forrest

*presented as is, yeah

• i have a real nice water tumbler, it’s black, stainless steel or something, my wife got it for me. water tastes good in that tumbler, and the same water tastes different in a different tumbler, so my tumbler has this special quality, in my mind. i’ve notcied that some people aren’t happy with their tumblers; they want all sorts of stuff, like the next best tumbler, or the next best car, or a bigger house, and a pool in the backyard. why does it seem like some people can only enjoy stuff they haven’t got? why can’t people just enjoy the tumblers they have now?
  
• my favorite pokemon is Togepi on account of all the potential—and the nice triangles
  
• It’s almost like, if you love something, you should leave it alone, set it free.
  
• some bloggers literally be like: “computer, write me the most overwrought fucking bullshit you can think of about my dead grandma. thanks.”
  
• “all morons hate it when you call them a moron.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• when I was young, i felt like everyone was looking at me. now, I feel like no one looks at me ever. I don't know which is worse.
  
• every medical drama when something uplifting happens: analytic piano melody
  
• lost phone like a phantom limb
  
• “Greetings, novitiate, and know first a reassurance: Mankar Camoran was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic.” —Mythic Dawn Commentaries
  
• democracy is doomed because anyone who seeks office, even through an electoral process, is predisposed to the pursuit of power, and the pursuit of power is inherently corrupting, and the desire for power is a huge red flag, as you know in your deep down places
  
• she felt far away like a person who is far away.
  
• “doordash partners with klarna to provide ‘eat now, pay later’ service.” ya, now I can take out a loan for my taco bell?
  
• pretend pretund
  
• page 193, Holden talks about wanting to become a catcher in the Rye, catching children before they accidentally fall off a cliff—which is metaphorically kind of what Holden is doing in this novel, being a stupid kid and maybe falling off an existential cliff; also, in the tarot, the fool card, the fool is about to walk off a cliff, and there's a dog barking/nipping at his ankles, trying to stop/warn him from falling off the cliff, so the dog In the fool tarot could be considered a Catcher in the Rye, of sorts, for Holden.
  
• you know that tense feeling you get in your mid-to-upper back when you're in a dark area? it's like this physical sensation of fear. sometimes it's predictable, like in a dark area you've never been in before, but other times it can randomly happen, like when you're outside your own home, taking the garbage cans to the road at midnight or whatever—this sudden sensation of fear in your back that seems to come out of nowhere, as if your body somehow knows that someone (or something) is watching you from a nearby bush or something. idk. just a weird thing. maybe some sort of survival instinct, but sometimes it seems to kick in when there's no actual threat around, as if the survival instinct is defective in some way—maybe because it hasn't been truly needed for several ancestral generations due to the relative peace of first-world life? the instinct is out of practice, dull? it's all out of whack or something? or maybe, when it does happen, seemingly at random, when you're taking out the trash at night or whatever, maybe someone actually is watching you. maybe our bodies do actually know when someone is watching us with malevolent intent, even from long distances? but that seems a little supernatural. and that also means that, just now, just before i got the inspiration to write this note, someone was watching me in my backyard… or perhaps the sensation just exists to keep us in a heightened state of awareness in the dark, in general—that seems more likely.
  
• anti-war is anti-orgasm
  
• when i was like 14 I had the coolest The Cure t-shirt, it was white with purple and blue watercolor paint splashes on it, and it had that silhouette-like pic of Robert Smith with his back turned with guitar hanging with the big shoes and crazy hair (same pic as the one on Join the Dots); I got it from Junkman’s Daughter in Little Five Points, downtown Atlanta. no idea what happened to it.
  
• America is Mordor. Americans are orcs.
  
• one of the core American values is hypocrisy. I don't need to explain this; you always know
  
• Kirsten Dunst singing Turning Japanese; “I want a doctor to take your picture, so i can look at you from inside as well.”
  
• Bill Clinton playing sax on The Arsenio Hall Show is one of the coolest things a president has ever done (note that Clinton played the same Sax lick during every recorded instance of him playing sax, so by no means was he some expert sax dude). the whole Lincoln emancipation proclamation comes in at a close second, of course.
  
• in a world where everyone has magical powers, those born without magic powers are the most magical of all, or something—although it would probably suck.
  
• Red Hot Chili Peppers fills the room with a certain vibe that i cannot abide
  
• “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” —The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
  
• the inside of Barnes & Nobles makes me want to kill myself. support your local book stores, kids.
  
• I have to catch a glimpse of myself in every reflective surface I pass, why is that?
  
• when trump says “you don't have the cards,” what he means is: you don't have the guns. because everything is about violence to these people.
  
• cyber attacks against oligarchical structures might be one of the only ways that the average citizen can fight back nowadays—DDOS attack Tesla, Amazon, etc? i think this might be totally justified, as long as you're not harming innocent people by hacking/leaking customer info.
  
• Brand loyalty is corporate mind control
  
• idk if it’s just the fact that i’m entrenched in writing and stuff, but sometimes i read these
  
• when the night sky clouds are like chiffon, the moonlight diffuses mellow gold.
  
• sad truth of the whole Lord of the Rings cinematic universe is that Tolkien would have hated all of them—each and every film—because they stray too far from the themes of the books, are too violent, and are too Americanized. America being something Tolkien disliked immensely, what with all the industrialization, greed, and endless drive for expansion, destroying nature, the list goes on forever. so when you watch the LOTR movies, you have to kinda treat it as it’s own thing entirely, almost not related to Tolkien’s work at all.
  
