forrest

• SAVING … DON'T TURN OFF THE POWER
  
• trying to convert my friends to Buddhism so they'll give me all their stuff
  
• polar bears in the zoo sometimes grow algae on their fur, turning them green; they say it's because they're stuck in the wrong place.
  
• the best feature of the Nintendo Switch is one that's rarely talked about: it's basically immune to power outages.
  
• there's no such thing as a normal person, only people who try really hard to appear that way; everyone's a fucking freak underneath the facade.
  
• trying to remove the word “just” from my vocabulary, outside of very specific instances. stuff i’m trying to avoid is, “I'm just saying …” or “I was just …” because these come off as very defensive and unconfident, in a way.
  
• every passing car, a breeze.
  
• ‘If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It's impossible.’ —Holden Caulfield
  
• police are in the business of crime; their quotas necessitate the existence of crime.
  
• so far, I'm not a huge fan of the first LotR novel, especially when compared to The Hobbit, the latter being a fun, action-packed adventure that quickly gets to the point, whereas LotR is much slower to start and overwrought with descriptive text, very “telling” over “showing.” like I don't need to know what every single hill in The Shire looks like. let's just get on with it, thanks. I usually appreciate descriptive writing that gets a description of a place across in one paragraph, more than descriptive writing that needs like three pages to describe a field of poppies. although, Fellowship does get a lot better In the second half, after Strider is introduced; but you have to slog through almost 200 pages to get there.
  
• infection maybe the highest form of intimacy
  
• I can't stand it when people fit stereotypes so perfectly. it's like they're doing it on purpose. like, every guy with a trump sign in his yard around here also has a motorcycle, a huge potbelly, and some sort of mustache. it's ridiculous. it's as if some sort of evil God pushed them all out of a demonic cookie cutter or something. I don't understand it
  
• every star a pentagram
  
• dozing off while reading a book in a nice comfy bed: one of the best feelings in the world
  
• we all feel like imposters because we are.
  
• Trump admin be like “there was one immgitent dude who raped a girl therefoee they all gotta go” every press conference is like this. just grasping at anything to justify their latent fear of people who look different from them, it’s basic baby stuff, actually.
  
• my entire life can be traced down i-95
  
• rechargeable bolted-in batteries in controllers are inherently anti-consumer compared to replaceable batteries, because batteries are the main breakpoint for controllers, And if a rechargeable bolted-in battery breaks or whatever, It's hell replacing it (at least for the average consumer); so, the normal person just buys a brand new controller, whereas in the past we could have just swapped out the double A's; in this way, rechargeable batteries are the ultimate convenience but they also pull the wool over our eyes and trick us into spending more money
  
• smartphones are humanity’s One Ring, and we are all being summoned to Mordor. this analogy basically writes itself; it's so obvious that it's not even worth writing more about it, because you already know. i mean, when Frodo wears the ring, an evil overlord is able to track everything he does, for God's sake, lol; the PHONES parrellel is too obvious. One Ring = Your Smartphone; Evil Overlord = Google, Apple, Zuck, &c. &c.
  
• I love these YouTube shorts that arelike two videos spliced together, vertically; like, the video on the right is some comedian telling a really bad joke that isn’t fuinny no matter how you listen to it, and the left is muted Rocket League footage or something. isn't this just like a tacit admittance that both things being shown are too boring to exist on their own? like they need to support each other to be interesting?? or maybe we have finally dropped the act, surrendered to the fact that we have collectively killed our ow attention spans and cannot even watch one video at a time anymore???
  
• i know it's a construct, but there's still something emasculating about sitting in the backseat of a four-door, like i feel like a child when i have to sit in the back, this is certainly a mental hangup of some sort lol
  
• It's good to take a break from a game every now and then, especially a game you really love—otherwise you might just wear it out.
  
• leave it to the Nintendo fan base to go wild over an announcement that 20+-year-old games are being rereleased on the switch 2—totally unchanged, without even so much as upscaled resolution. Nintendo literally puts no effort into it, just ports ROMS over to their new hardware, pretty much, and still the diehard Nintendies go crazy: “finally I can play Wind Waker again, at 640x480, on my 4k television!!! my nostalgia!!!!” man I can’t stand quote-unquote “gamers,” we are the worst kind of consumer ever. i’m embarrased to be a part of it, really. unfortunatley, games are in my blood, been playing them since like 2-years-old. but seriously only the Nintendo fan base would be happy with very old rereleases for near-full price on their brand-new state-of-the-art console. ROMS lol.
  
