Once more, I share my valuable insights with the world.

Took me slightly more than an hour to do the vid, including primary recording and editing. That seems like a reasonable amount of my day to sink into making them.

I am still wrestling with the issue of adornment. My flamboyant side still wants to add all kinds of fancy stuff to my videos, even though I know that is not the style now.

The style these days is to accompany your spoken word with relevant video clips and/or pictures, and I know I could do that, but holy crap is that a lot of work.

So perhaps I will work my way up to that.

As will no doubtedly be the case going forward, the editing is the real work. I can record the original video in like five minutes because I don’t need a script or notes.

In a weird way, it’s as if I already have a script in my head, or at least, the idea that will eventually form one.

But then going through and editing out all the ums and stammers and odd pauses takes a fair bit of effort. And I have had to regain my tolerance for hearing myself say the same things over and over as I edit.

What I really want is a modern AI miracle site or app that will do all that for me. I am sure it must be possible. I have seen sites that almost do that.

The missing ingredient is that those sites that I have seen so far do not have an option for you to use your own audio. They all want to use an AI voice so that all you need to do is submit your script, which is frigging amazing, but not what I want.

I want it all to be me, me, me! 🙂

Which brings me to another issue, because I genuinely think that my oratory skills are amazing and a big part of that is how I present myself as I speak. How I emote and gesticulate and the look in my eyes.

And you can’t see those if there’s pictures in the way.

So it couldn’t be wall-to-wall pictures (so to speak) like the videos from some of my favorite YouTubers like John Michael Gautier. I would have to somehow leave room for cutting back to myself from time to time.

These are the issues with which I struggle.

I’d like to think that I am such a hypnotic and powerful orator that I don’t need anything except for my little old self in my videos, but I um, wouldn’t count on that.

After all, I don’t know anyone on YouTube like that. Even my beloved Refashioned Hippie has pictures she’s reacting to in her extremely witty way.

Which brings us to the subject of comedy.

I have learned from awesome folks like the guy behind the Jokes from Al channel (presumably named Al) that it is entirely possible to do entire skits by yourself and have it work out fine.

A lot of the time he doesn’t even change clothes for his various characters, he just shoots them under different lighting conditions.

And I could do that. And I know I’m a very funny guy. For that matter, I could just do stand-up in my videos.

But I am just not feeling it right now. So that idea can wait.

I suppose I could riff off the news like Colbert or Daily Show. Would be relatively simple to mix that with my political commentary.

What I really want is for someone else to do the hard parts so all I have to do is record myself saying things.

But I have no idea where to find someone who would do such work for free.

So it’s got to be lil ol me.

More after the break.

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The K to the F of the C

Enjoying a nice KFC meal right now.

Including onion rings. Dang they’re good. I got the onion rings instead of the fries this time because I knew that if I got my usual Mega Fries, I’d want gravy, and they now charge like $3.59 or so for a SMALL frigging gravy.

A large gravy is 10 freaking bucks!

I remember when a small gravy was 59 cents. And sometimes in the summer, they would give it to you for free because for a while in the 70’s and early 80’s the KFC in my home town did MAD business because that’s where people went in order to get the food they needed for a picnic.

That’s why KFC has always had those great big family meals. You could pull up in the station wagon, make one order, and roll off with a whole feast and then go to one of PEI’s many parks and beaches, find a picnic table, and dig in.

Not that my family ever did that. My mother did not care for picnics.

We had a few but she was scowling pretty much the whole time.

She came by it honest, though, because her father, my Pepe, didn’t like eating outside either. His opinion was that humanity had worked hard to provide shelter and modern conveniences for ourselves, so why eat outside?

He felt the same way about barbequing.

Eccentricity runs wild in my family.

Tonight I believe I’ve birthed a new habit. On a whim, I took all the components of my meal – chicken strips, popcorn chicken, and onion rings – and dumped them back into the box the meal came in, and found that I quite enjoyed having a box full of delicious crusty fried brown things by my side.

Kind of a portrait in cholesterol, but what the hell.

Reminds me of when I used to go to this Chinese buffet place near Granville and Commercial and felt a little guilty about the fact that I always immediately made a beeline for the egg rolls and fried wontons, which were easily the least healthy things in the whole place.

It made me feel conspicuously non-Asian.

But having lived in Richmond for 27 years, I’m quite used to that now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s video was a hell of a lot of work.

Today was the day I decided I was going to go all the way into the weeds and edit my video till it seemed at least vaguely professional.

As a bonus, that naturally put those little discontinuities in the video that make the whole thing less static looking to our eyes.

So yay that.

Anyhow, I enjoyed getting deep into video editing again and actually trying to make something as good as I can for once but I had forgotten just how much mental effort went in to that process and now I’m letting my brain cool off like I just took an exam.

In a word, phew.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will actually remember to do my video at 1 pm or maybe even earlier as opposed to today when I didn’t remember until just before 3 pm.

As a result, I had to go into blogging while the little grey cells in my brain are still venting steam. And even then I was late.

So don’t expect any intellectual gymnastics today. I can just about manage to type down what I am thinking and that’s about it.

I know the video ain’t perfect. But my original recording was six minutes and change and the finished video is only two minutes and a bit, so I excised a lot of extraneous crap and made it seem, via video editing magic, like I can stay on topic.

It’s an illusion that has an almost hypnotic level of appeal to me.

Heck, maybe I can learn a thing or two from my edited self.

