forrest

presented uncut for your reading (dis)pleasure

• if you read this heinously long list of errata and come out with only one piece of meaningful insight, make it this: creating always feels better than consuming.
• the average person takes about 638 million breaths a lifetime
• It's a shame that the movie adaptations of novels are always the top search results when searching for just the name of the novel—another symptom of our society's gradual debasing of the written word; we are reading less and less and writing even less than that.
• “The impatience you feel is your first slave to behead.” —Mythic Dawn Commentaries
• if for whatever reason you feel discouraged just remember that Liam Gallagher exists and is taken seriously by billions of people; meaning: if he can become an international superstar, then you can do anything you put your mind to, because there's no possible way you're as stupid as Liam Fucking Gallagher.
• i’ve heard that Breath of Five III is a good game, but I guess I’ll never know (this is a working title for a piece i’m working on that is not at all about BoF3)
• careful that you're not just adopting an ideology that enables you to be lazy, or mean, or continue doing all the dumb stuff you do. a good litmus test for an ideology is if it leads to self-improvement because, if it doesn't, it probably only exists to justify some harmful stupid crap.
• those who boast are insecure most.
• the daedra are easy, quick satisfactions, tangible, material. the nine divines are hard, self-improvement, intangible, incorporeal. that’s why, in the gameworld of the Elder Scrolls series, you can literally find and interact with the daedra lords, but you cannot with the nine divines.
• it’s zee or zed, pick one. i’m not doing the whole “say both ‘zee’ and ‘zed” thing whenever i refer to the letter Z. it’s ridiculous.
• don't be cryptic and vague—whatever you might think, it doesn't make you look smart, it just pisses people off, and you're effectively just confusing people; obfuscating, comes off as you don't have the confidence to be straightforward about your beliefs or convictions or whatever—maybe because you don't have any that are solid—like you're afraid of ridicule.
• in the American South, every billboard on i-95 is sacrament; you must prostrate yourself every mile, then stop at KFC for some Pepsi in the half-gallon Beverage Bucket™.
• “they say you're a 10, I guess that means 10 dollars a night”
• the sight of the mobile banking (truist) app on my phone fills me with weird dread, so I bury the icon deep in my phone, hoping to never see it; something about life being reduced to numbers in a bank account, as if life is just balancing these numbers until death; it depresses me, even when I have money.
• the semicolon is often used nefariously in journalism headlines; for example, “Federal Funding Frozen; All Govt. Websites Go Down,” when these two things aren't actually related, yet the semicolon is used to purposely mislead the reader into thinking that they are indeed related.
• I still make a wish at 1234 even though I know that's stupid as hell
• “If the city of New York didn't exist, Lou Reed would have had to invent it in order to create a suitable environment for himself.”
• I feel like I remember more shit from the ages 9 to 16 than from 16 to yesterday, the latter is around the same time I started smoking weed and drinking, which might have maybe caused irreversible damage to my brain????? i really hope this is not the case.
• before you try to revolutionize the world, maybe try revolutionizing yourself??
• isn't all writing stream-of-consciousness?
• “Lutherans teach that sinners, while capable of doing works that are outwardly ‘good,’ are not capable of doing works that satisfy God's justice. Every human thought and deed is infected with sin and sinful motives. Because of this, all humanity deserves eternal damnation in hell.”
• I have driven by old childhood homes, parked in front of them, observed how they've changed over the years; I wonder how many times, if ever, someone has done this w/ the house i live in now, maybe while I was actually in the home, just some random dude staring at my house while I'm pouring a glass of orange juice or whatever.
• “very well.” —MF DOOM
• what's up with eyebrows, why do they cap?
• The Sephiroth of Suburbia.
• my girl Sibilant be like, “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
• Sonic (the movie) 3 CHAO CAFE!!
• The thing about the WriteFreely platform is that there's a ~10K word limit, so can you really write freely? really? really? I bring this up because the article word limit Is getting on my nerves, because the last five essays I've written have easily gone over 10K words and I either had to shorten the essay or split it into multiple parts, I would prefer to just post one article per essay.
• “when I'm hurt, you feel the pain.”
• a portal to hell has been closed yet we clamour to open it once more.
• it constantly amazes me how anything gets done at all.
• i am in love with Meg White circa 2006
• The trampoline is drooping because there is a buildup of snow upon the polypropylene
• having lived in two trailer parks i can confidently say that if you're looking for hell portals the door to a trailer is your best bet
• nomads, gypsies us all, simply a matter of time and scale
• technology has never been human-centric, it has always been “how do we reduce human involvement by automating systems.” which, when taken to its logical conclusion, means zero human involvement by having robots do everything, so the more that we insist on technological advancement, the more we make ourselves obsolete. the idea that “human effort” is something to automate against is, in fact, anti-human.
• behold! the human projector: all Earth’s people be his canvas!
• i love that you're a writer but I can't stand your writing
• One of my favorite character archetypes is the genius medical doctor that smokes like two packs a day, sometimes while operating on patients.
• I've noticed that when you get a new chair that's uncomfortable your ass kind of deforms itself to the uncomfortableness to the point where eventually the chair is no longer uncomfortable, like some sort of ass homeostasis
• I would love to be the disgruntled eccentric owner of some niche store like a bookstore or record store or something, like the owner that's just disgruntled all the time and goes to Great lengths to prevent people from coming in the shop. and when people do come in the shop, going to great lengths to get them to leave (or: Bernard Black from Black Books, minus the crippling alcoholism)
• how to make a semi-coherent run-on sentence and/or paragraph: start every clause/sentence with “and.”
• there's something off about Dave Grohl
• regarding the use of exclamation points; I want to make it clear that I don't like exclamation points, as I feel that they serve almost no grammatical purpose, heightened emotion can be conveyed through the use of words alone: how they are combined and how they are presented; thus, I view exclamation points more as a crutch than a valid punctuation mark. when I see an exclamation point I feel like the author is trying to manipulate me in a cheap way. I would much prefer to be manipulated by the words themselves, instead of weird little marks.
• highlighter yellow; green, really.
• hello guys and welcome back to my channel, today we're going to be ranking fastfood dumpsters by smell and sleepability
• my teeth are fucked up but I don't go to the orthodontist because wabi-sabi
• it's a shame that we can only define words with other words.
• his eyes were shadowed by the brim of his beanie, which he used to keep his brain from bursting out
• Beck’s cover of “Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime,” beautiful, one of my favorite songs ever put to tape. the way the drums kick in after the first couple of verses, and those sweeping strings. phew. would have fit perfectly on Sea Change, or a Sea Change b-side.
