forrest

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

• dress for success; die a mess
• no one wants to do nothing, it just ends up that way
• Google/apple have yet to solve for the whole connected-to-wifi-but-pulling-out-of-the-driveway problem, which seems like a simple thing to fix—but what do I know? (not much) also i could see someone saying something like “uh, you shouldn't be on your phone while pulling out of your driveway to begin with???”
• “did mister shouty really be sausages”
• when I think of “video games,” I think of the color green. it is interesting, the colors that pop into your head upon thinking of things.
• with writing, I have a real fear of stagnation or “regression of skill,” which makes me afraid to stop writing for any prolonged period of time (even though sometimes I want to take a break) for fear of this kinda regression-stagnation stuff happening. idk if this is an irrational fear or not, as once I went a month or so without writing, and, afterwards, wrote some pretty OK stuff, almost as if the break “refreshed” me in some way, but idk if this example is the rule or the exception. there’s also this question of “who are you trying to impress anyway?” and the answer to that, I think, is myself—not you. but then that calls into question why i even post my writing for public consumption at all, and then my cool persona starts to fall apart now doesn’t it?
• “i hear you telephone thing listening in” —Mark E. Smith
• “tea bags release millions of plastic particles during brewing.”
• if there were only one small pocket of the universe in which life could exist, we would be there, for how else would we exist? this is not profound or deep.
• sometimes i like traveling, but it always changes my “life vibe” when returning home, and this new “life vibe” settles in after a week or so. sometimes new life vibes override very good old life vibes that i don’t want to be overridden…
• superstition alters behavior, becomes self-fulfilling. superstition should never be underestimated.
• the whale is the hero
• SHADOWBONG
• honesty repels the dishonest; dishonesty attracts the dishonest; this remains true in all walks, all fields, all arts, all everything.
• “a recapture of a recapture of a recapture of a recapture”
• it is my opinion that The Verve’s 1997 album Urban Hymns has influenced popular music with its sweeping strings and grandiose romantic sound more than any Oasis album ever has, see later acts like James Blunt, The Fray, Coldplay, all of which sound like “Bittersweet Symphony” or “Sonnet” or “The Drugs Don't Work” in some way or other. The Verve, while gaining massively popularity due to one song—that being “Bittersweet Symphony”—is one of those underrated-overrated type things, i.e., everyone knows about them on some level, less people seem to know their true impact or significance.
• I want to experience everything for the first time forever
• have a merry AI-generated Xmas!!
• sometimes i feel so thin and sometimes i feel so fat; i know it shouldn't matter but it does.
• HEADLINE: “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably.” RANDOM ARTICLE’S QUESTION: “why even bother writing poetry anymore then?” MY ANSWER: what a stupid fucking question.
• I am once again asking that Nintendo make its online service (which I pay for) even somewhat usable, instead of 10-seconds-of-input-lag and always-disconnecting.
• adding is subtracting, because you are losing the two things being added—you are “subtracting” the original things being added? subtracting them from existence??? think of, like, hypothetically, fusing two people together: you get a new person but you lose the original two, hence adding is subtracting. (is this some Terrence Howard shit?)
• people in my neighborhood spend thousands of dollars on elaborate home security systems that are p. much only comprised of a bunch of cameras around their home DESPITE THE FACT that a single piece of cloth (AKA a mask) can thwart their whole setup lol
• I'm always doing everything as if on a timer as if I know that my time will soon be up, as if my life will soon be over and I just need to complete these things within this certain amount of time so I can get on to the next cool thing, because otherwise I might miss out on that next cool thing, run out of time or whatever. when really, I wish I could just fucking relax. I can never relax. my mind is always 100mph. it kinda sucks.
• It's interesting how when you're playing a video game on a television set, you somehow filter out the bezel of the television, get sucked in. in fact, you filter out the entire television unless you choose not to, consciously, it is just a weird thing, like no need for a VR headset, really, because your mind is its own VR headset.