One of the larger excised bits was me rambling on about why I thought we humans make up so many rules for sex.

Basically, I think deep down we are afraid of the power sex has over us, especially when it is suppressed and therefore has no release.

I mean, who thinks about food more, the well fed man or the starving one?

And sex is the key demarcation point between childhood and adulthood. The wholesale reject of sex by the prudes of the world is, therefore, really a rejection of adulthood.

The fact that we have socially developed a fairly long period between sexual maturity (menses or ejaculation) and adulthood does not change this.

It’s easy when you are a member of a fairly repressed society to believe that without strict rules, sexuality would rage out of control as being did nothing but fuck all day.

But like the unfortunate idea that retirement means doing nothing all day, this is an illusion created by deprivation because when one is deprived enough, the very idea of getting enough of the deprived thing seems insane.

That’s why I like posing the question, how much sex do you think people would have if everyone could have as much of whatever kind of sex they wanted at any time?

I don’t know the answer. Very few of us do. Even people who live marvelously libertine lifestyles don’t have that kind of access to sexual expression.

And hookup apps are limited by availability too.

But presumably one’s sexual appetite can be satiated just like any other fundamental drive and so one would then get to experience the marvel of a life free of the constant pressure of unrelieved lust.

Transcending earthly demands is easiest when you just give in to them already.

Honestly, I don’t know what life would be like then. I’d like to think that it would create a calmer, saner, smarter, more patient, more kind, and above all more relaxed world.

Pax sexualis, or maybe pax orgasmus.

People would finally be free to explore and express their full sexualities, and that, to me, would make the world a far better place.

So um, get to work on that, VR and AI. Chop chop!

More after the break.

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Oops wrong person

My friends have already seen this but the writing is so good that I just have to share it here so I can praise it :

The way it spirals out of control so beautifully is like a master class in comedic structure, including having the one center-point character who is trying to bring things back to some semblance of making sense.

Cody is my hero. He’s like a low affect trickster god warping reality around himself.

And the fact that he’s doing it basically to be included really tugs at my once upon a very lonely childhood heartstrings.

I so badly wanted to be part of the warm, friendly, relaxed, accepting, loving world that I saw all around me and that everyone else seemed to take for granted.

But I was locked away in my own cold lonely world by what I can now see as mental illness and severe social dysfunction.

By being raped then missing kindergarten my social development got severely delayed and the thing is, that kind of thing does not get better with time.

My social issues prevented me from getting the sorts of experiences that would have corrected it. I had no way into that big warm connected world.

If only there had been a kindly but very patient adult willing to work with me to teach me what I didn’t learn in kindergarten and help me find a way that I could go play with the other kids and maybe make friends.

I wanted to do that so badly, but I was not equipped to even understand what I was doing wrong, let alone correct it.

I wish I had possessed the courage to just go ahead and be an asshole. At least then I might have been worthy of some respect, like any good villain.

But instead I was a pathetic, whiny, bizarre little alien who was way too smart for his own good but it came at a terrible cost in terms of… well, everything else.

To this day, I am a socially retarded child in big boy’s clothes. Genius beyond the ken of mortal men but helpless as an infant to help myself.

At least I am working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the story of why I am starting my daily blogging an hour and change late :

You’re right, me. This is NOT fubn. Or fun.

Oh well, it at least puts a little variation into my day. A touch of the unexpected. Maybe I should get myself an actual alarm clock to prevent this kinds of hiccups.

Nah. Then the power would go out. And if it had batteries, they’d leak.

Jesus, do they even sell batteries any more? Let alone clocks.

So yeah, actually have my new glasses on for once. After having them on for the duration of the vid, I went to take them off. but then I realized that despite continued blurriness in their specs of mine, wearing them was relieving some kind of tension in my head so I decided to give wearing them in an attempt to get used to them another try.

Who knows, maybe this is all going somewhere.

I’ll try to keep them on for as long as I can. I can see the words I am typing right now well enough. They’re blurry but legible. I will try to stick it out.

I’m getting another needle n the eye tomorrow. The right eye this time. Maybe that will help. In theory, my eyes are not identical at the moment. The left one has been injected with the new medicine and the right has not.

And that’s an important distinction because my right eye is definitely my dominant eye and is doing a lot of the work ’cause the left eye suuuuucks.

I think the new medicine must be having some effect, though, because sucks substantially less than before.

So yay on that.

Who knows, maybe I will get to the now magical point of being able to wear my glasses all the time like a normal nerd.

Or at least have a pair that works for when I am here at the computer (which is most of my day) and another for when I am up and moving around and need distance vision.

You’d think glasses that work when you’re sitting at a computer would be an easy job, what with all the office workers out there.

But my eye problems are worse than mere vision correction can handle.

Best not to think about that too much. Or at all.

Before today’s computer mishap, I once more completely spaced on making a video at 1 pm. And like… what the fuck.

It’s like the warranty ran out on my remembering to do a vid. I did like seven vids in a row without fail then missed two in a row.

Then again, I feel more spaced out than usual lately so I’m probably not at my sharpest.

I think I must be behind on sleep. I feel this sort of lingering dopiness that indicates a need to rest these hardworking brain neurons of mine.

Plus I have noticing an uptick on my urge to sleep in general. Maybe my body has been trying to tell me something and as usual I have not been listening.

Ya know, maybe sometimes when I don’t want to get out of bed, it’s not because I’m depressed, it’s because I’m not done sleeping yet.

A radical thought well worth considering.