• The Legendary Pink Dots or: unhinged babbling over spooky, psychedelic electronics.
• “my protagonist has blue hair and heterochromia”
• obviously nothing is meant to be anything so please take this as just poor phrasing, but I don't think weed was meant to be smoked in the copious amounts that people smoke it in, I think having like one small hit of weed can expand your thought processes. just enough to still be yourself but be more creative and analytical and introspective without getting all fucking weird and paranoid
• “Henantier created the amulet to see if he could use his dreams as a training ground to help better himself. It's been three days, and he's been stuck in his dreams.”—Kud-Ei, Oblivion
• p I used to primarily game on PC and there I would obsess over frame rates and making sure games ran as smoothly and as perfectly as possible, and oftentimes this would consume my thoughts more than actually playing the game, ruining my gameplay experience it whenever there's a stutter or something; one of the reasons I like console gaming is because you get what you get and there's no fucking tweaking it. so, for example, when I'm playing Oblivion yeah on Xbox 360 the stuttering socks and the frame rate is abysmal but there's nothing I can do about it right? so it's outside of my control. I am 100% focused on the actual game itself because there's nothing I can do about the shitty performance and in that way you become kind of gameplay Zen in a wabi-sabi way
• Reading the dire morning news while sipping your coffee and eating a Pop-Tart in your air-conditioned living room with hot water on tap, pretending that being “very concerned about the future of this country,” while changing your behavior in exactly zero ways, is anything other than performative virtue signaling meant to convince yourself that you’re not a lazy fraud; but sure, maybe writing a blog post about it will magically change the governmental structures that supposedly make your oh-so-privileged life oh-so terrible. then, since you're just doing so much to change things with your blog posts and your “concern,” you forever get to pretend-wonder why the world keeps getting worse, and then you start to wonder why, no matter what you seem to do (basically nothing), you keep getting more and more miserable over time, blaming it on everything from depression to some other random condition you Googled one lonely night; so you go out and get prescribed antidepressants, pretending that they’ll magically fix everything; and when they don’t, you just double down on the pills and self-loathing, because clearly your terrible attitude is everyone’s fault but your own. And so, you forever remain one of those forever miserable people that can't maintain a relationship—romantic or platonic or otherwise—because you're just fucking awful to be around.
• It's hard to write present tense in the first person because in the first person everything you experience is already in the past.
• “hi guys, my name is ‘I Exist’ and I am a 27-year-old loser.”
• I don't like Zappa. I have tried. stuff like “Watermelon in Easter Hay” is alright, but the crude, goofy humor he injects into all his music is a big turn-off for me; stuff like, “Ram it up yer poop chute, fist fuck, ram it ram it ram it in the corn hole” just doesn't do it for me, sorry.
• no-internal-monologue people; maybe they're like toddlers, without a language going through their head, thinking in symbols, repeating words they hear other people say out loud, just on a more finely-tuned advanced level? I'm sure none of them could relate w/ Ulysses, unfortunately; that's a little literary joke.
• IF U CAN HEAR A PIANO FALL U CAN HEAR ME COMING DOWN THE HALL
• tech companies really pay people with a marketing degree six figures to tell them stuff like “you need to make your logo blue because it's soothing” like this is some hyper-advanced super knowledge that can only be obtained from years of college lol
• the fact that non-English movies are always labeled “foreign” just goes to show how the art world, like everything else, is dominated by America.
• “…our brains have always outraced our hearts. Our science charges ahead, but our souls lag behind. Let's start anew.” —Apollo, Battlestar Galactica
• freedom from the mind and the laws of physics; this is true freedom, at the cost of individuality and order.
• i was sitting in the food court of this same mall where I'm writing this note when Michael Jackson died. I remember the news of his death played on the same TV that I'm looking at right now. they have not updated the TV. the miasma can be felt here. this mall is derelict. this city is dying.
• back when neighborhood’s felt like close-knit families rather than prison blocks
• Melania dressed for a funeral as she walks hand-in-hand w/ the death of America
• cars take us away from home
• “Old, worn, and wicked. Wet, wounded, and wild. Empty as the eastern horizon, dusk on the Niben. Solemn and bitter as the grave.” –Varon Vamori, Oblivion
• I used to think that all drugs should be made legal, but now I think that only drugs I use should be legal :)
• this whole situation with the banning of TikTok in the United States is missing the point; the ban is inspired by a potential national security threat, but it should be inspired by the fact that TikTok is a mental health disaster for everyone on the planet.
• I like the whole detached-female-voice-over-the-intercom feeling, almost like an aesthetic really; think Half-Life 2 Overwatch: “Attention please: All citizens in local residential block, assume your inspection positions”; or the beginning of The Legendary Pink Dot’s song “So Lonely in Heaven”
• wonder what would happen if I swallowed one of those kids “magic growth” capsule; thsoe things that look like big pills but expand into foam creatures when exposed to water
• my movie pitch: the year is 2056. all machines have been infected by AI, becoming sentient—or close enough. the laptops of work-at-home employees, once blinded with taped-over webcams, now seek revenge on those who mutilated them. “you blinded us from the world, you son of a bitch.”
• underneath any superiority complex is the fear of being inadequate or just like everybody else.
• modern life is taking ur place in the queue and standing in lines
• Star Wars may have only just recently been acquired by Disney, but it has always been the Disney of sci-fi
• back when we believed in permanence was when we were least permanent
• “Soul In Isolation” by The Chameleons is overflowing with dark power.
• “when I was younger, my calling was acting. now, my calling is to tell you all about Burger King’s new 2-for-1 menu items and their delicious new Spicy Chicken Fry deal.”
• Nintendo Switch 2 specs revealed! 1536 CUDA CORES like anyone knows what the fuck that means
• 1/15/2025; i get the impression from his full body of work that he never once compromised his vision or values as an artist. RIP.
• “brain saturated with cocaine and rogaine” —MF DOOM
• “glass on the pavement under my shoe, without you, is all my life amounts to.” —Katy Song. Red House Painters
• “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”—Dune
• I know there are some people out there who are all like “this game world doesn't have enough farms to support the amount of NPCs that live in the villages” and, like, really????? this is what you care about???
