Holy crap, was this a lot of work to make.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever listen to myself.

Actually, the amount of work it took – almost two hours’ worth – wasn’t a complete surprise to me. When I decided that this would be the time I would put the lyrics on the screen, I knew it would be a lot of work and that I would probably hate myself for starting the stupid project somewhere along the line.

But I was thinking an hour, tops. Yikes.

Oh well, it’s good for me to occasionally get in way over my head with a task. It’s one of the only ways to fool myself into doing more than the bare minimum in life and that’s good for expressing way more of my personal energies than my usual low yield life.

If I do more, I’ll be much happier. I have to keep telling myself that. I have suffered under the tyranny of depression’s soul destroying anti-action bias for far too long. I need to wake the hell up and get involved in life.

If ya know what I mean.

And yeah, I know I’m not a great singer. I think maybe I could be a decent singer if I had the focus and self-discipline to practice and do vocal exercises and such.

Maybe then I could hit those low notes, like the word “sun” on “running naked in the sun”. My voice just disappears there.

Anyhow, my main reason to make karaoke videos is to stretch myself not just vocally but creatively. It’s something unlike my usual talking head stuff and it feels good to expand my capacities that way.

As well as learning what NOT to do.

I originally tried making today’s vid in Descript but it is NOT suited to that task. Sure, the whole “edit the transcript to edit the video” thing is impressive and very cool, but it’s useless for, for instance, trimming the ends of a video or doing any of the other usual video editing things like rearranging clips, fixing audio levels, and so on.

So it’s pretty much only good for talking head videos. Fair enough.

One of these day, my video might just be one of their AI talking heads reading out something I wrote for the occasion.

That could be quite amusing.

I did make this little thing.

Oh that reminds me. Check out the sample text from this voice changer app :

Discover a world where innovation meets elegance. Introducing the Aurora Series – our most advanced collection yet. With cutting-edge technology wrapped in sleek, sustainable design, these devices don’t just perform, they inspire. Aurora – illuminating the path to tomorrow, available worldwide this Friday.

Sample text from elevenlabs.io

Their technology is very impressive but who the hell wrote that text? It’s so pretentiously corporate it makes me want to hurt somebody.

I mean, nobody expects sample text to be Shakespeare, but oy.

I am so very, very sick of bland, bloodless, mindlessly voracious corporations all trying to seem like brilliant forward-seeing creative geniuses, like they just came down the mountain from Palo Alto to share their lofty and advanced vision with us mere mortals.

You’re a bunch of sociopaths in Armani. Get the fuck over yourself.

Been doing OK, mood-wise. My inner world is rather unstable and unsettled, which is to be expected when you’re trying to change very deep, fundamental things about yourself, like your entire attitude toward living.

I’m working on it. Pouring tons of energy and mental might into opening myself up to the world like I am throwing open the drapes and opening the windows in my soul after a long dark musty winter and finally getting some good clean air in here.

Turns out the world is a much happier place when you’re not drowning within yourself.

Who’da thunk it?

More after the break.

---

Something has to give

I know that there is a limit to gradualism.

Eventually, something more dramatic is going to need to happen within my psyche. Even if that just means that incrementally I reached a tipping point and the scale flips to the other side because of that, it’s going to have to happen.

Fine. I am willing to continue to consciously devalue stability in favor of long overdue change. Stability is great and all but not when you’re stifling everything inside of you in pursuit of it

And I definitely do not feel as stable as I used to. There is an undercurrent of anxiety in everything I do now. I have these terrible moments where I feel confused and scared and like everything is slipping away from me.

And that’s fine. I know that if I just hang in there, the moment will pass, I will be able to remember that everything is fine, actually, and then I am back in the real world.

Call them growing pains. Or maybe growing pangs.

The real issue is that I don’t know what form this sudden action will take. Obviously I don’t want it to land me in jail, or ruin my relationship with my three friends.

That would be a wee bit too high a price to pay for personal growth.

I suppose I am hoping that it will be something relatively calm and consequence free. I’ll just be laying in bed one day and have some kind of psychological crisis where I feel absolutely awful and freak way the hell out, but then it will pass and I will feel one hell of a lot better because I just processed a whole lot of backed up emotion.

Kind of like having a touch of food poisoning.

But nothing is entirely off the table, legal entanglements aside. I may need to become pushy and irritable just like my late father in order to get to a saner place. I might have to go deeper into outright insanity and stare at the wall a while, or even, god forbid, be a tad psychotic for a bit.

I’ll do what I can to keep things from being too disruptive.

But if I have to lose my mind to find myself, so be it.

Today’s video is anything but… nondescript.

That’s because it’s my first video made entirely in Descript, that website/app I’ve been talking about lately.

And I have to say, I’m not sure if Descript made it all that much easier.

Obviously it’s a little easier to edit a transcript than it is to edit video, and it’s entirely possible I was able to find and remove a lot more of my ums and ahs than I am when I am editing the old fashioned way, but I still dunno.

I will at the very least try it again. It could be that once I am more familiar with Descript, and therefore more relaxed when using it, it will obviously way, way easier.

It’s worth a shot.

Plus messing around with Descript was kinda fun.

On to the subject of the vid. It all started with this animation.

Like I say in the vid, that got me thinking about the whole subject of a lack of social awareness and how it can cause grave levels of misunderstanding.

Especially amongst us nerdy folk.

As I have mentioned before, I consider being a nerd to be a mild form of Asperger’s the same way Asperger’s is a mild form of autism.