So perhaps this is the leading edge of one of my sleepy periods. So be it. They kind of suck sometimes, especially when i sleep hot and wake up all sweaty and dehydrated and the mental fog is so thick it’s edible.

But not very tasty.

More after the break.

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Teachers in the 70’s

Most of the teachers I had in the 70’s and early 80’s were fucking useless.

They were all Baby Boomers who were all about peace and love and “not being an authority figure” (God forbid) and they all wanted to be our friends.

Well I didn’t want my teachers to be my friends. I wanted them to be authority figures.

Someone I could look up to and count on and who made us kids feel safe and calm by being solid and strong and in control of everything. Someone who made us feel like we did not, in fact, live in lawless jungle anarchy. Someone who acted in loco parentis and was therefore, like it or not Boomers, our leader.

People need leaders. Not in every situation, but in a lot of them. There needs to be someone people can turn to when they don’t know what to do. This person does not even need to give order, they just have to be someone the others will look at for how they should be reacting to something.

And that’s especially true with kids. Kids look to adults for nearly everything and that definitely includes cues on how to react to and handle things. That means the most important non-parental adults in the lives of children, their teachers, have to be ready and willing to teach these vital lessons.

And you can’t do that if you “don’t want to be an authority figure, man, ”

“Hey, don’t look at me, I’m just the only adult in the room and the one whose job specifies actually being there for you kids but that’s, like, way too much responsibility for a spoiled Boomer like me and because I don’t want to do it I think I don’t have to. ”

And so you got these wishy-washy namby-pamby useless teachers who can’t control a classroom not simply because they were trying to rule us with peace and loves but because of their refusal and/or inability to project the kind of authority needed to make the kids feel calm and safe.

And it’s a particularly vexatious problem because the deep intellectual superstructure of our society makes it nearly impossible for most people to say, “the problem is that I need someone competent and strong to boss me/us around”.

Or even, “the problem is that I need to boss these people around”.

That flies in the face of our individualistic culture and so we end up saying vague things about leadership and management without being able to actually name the problem, let alone actually fix the thing.

Just an unplanned side effect of freedom, I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I don’t know if I really got my point across in this.

I feel like I missed something.

Oh well, at least it’s almost good.

Fun fact : that was written and performed by the guy who invented The Chipmunks.

How’s that for random?

I’m feeling okay today. My mood has been fairly stable. There’s still a hell of a lot of emotions in me that need to come out but for now they are quiescent.

Joe’s not feeling okay at all. Apparently he’s been very ill since yesterday. He didn’t even go to visit his family and play board games last night, and that’s something he normally does every Saturday night, even in this anti-social era he’s been in.

The paranoid part of me thinks, “Wow, he got out of not one but TWO social engagements this weekend, How efficient. “

But that is probably just my hurt feelings talking. I’ve already told you wonderful people about how hurt I am that Joe skips out on literally every opportunity he has to socialize with Felicity and I.

It’s like we’re just not worth the effort any more.

And I know what that’s like. After all, I suffer from depression too. I know what it’s like to feel yourself retreating from the world and abandoning all the things that normally keep your life stitched together like social time with friends and not being able to stop it.

Not that I am saying that Joe isn’t legitimately ill. I have no reason to believe that except for my own paranoid and somewhat self-centered way of thinking.

And as the skeptic community likes to point out, emotions aren’t evidence.

Which is undoubtedly true but possibly unhelpful. I am still in the process of learning not to insist on being naked before the truth any more as part of some strange kind of intellectual machismo need to be, essentially, “righter than thou”.

On the whole, I’d rather be happy.

That’s why I ask people if they rather be happy, or right. You can inflict a hell of a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering on yourself simply because you refuse to admit that someone you had an argument with a long time ago might have been right.

Your parents, for instance.

And that goes double for a naturally very stubborn person like myself. I know that I can be irrationally pigheaded sometimes. It’s something I have learned to watch out for in myself. Part of my routine, “Wait, am I being crazy?” metaconsciousness check.

When you know you’re mentally ill, you have to watch out for stuff like that.

Knowing you’re crazy is, in itself, kind of crazy. There is only so much yiu can do to try to compensate and past that point, all you can do is assume that the way you are perceiving things might not be correct, but for now you have to pretend they are.

You can’t doubt everything all the time.

What I have to be especially wary about is my emotional perceptions and beliefs. Depression is underpinned by delusions of that sort.

Like my thinking that everyone hates me and has nothing but contempt for me. I can still feel that feeling within me as I type this even though I have that feeling safely locked up and dismissed now.

People love me. I’m a very special dude.

But it’s like negative emotions grow so huge that they blot out the real world entirely. It takes a fair bit of cutting those big feelings down to size before you can see outside of them and realize how irrational they are.

I have mine locked away, like I said, as I struggle to build up my self-worth.

Luckily, I’m pretty fucking amazing.

More after the break.

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I heart this man

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel like my era has come.

Because finally, people are as pissed off and vitriolic as I am.

Turns out, all this time I was just waiting for things to get bad enough for my unhinged ranting to blend right in.

In crazy times, lunatics become prophets.

And people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more!

And this is what gives me hope. My faith in the American people being stubborn and ornery and quick to anger and disinclined towards obedience is getting more and more justified every single day.

Oh, and so is the fact that they feel no need to remain consistent. Not only does the fact that they voted for Trump not keep them from giving their representatives hell at town meetings, it just makes them even angrier because they feel betrayed.