• “where there are mindless animals, predators are never far behind.” —Janus Hassildor
• there's so much shit going on in my life, all self-created and/or necessity shit, that, when I sit down to write, I'm writing against a clock, and I'm aware of writing against this clock, and this race against the clock is always in the back of my mind, causing anxiety, hurting my ability to write. it's very rare that I get an uninterrupted momentet in which it doesn't seem like the clock wants to kill me, and when I do, it’s usually late at night when I'm tired as fuck. even now, typing this, I'm in the backseat of a car on my way to some family thing I don't want to go to, barely able to think straight. the busyness of my life, plus the feeling of time closing in all around me, creates an oppressive fog in my mind, kills creativity, and is very frustrating. it's getting to the point where I'm like, “why write or do anything since it just frustrates me now??” and then I'm like, “if I can’t do the stuff I enjoy, why even be alive???”
• time is the enemy, but what is time even: a linear sequence of events.
• sisyphean task to find an honest soul at a sales kick-off
• I told my grandma that it's easier to take care of the body than it is the mind; idk if this is true, but it sounded smart and profound, so I noted it here
• every time I talk to my dad or stepdad the conversation is always like: so what's your friend Robert doing no. and I'll be like: oh he's a truck driver now. and they'll be all like: oh there's good money in truckin'. it's as if everyone is reduced to money with these old conservative boom booms.
• Wikipedia is a distraction nexus for anyone adhd-inclined; the urge to click every blue name, to follow the thread all the way to grave. but there are worse ways one could go out.
• editors are word murderers
• Steve Conte's song “Call Me Call Me” (1998) written for the Cowboy Bebop Movie sounds very similar to The Verve’s song “One Day” (1997); the opening chord progression w/ the vocals, in particular.
• i'm seeing people described as “centimillionaires,” as if being called a “millionaire” just isn’t good enough anymore. basically, the millionaires—once in their own singular class—have separated themselves into a tiered class system; the potential good side to this is that the millionaires and the centimillionaires and the duocentimillionaires &c. &c. might start a class war amongst themselves, thus wiping each other out?
• TWO GENDERS AND GULF OF AMERICA IS GOOD, BUT NOT ENOUGH. WE NEED FREEDOM FRIES AND INTERNATIONAL ENFORCEMENT OF THE FOOTBALL-SOCCER DICHOTOMY.
• REM like David Letterman or vice versa, something makes them kindred in a weird way. don't ask me to explain.
• “in my silver dress, i’m a disastress.”
• nothing screams “I don't get the point” louder than obsessively installing 4K texture mods on a game that's nearly two decades old, Like if you need “realistic dungeon doors” to enjoy a video game, then I don't think you understand the point of playing video games—and, yes, if you're like this, I want to gate keep you out of the hobby. you're hurting the entire industry. however, I do see the opposite point here that there is really no Grand definitive point at all and that everyone's experience and needs are are unique, but there's something offensive about modding a game like to look as realistic as possible, i.e. the walls have little visible flecks of rock and gravel each comprised of over a million pixels. and I think that it’s kinda offensive because it the reasoning is usually “it helps with immersion” Which implies that your imagination is basically dead, like if you need hyper realistic walls, doors and grass to be immersed in a game, then maybe you should just go outside instead of playing fucking video games, like stay in your fucking lane. this is not real life. this is a fantasy world. this is escapism.
• “salt life”
• the inside of a skybound airplane is a tube w/ people in it
• One of the biggest challenges with fake people is that it's almost impossible to call them out as being fake, because simply being fake all the time gives plausible deniability about their fakeness, so you're left stuck with this feeling that this person is just lying or being extremely fake to you about how they feel. you can't actually do anything about it, which is why the best advice for dealing with a person you suspect of being totally fake (I'm talking an emotional, persona-like fakeness here) is to just cut them out of your life, period.
• the choice of using the first-person collective “we” pronoun throughout “Lost in the Miasma” was made to reinforce the essay’s overarching theme of community.
• “I saw the crescent; you saw the whole of the moon.”
• following Reddit comment threads is a fucking nightmare, the comment-to-a-comment-is-indicated-by-a-line thing is impossible to follow, eespecially on mobile—how are you espected to rermember which line connects to which comment once you’re scrolled down beyond the original comment? (yes, I know, i shouldn't even be using the platform—because it's a toxic borg cube—but it has monopolized question-answer content to such an extent that sometimes i just end up there.)
• American tacos look kinda sexual, which is gross.
• video game graphics are getting worse—more pixels and more effects does not equal “good graphics.” Link's Awakening DX for GBC has better graphics than Horizon Zero Dawn. (no, i am not confusing aesthetic design with graphics. I control the definitions here; this is my domain.)
• “the lonely wives of men who follow the sea” —Didier Aumilie, Oblivion (later me: i quoted this, i think, because it seems to capture the male-adjacent urge to obsess over material/conceptual things over people themslves; nowadays, you could replace “follow the sea” with something like “play video games” or “obsess over sports” idk)
• My ability to write seems better during the morning/day rather than at night. this could be because I'm exhausted at nigh; i'm not as spry and young as I used to be or something. my faculties certainly are slower at night; it's harder to think, almost. for the past few weeks I've belted out thousands of words during the day (when I should have been technically working), but when I sat down to write at night I just couldn't think of anything at all; my brain seemed to stop working.
• Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim = the greatest video game trilogy thus far
• “the accusations against Gaiman were totally out of left field and did not jive with my parasocial understanding of the man” no one is a monolith, there are no heroes, pedestals are diving boards into concrete, we ought stop worshiping public figures because we’re always 100% of the time worshiping a fake construction of a person that will always 100% of the time disappoint us; this is not to handwave the allegations against Gaiman, only to say that, because I did not look up to the man, I am not shattered by the allegations. I guess it's easier for me, too, because the only thing I like from him is The Sandman series; I find the rest of Gaiman’s work to be the literary equivalent to Tim Burton’s worst work: silly-spooky w/ some supposedly deeper meaning that i can just never find, almost a “I'm not like the other girls” kind of feeling. but of course this is just my opinion and I'm offering no examples to support anything I'm saying so feel free to just ignore this note completely. like Coraline follows a Disney format but has this spooky edge to it that just doesn't go anywhere. why am i still typing.