• something existing “in a vacuum” undermines the vacuum, making the vacuum no longer a vacuum??
• imagine a pokemon-like game in which you have to actually feed, selter, train, and play with every creature you catch, elsewise they run away or die or attack you or something (i.e., an unfun game).
• sometimes I wonder how I even write sentences; it's more like vomiting words then figuring out where the punctuation goes in a way that only makes sense to me post-hoc.
• conservative economics (i.e., “reaganomics” p. much) dictates that lower taxes on the wealthy/corporations 1) lowers prices on products because the company has to pay less in taxes (and thus can afford to sell their goods at a lower cost) and 2) creates jobs downstream due to the saved money that is able to be reallocated into the job market (or something [this is assuming that the execs don't just pocket all the saved money, of course, lol]); but, when we consider Trump’s tariff plan (a tariff is basically just a trade tax on another country that’s doing business with us) which dictates HIGHER TAX on countries trading with us, the conservative logic is opposite of Reaganomics here, as if increasing the taxes on other countries is going to produce better goods or make more money for us (when conservatives don’t believe this works for at-home American businesses). in reality, those tarrifed countries will likely just sell their stuff to another country and then that other country will sell it to us—the US—thus creating unnecessary middlemen who need a cut of the profits thereby increasing prices in the long run. So, for conservative thinkers it’s: at home: LOWER TAXES GOOD; overseas: LOWER TAXES BAD. so, you then have to ask a conservative, are lower taxes good or bad? because they are not consistent here. make up ur mind! (perhaps they would say different circumstances dictate different taxes???)
• Xena: “The rules of survival. number one: If you can run, run; number two: If you can't run, surrender, and then run; number three: If you're outnumbered, let them fight each other, while you run; number four: four is where you talk your way out of it. the moment you pick up a sword, you become a target. and the moment you kill, everything changes.”
• the Animal Crossing MC keeps beehives in his pocket. think about it.
• “What do you despise? By this you are truly known.”—Dune
• football: the ancient caveman comes out
• if you need an example of misleading headlines, look no further than gaming journalism, stuff like: “New Oblivion Remake Just Months Away From Completion!” But when you click into it, the article is about a fan-made Skyrim mod recreating the world of Oblivion; while the article headline is not technically a “lie,” it’s still incredibly misleading, written to make the reader believe a new official Oblivion remake is being developed/released by Bethesda, so that the reader will click into the article. it’s all about greed and whatnot blah blah blah whatever
• no amount of likes or shares will give you a personality
• i can never see my children growing up in the moment, yet every moment i am in the aftermath of their growing up, and that makes me profoundly sad when i happen to think about it.
• time, in quaaludes and red wine
• if my life were a role-playing game, mr. beast would be the final boss.
• the paradox of these “get your paycheck early” lending tools (one of them being backed by the final boss of the role-playing game), is that those who need their paycheck “early” don't need to be taking out loans to get their paycheck “early” to begin with (which is what getting your paycheck “early” actually is [the service fronts you the money early, expecting you to pay it back when your paycheck actually arrives]), because they (the people getting their paychecks early) don't have the money to begin with hence needing their paycheck early which they will have to pay back eventually and they'll probably be paying it back with another advanced paycheck—they are just kicking the can down the road—thus the cycle of poor persists.
• Spotify seriously needs to separate studio albums from live albums, see The Fall's album list on Spotify, it's a fucking mess, impossible to navigate.
• “Georgia Power is an investor-owned, tax-paying public utility that serves more than 2.4 million customers in all but four of Georgia's 159 counties” this seems like some weird equivocation to get around the fact that Georgia Power is basically just a private for-profit corporation??? maybe I'm stupid?? are not all companies “investor owned?” isn't an investor just a shareholder on some level?
• The difference between “these” and “those” is that “these” is used to refer to things that are close to the speaker, while “those” is used to refer to things that are far away; also, “these” is the plural of “this,” and “those” is a plural of the word “that,” supposedly.