Now is not the time – and I can’t stress this enough – for saying “I told you so”.

Now is the time where we support these people with kindness and forgiveness and cheer them on in their profound sense of umbrage and be ready and willing to finally show them, not just tell them, that we are on their side and Trump is not.

Trust me, they are ready for this message. We, the left, have a golden opportunity to show the people what real populism looks like. Show them that we have plans that will help them the moment that we are in power. Concrete plans that address their needs in terms they can understand and see and most importantly feel in their lives.

It’s time for another FDR to come along to convince the rich that it’s this New Deal or them getting strung up by their thumbs and used as a piñata by an angry mob.

And if we can offer the people real, comprehensive, understandable solutions that will directly improve their lives, they won’t care if Fox News calls it socialism.

All they will care about is that their kids ate better this week.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Aaaand today’s vid might seem familiar.

See, for those who don’t know or don’t remember, I executed that same concept in a video from a long, looong time ago.

But I felt it needed a remake because the previous vid was quite crudely accomplished in terms of my presentation style and I am much more sensitive and sophisticated now.

Plus in the first vid, I didn’t have a shirt on so I looked naked.

I am quite pleased with how the remake turned out. I think I projected my warm and caring personality really well.

Like I said in the vid, I’m not trying to attack or hurt anybody with my vid. I just want to show women how life looks from a man’s perspective by putting them in our shoes. Give them a taste of how harsh life can be for straight men.

I realize the concept is somewhat out of date. I think most Millennial and Gen Z ladies are far more likely to view men as human being with feelings than the more defensive (for good reason) women of previous eras.

Feminism makes things better for men too, at least some of the time. The overall tension level between the genders has gone down a hell of a lot since women needed “Take Back The Night” campaigns and a can of Mace in their purse.

And I honestly hope this trend continues and the amount of attention the opposite gender gets ends up being a little more evenly distributed, so that plain girls get more love and knockouts like my sister Anne don’t have to suffer through the opposite extreme and end up with way more attention than anyone could handle, and not always the good kind either.

Unfortunately, we can’t limit whom we attract to only people we’re attracted to, let alone only to people we’re attracted to who won’t turn out to be horrible.

And she attracted some doozies.

At least we have dating apps now. Those can at least filter out the obviously unsuitable people. The people who have guns in their profile pics, for instance.

I’m considering making another foray into the online dating world. It’s never worked out for me before but I am more stable and confident now and better suited to the task of wading through the waves of boring dudes to find the occasional pearl.

I hope I’m getting less easily discouraged in general. I’ve been very flighty in the past. The slightest thing going wrong could put me off something because deep down my permanent state of crisis mode gave me the flight response of a rabbit on crack.

Still, maybe I should pop a Xanax beforehand just to keep myself level.

It’s hard to convey what it’s like to be anxiety-prone, especially to people who have only ever known me in full Fruvous mode.

But the wildest, weirdest part about it is that the anxiety is beyond your control. The mechanism that triggers that flight response is automatic, and far too sensitive.

And once all that adrenaline is in your system, your ability to deal with situations rationally goes out the window.

You’re on the fast brain circuit now and it doesn’t care about nuance, logic, or long term consequences, all it cares about is escape.

Which is better than a fight response, come to think of it. My anxiety is fairly unlikely to land me in jail.

I think I need to forgive myself for the things I do when I’m not rational. That would go a long way to keeping that toxic “I’m so stupid, stupid, stupid!” response under control so that it doesn’t make things worse.

No wonder I have such a strange, strained relationship with self-control. I have been trying to apply slow-brain criteria to fast-brain moments, and worse, pursuing a futile fantasy of permanent self-control.

Like I could keep my system from activating flight mode by sheer force of will.

More after the break.

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Chicka the Chinese, the Chinese dinner!

Having some Bamboo Express tonight.

I started out wanting my beloved Meat Marinara pasta from Pizza Hut but the weirdest goddamn things happened.

OK, first, the DoorDash site said our local Pizza hut was closed. Said it has closed at 7:30 PM. On a Saturday.

A likely story.

So I went to Pizza Hut’s own website, which I have also used before, and even earned the occasional free item that way.

They have a points thing. It’s pretty cool, actually.

So I’m on Pizza Hut’s site and I click on the Pasta tab and… nothing. Absolutely nothing comes up. Not a single dish.

All the other tabs worked normally. I checked. But no pasta.

I briefly thought about getting pizza instead, but nah. If I wasn’t going to be able to get the pasta I wanted, I would get something completely different.

So I ended up my usual from Bamboo Express instead. Number One combo dinner : Pork Fried Rice, Sweet and Sour Pork, and Beef Chow Mein.

At least they still do a combo meal. A lot of places gave up on that. They probably realized that people were getting good value for their money and thought, “No! If they want three different dishes they should have to buy three separate full priced dishes!”

Or do like me and just order from somewhere else.

I don’t like ordering the usual way. I need variety. I am guaranteed to get bored of any individual dish long before I finish a full order of it.

Combo meal are exactly my speed.

I dunno why ordering in always turns in to such an adventure. Especially on Saturday nights. I should learn to be Zen about the whole thing and withhold all expectation. Cease my futile efforts to control outcomes when all we can truly control is ourselves and how we react to the ever flowing river of time that is life.

I think I just invented Zen Stoicism.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s video ain’t about much.

So, now you know how my day has gone, more or less.

I do have a small confession to make : I knowingly bought an American product with my groceries this week.