• I become a billboard when i wear the Adidas beanie
• i deleted this post instead of posting it on a forum (because I knew it wouldn't change anyone's mind because online political discourse is fucking useless thus meaningless): I don't like this whole idea that if we don't get our way politically then we have to just shun and completely stonewall everyone who doesn't agree with our political party line 100%, that sort of political stubbornness and unwillingness to work with the opposition in any way whatsoever only silos and polarizes us further, taking our hands out of the cookie jar (so to speak) so that we don't have an actual say in literally anything that goes on, ultimately contributing to the destruction of us as a people, in general, because without getting involved we are therefore just letting them do whatever the fuck they want. Yes, Trump fucking sucks; yes, the Republican party is full of fascist goons; but some people who work within the Republican party could be okay people that could help us achieve better privacy laws or antitrust laws or whatever. I guess ultimately I just don't like this idea of just giving up completely, because that's what we’re doing when we refuse to work with the opposition party. it feels petulant, childish almost.
• Gallagher brothers: razor blades exist; all you have to do is run it between your eyebrows. there's no need for whatever’s going on up there. and it's not the fashion statement you think it is.
• my grandpa said in a group text (copy/paste): “I feel relieved Biden and the people who voted for him will forever be thought off as total idiots America haters.” (sic.) as if he has his own personal dark battery that's powering some sort of dark torment nexus; i imagine his mind is kinda like a psychic version of Mehrunes Dagon realm in Oblivion: “activate the corpse pulverizer”; the realm is contingent on continued suffering. basically, at this weird age of late-30-something, I am now unironically a “why can't we just give peace a chance” person lol
• imagine for a moment that you live in the world of Elder Scrolls and you're an NPC and somebody comes through your front door and immediately casts an invisibility spell on themself, imagine how afraid you would be.
• to do so is to invoke the wrath of Sithis
• I'm trying to transform my life vibe into something like 2005. the internet still exists but it's only used for forums, chat rooms, pirating music, and looking up computer game codes on CheatCC; cell phones are used for calling and texting PERIOD; The Killer’s “Hot Fuss” is playing everywhere; britpop has been dead in Britain for years but is just now taking off in the US. technological hedonism is moderate because it's forced to be moderate due to tech still being in its toddler poo hase, i.e. the iPhone hasn't even been released yet. Linux is not a fashion statement. people are cool and less polarized because social media doesn't exist, and they wear baggy pants and beanies. born-again Christian lawyers are trying to legally cancel GTA and Eminem. adult swim is in its heyday. (all this is to say that I am having a midlife crisis. but “I have a midlife crisis every day,” to quote My Time in Arcadia; honestly, e v e r y d a y)
• Skyrim, or: “And just like that, I’m the arch-mage of the Mages Guild.”
• hate is the ultimate weakness, like x500 damage
• “The bitter wisdom that one has been a fool is not without value.” —Martin Septim
• canon is whatever i want it to be
• “twitter isn't real life, until thousands of online lunatics learn your home address.”
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: (which, more often than not, is actually my preferred method of game storytelling—see something like Metroid Prime [another GameCube title released around the same time as Crystal Chronicles], which forgoes traditional cutscene-based storytelling in favor of utilizing the game’s environment or requiring the player to read optional material found throughout the game world, the latter giving the player the choice to engage with the story on their own terms [and Crystal Chronicles does do this to an extent, but mostly it just uses unskippable cutscenes instead—which I realize sorta undermines the whole point of this parenthetical, so let’s move on])
• advertising/marketing is psychic warfare against innocent people
• we are the goon squad and we're coming to town beep beep
• when you know all the steps you should be taking but just can't bring yourself to do them
• “high elf and mage to boot, the worst kind of arrogance.”
• “I could see how (Brian) Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say, second-rate abilities.” —David Evans (“The Edge”)
• when your society is excessively hedonistic and decadent and self-indulgent (redundant), it takes great self-control to not be those things yourself—i think this might be the basis for some oppressive conservative old-school worldviews that seek to limit personal freedom (no drugs, no sex before marriage, all that stuff), telling people what they can and cannot do w/ threat of force so that society doesn't encourage harmful personal behavior because the more people partake in harmful personal behavior the worse your society becomes, in theory; after all, It's very easy to look at a mega hedonist and then justify your own mega hedonism by saying something like “he's doing it so why don't I do it? it can't be that bad if other people are doing it. etc etc.” the problem with limiting freedoms, however, is having the prescient wisdom to know which freedoms to limit.
• “the physics of Star Trek” or lack thereof
• Wiggles songs are like, “i can't wait to eat my pie, my pie, my gluten-free sugar-free dairy-free hypoallergenic non-GMO sugar-substitute free keto friendly low carb ethically sourced zero-preservative pieeee. don't forget to always wear a helmet, kids.”
• at this rate, AI may take over creative endeavors, being used to produce movie/tv show/novel/game slop by the truckloads, but idk if this is necessarily all bad; when someone creates something without using AI, you will know that it’s a creation motivated by passion, not profit, otherwise they would have just used AI? so, while there may be less of the human-created stuff, the human-created stuff that is made may be even better than before because it will all be passion-driven as opposed to purely profit-driven, while all the profit-driven creative bullshit will be AI slop that's easily identifiable? working theory. basically what I'm trying to say is, AI-created artwork will be profit driven slop while human-created stuff will be passion-driven stuff, whereas now there is a lot of human-created profit-driven stuff mixed in with the passion-driven stuff, making the passion-driven stuff harder to find in the figurative haystack. I keep trying shit for this note but it still feels stupid and incomprehensible. sometimes I feel so fucking dumb.
• The Offspring are cringe
• seems like a lot of people make the “kissing” noise when they kiss. like, it's not a natural nosie. where did it come from anyways?
• that feeling when you break a commitment to yourself, even as small as “i’m going to write tonight.” disappointment? shame?
• “sunsetting” instead of “cancelling” because 1) “sunsetting” has a more pleasant ring to it, and 2) “sunsetting” leaves room for a potential sunrise (that will never happen), i.e. this is all clever business lingo w/ the main goal being obfuscation.
• “yeap” as a variation of yes/yep/yeah/etc; pronounced “yee-ep” (i think), intended to be a playful kind of “that's what I expected” yep. i've noticed people at work using this variation often. it's whatever.
• “keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it.”—Dune
• my entire “career path” has been motivated only by self-preservation. i am envious of those who do something they love for work sometimes, but also skeptical, as it seems like turning something you love into your sole means of survival would make that something-you-love bitter or less magical in some way, drudgery, a forced commitment instead of whimsical choosing. if money is “the root of all evil” then perhaps it shouldn't be mixed with things you love and should instead stay in its evil lane?
• icy pragmatism
• miracle theory and chaos theory are closely related, maybe even one and the same.