• sleeping in a non-ground level room just feels different, you know? elevated.
  
• conduct yourself in a way that wouldn't be embarrassing if written about in a memoir.
  
• had a dream where I bought a “Nintendo Genesis” and, before checking out, I turned to the cashier and said “it’s not going to work is it?” then the cashier just laughed at me. what does it mean??????
  
• one of my co-workers demands people address her with the “miss” honorific which is a little fucking weird.
  
• “I thought I could organize freedom; how Scandinavian of me.” —Bjork
  
• ReviewBrah (TheReportOfTheWeek) is the millennial-era Christopher Walken of YouTube
  
• she's the type of person who would get mad at you for something you did in a dream
  
• thinking back to a good day, you might remember the songs you were listening to or way the flowers smelled or her smile against the ocean backdrop, but you never remember how your hair looked—that's why I shaved my head.
  
• you ever heard a good song titled “Untitled?” i haven't
  
• you have contracted droops
  
• cell phone manufacturers should go all in and start making dumb phones with the slogan “are the smartphones that WE MAKE consuming your life and making you feel stupid? get one of our new dumb phones instead!” capitalize on both markets, a market they made themselves lol insidious rly. see, i don’t even need a degree in marketting to come up with evil shit, it’s that easy
  
• I think about myself in the past tense often, as if I'm someone else talking about another person (me), like “oh, he was shot at the pier and he was listening to Sonic Youth when it happened.” I don't know why I do this. it feels very egotistical, though. I've done it my whole life, as far back as I can remember.
  
• “ I watched this thing on the news and now I'm really upset” maybe stop watching the news?? The greatest existential myth of our time is that the average person needs to be aware of literally everything all the time even though we have basically no say over any of it, like the media/politicians just want us all to feel really fucking bad all the time, so we don’t better ourselves
  
• “when you're young, you're a loaded gun.”
  
• i often mistype “YouTube” as “YouRube”
  
• a co-worker sent me an email with the abbreviation “tldr,” but “tldr” was hyperlinked to the Wikipedia article detailing what “tldr” actual meant, which I thought was a little fucking weird—considerate, but a waste of time, and a little presumptuous—as if people don't know what “tldr” means. i guess some don't. but who are you, the arbiter of colloquial early-2000s verbiage? fuck off
  
• “In summary, while “may” and “might” are often used interchangeably, they do have subtle differences in meaning and usage. “May” is generally used to express permission, possibility, or a high degree of certainty, while “might” is used to indicate a lower degree of possibility, hypothetical situations, or past events.”
  
• if you cross your eyes while looking at yourself in a mirror then slowly get closer to the mirror, you look like a cyclops you.
  
• msm talking heads refer to “the market” as if it's a living organism; “the messaging from the White House certainly doesn't put The Market at ease! The Market is scared! We should be nice to The Market! The Market is sensitive!” like The Market is down sort of metaphysical borg cube, a postmodern collective of all of humanity’s wishes and desires. when we're having a bad week, feeling depressed, The Market goes downnnnnn. etc.
  
• “I like to remember things my own way; how I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” —Lost Highway
  
• chewing gum brands ranked by bubblability:
  
• “good people have to fight to exist.” —Alex G, Gretel
  
• life insurance incentivizes murder???
  
• i cannot stand the saccharine “notes”-culture bullshit on Substack; “having readers doesn’t matter if you love to write; true writers don't care about likes and subscribes; the number of subscribers you have is not an indication of the quality of your writing! don't feel bad if no one reads your stuff, because you're a genius either way! …. but also, if you restack this note, I'll restack and promote your blog! but again, none of this matters, but please post a comment below with a link to your blog, and please restack this! but again, true writers shouldn't need or want to market themselves!!!” I think you kinda get the point; it's also easy to sit there and be like “look guys, likes and subs don't matter” when your account has 10k subs and hundreds of likes on every post, lol. the hypocrisy is palpable, but not only that, the unawareness—that's what really gets me; either the poster is totally unaware of their contradictions, OR they are actually grifting for subs by playing on the emotions of writers who feel like their stuff is shit because no one reads it. it’s kinda gross. similar energy to ambulance chasers or something, charlatans, idk
  
• “They serve Quarter-Pounders, they will put pounds on you.” —Wesley Willis, Rock N Roll McDonald’s
  
• I love these YouTubers that put the copyright law text/verbiage at the start of their video; is this not the most guilty-minded behavior ever? under title 17 of U.S.C. section 107 I AM NOT BREAKING ANY LAWS, I SWEAR. like they're citing the shadow proclamation or something.
  
• TIME IS A CIRCLE; what once was is again; the first and last thing you remember is womb egress, or something.
  
• The most offensive thing about the smartphone market—apart from the fact that the industry tries to get you to buy a new phone every year and they rot your brain—is the fact that every new smartphone looks exactly the fucking same. it’s the most boring-looking tech imaginable, just a fucking rectangle, with absolutely no ingenuity or creativity behind it whatsoever; that's the most offensive part about this whole thing. (maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, maybe it's not the most offensive thing, the most offensive thing would be the fact that smartphones are rotting all of our brains, but in terms of like aesthetics, this is really really bad, like imagine if every new game looked like Gears of War or something)
  
• 2/23: just sat in my office for three hours writing, only managed to get 222 words out. they are OK words, but god damn this writing thing can be fucking ridiculous sometimes.
  