• we dressed ourselves in shoegaze and grunge
• she could play “Computer Blue” on the viola.
• “there is something beautiful between life and death.”
• sales pitch: “don't you want to wear a smartphone on your wrist that requires a smartphone in your pocket to function properly? it's not redundant at all!!”
• something something melty chocolate
• w/ my family, the onus is always on me to visit them, never the other way around
• the early days of wifi-enabled 2-way video-audio baby monitors, when codekiddies were hacking into the software, talking to your kids. lol.
• “you know what they say about honey bears when you shave off all their baby hair, you have a hairy-minded pink bare bear.” —Lou Reed, “Andy’s Chest”
• I can't read about or watch someone play Oblivion without immediately wanting to play Oblivion myself, almost pathological, uncontrollable; such a majestic, bizarre, incredible computer game; you walk up to an NPC and she's just all like “the horses are gone. big mystery. figure it out.” (actual dialogue.) and suddenly you’re on an epic adventure that will likely end up in some sort of drug skooma den or a daedra sex dungeon.
• “i don't have a home to go back to; all i have is my cat.”
• Andre 3000’s performance of “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter Wears A 3000® Button Down Embroidered” on Fallon is transcendent and everyone should watch it.
• i can't stand products that try to market directly at me and my sensibilities, out of principle alone. “a new adventure…just for you…” thus i refuse to go on adventures period. in this way, i am almost just as controlled by advertising as everyone else.
• article title “are atoms conscious?”, i sincerely hope not, otherwise we have yet another ethical nightmare on our hands.
• Roblox is a copyright nightmare (daughter plays this game with popular top-10 pop charts songs coded into the games, obvs without permission), which would be kinda punk rock if the entire Roblox ethos wasn't centered around exploiting children and their dumb parents.
• procrastination is not always a depression response. not everything is a depression response. people can be distracted or lacking motivation w/o being depressed. online discourse around mental health nowadays seems to be “YOU ARE MISERABLE. BELIEVE ME. EVERYTHING YOU DO IS MOTIVATED BY SADNESS. AND YOU HAVE MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS, FOR REAL.” seems kinda self-fulfilling.
• there are some relationships that I have irrevocably ruined. and, try as i might to reconcile them, the other person just refuses to give me another chance; maybe this is necessary, to learn from my mistakes, to forge critical self-analysis and, hopefully, better myself. maybe this is a normal part of being a thinking human person who is not perfect. (careful not to use this as an excuse or justification for being a dick.) although, i would also think people should have the capacity for forgiveness.
• my entire writing portfolio is trying to capture something that cannot be put into words
• (because I suck at writing)
• “persona games” are not a personality type
• my make-or-break date question: “show me ur Spotify wrapped”
• in ff7 disc2, after Jenova-DEATH battle: select the option to let Yuffie, the materia thief, hang on to the black materia, while Cloud confronts the real Sephiroth, but she responds with “I don't want anything to do with the black materia!” which isn’t consistent with her character, as she loves all materia (being the materia thief, remember)
• consider this: outrageous debt on the Target Credit Card. now consider this: “Most creditors can only garnish wages or benefits after a court issues a judgment saying that you owe the debt and that the creditor can garnish.” therefore there is a possibility that a business you made a purchase with (Target, in this example) can, in a roundabout way, garnish your wages, regardless of where you work. debtor society is crazy.
• the next Animal Crossing game should focus on minimizing the number of menus you have to navigate and how many prompts you need to accept to get stuff done; the “nook miles” thing, in which you have to pull up your nook phone, navigate to the nook miles icon, press confirmation button, navigate to the completed nook miles entry, press confirmation button again, press the confirmation yet again to collect the nook miles points, press back button to get out of the nook miles menu, and press back button one last time to get out of the nook phone is just all too much. kinda infuriating, almost, when you really think about it. for a game w/ primary focus on vibing-out in chill environments, going through all these menus really takes one out of the zen headspace. solution is easy: give nook miles points automatically upon completion of necessary task. also, to save even more time, learn DIY recipes automatically instead of having to use a DIY card (which requires many prompts to use as well)
• pyroclastic surges
• From a utilitarian perspective, we can't just go around extrajudicially killing people we don't like even if they did something wrong because this sets a terrible precedent: if we took it to its logical conclusion, people would just be killing each other all the time in the street; like it doesn't check out
• i just assume everyone is full of shit, and that has been working out well for me.
