First, the usual rattling on.

I really need to find the energy to do more ambitious videos because my usual talking head bullshit is beginning to bore me. It doesn’t scratch that creative itch very well and I want to have more fun with the whole thing but by the time I have edited the video I am pretty much done in.

But less so than before, which is encouraging. As I exercise my video editing muscle every day, the editing of that day’s vid wakes less and less out of me.

So hopefully it will become a minor enough thing that I can take on trickier and more fun kinds of projects.

Daddy needs to fly.

I’ve been feeling especially restless lately. The sort of mood where nothing really satisfies you and you end up grumpily switching between activities in a vain search for something that doesn’t bug you.

My crappy mood started last night. See, I ordered pizza. Pizza did not arrive. I checked the Pizza Hut site and it said the pizza had been delivered. But the phone never rang.

So I went to call Julian to ask that he pick up my pizza when he and Joe got back from Joe’s parents’ place. Only to discover my phone was not working.

Ah. So that’s why my phone didn’t ring. I guess the delivery person tried to call but my phone was out of service so all they could do was leave it outside the building.

Not fun. But that’s not what put me in a bad mood.

That came when Julian reported that there was no pizza waiting for me down there, meaning that someone took it.

Son of a bitch. Now I am out $22 for a pizza somebody ELSE ate.

The weird thing is that I never heard the phone in the kitchen ring. Now I was very deep into my video game so I might have simply missed it.

But it’s also possible that my delivery person decided it smelled so good they would help themselves to it.

Unlikely, but possible. It would be a neat if ultimately doomed scam. Report it as delivered, wait for roughly as long as it would take for a porch pirate to show up and take it, then dig in. Bon appetit.

You’d get caught pretty fast but for a time you’d dine quite well.

Knowing I paid for something some thief got to eat really pisses me off. It sticks in my craw something fierce and I know it will take days for me to get over it.

It’s a Taurus thing. We have strong feelings about our money.

There’s no solution, either. Pizza Hut held up their end of the bargain. It’s not their fault some evil person helped themselves to a pizza they knew was not theirs.

Even if we had CCTV footage of the crime, we wouldn’t know who the hell that person was, so what could we do about it?

It was the perfect crime. With MY FUCKING PIZZA. Grrr.

And all because my portable phone was on the fritz and I didn’t know that until it was too late and my pizza was gone.

Talk about being fucked over by fate. AGAIN.

Anyhow, since then I have felt cranky and out of sorts. And that has made me restless and irritable and I am choosing to see this as a very good thing.

It’s when I am pissed off that I become capable of serious change. Hopefully this little incident will help fuel my attempts to rise up out of this pit I’m in.

Oh, and I have completed my list of 30 potential Onion headlines. Now I will spend some time polishing them before I send them off to The Onion for evaluation.

They really are quite good. God damn am I clever.

They’d be fools not to hire me. I’m amazing.

More after the break.

---

As the wheels grind on

I feel like I am going through the wringer lately but that’s not a bad thing.

Because means things are moving. Emotions are being processed. The wheels of this bus are going round and round, albeit slowly and reluctantly, and all the gunk that has accumulated in the engine and the fuel line and so on is being burned out of there by the motion and the heat, and things are beginning to move forward.

Now all I need to do is avoid the temptation to slam on the brakes and crawl back into my deep dark garage when I start feeling like we’re moving too fast.

No, we’re not, we’re just not used to moving at all. It is true to say that our rate of speed has gone way, way up relative to what it was before.

But that’s because my speed before was zero. Everything is infinite compared to zero, even the tiniest increase of all.

So like I keep telling myself, I just have to hang in there and not freak out and run away so that I can adjust to the change and maybe learn not to be so damn flighty.

That’s a word I have been testing out applying to myself lately : flighty. It really seems to fit me. What else do you call flying off in a panic at the slightest provocation? Giving up on and abandoning things entirely when I encounter the tiniest of problems? Returning games on Steam when I don’t instantly fall in love with them?

The urge to flee is strong in me and it’s got to stop. The ability to stay and fight and deal with things has to be there too. Being skittish as a deer in hunting season all the time is deadly. So much of life can only be experienced if you stick around.

So I am working on developing my “stick it out” muscles. I go into situations knowing I will probably have the urge to flee and I am therefore ready to delay my flight instincts long enough to at least start to enjoy myself.

Delay is the right word. Directly opposing the urge to flee only makes you panic even more strongly. But saying, “Yeah, yeah… in a minute… ” works because it doesn’t make you feel trapped.

This is all part of my trying to stop being such a scared little animal.

If I stick with it long enough, I might even become a real little boy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, a few things I got off of TikTok recently.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to embed them, so links will have to do.

How very Web 1.0! Anyhow…

First. a most excellent overview of biological sex. The combination of her accent, her earnest approach, her academic acumen, and her cool British beauty really makes her presentation powerful to me.

I don’t know if it would convince any gender skeptics or other transphobes. Those kinds of people probably slammed the steel doors of their tiny minds shut the moment they realized someone was trying to put knowledge in there.

But I found the whole thing delightful.

The other thing is a piece by the incredible poet Ren.

The dude is a wizard. The words, the style, the presentation, everything. It all combines to make his work mesmerizing and compelling every damn time.

God did I miss TikTok. You know how you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?

Well sometimes you don’t know how much you missed something till you get it back.

And I plan on being active on the Tok again too. My webcam is right here 24/7 and so it should be easy to record replies to vids and so on.

Oh, and I will eventually upload my current vids there too, or at least the ones that I think might be of interest to people.

