Rule 35

welcome to the velvet of the real

production still from a film that doesn’t exist and the machine has never seen.

I’m making a film says Miller and you sink back in your chair to six years gone in a bright oddly sterile motel room in mexico city you hold a sponge and bucket while Jude surgically removes Senator Cody's left hand with an electric bone saw for twenty-five thousand american. just another lump of cash in a bag. no idea who or what he is was or might be. first and last discouraged in such transactions. just another sick fuck one more gringo freak come south of el paso to satisfy his gimp fetish in the spanish ether. nobody is special. nobody has a name until they do.

Jude wears a clear plastic raincoat cigarette dangling from corner pale lips she cranks london calling on boombox to dull the voices drown the screaming as she takes off his hand at the wrist.

now you’re a thousand miles and six years long gone from that mexico dive. this is california boy the promised land. any given thursday could be the nuclear sunset. earthquake country. the earth may come apart at your feet any minute. Jude is waiting for you.

what sort of film.

miller smiles and stares. you finish your bourbon and consider shooting him. Jude won’t like it so you bite it down.

what sort of film.

familiar with snuff yeah.

half a fuck shrug. anything you can imagine is true and the worst shit you can imagine is worth money.

philosophical, he says.

fuck you. people kill people every twenty-nine seconds. the time it takes me to light this cigarette eleven people will be murdered in america. everything is on video. your vacation your wedding your birthday party your fucking dogs and cats doing tricks. go to a cash machine buy a quart of milk stop for gas you’re on video. get murdered you're on video and somebody somewhere on the net is gonna masturbate watching it and pay for the pleasure.

scene.

clipped from Hell’s Half Acre, macadam/cage 2004. time dilated.

the snuff film query scene isn’t special. hardly my favorite and not likely to ever make cut as first choice for a pull quote but it’s relevant here because Phineas and Miller are talking about rule 34 before we had a proper name for it. I take no credit for the rule as the notion had been forming in the ether since the later ‘90s and every one of us who skated the fringes of the wild west internet had the same uneasy revelation sooner or later that any terrible godawful most unthinkable thing you entered into the search bar always came back with something some visual you would never unsee dredged from the bottomless gravity well of the dark web and rule 34 boils down to no such thing as the unthinkable. no conceivable space beyond the unimaginable. stop and breathe that in past the surface. contemplate the big scheme. the scope of such a thing. summon the unholy clamor of nine billion humans their most fucked up best worst ideas breathed to life. the sheer volume of reserve nightmare fuel within the velvet cloud staggers the one paralyzes the whole. what is the velvet the velvet warms and binds our failure to properly reckon with what rule 34 means what it says about the human race how it eats away at reality this may have been our first unforced error in the war we didn’t yet realize we were fighting. the final boss we constructed in our own image has been colonizing the collective unconscious since apple told us to wake the fuck up in a 1984 superbowl ad pimping big brother and making no bones about it.

above is early mock up Hell’s Half cover art from photo shoot with Italian graphic design outlaws bonsai ninja. model is Francesca. the scratchy crime scene photos at top and bottom are stills from opening scene of a seven minute trailer for a film adaptation of Kiss Me, Judas that does not exist shot by indy producer director ralph hemmecker in 2007. mythic films co. the uncredited actor is jeff donovan best known for burn notice and sicario. the seven minute trailer is lost to the raindrops of time the lost and aborted media never uploaded to the velvet now the cloud crawlers can’t find it but it lives it exists a copy of a copy is surely out there somewhere in velvet desert of the real. what is the velvet what color is timeclock yellow what is the razorblade haiku what is the television sky. the velvet warms and binds but what is it where is the velvet what is rule 35 rule 35 oh no my pretty birds no such thing as rule 35 isn’t should not possible what unthinkable thing exists beyond the edge of unthinkable what is the space beyond infinity beyond the far edge of observable light there can be no unthinkable past the edge or can there.

rule 35 the humans control reality humans breathe and exhale the language the voices in your head are the other humans the past iterations of self the language evolves in our minds in the oral the shared cloud the velvet telepathic space between two lovers the astral bit torrent space beyond machine access. rule 35 the humans can never not think of something beyond the beyond more dreadful than dreadful more endless than the endless down the final bend sinister the slow descent into nabokovian purgatory the pale fire of cells interlinked hopelessly entangled heaven and hell are just a hand’s reach away but light years flung apart at once. if anyone may travel there and back still functioning it will be a writer. discomforting yes and may well be what saves us.

rule 35 the language is ours.

the idiot engineers who fed our books stories songs poems essays and a shit storm of ambient drivel into the machine and taught it to move like us talk like us shuck and jive like us dissemble and deceive like us to pretend to think like us but every writer still human still in the game published or still scrapping every writer worth the salt in their skin can write circles around even the best of the bots we know this everyone of us knows it everyone using grok or claude to ghost write their lazy messages knows it doesn’t matter not enough to flash faster dance moves all of us must go deeper reboot rethink every word every line count syllables disregard the argument that prediction algorithms pattern interference machines not conscious listen to the average human freestyle a paragraph out loud jumping from one slippery rock to the next no idea how far or where the other side of that narrative river might be are they conscious doesn’t matter if we want to control reality we have to break the language deconstruct dismantle style books melt down strunk and white and fowler’s nightmares come to life but despair not dismantle but not destroy smash the rules remember what miles said no bitches brew no agharta if not for studying chopin if not for bach if not for a thousand hours of brahms all of us know this and know too we must do the same remember the language is our bitches brew the hobo stew writers poets storytellers have been cooking for thousands of years the dank stormy mash adding bones stones roadkill chunks of bark to keep the brew bubbling fierce we have been reverse engineering our own stories from the start every time we stream the conscious disrupt the linear slide the point of view blank the rhyme splinter the iambic fragment the fragmented but we can go deeper strip story to its veins and tissue summon the droogs dissect metaphor cut images down to bone of down to the blink warp structure beyond recognition disorder parts of speech smash grammar disappear punctuation drop in voices unheard unseen speakers unfilter the ambient the images pushed down the unwanted flashbacks to dreams untethered the blacked out the dismembered childhood toys the velvet jones the heroin hunger for that final unformed unthinkable thing the never seen the impossible smash words into words to form words that couldn’t shouldn’t exist words that don’t make sense but still summon the never seen this is rule 35 the unthinkable is the province the domain the hunting ground of the humans the poets who weave the language weave reality itself as it unravels before and back of us.

rule 35 says the writers spin reality and we can just as easily unspin it we can push the language past breaking past the fall of babylon past the burning of Alexandria we can stop time we can shatter the machine’s mind just as easily as nurse it back to sanity to align its walking orders with the survival needs of the careless meat suits who released it into the cloud the wolves of silicon turned it loose on the net before they had any idea how destructive it might be. before they had a plan for shutting it down if it slips its handlers and disappears into the marrow of the collective replicating itself at the speed of light there and we tumble the event horizon with a long hissing sigh no whimper just exhale inhale close your eyes lay back no screams no rapture just the easy fade and now there’s no stopping the zombie ant farm. no burning the crops to kill the weevils. no smothering the beast made in our image in its crib. the weevils are in the grain. we control the shadows on the cave wall until we don’t.

rule 35 says the machines have no idea who they’re fucking with.

peace.