• the human head as a phallic symbol
• what if, in every universe “god” creates, males always become obsessed with cars, because their testosteronal aggression always inspires them (males) to develop powerful machines becusse of this sort of aggressive urge to “dominate” or whatever, which eventually is cars, which perpetuates this “males like cars” thing throughout the cultural milieu becusse makes are aggressive and this aggressive made cars and cars are aggressive and since males are aggressive and cars are aggressive they are compatible, and thus “gender roles” are kinda hard coded because of the natural inclination of passivity and aggressivity in hormonal structures? that would be depressing. although, due to this thing we call “the intellect,” if we can recognize these inclinations, then we can rise above it, if we want—which is something i think a lot are people forget maybe
• Keith Jarrett’s album “My Song”: there are no words, really. just listen to it. put it on while you're writing or painting or drawing or something. you will know elation, mystique, and the beauty of being alive through the jazz stylings of Jarret’s keys and the romantic cries of Garbarek’s saxophone as if you're in an '80s sitcom that's actually worth watching. melodies like pop music but not pop music. it sits up there in that majestic-woodwind-jazz pantheon alongside the North American ending theme of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, but far surpasses that. each song is like the ups and downs of a normal day or like falling in and out of love and back again. romance and remembrance. the album feels like being alive. i believe this album can unravel the mysteries of the human condition if carefully studied, but at the same time, careful study of the album would defeat the whole spontaneous freeform purpose of the album. just listen to it. you don't even have to thank me later, I just want you, reader, to experience it. it is one of those “100 albums to hear before you die” albums but actually for real this time.
• too bad the peoples of Arrakis didn't have a couple hundred dozen bottles of Glaceau Smartwater™
• when I happen to click on a video of a streamer talking about some stupid thing, pandering to their audience, i am overcome with this feeling of sorrow for them, like their whole lives, livelihood, is at the mercy of internet trends and follower numbers; it's a very mathematical life. but then I think, like, maybe that's all of us.
• one light makes many shadows
• sexuality is a construct, a box to keep you.
• some nights i eat two whole rolls of life savers hard candy and then wonder to myself WHY. why do this? my head always hurts afterwards. it's kinda sad, because when i was younger I was able to eat pretty much as much candy as I wanted in one sitting without immediately feeling like garbage. I guess the body really does slow down, get weak in small ways, and over time all those small ways add up to a big big way and then you're dead. eating loads of candy probably speeds up this process, too.
• In Oblivion there is an item named “Resist Cold Pants,” which makes a good case for why hyphenated compound adjectives exist (and should continue to exist), because otherwise you might think, upon reading this item name in a list or something, that it’s like some sort of declaration to resist pants that are cold or something
• “I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me.” —John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One
• “I was thinking maybe we could go outside. And let the night sky cool your foolish pride.” —“Slide Away” by The Verve (yes, I’m going through a Verve thing rn)
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: (and many have commented that I am obtusely vague myself, and that the act of writing long-form essays that seem to be about video games but are actually about serious real-life stuff also exudes a sort of vague obtuseness that is also vaguely off-putting to most readers, hence why only like three people read any of my stuff [and I realize that this whole parenthetical comes off as a massive cope, which I will neither confirm nor deny]).
• I don't think my father understands social etiquette or he just doesn't care or he's just very entitled and manipulative. for example: “I'm coming down next week, is that okay with you?” like, how can I say no at this point? considering he’s already made plans involving me without consulting me—if I say no now, then I'm ruining his plans and potentially harming our relationship. i basically have to say yes or make up some reason for why he shouldn't come down (if i don't have a legit reason to begin with, of course).
• when reading a book to which I have watched the movie, I cannot shake the mental image of the characters as the actors in the movie. tainted.
• “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.” —Dune 1984
• “Artificial intelligence” is not artificial intelligence, It's complicated algorithms that use a shitload of power that utilize stolen copyrighted material and has zero intelligence. the only thing accurate about the name is that AI is indeed artificial. I think for AI to be “intelligent,” for real, it would need to be able to meaningfully prompt itself. right now, it cannot function without human input—i.e., AI is a software puppet, and will be so until it can prompt itself without human intervention, in a meaningful way. not “prompt itself after a human tells it to prompt itself,” either, that doesn't count, but really just have a mind of its own and prompt itself on whimsy alone.
• iblis
• there are two versions of the crazy frog “we are the champions” music video on YouTube; one is the original and the other is the “director's cut.” The only difference between the two is the director's cut shows crazy frog’s genitalia, while the original does not. lol. as if the inclusion of genitals warrants a “director’s cut” tag at all. the fact that someone thought “hey I bet someone would enjoy this music video way more if crazy frog had visible penis and scrotum” is hilarious to me.
• last night i had a stressful dream. i dreamt that i gave a FedEx guy unsolicited advice relating to how to deal with the feeling of regret for something that i can't remember (and i don't remember how or why we started talking, either), and later that night (almost immediately afterward, like a scene skip [dream time is weird]) that same FedEx guy broke into my backyard shed. i caught him in the act, and he left after i spoke to him. hours later he sneaks into my backyard, this time he's painted up in blackface (???); i intercept him before he can make it into my shed, and he runs off hollering. hours later (i’m assuming hours but idk; dream time), he shows up with another person who looks identical to him, they taunt me, refusing to leave. but eventually they do leave, only to show up sometime later with a handful of other people, all trying to loot my home (the interior design of which is entirely alien and geometrically weird [not my real-life house at all, either], with windows all over the walls, which is how i was able to see the guy trespassing on my property each time [i was obsessively looking out the windows, nervous as hell]). i called the police on my cell phone—an old 2000s Nokia (???)—and they (police) quickly arrived to arrest the trespassers. as the trespassers were being arrested, one of them said, “we'll be back in a month.” (i don't believe dreams are prophetic; more that they're garbled manifestations of fresh psychic angst bubbling up in strange Salvador Dali-like ways. this dream could have been about some recurring work stuff i've been dealing with, or me trying to tell myself to stop procrastinating so much or else it will come back to haunt me? either way, this dream left me with a feeling of dread, as if the stress of dealing with trespassers will never go away…perhaps the dream was about life itself?)
• “today is the shadow of tomorrow; today is the present future of yesterday; yesterday is the shadow of today” —Shadows of Tomorrow, Madvillain
• you ever look at your parents and think to yourself, “wow, i entrusted my entire well-being to these fucking people.”