Time to see if my charisma really works!

Anyhow, here’s today’s actual vid :

Some of that is actually from as far back as 2008!

And it was nice going through the clips and remembering, though of course, nostalgia is always bittersweet and so it made me a little sad too.

I seem so young and energetic and full of life compared to now. And yet, the weird part is that I know I was actually a lot more depressed back then.

As nice as it would be to have the energy and hope back, that would be too high a price to pay. I was often suicidal back then.

But way more socially active.

I don’t think the two things are related.

I had to include what I consider to be the stupidest thing in a movie ever, the whole “removal all numerals except six” thing.

That’s so gobsmackingly dumb that it beggars the imagination. There is no way that I, as a very talented comedy writer, could have thought of something that amazingly, beautifully, thuddingly stupid.

Other than scouring the backup I made of the HD I had before this one, today has been pretty routine. I am happy that I did a video that was NOT just me talking into the camera for once.

I started off thinking I would maybe do a karaoke. But I tried a few songs and I did not like the sound of my voice, so I decided it was not a good voice day for me and went looking for a better idea.

The point is that I did something new (ish) and had a lot of fun doing it. I let myself go in an unexpected direction and it turned out great.

I went exploring for once in my life! In a pretty minor way, but still.

And I have going back on TikTok to thank. And to think, I went years without it because I thought there was no way to access it on a PC.

But there totally is. There’s a Windows TikTok app. All I had to do was download it from the Microsoft store. It was crazy easy.

I feel like such a fool! But whatever. It’s good to be back.

Time to make some waves. 🙂

More after the break.

---

What is dis praxia?

For me at least, dyspraxia is a barrier.

One that has been there all my life and lies between myself and whatever motor skill I am trying to learn like an invisible force field and keeps me from being able to do it.

The motor acquisition center of my brain is just plain broken. For all I know, it’s barely even there. It certainly feels that way.

Any attempt I make to learn to do a physical thing has to go through the conscious rational mind and that is just plain not good enough. We human beings are supposed to have mental hardware dedicated to that kind of thing. Society presumes it is there.

But mine ain’t.

So it’s a learning disability. One I wish I had been diagnosed with a very long time ago, like say when I was in elementary school, where the right kind of intervention might have corrected it.

Or at least I would have been officially designated as a person with a disability (albeit an invisible one) and I could have been better understood by the world.

I picture myself carrying business cards that explain my condition like some deaf people do. They’d say, “Hi! I have dyspraxia! Here’s what that is… ”

The thing is, not only is it an invisible disability (like depression), but I can go long periods without it having much of an effect. It’s not like we learn new motor skills all the time. It’s actually pretty rare.

What it would mostly do is explain to people why I’m such a spaz.

If I was a kid today, I would probably have one of those individual learning plans (forget what they are called) and that would explain the problem to my teachers and give them tips as to how to help me with them.

Not that I would need a lot of assistance. Despite all odds, I did manage to learn to write and type and dress myself and so on.

But I’ve heard some kids get someone to take notes for them because they can’t write fast enough, and I’d be all over that.

AI can almost sort of kind of do that now. The auto-captioning on YouTube is getting better and better and there are programs out there that claim to be able to transcribe what people are saying accurately.

Honestly, I would probably just record the whole thing with a smartphone. That way I would get the prof’s body language and tone of voice, too.

Maybe I should be taking some online courses…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It shall be a Day of Reckoning!

My biggest worry about tomorrow is that people will think, “Meh, big deal, we already did that. And he paused the tariffs, so we won, right?”.

I don’t know how likely that is. I am too anxious to rationally assess that, and I supposed that even if I was on a triple dose of Xanax, that can’t be figured out anyhow.

I mean, there’s millions of variables, and they’re all human beings.

But obviously I hope the turnout is simply massive. People on BlueSky are saying ten million, which would mean that everyone from the first one would have to bring a friend.

The positive forecast, as I see it, is that the first protest caught a lot of people off guard, seeing as it was organized in like three days, and a lot of people who wanted to go could not because of work, family commitments, logistics, or just plain not hearing about it or not being able to make up their mind about it until it was already over.

But now they’ve had two weeks’ notice to get their act together. They’re arranged sitters, watered the plants, packed a nice picnic lunch, and are ready to protest.

Heck, even if you don’t care about politics, you might want to go just because so many other people are going and you like to be where the action is.

Or maybe you just want to sell food there. No judgement. This is a capitalist society and the reason we have all that we have is that someone can make money doing it, whether it’s running a pizzeria or a hardware store or a dry cleaner’s.

Wanna change the world? Do something profitable.

Anyhow, that’s my hope and my fear about tomorrow’s protest. My fear is that it will be smaller than the first one because people are all, “been there, done that, whatever.”

A very Gen X fear, now that I think about it.

And my hope is that the protests will be so huge they can be seen from space and some aliens will be like, “What’s going on down there?”

Just in case, let’s play this on a loop :

But if they ask, maybe we should skip the whole “take me to your leader” thing, at least if you are an American.

Take them to our now and future PM, Mark Carney, and tell them he is the President of Earth. I am pretty sure he could pull it off.

Anyhow, like I say in my vid, I want the powers that be to be scared. As scared as it takes. Historically, big change only happens when the people in power feel like the alternative is them getting strung up on a fucking lamp pole while mobs cheer.

Hopefully it won’t come to that. But it might have to get close. I have little faith that the billionaire tribe actually knows what is good for them and understands that millions of people beat billions of dollars and that if we decide to come after them, all that money won’t mean a god damned thing.