And the key to the whole thing seems to be the social awareness I talk about in the vid. “Normal” people have it, but for the most part, they don’t know they have it and are therefore unable to articulate it.

After all, nobody explained it to them. It’s something they learned via social interaction and I think the heart of that might just be the desire to “fit in”.

In trying to fit in, they tap into an intuitive sense of what the other monkeys are thinking and doing and adjust their behaviour in order to remain in sync with them.

This is all going on subconsciously, for the most part. It does not involve the rational, conscious mind at all. And that’s where the problem starts.

Growing up nerdy means “choosing” (in the purely developmental sense) to focus on the sort of logical abstract reasoning skills that things like school rely on.

This often leads to introversion, as said skills require a very robust ability to listen to one’s “inner voice”, and that requires screening out the outer world.

But the outer world is exactly where that social awareness comes from.

Basically, you can’t learn social skills if you’re all wrapped up in yourself.

Hence the continuum of nerdiness and sociability. It really does seem like the more nerdy you are, the less socially skilled you are, as if there is a finite amount of potential and the more you invest in one end of the scale, the less you have for the other.

Seems vaguely unfair.

But like I said in the vid, that does mean there are compensations for one’s lack of a social cue. We tend to do quite well in school, and in general have a strong grasp of abstract reasoning in all its forms, and that leads to a certain point of view.

One based on “leading with your head”, in other words, dealing with the world primarily through one’s abstract reasoning skills and not through other faculties like social awareness, empathy, and intuition.

Those without our advanced mental faculties have no choice but to rely on those other faculties in order to navigate through life.

That’s the main reason there is such a disconnect between us nerdy left wing liberal types and the more middling masses.

We don’t speak one another’s languages, so to speak.

But as the “smarter” half of the equation, it is incumbent upon us to learn their lingo. To learn to see the world through their eyes, without judgment or criticism, and through that learn to lead them in the right direction.

In many ways, we’re the grownups of the world. And it’s up to us to raise the kids right.

More after the break.

---

They just can’t

To carry on where I just left off (for once) :

Let’s take another stab at one of ghosts that haunts me, one that just becomes more solid and real as time goes by : what if the average person simply cannot see the world the way a liberal intellectual like myself does?

Their hardware can’t run our software. And it doesn’t matter how articulate, or compassionate, or “nice” we are, there is a complexity to our thought processes and point of view that their brains simply cannot handle.

If so, then our capacity for compassion and understanding will truly be tested because it would mean that to get through to them, we have to communicate with them in a way that we ourselves would find insulting.

We have to talk to them like they’re idiots, essentially, or what we would interpret as such if it was directed as us.

And yet, we also have to avoid talking down to them. That would even worse than just talking over their heads.

It’s a very difficult needle to thread, I will admit.

But it may well be what we have to do to lead them effectively. And it’s better than constantly beating our brains out trying to get them to see things our way when it is entirely possible that they simply cannot.

This is a traumatic thought, I realize. I don’t like thinking about it and I’m the one who thought it up in the first place. It flies in the face of the egalitarian roots of modern society which necessitate viewing everyone as fundamentally equal.

And I’m not suggesting there is a moral difference or a difference in worth between us and them. I am vehemently anti-elitist.

Which is probably why discussing this subject at all makes me feel queasy.

But equal worth does not necessarily equate to equal intellect. And it could be that for us to truly encompass this extremely unpalatable truth, we might just have to dig our own intellectual elitism out by the roots.

A stupid person has the same human worth as a smart person.

Bet you thought you already thought that, right?

But did you really?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well at least I am feeling more awake now.

I’m certainly never going to let THAT happen again.

What I should have done is just taken a nap and pushed the video making to later in the day, when I could do it properly.

But that’s exactly the sort of thing that doesn’t occur to me when I am sleepy.

Ah well, it’s water under the bridge now. It’s not like I have disappointed my legions of followers or anything.

My just under 200 subscribers will just have to deal with it.

Were I a far more organized and ambitious type, I would be working my ass off to try to get that up to at least 500 subscribers because then I could start making money from the videos I post.

At least, in theory. People would still have to watch the dang things, too.

And you know, maybe one day I will have my excrement concentrated to that point. I can certainly envision that possibility. I can see myself busting my butt to make high quality videos with mass appeal and really making a go of this whole thing.

But um, not yet. I would need to be considerably more awake first. I am still in the process of exiting my long lonely state of stupefaction and so being able to summon that kind of energy and enthusiasm and confidence is still a tad beyond me.

But there’s still that idea for a satirical news program to ponder.

I could really make something like that work, ya know?

So who knows, maybe today’s sad little video will serve a purpose. Maybe this near-failure will give me a kick in the rear and get me to try harder.

But man do I miss caffeine sometimes.

I’ve been playing around with a rather extraordinary website/app called Descript, trying to get it to work for me, because it could save me a heck of a lot of effort.

The idea is that you feed your video to Descript and it generates a transcript of it and then you can edit the video by editing the transcript.

And it has the ability to automatically detect and delete your ums, ahs, stutters, and so on, and that’s basically all I am doing when I edit my vids.

So in theory it could almost automate the whole deal, leaving me to concentrate on improving the content in other ways.

Which would be rad.

It does a whole lot of other amazing stuff too, like AI video and speech generation. meaning I could write a script and it would generate a talking head video complete with a presented and their voice for me.

That’s not how I roll but I can see possibilities for that. Like using that capacity to generate “actors” for my skits.

I could write stuff that’s just me communicating with other talking heads, like we’re on a Zoom call or the like.

