Hey, everyone in therealljidol, I'm wicked-sorry but my brain is just unable to bend itself back into a shape where Idol is a thing I can do at the moment.

I'm really sorry, but I have to punk out.

Best of luck, all.

Well, hey, let's start this off right:
Content Advisory for content related to mental/emotional health. Seems proper to advise around such issues.

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On my best days, I know I'm made of meat.

It's a hard realization and while I don't know if it's always been so, it's a thing that's been harder and harder to not know is happening.

The rest of the time, there's an absurdly strong assertion in me that I'm not human and never have been. This assertion tells me that somewhere there's a button and when I find it, the plastic housings holding my face clamped to my head will release and I'll be able to start... something. I'll be able to show my true face, which is not a face.

A friend of mine helpfully told me that that's a kind of low-level depersonalization, usually connected to anxiety. They pointed me to some lovely websites that do that frustrating thing where they let you know that your problem is a problem and also give you context for it, which is one of the most useful things on Earth for me as I start to do that adulthood thing where you reckon with just what the shit is going on in your head. Of course, the website also offered advice that sounded great, but is also the kind of thing that is pretty useless because my brain doesn't do that thing or the way my brain is finding itself set up makes it so that I don't have any real understanding how to do the thing.

It's funny because I always thought I was a superlatively chill person. Then I started actually digging into things and realized I've always been a bundle of nerves because, frankly, there's not a person on Earth I'm not afraid of.

And I only really notice it nowadays because I've started messing about with my brain chemistry. Not capriciously, mind. This isn't one of those "white cisdude sits on a bed smoking and talks about his heavy drug use because that's a shorthand for being interesting" things. As an attempt to have a better shot at getting through college--because college is a hell of a thing after a decade or so of not being at school and also dealing with how your brain is formed in a very sub-optimal way given the needs of the society in which you live, a society where you only sorta speak the language.

At this point in the first season I took part in, I didn't know most of this.

I didn't know a lot of things I learned in the meanwhile.

And, honestly, I don't think I wanted to.

Once you know a thing, you have to deal with it. Even if it's just to sort your head around that thing.

So I found out that I do, indeed, have ADHD. On top of that, my brain is wired along the lines of the portion of the Autism spectrum formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome. It's a weight off my shoulders in a lot of ways because I don't have to worry about what the shit is my problem, but it also means that in the light of the way treating some of my symptoms goes, I have to make a lot of changes and try to figure out how to steer this clunky machine I'm in all over again.

But as I get past the adjustment phase of anxiety attacks and forgetting to eat for the better part of every day, I also find that I can just sit down and write the way I've always wanted to: obsessively and straight through, provided I have something to say and can think of the shape of the thing. I know also that I have to stay away from the computer for the first few hours of my day lest it suck me in. I know that I have to find a way to pull out of that obsession and feed my cat or he will just wind me up and I have lost some ability to distract that wound-up-itude into some kind of calmness by giving myself a taste of the focus I've always wanted. I know that I have to live more mechanically, think more mechanically, become more mechanical if I'm going to thrive in the way I want to.

So I guess what I'm saying is that on my best days, I know I'm made of meat, a perfectly normal human worm-baby.

And yet somehow, it's nowhere near as comforting as the idea that one day I'll find that button, slough off the rubbery plastic that makes up my skin, and emerge some strange steel butterfly.

And I don't yet know how to feel about that.

I call myself Aleph, I'm 34 years old, I write a lot of fantasy-based stories because on some level, the fantastic is how I understand and contextualize my life. I jokingly call my brain defective and have a dream that one day I'll be able to spread my much-studied love of communication to a new generation of people who will not take me seriously because it's hard to explain poetry to someone who doesn't already understand what it's for. I don't go personal often because I can't imagine myself as being interesting, I don't worry about self-esteem because my life got easier once I gave up on getting any of it, and all I want is to sing the song that will free the whole human race from sadness.

And I'm back for as much of season ten as I can manage.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I could do with some LJI. Might not go the whole way, but it'd be nice to goose my brain a little.

Signups are here, if anyone's looking for it.

I'm not actually playing. I don't quite have the time or quite as much brainspace as I'd like to do it with any seriousness, but now and then I'll probably have an idea that the topic brings out in me and I feel like I'd be giving up something to not roll with it.