• there is a chill wind blowing through Avalon
• people you hate have power over you
• TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOURSELF
• sooner or later the lies we tell ourselves become truth (so deep)
• “in a dark room you see more than you think.”
• if your favorite video game characters showing up as rare pulls in mobile gacha games doesn't convince you that you're being manipulated by massive multimedia companies then you're lost and nothing can save you
• Business problems are self-created, it seems like, I don't know how to explain this, but it seems to me like if there's a problem in some data or in a spreadsheet then the root of that problem is always 100% the fact that we want the data/spreadsheet to begin with, the fact that we conjured this system in which we need this data for some weird reason. The flip side of this is that we've conjured this weird weird system that supplies people with jobs and thus livelihood, even though it (the jobs and output of the work) is essentially meaningless; like if we consider a call center, for example, what is really the impact on society or humanity as a whole? What is a call center that takes customer service calls doing for me or for society—really? other than just moving money around? it’s almost as if all white-collar work is just really complicated money laundering or something; esoteric goods and services being exchanged that are not tied to natural resources at all. I don't know I'm not explaining this very well, and i’m probably very wrong about the whole thing, because surely there must be a material resource at the very beginning of the work thread?
• sometimes i pull the collar of my shirt up over my nose and pretend i’m a ninja
• stairs make a case for accession
• shut the fuck up about the Final Fantasy IX remake already, it's been literally ten plus years. it's not happening. at best we'll get a “remaster” like ff8, which everyone will hate. Square Enix is garbage now, stop pretending otherwise.
• “you lied your way into the company of good people.”
• i like baggy clothes because they hide my true form
• “caught up in the conflict between his brain and his tail.”
• these people who seem to think that technology should work 100% of the time as if it's not created by humans but instead created by some magical techno god that has no flaws and is just perfect; imagine the disappointment these hypothetical people must feel every single day when something doesn't go their way, like when their phone closes an app due to an error or their window freezes in their operating system. such disappointment these people must feel constantly. unbearable, almost, it has to be. these people’s brains: shattered, daily. their day just ruined. It seems to me that you should have realistic expectations, otherwise every day is going to be a fucking nightmare for you.
• kids that call me sir give off hardcore “dad beats me” vibes
• a prison guard who drags a metal pipe against the bars hoping that the noise disturbs the prisoner also disturbs himself, one would think
• 12/11: today is a rainy day. the sky is covered in a blanket of gray; the sun shines sick through the fabric; a faint yellow on all things, like looking through a jaundiced eye. i am motivated and focused.
• I have a pretty low sex drive, maybe that's why I have such a nihilistic outlook on life: I lack a strong survival instinct (lol)
• NINTENDO SWITCH NOTE: JoyCon screenshot button should be on the opposite JoyCon; as it is now, the screenshot button is on the same JoyCon as the left thumbstick, which is almost always used for movement, so you can't take a screenshot while moving your characters around without doing some weird maneuver with your other hand.
• FLCL is overflowing with existential slapstick.
• “nothing can happen until you swing the bat … a real slugger imagines an arch in their heart, an arch all the way to heaven.”
• In Animal Crossing New Horizons, you shouldn't be able to see the curvature of the planet, it doesn't make sense, unless each player’s island is a small satellite moon or something.
• “tomorrow remember yesterday”
• Earth post nuclear Holocaust be like “we trading ancient iPods like CDs up in here” (you know, because they have old music saved on their hard discs or whatever, and they probably last longer than other physical media? idk, this is a stupid idea)
• recently I've been telling myself to write shorter, less serious, less hardcore essays, but i just can't stop; whenever i get going, i go 100mph, sometimes it's so fast that i crash head first into a wall but somehow don't realize it until months later when i reread the piece and think “what the fuck?”