Hell, if the people are mad enough, we can make it illegal to buy from or sell to them, and go after any “friends” helping them out, too.

Luigi Mangione’s killing of that health CEO was just the opening shot.

Sometimes has to be done to show these people that they are not untouchable.

I’d much rather that was done via law enforcement. And that’s a real possibility. The legal establishment is super pissed off too. Especially judges.

But I am open to other possibilities as well.

More after the break.

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An average Friday

Normally I would resort to personal reportage right now but I don’t have much to report.

Had Wound Care this morning. Somehow screwed up setting my alarm so I woke up at 9:35 am for an appointment at 10 am.

Had to get dressed real quick. Didn’t even get to eat first.

That tiny burst of excitement aside, the only faintly interesting part of it was that, because it was Good Friday, the health center wasn’t actually open and I had to ring the doorbell so that one of the nurses could let me in.

Oh, and when I was waiting, I heard someone say my name, so I got up and went into the usual room only to have a nurse stop me and say, “I don’t think she’s ready yet!”

To which I said, “Well then who called me in here? Because someone said my name. ”

Luckily she was close enough to ready that I could just sit on the examining table and wait for her to finish getting ready.

I’m kinda glad I got cranky about it, though. I rightfully asserted myself.

Don’t make me get up then go back to the waiting room then have to get up and come back to the clinic AGAIN.

I’m already in pain.

Let’s see. Oh, and after that I wanted a vanilla cone from McD’s, so we pulled into the drive thru at our local McD’s only to be told “we’re not doing ice cream today”.

Today? What the conceivable fuck? No ice cream for an entire day?

Luckily the other McD’s, over near Lansdowne Mall, had ice cream.

I guess our local McD’s ice cream machine was broken?

After that I came home and ordered groceries. It would have been convenient if they had arrived super early again this time, so of course they were on time instead.

Got everything I ordered, which is always a plus.

Then I made the video you see at the top of this entry. Which was tricky because I was so sleepy I was nodding off in the middle of editing.

Oh well. Got the damned thing done and took a nap.

And for everything else… you were there!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or was it the other way around?

Anyhow, here’s the vid.

So yeah. I think I am ready to start living for fun. And not just the sad, weak fun I can get from video games. Real fun, the kind that comes with thrills and excitement.

I’ve enjoyed a lot of video games over the years, and some of them have been truly great experiences, but they were still safe, tame, controlled experiences with very little in the way of real, physical stimulation.

Which was kind of the point, in a way. No physical, all cerebral, nice and cozy and contained and guaranteed not to upset the status quo.

Said quo being “do nothing but play video games all fucking day”. Every day. All the time. For decades on end. Like I was in a prison cell for fuck’s sake.

Well that’s not good enough any more. Fuck that shit. I’m not in prison, or cold storage, or suspended animation, or the witness protection program.

I’m a living, breathing mammal who is finally ready to increase his stimulation level.

Shake off my lethargy and do stuff. It doesn’t have to be some kind of world shaking megaproject or magnum opus or anything.

It can just be me fucking around with some AI tool or another. For example.

It just has to be new and fun and exciting. The world is a toy chest right now and I can’t wait to find what wonders this new age of AI will produces in the future.

Because this shit’s just getting started, folks.

Speaking of which, I made another little thing with Vidu that I like.

It’s just so wholesome that you’d suspect Vidu had a lot of restrictions. 😛

Just for the heck of it, I tagged it as being made for kids. I mean, why not? Kids might well enjoy this lovely little snippet.

I just wish they would rephrase the question. No, it’s not made for kids. But it is safe for kids. It’s as G-rated as it gets.

Heck, most of my vids would be SFW if I didn’t swear so much.

But I express myself in the manner of my people. I grew up in a swearing culture back on Prince Edward Island, and I am proud to carry on that tradition, for fuck’s sake.

I will consider stopping my swearing when and if I get the requisite 500 subscribers necessary to be able to monetize my videos.

Which would presumably involve promoting them somehow, and oof. That is not something that comes naturally to me at all.

My instinct is to just put things out there and people can decide for themselves whether they like it or not.

But of course, they have to know it exists and see it first.

The other unappealing solution would be to work really, really hard to make videos so damned good that anyone who sees them not only loves them but absolutely must get all their friends and family to see it too.

That does not currently seem likely. Though my discontent with how plain and boring my videos are visually continues to grow.

Which reminds me… I found out there’s a Windows TikTok app!

So I am back on TikTok. Most of my vids would fit in there quite well. Most of the videos on TikTok are just people talking.

It’s what is expected there.

I dunno if there’s a time limit on videos on TikTok but I am pretty sure there is not. I recorded some fairly long vids back when my tablet was working.

I might even start uploading all my current vids to TikTok. I mean what the hell, I technically have a following there too.

I am just happy to be back on the Tok. I really enjoyed my time there.

Who knows, maybe I’ll become famous that way.

More after the break.

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`In the middle of a thought

That’s how I feel right now.

Like I’m a CD that got stuck between tracks. My brain is looking for something to say but it’s not coming up with anything. I feel alarmingly blank.

Oh well, I know this too shall pass. Just like my attack of mental thickness last week. it seems upsetting now, but once I am rested up and hydrated, I’ll fine.

Slowly I am learning not to freak out about stuff.

But that means finding other uses for that energy. I had another “bad moment” earlier where I felt like could jump out of my own skin out of sheer frustrated nervousness

This time, though, I was able to really focus on the “what would make things better right now? ” question and I got an answer :

Running. What would have made me happy would be to go full tilt running across a grassy field that stretches out infinitely so I can just run and run and run and not have to worry about turning or slowing down, just running as fast and as hard as I can for the sheer exuberant rush of letting all that pent up energy out like a wild stallion.