• how to raise a kid in 2020s: just don't give them a phone. that's it. if you can do that, your kid is already way better-off than most. the bar has literally never been lower.
  
• some people may consider themselves “lucky,” but no amount of “luck” is going to save them from long-term asbestos exposure. what I'm trying to say is, there is obviously a hard biological limit to “luck.”
  
• delivering mail is one of the best jobs ever, and one of the most meaningful, in my opinion, in terms of raw “goodness” and true fulfilment—because mail-people are literally bringers of joy, deliverers of happiness. one of the few jobs w/ significant existential meaning. like, some random guy just handed you the book that you have been wanting to read for 10 years (cuz you ordered it), or they hand you a sweet letter from mom, or whatever. delivering joy is literally the job of the mail person, what could be better? yes, i guess they sometimes deliver bad news, too, but whatever; yinyang wabi-sabi &c. &c.
  
• Suikoden HD, a remaster of a single player jrpg from the 90s, just released, and they're releasing a patch for it to fix a number of bugs; this got me thinking that, back before online was such a prominent thing, games were just released as is and that was it, no more changes; it’s not like a guy could come to every house and reprogram the game if there was a bug just discovered after release. but also, I feel like there weren't as many game-breaking bugs back then compared to now when nearly every game needs a bunch of post-release patches—why is that? Could it be that the prominence of online has made developers less thorough in the development process because they know that they can just fix their mistakes with an online patch post-release? i guess this method leads to faster game development, thus more games, but the trade off is more bugs because developers can be less diligent in the development process. idk.
  
• The Trump tariffs are impacting the price of video game consoles and PC parts and, at this point, the tariffs have even delayed the Switch 2 pre-order. which means, FINALLY, it is happening: the beast, once asleep, now awake: GAMERS ARE RISING UP TO SAVE AMERICA, NAY, THE WORLD.
  
• How can I sometimes think myself so smart yet so dumb simultaneously; this is my essence, my burden, my cross to bear, as they say, or something, whatever.
  
• “this machine kills fascists,” written on Woody Guthrie’s guitar.
  
• make everything slightly inconvenient and the stuff you find yourself still doing frequently will be the stuff you truly love; for example, instead of using Spotify, switch to a Cassette player, then you'll find yourself taking the time to seek out and listen to the music you’re actually interested in, instead of mindlessly going from one song or album to the next, going in one ear, out the other, due to the sheer convenience of Spotify. access to everything all at once is NOT a good thing. convenience turns everything mundane, in a way, you start to take things for granted when you have access to everything at your fingertips.
  
• i have fond childhood memories of reading manga in the nail salon after school, my mom getting her nails extravagantly done, it taking fucking forever.
  
• THERE'S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT THAT BRICK WENDY’S AESTHETIC
  
• ChatGPT just released a new image generator that people are using to create Studio Ghibli-like images; I was reading an article about this which included a picture of Miyazaki, and the caption underneath read: “The animator and director Hayao Miyazaki, whose work can be EASILY RECREATED using ChatGPT, has been critical of artificial intelligence in the past.” And I thought this caption was incredibly disrespectful because of the verbiage “can be easily recreated using ChatGPT,” which is a very bizarre, almost naive (or willfully dishonest) way to spin this, because ChatGPT cannot and will never be able to “easily recreate” Miyazaki’s work. ChatGPT could never create something like Kiki's Delivery Service or My Neighbor Totoro, because these works are more than just an art style, they are the creation of human imagination—which is my way of saying that ChatGPT (and other AI tools) will never be able to come up with something as original as a Studio Ghibli movie, even if it can create artwork that somewhat looks like it, because AI tools don't have the level of ingenuity and/or creativity to come up with their own unique ideas, they feed off the ideas of humans, so of course it could never create an original Ghibli film, because anything it could create would be derivative of already existing Ghibli films—what i’m trying to say is, anything ChatGPT could create would be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy &c. &c.
  