You see, the only sugar free jam Superstore sells is from Smucker’s, whose mother corporation is, of course, American.

So I had no choice but to buy from those American mother Smucker’s.

The alternative would be to go jamless, and peanut butter sandwiches are way, way too boring to even contemplate.

Unless they’re on toast.

That did get me thinking about the future of our supply chain, though. Theoretically, if enough Canadians refuse to buy an American product, the supermarkets et al will stop stocking them and stock Canadian equivalents instead.

But what if there is no Canadian alternative, as in my case? This is a question of conscience that millions of Canadians must be facing all over the country these days.

And suppose the tensions escalate to the point where we just plain stop importing American products completely?

The American made goods remaining in the country would dwindle in supply and presumably rise in price and it would be time to seriously investigate whether it’s profitable to import said goods from elsewhere.

We already import our chocolate bars from the UK, sort of.

Luckily, I don’t think we get anything we absolutely cannot do without from the USA. We pump our own oil, grow our own wheat, raise our own cattle, and generate so much electricity via hydro that we sell a lot of it to the USA.

And we’re slapping tariffs on THAT, too. Mua ha ha. Just try to power New York City without us, Trump.

Otherwise, my day has been routine and unremarkable. I am still playing Divinity : Original Sin 2, though now I have moved on from the main game and I am investigating the mod scene.

It’s quite robust, which pleases me. And Steam has a workshop for the game, which means I can browse mods via Steam and install them with just one click.

And that pleases me even more.

Of course, this means that I have not yet bought myself a new game, I guess because I don’t actually “need” one yet.

DOS2 is still keeping me busy enough.

My friend Maelkoth is bugging me to get this game called Dungeon Siege 3 because it’s only $3 and he says it has amazingly good writing and voice acting.

I downloaded the demo and it does seem well made but because it’s a very old game the controls are not great and that bugs me.

I may get it, I may not.

I suppose what I am afraid of is that if I get a new game, I will forget all about DOS2 and what I am doing in it.

Why that would be a big deal, I dunno. I’ve already beaten the game again. Dropping it now would honestly be no big loss.

But I guess it’s just an excuse for me to be my usual indecisive self. Ho hum.

Still, I have almost $65 in my Steam Wallet and it is definitely starting to burn a hole in my pocket, so to speak.

I will make up my mind soon. Most likely I will do it rashly and impulsively after I get sick and tired of my own waffling.

And then, of course, regret my purchase and beat myself up for not thinking about it more, even though thinking about it did not lead to a solution.

Some things…a lot of things, actually… cannot be solved by thinking. There are too many variables and too many unknowns. At some point, you have to make peace with making arbitrary, emotional decisions for the things that cannot be calculated.

And that’s most things.

You can’t always know where the road ends before setting foot on it. In fact, that is almost never a possibility.

So the choice is either go nowhere and live like a dead person, or get out there and learn and explore and get hurt and learn and LIVE.

I’m learning to choose the second one.

More after the break.

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You know what comes next?

The guillotine, motherfuckers. That’s what comes next.

So which seems better, losing 10 percent of your money to higher taxes, or being hauled out onto the street and decapitated?

Note, you will still be rich. All that will change is the number that comes up when you check your account balance. Other than that, your life will barely change at all.

And more importantly, you will get to keep it.

I am going to keep reminding people that there are billions of us and thousands of them and we can take everything away from them any time we want.

We, the people, are in power. Their power comes from us forgetting that fact. That’s why they work so hard to keep us disconnected and distracted.

Oh, and in case you’re one of those sad traitors who has been fooled into thinking you’re one of them, not one of us, I will remind you that to the top one percent, there is no difference between your upper middle class ass and a hobo on the street.

We’re all just poor people to them. Groundlings. The unwashed masses. PEASANTS.

Still feel like you’re above the rest of us somehow? That they like you more than they like all the other serfs?

You’re right. They love how suicidally stupid you are. They laugh themselves sick when they talk about you, you god damned quisling sonderkommandos. 

What else are they going to think about the sheep willing to completely sell out all the other sheep just for the vague impression that the shepherd likes them best?

But they’ll end up as mutton just like the rest of them.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, maybe not ALL…

Nothing particularly revolutionary about that vid, and yet I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it’s because I was being very candid and open and I think that imparted a certain amount of warmth to what I was saying.

I will have to remember that for future vids.

The camera picks up honesty remarkably well, at least for me.

Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Talked about how relatively unemotional my family was and is. We all ended up being highly intelligent and deeply neurotic, and I think that came from the top, from our mother.

My mother, being a teacher, did an excellent job of encouraging and nourishing our young minds but not a lot to help us mature emotionally.

The truth is, we were never all that close. Especially not me, the uninvited one. I was telling Doctor Costin about how when my babysitter Betty would take me to her house when I was a wee thing, I got to see a family that was radically different than mine.

I’ve talked before how I had to figure out that despite all the yelling and swearing and verbal roughness, they were not, in fact, angry with one another.

That’s just how they communicated. Loud, blunt, open, and direct. So very, very different than my cold and constipated home.

But what I was talking about today is how Betty’s family was constantly doing things for one another. Their milieu might have been rough but their hearts were warm and they were always doing things for one another and in general they seemed to face the world as a group or a team and my home was just not like that.

We always just kind of did out own thing. I can’t even imagine asking one of my siblings for help unless the stakes were pretty dire. I don’t think any of us would dream of imposing on one another like that.