• you have to have dreams to have a dream come true
• Nintendolife is a nasty website wherein you cannot tell when articles start and stop due to the insane amount of ads all over the place. sometimes there are evn articles superimposed atop other articles??
• Zelda arm tat is guaranteed to get you at least one or two precious Reddit goldz
• the appeal of becoming part of a company's C-Suite, i imagine, is similar to the appeal of being a leader of a country or something. it's a power thing. i've met several c-suiters and VPs and directors, and they all speak of other companies as if they're other countries waiting to be conquered or forged temporary alliance with.
• future essay/game plans: finish FF7 essays, replay Oblivion on Xbox 360 whilst pretending to be 16 again, finish reading Dune, write Oblivion essay, play Breath of the Wild???, write Dune essay (maybe, no idea what this essay would actually be about [aside from being about Dune, obviously], write BotW essay????
• i would like to maximize my time on this planet, like, minimize time spent scrolling screens, instead use that time on the stuff I actually enjoy doing; reading, writing, mostly, but also games and music. removing social media from my life has been super positive in this regard, but was not a 100% thing.
• something about the formatting of Screenrant (and similar likely-AI-generated journals) that makes it impossible to read the article, instead always scrolling through trying to find the info the headline hinted at asap
• UNREGISTERED HYPERCAM 2
• no-internal-monologue people should qualify for disability
• seems to me that everybody thinks the world's going insane, but everyone thinks it's going insane for a different reason; and I think that the insanity is actually caused by the fact that everyone thinks the world is going insane for a different reason
• It might be cool to be a cat but how would I farm dopamine from screens
• Animal Crossing houses, all rooms are all perfect squares, kinda jarring after you realize it; real houses have all sorts of different shaped rooms and whatnot. Rune Factory and that one Disney game have the same square-room limitation.
• “’There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear, ’the Wings singer said …” QUOTE bizarre descriptor here. “Wings singer” like that's what Paul is most well known for or something?
• all food smells bring me to the verge of gagging
• transcend the mask or become it
• it takes exactly the length of David Bowie’s song “Blackstar” to drive from my home to the nearest playground
• looking out upon the ocean makes me feel uncontained, like an endless blue is calmly spilling out of me; in these moments, the burden spills out with the blue.
• “they burn you with their radiant smiles.”
• CUT FROM “CHIEF EXECUTIVE SLAUGHTERER”: partially due to the increased storage capacity of Sony’s CD-ROM format compared to Nintendo’s cartridge format (yet the game still required three discs, which makes for one big fat jewel case that evokes unfiltered nostalgia essence in the brains of all geeky millennials), but mostly due to Sony Music’s sales team getting the Square team drunk on saké every night until Square agreed to drop Nintendo for Sony exclusivity[1] (and this exclusivity lasted from August 2, 1996 [with the release of Tobal No. 1] all the way to December 13, 2002 [with the release of Chocobo Land: A Game of Dice for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance])
• “we would have gotten” vs. “we would have got.” the former is British-English, the latter is American-English, both technically correct; this is really a matter of preference, but “gotten” sounds nasty to me, almost super American-southern, like you can almost imagine a good ol’ southern boy saying something like, “ain't for Trump we wouldn't gotten them good jobs back” or something.
• CUT FROM “CHIEF EXECUTIVE SLAUGHTER”: (or some replica of the Masamune, I forget all the exact details; for you see—[and sorry to get all nerdy on you here]—it was a copy of Sephiroth being controlled by Sephiroth being controlled by JENOVA who actually killed President Shinra [which, in my mind, is still just Sephiroth killing President Shinra, but I’m sure there’s some Final Fantasy VII fanatic out there who would disagree])
• if atoms never truly touch then how will we ever be able to touch grass
• eclectic manifestations
• Google AI Glasses: the future of tech ... or the future of stupid?