Not an option, obviously, but it gives me a clue as to what the problem is.

If the goal is to release energy, there are probably ways I can do that which fit within the confines of my disability.

I am still worried about hurting myself via my undiagnosed and apparently uninteresting muscle disorder. But I am weighing that against the benefits I would undoubtedly get from exercise, such as tension relief, mood elevation, better vascular health, and so on.

There has to be some form of exercise I can make myself do that won’t make my condition worse and will give me some form of relief.

Pity that the physiotherapy place hasn’t gotten back to me yet.

I really want to consult a professional about this.

But I guess they don’t find my case interesting either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or maybe that should be “the feelers”, or antennae.

I got onto the subject of empathy by way of one of those “when was your gut feeling about someone right?” Reddit videos I am so fond of.

Being a strongly intuitive rational materialist, those things appeal to me.

Like I said in the comments, I use my empathy and/or intuition (my “gut feelings”) to give me leads about people. If I have a bad gut feeling about someone, I then investigate the people to see if it’s right about them.

It usually is.

And I am quite good at sussing people out. I can ask perfectly innocuous sounding questions that will nevertheless tell me a lot about someone just by how they react.

Man, I really am creepy.

Oh well, this is the soul I got so that’s the person I am.

C’est la vie.

Being science minded. I sometimes wonder what, exactly, it is I am picking up from people. What could be traveling between them and me?

To me, it feels electromagnetic. Like my nervous system acts as a receiver for some kind of broadcast from other people’s nerves.

And that’s not completely ridiculous, but it’s not too likely. The amount of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the live electrical system that is our nervous system is pretty small so that “antennae would have to be quite sensitive in order to pick up that transmission.

But like I said, not impossible.

My only other idea is pheromones. And those seem even less likely.

I am sure there is a whole galaxy of things we don’t know about how pheromones work and how they affect our minds and our moods. Indeed, they could be the source of the very “bad gut feelings” I mentioned above.

And they must surely be how dogs sense our moods. And be why I sometimes get a bad feeling about places, too.

There were houses I delivered papers to where I am sure some bad shit was going down. But you can’t very well call the cops based on a bad vibe.

But my experience of empathy is too immediate and dense with information to be something that wafts over to me whenever.

Pheromones are definitely part of the equation but they can’t be the whole thing.

And with that I am out of theories. The fact that my empathy reflects people’s real emotions is attested to by the very “creepy” things I mentioned in the vid.

I would not have been able to freak out my siblings by casually mentioning things I saw in their heads if my strong empathic powers were delusional.

And of course, my own subjective experience is really all I need. Like I said in the vid, other people’s emotions are just there for me.

I suppose I could have followed some career path based on my empathy. That’s basically what I would have been doing had my life gone as planned and I would have become a practicing psychologist.

I really want to help people, and with my natural abilities augmented by a college degree plus whatever other education I’d need, I would have been a very good one.

But my parents wanted early retirement instead. Fucking Boomers.

I suppose I could try to become one now. The psych courses would be a breeze for me and my aptitude for the subject would be more than evident.

My handicap would make things tricky. Probably best to take the courses online.

It’s a possibility I shall ponder. Spending my days helping people with their darkness and their demons by shedding some light into their worlds sounds so good to me.

And talk about good karma!

More after the break.

---

Ooh pretty horsie!

I made this here in Vida and I love how it turned out, so here it is!

I’m jealous of both of them. 🙂

---

The spooks in the shadows

Got that “haunted” feeling again.

Oh well, whatever. Shit happens. Excrement occurs. Sometimes I feel spooked and strange and alienated for no apparent reason. Big deal.

A mind as powerful and unique as mine is bound to have some eccentricities.

It could be sundowning. That’s something people at eldercare facilities discovered about the elder they care for that some of them are fine all day but when the sun goes down they become fearful and/or difficult and/or just plain nuts.

Same thing happens in mental health wards too.

And I have noticed that a change comes over me when the sun comes down lately. And it seems to match sundowning. I feel twitchy and nervous and spooked. I feel like I am one sudden loud noise from shrieking hysteria.

That might do me some good, come to think of it. Blow through a bunch of latent emotions all at once. Clear out the cobwebs.

But I am too damned stable for that.

Sad. But stable.

So I just trudge along my therapeutic path like I’m a tortoise hoping to outrun a particularly stupid hare.

Only in my case the hare is death.

The truth is that I am unwilling to abandon the safety of stability for the potential of renewal. I fear the chaos that lies in the darkness of my mind too much for that, and I have no faith that things can be okay unless I consciously and logically make them OK.

I’m too old and broken and poor to go off on any sort of life adventure where I get to find out who I really am by dealing with novel situations that teach me to rely upon myself.

The only way that’s going to happen is if I’m rich, or marry someone that is. Traveling when you’re disabled pretty much requires assistance that ain’t gonna come cheap.

Though from what I have seen, people are quite nice to us cripples. So there’s that.

Still, I rather like the idea of traveling in the lap of luxury, with porters to carry things and fancy little staircases to help me get in and out of vehicles and a handsome nurse/assistant to keep me alive and happy.

I could see the world if I had that.

But I kind of need to get rich first.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

---

Today, I gave storytelling a try.

And the video turned out fine. But I’m not happy with it.

I could have sworn that the story I tell in the vid was a lot funnier. But somehow it doesn’t seem all that humorous to me now.

Perhaps I’m too close to it.