• social media is an extension of capitalism. the product being sold is the self. money is replaced by social clout represented by a number. higher number is good; expansion never-ending. and social media follows the same tit-for-tat principles as any old corrupt backroom dealing. I think animal life kinda defaults to this tit-for-tat behavior, but we as humans with higher intelligence should fight against it, because it makes us feel like shit, as evidenced just by looking around and talking to people. nature is no justification for suffering. “that's just how it is” well it doesn't have to be.
  
• they're selling Nirvana shirts at Target; I'm sure Kurt would have loved that.
  
• “you have the invitation, you have not the address.” —Mythic Dawn Commentaries
  
• everything feels mundane in the moment, magical in memory.
  
• from a lore / writing perspective, Michael Kirkbride is the Elder Scrolls’ special sauce, and without him I have a hard time believing anything interesting will happen with the Elder Scrolls series going forward, in terms of stor, lore, and all that stupid crap.
  
• there's an entire industry of CBR-like “Dragon Ball DAIMA Confirms Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta is Stronger Than Super Saiyan 4 Mini Goku” articles out there which, to me, is like the lowest-of-the-low most bottom-of-the-barrel media-based online content out there; like being 8 years old and insisting Superman is stronger than The Flash or that Spider-Man can beat Captain America in a fight, as if the whole thing isn't fictional bullshit that the authors make up as they go along—its worse than, like, Kardashian content, I think. at least Kardashian stuff is rooted in real life, although highly dramatized and often made up, but at least it’s real people. DBZ power-levels are totally ephemeral postmodern non-things, totally brainless, they offer no deeper meaning to anything, no insight on the human condition, actually a real waste of time and brain space, deep sorrow for those adults out there that read these types of articles. but also WhATeVeRrRrRrrr xD So RaNdOM
  
• if I were a betting person, I would bet money that the majority of media/art critics out there are literally just fucking jealous.
  
• in a post-facts society, rhetoric is all powerful.
  
• “Aurora Phelps allegedly used online dating apps to lure at least four older men to meet her in person, then drugged them with sedatives and stole their money in a ‘sinister’ romance scheme, the FBI says.” this is one of my kinks.
  
• “Errol (Elon Musk’s father) once commented, ‘The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce.’” RUNS IN THE FAMILY
  
• the ghost of a ghost
  
• Robert Smith has been married to the same woman since high school—so my question is, who the fuck are all his songs about? some are quite clearly about other women, lyrically, like “How Beautiful You Are,” in which he talks about hating some woman they he was once intimate with. maybe they have a polyamorous relationship? or maybe he's just singing hypothetically about stuff? storytelling??
  
• self-promotion makes me feel so sick. this whole please-read-my-work dynamic, like whoring myself for attention—attention that I want but shouldn’t want because I should be self-sufficient, able to cultivate my own happiness without people telling me that I am smart or a good writer or whatever. there is something gross about marketing yourself. i need to dig deeper into why it feels so gross, maybe an essay, one day. the money one is easy, because money taints artistic endeavors, however slightly, by making part of the artistic pursuit about making money, which means the art is subject to corruption or disingenuousness as to manipulate a market as to make more money; but the “attention seeking” self-promotion is harder to attack, because obviously humans like attention and need it, being social animals, but it still feels gross on some level, maybe for the same reasons as the money-making self-promotion, i.e. to maximize self-promotion you need to pander to a certain audience, and this inclination to pander may dilute the work, make it disingenuous in relation to the true intent of the artist, who is now subtly altering their work to pander to a certain audience.. hmmm. i think there may be a seedling here, or a sprout, but not a full tree, not yet. maybe it's the ME ME ME-ness of the whole thing, so focused on the self, self-promotion as a willful admittance of narcissism, like you're so special that you deserve more attention than the normal everyday person, perhaps this is what makes me uncomfortable: the ease at which people can self-promote but not admit that they're self-absorbed egotists that really only care about ME ME ME?
  
• it's nearly impossible to make friends as an adult. while playing with my son, I met a husband/wife at the playground, they also had a kid my son’s age, so we exchanged numbers, and I sent a text like “hey let me know if you want to do a playdate or just want to hang, I don't have many friends in the state” and ever since then, when I see them at the playground (small town), THEY AVOID ME—yes, AVOID ME; and it's not just in my mind, or paranoia; last two times they saw me, they left around the back area, without saying a word, despite having seen me, to avoid me. ONE TIME I EVEN WAVED. it's actually really strange, like maybe me “I have no friends here” text made them think I was a weirdo or something? I came on too strong? like, what is this world we're living in where people being honest and vulnerable are seen as fucking creepers? Jesus.
  
• every minute, a butterfly drowning
  
• cut from THE GHOSTS OF 27TH STREET: Sometimes, things just happen, and sometimes those things are good things, but other times those things are really bad things—and yes, I know, that sounds really dumb, a big duh moment; of course things happen. And of course we can, and should, take precautions to prevent certain things from happening, and certainly the wisdom gained from being an idiot is not without it’s perks, but, still, sometimes, things just happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and, in all fairness, there’s nothing you should have to do about it, in an ideal world, bad things shouldn’t happen at all.
  
• The Space X TESLA Zaibatsu (We’re close to this future, maybe already there)
  
• “this whole album slaps” like WTF does that mean. what is it hitting. the listener?
  
• Bilbo is like god mode in The Hobbit, the ring breaks the game—just like invisibility breaks Oblivion.
  