And that’s pretty messed up, to be honest.

We could chatter all day but displays of emotion were not a thing. For one thing, we didn’t want to upset our mother.

Not upsetting her is like a prime commandment for all of us kids. We shield her instinctively because her being upset upsets us severely.

We feel what she feels, I guess.

And so we became kind but aloof intellectuals, just like her. None moreso than me.

In fact, of all four of us Bertrand kids, I’m the most like her.

We also talked about how I have never been emotionally close to anyone. At least not after elementary started and Betty went away.

That’s when the emotional coldness really set in, causing me to continue to withdraw from the world deeper and deeper into myself.

I keep imagining myself as going around the world in a human-sized mecha suit in which I clumsily pretend to be human and present but all the world sees is a hologram of me and the real me is miles and miles away.

Like my mother, it’s not as if I am cold in any obvious way. I come across as a warm, genuine, and kinda wacky dude just like her.

And if the situation calls for it, I can being a very sensitive and insightful listener who makes people feel heard and understood.

And it seems like I am getting very close to those people. And I am. But then again, I am not. I am getting close like a therapist would, not like a friend.

The truth is that I don’t really know how to open up to people. I intellectualized everything even when I am talking to my therapist.

I want to change that. I want to be more emotionally open and present and real. I want to truly connect with others for the first time in my life and that means abandoning my posture of the curious intellectual and risking being “out of control” and, heaven forbid, doing things for purely emotional reasons.

I need to let go of that chokehold my ego has on my id so that I can just relax and do the best I can with being myself.

I think that’s how normal people do things.

It’s worth a try.

More after the break.

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Relax and let go

Let’s poke this particular knot : the moment of error.

That’s the moment where you realize that you’ve fucked up big time. Everyone has been there. It’s a very bad feeling.

But it’s what happens immediately after that I’m interested in tonight.

The self-repudiation. What form does it take?

For me, it usually takes the form of excoriating myself for not thinking. I’m such an idiot, if only I had given it two seconds thought, why didn’t I do that, argh.

Which is understandable, and even healthy when done in a balanced way.

But taken to the sort of scourging extremes a mind like mine takes it and it becomes the birthplace of “the committee” that insists that absolutely no action can be taken without its express approval to make sure you’re not doing something “stupid”.

And it does not approve much.

In fact, in my case at least, “the committee” has metastasized into a thick wall inside me that lets almost nothing through and so I remain “safely” constrained.

But hey, at least I’m not doing anything stupid, right?

I’m not doing anything.

And all out of a hyper-neurotic fear of making a mistake. But what’s the big deal about mistakes? You learn from them and move on.

I act like the whole universe is booby-trapped and only by inaction and staying within my tiny comfort zone can I avoid catastrophe.

But it’s just mistakes. They’re part of life. And eminently survivable.

Total inaction on anything that isn’t a “sure thing” is far too high a price to pay.

I think I need to think about this some more now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here’s today’s vid.

I feel a little bad about saying that it’s not a trick, because it totally is a trick. I’m trying to trick Republicans into remember their real values, the things they have always held to be true and that they have always thought they believed in.

It’s my shock treatment for severe cases of Fox News poisoning. Part of how the Trump cult works is that it keeps its adherents too busy performing mental gymnastics as they desperately dodge the truth of Trump’s horribleness for them to remember what they truly believe or apply any actual tests of truth to what Trump says and does.

So I want to wake them up to their real, core beliefs. These people are not monsters. For the most part, they are good people whose one moral weakness is that they are followers by nature and do not have it in them to reject their shepherd outright.

Until the shepherd rapes their wooly little butts personally, or those of their family. Then suddenly they are all shocked and offended and surprised because suddenly, politics is real and not just something on the TV or Reddit and what they espouse and believe has actual, real consequences to them, personally, and not just “other people”.

I honestly believe that this phenomenon explains why it has to hurt them personally before they see it as a problem. Until then, politics aren’t real. They’re just a place where you can dump all your negative emotions and express all the rage and frustration that you can’t express at the real source of your problems, like your boss, and you don’t have to restrain yourself or worry about the consequences because it’s not really real anyhow so you might as well let loose.

I came to the conclusion in my late teens that people, for the most part, believe what they need to believe. This is especially true in the arena of politics because its abstract nature makes it a perfect place to imagine things are however you need them to be.

The only place more effective for that is religion. And unfortunately, one of the the ways in which the USA lags behind the rest of the world is that they still allow politics and religion to merge and mix.

The rest of the world shut that shit down ages ago. Just try to claim you’re God’s chosen one here in Canada.

People will blast you with disapproval from all angles because that is not merely blasphemous, it’s indiscreet. You are baring in public that which should be private.

And in a reserved culture like ours, that’s just plain NOT DONE.

Anyhow. My point is that we need to reach out to the Trumpers of the world and see them as the tragically flawed but otherwise good people they are and do the one thing we can do to lead them out of the terrible trap they are in :

Become a superior shepherd.

Be willing to, gently but firmly, lead them away from the vileness in which they find themselves enmeshed and into the pure green pastures where they can thrive.

To do so will require being very understanding of who they are and how they think because what works for them might well seem patronizing or even insulting to liberal intellectual types like ourselves.

Like direct emotional appeals. We can’t be afraid to go directly for the gut. Accept that these people cannot be reached via logic and evidence because their beliefs were not the product of reason, they were formed to meet a need.