It's not that late on a Sunday night, but it looks it--feels it. Winter's setting in. The darkness becomes denser, rolling over this tiny town that is now my home like a creeping smoke that oozes between the low buildings, an invasion on two fronts. Behind me, the sky is red or orange or brown or green where the sun goes down. I can't tell, quite; bad sense of color. In front of me, the dense, humid dark is pushing forward, only held back by streetlights.

I'm standing at a bus stop. I'm not waiting for a bus. I don't entirely understand what these bus stops are for. This town doesn't have a public transit service. It's the first time in years I've lived without one. On the other hand, it's a thirty-minute walk from our place on the edge of town to the train station on the other far side of town. But all over town are these dilapidated blue bus stops, waiting for buses that don't seem intent on coming.

It feels right. Two steps forward and there's no more sidewalk. Just grass leading to disused-looking industrial buildings. I'm standing there with my secondhand smartphone, a pair of people crooning Japanese in my ears while I look around for a new stretch of sidewalk. Across the street is high fence and keycard-locked gates, ahead of me grass and a two-story building whose functions I don't know.

The dark is creeping in, my nose is cold, and my knees are starting to hurt, out here where the sidewalk ends. Past here, I am unwelcome because I am not going there to produce, I am not going there to be a part of someone else's machine, I am not going to be productive or industrious and I can almost sense that this city is telling me that for all I am welcome in the city, this part of it is not for me. It is slumbering and interlopers would disturb it unkindly.

But I feel my legs itching. I want to keep moving. I've been exercising more and it gives me a need for motion. Either that or it's another welcome side-effect of the new medication (30mg Elvanse). I can't quite tell.

I take a picture of the place where the sidewalk ends, sad that the lens can't quite capture what my eyes do. Even when it doesn't flash, it lightens, adjusts the contrast and brightness to make the sight understandable to others. But I can't infuse the picture with the occasional throb of something that's not quite vertigo, that crisp wetness separating October from November either offering to turn me around with them or to pull me along with the lost month.

I feel quietly inhuman. It makes me want to take a step off the sidewalk, off the path, outside of the confines the concrete have made for me to take my place with my brethren machines in the sheet metal-covered buildings, some hard-to-name part of me knowing that I would be welcomed by them in a way I have never known. The confusion and the hurt and the frustration that defines being alive replaced with a knowable purpose, something easier than making my own.

The feeling passes, as it does.

I take a lungful of air and as I exhale, I am aware that when I inhale again it will be winter inside me.

I'm not quite right. I feel adrift. Apart from myself and connected with the life of this tiny city. I like to flatter myself that those feelings are real connections. They aren't. But that's okay. I don't need a ton of real things. One or two is all I need.

The light of the city has become the only light behind me but for dear Luna peering through the clouds.

I tuck my phone into my pocket. The album ends. The sound in my ears is the low bass rumble of reality and the whispering creeping of a night still remembering how to be winter. A car, the first one in a long time, passes by me. I wonder if they see me. I wonder if I'm real to them. I wonder if we are sharing the sensation of being inhuman or if the rubber of the tires insulates them from the siren song of mechanization as they barrel deeper into the last couple blocks of the industrial area. I was wondering if I would be able to make it to the recycling center and the gas station not far from it. I hope they make it. I feel, foolishly, like I'm the shaman of this place, this border between the world of soft humanity and solid machines, this stretch of concrete where warm flesh and dreams that defy articulation brush up, uncomfortably, against known purposes and cold, oiled metal.

I am tempted to raise my arms, to invoke some old power, to assert myself against this border, to let the machines know that one of their lost brothers has not forgotten them, that I hear their slumbering breath and recognize their clockwork dreams as cousins of my own.

But then I shift my weight and feel the familiar rush of blood back into my heel and I am reminded again that I am not metal, oil, and electricity, but meat and protein and chemicals. I do not have a keycard and am not a machine and know that I am to return to my world of warmth and frustration. I turn my back on the creeping dark, blow a kiss to Luna peeking out from behind a cloud and move toward the warm light of my new hometown, every step away from the border making me feel more grounded and connected to the down.

Everything is concrete under my feet and the sidewalk seems to go on forever even though I know that there are other places where the sidewalk ends and promise myself that one dark Sunday when the world feels in the midst of transformation, I will turn a different corner and find another borderland and feel the heartbeat of some other spirit, some other way of being, and I will ponder it before I return home.

Holy shit.

I'm a homeowner.