• had a bizarre dream in which I swam in the decorative pool of some mansion. nothing further.
  
• I visited the USAID.ORG site on 2/27, and it's been turned into a big wall of text, a notice with the headline “Obtaining Personal Belongings from the Ronald Reagan Building,” and at the bottom: “As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally.” something scary about this; how quickly someone's livelihood can be changed by a notice on a website. what is really happening to our country, really.
  
• one of the things about Trump is that he’s proved that, if the president wants something done, it can and will be done, and this means that, in the past, when liberal presidents were sitting there like, “i want to legalize weed (or abortion, or student loan forgiveness, or whatever), but it’s a big bureaucratic thing and it needs to go through all these approvals, which is why i can’t just snap my fingers and do it” that these were all just bullshit excuses, they never really wanted to do any of that shit, it was all to manipulate voters, to get more votes. this is the only good thing Trump has done: lifted the wool over our eyes, revealed that changing shit in government is actually pretty easy for the president, if they want to do it.
  
• Trailer-home backdoors without steps so you just fall right through; Wonder if anybody has died accidentally doing that, like, maybe, they were visiting the trailer home for the first time, and they just opened the backdoor and walked through without thinking and just fell. broke their legs or something
  
• my day-to-day is like small existential crisis over whether or not I should download the reddit Mobile app and what kind of attention-deficit darkness that will lead to, and what sort of productivity issues that will lead to, and how that will impact my writing, and my free time—just to illustrate the magnitude of probably unnecessary worry that goes into every little decision.
  
• the fact that newer games often have some sort of TWITCH DROPS menu programmed into them is fucking sicken to me; like, 20 years from now, when Twitch is fucking dead or sold off, name change, whatever, these games will continue to have this fucking nonsense menu that does nothing (i guess devs could patch them out at that point but why would they bother?)
  
• only in America can you be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt but still buy a brand new 100inch TV
  
• Brave New World’s success at the box office makes me figuratively weep for modern cinema.
  
• carwash or car wash or car-wash
  
• there is a difference between cleanliness and order.
  
• Oblivion’s Shivering Islands expansion has the same energy as Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!1!!1!
  
• I feel kinship with Andy Rooney
  
• watching dragon Ball daima to see the cool super Saiyan 4 shit but as I was watching it I just felt embarrassed, just pure embarrassment watching these cartoon people scream and punch and shoot balls out of their hands/head and shit; it's just so mindless, no substance, stupid, just pure cringe; when they say “anime is for children,” this is what they're talking about, maybe I'm getting old, fuck. some entertainment is better than others, from a standard of “meaning,” like, the anime “MONSTER” has a lot more “meaning” than “DRAGON BALL.” this applies to all stuff, for exmaple, if you’re a writer, and you only write sex/action stuff, your writting has very little meaning outside of BASE URGE SATISFACTION (i like fuck, i like violence), like, there’s an audience for that, sure, but that’s not me. I need my VIOLENCE/FUCKING to be accompanied by some introspection and higher thought, not just the base urges on paper. SORRY.
  
• David Bowie plays a very important character in Twin Peaks
  
• imagine how sad your life would have to be to say something like, “I've been a life-long Wendy’s fan…” like, the corporate hands here have dug deep into the gray matter of this hypothetical person. idk. being a FAN of [CORPORATE THING] seems sick to me, in a i’m-being-manipulated kind of way.
  
• the simple reason why Zelensky doesn't want to sign a deal giving up land/resources to the Russia/US (respectively) in exchange for “protection” is actually really simple, for 2 reasons; 1) it’s exortotion (like the mob coming to a local store and offering “protection from theft” for a price lol) and 2) Ukraine is a sovereign fucking nation, and Russian invaded them, so regardless of how much blood has been spilled on either side so far, Russia doesn’t get to time out the clock as if they never tried to conquer a sovereign nation to begin with. basically Russia is the aggressor here, and any concession made to Russia is more akin to Ukraine just rolling over, which sets a very bad precedent, reinforcing the idea that MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, which, when taken to its logical conclusion, results in dictatorships and widespread death all over the planet.
  
• I hate everything I've ever written. if I like something I've written. just give it a month or so and I'll hate it. this seems to be the curse of writing.
  
• “Dragons may not have much real use for all their wealth, but they know it to an ounce as a rule.” —Tolkien, The Hobbit
  
• there's like six novels worth of interesting material to be gleaned from any given Waffle House’s workforce.
  
• Robyn Hitchcock has a substack, most posts are hidden behind a pricey paywall, this disappoints me, big time. makes me sad.
  
• i loathe the adjective “INTERESTING,” it's vacuous, a platitude, and redundant, because everything is interesting—if you find just specific things interesting, then you're just boring.
  
• “Lord of the Never-There.”
  
• spend 2 years making a record only for it to appear on some tiktokers’s “best rock album head tilt” video—something about dimwitted critics turning very hard work into a casual score or “yeah this is a good album” or “yeah this is a bad album” for clicks (and cash) is gross, very American, consumerist, i think i am starting to develop strong anti-America sentiment, and i think that, if you read this whole thing, you’ll agreee that i am indeed starting to develop those things, like i don’t even know if i like democracy anymore.
  
