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grunionguy.bsky.social
Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea
@grunionguy.bsky.social
130 followers 130 following 2.1K posts
"He's a master at being clever and counteracting the clever." -- Steve Ditko (about me, probably)

https://tessatechaitea.blogspot.com/
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grunionguy.bsky.social
The Wicker Man burning with the words "Live. Laugh. Love."
November 6, 2025 at 7:40 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
did i do this meme right?
Hands clasping meme. Left hand: Jason. Right Hand: Freddy. Clasp: Murdering Teenagers.
November 5, 2025 at 4:34 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
"You’ve inherited a movie theater, what’s your first double feature?”
Heathers movie poster. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure movie poster.
November 5, 2025 at 4:29 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
I saw people criticizing the military hunting for Pennywise in the new Welcome to Derry series and, well, what did you expect from a town whose junior high school principal was The Cigarette Smoking Man?
Richie Tozier (Seth Green) gasps in horror as he realizes his school principal (or a teacher? Who knows! I chose the big guy!) is The Cigarette Smoking Man. Still from Stephen King's It, the 1990 made for television series.
November 5, 2025 at 1:11 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
@kenhughe.bsky.social
Blonde Wonder Woman getting drunk with the awesome and super cool Captain Cold. Dream stands nearby wishing he was cool. Also cool: some guy dressed as me. So cool!
November 2, 2025 at 1:42 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
From my Against the Day, One Line at a Time Blog (atd1line.blogspot.com) :
What I mean to say is think about how ignorant of history you actually have to be to believe the kinds of things Charlie Kirk or Dinesh D'Souza or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham say. I'm sad I even know those names. Just vile, terrible people with less remorse than Vonnegut's Howard J. Campbell from Mother Night (and I'm not quite sure how much remorse he really had! He was pretty apathetic about most of his life when you get right down to it. Which might have been a large part of Vonnegut's point. "Look how much evil you can do when you just shrug your shoulders and don't give a shit.").
October 24, 2025 at 4:15 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
From my Against the Day: One Line at a Time Blog (atd1line.blogspot.com) :
But by 2016, something wonderful had transpired (wonderful if you're a piece of shit, that is). The biggest piece of shit ever decided to run for president. All of the other pieces of shit who were doing their piece of shit business in dark hotel rooms full of tobacco smoke and empty of potted plants stood up in the daylight and said, "No, no! We are not affiliated with this huge piece of shit. He is what is wrong with business and politics and civility and everything! He does not represent us!" But then the little pieces of shit discovered that the teeny tiny pieces of shit (the ones with no real money and no real power) seemed to love the huge piece of shit and how he acted terribly right out in the open. It was then that the little pieces of shit had the scales fall from their eyes and a chorus of heavenly angels sang down in a thunderous voice, "You can finally and truly be yourselves! The huge piece of shit has made a leap of faith and it has paid off!" Then all of the little pieces of shit began worshiping and loving the huge piece of shit because he had freed them of their self-imposed manacles. He had taught them that they did not need to hide their unethical behavior behind dog whistles and half-truths. The teeny, tiny pieces of shit would believe whatever the larger and more powerful pieces of shit told them to believe.
October 24, 2025 at 3:19 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Published in 1973.
"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantitities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide..." — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
October 23, 2025 at 8:10 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
And that's sort of what sent me on this tangent: the introduction of the Ku Klux Klan in this line by describing them as "dreadful." They're bad guys and Pynchon doesn't need to waste any space showing the reader why they're bad. We just know it. Here are some people described as chasing a boy through the night in sinister hoods and when it's revealed that it's the dreaded Ku Klux Klan, the reader just thinks, "Yeah. Of course it is. Jerks." That line is a lot like the movie Get Out. It's revealing in how the audience reacts to it. The story isn't telling you what to think or feel; the way you wind up thinking and feeling tells you how true the story is. Who reads this line and thinks "Hey wait a second now! The Ku Klux Klan had some good programs and ideas!"? A terrible person, that's who. And who can watch the final scene of Get Out and not feel the tension and despair and fear when the cop car pulls up, a scene that has been played over and over in white horror movies as a way to release tension and to say, "Everything is safe now. The horror is all over"? A person who is defending terrible ideologies and denying reality is who.
October 19, 2025 at 10:49 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
The only protagonist an American conservative can identify with is Ebenezer Scrooge and he's tormented until he gives up his American conservative values! The greatest and most uplifting look at Earth's future is Star Trek: The Next Generation and it's a socialist utopia where they don't even have money! I don't know what they're always gambling for when playing poker but I assume every chip can be redeemed for oral sex. How do they see inclusivity and universal health care and the elimination of poverty and helping anybody who needs help as terrible acts that will destroy our country? Oh, I think that question answers itself. Those things will destroy what they think of as their country. They might support the same thing American progressives support but they only support those things for certain people. Some people are deserving of life; some people are not.
October 19, 2025 at 10:49 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
For those who still wanted to be entertained, you would have to come up with a different tactic than simply immersing yourself in right wing propaganda and that would be attacking media entertainment outlets for getting too political in their stories. You would then argue that stories used to be non-political and simply entertaining after which you would not point to any past examples because those don't exist. All stories are political when the politics you've chosen are selfish, cruel, and without any sacrifice for the greater good. All stories appear political when you constantly see yourself as the villain. Instead of engaging in self-reflection and thinking, "Am I the baddie?" [Thank you, Mitchell and Webb], they simply condemn the thing that made them feel bad. And then they paint that as some new form of political correctness gone mad instead of realizing that the little guy fighting back against injustice has always been the core of most stories. They just didn't see it that way until they embraced the injustice. All of a sudden, every story was an attack on them.