Missed a few days here. Haven't had a lot to day about the last few days. But there is some news, so here we go.

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It's hard realizing you (which is to say "I") suck.

Or at least it was for me.

That's not me passive-aggressively asking for assurance to the contrary, mind. That sorta thing makes me mad uncomfortable.

I bring it up because it was one of the most frustrating times in my creative life and also the one that's been the most fulfilling for me because it really helped me realize why I had so many abandoned projects behind me and why I never had any plots to go with the piles and piles of (if I do say so myself) really good characters I'd come up with.

See, what happened was I spent a goodly while writing some superhero comics--I had the betas up on my LJ for the first six scripts, got some good notes from y'all--and after feeling like I'd got some of the kinks worked out of those first six and was doing a little extra spit-n-polish on the six that were to come after, I went looking for unpaid artists.

Now, as y'all may know (some of you more than others), that's a titanic thing to ask of someone: "here, spend time you could be spending on something actively profitable on my idea which will most likely amount to a big ol' nothing". I always appreciated the people who responded to my calls for artists interested in that sort of thing and while I never heard back from most of them after a certain point (a couple of which were particularly close to actually getting pages did), I finally got a response back from a guy who gave me the straight skinny as nobody had before.

He did not tell me that the work sucked, which was pleasant enough, but he did tell me why it sucked and probably why nobody ever got back to me after a while.

It was hollow.

It was, to quote the Bard, "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

I don't know how good the panel descriptions or my pacing was and I'm sure there's still a whole damn world of stuff I've yet to learn about ARG THE CRAAAAAFT of the thing... but even if I'd lucked my way into a near-perfect understanding of all that stuff, it wouldn't matter because my thrilling adventure story was just that: a thrilling (I hope) adventure story.

Seriously, I looked back through the whole thing after I got that critique, trying to find anything in the text that wasn't just "Aleph likes superheroes, especially when they do things like this", just even this little scrap of meaning.

And I came up empty. Ashamed as I am to say it, I just came up with nothin'.

So, well, tossed the whole thing out, started rebuilding from the ground up, trying to bend the whole thing around a central message and it's hard.

I've felt like that's made it better. I won't know for sure until it's done because it's been like three years and it's being written, re-written and re-written all through as I find better ways of expressing myself or realize a flaw in what I was saying or just get my ass kicked because college is no joke and sucks up so much of a body's creative energy so that you can be a different kind of productively creative.

More than anything, it's really got me into a frame of mind about how I can use fiction in the future, about how to make stories for myself (and, hopefully, other folks) that won't just fall apart like junker cars in the back yard of my unconscious mind. It's got me thinking about how I can connect with people, not just on the level of ARG THE CRAAAAFT but also on that more heartfelt one.

Because I don't have enough interesting things that happen to me to ever be a proper blogger.

But there's this whole world of feelings inside me, things that I can't often put into direct words, things expressed best by obscuring them with metaphors and clunky prose, things I'd write poetry about if I had any faith in my ability to write in verse, things you can't say effectively by just saying them.

And I doubt they're particularly special, given my comparatively limited and sheltered life experiences, but with any luck and a lot of practice and endless endless hours of harsh criticism, I can make something worthwhile out of them, a little crystallized chunk of my life to hand out to people and let them examine it and seeing what bits of me reflect in them and what they project onto 'em.

But I can't see all that stuff 'til I get the words out (and probably shell out some money, too).

Now here's hoping I've learned even a quarter as much as I think I have, hm?

So I guess I best get crackin'.

"You wanted to be a hero," it said, voice a tinny, mechanical rumbling in his ear.

"Proctor, this isn't..." Jonathan rasped, struggling to push up from the ground on quavering arms, "I didn't..." he let himself slump to the ground, panting as darkness took him.

---

The youth, Jonathan, stood atop a tall building and looked down at the simulated city stretching out in all directions. Proctor, acting as an anti-crime computer, was silent, which meant that in the city, everyone was happy and all was well. Jon let out a sigh of relief. Nobody needed a hero, nobody needed him to fight.

There was a near-inaudible static hiss and then there was information pouring into his head. Another of his too-familiar rogues gallery, clad in brightly-coloured military gear, was menacing a family of four. They were barking demands he couldn't hear but which Proctor relayed to him in its mechanical rumble. It was the usual stuff. Money, jewels, helicopters, material wealth, all that nonsense. Things the threatened family didn't have. That fact would not go well for the family.