• “I will wear costume after this war will finish,” Zelensky replied. (in reference to why he doesn't wear a suit to Oval Office meetings. I quite like the use of the word “costume” for suit, lol. although i don’t tihnk he used the word “costume” to offend, he’ just bad at American English, but this only makes it better, i think. [fuck america])
  
• stop being pretentious, just use Ubuntu bro, who cares, not every choice in life has to be some profound ethical statement, abstaining from certain operating systems or browsers or whatever is not going to save the world, so annoying, CHILL OUT, or at least stop shaming people, chrissakes
  
• “Blessed are the Obsessed, for their courses are clear.” —The Blessings of Sheogorath
  
• anti-trump posting on x??? apparently there are real people who do this and don’t think twice about it, and many of these people are American, which makes sense because hypocrisy is a core American value.
  
• my dad has always been somewhat of an anti-intellectual—”philosophy is pointless, money is more important than you think, art is a waste of time, &c. &c.”—and I think I have inherited this trait a little bit, as I have a default disdain for pretentious intellectual types (like, the disdain just automatically turns on for me the moment someone starts talking about literature [in person], unprompted; like, if we’re friend or whatever, and we’re talking about books or whatever, that’s fine, but just randomly talking about intellectual stuff, or trying to fit it into vaguely related conversation [even friends who do that annoy me]), and I do see the logic behind my father’s anti-intellectual sentiment—mostly because it's easy to think yourself into a coma, into inaction, like someone who pledges total non-violence might then let themselves killed, for no good reason, other than the fact that they had pledged total non-violence (this is not a great example, but i’m typing on a roll right now and am not proof-correcting). And I do focus on “real, tangible” stuff over intellectual stuff sometimes, usually. And I get very annoyed when I'm talking to someone online/irl and that person is all like “the proto-wittgensteinian blah blah” or they’re typing to me in like perfect english with high-brow punctuate, as if talking to me on Discord or whatever is akin to writing a novel, like they’re obviously trying real hard to appear smart and/or impressive, while being unable to realize that they're embarrassing themselves, which kills me; but at the same time, I am intellectual myself—as evidenced by my entire writing portfolio— and I do some of this stuff myself, hypocritically, so, in some ways, I guess I'm an anti-intellectual intellectual, which is why people like Mark E. Smith and Lou Reed appeal to me, i think, because they too claim to hate intellectualism while simultaneously having vast bodies of intellectual work credited to their name (be it music, books, lyricism, etc); so it’s almost as if they hate themselves in some way—as if us anti-intellectual intellectuals hate ourselves in some way, like we’re so contrary that we’re even contrary of our own very nature. idk.
  
• keep on pushing me baby don't you know you drive me crazy
  
• aliens come down, find the ruins of human civilization, find a keyboard, see 1! and 2@ and 3# (etc.), and believe those to be single symbols; so our human legacy is misinterpreted, you know, like a big galactic phone game, of sorts. the aliens would be all like, “the civilization on this planet used did 1! plus 1! and the like” etc.
  
• “Have you caught my act yet? I'm Thaedil, the juggler. I'm sure you've heard of me. Oh, who am I kidding? More likely you came to scoff at the worst juggler in the world.” —NPC from Oblivion, who reminded me of me, just replace the word “juggler” (in the quote) with “writer.”
  
• Short story about a guy who role plays in World of Warcraft (or a -like) all day, and the story starts out as if it's in a real fantasy realm, like a fantasy novel, using fantasy language without telling the reader that this is a digital fantasy world; but towards the end of the short story, the guy has to log out and like brush his teeth and go to bed or something; the big twist being that the whole story took place in a digital world instead of a real fantasy world (kinda like The Egg chapter 1 I guess, but more SAD, like implying this digital fantasy world was the guy’s whole life).
  
• the best, most well-maintained, nicest-looking, fan wiki is,UESP, by leaps and bounds; the staff’s dedication to quality (and Elder Scrolls), is incredible. and the no-ads, tan-parchment aesthetic is top notch, always pleasant to look at.
  
• never met an honest Air Conditioner guy, or competent.
  
• “DUNE 2 wins best self-serious, humorless film award” everyone cheers
  
• Gen x online usernames often be like “dipshit” and “2DFraud” and other self-deprecating things, obviously to give a first impression of “hey look i know I suck and I don't care” when they actually care a lot, otherwise they wouldn't care to preemptively deflect accusations of being a dipshit/fraud (I'm generalizing here).
  
• finish a video game: feel changed for thirty minutes, then feel empty inside. finish a book: feel changed forever.
  
• substack culture is more celebratory of the idea of being a writer than of the act of writing itself.
  
• if you think my depiction of people in the deep South ghetto is offensive or generalizing, then you have never been in a deep South ghetto; keep your sheltered performativity to your cringe Tumblr blog, thx.
  