For now, though, I am just messing around with Descript’s video editing function. Editing the transcript is a lot less mental work than editing the video itself, and it makes it easier to get all of my little stutters and such.

We are gradually getting to the point where I could just give an AI a screenplay and it would spit out a movie.

The acting might not be great, though. It would be pretty hard to train an AI to get that right given it’s not easy to get people to do it right.

It could probably make intelligent guesses as to the proper emotion based on context clues, but of course, acting is all about the subtle nuances.

Just like with reading faces, we human beings can detect the tiniest of variances in how something is said in order to pick up on the emotional content of our speech.

It’ll be a long time before an AI can do that.

More after the break.

---

Not frigging bad

I decided to try out Descript’s AI talking head feature.

This is the result.

And I have got to admit, my dude there sounds a lot more human and natural than I thought he would.

I can see uses for this.

One odd but not dealbreaking thing : it took a weirdly long time to generate that little vid.

As in, it’s only a paragraph and a half long yet it took ten minutes plus to generate it, and I can’t see why. It’s a pretty simple thing.

My dude doesn’t even move much.

But it could be like with image generation, where in order to get high quality results, you have to let the computer make a LOT of passes at rendering the result, each pass refining it a little bit more.

Or it could be that because I am using a free account, their system ain’t exactly in a hurry to process my request, and if I want quicker results, I should pay up.

Or it could be both, I suppose.

Whatever. At minimum, I have a way fun new toy to poke around with for a while. One that I might conceivably have a use for in the future.

Not today though. Today has been sleepy. As seen in today’s rather minimalist vid.

I don’t think I’m sick. Other than the sleepiness, I feel fine. I have a little bit of a runny nose from seasonal allergies but that’s about it.

But I will keep an eye on the situation. While making sure to keep up the hydration, even when I don’t feel like it, to avoid feelings like I need a trip to the ER when all I really need is a tall glass of water from the Brita filter jug.

I wonder if I could get one of those Brita filters that attach to the sink to work with the sink in my bathroom.

I bet that would improve my urinary health. Keep me truly flushed out.

Something to think about re : birthday presents.

I should write about what I want for my birthday soon, in case it matters.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The good kind. The FUN kind. The kind where I get to defend my beliefs.

The kind just like this :

And let me tell you, I am in my element as I take these “liberals'” outrageous bigotry and throw it in their face.

Aren’t we supposed to be better than that? Isn’t unrelenting, irrational, immoral hate based on a stereotype of people you think are “all the same” supposedly their thing?

Aren’t we the nice ones?

And the thing is, my position is unassailable. Liberalism is rooted in humanism and humanism clearly states that we are all human and vulnerable and weak and fallible and that none of the superficial group-think bullshit we invent to divide us from them really matters because we are all, in the end, only human.

Certainly nothing as petty and ephemeral as politics should keep us from seeing the humanity even in those unlike us.

Humanism states that we are all far more alike than different and that is true scientifically, morally, psychologically, and physically.

Go ahead, try, as a liberal, to argue that Trump voters are somehow less than human, or that they don’t have the same rights as you, or that “they are all the same”.

And I will always stand up for greater compassion and true humanity and real understanding between people, no matter the consequences. I can do no less. What I believe comes from the very heart of my being and that means that I have to act on them or die inside.

And I prefer to avoid that.

So as I prick people’s consciences and challenge their preconceived notions and get them to think about and examine their biases and prejudices, I am, naturally, having the time of my life.

This is what us trickster types live for.

It’s simple : view Trumpeters with the same sympathy and compassion you think they should show you.

The moral mirror never lies. And it is impossible to argue that someone should treat you better than how you treat them.

Our basic moral programming rejects that idea outright.

The trickster’s job, ultimately, is to wake people up and make them think. People are, of course, rarely grateful for that. They prefer to remain in the daze of routine, where every day is just like all the others and nothing they do really matters to them.

Actually, I take that back. That’s too harsh and judgmental.

How inhuman of me.

See, I don’t claim to be immune to those temptations.

And now for something completely different : learn to speak fox!

Turns out we foxies make all kinds of sounds, many of them hard on the ears. I’ve been pondering adding some of them to Fruvous’ repertoire but ehh.

Might not be all that cute or charming, to be honest.

Today’s been pretty decent. Had therapy at 1 pm today instead of yesterday.

That was mildly novel. My therapist travels back and forth to Calgary a lot so sometimes our therapy times get shifted around.

Speaking of which, did Wound Care at 3 pm today, which was very novel. Usually we have it in the morning.

Except apparently, according to them, the appointment was at 3:15 pm. That’s not what it said on our printed schedule.

They gotta stop doing that shit with us.

After that, we stopped at McD’s so I could get a cone to celebrate the first day of 2025 where I could go outside without a coat.

I was the tiniest bit cold here and there but I don’t care. I always love finally being able to go out coatless after winter. It always feels so freeing, and not needing protection from the cold makes the world seem so much friendlier.

Then we came home, I finished editing today’s video, ordered my grocers, managed to keep the bill under $70, and now I am going to finish blogging so I can flop.

All in all, a pretty full day.

Beats spinning my wheels playing video games, that’s for sure!

More after the break.

---

Very important science

This study really unlocks the secrets of the universe :

I saw something about this study a very long time ago and it blew my mind because it starkly reveals a hell of a lot about the sad state of the world.

And that was way before our current era of oligarchy!

Wealth is a terrible influence. It makes people objectively worse human beings. And it absolutely does not matter how the wealth was acquired.