Find that need, and fill it better than the current coterie of fucktards.

It shouldn’t be all that hard.

More after the break.

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Last of the month

Hit the end of the government cheque month today, the 19th of March, which is exactly two months before my 52nd birthday.

That doesn’t mean anything, I just thought it was neat

Checked my VISA card and found I had $50 left on it. After hemming and hawing and agonizing over what I “should” do with it, I said fuck it and ordered in.

So I looked over some options on DoorDash. But most of them seemed way too expensive for my budget.

Or, in the case of one place, the burger had brie on it. Plus it was expensive.

I’m not paying you $25 for a burger and fries no matter how “bistro” it is.

So I gave up and went to our old friends at Donair Dude. I am currently in cholesterol heaven as I eat lamb donair meat on a bed of fries.

That plus a big veggie samosa was $30. Still not cheap compared to when Julian is nice enough to get me McD’s, but it makes me happy.

I love lamb so damn much.

That leaves $20 on the card, which I will just put onto my Steam account, raising the current balance there to around $60.

I am getting to the point where I am going to take the plunge and actually buy a new game. I don’t know why I am so hesitant – if I don’t like it I can just return it.

I just have a nervous and fretful temperament, I guess. I suppose that’s yet another thing I need to learn to accept about myself.

Science says that temperament is permanent. You come out of the womb a nervous baby, you’re gonna be basically nervous for your entire life.

It doesn’t have to make you miserable, though. Not if you stop trying to fight it.

I feel like for my whole life, I have been trying, unprompted, to force myself to be the person I want to be or feel I am supposed to be, and it’s taken this long in my life t figure out how self-destructive and futile that is

One of the most important determinations in any person’s life is, as the cliché goes, who you really are. And that includes figuring out what parts of your personality are permanent and thus something you’re just going to have to deal with.

I’m a shy, nervous, silly, and not very sensible or practical dude.

But I am also incredibly intelligent, with enormous creative energy and talent, and unique and powerful insights into how things, and people, work.

And I am starting to think that all of that comes from the exact same place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess I might as well get this out of the way first.

Is it just me, or does it like I killed and mounted Eeyore?

Anyhow, as you can see (and hear) from the above, I don’t have a lot on my mind right now, or at least, nothing currently outputting to my conscious mind.

I’m pretty sure that my subconscious mind would still be processing stuff even if I was a coma. That’s just the way I am.

In that case, I hope it would all take the form of an exciting metaphorical adventure.

Some sort of quest to wake the giant, or something.

Finished my playthrough of Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive (aka final – Ed.) Edition. Ascended to the titular Divinity, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds because it’s not like you get to actually do anything with your new powers.

I guess godhood would be rather hard to program into a game. Even vaguely defined “divinity” would probably end up being either boring or just maddeningly vague.

I guess I was wrong about the title having nothing to do with the content of the game. The subject of Divinity is actually central to the whole plot of the game.

But the Original Sin bit is still a load of crap.

Now, I am at a crossroads. I could :

1. Do another playthrough. As usual, I have already started one. That’s how I deal with the post-completion depression that often comes with finishing a game. As depicted in this song. I could just keep going with that playthrough, maybe after looking through the rather enormous collection of mods for the game for something to make a second playthrough more fun and exciting.
2. Play through Baldur’s Gate 3. That would complete the “trilogy” of games by Larian Studios. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one hell of a game, even though it has nothing to do with the previous two games, and there would be a sort of logic to completely the triptych. But that game, being modern, has a tendency to make my computer crash. And…
3. Buy a new game. There’s the Spring Sale underway on Steam and I could get a number of games for rather good prices. Of course, being recent, they might crash my computer too, sight. I really need to get that new power supply. And then ask Spuug to install it for me. Should be way less complex to install than the GPU.

So that’s where I am right now relative to my one and only hobby, gaming. Right now I am leaning towards getting a new game and taking my chances with crashing.

If I do get something new, it will probably be the blazing hot “new” release Elden Ring, a 3D ARPG from last year that was all the rage during those bright and shining pre-Trump days, or Palworld, which is a Pokémon clone with guns.

I’ve enjoyed that kind of monster collecting game before, but the real appeal to me is that this particular game has a lot of very spicy mods for it that will let you interact with your monsters in a more intimate way.

Gotta fuck’m all, after all.

But I know that adult mods tend to only be amusing/arousing for a little while before they become old hat, so I am not sure they are enough of a reason to buy a game.

So I will probably end up getting Elden Ring.

Or, ya know, being paralyzed be indecision until the sale is over and I can’t afford anything recent again.

That’s always an option.

More after the break.

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Through a glass darkly

Got my new glasses in the mail today.

They don’t work any better than my previous pair, at least not yet.

I am going to try to keep them on as much as possible in case my eyes just need to adjust to them.

But needless to say, this development has depressed me.

I was so looking forward to nice, normal glasses I could wear all the time instead of my current pair which make me farsighted and thus are useless to try to wear when I am reading or using my computer, and that’s most of my day.

So far, I think I’m habituating to the new glasses, but only time will tell. It might turn out to just be hopeful thinking.

If the glasses are, indeed, unsuitable, I will be faces with the thorny issue of why.

Did I accidentally give the glasses company my old prescription? I don’t know. It’s possible. But the new glasses seem to have a different effect on my vision than the previous pair, so I don’t think so.

Are the new pair defective? Possible. But I don’t know how I would figure that out. So for now I will have to assume that they are functioning as intended.

