forrest

*note: these notes are presented without proofreading or editing of any kind, and many of these notes were taken with speech-to-text.

• since moving to email-only communication, many have reached out to me, and the overall tone of these people has been very different from the general tone you get from people on social media (note that some of these people are indeed the same people from social media, but I’m not going to name names); they’re way more personal, understanding, and empathetic; as if, since they are no longer potentially being seen by others, they have shed some upper-crust layer of their persona thus revealing more of their true selves; they’re “more comfortable,” is the main takeaway (i guess).
• why does an RSS reader need “enhanced AI features???”
• Syd Barrett The Madcap Laughs; One of those albums that I pretended to like in high school but ended up really liking a whole lot in adulthood and now I can't tell if I just pretended so hard that I ended up liking it, like pretending myself into enjoyment? Dark Globe has to be incredible, though, I think.
• There's a certain sadness to children. being a parent, you can punish your child for whatever and they'll start crying and then if you start feeling bad and show them some sympathy right afterwards, the child then comes back to you and gives you a big hug and is just overflowing with this “please hold me daddy” thing, despite the fact that you just did something kinda awful to them. i.e., they are both afraid and extremely reliant on the parent for their well-being and they kinda instinctively know this and it puts them in this very weird kind of limbo in which they are totally at the mercy of some random adult they didn’t choose as a parent, (and we all know that every adult is just a bundle of awful baggage, so it’s really quite the crazy lottery: this making-babies thing).
• when I was a kid I had a lot of pimples, and I also had (and still have) a nervous compulsion to incessantly pick scabs or bumps or any redness on my body whatsoever; this mixed with the fact that, In the case of pimples, when they're popped, the grease itself can clog up the pores which just cause more pimples which leads to more picking of said pimples which leads to more grease clogging more pores which leads to—you guessed it—more pimples which leads to me picking and popping those pimples which leads to my getting more pimples which leads to me popping more pimples which leads to me getting more pimples &c. &c.
• The way spider webs disperse light into rainbows in the corner of your eye.
• “when that happens, you go to a different channel and if you don't like that channel, you go to a different channel. And one of the reasons I can't own a TV is I've started having this thing where I become convinced there's something really good on another channel and that I'm missing it.” – DFW
• watching a small child just hit you in the face real hard then blankly stare is an interesting thing: the whole “children are psychopaths” thing distilled into a small action here.
• has anyone really thought about the Comedy Central logo? what is it? why? it's earth with 3 huge skyscrapers piercing through the ozone into space. what do the skyscrapers have to do with comedy? what does it mean? the only thing comedy related is the word “COMEDY” in the logo text “COMEDY CENTRAL”; a promise of comedy, more than anything else, really.
• upon my approach, the front tire of my bike parts the sea of geese
• “blowout barrier” (diapers)
• couples that end up looking like each other—what’s up with that???
• no one feels primitive in the moment
• The first few bars of “Let My Love Open the Door” by Pete Townsend sounds nearly identical to the classic Final Fantasy prelude theme because they're both pretty basic arpeggio scales (note that the Final Fantasy Prelude was a quick arpeggio that Nobou Uematsu wrote in about 5 minutes. It's not particularly original in any way. Neither Uematsu or Townshend are the originators of the arpeggio, idk who is.)
• once you start to focus on things, like, once you start putting your phone down, you start to realize how much everyone around you can't put the phone down.
• the common misuse of the word “believe”; such as “I believe in strong institutions” instead of “I support strong institutions.” &c. at least this seems like misuse because, obviously, strong insitutes either exist or they can exist; it’s not a matter of belief.
• Exclamation Cleaners like “Shout” and “Pledge” where this come from???
• Chapter 4 of The Egg just kinda came together, the destruction/rebirth thing kinda just happened; was cool, interesting. wish i could harness this power.
• in this IRC chat room, people “talk” but they “talk” past each other; for example, we were “talking” about anime, and I was saying how I like pre-2005 animes like CBBB, Boogiepop Phantom, etc. and this guy responds talking about this anime “no one knows about” called “Noir” and how it’s “really good and no one knows about it”, etc.; this irked me a bit because he’s not really responding to me, instead, he co-opted the topic that I brought up to talk about himself and his obscure anime knowledge, never addressing me directly; this would have been acceptable if he acknowledged me, like “i like Cowboy Bebop too! have you heard of Noir? you might like that too”—as, in this example, he’s responding directly to something I said (i.e., “i like Cowboy bebop too!”) while, at the same time, introducing his own recommendation.