• Trump has imposed high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, citing their unwillingness to combat the “fentanyl trade” as the reason—this claim is both untrue (Canada, at least, has done a lot to curb the drug trade at their border) and, frankly, a very niche justification for a trade tax that harms citizens of all affected countries, especially Americans, since the U.S. imports more than it exports, meaning that if Canada and Mexico reduce exports to America (in response to these tariffs), prices for Americans will rise due to basic supply and demand. Trump is even on record saying Americans “may be harmed in the short term,” so what he is banking on is that we will recover by pivoting to making more goods in America instead of relying on other countries. This is a deliberate way to ensure that America is not reliant on other countries to prosper (whether or not this will be successful is a whole other thing). My theory is that Trump is not imposing these tariffs because of fentanyl but rather because, in the long term, he wants to distance America from other countries, as he wants to prime America for expansion. Trump is a pro-isolation nationalist who believes that America is the best country in the world, that America should be the only country in the world, and that America can support itself without relying on imports from Canada, Mexico, China, or anywhere else. Trump is trying to make America a self-sufficient superpower that doesn’t need support from any other country, and his way of achieving this is to impose tariffs that deter building allies (among other things—see: withdrawing from WHO, Greenland, talks about exiting the UN, halting funding to literally everywhere, the Ukraine situation, etc.). Now, if you’re not convinced, consider that Trump has “jokingly” threatened to take over Canada—a sovereign nation (meaning such an act basically necessitates a war)—and that he is renaming all sorts of shit to “America X” (or whatever), and suddenly his true motive starts to reveal itself: He wants America to take over the world and, as such, he does not want America to rely on other countries—which he views as TARGETS FOR EXPANSION—as dependence on these other countries would make American conquest/expansion more difficult in the long run. From Trump, going forward, expect to see more policy that, on the surface, doesn’t make sense; stuff that may seem to hurt America more than it helps (in the short term [Trump logic]); stuff that makes countries we were once friendly with pissed at us—and each time Trump does something like this, expect him to blame it on the targeted country/organization, like he did with Canada (“didn’t do anything to stop fentanyl!!!”) and WHO (“mishandled the Covid 19 pandemic!!!!”), so that 1) his base doesn’t realize he’s a warmongering monster and 2) he can feel justified in his expansionist bullshit. So, basically, what I’m trying to say is, RIP.
  
• “Topping the list: Dark Side of the Moon. Dark Side of the Moon is considered Pink Floyd's best album for a reason. I will not explain the reason.”
  
• another classic from the band fantasy of a broken heart: “We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways.”
  
• stuff like this for single-player games is a huge turn off: “Preorder Day One Edition and get: Prosperity Orb, Fortune Orb, and 57,300 Potch!” like, it manages to make this single-player-offline game seem mobile, gatcha-esque somehow?? why do they do this.
  
• consider plucking an eyebrow, and then looking at the part of the hair that was inside of your head, the little film around it, the DNA or whatever that is; and then consider that there has to be a section just beyond the first layer of skin that is just these inside-the-skin hair film parts, the hair epidermis, like eeew. human body bestows us with a brain that finds it's own body vessel disgusting, isn't that weird
  
• look what your love has done to me cmon baby set me free
  
• i don’t think modern AI (which is not “AI,” but I’m going to keep using the term AI because it’s the most well-understood, colloquially) could ever write/record a Sonic Youth-like song. i don’t think AI would ever think to drag a screwdriver against guitar strings, not in a vacuum at least. any ingenuity like this would have to be inserted by humans. and this interests me because, like, “Avant Garde” probably couldn’t happen with AI, at least not true “Avant Garde” that’s entirely unique; NEW stuff. humans have to think of something NEW, then do it, then AI copies it, so AI can’t come up with new shit, it’s just copies at scale.
  
• the elder scrolls online artwork aesthetic is too glossy and sexy; es should not be sexy, it should be a cross between tolkien-esque and pulpy.
  
• we're a Roku-TV-only family
  
• the concept of “canon” in fiction is cancer
  
• paid “writing workshops” are a scam, the only way to become a “better writer” is by reading and writing all the time. some workshop isn't going to make your writing interesting, or give it character; it might make your writing proficient in some arbitrary standard, but not interesting or worth spending the time to read—if anything, a workshop will make your shit more sterile, homogenized, “workshoped.” if you want feedback on your writing, give it to a friend or someone you respect as a writer. random people online or an instructor at a workshop, both are not going to provide valuable feedback, just standardized, boring stuff. not all feedback is valuable, in fact some of its detrimental.
  
• waiting on the Jon Favreau allegations
  
• artists/bands that pretend to be hard, edgy, rebellious, beyond the status quo—but are really just a bunch of white larpers that do Starbucks promos with expensive high-rise condos in the most pretentious artsy part of downtown, aka The Flaming Lips, Spoon, late Sonic Youth, Beck. note I listen to all these bands lol
  
• collectors are gollums
  
• “you can soul trap creatures you summon yourself.”
  
• wife's been listening to rain sounds on the speaker at night; and the other night, it was actually raining, but she still put on rain sounds—yes, despite real rain sounds. “Spotify version sounds better,” she said.I just about puked.
  
• Spoon’s album Girls Can Tell is like Squeeze’s Eastside Story, in fact Spoon is kinda like the 90s-era Squeeze; quirky, soft, melodic, obviously influenced by The Beatles but also the back-then indie grunge zeitgeist, but different from the rest, in some special way.
  
• today, on 3/11, I watched a car hit a goose. dead. the car just drove off. didn't stop or nothing. the goose's mate was standing nearby and, upon realizing that their mate was dead, they started honking, standing in the same spot, near their dead mate, and they honked for at least an hour. I could hear it in my office, the honking. so i got my shovel and a trash bag, went out there, in the middle of the road, and shoveled that dead goose into the trash bag, and then I put that trash bag into another trash bag, tied it up, and then put that trash bag in the outdoor trash bin. and now, when you're reading this, I imagine that trash bag in it is in a landfill somewhere. And I imagine that dead goose’s mate will never truly understand what happened, maybe they've already forgotten, found another mate, I hope so. anyway, the whole thing was a bit foreboding and depressing. when you're born, you never expect to end up in a trash bag in a trash bag in a landfill.
  