It spoils the self made millionaire, the trust fund baby, and the lotto winner alike.

I bet that if you surveyed lottery winners one year after their win and asked them how they got to be so rich, they’d be sort of fuzzy on the details.

For sure they would not say, “Pure dumb luck”.

And it’s not hard to see why. We humans are born with an urge to seek status. Wealth gives us that status. With that kind of prize, is it any wonder that people kind of forget how they got the money and start to feel like their new high status lifestyle reflects something intrinsic about themselves and not just a number with their name attached.

And this sense of inflated status is what really brings out the ugly side of people, especially because it is coupled with the infantilizing influence of living in a world where everybody is there specifically to make and keep you happy.

So people devolve into emotional infancy. They become selfish, rude, short-tempered, demanding, and callous.

They are now high status toddlers, and so we have the perfect recipe for creating people uniquely unsuited to wield the enormous power they now have.

The only solution I can see is a wealth cap. Above, say, 250 million dollars, wealth is taxed at 99.9 percent and if people don’t like that, tough.

Trust me, Joe Six-Pack, it ain’t ever gonna be a problem for you.

At the same time, strong measures to limit the power of wealth need to be implemented. Most people have no problem with the rich living lives of opulence, decades, glamour, and excess. More power to them, really.

It’s when the money gives them power over the government that we have a problem.

I’ll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I decided to steal some today.

Like I say in the vid, I just wanted to make sure I had that ability.

I might use it for compilation videos, though I would be more likely to do compilations of bits from my own videos and I don’t have to download those = they’re already here.

Funny how that works.

But doing my own funny take on the news type show is a real possibility. Especially if I fail to get that Onion job.

What the hell, I’m funny with or without them. (But please, please hire me. )

I’m annoyed with myself that I haven’t sent my application in yet. I suppose I am hesitating out of fear, at least in part.

Which is silly. Worst thing that can happen is they say no, which is probable. I will presumably be up against thousands of other applicants.

But I’ve got to take my shot.

After all, I’m hilarious.

And that $100K/year CND sounds awfully good.

But my own funny hot take type show would be good too. And pretty easy to produce over all, really.

The “desk joke” format is pretty easy to put together. Clip, riff, repeat. The news clip is the setup and you just need to provide the punchline, more or less.

Pulling off a “newsroom” look would require a little work. For one thing, I would have to come up with some way to look at least a little respectable.

My usual array of T-shirts don’t exactly scream “news anchor”.

Then again, maybe I could make that work for me. Instead of trying to come across as a news anchor, just go with my strengths as just some guy on the internet.

After all, the real product is my sharp and incisive wit. Trying to come across as a parody of a news anchor would be the traditional way to do satirical news, but at the same time it’s kinda old n’ busted now.

And since when have I been traditional?

So who knows. Maybe I’d use a persona closer to my real self, a sort of every-nerd maybe, or heck, your next door neighbor sitting on his couch with a beer.

Or just be myself. What a radical idea.

“And now, with the news, we have… me!”

Hmmm. Dunno if I could pull it off.

It would also, of course, be a vehicle for my politics. You can’t really do political satire without a political POV, especially these days when even simply reporting the facts in a neutral and objective way fit for the BBC World News is seen as biased.

So fuck it. I’m biased. I’m a bleeding heart liberal socialist commie cucktard faggot and I am proud of it.

Now what are you going to do?

I’m your worst nightmare, fuckheads.

And given the dire times we live in, I’m not inclined to hold my tongue about anything.

It’s the sort of format I could live with. Generally speaking, I am quite format averse as, for me, what it essential is that I express myself and formats demand doing what they demand instead, and I ain’t about that.

But riffing on the news would provide a fair bit of variety, and I can pick and choose what news stories to riff on, so I could probably live with that.

My format is “whatever I have the funniest jokes about”. Or somesuch.

I wonder what the legalities of using news clips is. Clearly it’s allowed in some circumstances. But would I need a corporation to back me?

Or would I use bad re-enactments of the clips instead?

And what about just using the audio? The whole thing could be a podcast.

Or I could add a phone filter and pretend I’m on the phone with famous people.

I’ve got a lot of ideas.

More after the break.

---

The die is cast

Welp, I did it. I have applied to write for the Onion. I think.

They have my hilarious and charming cover letter, and my equally uproarious and engaging resume, at least.

But the website never asked me for my 30 headlines, so they continue to lie in wait.

Oh well, gives me more chance to work on them, anyhow.

I imagine that there was no place for my headlines because I was applying through some job website called Gusto (ick) and nobody at Gusto (ick) knew they needed such a thing so they just slapped together the most basic page possible (name, cover letter PDF submit, resume PDF submit) and called it a day.

I guess if the Onion likes those, they’ll ask for the headlines?

I, of course, went all out with them. If I get rejected by the Onion (which is probable), I will post them here for you, my gold plated fans, to enjoy.

But I really packed them with my signature wacky wit, and I have a feeling that the Onion and I might have a similar sense of humour, as this is their LinkedIn profile :

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

Yup. These are totally my kind of people. My cover letter and resume should fight right in to their editorial milieu.

There is, of course, still the question of whether I would have to relocate. Which of course I am willing to do, but boy would I rather not.

I’m lucky enough to already be outside Trump’s America. And I have already escaped the United States twice.

What are the odds I will make it out now, when the border guards might actually be awake and paying attention?

Then again, what’s the worst they can do? Deport me the 100 feet to the Canadian border? Oh darn.