• seems like we're all kinda pavlov’d to ease our bladders a lil’ bit within 10 feet of a toilet (maybe it's just me??)
• the fallacy that is believing that writing about your personal issues resolves those personal issues. being able to critically analyze yourself is good and all, but being able to improve yourself is a whole ‘nother thing entirely.
• stopped wearing a smartwatch about a year ago, and I see no reason why I would need one at all ever now. It seems. seems I only wore a smartwatch because I thought it was cool and trendy to have this circle with digital stuff on it on my arm, but i was actually just implanting corporate spyware on my arm, and it's always tethered to a phone which has literally the same information on it, so what you're really doing is just wearing some unnecessary accessory on your wrist that mirrors your phone one-to-one; how the tech companies tricked everyone into wearing one of these is really beyond my comprehension. just absolutely fucking wild.
• oh no, i’m getting smashed on the Pavement again.
• perhaps love is a sacrifice one makes gladly.
• top-10 lists only serve to validate or agitate
• “indieheads, gregheads, hiphopheads” i do not identify as a head or believe that i even have a head
• I MUST PLAY OBLIVION AGAIN. WITH PROPER CONTROLLER SUPPORT. ON CONSOLE.
• In a way I feel like fandoms cheapen the thing that they're a fandom of, for example, the anime flcl has this excellent mystique to it and kind of postmodern weirdness, but when you go on like a subreddit, for example, you have all these people who think they know what it's about; they're making covers of the songs and posting them on YouTube; they're doing THEME DEEP DIVES; they're posting all sorts of weird fan art; which is all fine, but it removes some of the mystique of the of the show a little bit, almost as if it's cheapening your original experience with the show in some way like you're over analyzing it or something; “too much of a good thing” or something. it's kinda like listening to an album for the first time without knowing anything about the band; there's a certain mysteriousness there; the imagination runs wild with endless possibilities; and then, after you learn about the band and its members and its history, something dies, the magic becomes mundane (in a way), less supernatural, almost.
• “Phoebe Bridgers claims Marilyn Manson has a ‘rape room’ in his house.” not surprising. (see Marilyn Manson lyric that reads “I have a rape room in my house.”)
• I'm seeing 2020-era memes on linkedin, like that man progressively putting on clown makeup; Linkedin boom booms adopt the refuse and runoff years late.
• everything is better in the mind.
• wanna go down to the charger park and throw tennis balls at Teslas with me?
• superstitions persists because we watch so much TV that we have been conditioned into seeing everything as poorly written foreshadowing and other tv tropes sha sha sha
• majority of people on LinkedIn are marketing/sales people pretending that their jobs are more meaningful than “i send emails all day.” (i.e., 0 meaningful)
• going on holiday doesn't help w/ burnout because you know that the thing burning you out will still be there upon return
• adult size long-sleeve button-up is a trench coat on a toddler (size matters)
• false memories caused by recurring dreams
• somebody stop me from buying a refurbished Xbox 360 so I can play Oblivion (on console, like during the good ol’ days) and Fable 2
• the old ladies at the library bookstore
• “So im assuming we all know who the crazy frog is and how we all grew up listening to his bangers but did it ever occur to anyone to ask why the fuck does that thing have a visible penis? And its not even a proper cock and balls, its just a really short stub coming out between his legs. I understand that the frog is a male animal and therefore must have a penis but the question is why the animators of the frog had to add it in to be so uncomfortably visible.”
• “In February 2005, viewers submitted a number of complaints to the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regarding Jamster's advertising campaign, complaining that Crazy Frog appeared to have a visible penis and scrotum. Some parents claimed that it was inappropriate for children. There were also complaints regarding the frequency with which the advertisement appeared on television, reportedly up to twice an hour across most of the day, with some channels showing it more than once per commercial break.”