• imagine being a “gamer”
  
• hayao miyazaki’s anti-west, anti-war movie (The Boy and the Heron) won an Oscar, an award provided by the very same war-loving West that Miyazaki so often subtlety criticizes with his work; I wonder if anyone in the audience that night got the irony. and that irony is literally all over the place in the west, btw, we celebrate all sorts of anti-west stuff while at the same time partaking in the same western behavior that that anti-west stuff lambastes (see South Park’s anti-corporate sentiment now streaming on MAX!)
  
• I don't really get Bjork, but I don't think anyone can really get Bjork—that's why she's a treasure of our time. She's a foreign soul. Totally unique.
  
• as a developer, by making the MMO more solo-accessible, you run the risk of essentially forcing a community-focused game (w/ dull single-player aspects) into a dull single player game, because it was never really meant to be single player to begin with; for example, one of the appeals of Final Fantasy 11—while being very time-consuming to play—was that it was extremely community focused in that it forced you to play with others and thus build relationships with other people; this was one of the shining strengths of the game outside of its general aesthetic and world. now, with all the recent updates, Final Fantasy 11 is very solo-focused but in a way it feels like a ghost world because you don't need to actually play with anybody to to do anything anymore, they've solofied the experience. you see other players running around but you never interact with them so they're just kind of like phantoms, in a way, might as well be NPCS. it's lonely and depressing. and I understand the need to make an MMO more solo friendly, especially if you intend to keep the game alive forever, because you can't have it online forever due to cos, so turning it into a single-player game essentially keeps it alive forever because you can then, as as developer, remove the online component and just leave it as a dull single player game, a ghost of its former self. what I believe is happening with Final Fantasy 11 is that essentially they're going to make it a single player game so that it's not dead one day, but the problem with this is that it won't be the same game—it'll have the same world and armor and NPCs and weapons and jobs and all that, but it will be missing its most important element: the element of community, which is the most important element of every MMO ever, so in a way all MMOs are destined to die eventually due to cost and the passage of time, even if they’re turned into an offline solo-game, they’ll be a different game at that point.
  
• “Magic: The Gathering fans are not happy about the SpongeBob cards.”
  
• cut from “Something Tookish”: And while I did eventually get a better job, it was only because a coworker got a new job at a different company and then urged me to apply to that company with her referral, which gave me the same nepotistic advantage that I once used as an excuse for not trying to get a better job to begin with, so of course I had to make up another excuse as to why I wasn’t a massive hypocrite, and then another excuse excusing that excuse, and so on, repeating the whole endless cycle of excuses. All this is to say that I have been pretty much just lucking out my whole life, putting in the minimum amount of effort required to get by, and I have a whole bunch of excuses as to why that’s perfectly OK.
  
• On 3/14, while driving past a strip mall, I saw a large Black woman get out of her car with her young child in the parking lot behind the strip mall. She pulled down her pants—exposing her huge Black ass—pissed on the pavement, pulled her white panties up, then got back in the car. Idk wtf that was about. Fucking bizarre. was one of those third-world moments.
  
• short story about someone dating a stage magician who pulls out doves and shit while they're having intercourse, and other weird behaviors, like the magician can't turn it off or something.
  
• ive been thinking about playing Pokemon Gold recently, like on my Miyoo, but then I realized that it's literally just left-right-up-down and A button, sometimes B for backing out of menus; like, like, I realize all games are buttons, but this was like, when the game is so simple—mechanically—that you literally can't not think about the buttons, like the buttons are all you think about, I am going right, pressing right on the pad, now I am talking to this NPC with A, now I'm cycling through the dialogue with A, and so on
  
• isn't funny how sometimes you think you'll never find another great melody to hum, but there you are a week later humming a totally different tune, as if there's just an infinite amount of music to fall in love with? I love music.
  
• I like how my phone keyboard sometimes suggests frowny face emoji as a response to other people's messages, sometimes inappropriately. I always send the frowny face when suggested, w/ no further explanation.
  
• “run for your life, it's Civil Protection!”
  
• “Pokémon Go Players Were Duped Into Training a Powerful AI Map of the Real World: While you thought you were training your Pikachu, you were actually training AI to see the world. This AI doesn’t just create a 3D model—it understands space. It can recognize the layout of a city street, differentiate between buildings and trees, and even anticipate what’s around the corner based on millions of other locations it has seen. Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS), trained on over 50 million neural networks and 150 trillion parameters, is already operational in over a million locations. So here’s the kicker: Pokémon Go players weren’t just collecting Pokémon. They were, in essence, unpaid cartographers for one of the most sophisticated AI mapping projects ever attempted.”
  
• Facebook/Meta is such a failed company that the only reason they're still in business is for a reason totally sidebar to what their actual goals as a company—which is to buildAI/tech garbage—instead, people now just use Facebook to sell cabinets and sofas to locals. it's like a Craig's List 2.0. and Meta execs are seriously trying to make “Meta glasses” the next big thing, lol; they either have no idea how people use their shitty product or they are in denial about it. how embarrassing.
  
• “In the darkest times, hope is something you give yourself. That is the meaning of inner strength” -Avatar: The Last Airbender. Iroh, Book 2. Episode 5.
  
• a core American value is hypocrisy, and then we go to church and pray for hypocrisy forgiveness.
  
• fattest woman i had ever seen was working at waffle house, her name was literally America. it was poetic, almost.
  