I wonder if the Onion would arrange a work visa for me?

But I am, perhaps, getting way ahead of myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, if what you want is hot takes with no filter, I’m kind of your guy.

I don’t even edit.

It felt good to get my various confessions out.

The only possible plausible explanation for how I get away with only ever doing a single draft is the one I mention in the vid, that I must be incredibly talented.

And honestly, that ain’t even half of it, because what I failed to mention in the above is that only did I never do a second draft at any level of my education, writing that first draft was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Never in my entire educational history have I felt seriously challenged. When I was going to VFS, it was only in the final semester that I felt any strain.

So much for the big scary “intensive” program.

And honestly, that should have pointed to my having stellar life prospects. I could have gone into any number of historically academically challenging fields like law or medicine or business and kicked royal ass and then, who knows?

But I had no guidance from anyone as a teen. I mean, the guidance counselors were pathetic jokes. The one in junior high was a total knob and the two in my high school had absolutely no interest in doing their jobs.

All it would have taken was for someone to sit me down and tell me that I was very, very gifted and needed to apply for every scholarship under the sun so I could afford to go to a decent university that could offer me real prospects as opposed to the second worst college in Canada, UPEI.

On my own and with nobody to tell me where to go and what to do, I was far too lacking in ambition and focus to think to do any of that when I was a teen. On my own, I’m a happy go lucky directionless wanderer who doesn’t think much about the future.

Or at least I was. I am getting over that now.

I want things, dammit. Like a job. And a husband. And a HOUSE.

I suppose I should get over being embarrassed by my excellence. I mean, what purpose does that serve? It’s not my fault if my amazingness makes somebody else feel bad by comparison.

Someone like my brother. I get the feeling that his jealousy had a much larger impact on my life than I’ve ever considered before.

Well fuck that. I’m a brilliant scintillating star and I’m going to shine, shine, shine.

And I’m going to get some fucking respect while I’m at it, too. By any measure, I practically have superpowers, and this hero’s got to fly.

Looks like our little robot alien boy is finally growing up.

The other big confession was the fact that I don’t edit. And I get away with it. There was a time when I honestly thought I would reach a point where my first drafts wouldn’t be good enough any more and that would be my wake up call to get serious and buckle down and actual write like a normal person.

But nope. Never happened. Maybe if I had gone on to graduate school I would have finally met my match, or at least found some degree of challenge, but maybe not.

Maybe I could have sailed through law school and pass the bar with flying colors and made a career as an ass kicking lawyer who fights for the little guy.

I would love to be one of those lawyers who forces insurance companies to pay out when they are trying to get away with stiffing some regular person or people.

Call me. I’ll make the bastards pay.

I feel a thrill just typing that.

More after the break.

---

My feeling of power

It’s probably overblown. By a lot.

But even if it isn’t – even if I walk godlike amongst the mere mortals of the world and they should tremble at my might – I’ve got to get some kind of handle on it.

Right now, it mostly underwrites my fears. As if I am Gulliver in Lilliput and I have to be infinitely careful how I move or speak lest I crush the life out of the tiny creatures who swarm around my feet.

I don’t know where this sense of my own gigantism came from. Probably in elementary school, when I first realized how different I was from the other kids. How I towered above them intellectually.

But that doesn’t explain this stultifying sense of responsibility. I don’t know why I feel like I have to tread so very carefully.

So carefully, in fact, that my best option is to just not go anywhere.

Can’t step on anybody if you don’t move, right?

Perhaps it was born that day when two different philosophy teachers, completely independently of one another, took it upon themselves to ask me to stop dominating class discussions and give other people a chance to speak.

Maybe I took that lesson way too hard. I know that by the time the second teacher was half way through their speech, I felt really bad about the whole thing.

Especially because I’d had no idea I was doing it. I suppose back then I would have assumed that you had to choose to do evil.

And it came just as I was really starting to “feel my oats” as an intellectual.

Maybe I should have taken the asshole route and said, “Hey, if they can’t hold their own against me when I talk, too freaking bad. Get stronger or shut up. ”

That would have made me a horrible human being, but possibly a much more successful and happy and competent one.

I’d have something upon which to construct a positive image of myself.

And I probably would have gotten over myself eventually. Probably.

Well it’s too late for that now. You can get away with a lot at the age of 19 that you could never get away with at 51.

Besides, I know better now.

In conclusion, I am still trying to integrate my abilities into my sense of self without losing my mind completely.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Allow me to revel in this, the official post election gloating period.

To add something I only just realized while I was making lunch :

The best thing about this election is that in order for the Conservatives to have any power whatsoever, they will have to work with the Liberals and compromise.

And we all know they are way too emotionally immature for that. Toddlers that they are, they will demand to have everything their way or they’ll pitch a fit.

Well go ahead. Pitch a fit. Hell, slap that shit onto pay-per-view. I’d pay good money to watch you little burnt butt bitches wail because you’re not getting everything you want.

Carney knows that Jagmeet Singh will be a whole lot more reasonable.

So thanks, Dumb Donnie. By threatening Canada, you insured that Canada will have a thoroughly left wing government for the foreseeable future.

Go ahead, keeping talking that “51st state” crap.

We’ll be a socialist democracy by Christmas.

On the CBC they said people were saying that Carney has “big daddy energy” and they are not wrong.

He seems like exactly the sort of serious, stable, no-nonsense, principled guy I want to be dealing with that tempestuous toddler Trump.

I’m betting he knows that the only way to deal with brats is to tackle them firmly and not let up until they behave. Make it clear that this is not an argument or a negotiation, no matter what they say or do. The only way out is to do what you want them to do.