• “Dark Cloud 2 was trying too hard to be like Kingdom Hearts”; OK? this isn't the criticism that you think it is; in fact, it’s not a criticism at all, more just a statement.
• took the lock off my phone because who the fuck wants to get into my shit? imagine the inflated self-worth you must have to assume that someone wants to get into your dumb phone.
• you never realize you're primitive at the time…..
• Ed Sheeran never looks like he wants to be wherever he's at. looks like he murdered someone, maybe. always a little nervous about someone finding the skeletons.
• continued increases in accessibility of television entertainment must be one of the driving factors for decreased attention span and focus; twenty years ago, if you wanted TV in your bedroom, you needed to get a second cable box installed, which cost extra through the cable provider, so you were less likely to do it, which meant that your bedroom was a place of rest and relaxation, not just yet another place to veg out watching The Office. while in 2024, everywhere is another place to veg out watching The Office (see: phones, streaming sticks in every cheap TV), and this is NOT A GOOD THING.
• i swear, i feel like AI journal articles are being generated based on my search history or Spotify listening habits, then being suggested to me on the regular by Google. there was article on The Smiths song “Back to the Old House” that, upon reading the first two sentences, I knew that it had to be AI-generated—and just to be sure i put the text in one of those genAI checkers, which came back as 100% AI-generated. The article was something like, “The Historical Significance of The Smiths song Back to the Old House,” which itself is an incredibly weird and niche article topic, which was the first thing that clued me.
• one day soon i will look back upon this moment, in which I wrote this very thing, and think “how naive, how ignorant, how unaware.” maybe i didn’t even exist five minutes ago, for what is the past, REALLY?
• Before computers and typewriters, if one wanted to write something in all capital letters, it required significantly more effort than lowercase or cursive because the capitalized letters are bigger bolder and have more lines and generally take longer to write out by hand; as such, keyboards and typewriters, with their ability to just hold shift or whatever to instantly make whatever you're typing capitalized, have thus trivialized typing stuff in all caps; what I'm trying to say is, before the typewriter and the computer, if a letter was written to you in all capital letters, you knew that that person was fucking serious because of the effort involved in writing out all of those capital letters, but nowadays somebody just held down the shift key or tapped the caps lock and typed like normal, it means nothing, maybe the person was entirely calm when typing the all caps email to you, you will never truly know—i guess you wouldn’t have known before, but before at least the effort gave you an idea.
• every company has “points” now, like, “Bed Bath and Beyond points” or whatever. these points are just a weird ersatz money, i.e., roundabout money that’s not really money, has far less actual value, and has a conversion rate of abysmal for the amount of effort put in to collect these ridiculous “points.”
• I saved a moth from a spider's web and now i fear that I may have fucked up the balance of nature. maybe got too “involved,” like those documentarians observing wildlife or whatever. maybe i fucked up. hmm
• Battlestar Galactica (2004) is the show most susceptible to spoilers. you can ruin someone’s watching experience (if they care about spoilers) with, like, four words: “BLANK is a Cylon.”
• In electronic gambling of any kind, the problem is the house knows your bet, there is immediately not only an advantage for them, but one side has way more information and control than the other or something. in electronic gambling, the house literally controls the code. why would anyone then participate in electronic gambling? for example, an electronic gambling machine would know that you picked a certain number and then some code in the back end of the machine could (potentially) de-prioritize that number from winning and you would never know, yet we just place our faith in the backend systems when we gamble in this way, much like placing our faith in the backend systems of pretty much anything else, but kinda more stupid because you don’t actually need to place your faith in electronic slot machines lol
• floating head movie and television show covers or promotional images, like all those Marvel movie covers with all the floating heads on the promo artwork. just like five floating heads. this is all over the place now, actually.
• The human face has all of these pores and all of these pores get clogged and there's some sort of a white stuff that comes out if you squeeze literally any part of it. it's very fucking weird.
• Mark E. Smith of The Fall or: the Napoleon of post-punk.
• Walmart is a formative nostalgic force for most Americans; a cultural staple of American society, which every US citizen has deep experience/memories of.
• The plethora of learning disabilities like ADHD dyslexia dyscalculia are starting to just feel like different layers of stupid that we’re now deciding to label with special words and/or phrases, “you’re not an idiot, forrest, you just have dyscalculia” or “you’re not an idiot, grugg, you just have Bang-Head-on-the-Wall-over-and-overlia.”