• the thing about Stewart Copeland’s drumming is that he's wild as fuck even on slow tempo tracks, take “Murder By Numbers” for example. you’d figure, with how many different things he's banging on in the timeframe of literal milliseconds on that song, that the song would have to be up tempo, but somehow it's not, somehow he just fits a whole bunch of crazy shit into small periods of time, all while keeping a slow time. he’s one of the most impressive drummers I've heard, and he’s def the most talented guy in The Police, and that’s saying something because i normally don't care about drums too much. same guy did the soundtracks for the Spyro games, i think.
  
• “So I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• PlayStation 3 logo font is the same font used in the titles of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. this makes sense when you think about how both were owned by Sony, but it just makes the Ps3 stuff look really tacky in hindsight, like the console of choice for edgy 13 year olds (which i was one, don’t get me wrong lol).
  
• SaGa Frontier 2 (one of my favorite rpgs) has been remastered. If you haven't played it give it a try, the music alone is worth it—best soundtrack on the PlayStation, even better (imo ofc) than Chrono Cross and FF8. But DON'T play the remaster; play the original. SF2 has gorgeous hand-painted watercolor backgrounds, but the remaster team has “upscaled” the background in a way that stretches and lowers the quality—it's likely that they used some cheap AI tool to do it, too, which, frankly, is disrespectful to the game’s legacy—and pisses me off, somewhat. Unfortunately, this is a common trend with these old PS1 “remasters,” especially the SquareEnix ones, upscaling the backgrounds poorly or whatever. I'm sure the game itself is still fine, it's just not the original experience, and some of the beauty is gone. (I'm noticing that these “fragment” documents are progressively featuring more and more complaints about AI—a portent of things to come??)
  
• the pursuit of intellectual enlightenment or whatever is always selfish, which is why most intellectuals stay unhappy and depressed, because it's a solipsistic pursuit, obsessed w/ the self; true happiness comes from family and companionship, which both require a level of selflessness that the average hardcore intellectual does not really have, because they're more focused on expanding their own brain or whatever.
  
• “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” —G-Man, Half-Life 2
  
• the right fart at the wrong time can make all the laughs in the world
  
• “Super Anti-Kaiju War Machine Mecha-Thunder-King” real Yu-Gi-Oh! card
  
• the official white house twitter posted an AI-generated Ghibli-style image of a woman being arrested by ICE. let it sink in.
  
• Ruka Buraito
  
• “Nostalgia” by The Chameleons. great pop song. considered putting a quote from it in Mysterium Nostalgia, but wouldn't have fit, thematically.
  
• Zelda BOTW note: I don't think weapon breaking is a bad thing, but I do think having to navigate a menu to equip a new weapon every time a weapon breaks is a bad thing; for a game like BOTW—which no doubt aims to be immersive—any time the player is forced to navigate a menu, immersion is broken, which is objectively bad within the framework of maximizing immersion, which, again, seems to be the game’s goal.
  
• “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.” —Gandalf
  
• The problem with this “everything is subjective, nothing matters” philosophy is that it's self-defeating in that, if nothing matters, the philosophy itself doesn’t matter, thus it’s not worth discussing; it trivializes literally everything to the point where why are we even having discussion at all. It's some of the most brainrot philosophically paralyzing garbage ever. And, to me, it's just clearly not true; if you say nothing matters yet are depressed or sad or enjoy certain things, then obviously stuff matters to you, like the fact that you care undermines the whole premise.
  
• we're all putting on airs, perhaps airs is all we are.
  
• can bugs read malicious intent? why they bite me???
  
• do you know what pisses me off in video games? The whole “here’s an enemy standing on a wooden tower with a bunch of explosive barrels near the bottom of it” thing, like why would the enemy put a bunch of explosive barrels right at the bottom of their wooden tower so that someone could easily just trigger the barrels to explode??? it's just so dumb. it totally takes me out of it. I know it's just video games, but this type of stuff is too video-gamey, if you know what i mean, it breaks immersion.
  