• Tim Walz says Democrats “aren't doing enough,” but what's he actually doing, really? he's just talking about it, in interviews, then going home to his high-class fancy white suburban gated community. “if i say democrats aren't doing enough, maybe people will think i'm actually doing something, and then they'll vote for me in 4 years!!” one of the core American values is performativity, along with hypocrisy, and inaction. the whole system's a joke. democracy was flawed from the get-go, anyone who runs for political office willingly is already predisposed to the pursuit of power, which is inherently corrupting. walz will continue to do interviews in which he lambasts other Democrats for not doing anything while he himself does nothing at all. as a politician, simply talking about things is not enough—the everyday person can talk about stuff—he has to do something, help force bills through, help organize real political opposition. etc
  
• the grass smelled like grass.
  
• “I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that—although I am quite sexy.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• vespertine is my favorite bjork album; favorite track: frosti. the whole album has this hazy “what if the early 2000s were captured in a music box” kind of feel.
  
• in American video games, nine times out of ten, you can shoot through padlocks, as if every problem can be solved with a gun.
  
• I want to write an essay about Half-Life 2 but it's going to be very very very difficult not to go very very very political with it—what with all the human enslavement, misinformation campaigns, oppressive government, etc.—and I don't like going too political in my work. maybe i could do something like, “when is politician violence OK?” but I've already done that, although the one I already did is kinda weak, and I could probably do it better now, but it would still get too political I think.
  
• “‘I don't want to scare you,’ he said, ‘but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.’” —Mr. Antolini, Catcher in the Rye
  
• pretty sure my sock account on reddit is shadow banned, and for good reason, because i’m just vitriolic as hell over there, about everything. i feel like i’m channeling some sort of profound darkness when i’m over there. like the dark battery is fully charged, overflowing with negative energy.
  
• I like Moby, IDC what u think. listen to “Shot in the Back of the Head.” how can you not like that?
  
• hello i am the blog police, i am emailing u to let u know that ur site has bad blogs on it, these are blogs that do not adhere to my exact political/social leanings, all takes that are not my own are bad, reporting this to u make me feel very accomplished, like i am making a big difference in the world, getting this one blog taken down, becasue i don’t like the takes, because i have nothing going on in my offline life, and i am actually just a very sad person in general, will u be my friend, please be my friend please please please please.
  
• some of my friends like to pretend that I didn't exist before I met them: “how do you know about X band? never heard you listening to them before.”
  
• there's shit going on at the church tonight. lots of cars in the parking lot, a line of them going far out the lot. their God ain't real but their love & community spirit sure as hell is. that's something I'm missing in my life.
  
• why is it that everyone who claims to read “the classics” has to tell you they read the classics at every opportunity? I read Kiki’s Delivery Service last year—take ur head out of ur ass.
  
• I feel genuine sympathy for older people on social Security who voted for Trump that are now about to have their fucking social security just totally wiped out—and I'm not being sarcastic here. I think anyone who celebrates the fact that “these MAGA boomers will reap what they sow hahaha” are just as psychopathic as the worst of them, because these older people who depend on social Security, misled by propaganda, are really going to suffer when Trump cuts their only means of “income.” suffering is not suddenly okay just because it's happening to people you don't agree with politically. the goal should be to reduce suffering, not celebrate it. there are grown adults out there that literally don't understand the basic lessons of kids shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender. how can we ever expect to improve as a species when “people with red hat should die.” maybe all of us should die.
  
• character that releases any caged animal they see. humorous zoo and pet store situations
  
• the only logical conclusion to America’s materliasm and expansion-obssesssed culture is suicide because, if you follow the doctrine, whatever you achieve will NEVER be enough.
  
• Michael Walz added you to the group.
  
• “In Mark 5:5, the Bible describes a man possessed by demons, often referred to as a “lunatic,” who is described as “crying out and cutting himself with stones” both day and night, living among tombs and in the hills.”
  
• the miserable neighbor who looks for things to report to the HOA just because. people with no real problems make their own, and they make sure everyone around them feels it too.
  
• In avatar The Last Airbender there's an episode where the Avatar has to unlock his chakras, and the final step to doing this is to let go of all attachments— This mirrors some Buddhist teachings— but the Avatar refuses to let go of his love for his girlfriend or whatever, and this Is played as a good thing in the show; I took this as a pretty scathing critique of Buddhism that mirrors my own thoughts on Buddhism, particularly the LIE of enlightenment, or the idea that you (and people in general) should let go of ALL ATTACHMENTS, when I think this would have some pretty negative consequences on human well-being on a massive scale. Note that I think people should let go of some attachments (like many material attachments), but I don't think that people should let go of attachments to other people. Buddhism is something I'm critical of in general (Buddhism is too theoretical, imo, i.e. In theory, if you let go of literally all attachments, you will have nothing to feel suffering over, So therefore you have a eliminated personal suffering in some way, but 1) I think people need some suffering and 2) I just don't think it's realistic to get rid of all attachments—it's like saying “oh if you just drink the happy juice, you'll be happy,” like okay, but like what the fuck is the happy juice? is it even real? [this is a really bad analogy, I blame my fast note-taking brain, no prep, and no editing]) and this is something that I've wanted to write about, and I probably will one day but not anytime soon, cuz got other things i’m writing right now. but this is on the back burner, too bad my burner is way too hot and burns ideas to a crisp quite often.
  
• I don't need copyright protection for my writing because my writing is so cringe that no one would want to take credit for it.
  
• “my teacher is a child with a big smile, no bitterness.” —Alex G

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#fragments