The villains weren't messing around. They were never messing around.

Jonathan took off running. The ground underneath him propelled him along, hooks reached down from the sky to turn his hops over small obstacles into titanic leaps over tall buildings. Pistons in the city's many modular walls, floors and streets propelled vehicles and other distractions out of the way as if he'd become more powerful than a locomotive when really, he was still just a boy.

The simulation rushed past Jonathan, his feet slapping hard against its moving streets while Proctor broadcast the audio from the besieged apartment into his brain. It was terrible. This villain used knives and was happy to use them on the family. Jonathan didn't know if this villain was real or if the family was. Proctor had told him that it would be using a blend of holograms, clones and even the occasional body from cryosleep.

Proctor, vile thing that it was, had granted Jonathan's wish.

He'd wished to be a hero. And, according to Proctor, you weren't a hero without stakes. You weren't a hero without villains. You weren't a hero if sometimes you didn't fail.

---

Jonathan, stupid kid that he was, hadn't been able think of anything to wish for except for life to be completely unlike the sterile routine of his stint as humanity's ambassador and the colony-ship's first line of defense against things going wrong. Young enough to be adaptable, old enough to have worthwhile problem-solving capabilities, educated in etiquette believed to be nonthreatening to possible intergalactic threats and in basic maintenance.

He'd just wanted his shifts to be more than just watching old movies and waiting because, he knew, the waiting wasn't going to end until after his ninth shift with the rest of the sleepers when they hit the planet and then the real work would begin. So he'd talked with Proctor and Proctor'd scanned the books and movies and other media that Jonathan'd fed it. It took him to the recreation chamber and created the simulation. It gave him strength and speed and--as its job was to protect him--it made his invulnerable.

( Then it put him through his paces.Collapse )

A new year has a kind of spiritual-cultural significance, less a real thing in the sense of touching, but a feeling that surges through sections of the morphomemetic field (like the morphogenetic field, only not quite so broad) at different times in different cultures, depending on what part of the year seemed a good place to start it.

I have many resolutions for this event, ways in which I will evolve my self-idea into something I consider to be generally more useful and otherwise moving toward the things I would like to be, but I would only put forth this wish and this challenge to everyone else.



Let us be kinder to one another.

Let us see more of ourselves in others.

Let us love one another better.

Let us hope harder.

Let us be louder in the defense of others.

Let us see how we fail our highest morals.

Let us change ourselves to better achieve them.

Let us dream large and find the small things we can do to get us where we want to be.

Let us cast off habits and systems which do none of these things.



Let us be better now than we have ever been before.



There may be other chances.

But they will be easier to take later if we take this one now.

Gabby was supposed to be her father.

Not literally, of course, but she was the only child and her father wanted passionately that she take over the family business and run it as he would have.

Exactly as he would have.

But there was a problem and that problem was that, simply, that there was no way to make that happen. David, her father, had read books on parenting styles which were supposed to reliably instill children with the parents' moralities but a quick search of the results of this found it to be far from foolproof. Indeed, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would lead her to hate him and he dreaded to think what that would do to his legacy.

What would happen if after he left the business to her, she changed her mind? What if she changed his long-standing policies on labour or pay or benefits? Even if he left some sort of orders in the bylaws of the business or a whole book which detailed the sort of thing he would do, the bylaws could be worked around, interpreted in a way that was not how he would do it. And this wasn't even taking into account the potentialities of new, strange advances in the future. Gabby's decisions might be different from what his were, might be wrong.

It was unacceptable.

Unacceptable.

Which was why, after a night of heavy drinking, brainstorming and contemplating the irreversible fact of his aging, he stumbled upon the idea of black magic.

( It was a strange idea, true...Collapse )

There was a failure. A flaw. Something they'd missed.

Something they should have caught that they didn't.

Captain Andrea Washington couldn't put her finger on it, but it was there.

Her ship, the Ascension and the dozen souls onboard were in danger. They all of them knew it. There was something in the recycled air from the hydroponics bay which had started smelling... not wrong, exactly, nor "off" in any way that was definable but there was a flaw in it. The plants themselves were free from any mold or contaminants and the frequent, almost obsessive scanning that Commander Panerjee subjected them to proved it. No mold, no foreign substances, nothing that would explain what was wrong with the air.