• CUT FROM “ON THE PHENOMENON KNOWN AS LOVE”: ... who was once into Ben Shapiro facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings type YouTube videos but has since come to his senses—meaning he went through his coming-of-age alt-right libertarian phase that many young 21st-century boys slide into (including myself) but eventually grow out of once they realize that laws actually serve some important purpose, such as preventing people from cheating and killing each other, and that true laissez-faire capitalism leads to McDonald’s developing McNukes and McOrbitalLasers—none of which is really important to the story or the subject matter of this essay.
• there are only two major human epochs: pre-fidget toys and post-fidget toys.
• “According to The Guardian, Jamster bought 73,716 spots across all TV channels in May alone — an average of nearly 2,378 slots daily — at a cost of about £8 million, just under half of which was spent on ITV. 87% of the population saw the Crazy Frog adverts an average of 26 times, 15% of the adverts appeared twice during the same advertising break and 66% were in consecutive ad breaks. An estimated 10% of the population saw the advert more than 60 times. This led to many members of the population finding the Crazy Frog, as its original name suggests, immensely irritating.”
• one could argue that crazy frog’s exposed genitalia is/was the craziest thing about crazy frog, and by censoring crazy frog’s crazy genitalia, you are, in fact, neutering crazy frog’s craziness on some level—making the crazy frog less crazy.
• children's pageant shows are seriously fucked up—nothing else to add at this time
• Trump has hat hair in one video and now there are hundreds of articles analyzing his quote-unquote new hairstyle. why do we give this man so much attention and power? lol.
• the word VANITY means both “excessive self-admiration” and “worthlessness” or “futility,” like: “the vanity of seeking perfection.” idk, i think this is interesting, the duality of the same word, kind of thing. yinyang really
• she's got Ella Purnell eyes
• hard to keep your soul intact in this digital age, wherein every tech company is competing for a portion of it.
• EXISTENTIAL SLAPSTICK
• “I'm not racist, I just happen to dislike all music written and/or performed by black people.”
• “viewers of quantum uncertainty are also subject to uncertainty”
• employee success metrics measured by the employees themselves, like curbside pick-up speed calculated by the time the employee hits the delivered button on their order system or whatever
• that soul-shattering moment when you're a kid. seeing an old friend that you haven't seen in a while, and you're intent on doing the things you used to do with that friend—like play video games or climb trees or whatever—but your friend has “grown up,” has a girlfriend, is smoking joints constantly, all they want to do is go to parties, drink and fuck—and you're left feeling lost and sad and innocent like a baby
• i wear two watches because I am very concerned about the time i'm wasting
• “the secret Mona Lisa hides behind her smile.”
• laughed out loud at the ending of the Doctor Who 2024 Christmas special; Steven Moffat: “i’m just going to write some bullshit here real quick” like i can't even, you have to watch it.
• “MySpace lost all music uploaded from 2003 to 2015; About a year ago, all music on MySpace from 2015 and older stopped working. At first MySpace said they were working on the issue, but they eventually admitted they lost all the data (and apparently didn't have backups?)”
• I wrote and recorded several songs for my high school bands Golly Gee and Sailor Uranus that are forever lost to time due to the bullet above this one—one of those songs, an instrumental titled “Mapping Geography,” was quite good, imo.
• tamagotchis have a discipline meter; if this discipline meter is low, they will beep at you constantly, and the only way to increase their discipline is by using the little YELL option—yelling at them when they beep at you, which, to me, is a pretty weird endorsement of how to discipline a living being, although yellings and beating do produce something that may seem like discipline but really this discipline is actually fear masquerading as discipline, and the reason you don't want fear masquerading as discipline is because the first moment this fearful creature can kill you or run away or whatever, they will do so, because underneath that fear is really just hatred, because you keep yelling and hurting them.
• most depressing headline i have seen in awhile: “I’m 65, have 0 savings and can’t afford to retire — but I don’t want to work until I die. What can I do?”