October 19, 2025 at 10:49 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
I have often wondered how American conservatives can enjoy any kind of storytelling entertainment (books, movie, comics, television, music . . . you know, all of it, really) when the protagonists of those stories are often fighting against everything the American conservative believes in. At least, I had often wondered this until recently when I realized right wing talk radio and right wing television news programs became a thing to fill the entertainment vacuum for American conservatives. No wonder they watch and listen to the propaganda spewing assholes all day long because other forms of entertainment constantly remind them that they are the villain to be fought against. Of course you'd want to watch something that told you that your values were those of the hero and that the other people were terrible socialist monsters who wanted to destroy you and your family and, most especially of all, your precious guns.
October 19, 2025 at 10:49 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
An excerpt from my Against the Day by Pynchon blog where I discuss the novel line by line. It's taking forever because I keep forgetting to do it but then I start doing it again until I forget. Am I doing it again? Yes!

atd1line.blogspot.com
The term "national heartland" seems like one of those terms that people never really thought much about and used it in such a cavalier way that it grew into a monstrous mutant that now threatens all of our political discussions. The problem is that the definition of heartland is both "the central part of the US" and "the central or most important part of a country." That seems like a mistake, right? It's like if the definition of "genius" was "a super smart person with tons of smarts" and another definition of "genius" was "Grunion Guy." It wouldn't mean I, Grunion Guy, were automatically both definitions just because the second definition defined me. But over time, how could you not simply equate Grunion Guy with a super smart person with tons of smarts? It couldn't be helped! Well, that's what's happened here! A bunch of media jerkos think "the central part of the US" is equivalent to "the most important part of a country" and now we get a never-ending cycle of articles about how important they are to the United States! No wonder some smart mouth came up with the term "flyover states" to replace "the heartland." That guy was a genius! No, it wasn't me! I meant the first definition of genius!
October 18, 2025 at 7:17 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Has Stephen King ever seen a vagina? Or, since we know he has, Tabitha King got some wild shit going on down there.
"But sex will almost certainly continue to be a driving force in the horror genre; sex that is sometimes presented in disguised, Freudian terms, such as Lovecraft's vaginal creation, Great Cthulhu. After viewing this many-tentacled, slimy, gelid creature through Lovecraft's eyes, do we need to wonder why Lovecraft manifested 'little interest' in sex?" -- Stephen King, Danse Macabre
October 12, 2025 at 6:47 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
It's a picture of me at 22. I can't describe it because I'll sound like an arrogant jerk and might even begin writing fan fiction about me making out with me. Anyway, I'm in a Lobo shirt. I'm on LSD. I have wild beach hair. My cousin taking the picture had the date stamp still on the camera so you can tell this is from May 6, 1993.
October 8, 2025 at 8:34 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
You can tell too many people from my generation didn't do their reading homework.
"Okay okay. I’m being one-sided here. But it’s fun to trash Tobias. It’s easy. He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short-term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom-feeding jobs–marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. […] Oh, I don’t hate Tobias. And as I hear his car pull into a stall outside, I realize that I see in him something that I might have become, something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance. Something bland and smug that trades on its mask, filled with such rage and such contempt for humanity, such need, that the only food left for such a creature is their own flesh. He is like a passenger on a plane full of diseased people that crashes high in the mountains, and the survivors, not trusting each other’s organs, snack on their own forearms." — Douglas Coupland, Generation X
September 30, 2025 at 12:41 AM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Thanks! I've been celebrating for decades!
Me in like 1978 or something dressed in my mom's homemade Batman costume so be nice about it because my mom made it, you jerk!
September 20, 2025 at 3:32 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Evergreen:
Josie Long post: "Lads, I broke my rule of no political chats with twats and I bitterly regret it.
September 17, 2025 at 11:46 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Same Catwoman: Defiant advert as previous post but I Photoshopped her tail so it looks like an actual poo dropping from her backside.
September 17, 2025 at 9:17 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Thank you DC advertisement from 1992 for exposing me to a kink I didn't know I was into.
DC Comics advertisement for Catwoman: Defiant. Silhouette of Catwoman holding her ass up off the ground with her hands and feet while her tail hangs down making it look like she's taking a ropy shit.
September 17, 2025 at 6:27 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Nice Alice!
September 16, 2025 at 1:58 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
Back in the day, I used to know how to make .gifs! This is from, like, 1999 or 2000. Maybe earlier! When did Spice World come out?!
September 16, 2025 at 1:54 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
For some reason, this Pynchon quote has been rattling around my head this week.
"'We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests. . . . 'It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant—faith in Death as the master of us all—is to ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot speak for others. . . . But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those whom we die, our own immortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished—returned to where it all came from. 'To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return." -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
September 13, 2025 at 12:40 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
A picture of Trump in a blue suit with red tie and Vance replicating the outfit exactly, standing together like two identical buildings at the 9/11 memorial. I tweeted (in 2024), "Someone should fly a remote control plane into these guys."
September 11, 2025 at 3:56 PM
grunionguy.bsky.social
This might be my favorite grouping.
Katana, Klarion, Cheeks the Toy Wonder, Jonni DC, Amazing Man, ARG!yle (sp?).
August 29, 2025 at 1:26 AM