Or maybe I need to add a laugh track.

Still, I have loads of anecdotes so I am glad I broke ground on telling them. I’ve never done much comedic storytelling but the internet runs on stories so there is definitely a market out there for funny stories told well.

Heck, maybe I could just record myself reading one of my short stories out loud.

It would be the closest I’d ever get to working from a script!

Today has been mellow. Did Wound Care this morning. Everything went smoothly as usual. The wound on my right foot remains closed.

I am supposed to be painting it with iodine once a day. Such a charmingly old fashioned kind of treatment. Like applying a liniment or taking headache powder.

So far, I have not remembered to do that even once. So if the dang thing ends up infected, I will have only myself to blame.

Well, myself and the germs, but they can’t be held legally liable.

Mood wise, I am doing okay. I still have moments where I feel scared and/or lost and/or like I wanna scream, but my brain is struggling to rewire itself so these things are to be expected, I suppose.

Which reminds me…

The way up

That’s what I am looking for, in my own way.

I’m searching for a way to raise my mood and I think the first step in that is convincing myself that it’s safe to be up.

Or if not safe, then good.

That’s how seized up my internal engine is in my ego’s quest for “control”. Being up might lead to doing unforeseen things on impulse, and that’s strictly verboten.

It’s like my mind has been occupied by a fascist regime that oppresses and suppresses me in the name of “national security”.

Safety uber alles. It’s a terrible way to live.

And it all leads back to that primary trauma of being raped when I was 4 and that convincing me that the world was a horrible place that I should have as little to do with as possible in order to not disturb the big part of me that went to sleep back then.

And it’s still sleeping now, the poor thing.

The bullying was the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with reality. Especially when it happened outside of school.

That’s when I concluded that the only safe place was home, and the only truly safe place at home was alone in my room, reading.

That way I wasn’t in anyone’s way and nobody would notice me and I wouldn’t feel ignored, dismissed, neglected, or like I was getting on someone’s nerves.

It’s always better to feel alone when you are alone that to feel alone when you are surrounded by people who technically love you.

Man I’ve led a lonely life. No wonder I’m so god damned weird.

And even now, I only feel safe when I am alone. That does not, sadly, keep me from being lonely. I want to be with people. I’m happiest when I am around the right people.

But I still isolate myself because anxiety doesn’t give a shit about happiness and it’s going to enforce the edicts of my inner regime come what may.

I’m working on it.

More after the break.

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I finally did it

I bought a new game!

It’s called Rogue Trader and I mostly got it because it’s by Owlcat Studios, who made the two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, that I absolutely loved to bits.

Plus the reviews are good and it was on sale for a non-insane price of around $40.

So far it’s pretty cool. They are really leveraging the awesome “fantasy meets science fiction” vibe of the Warhammer 40K^[1] universe on which the game is based. The setting reminds me of Dune that way.

Plus it is that rare thing, a science fiction (ish) RPG, and I am enjoying the hell out of that. Finally I can play a turn-based isometric RPG that doesn’t rehash Tolkien.

I have nothing against elves and orcs and stuff but it’s EVERYWHERE in my preferred genre of game and I am sick of it.

And I am very, very definitely a science fiction guy deep down. I’ve read a fair bit of fantasy too but science fiction is and always be where my heart is.

My character is a close combat specialist. I figured I might as well do something different that my usual wizards and sharpshooters/archers.

Though I dunno. In a universe with guns, melee skills might seem a little quaint. I assume I will have abilities to compensate for that.

Like deflecting blaster bolts with my light saber or something.

Do you suppose that there’s such a thing as a heavy light saber?

I’m just glad I finally frigging picked something. I’ve been dickering and dithering for weeks with like $60 sitting there on my Steam account waiting for me to make up my mind and find something!

I’m also glad that, if I want to, I can stop playing Tyranny. It’s not a terrible game but I don’t find it very inspiring to play.

Part of that is the dark and semi-evil tone, part of it is the lack of an overall noble quest, and part of it is the drab and depressing brown and grey art design.

I might keep playing, I dunno.

But Rogue Trader is turn based and Tyranny is “real time with pause” so it’s not really a fair fight. I’m a thinker, and thinkers prefer turn based.

In fact I wish the real world was turn based.

I’d be so good at it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today I decided to talk about sleep.

I am still feeling the itch to make something more fun and ambitious, but if I want to do something like that, I’m going to have to do it earlier in the day, or in two sessions.

Because I keep sliding up on 2 pm with pretty much exactly the amount of energy I need to do what, for me, is a fairly minimal video like the one above.

So I am pondering doing my vid at 10 am instead, at least on the days I don’t have Wound Care. That way if it ends up being something fairly elaborate, I can put in the necessary effort then take a nice long nap before blogging at 4:05 pm.

That will take a certain investment of self-discipline, of course. I know that initially I won’t want to get my creativity in gear that early in the day.

But it beats running my brain on idle by playing fucking video games.

They are, at long last, starting to feel very pointless to me. Why am I investing my enormous brainpower into something that amounts to running in place?

I still enjoy my games, but not unreservedly. The moments when I say, “Is this really all I’m going to do with the day?” are growing more frequency and more potent.

Who knows. Maybe I am on the road to outgrowing the whole thing. The truth is that I would rather be doing something fun and exciting and new, like messing around with AI tools, or writing a short story, or making a funny video.

Thanks to the vids, I am out in the world now. People notice what I put on YouTube. Occasionally they even leave comments. It’s amazing.

It’s almost like I am a valid entity! Can being a grownup be far behind?

Yes it can. But whatever.