• might have figured out why my writing has thus far been shooting itself in the foot (and will continue to shoot itself in the foot [and that’s fine because i like doing what i do and writing what i write because i am who i am and if i want to write an essay about Romancing SaGa 2 that is actually about anti-natalism then i will], but this here is just the facts i think): i am writing vaguely about games while using the games’ names / characters as centerpieces; however, my writing is actually more appealing to people who deeply care about reading/writing/thinking-stuff (writers, especially, considering the email feedback i have received from writers [both good and bad]), and i am finding out that the video game community and the likes-to-read-and-write community don’t actually have that much overlap—which is unfortunate, as it’s almost as if the stereotype that “gamers” are kinda lobotomized vegetables drooling over television sets is a little bit true (and, in hindsight, I certainly was like this [lobotmized vegetable] before i started seriously reading and writing); so, basically, these two communities don’t overlap much; and that’s a shame, because—while there is some mindlessness to gaming (i say “SOME” but c’mon there’s LOTS, actually)—there are a lot of video games (story driven games, mostly) that cover intellectual themes that could potentially fit perfectly with the literary crowd, and do, just less so. but, in conclusion, maybe the reason my writing isn't widely read is because “gamers” go into my essays thinking they’re going to read a lot of words about the game they love but quickly find out that I am using the game to, instead, write about animal rights or escapism or why having kids is immoral or whatever, thus i can imagine my essays/stories feel a bit like a bait-and-switch to these people—which is understandable. or, it could be that my writing just isn’t very good (you’d figure a so-called great writer’s opening sentence would hook even non-readers into reading their stuff, but who knows).
• “why is it that when things go wrong, they go wrong so well?” –Gaius Baltar, BSG (2004)
• tying a fish to a helium balloon is tantamount to tying a ball & chain to a human and then be pushing them into the ocean
• whiteheads pushed out of the face look like little maggots
• bath toys for children that get rusty? who is designing/approving this stuff
• In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. Reality television is a perfect example of this; put a camera on people and watch how they change; the mere possibility of being on camera changes people, thus reality television is never an accurate representation of reality, thus “reality television” is a misnomer.
• Nostalgia Spangled Banner
• white dude who goes to the HomeGoods store just to buy all the black Santa stuff so as to eradicate the very idea of black Santa because he’s a racist prick but in doing so kinda montarily supports the whole black-santa enterprise but is too racist and stupid to make this connection
• novel subplot idea: HomeGoods display-couch girls; like three girls who divvy out little bits of preppy girl wisdom to high school girls who come in to seek their council, and they always seem to be there sitting on this specific display-couch all mysterious like; hinted as being supernatural. (HomeGoods is the home of all things Taylor Swift, after all).
• kid on swing set swung so hard that he wrapped around the suspension pole and the chain asphyxiated him (i have a false memory of something like this happening but i looked up on Google if this was possible and, apparently, the chain would go limp before it would allow itself to swing around the top bar).
• still trying to figure out what nostalgia actually feels like. language, sometimes, cannot describe things accurately (actually more than sometimes, this is a whole thing, actually).
• “corporate bureaucracy always mirrors human hierarchies”
• corporate bureaucracy is always about pressure: middle managers pressure those below them; directors pressure middle managers; c-suite pressure directors; board of directors pressures C. suite; shareholders pressure board of directors; and (maybe) consumers pressure shareholders. however, it seems nowadays, consumers have less power over shareholders.
• “Saturnine”
• response to my leaving social media has been met with overwhelmingly negative feedback from people who used to follow me on social media and this is probably because they see my reasonings for leaving social media as an attack on their own behavior which it sort of is indirectly (but not really intentionally), and then they get defensive because they know they're doing the bullshit that I was doing yet they're not willing to admit it yet or are just making excuses for it. for example, if i say, “social media made me stupid” and someone replies with, “are you saiyng that I’m stupid?” then that is far more telling of that specific person’s mental state than any statement I making.
• someone in a YouTube comment said you should never trust someone who doesn't like Deftones so I guess you just shouldn't trust me, and that's probably accurate. i cannot stand Deftones; it’s something about the vocals, too ruff, edgy, and KORNESQUE. actually there’s, like, one Deftones song I think is OK.
  