• “Be a Country Singer to Escape Trailer Park Tycoon” (real Roblox “experience” [Roblox’s word for player-created games])
• I used to take fish oil, but it ran out and I haven't refilled it partly because I don't think it does anything. I think it's all some sort of weird marketing scam. but the thing about supplements is that they affect you in such minuscule ways that it's hard to tell if any of them do anything, like it seems pretty matter of fact tha, like, the basic vitamins, like, you know, DO SOMETHING, as they are needed by the human body—but fish oil? I doubt fish oil is needed by the human body. they say it helps brain functionality but it's impossible to tell, so therefore impossible to validate, so therefore a scam product most likely?
• fashion is totally irrelevant to my life; i find Crocs to be comfortable and convenient.
• Cut from “On the Phenomenon Known as Love”: I wanted something intellectual (which, in a way, could be interpreted as just another power fantasy—a different type of power fantasy, maybe: a power fantasy of the mind)
• when I was a teenager, i thought tragedy added to my character, made me cool, so i made it up.
• WHY DOES THE COFFEE MAKER NEED TO BE WIFI ENABLED
• there's a mall in my city that is totally derelict and dead and sad and it's very much so like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles online play
• story idea: derelict mall that is actually a starship wherein a few people are trapped for some reason
• an empty mall is the most frightening of liminal spaces. 80s-pop hits seem to be playing faintly in the background at all times, despite there being no speakers in sight.
• when you're on a long vacation from work but halfway through you start thinking that you're halfway through and you start dreading the countdown back to work thus the rest of the vacation is tinged with this feeling of dreading-going-back-to-work thus the second half of the vacation is ruined, like you might as well just be back at work at that point.
• New Year's resolutions are cheap, done only to make one feel better about themselves; real significant change in a person only happens when a real significant event primes such a change; a number on a calendar is not a significant event; being told you have heart disease is (for example).
• “Being a billionaire is no longer cool, so where does that leave Batman?”
• NEW YEAR NEW DESKTOP WALLPAPER
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: It's like the redolence of falling leaves in autumn, knowing that the cycle has just begun—if that sort of thing could be captured in video game format.
• CUT FROM “LOST IN THE MIASMA”: Going forward, any use of the pronoun “you” refers to myself—the author of this essay—not you, the reader. (And any use of the pronoun “we” refers to myself and myself.) I do this because—in my personal opinion as a very amateur writer—using “you” as opposed to “I” sounds better in certain contexts, structurally and rhetorically. And no, this is not just a clever way to cover my ass from criticism like, “You can’t make that judgment about everyone!” or “How dare you?” or “Everyone is different!” or “I feel targeted by this essay” or “This feels like hardcore projection!” &c. &c.; this is just me outright telling you that I am, in fact, projecting. So, you are free to continue reading the rest of this essay as if I am just going crazy over here talking to myself in the second person, as if none of the stuff written hereinafter applies to you at all; and that’s fine, I’m sure that you—the reader (specifying “the reader” here on purpose to make sure you know that I am indeed talking to you—the reader—not myself [in this one specific instance])—are simply immune to everything outlined in the rest of this essay and that you are, like, very with-it and empowered and in control of your life and totally zen and happy or whatever; and that’s fine, I’m not doubting you (if it sounded like I was doubting you, I apologize, this whole chapter is a stream-of-consciousness thing and that’s just kinda how it came out), but if you do happen to relate to anything written from this point onward, well, I would be glad, as we would be making a human connection simply through the written word, which, while not better than an in-person connection, is something. (Note: This disclaimer also applies retroactively—not only to the previous chapters of this essay, but to all of my essays [and future essays].) Anyway, moving on.
• this episode of fragments is brought you to by: my insanity
• note that you—the reader—did not prevent me from buying a renewed Xbox360 and a copy of Oblivion (which I asked you to do earlier in these fragments), as both things are now sitting on my desk, and I have been obsessing over them uncontrollably.
• to hear the wings of kynareth upon the digital winds as i step out from the sewers and look upon the heartlands. (thank you.)
• oblivion: my oblivion
• close shut the jaws of nostalgia

#notes #fragments