I’m working on it.

The secret, I think, is to let myself become excited and/or inspired. And that means I have to stop being so terrified of being disappointed.

I have to stop laying in the dirt for fear of falling and start being who I truly am, someone who recovers, recharges, and is back on their feet in no time.

I just have to tap into that eternal spark inside me and let it drive me instead of wrapping it up in wet blankets and smothering it because it might make doing nothing uncomfortable for me.

Seriously. I’ve been treating it like a chronic illness. Like it’s this horrible affliction that seizes me now and then and makes me anxious and tense.

Well then DO SOMETHING. dumbass! Even just lying on my back on the bed and flailing my limbs around would be better than stupidly suffering out of stupefaction.

Get some frigging exercise for once. It’s good for you!

There are so many ways in which I am my own worst enemy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to untangle all the ways in which I have tied myself into knots just to avoid the temptation to actually do things.

I’m tired of being all balled up inside myself. I want to be reckless and restless and wild and free. I want to seek and find excitement and enjoyment and joy.

It’s no longer good enough to just subsist, like some kind of filter feeder stuck to a rock in the Atlantic somewhere. I’m not an invalid in a back ward being kept like a potted plant by bored nurses and whose entire life revolves around pudding.

Not yet, anyhow.

It’s not too late for me to learn to live another way. A way that opens its arms wide and embraces life instead of shrinking away from it.

And I will get there, god damn it. I will burn the gunk out of my engines and work the kinks out of my muscles and finally stand up and be counted.

Because I count.

And that’s a good thing.

More after the break.

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A better attitude

I need one.

But lordy, will it be hard for me to get.

I’ve been a cranky, depressed, nihilistic Gen X loner and loser for so long that it’s hard to remember that there is any other way to be.

I’m too old to learn to be perky, god damn it.

I can probably manage to be a more upbeat version of a downer, though.

“Hi there folks! We’re born astride a grave and death is the only salvation any of us will ever know, but until then, why not try our new huevos ranchero burritos?”

Seriously, though, I know there’s a happier and more optimistic version of myself who stubbornly refuses to be “down” hiding in me somewhere. buried under decades’ worth of emotional detritus and broken cognition.

And I want to be that guy. He would be way better at dealing with life than me. He’d be optimistic and hopeful and resourceful and he’d be geared towards seeing solutions not just problems and everyone would love him because he makes people happy just by being around spreading sunshine!

He’s so cool.

Honestly, I feel like he’s the person I was supposed to be. The person I was before a stranger’s cock shattered my little four year old life. Someone bright and hopeful and ready to take on the world with nothing but his wit and his personality.

Both are formidable weapons.

But all I can do to try to become him is to keep pushing myself in that direction and removing or burning through any and all things that get in the way.

I’ve got a lot of blooming to do and I am already late.

The thing is, I obviously have no doubts as to my intelligence and talent. It’s clear to me that I could do great things if given the chance.

What I doubt is my ability to do what it takes to get that chance.

I’ll need one HELL of an agent.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This time it was Coldplay. Sorry.

Dunno what the hell key I sang that in. The Key of Me, I guess.

But that’s what came out when I started to sing the song, and I just kind of went with it because I was managing to get an okay tone and I knew that I sure as fuck couldn’t sing in the original singer’s testicular torsion range so what the hell.

So it ended up kind of weird sounding. Call it a “personal interpretation”.

I’m not happy with the video, though. I feel like I should either commit to just having a still image for the whole thing or put the effort into putting the lyrics on screen so that people have something to look at.

I chose that sunset picture today because I thought it gave the whole thing a “karaoke feel”. Like I’m right there in the bar with you!

The stuff I put on screen for the instrumental break is pretty much me in full on Jesus mode. My big warm gooey heart on full display, which is rare for me.

But I really like that side of me. In a way I wish I could be that way all the time. Just go around being sweetness and lightness and love all the time and inspiring others to let go of their anger and their hate and join me in the clean green meadows of love.

I would have made such an amazing hippie.

But of course, there’s a lot more sides of me than that, and I am still hard at work trying to come up with a single sense of self that includes all of them.

I mean, sure, I can go around saying, “I am not my facets, I’m the gem” and that’s certainly true. It’s all me, as complicated as that can be.

Maybe I am just too bizarre a creation for a singular sense of self to be possible. I get the feeling that developing one of those means cutting off a lot of yourself that does not fit and I am just plain not willing to do that.

I am too firmly committed to indecision for that.

Plus I have always been very definitely myself. To a fault, really. If I had been more willing to bend in order to learn to fit in, I might have actually gotten the fuck over myself and made some god damned friends and had a peer group.

But it feels like that was never really in the cards for me. I was just too weird a kid from the get-go. Maybe kindergarten would have taught me the social lessons I needed so badly but that was not in the cards for me either.

I was destined to be weird little critter, I guess. One of a kind.

But at least I have superpowers. That helps. I might be weirder than a snake’s luggage but I am also incredibly intelligent, powerfully creative, supernaturally articulate, glowingly charismatic. and humble.

By all normal measures, I should be able to harness my extraordinary abilities to walk astride this little world of ours like a giant, or at least make a life for myself.

Billions of people would sacrifice major organs to have what I have, etc.

But for some reason I just can’t do that. I could call it indecision and I could call it lack of will and I could call it having a very underdeveloped id, but whatever it is, it keeps me from being able to leave my grotty grotto and find my place in the world.

I’m too scared. Scared of doing the wrong thing and getting hurt, perhaps. Scared of ended up overstimulated and confused and scared and lost. Scared of having to cope on my own and be my own person and develop my own ways to cope.