Is it the worst option, namely that my eyes are just plain too fucked up for glasses now? I really, really hope not.

If I go blind, I will kill myself. There’s no way I could handle that.

Luckily I have a needle in the eye appointment next week so I can just ask Doctor McKay about it. See what he thinks.

It could be that it’s hard to correct my vision while this swelling issue that is the reason for the needles remains unresolved.

So I am still holding out hope that if Doctor McKay and I can get the swelling to go down and stay down, my vision will improve dramatically.

Especially in my left eye, which is the more fucked up eye.

It will be tricky, keeping the new glasses on for extended periods. I can feel eyestrain building up in my eyes and my forehead from all the straining to see I am having to do just to see what I am typing.

And I have the WordPress screen font turned up pretty large.

We will see how things go. I will keep the new glasses on for as long as I can stand it, anyhow, and maybe my eye muscles will adjust.

I’ll be sure to keep an eye on the situation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Welp, he’s my video for today :

I’m thinking I was maybe a bit too harsh.

I mean, I believe everything I said in that video. Conservatism is the political ideology is stupidity. Its media’s real purpose is to hide the actual complex and nuanced realities of life from people so that they do not have to face the harsh truth that they are actually just plain not smart enough to understand the world, let alone have opinions about it.

All of that is true but not useful, as Felicity would say.

And it represents only part of what I want for the world. As I have discussed before, part of me is a fire-breathing truth-spitting iconoclastic ideologue looking to shake the walls of Heaven with my words, and part of me just wants everybody to come together in peace, harmony, and understanding of our mutual shared humanity.

What can I say, I’m a complicated man. I contain multitudes.

I suppose that, just for public sanity’s sake, I may have to choose which side to go with one of these days. I can’t be like Don Rickles, acerbic and insulting one moment then an overflowing pot of human warmth the next.

At least, I don’t think I can do that.

But for now, I am just stretching my capabilities and learning what I can do with this whole YouTube thing. I mean, that’s just my third video of this new era. I haven’t even started to find my real voice yet.

And who knows, maybe tomorrow I will be full of loving kindness.

Like I said. Complicated. Like I am part Martin Luther and part Jesus Christ.

I do have an intent behind the video above. I want to activate shame and outrage in my conservative targets because I want them to get mad enough that they have to prove to me that they aren’t stupid by actually thinking of counterarguments.

And that’s the long game I am playing. If we can get them truly thinking about their opinions and testing them against reality, the side of the angels wins in the long run. Even if all they are doing is looking for ammunition to fire back at me.

So am I just trolling? Well no. I’m not just trying to piss people off so I can laugh at them. I am trying to challenge them in order to make them mad enough that they are willing to do whatever it takes to defeat me – even think for themselves.

But in the interests of full disclosure, there’s part of me that just wants to have people to debate with because that’s my idea of fun.

More fun that just burning my brain cells with video games, that’s for sure.

And I want to contribute to the public discourse. That’s one of the main reasons I want to become a pundit.

The other reasons are more selfish. What can I say, I’m only human.

I want nice stuff too!

But I also think I have a very unique and distinctive point of view that could move the public discourse along by prodding people to think about what they believe and why.

In that, I would be playing the role of the trickster. That’s the trickster’s karmic role, to wake people up and get them thinking, whether that’s with delightful comedy or searing diatribes or insightful political commentary.

And I can do all of those!

And I’m willing to cautiously believe that this YouTube thing might be an actual purpose and a role for me in life.

Certainly if I attract an audience, whether they’re for me or against me, I would feel like I am doing something with my life for once.

There’s got to be some righteous purpose for all the stuff going on in my head.

Or at least a way to make a living.

More after the break.

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The first step is change

When I was a “too smart for his own good” bored out of my mind in class because thw work wasn’t even in the same galaxy as being challenging for me, I would look around at my fellow students studiously beavering away at the classwork and wonder what it is that made me different from them.

I eventually came to the conclusion that part of the difference was self-image.

They didn’t think of themselves as the kind of people who get good grades, nor did they want to become that kind of person, so they struggled. Often they came from families where academic achievement was either passively or actively punished because it made the child not “fit in” with their family and/or one ot both of the parents was very sensitive about their lack of book smarts and would undermine the child out of their own jealousy or hurt feelings.

My “advantage”, therefore, was that I came from a very intellectual family where curiosity and learning were very much encouraged by my mother the teacher and there were lots of books lying around that I could read and feed my mind.

But even moreso, I was way too socially clueless for me to know I wasn’t “supposed” to be so overwhelmingly bright and by the time I figured that out, I was far, far too stubbornly prideful to pretend to be dumber than I am for any reason.

Pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to pull that off anyhow.

The conclusion I draw from this is thus : if you are going to set out to learn something, the very first thing you have to do is make peace with the fact that you are going to become the sort of person that knows that thing.

For example, don’t take a cooking class unless you’re certain that you are ready to become someone who knows how to cook.

If the knowledge conflicts with your self-image, stay home, because no matter how hard you try to put the knowledge into your mind, your identity will spit it right back out again.

Me, I’m socially inept enough to be a total polyglot nerd. There is literally nothing I could learn that would conflict with my self-image and/or my social role.

There would be things it would surprise me to learn, like sewing, but I’m not against it.

SO before you set out to learn something, ask yourself what you assume about the sort of person who knows that kind of thing, and if you want to belong to that group.

I think it could clear away a lot of roadblocks for you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.