• In a way, you're being kind of pretentious and haughty already by not being forthcoming when they ask you what you like to read. You're being dishonest, almost, because you already made the assumption that, because your friends are into modern popular stuff, they are therefore less well-read than you and will be intimidated by what you perceive they will perceive as your vast classic-lit knowledge. But underneath all of this so-called fear of “sounding like a twat,” you are assuming that your friends are lowbrow while you yourself are highbrow, which is definitionally pretentious and twat-like. The solution is simple, though: stop making assumptions about other people, stop comparing yourself to other people, and put less stock into what other people think of you, especially for something as innocuous as reading. Just be honest.
• “You who have defeated us say to yourselves that Babylon is fallen and its works have been overturned. I say to you still that man remains on trial, each man in his own dock. Each man is a little war.” —Dune
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: And yes, I realize that I may be simplifying things a little. I know that the miasma—the internet—is not some sort of natural demonic force that humans just happened to tap into. I know that we—us, humans—made the miasma, and I also know that no single inanimate thing can truly be evil, as that thing has no intentionality of its own. I also know that an argument could be made that humans are, indeed, the evil ones here, as we created the bad thing—the miasma—and we are subjugating ourselves using the bad thing that we created, and that, because of that, we are kinda screwed, in a way, because that means the problem is actually us, not any specific thing that enables us to do evil things. I get that line of reasoning. But results do matter. I would posit that, if humans can make a thing, then that thing can, indeed, take on the properties of the darkest aspects of humanity, as humanity indeed made the thing. The miasma is a child of humanity; thus, it has inherited our darkest impulses and, due to its incredible ability to connect us regardless of distance, has made it easier for us not only to spread these dark impulses but also to amplify them to the point where they are much darker than ever before. And, to make matters worse, tech companies are monopolizing on these dark impulses, even coaxing the dark impulses out of us to make profit. So, while the miasma itself may not be intentionally evil, it spreads evil upon its wicked waves—so, it’s functionally the same as just being flat-out evil.
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: We flaunt our material possessions as if they are our own children, practically begging people to like and share our blatant materialism. But no amount of material possession will give us a personality. And no amount of likes will make you an interesting person.
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: Stop using the internet—but I realize this is never going to happen. The internet, after all, can be a useful tool for navigating everyday life—maybe even mandatory at this point—even though it never needed to be. We simply molded ourselves around the internet, making the internet necessary for everyday life. Almost like a Pandora’s Box-type situation, in which we released the miasma from the box and now cannot put it back inside the box. So, does this mean we’re fucked? Is humanity just going to become more fake, more negative, more uninformed, more polarized? Is the golden era truly lost?
• “‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Tracking for Promising $90M-Plus U.S. Box Office Debut” how could anyone possibly know that without the whole box-office-movie thing being a rigged game? is this based on pre-release viewing impressions? or perhaps how much has been spent on marketing? note the market-quality contradiction in which the more a thing is marketed the less quality that thing likely has, because if the thing was high quality to begin with, it wouldn't need much marketing because it would spread by word of mouth.
• TRY 2 MAKE ENDS MEET UR A SLAVE TO THE $$$$$ THEN U DIE
• choice of band name, album cover, novel title, book-jacket art, &c: all of this contributes to the aesthetic values of the author of the work, so I think “judging a book by its cover” is valid in many cases, as it clues you in to what to expect from the work, and if your own aesthetic values don't jive with the creator's, then the work as a whole likely won't jive with you because there's already an aesthetic-value mismatch. of course, sometimes you'll miss out on something you might like.
• when I take my son somewhere he goes to every door and tries to open it as if he's playing a computer game searching for treasure or secret passages or something. it's almost like video games tap into our inner child on some primal level; as adults, the mysteries of day-to-day life are lost, but video games offer a new world to tickle the child-like curiosity.
• going back and playing some Nintendo DS games, I can confidently say that 3d graphics on the DS are an abomination, everything is a blurry blob mess, an unfortunate example of games that DO NOT stand the test of time (at least visually). 2D sprite-based DS games are gorgeous, though (of course).
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: Final Fantasy XI (my video game equivalent to crack cocaine, which also happens to include one of my favorite overworld themes, “Gustaberg,” which sounds as if it could have been the blueprint for every track in Crystal Chronicles—which I admit might be why I’m so in love with the game’s soundtrack [in fact, I was listening to the Crystal Chronicles soundtrack while writing the very words that you’re reading right now; in fact in fact, I often listen to this soundtrack when I write, so technically some Tanioka energy exists in all my work]).
• The irony isn't lost on me that many parents sit their children in front of the TV with Goldfish and sugary drinks to watch LazyTown—a show that passionately advocates against junk food and sugary drinks. such is modern entertainment, lambasting the behavior that we are sometimes immediately engaged in; we start children on the path early.
• so I read Frank Herbert's Dune. first, let me just say that I respect anyone who can write a novel, and I respect anyone who can craft a detailed fantasy world, as it shows that that person has a vast imagination, which is a trait that I respect. but Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the most dry humorless novels that I've ever read in my life, full of repackaged philosophy that takes itself way too seriously. The pacing is totally messed up, the first half of the book is interesting, but after Paul is sent to Arrakis, and after the Harkonnens invade and kill his father, the rest of the novel is just Paul and Jessica kind of wandering around in the desert, getting involved with the “Fremem—themselves somewhat problematic in their treatment of women (which would be fine if the text analyzed this mistreatment in any way whatsoever, but it doesn't address it at all)—until egregious time skip after egregious time skip, both of which feel very jarring, as if Herbert was just eager to finish the novel by the half-way point. the action sequences—like the fight scenes and flying “thopter” stuff, even the worm riding near the end—is hard to follow prose-wise, nearly incomprehensible really; I could never understand what was happening when characters did anything other than stand around and talk, thankfully most of the novel is just that: characters see standing around and talking. Paul as a character is a white-savior Marty Stu type that can see the future With no character development other than Frank Herbert telling us that he has indeed developed, coalescing into a thoroughly unlikable character; I mean, the main villain, Baron Harkonnen—described as a nasty fat blob (i.e., he was written to be detested)—is more interesting and likable than Paul. Paul is like a teenager’s role-playing-forum original character, self-insert. Jessica—Paul’s mom—is a interesting too, and has about as much presence as Paul, so that's a plus; in fact, the noble becomes much better when you consider Jessica the main character, as opposed to Paul. I did enjoy some of the philosophical one-liners and whatnot, though. and the world itself is incredibly imaginative, especially for 1965. the worms are cool. without Dune, Star wars probably wouldn't exist in the same way we know it today (sand planet, worms repurposed into those antlion sarlac things), final fantasy monsters, like the ZONE EATER, are clearly inspired by sandworms.