Scared of being out there, being seen, having to deal with that big bad world.

Everything about that scares the shit out of me.

But as God as my witness, I will overcome that. I will rise. I will escape.

And this phase of my life will finally be over.

More after the break.

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What makes you happy

Mulling over our strange relationship with happiness again.

Ask people if they want to be happy and they will, of course, say yes.

And most people have at least some notion of what will make them happy.

And yet, we don’t do those things. It almost seems like we avoid them. Why?

Is there something about modern society that makes us demand new sources of happiness all the time? Because the ones we already know about are… boring?

I feel like on some level, society makes us ever-hungry little piggies eternally worried that if we stop and appreciate what we have we might miss out on stuffing our greedy little mouths to the absolutely maximum amount.

You fool, in the time it took you to stop and smell that rose, you could have stuffed your gullet with TEN MORE TONS OF FOOD!

That’s why one of the most radical and liberating things we can do is settle for less.

To say, “I have enough, thank you. I know that I could get and/or have and/or achieve more but I am perfectly content with what I have and don’t need any more. ”

Odds are, just reading that made you uncomfortable. I know typing it did it for me. It is such a radical heresy that even an outré weirdo like me feels weird about it, and I am the person who came up with it.

But why? Why do we have this universal assumption of full on feckless greed that states that, of course we are all constantly trying to get as much as we can all the time?

Looked at objectively, I find it very spiritually depressing. Not that I am claiming to be immune. I’m a greedy little piggy like everyone else.

We’re simply not allowed to say “enough”. There’s no such thing as enough. Because if there was, then at some point you might stop getting as much and that’s unthinkable.

The very idea of “enough” is unthinkable, as in we can’t even imagine having enough except in a detached, abstract sense.

Sure, we can imagine a nice little lifestyle for ourselves and say to ourselves, “Yeah, I guess that would be enough. ”

But never ever could be imagine turning down more.

That would be absolutely beyond the pale. The sort of thing that leads not to outrage but blank incomprehension. Most people don’t even know that’s a thing you could do.

Before long, people will invent reasons it’s somehow wrong. But the real reason will be that you’re making people uncomfortable and they want to punish you and make you start acting normal again.

All because you dared to have enough.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. .

First, I have, of course, made a vid.

You know, sometimes I have a vague idea what I am going to talk about but a lot of the time I just start talking or typing and see what comes out.

It’s one of the way I prevent writer’s block. When you know you’re going to start writing no matter what, your mind is forced to come up with something.

Or at least that’s how it works for me.

Before I started blogging in 2011, I would sometimes do literal “write anything” exercises. Just typing whatever came into my head with absolutely no forethought and no concern for whether it was “right” or coherent or made sense or anything.

The only goal was to keep typing.

And that was super valuable because it helped to unclog the verbal pipeline between my mind and the world and get me used to putting my thoughts into words on a page.

And sure, it was incoherent and nonsensical…. at first.

But the more I did it, the more coherent and structures this seat of the pants writing ended up being. To the point where I wrote an entire short story of around 800 words in one nonstop typing session.

Which is pretty impressive, don’t you think?

It was not a great short story, mind you, but it had a beginning, middle, and end, and it all made sense.

It was readable.

And I have carried that lesson forward to this very day. It’s how I learned not to second guess what I am writing, because that road leads to paralysis.

I write what I write, and I rarely look back. For better and for worse.

It has its drawbacks but it’s made me very productive. I can write damned near anything and I can do it fast.

Anyhow, this is what I am REALLY excited about posting…. look what I made!

It’s ME! It’s Fruvous strutting the stage as lead singer of a rock band and he’s doing it in front of an audience of FREAKING MUPPETS.

Word cannot describe how much that means to be.

Relatedly, I seem to have made my first YouTube Short.

I guess it became one because it’s only 4 seconds long? What I like is that I didn’t have to worry about the aspect ratio. It did that itself.

So all I have to do is find a way to say something worth listening to in 60 seconds or less and I, to, can make Shorts.

Works for me.

I used a site called Vidu to make Fru’s fabulous debut. It’s been amazing to play with. All it needed was a reference photo for Fruvous (which I generated via image generation) and a description from me and boom, I’m a Muppet!

That wasn’t even in my description. I just told it to give me a rock and roll band with all anthropomorphic animal musicians, and pow!

It is, no exaggeration, something I will treasure forever. And it’s great that I know that I can make Fruvous animations any time I like!

I wonder if it could handle the four footed version of him. Could make some pretty darn cute “fox on the beach” animations for the coming summer.

Of course, Vidu doesn’t do NSFW stuff. If I want to do that kind of thing (and I really, really do!), I will have to find some shady AI that doesn’t ask questions.

But get this : I tried to get it to animate with a male furry nude as the reference, and it refused to do it!

HOW DID IT KNOW? It must have a penis detection formula or something.

And just thinking about the math involved makes my head spin.

Well it’s sort of half a sphere on top of a cylinder…

More after the break.

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Doing dumb shit

Right now, I am sitting here waiting for dear Julian to bring me the food I ordered.

It took about 20 mins to get here. I’ve needed to poop since before I ordered. That 20 minutes would have been the ideal time to go poop.

But I just kept playing my video game instead.

Now the food hath arrived and I am eating it and I still need to poop. But apparently I lack the self-discipline to make myself get up and go poop BEFORE I eat and blog.

In the abstract, I am sensible and pragmatic, like a good Taurus. I always know what I should be doing.

I just don’t do it a lot of the time, and generally speaking, the reasons are emotional.