• “this game needs a remake.” no, it doesn't. great games never need a remake. stop encouraging companies to milk you for money with copies of copies of copies and ouroborus tail-biting behavior.
  
• dig a little deeper into Steve Albini and—I assure you—you'll hate the guy. idk why no one talks about this. don’t say i didn’t warn you though. it’s gross.
  
• I hate being lectured at; I immediately tune out, regardless of content of the lecture. this is probably one of the factors that contributed to my poor performance in school.
  
• i’m entranced by Breath of the Wild. i haven’t felt this sense of wonder for a video game in a LONG time. i play it at night, after my son goes to bed, and I am actually excited to play it throughout the day; a game hasn’t made me feel like that in a long long time.
  
• I got Suikoden Remastered for Switch, it came with a code for day-one exclusive content. like what? “gotta get my day-one content for this single player role-playing game from the '90s.” ?? devs & publishers: stop doing this.
  
• use ChatGPT to write an essay about how much AI sucks
  
• now that I've played played breath of the wild, I can now see just how much it influenced elden ring, but elden ring is almost like the Hyrule map without any of the exploration tools like climbing or gliding or whatever, and now elden ring just seems very blah; Like I was never fully sold on the fact that elden ring needed an open world to begin with, and now I'm even more convinced that it never needed one. open world is cancer 90% of the time.
  
• “I was concealing the fact that I was a wounded sonuvabitch.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• “free speech absolutist” or: i should be allowed to say the n-word while you should NOT be allowed to say anything negative about me saying the n-word or the country or the president
  
• what if dreams are actually windows into events happening simultaneously to other versions of yourself in a parallel universe? welcome to “high thoughts,” high school edition
  
• which means that some version of myself just got his head sawed off by a maniac near a dark pool at night. fucking hate dreams sometimes. actually, hate them all the time, because i only remember the bad ones.
  
• I love how “transmog”—a word from “transmogrify” that was made popular by the World of Warcraft player base, pretty much—has been adopted by all other game devs across the planet to mean any in-game mechanic that changes the look of something. this is a perfect example of how language is like a virus (negative connotation, but no negativity intended, just an observation).
  
• “people never think anything is anything really.” —Holden Caulfield
  
• I wanna know what you're like, alone, driving in a car, at night, when no one watching. do you pick your noses? scream lyrics at the top of your lungs? say weird stuff to yourself? i really wanna know.
  
• i know this is capital-letter MEAN, but i can't take Brandon Sanderson seriously because I keep picturing him without his shirt on. i can’t imagine that guy has much self-control or discipline in his life, and I shudder to think what his ofice looks like, probbably nasty with fast-food wrappers all over the plac. and—THIS ISN’T JUST ME BEING JEALOUS—but, after reading some of his prose and considering his extremely fast novel output, i think a lot of his work is actually AI-generated.
  
• There are quests in breath of the wild that are collaborations with other games, for example, there's a quest called literally “Xenoblade Chronicles 2.” it makes me want to throw up. I can't think of a better way to break immersion than by reminding the player that the game they’re playing is not only a game but also an advertisement for some other game. uhhhhggggg
  
• my default state is “fuck you”
  
• 4/1 WHITE HOUSE PRESS SEC. ANNOUNCEMENT (not april fools): “An illegal alien released by the Biden administration into our country was just arrested in Georgia and charged with the horrific killing of Camellia Williams, a mother of five and grandmother. The suspect has now been indicted on charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, rape, aggravated sexual battery, and necrophilia—which, for those who don’t know, necrophilia is an sexual obsession with a horse, ahem, corpse.”
  
• ‘”Lawyers are all right, I guess-but it doesn't appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn't”’ —Holden, The Catcher in the Rye, pg. 190.
  
• pressure washing an old stone wall is like wiping the wrinkles off an old man’s face or something
  
• young children tend to sleep more than older people and this seems tragic, like biology insists that youth be wasted.
  