Be as solid and unyielding as a mountainside.

But the moment they behave, be as warm as a sunbeam. Make the difference between you when they misbehave and you when they behave as stark and plain as possible.

You’d be surprised at how well behaved your little hellion can be when that’s the only way they can get the sun to come out.

And Canada has an advantage in that kind of situation because we don’t actually wish the USA any harm. Even though we’re pretty upset with their government right now, we definitely don’t blame the American people for what it’s doing and saying.

So we can take the “this is for your own good” position with a clear conscience.

One fear I have is that the one thing the Liberals and the Conservatives will be able to agree on is “fuck the NDP” and so Jagmeet Singh won’t matter at all.

I hope that won’t prove to be the case. And I have faith that the basic babyishness of the current crop of so called Conservatives will keep that from happening.

But as a hardcore leftist, I will wait and see how the Carney government actually acts. If they turn out to be a bunch of cowardly corporate centrists uninterested in making any serious changes to the status quo, I will be deeply disappointed.

And pretty pissed off.

And the worst part is that they’ll still be able to say, “Well, we’re better than the alternative, right?” and they’ll be right because that is how god damn low the bar set bu the Conservatives has gotten.

As long as you are a marginally competent adult who can regulate their own emotions and resist the urge to soil yourself, you are light years ahead of them.

And that leads to very, very underwhelming liberals like Chuck Schumer. The entire boomer “old guard” of Democrats are proving to be entirely unable to meet the challenge of our times.

Except for Bernie, of course. He’s been training for his whole life for this!

Time to clear out the DINO-saurs.

More after the break.

---

Meanwhile, back at me

I am doing OK.

But there are things that are beginning to worry me.

For example, I have this rash on the outside of both upper legs. On my hips, more or less, and just below them.

It’s quite extensive and looks pretty bad. I thought it was just wounds from the jagged metal spikes that jut up from the surface of my bed (and you know they’re real because I’m not a fakir) but then I realized they are a) evenly spaced b) itchy and c) on both sides, though more on the left than the right, and that suggested it was a rash.

From what or where, I dunno.

And it’s been there for more than a month, with me, and my childlike attitude towards life. ignoring them because they don’t hurt and they don’t get in the way of my life and so to my dumb numb self they aren’t a problem.

But um, I should probably get that looked at.

Skin anomalies of all kinds are a red flag in diabetes.

Also, I have started to worry about just how much “clicking” my joints do. The number of times a day I have to jerk-flex a joint that’s gone stiff so it will go click and loosen up again seems to be getting higher.

And it’s affecting more joints, too.

It makes me feel like I’m the Tin Man and my joints keep rusting in place so that I have to “work” them to get them moving again.

That’s probably an age related thing but that doesn’t mean it’s not a medical issue.

Should probably talk to someone about that, too.

Which means I should probably make an appointment to talk to my GP, Doctor Chao, about these things. They’re neither an emergency nor urgent, so I would not take them to the ER or UC. Ergo, GP.

I should try to arrange a Zoom type meeting so I can show the doc the rash.

I know it won’t be an in person appointment because those take forever to get. I don’t think he even sees people in his office every work day.

Covid was just the excuse doctors needed to get even lazier.

But as a person with an undiagnosed condition crippling his legs, I might be biased.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, for me it is, anyhow.

This should explain that mysterious and provocative statement :

As you can imagine, not being able to vote today due to my disability has me pretty pissed off. They managed to accommodate me in the previous election, dammit.

But I get the feeling they are not nearly as well organized this time.

How very sad.

I’ve been looking forward to voting against Pierre Poliwannacracker for weeks now, and looking forward to voting for Carney almost as long.

He seems like a very solid dude and I completely trust him to deal with Trump. He has the appropriate level of disdain for the “man”. He knows that you can’t deal with Trump like he’s a reasonable adult human being.

You have to school him like the toddler he is. And that means being firm, direct, and unwavering in your convictions.

And being willing to correct Trump as many times as it takes for him to actually start paying attention to what you’re saying.

If only to make the situation end sooner.

And it means abandoning all respect for him. That’s something the American media seem unable to do. They continue to cling desperately to the idea that he’s not as bad as he seems and that he has some sort of master strategy, even if it’s an evil one.

But no. He’s just an idiot.

His people, sadly, have a plan, and it’s to destroy America. The true underbelly of the Republican party has finally stopped pretending that they ever liked freedom and democracy and they are eager to follow Hitler’s playbook in getting rid of literally everything America has ever stood for because they’re such “patriots”.

Where’s Captain America when you need him? Or Superman.

Luckily, enough of them actually do believe in America to be having drastic second thoughts about that Trump fella.

I read on Bluesky that articles of impeachment have officially been filed. Good. I am dying to know how exactly the Republicans are going to defend Trump from the literally dozens of impeachable offenses he can be charged with.

How typically Canadian of me to be discussing American politics on Election Day.

The most important thing is to force as many Republicans in the House and Senate to defend Trump’s actions as much as possible.

That’s more important than if he’s actually removed from office. Sure, that’s definitely the best outcome, but that’s not going to happen unless you can really rattle his Republican robots in Congress into thinking that if they don’t turn on Trump, the people will turn on them.

It is within our power to turn Trump into pure political poison.

Let’s do that.

I mean, who would even represent him if he did get impeached and thus had to be defended in the “court” of Congress?