Nobody could explain it. Ventilation ducts were checked and re-checked, personal hygiene grew almost violent, freeze-dried food checked for spoilage and every other possible source for the smell was given at least a sniff-test if it wasn't just tossed in the airlock.

They didn't dare jetison it. Not out there. The airlocks were made to let people in and out of normalspace.

Nobody'd quite figured out how they were supposed to toss things out into the betweenspace.

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Mostly it's just that there's so much very specific shit to remember. I can get a general idea but remembering who wrote which of the studies is frustrating.

I swear to fuck, I'm so close to crying in impotent frustration anymore and I don't even know what to do except keep working.

A really part of my recent ADHD diagnosis is trying to study for a test, being aware that there's going to be just a WORLD of cognitive chaff really messing up the information's ability to stick with you and keeping at it anyway with the vain hope that somehow it'll just sink in and stay there.

The MOST frustrating part, at the moment, is knowing that there's help out there, like meds and whatnot, but I don't have them yet.

Being so very aware of the processes which are making this feel so much more difficult and complex and tiring when I know there's a possibility to do it another way. Knowing the physicality of what is and isn't going on up there and not really being able to do anything but take breaks like they say I oughta and keep at it is great and all but every time I feel the focus giving up, I just keep coming back to "but somewhere there's a way" and getting frustrated like a child trying to communicate and failing.

Because I am. I'm trying to communicate to parts of my brain that there is new information they need to absorb and it's all there (for the moment) in the working- or short-term memory but I just have no idea if it's gonna make it back to the actual storage or if it's just gonna evaporate at some point.

And that knowledge--knowing that it's not JUST me being stupid but me being stupid AND there being a bunch of shit that's just not quite slotting into place--I just can't even figure out how I feel about it.

I wish I would've got all this shit done during a break somehow. Being aware of all the shit my brain is doing is not actually helping me counteract it and then add in the SAD and there having been something like six hours of sunlight through the clouds all November over here is just wrecking me.

The wet smack of fist against flesh and bone.

That's all it'd ever been for the Brute.

She had a name. Nobody used it because the moment her third grade teacher called her a brute, it stuck and she lived up to it.

She wasn't exactly an A student and honestly didn't do more than she had to do to get by because she had one thing up on the rest of the class: she could fight. She could fight well. Very well, in fact.

So well that, honestly, it was only ever the new kids who ever started anything with her. They weren't the only kids she fought but those were the only ones who ever tried to start anything with her.

Her parents were proud beyond words. Lacking the funds to pay for college for their little brute, they were ecstatic to find that she had a chance in the Spencer Exams. Oh, certainly, they did their best to encourage the Brute's other, non-fighting-based interests (she enjoyed the feeling of breaking through math problems, found the step-by-step of it all remarkably soothing) but by and large, they just encouraged her to find the hardest fighters, men and women thrice her size. She didn't always win. But she won often enough. There was a waiting list of would-be badasses eager to prove themselves against her before she was sixteen.

She had a thought that she'd like to be a mathematician. Maybe someone working in the statistics bureau or doing big important research. At any rate, she'd go to a big school and she'd bloody well find a thing to do and a way to get the degree. It would be a lot of work but it was getting old, all the fighting, and it wasn't as if it wasn't a lot of work hurting people, too.

But she was good at it and being one of the ones to pass the Spencer Exams meant a lot of things changed for you. It was the king of all scholarships, a pile of opportunity, a chance to hobnob with the best and brightest and make connections no merit scholarship could muster: 1600 SAT scores and a 4.5GPA filled with advanced classes and a pile of worthy extracurricular activities didn't have anything on being the person who made it through the Spencers.

At least that was what she'd always heard. That was what they promised her.

The man on the TV in the locker room was excited for the Exams and waxed lyrical about them, about the human drama, about creating real merit, about the ratings and profits this year's event was sure to generate and how very, very assured and comfortable the life of the winner would be.

She'd heard other kids talking about it. About how fucked up it all was. About how it was dog-eat-dog and a good way to escape the open secret that the only way the leaders would let any of their ilk in was as freaks, as oddities, as monsters. It was a mishmash of ugly, degrading metaphors. Bread and circuses and cats and dog-eating-dogs and lions and Christians and worse. The Brute didn't feel like any of those things. She was just the Brute and if she wanted to win because nobody could imagine anything better.