Quite often it’s simply a matter of lacking the will to overcome myself and make myself do something. My lethargy and indolent indecision make it hard for me to simply decide to do something a fair bit of the time.

That’s part of why I rely so heavily on routine. Routine really cuts down on the number of decisions you have to make, especially that most dreaded one : what do I do now?

I follow my routine, of course. And any spare moments I have, I stuff with video games.

That way I almost never have to decide what to do with myself, and it’s ever so easy to just let the days click by like numbers on a clock, each day seeming a little shorter than the last, until they all become a blur and it seems like whole weeks blink by in a snap.

And then you die.

They say that when you’re over the hill, you pick up speed, but seeing as death lies at the bottom, that’s not such a good thing.

For most people, anyhow.

Lately I have been harboring some “not technically suicidal” thoughts about how I am looking forward to being old enough to die a respectable death because then this whole sordid mess will be over.

That’s a heavy damned word for me. Over. It’s like the ultimate expression of unhealthy escapism, the desire to escape literally everything so you don’t have to deal with living at all any more.

Those are the rocks I work hard to avoid. I keep myself busy with my routine and my games and my creative output so I don’t think about that kind of thing too much.

And I am most definitely not making any plans to harm myself.

But when deathcomes for me, many years from now I might not put up much of a fight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It was supposed to be rap lyrics, but whatever.

Don’t mean to be crude, and
With all due respect
When the perfect pink girl
Decides she wants sex
She’s not the honey sweet virgin
Or Daddy’s little girl
When she wants a big man
To rock her little world
All those ribbons and lace
Kept her pent up inside
So when she finally left home
She went buck wild
She was burning up down there
Which is why, at her peak,
She was sleeping with a dozen different guys a week
She wanted to try every man in town
It took a pregnancy scare
To get her to slow down
And so the pretty pink princess
Is gone for good
And she’s got a reputation
In the neighborhood
But it seems like she finally satisfied her whim
And now she’s looking at her best friend Doris and thinking, “Hmmm. ”

There’s an AI music generator called Mureka^[1] and I wrote those lyrics to try it out but when I went to create an account it turned out I already had one and I had used up all my free credits so I couldn’t make the new song.

So I decided I would get a paid membership. What the heck, it was only $10/month USD (so a hair under $14 in real money) and for that I would be able to render 400 songs, as well as a lot of neato features I’d never seen anywhere else, so I figured I would give it a shot.

But they wouldn’t accept my credit card, so fuck’em.

---

Anyhow, here’s today’s vid.

The feeling of brain congestion has eased some since I recorded that, so I guess it really was dehydration or whatever.

I was pretty worried there for a bit. Visions of early onset Alzheimer’s or something even worse were dancing in my head.

And that would be so unfair given all the mental exercise I get!

But no, it turns out I was overreacting, like I often do. I honestly think my body and brain just need the excitement now and then.

I’m high strung. I need something to get super excited or totally freaked out about on a regular basis in order to burn off all that excess mental energy I generate.

I am learning to live with that. It would be better to turn that overcharge into excitement or even happiness, but I don’t have the knack for that yet.

Oh well, flipping out for no good reason every now and then isn’t the worst crime.

More worrisome, for now at least, is these pains I have been getting in/on my head. They are brief but pretty intense and I am wondering WTF.

So far there’s been three. So, not panic worthy yet.

Luckily, they are at the surface, just below the scalp, so I am not worried about this having a totally different cerebrospinal implication or anything.

But all three have been in very different locations, and they definitely don’t feel like a skin thing, so I am still wondering WTF.

They’re like a toothache of the skull. And that can’t be good.

A few more and I will definitely consider a trip to Urgent Care or the ER. It’s some pretty serious pain so this is one thing I will not ignore.

In general, I only go to the ER when I’m scared. It’s not smart, but if I went to the ER or UC every time my health did something weird, I might as well move in.

Most of the time it’s just dehydration anyhow.

More after the break.

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Growth and pain

Growth – real growth – pretty much has to hurt.

At least if your psyche is as rigidly structured as mine. When I pulled myself together after my psychological meltdown in my early 20’s, I create a version of me that could function at a very low level – and that’s still the version of me that is running 30 years later – but in order to create that version of me, I had to install a sort of exoskeleton to hold myself together given what my life had become.

And like a lizard having to shed its skin as it grows, I have to more or less break myself open to let myself grow now and that is bound to hurt.

But I don’t care. Pain like that means very little to me any more. I want to grow and thrive and rise and if pain is the price for that, so be it. Bring it on.

I’m learning to weaponize my innate stubbornness and it’s glorious.

So I am having my bad moments. Moments when I feel confused and anxious and like I don’t know what is going on any more.

But I do. The feeling fades and I remember that I am fine and nothing bad is happening and I can just relax and feel safe.

Well I can try anyhow. High strung, remember. Truly relaxing would probably require a much, much bigger expenditure of effort than I am used to doing and I am very much still adjusting to the whole “effort is not the enemy, idleness is” shift of POV.

I know I have to make myself do more so I can drain the curse that is frustrated energy out of my body like squeezing poison from a wound and that means overcoming this absurd tendency to be a miser when it comes to effort.

As if that’s something you can hoard. It’s not like being idle or aimless now means you can be super energetic and purposeful later.

Rather the opposite, in fact. Lethargy is a disease and the more you feed it, the more it grows and takes over.

I’m going to try to shake that shit off and bring myself to life once more. A life where I have hope and ambition and a life to lead.

Cold sleep is over. Time to wake up and run this starship of mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.