Certainly nobody competent. He hates people like that. Competent people might tell him no, and toddler that he is, he doesn’t think anyone should ever be able to tell him no.

That’s the essential through line of his entire pathology : nobody has the right to ever tell him no about anything.

After all, if they say no, that comes dangerously close to the idea that it is possible for him to ever be wrong about something.

And that’s just not true. It isn’t, it isn’t, it ISN’T!

And he has made himself into the patron saint of people who can’t ever ever EVER admit that they have ever been wrong about literally anything.

And that’s why they keep supporting him. Because to stop supporting him would mean they had been wrong about something.

And they would rather see America burn than admit that.

Imagine going through your whole life thinking you’ve never been wrong.

Imagine the feeling of power when your realize that this means that you can make things true just by saying them.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

More after the break.

---

Peeling back the layers

So I have made progress on the whole applying to the Onion thing.

I’m hoping to finish up tomorrow.

I have the resume done, more or less. It certainly won’t be the most impressive resume they have ever received but I guarantee it will be the funniest.

I’ve decided that for this application, I am just going to let my zany nature run wild. Jokes tucked in everywhere to show off my wacky wit. A general atmosphere of comedic intent and wild, anything can happen, devil may care merriment.

I’m trying to be funny, is what am saying. And cute.

I’m pretty good at both of those.

And what the hell, I can live with the risk of coming on way too strong or otherwise being just a tad too much.

I gotta be me, after all.

One thing that bothers me about the application form is that I don’t see anywhere to submit my 30 headlines.

I assume they’re on the next page of the form or whatever. I am eager to submit them as I am rather proud of them.

And I haven’t even given them their final revising yet!

Or their first one, for that matter.

What can I say, I’m lazy.

Anyhow, I have the resume done and tomorrow I will seriously get down to making those headlines as funny as I possibly can.

Which should be novel. I rarely do that. I just write whatever and shove it out the door.

But I really, really want this job and so I am going to slow my creativity down long enough to stick with a thing and try to make it as amazing as I can.

Historically, doing that makes me depressed. Once I’m done writing something I don’t want to see it any more. I’m off to the next thing.

But I will go into revision knowing this and thus with my nerves steeled and a sense of grim purpose as my armor.

It may not be my favorite part of writing, but this time, it has to be done.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So this problem was on my mind today, so I talked about it.

Having the game you’ve been very much enjoying playing start crashing consistently is really hard on the nerves.

Having it happen even after you turn the graphics settings down to their absolute minimum is just plain depressing.

I have a couple more ideas, but like I say in the vid, I may have to face the fact that I just can’t play Rogue Trader until I get a better power supply unit, or PSU.

Which would be a serious bummer, man

Because I really am enjoying the game quite a bit. The highly unique setting took some getting used to, but it’s basically science fiction with some magic involved in the mechanics of things, so it wasn’t too big of a stretch.

And the game has a very strong and unique art style, which honestly gets to be a bit much at times.

But such trivia aside, it’s a great game and I am very invested in the plot and the battle system and so on. .

So having to stop playing now would seriously suck.

But my nerves can’t take making progress five minutes at a time. Especially now that I have started a big battle with what appears to be some asshole in elaborate power armor doing the usual, “You thought I was dead, but now it is you who will die!” thing.

I could have a lot of fun with a character who’s an old, jaded, tired superhero.

“Look, let me save us both some trouble. You want to destroy the world as revenge against all the people who never took you seriously and now you want to make them pay. That sound about right?”

“Um… yeah. Look, I have this whole speech prepared. Can I deliver it anyway?

“Sure… knock yourself out. ”

I totally imagine him as being played or voiced by Bruce Campbell.

Anyhow, it would be one thing if the crashes just left me on my desktop. That would be aggravating AF but I could tolerate it.

But no, I have to do an ice cold reboot every time.

I used to only have to do a lukewarm reboot, where all I had to do was press the reset button atop my computer case.

But now when I do that, the computer reboots but the internet is fucked. So now I have to actually turn the power off at the power supply, wait a few seconds, then hit the power button to boot up again.

At least that works, knock on wood. I would be absolutely lost without the internet.

Well, I’d be shopping for a new computer, if that’s what it took.

If I can’t play Rogue Trader for a while, I will have to find something new to me but old enough not the make the computer access the GPU at all.

That’s getting increasingly difficult. My taste in video games keep shrinking over time and at the same time I have played most of the games in my genre of choice, RPGs.

Or as they are apparently calling them now, CRPGs, which stands for, believe it or not, frigging COMPUTER RPGs.

As opposed to what, ones inscribed on papyrus? It’s a genre of video games. That pretty much guarantees that a computer is involved on some level.

What they mean by that, I surmise, is that it’s a computer STYLE RPG, like the turn based epics I enjoy, as oppose to an ARPG, which stands for Action RPG, where you are physically present in the game world and have to fight in realtime, like in games like the Zelda series or Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur.

I like those too, though slightly less as I get older.

Anyhow, I’ve played most of the top CRPGs of the past now, so I really have to scrounge around to find something I want to play.

I don’t want to go back to playing Tyranny. That game’s depressing.

There’s got to be something I have played yet. Or would play again.

More after the break.

---

The Unemployed Man

I probably should wait and do a video on this instead but what the hell, my muse is very powerful but it is not patient.

Warn the affiliates we may be going late.

To be an unemployed man is to feel worthless. Society judges a man by what he earns and/or produces and if you’re an unemployed man you make absolutely nothing.

