuck you!

If you’re not one of the aforementioned, you might be one of those people who swear they hate V-Day, because of its commercialisation of “love” or whatever anti-consumerist sentiment you doggedly preach. Or you sit on the fence and claim to be unaffected by everybody else around you feeling so loved or loathsomely unloved. Really, we all know you’re poisoning your guts with jealousy and secretly so miserable that you don’t have anyone to call your valentine, that you’re close to hiding in the work toilet cubicle, in tears, cutting yourself. You are a loser and no one loves you. No one in this world finds you fuckable enough to even bother sending you an expensive piece of mass-produced cardboard with some rendition of a bare-assed, mutant baby with wings, sporting a deadly bow and arrow, printed on it. You’re in denial. And it is pathetic to watch you squirm in your insecurities while feigning nonchalance or contempt.

So what do you do on Valentine’s Day when you’re single?

Exchange gifts with your valentine – you’ll give them a portrait of them painted in your own blood and excrement and you’ll gift yourself with their underwear you stole… Have a romantic dinner for one and be mocked and pitied by waiting staff and other diners… Masturbate in the soft glow of all your scented candles, on your bed littered with dry scratchy rose petals to sounds of Barry White and cry yourself to sleep like the deranged freak you’ve turned into during the last week leading up to Valentine’s Day. You could attend the “anti-Valentine’s Day” parties, which number in the plenty but are so overplayed and filled with the likes of you who are purely there, in the hopes that you drunkenly hook up and validate yourself just a bit for one second before you realise how pathetic you both are, having loveless, drunk sex in the backseat of a car or down an alley.

My suggestion is… Well I don’t have one. I just don’t see a point in pretending to not care when secretly we all do, and wish we didn’t. We all want to feel a tad bit special sometimes and on the day when our attachment or lack thereof, is thrown under the spotlight more than usual, a good portion of the population will be close to suicide or remedying their depression by eating, drinking, fucking, or hiding under their blankets till it all goes away. However you choose to mask the pain and hide your shame, at least try do it so on February 15, you still have a shred of dignity and no long-term repercussions. That means no drunk texting your ex and no meaningless one night stand in a pub toilet without at least donning a condom.

On an unrelated note.

One of the reason I haven’t kept up with posting on here as much as I should is that I’m busy writing for other people… They don’t pay me or anything but I get free shit occasionally as opposed to getting nothing out of this except the odd compliment from half drunk strangers in bars and clubs. In addition to writing for other people, I’ve expanded my corner of the internet in a bid to start getting paid more for this thing I do with words. I now have a personal website/on-line portfolio!
If you’re inclined to the type of trash I talk on here, you’ll love it that much more when I’m actually trying…. Go see, www.russelsmithwriter.com

Realism for the Day #4

Hours in the day, days of the week, months in the year and years themselves are a wholly human construct that happens to coincide with the Earth’s rotation around the sun – and should be treated like any other man-made idea… That is with extreme caution, or preferably ignored completely. Other than being useful in arranging when you will meet up with mates at the local drinking hole or how many hours of daylight you have to hide away from still, it really is just a source of stress and aggravation that no one was meant to put up with. Blame modern life or the bastards that thought it would be a good idea to name days and call one of them Monday, but getting your titties in any kind of knot over where the rock we’re riding around the sun is, is only going to get you stretched tits.

Realism for the Day #3

Anything can be forgiven with cake. Even if you don’t like cake, cake can and will make it better. If you cannot forgive someone after they have made and presented you cake, you are probably a sour, cynical, angry, dry husk of a crooked human being with a small black lump of shit for a heart and it is by sheer hatred for everything in this world that you live on…

even I want to have a fucking tea party with a unicorn looking at this cake!

Related articles

• Realism for the Day #1 (pissingblood47days.wordpress.com)

Realism for the Day #2

On the cusp of the weekend you will be looking forward to at least 48 hours of overindulgence. Overindulgence in all the things that these fucking people will tell you is bad for you. They’ll do whatever they can to try make you feel horribly guilty by Sunday Night or Monday Morning – whenever it is you resurface from the orgy of stimulants, sex and food. Fuck them! Fuck that! Life is short, painful and generally quite pointless. You are not a special butterfly, so you will not be missed when you die. You are not a Dodo, we will not remember you 300 years after you’ve died out. You might as well make it as bearable as possible and squeeze some joy out of life. People will probably like you more while you’re drunk, cancer ridden and fat anyway.