• Nintendo’s RIDICULOUS Switch2 pre-order process: ‘As of right now, the reservation process is limited to Nintendo account holders in the US and Canada who are at least 18 years old. Invitations will be valid for 72 hours and will be “prioritized on a first-come, first-served basis,” according to Nintendo; you’ll also need to have purchased a Nintendo Switch Online membership for a minimum of 12 months and have logged 50 hours of gameplay on the original Switch as of April 2nd, 2025, to be eligible. What’s more, you must have opted in to share gameplay data with Nintendo (you can see if you’ve done so in the privacy section when logged into your account). Once invitations have been sent to account holders who have met these criteria, Nintendo says it will send invitations to “remaining eligible registrants” on a first-come, first-served basis. Unsurprisingly, the invitations will be nontransferable and sent to the email address you used while registering your interest with Nintendo. Console and accessory purchases will be limited to one per eligible account, at least during the initial invitation period, with the first batch of invitations going out on May 8th.’ YOU MUST ALSO BE WHITE OR JAPANESE, NO CHINESE OR BLACKS. ALSO, YOU MUST COMPLETE A CREDIT CHECK, AND SUBMIT YOUR LAST THREE PAYSLIPS. YOU MUST ALSO OWN A HOME, NO RENTERS. AND YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST 3 YEARS OF TENURE AT YOUR CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT—IF YOU OWN YOUR OWN BUSINESS, YOU MUST SUBMIT NET PROFITS FOR THE LAST THREE YEARS. thank you.
  
• “Former Persona and Shin Megami Tensei Creator returns with Tsukuyomi: The Divine Hunter — A Roguelite Deckbuilder powered by AI trained on his own art.” retch. hope it bombs. we shouldn't normalize any game made with AI, even if it's only made partly to w/ AI. should've known it would be Atlus.
  
• there's a “Villains wiki” that labels Mr. Antolini as the “main antagonist” of the Catcher in the Rye, which i find just absolutely knock-out funny—like, that's certainly one perspective
  
• Imagine, like, a club of pee drinkers. Like a Pee Drinking Club, and all the members are like, “We love drinking pee; and the only ones who get harmed by drinking pee are ourselves, so who cares if we like to drink pee? Ain't hurting anyone else.’ Then someone comes around and is like, “Yo, maybe you shouldn't drink pee?” But they're all like, “Um, please let us live our lives; we aren't hurting anyone else, and if drinking pee was so bad, why do other people do it, like the people in this club? Please stay out of our Pee Drinking Club, we don't want any Anti-Pee Drinkers in our Pee Drinking Club.”
  
• when you get so hungry that you don't know what to eat anymore because everything seems gross.
  
• “'A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later—later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last-sooner or later the dark power will devour him.’” —Gandalf, LotR 51
  
• is Hamilton supposed to be uncomfortable to watch? the actors are impressive, and I respect anyone who can recite all those lines so perfectly in one go like that. but the music is definitionally cringe, like a middle school diss track, lPG Eminem on sedatives, and the history is storybook, and the whole thing reeks of hardcore bourgeois virtue signalling for the terminally well-off. people who obsess over Hamilton are the same type of people who spend $400 on useless shit at Target every week and drink white wine every night.
  
• for a super rich guy about to fall off a mountain, you sure are desperate to pitch your chocolate to me, sir
  
• something you may not know about me: I don't use big words, because I can't remember them, because I'm fucking stupid. and no, this is not some self-deprecating joke.
  
• one time, when I was 10 or something
  
• sometimes i seriously wonder, considering all these stylistic genre labels, if they're all just made up after the fact, to pigeon hole an author, when the author was just writing what came from their soul. like, imagine you're an author and you just released your breakthrough novel or whatever, and then imagine some critic is interviewing you, asking you stuff like, “so what gave you the idea to write a novel w/ such baroque prose in the philosophical didactic style with hints of metafictional irony?” idk about you but I would be like: “excuse me, what?” i doubt any novel written with the intent of trying to check specific genre/style boxes is even worth reading to begin with because it would be tainted from the get-go with this pretentious conformity to some high-minded genre labels instead of being original and honest to the writer's true self. it follows that, if you willfully try to fit a mold—“I'm going to write a Neo-Victorian Pastiche!”—then you are sacrificing a little bit of your originality.
  
• Brian Eno's Windows Chime is a lesson in minimalism: you can cause great joy with just a few seconds.
  