The man on the TV in the locker room didn't rate her chances. Her town wasn't much for fighters and her parents had relied on her natural skill at violence to push her forward, nurtured it like a flower where other parents, parents with more money or connections, hired professional fighters, people who could teach the necessary finesse. On the other hand, if her parents were betting on her like they said they were and she won, well, at least they could get a little something back besides one fewer mouth to feed.

The bell rang and the locker room, silent but for the TV, emptied. Row after row of her schoolmates and contemporaries who had also traveled from all over the region for a chance. Some of them walked tall, with confidence. They'd probably been trained or were too stupid to know that if you stuck out, you got hammered down. Most approached the gate with a solemnity befitting the occasion: they weren't playing a game, they were taking exams which would decide her future.

The lot of them were herded into the center of the arena, crowd roaring, lights flashing as all sorts of cameras recorded the spectacle. Some of the favourites went up on the big screens around the arena. The Brute was not one of them.

She was sorry she recognized as many people in the mass of faces as she did. One way or another she wouldn't be seeing them again.

"Five."

That hurt her.

"Four."

But in three seconds, the Exams would begin and she would be tasked with

"Three."

taking down as many of them as she could before she tired and one of the others

"Two."

brought her down or worse. She didn't relish the fact that the only way to win was for them to lose (and lose so much)

"One."

but she needed a future beyond her tiny hometown fame as a good fighter, as a coulda-been.

"Begin!"

The crowd roared, a sound quickly drowned out by the wet smack of fist against flesh and bone.

We built them, the robots.

We built them strong and fast and smart. My God did we make them smart. We set them to work doing things we--with our slow, stupid meat--could never manage. Inside a century, they'd upgraded themselves to the point where their thoughts were moving faster than the speed of light, an innovation they could explain in principle but which flummoxed most of our mathematicians; the ideas they'd shorthanded or made into jargon, they had difficulty breaking down for us in any sort of speedy way.

In time, we just threw up our hands. After all, academia (like manual labour) had become a hobby, a pursuit of art more than anything else. After all, nobody needed to work any more. Money? Money was a thing of the past. Our machines had given us the utopia we'd always been promised.

But we weren't stupid about it.

( Or so we told ourselves.Collapse )

Oh my fuck, it's been literally six hours of just trying to get started at Idol.

This is awful.

[Content Advisory: We'll be discussing first-hand accounts of neuroatypicality and bits about emotional distress today]

( I've been spending a lot of time lately finding myself recontextualizing a lot of my past experiences in the light of my recent ADHD diagnosis...Collapse )

[Content Advisory: Set in a horror universe so dehumanization, blood and violent imagery are present.]

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A Tale From The Home Office

Systems exist for reasons.

Those reasons might not be very good but if they are strong enough to build a system around, they are usually backed up by something. In this case, that "something" called herself Teeth.

( Teeth did not consider herself a bad person. Indeed, she would have said that calling her a person at all smacked of her putting on airs.Collapse )

Just being a person is hard and filled with all kinds of weird signals blinking around inside your head and filling you with obligations or decisions or what-the-fuck-ever.

And some days I just don't want to.

There are days I wake up and all I want is for someone to tell me what to do and not make a single decision because having to deal with the consequences of any decision is, some days, just too much for my little brain to handle. I just want to reach in, turn off all the "me" that's in there and just coast on by as an automaton for a while, just following my programming, doing whatever is expected while inside I just rest.

I realize that a lot of this is coming up because the seasons are changing and I get the Seasonal Affective Disorder and that I'm starting to make decisions which have actual life-scale, real-world consequences for the first time in, gosh, a decade or so. I'm back in school and having to actually do work. I'm talking with some medical professionals about getting some drugs to act as a prosthetic forebrain to counteract my recently-diagnosed ADHD and...

( And for the first time I got something to work toward.Collapse )

I know what Slaughterhouse Five actually is.

All the same, every time I hear the title, I think it should be on a hidden classic of direct-to-VHS eighties action schlock and have a "the" at the start of it.

"Lost to a world that rejected them. Thrown to the four winds by their homelands. United by vengeance! THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE"

And then just pack in five of the most absurd badasses played by an international cast you've never heard of (one of whom would be a Hong Kong martial arts actor who made a fuckton of movies during the short-lived Bruce-sploitation boom named something like "Bruce Lii") set to a faux-John Carpenter soundtrack as they pull some Robocop-level bloody violence on the Reagan era's dominant policies.

I dunno. I'd watch it, anyway.