Damned Praise

A collage: a vintage photograph of a woman sitting on a front porch, A devil face over her head. On the right is a cropped American flag. Title and artist text are placed in front of the sky.

The Devil Is A Woman

I think it goes without saying how the world we exist in is psychologically destroying us.

A screenshot of a scene from Pluribus, featuring two women (Carol and Zosia) in the desert. The subtitle reads "Man, I love trains."

Essays

Readings: Pluribus as a metaphor for Autism

SPOILER ALERT: Readings is a name I am trying out for any articles exploring the themes of a piece/pieces of art from a specific perspective. There will be spoilers therein. Pluribus is the newest show created by Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul). Season one concluded recently, and

The Lonely Island - "Equal Rights (feat. P!nk)

The Lonely Island's second feature-length film, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, is one of the best comedies of the 21st century. It's gained cult status as such in the years since its commercial failure, but it's still a bummer that it's not

Essays

2025 Albums of the Year

Here it is again: the most autistic thing I do! I missed doing my list last year because, well, life has been a lot lately for reasons both universal and very personal. I'll mention right here that my number one album of last year (and the 2020s) was

Cover art for Ghoti Hook's "Sumo Surprise" LP depicting two sumo wrestlers fighting

Essays

"You gotta hear this one song. It'll change your life. I swear."

I've been a daily internet user since around 1995/6. I know now that my fascination with the information I could find online is connected to Autism. The communities of like-minded souls I found in chat rooms and discussion boards provided a type of connection I struggled to

A screenshot of the Voice Memos iOS app with two song titles displayed: "RIch Man" and "Limping Toward Gomorrah"

Songs

"Rich Man (phone demo)" / "Limping Toward Gomorrah (phone demo)"

"Rich Man (phone demo)" / "Limping Toward Gomorrah (phone demo)" by Damned Praise I wrote these two songs within the past month or so. I intend to record fully-produced versions of them in the future, but wanted to share the demos now. "Rich Man" This

A box of prescription Estradiol patches. Estradiol is a drug developed to treat menopause that is also used in transgender hormone replacement therapy.

What god doesn't give to you

So, I started estrogen a few weeks back and the court date for my legal name change is tomorrow. My egg has been a nesting doll. There are a handful of reasons for that: * Religious repression baked into my being * The "Pure O" OCD making it a complex

A pin with the text "Not tonight, dear...it's a felony."

Some pin!

I recently moved all of my prescriptions from Capsule (because they wouldn't fill my Ritalin) to the Walgreen's inside of Howard Brown Health's Rogers Park location. In their waiting area, they have two big framed boards full of vintage gay rights pins. These are

The cover of Descendents LP "Cool To Be You" with an illustration of the nerdy Milo character on graph paper

The Descendents - "Cool To Be You"

Best Descendents song? Best Descendents song.

The cover of The Wonder Years' "No Closer to Heaven" - a sketchy illustration inspired by graffiti and stained glass of a saint smoking a cigarette in front of a smokestack

You Were The Obvious One

A few days before No Closer to Heaven came out in 2015, I downloaded a .ZIP of it and was convinced I'd gotten a bad rip. I hadn't. Apparently, quite a few fans (and even the band themselves) hated it more than I did. I got

Damned Praise

Dead Mall Punk

Latest

I'm Sorry, And You're Welcome

The title of this post is a favorite saying of one of my career mentors, Amanda Bernard. I could think of no better way to describe what I'm sharing here: a near-comprehensive playlist of songs that have meant a lot to me over the years. I've

The cover art to Motion City Soundtrack's "The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World", which depicts a statue of an angel edited to be wearing headphones and holding a rose and a knife

Motion City Soundtrack - "Downer"

"When I was small, I made a lot of mistakes/ Then I grew up and learned it wasn't quite that way/ If I had known back then, it wasn't my fault/ It might have affected the way that I acted/ With confidence instead of hiding

Damned Praise: An Autobiography?

An old bandmate once told me I should write an autobiography. At the time, I didn’t necessarily think there was anything special about my story. Of course, we all think our story is interesting, but I’d never done much outside of that band that I thought anyone would

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