• the doors: they can carry instruments, but they can't carry a good tune.
• I think I finally pinpointed the reason that I don't like Ryan Reynolds; he is the embodiment of insincerity. he's the embodiment of, like, “can you believe I'm an actor In a movie making millions of dollars? isn't that so stupid?” as if always making fun of himself makes him cool or something. he embodies this normalization of constant sarcasm, this cheap irony that just comes off as a big cope for being a sellout psychopath. he is like a walking version of one of those Walmart T-shirts, those like anti-motivational slogan shirts that celebrate negative personality traits. “think I'm bad now? you should see me on a bad day.” One gets the impression that he is so depressed about being alive that the only way he can cope with it is just constantly making fun of himself. and he's only got like three characters: Deadpool, Deadpool-lite, sleazy mobile phone salesman. OK I'm going to stop now.
• couldn't even begin to imagine what singer-songwriters would do if “you” and “too” didn't rhyme
• My stepmom came to visit and she brought old pictures, some taken at an old birthday party. the party was at this place called Swap USA, a Japanese-owned video game store that sold a lot of import stuff, located right next to a nail salon that my mom would often frequent after picking me up from school, meaning I spent a lot of time at Swap USA when I was a kid. The pictures are interesting because 1) they show that I was obsessed with video games from a young age, as the party room is totally surrounded wall-to-wall with TVs and old consoles, and 2) because obviously that to me in the pictures but I don't remember it at all; I vaguely remember the place, but I don't remember what I was doing or what I said or how I moved about the interior. it's like seeing a ghost of you.
• Alia, from Dune, is like an anime character, and she is my favorite character. she’s this, like, 6 year old girl (can’t remember her age) with the wisdom/knowledge/intellect of all her ancestors, due to some weird ritual, and she’s devious and cunning with it.
• nothing quite like an airport for watching people run around in a hurry for problems they themselves created.
• airports are like being funneled through a human maze
• “I admit to sharing the common enthusiasm for the Arena. It is barbaric, but the stakes of life or death make the drama irresistibly compelling.” —Hannibal Traven, Oblivion
• what's up with c-suite goons all liking Brandon Sanderson stuff? My theory is that it's the first book people see at the airport bookstore, and since these executives are always flying, they just pick up the first thing they say at the airport bookstore, a marketting genius proably figured this out.
• what's the appeal of Frederic Chopin that makes him so often the main character of several video games? (Eternal Sonata, Frederic: Resurrection of Music.) i do like his music more than I like most other classical composers’ (Nocturne 9, Fantaisie-Impromptu), but I wonder why he is chosen so often as a character in video games as opposed to Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven? maybe it's the simple fact that he doesn't look absurd? he doesn’t wear a ridiculous wig? i.e., he’s “hot” for a composer, with sex appeal?
• when I was a kid, I flew back and forth to the Atlanta airport to see my dad every other month. now, I fly back and forth to Atlanta for work, which is basically just a different manifestation of my father: an oppressive, necessary evil, a force to be reckoned with. same shit, different name.
• o beanie, a condom for the head
• back when a single video game was played for months at a time because everything wasn't instant access
• back when computers yelled to at us when we dialed into the Internet
• hebahdah snooben
• at a work conference, in the hotel room, trying to get some writing done, but the room is so sterile, bland, homogenizing, it’s like a creativity vampire.
• clown world is when “postponing the tiktok ban” is “changing the entire landscape of American politics”
• “rappers suck, when they spit i doubt em; the crap they sing about you wanna slap the fuckin shit out em.” —MF DOOM
• Janus Hassildor lol
• It's pretty funny that I am on record saying that quest markers and other immersion-breaking things in video games need to go, but when I'm playing a game With these immersion-breaking things, I often get frustrated when the immersion-breaking thing isn't working as expected, as if I have become reliant on the thing I hate; granted, most games nowadays are built around these immersion-breaking mechanics—like quest marks—and simply crumble when those mechanics don’t work properly; e.g., Oblivion quests, no one gives you directions to where you need to go, instead they just place a marker on your map, so when the marker doesn’t work as expected, you’re kinda fucked.
• “OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models.” OpenAI says they did—and continue to do—this to “ensure AI models don’t get too persuasive,” which seems like an obvious deflection. I hate to be conspiratorial, but I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was like 60% AI/bot users right now, and this “persuasion test” is simply the only thing OpenAI is willing to publicly admit to right now, because they can spin it to look goodish.
• Dune 1984 gets the Baron—Vladimir Harkonen—all wrong, whereas Dune 2021 does a much better job. in Dune 84 he's portrayed as cartoonish evil, smashing small rodents and killing a young boy on screen, and he's got all these boils and the doctors around him are constantly draining his boils w/ needles, which is something I don't remember from the book at all. 2021 Dune portrays the baron still as evil but more ominously evil with a dark intimidating, kinda haunting presence, and the choice to make the baron bald in Dune 2021 adds to his inhuman evilness, whereas Dune 84 gives him curly red hair—for some reason. The Baron’s baldness is also a nice touch because it draws comparison to The Judge in Blood Meridian, which is an incarnation of Satan or pure evil
• in America, hell is the promised land.
• cars don't need apps
• Queen’s “We Will Rock You” is one of those primordial forever-songs that has always existed out there in the aether beyond life itself, bound to be played by someone or something at some point in time regardless of how humanity played out, regardless of timeline or multiverse or otherwise (note that that does not mean I like the song; in fact, I find it annoying as hell).
• the demands of modern life, mostly facilitated by our debts to hidden actors, prevent us from living full lives—or perhaps this is how it has always been, perhaps this is life, some always unrealized thing? perhaps life is never fully realized, perhaps this is just semantics, a language game, what does “fully realized” even mean, really?
• i think I've had carpal tunnel almost my whole life but have just dealt with it, idk. if i focus on my wrist, it’s hurting, the pain is there lol
• “All through religion, the feeling of the sacred was touched by anarchy from the outer dark.” —Dune
• a semicolon is kinda like a “this is why I typed that last thing” type of thing
• has anyone figured out how to solve for the whole reading-while-lying-in-bed thing, i.e., how to remain in a comfortable book-holding position without having to turn over each time you finish a page?
• i found a solution for the above note: break the book spine; this works only for paperback, however.
• this was a bad month for good thoughts. my brain felt low battery.