Realism for the Day #1

Faith in a god is pointless. Faith in people is a shortcut to disappointment. Faith in ideals is like faith in people except you only have yourself to blame. So give up that last glimmer of hope and just take the beating life has in store for you. You’re welcome to try your damnedest to not shit yourself when you die but don’t be surprised if you do, because no one gets out with any dignity anyway. Faith in shitting yourself when you die seems to make a lot of sense.

pissingblood’s grindhouse classic review: Flash Gordon (1980)

Although not at all a Grindhouse flick, or even widely considered a B-Grade film surprisingly – it does fit rather nicely in to my trash sci-fi collection. I do have to admit though that – despite the wooden performances by the cast, the low-budget special effects, and the not-so-subtle fetish and bondage gear – the only reason this isn’t thought of as a B-grade exploitation film is because Queen were responsible for the pretty amazing title song and music throughout. I guess that’s enough really… And before you ask, yes, the re-watching of this film and subsequent review was brought about by Ted. Now on with the review!

Flash Gordon is a harrowing tale that highlights the plight of the Lizard-Men of Mongo. (Not where you thought this was going was it?)

The Lizard-Men are easily the most oppressed people in the galaxy, maybe even the universe. The first example of the cruel and inhumane treatment of the downtrodden Lizard-Men comes soon after Flash Gordon , Dale and Professor Zarkov crash-land and are taken prisoner by Ming’s forces. The unwitting space adventurers are led to the Emperor’s Palace where a Lizard-Man, apparently being held captive is disintegrated before the earthlings very eyes for trying to escape. No trial, no just cause, just turned to atoms. This is only the first of many examples of the cruelty endured by the Lizard-Men of Mongo that we could find.

In Ming’s throne room all the different people of Mongo are in attendance, there to pay fealty to Emperor Ming. The obvious absence of any Lizard-Men party goes seemingly unnoticed and unchallenged by any of the other native Peoples. Not even by the Hawk-Men, the only other Mongoloid race who somewhere along the line got it on with an animal. After Flash makes a daring attempt to escape Ming’s soldiers using an American Football inspired style of fighting, is he then sentenced to death, Dale is to be added to Ming’s harem and become his sexual play thing, (Banging aliens is cool but he can’t treat Lizard-Men with any kind of decency? What the fuck, Ming?) and the Prof’s mind is to be wiped to become a slave or something.

In the dungeon, we see yet more Lizard-Men imprisoned behind bars, while Flash is being held in a rather compromising position barely clothed… This is where you start to get the feeling that the film is more sinister than just the persecution of Lizard-Men…

With the intervention of Ming’s own daughter, Princes Aura, Flash is saved. His execution is staged and along with Aura escapes to the Arboria the kingdom of the Tree Men ruled by Prince Barin who also happens to one Aura’s apparently many lovers. The trend of sexual deviancy runs in the Ming family, I guess. Although now alive, Barin out of jealousy sticks Flash in a cage suspended in the Arborian swamps. There in the watery cell, Flash shares the cage with a Hawk-Man and two Lizard-Men who are forced to hold themselves above the slime and mud or drown. How the Lizard-Men came to even be in Arboria is a mystery, yet there they are, once more prisoners. Flash is even party to the wholesale discrimination against the reptilians as he helps the Hawk-Man but leaves the Lizard-Men to their own devices. Even when escaping Flash offers no help to the Lizard-Men. You would think for a man who carries the title of Saviour of The Universe that it would include all its inhabitants…

When all the people of Mongo are eventually set free thanks to Flash forging an alliance between the Tree Men and The Hawk-Men leading a revolt against Ming’s tyranny – not a fucking green-skinned humanoid in sight, I tell you! It’s a disgrace! For shame! For shame on you, Flash Gordon! For shame on all the Mongoloids who are party to persecuting the innocent Lizard-Men.

Now I know some denialists will jump at the chance to point out that the Flash Gordon film is not a complete and accurate depiction of life on Mongo. Yes that is true, but there are other examples of cruelty towards the whole Lizard-Man race even as far back as the comic strips from the 50’s!

3 counts of cruelty to Lizard-Men (which I am told were very easy to find!)

If you’re that sort of despicable, heartless cretin that can abide the sort of wholesale abuse on show in Flash Gordon you’d probably enjoy yourself to the point of re-watching the unadulterated 80’s cheese fest over and over again. There isn’t a moment in the film you won’t find something to revel in. Since you’re in to the abuse, you’ll probably note more than most the fetish and bondage gear that has been worked in to the sets and costume design. You’ll probably enjoy it so much you won’t be able to help but call up all your  sick friends and get them to come round so you can watch the slaughter and debasement of an entire species and then have a glorious BDSM orgy!

what is up with those guards masks?

not even trying to be subtle here!

If in the final scenes of the film the shot of Flash’s rocket ship crashing through the conveniently shaped window of Ming’s pink palace doesn’t plant the seed for some kind of penetration action at all… Even the most decent morally incorruptible of viewers can’t fight that kind of subliminal messaging. Even just looking at the screen shots again has got me feeling a bit funny… Look at the image below and tell me what you see!?

a phallic metal object flying in to a round pink hole? not a stretch of the imagination here, people…