• ‘That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tomb-stone and all, it'll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say “Fuck you.” I'm positive, in fact.’ —Holden Caulfield
  
• YouTube has created a culture of creation that is dependent on other creators to exist, for example: “Skyward Sword Retrospective.” 2 hrs of some dude talking about some other creation. so there's creators then there's creators that rely on other creators to create then there's consumers, and the last two there are very close to being exactly the same, except the Creator who relies on other creators to create is making money from their consumption of other creator’s creations, so they're almost like exploiting other creators creations, in a way. it's really telling about the nature of YouTube that nearly all the “content” on there would not exist without the existence of some other content that precludes it. YouTube is like a leech, in a way, attaching itself to someone else’s baby, sucking the life blood to sustain itself. this is also why watching YouTube videos always leaves you with this unfulfilled feeling like you just wasted an hour of ur life, and you immediately forgot what you just watched; whereas watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a game barely ever leaves you feeling this way.
  
• AI has made it so corporate content masquerading as “artwork” is easier than ever to spot and avoid; all u gotta do is look for that glossy sheen.
  
• I actually really like Shinichirō Watanabe’ new anime Lazarus. obviously trying to capture the magic of Cowboy Bebop a second time, and it's very obviously style over substance so far, but the electro-jazz soundtrack is excellent AND THE EVEN USED “LAZARUS” BY THE BOO RADLEY’S AS THE ENDING THEME; man, I got goosebumps when that started playing the first time, bravo.
  
• when you're feeling stuck, artistically, rearrange the furniture in your workspace.
  
• I've been playing Zelda BotW recently, and it's got one huge problem: it's too fucking big. in game dev, at what point does the size of the game world become a psychological burden upon the player? well, the answer appears to be BotW.
  
• I think as an adult with big-boy job and kids and a writing hobby, 100-200 hours to complete a game is way too fucking long
  
• another flaw with Zelda BotW is that there's nothing to unlock; like, in previous Zelda games, you progressively unlock new, cool items, and those items allow you to access new, cool things, and this ushers you on, encourages the player to keep going, to unlock the new stuff; but in BotW, you get all the tools at the beginning of the game, and those tools become stale after a couple hours of play. compared to another type of game, like a JRPG, as you progress in the game, you unlock more characters, more spells/abilities at higher levels, etc. but BotW has none of this, there is no true feeling of progression outside of hearts, stamina wheel, and clothes, which is all too basic or superficial to feel profound from a gameplay sense.
  
• BotW is a game moreso about vibes than gameplay: moreso about wandering the perfect cell-shaded Ghiblian countryside of Hyrule than swinging a sword back and forth. So the true question is: How long can vibes alone sustain interest in a video game? of course the answer will be different for everyone, but for me, it's about 20 hours.
  
• generative AI is very unregulated right now, but just wait until some billionaire loses a bunch of money because of some AI-generated hoax; once that happens, AI will be locked down hardcore. maybe we should encourage that to happen????
  
• body dysmorphia is when your face feels blob-like and you have constant intrusive thoughts telling you to take a knife and carve up your jawline so that it looks immaculate; or the urge to slice off the small curves of fat on your stomach and sides, regardless of the numbers on the scale (it’s malfunctioning and/or inaccurate) or the positive feedback of others (they're lying). sometimes I wonder if it's biological or if it's cultural, like if i had grown up in a body-positive culture, would I still feel this way? would I still feel like a nasty bulbous monster when walking down the street? does culture dictate my reality so plainly? it's sad that that might just be the case, implies my will is not my own, or I am incredibly weak and susceptible to manipulation.
  
• pickleball is so lame; it's like tennis with its balls chopped off.
  
• DBZ is probably the hardest anime to adapt to live action because the character aesthetics are so pivotal to the popularity of the series. like Goku has to look like Goku or the fans will flip.
  
• contrary like the sun to the moon
  
• we all want acceptance from others, but we rarely say it outright. the whole reason anyone tells someone else about their own interests is to gain acceptance and companionship. this is the only reason people talk about themselves, even for narcissists.
  