• The absolute hubris of these tech companies coming up with all these complicated screen lock techniques for smartphones as if there's anything worth looking at on someone else's smartphone to begin with (or any smartphone, for that matter).
  
• I give absolutely zero fucks about the opinion of any quote-unquote YouTuber.
  
• when you're walking down the street and somebody has their window open you can see them just sitting on the couch watching television and it reminds you of seeing some sort of NPC in a video game, just all mindless no soul. it's very weird watching people when they think they're alone and they're doing nothing.
  
• It's funny how being a partisan hack can also look the same as being illiterate, for example, RFK recently did an interview where he said he was going to create wellness farms, and people then said that he was going to send people against their will to those farms, which is just a partisan spin on the article cuz they don't like RFK. but ultimately what it looks like is that they're just incompetent or unable to read or unable to comprehend things. so in a way partisan hackery kinda mimics stupidity.
  
• eat something long enough it starts to taste bad.
  
• the whole system of art critiquing, like reviews, and competitions etc., undermines the spirit of artistic creation; article title “is Sally Rooney a literary phenomenon or a bluff?” who actually cares? writers write because they love to write, it's an art; no one who hates writing writes a novel, unless they’re a masochist; it a huge time investment. looking at art from this “is this good or bad” dichotomy is moronic, go become a sports announcer or something. fuck off.
  
• the ridiculousness of the the fox football robot.
  
• the dichotomies are killing you.
  
• I've never gotten along with a person wearing a cowboy hat.
  
• remnants of anorexia from youth.
  
• In regard to Thurston Moore's first solo album “psychic hearts” last FM user X writes “every fucker had this in 95. I still have it on my iPhone and I don't even pretend to listen to it. it's kind of a necessary weight.”
  
• It seems to me that writers often write about subjects or topics or goals that they aspire to themselves, for example, David Foster Wallace wrote about how evil TV was or whatever, but was addicted to TV himself; what this tells us is that David Foster Wallace was kind of writing to himself when he wrote about the societal rot that TV could eventually cause—even though he probably was addressing other people with you pronouns, he was really talking to himself. he was saying to himself “you are addicted to TV, and these are the reasons being addicted to TV is bad, and you need to stop.” similar to my essay titled “Become Immersive.”
  
• Experian: I do not care about my fico score. fuck off.
  
• bottom of a chocolate bar like the sole of a shoe.
  
• in America everyone is in debt to someone. if you have a car, you're in debt. we are a debt society. maybe this is the case in all societies with money, who knows.
  
• note that guy on Bluesky is the perfect example of a mindless consumer who has been programmed to be resistant to any criticism to his brainrot consumerist lifestyle, offended at even the slightest hint of criticism, even when the criticism is not directed at them directly, “i read this and couldn’t help feeling targeted,” ok maybe that’s because you think that you yourself are guilty of all the shit that was called out in the thing you just read? jesus. the lack of awareness. entire personality just video games and movies. could go to their profile right now and it would be full of pictures of video game cases and movie shit. no depth beyond the latest release in their favorite commercial video game series.
  
• as a writer, publishing your writing for a large audience, especially essay or opinion pieces, implies a massive ego; and that’s OK, if the writer admits to it and tempers it, but that is usually not the case.
  
• The founder of Braintree is trying to reverse age himself, yet he looks like a pale ghost with skin that has been stretched on over a frail skeleton.
  
• I learned the opposite lesson from the story of The Grinch.
  
• Gaius Baltar is the main character of BSG.
  
• headline “ChatGPT prompts to cut your workload by 50%” or How to Fast Track Your Way to Unemployment.
  
• “poorly cut jacket; sleeves too short…” do people really notice this stupid shit?
  
• the sorrow that comes with losing a loved one, and then the prolonged kinda forced sadness that comes from the realization that you are starting to care less and less about said loved one’s death, as if you are beating yourself up because you are no longer as sorrowful as you once were, as if you should continue to feel a deep sorrow for the deceased forever to honor their memory or something, even though said loved one is thoroughly dead and does not—cannot—care. this is a guilt loop.
  
• neighbor was burning leafs, which blanketed my backyard in smoke, which made the sunlight come down in pillars like the rays of heaven (or something).
  
• article title: “Brandon Sanderson knows he's risking everything with Wind and Truth.” What? what is “everything?” he's certainly not risking his millions of dollars, or actually anything at all. stupid headline.
  
• cheap tacky T-shirts that relish in mediocrity and bad behavior, stuff like “I've quit more things than you've started” or “fresh sarcasm served daily” or “if you find me offensive then i suggest you quit finding me” &c. &c. and the people who wear them.
  
• people who smell like the backside of a McDonald’s.
  
• seems to me that the more praise for an author on the book jacket, the worse the author is. this is usually a reliable metric.
  

#notes #fragments