Now raise that to the power of being not just unemployed but unemployable because you are handicapped. That means you do not have the hope of ever attaining any worth. You are nothing but a drain on society and that’s all you will ever be.

And that creates a dark and terrible shame within you that no amount of reassurance from loved ones or society can dislodge.

I speak from experience.

Patient readers know that I have a massive sense of shame about having been so unproductive for my entire life. It’s gotten a little better over time but it is still a thick, dark cloud in whose shadow I shiver and freeze.

Story of my life, really. Feeling shame for things I can do nothing about.

And there is no way out of that mess except to find work somehow. And the elephantine weight of the shame I carry does not make that easy. Most of the time I don’t feel like I am capable of doing much at all besides the same ol’ unsatisfactory bullshit.

Just spinning my wheels and waiting to die.

That deadly shame is the real monster in my head that chases me everywhere I go and forces me to hide like a mob informant for fear of being found out.

God, how badly I want to stop fearing the dreadful moment when someone asks me what I do for a living.

Nothing. I do nothing. I do nothing, I make nothing, I add nothing, and I’m worth nothing.

On all levels I am nothing but a liability.

And knowing that’s not true does not keep me from feeling that way.

I need a deprogrammer.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I am feeling at the moment.

I talk about it here :

Hey, it could work. Every time I talk about going to the ER or UC it ends up just being dehydration and I get better once I get enough water in me.

That’s part of why I haven’t escalated to a full on red alert yet. Right now I am, as usual, closely monitoring myself so that I can see if it all goes away or gets worse.

God, I hope it doesn’t get worse.

Oh, right, before I forget : I am also experiencing muscle aches, runny nose, and that weird ache that goes all the way from my lungs to my ear canals.

Again, believe it or not, that could all be dehydration.

My life is so fucked up.

The runny nose is probably just my seasonal allergies kicking in. Heck, my whole pathology of the moment could be traced back to a body wide inflammatory response to some god damn pollen or other allergen.

Why do we even need histamines, anyway? I know I looked that up a while back and the answers was something about ways your body sends chemical signals and thus communicates with itself, but I’m not satisfied with that answer.

We need to teach our cells to write teeny tiny Post-it notes.

What bugs me is how fast I can dehydrate. I can go from adequately moistened to practically a powder in a matter of hours.

And that makes me feel like I have to drink water constantly just to stay alive. Like all those episodes of Flipper I watched where they were transporting Flipper to wherever he was needed by helicopter and the main characters kept sponging water over him so his skin didn’t dry out.

Man that show was contrived. I mean, if you thought the stuff they had to come up with so that Aquaman could use his powers in the Superfriends was contrived, at least Aquaman could survive out of the water.

But it had animals AND helicopters so I loved it as a kid.

Once more I briefly flirt with the idea of living life with a hydration IV and a freaking urinary catheter in just so I could be sure to stay hydrated.

Then I wouldn’t have to get up nearly as much, and that sounds like a bad thing now that I have typed it out.

I mean, I’m already practically sessile. If it wasn’t for getting up to empty my pee receptacle and refill my water glass I would be one jumbo pack of adult diapers away from never moving at all.

That would be the ultimate oral-retentive dream/nightmare. The sort of Twilight Zone “careful what you wish for” dream from which you wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, not simply because it was horrifying but also because part of you found it so very, very appealing.

Great, I have successfully creeped myself out.

Deep breaths. Find my center. Remind myself that I want to live, not merely survive, now and that means that said nightmare is not in my future.

Not by choice, anyhow.

Oh, by the way, I have now hydrated a fair bit and it has, indeed, made me feel somewhat better. The symptoms remain but their severity is diminished.

So I don’t know what to think. I will hydrate further and see how things turn out. It might be just a side effect of my body adjusting to the warmer weather.

Eventually the afternoon will become my enemy and I will really have to hydrate constantly or end up heat sick.

Maybe this is the year I get one of those portable AC units.

More after the break.

---

Another epic journey

From here to the kitchen and back! Tally ho!

And when in the kitchen, I didst microwave a Michelina’s (fettucine Alfredo, classic) and makes myself some garlic cheese toast while I was at it.

And yes, it continues to be sad (and upsetting if I think about it too much) how much such a simple act takes out of me.

On the other hand, I am merely winded and a little sore, and that’s not so bad. That just means I got a little bit of exercise, and that’s a good thing.

Part of freeing myself up inside has to be learning to accept that a certain amount of effort is not just good for me in the long term, it can be good for me right away in terms of relieving stress and muscular tension.

And that feels good, and who needs another reason to do something that feels good?

It’s just a matter of convincing myself that the effort will be worth it. That reward will fully justify and even exceed effort.

And that goes against one of depression’s favorite lies, which is that nothing is ever worth what it costs and that therefore all you can do is do as little as possible.

But nobody truly believes it or they would be catatonic. All they would do is lie there and stare at the wall all day, every day.

Clearly on some level there are things they consider to be worth the effort, even if they’re just mundane things like eating and using the bathroom.

Generally speaking, we at least serve whatever our addiction is. Food, masturbation/porn, video games, birdwatching.

One of the secret keys to unlocking depression is realizing that life gets a lot easier if you just give your body what it wants.

And when you do that, your body will reward you will pleasure. And it won’t even feel like effort, the effort actually comes from restraining your body from doing what it is meant to do.

I’m not saying that will make everything feel like golden sunshine all the time but it will release a lot of tension. Tension you didn’t even know you had.

Doesn’t that sounds good?

Hmmm. I wonder how much I could make off a book called, “The Hedonist’s Diet”…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.