• on 4/16, after a 3 day weed break, i smoked some resin and had something like an existential crisis, one of those recursive psychological weed-loops in which you just keep circling back to something, overanalyzing it to death, seeing all the ways it has possibly fucked you over going forward in the future. this feeling, which i’m still having while typing this, has shown me, once again, that i should never smoke weed. weed is so weird and contrary that it tells you not to smoke it. seriously, i am not smoking weed after today. DONE. i quit alcohol, i can quit weed.
  
• sent this to some dude in an email and liked it: “I'm in that sort of so-high-you-hate-yourself-for-being-high high state.”
  
• “It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.”
  
• one of the things i hate about the Nintendo Switch is that, once I play a game docked on the TV, I feel like I can’t play that game on handheld anymore; as if the handheld experience is now lesser in some way, when i know that that is totally stupid, yet i still psychologically loop this way for some reason.
  
• “Wallace said the plotting and notes had a fractal structure modeled after the Sierpiński gasket.” note that a ‘sierpinski gasket’ is basically a TRIFORCE, literally a triforce shape. Infinite Jest is modeled after a triforce.
  
• I've been listening to albums on cassette tapes w/ my walkman for the past month or so, and the whole process has brought me closer to the music, like I've formed a special relationship with the albums themselves, because tapes kinda facilitate a full listening experience because they force you to put in real effort to listen to them, as opposed to something like Spotify where listening to music turns into a throwaway, “swipe right”-like experience. seems to me like over-accessibility leads to taking things for granted.
  
• all philosophy is cope for the horrors of biology; in this way, religion and philosophy are not so different.
  
• funny how these mega corps manipulate people every day into saying their ridiculous product names out loud, like “hey pass the NERD CLUSTERS™”
  
• Tom Bombadil is annoying as hell. Jackson was right to cut him from the movies. although I like this quote, “Take off your golden ring! Your hand’s more fair without it.”
  
• there's a scene in Suikoden I In which the main character is given the choice to drink some poison tea, and if you select the no option, the dialogue simply loops around back to the choice again until you select the yes option; and this is like the epitome of JRPGs, their essence. the illusion of choice. which, from a certain perspective, is fine, because jrpgs are more about telling a linear story rather than letting you make up your own (story), but it's always jarring running into one of these fake choices in jrpgs
  
• when i was 15, my dad sent me to the South Carolina Citadel military camp for a month. during my start, i sent a note home that was full of expletives. my grandma kept the note. years later, the citadel camp program was shut down due to allegations of widespread sexual abuse; i didn't see any of that during my time there, but it didn't surprise me, considering hardcore conservative Christian military dudes seem like the perfect chemical petri dish for suppressed sexual urges. anyway. I'm thinking about writing an essay or short story about this whole thing, although, for some reason, I don't remember much of my time at the camp, but—interesting fact—there is a Columbo episode set in the exact same barracks I stayed in.
  
• country music like weird al without the jokes
  
• all these modern remasters of old JRPGs (like Suikoden 1+2 & SaGa Frontier II) fuck up in the same way: they make the UI modern-looking in this minimal, black way, and they smooth out the font, which the makes the whole UI look and feel soulless. the original Suikoden 2, especially, got a lot of character from its antique, earthy UI, which is just lost completely in the remaster. i am not shaking my fist at clouds here, it's objectively stupid and ugly and pointless; the only reason remasters should exist is to make the same old games playable for a new audience, nothing else; the games themselves don't actually need to be changed in any way, they just need to be ported to modern hardware so they're not lost to time. stop putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
  
• our childhood wants and need never change—just the older we get, the more we’re pushed into phonyism to continue to fulfil those wants and needs; what I'm trying to say is: everybody would rather be playing games, hanging out with friends, or doing whatever, than working, but they still do the phony work. ask anyone, the goal is always to retire comfortably, everything up to that point (outside of leisure and passion) is phony.
• this will likely be my last fragments post, because i’m trying to transition to taking notes in little notebooks, because writing by hand feels better—more deliberate, thoughtful—and also so the notes will be accessible to my kids when i die or something, idk, and also because i’m starting to care less and less about advertising my thoughts to people, like they’re even worth advertising here, and how egotistical it all feels, expecting you to read this stuff and think it smart or whatever.

#fragments #notes