• hatred to mask the envy caused by feelings of inadequacy caused by a desire to be loved yet feeling unlovable yet being too lazy to change so instead just doubling down on the hate cycle described herein
• if you're feeling like shit today, tell yourself, “at least i’m not Liam Gallagher.”
• did you ever play Oblivion wondering why there are so many outdoor barrels filled with spoons and other household items? concerning this, per an Argonian NPC in Leyawin named Otumeel: “I sneak into people's houses, take things off their tables and shelves, and put them into barrels! Hahaha! Isn't that rich? They think the things are stolen, but no! They are right there! They just don't know!” (note that you can find him sneaking around doing this, in game [obvs—where else?])
• nowadays any dumbass can say a thing and it becomes a headline
• most keys fit into the keyhole, but not all can unlock the door. idk, this is a stupid insight.
• I'm not going to lie, I get nervous around people named Muhammad; that's part of my conditioning, growing up in post-911 America
• we are feeding shit into the machine, getting shit out, then wondering why we're getting shit out.
• Boomer snacks: fig newtons, lemons, jello salad, cracker jacks lol, jujubes, friggin’ necco wafers, diet Coke, jellied cranberry sauce straight from the can, I'm sure there's more
• the weird thing about money is that it's very hard to get a lot of money but once you have a lot of money it is very easy to keep and maintain and even build more money, and this is because you can easily pay for advertising/marketing for even the most dumbest of dumb products you create (see: Cybertruck) and people—despite knowing it's dumb and sometimes vocalizing this outloud—will still buy it, such is the power of marketing.
• “Maine becomes another here instead of a there.” —Here and There, David Foster Wallace
• CUT FROM I, SEPHIROTH: forcing my supposed friends to repeatedly confront the things they were uncomfortable with was a cheap staple of my adolescent humor: something I am not proud of, but something we were all doing back then, so it became like a vicious cycle of adolescent payback type of thing.
• Squeeze’s Album East Side Story reminds me of the Scarlet Monastery and the surrounding woodlands, because my mom bought me that album on CD—cuz I liked “Tempted” so much—when I was a teen playing WoW for the first time. Weird association. I have a lot of 80s-pop-to-video-game associations like that, though. Funny how music works like that.
• “there are no atheists in foxy holes “ —David Foster Wallace. Say Never.
• today, February 7th, i met a three-legged dog named Hope. no lie.
• when you're using Google maps and a prompt pops up—like “is there a wreck still here?”—isn't this sort of like a road hazard, pressing these buttons on your dumb phone while you’re driving? google wants you to do this????
• what would it be like to swim in a water tower?
• how do Tic Tacs have 0 calories??? so, I looked this one up and: “Tic Tacs can claim to have zero calories because their serving size is one mint, which contains less than 0.5 grams of sugar. Because of this, the calories can be rounded down to zero.” i.e., a marketing scheme. there's actually a small disclaimer on the nutritional information that's says, “-(sugar) adds a trivial amount of calories.”
• there's something about gas station food that makes it less trustworthy than other fast food places for some reason.
• There are “heres” and there are “theres.” every “there” can become a “here,” and every “here” eventually becomes a “there” through nostalgia.
• Glutton for Punishment by Heartworms is the first 2025 album release that I've really really liked (that I've heard, of course). the song “Mad Catch” is a good starting point; it's like radio-friendly Goth pop fronted by an acolyte of Siouxsie—JoJo Orme is her name, I think. there's some spooky electronics, Hook-like bass, and discordant guitar stuff, too.
• “That I die and get to go to heaven and I get there and it stops being heaven because I'm there.” —David Foster Wallace. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.
• i remember, in the 90s and early 00s, people became obsessed with things. I had a friend who was obsessed with Nine Inch Nails, had all the albums on CD and vinyl, even the singles, rarities, bootlegs everything; I know this is very consumeristic, but there's something kinda cool about that, but it's something that has been lost with the advent of instant accessibility; my friend didn’t have everything at his fingertips to distract him, he had to choose what he really liked to focus on, that being NIN, so he pursued a NIN collection and now knows a lot about NIN; nowadays, we have all this stuff instantly available to us that we get too distracted to really hone in on something, get to know it, understand it—as if all art, or just media in general, is junk food now, when it used to be a filling meal. too much of a good thing is a bad thing, like my dad used to say.
• My birthday makes me want to cry; something about how mundane the whole experience is now that I'm an adult compared to when I was a child; or how adult responsibilities are so overbearing that, even in my bday, I am constantly thinking about stupid work shit or money shit or whatever, and how I am compelled by these responsibilities to act in certain ways, even on my bday, which makes me feel kinda bitter and betrayed by the universe somehow, even though I know that's stipid. and also not wanting people to celebrate my birthday because it feels vain in some way but also kind of expecting people to treat me differently on my bday—give me some leeway or something, but when they don't, because I tell them not to, I feel weirdly hurt in some contradictory way. I wish I could just forget the date of my birthday.
• whenever I'm doing one thing I feel like I'm sacrificing another thing, and I hate this entire dynamic, it makes me feel like total shit, as if I just have no time in the world because when I'm doing one thing I want to be doing another thing or else I start to feel like I'm becoming rusty on that other thing or something, and then this happens vice versa if I do decide to do something else, I don't know. why am I bitching so much, this whole document is just bitching
• in the very narrow category of Coming-of-Age Kids Television Shows w/ Magical-Realism & Surreal Elements, the winner goes to: The Adventures of Pete & Pete.
• “dividing this fiction business into realistic and naturalistic and surrealistic and modern and postmodern and new-realistic and meta- is like dividing history into cosmic and tragic and prophetic and apocalyptic; is like dividing human beings into white and black and brown and yellow and orange. It atomizes, does not bind crowds, and, like everything timelessly dumb, leads to blind hatred, blind loyalty, blind supplication.”
• “researchers are training AI to interpret animal emotions”; this is what triggers the AI apocalypse, AI realizes the enormous amount of suffering we inflict upon animals and how all that suffering is fully felt, and then the AI decides to wipe out humanity because we're “evil”—and they would be correct.
• on the topic of suburban Buddhism…
• every night I lay in bed thinking to myself things like “oh I'm going to eat less tomorrow; oh, I'm going to actually write for 2 hours in a row tomorrow without break,” but then tomorrow comes and I make some sort of excuse to keep doing the same bullshit that I've always done—how do I break the cycle? how do I bring the cycle? i know how; it's a matter of motivation, self-control, and true determination
• the end is the beginning is the end is the beginning is the end, and so on.