I did a sort of vid.

It’s technically better than me just sitting there talking, but… ehh.

It’s still not making me happy. I get the feeling that if I want to make the best videos I can make (and I am pretty sure I do), I am going to have to put far more time and energy than I am right now.

At least at first, when I am developing the format.

Once the pieces are in place and I know what I am doing (it could happen), it will presumably become more routine.

I know what elements need to be there to make my little vids the slick satirical commentary news-style program I want it to be, so it’s just a matter of pulling enough of myself together to get all those things into one project.

But I know how I operate. Incrementally. I build things up layer by layer. I add a thing, test it, see if it’s working and if so if it could work better, and the next day I do it again.

That’s just how I work. I tinker. I test. I analyze the result. I think about it. That thinking goes into the next model, and the next, and the next, and so on.

I can’t imagine going on to step B before verifying that step A is solid and trustworthy, or at least is as solid and trustworthy as I can make it.

I guess it’s sort of an application of my fundamentally cautious nature. Deep down I don’t trust things to go well unless I make them go well and that naturally leads to a certain slow but sure approach to things.

Today, I gave looking to my BlueSky for inspiration a try. When it was vid-making time, I had no particular inspiration for a vid and my mind seemed reluctant to come up with one (stupid summer brain) so I figured it was time to look to the news.

Clearly, static images while I talk is not much of an improvement at all. Technically, there’s more to see when I am talking on the screen.

So obviously my technique needs to be refined a tad.

What I really should do is stop being so damned lazy and put in the hard work to come up with enough images and clips to accompany what I am saying.

It doesn’t have to be a non-stop slideshow. After all, that’s not how Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Seth Myers do it.

But it has to be enough to keep the visual presentation going and make things look slick and cool and like I might even know what I’m doing.

I don’t, really. But it feels nice to pretend.

I provide the genius. The competence tends to come from others. Or at least I wish it would. I would be so much more relaxed if I had a trustworthy crew.

There’s that word again. Trust. I don’t have it. I only trust what I can know and verify and that leads to a very limited life.

At some point – a point I can only call “faith” – you have to trust that the universe is not out to get you and that disaster does not constantly lurk waiting for you to foolishly trust that things will be okay and then POUNCE and that the world is, in fact, pretty okay.

And on the surface of my mind, I know all these things. Logically speaking, my level of suspicion and paranoia is insane. None of it is remotely justified.

But deep down I have a lot of unhealed wounds and infected scars and those refuse to let me ever truly relax and trust that everything will be okay.

Because by default, everything sucks and everything that can go wrong will and the only hope of any kind of safety is to watch in all directions at once.

And that’s impossible.

More after the break.

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The dire deep

It started with this :

(warning, video is somewhat emotionally disturbing for non-scary reasons)

I needed to see that video because it pushed a lot of emotional buttons for me that I really benefitted from having pushed.

Her descent into and out of madness helped me process some stuff.

But it also left me in a temporarily perilous state. When the video finished I felt my frustration with my life very keenly, like the video had honed it to a point, and I felt dizzy and confused and a little crazy.

More than a little, really.

But there was no need to panic. I knew it would be temporary. In fact, I wish I had thought to grab that feeling and hang on to it because it had managed to penetrate my usual cloak of numbness and made me feel emotionally real and present and alive for a while and I wish I had made that last as long as possible.

Those rare precious moments are when I truly get some emotions processed, and it’s almost always because something made me really really sad and/or upset.

Not the most comfortable way to piece one’s insanity but not the least either.

When I have these moments, it’s like for a little while I know how normal people experience life. How they just go forward feeling what they feel and making the best decisions they can based on an emotional logic that eludes me.

It’s like a calculus that takes their emotional needs as a foundational variable and therefore produces well rounded and psychologically healthy solutions.

That seems achingly beautiful to me. Sure, they may not be as “smart” as me, but those people are a hell of a lot more functional and wholesome and complete than I and so my hot n’ greedy little heart wants to reach out and take what they have for myself.

I’m no angel. Or rather, I am an angel, but I’m a hell of a lot of others things too.

I know that the cold, broken world inside me is wrong on so many levels. It came from a small boy withdrawing into the world of the mind to escape the unthinkable happening to him and it alienated me from my own emotional core in order to create this eerily calm and secretly coldblooded ice cold snake inside me that intellectualizes everything as a way to make it digestible.

And I am still hiding inside myself from myself and from the big bad world out there.

And I wish I could just make myself be real and normal for a while. For long enough to worth through some very strong and deeply buried emotions.

But I can’t.

Not yet, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First we have today’s vid :

I realize I didn’t say anything particularly novel or unique about the situation, but what the hell. For once in my life, I was just like everyone else.

Feels weird, to be honest.

I’ve been trying to compute what the actual likely outcome of this big sissy slapfight is. It’s really hard to say. Both men are theoretically quite powerful and therefore they could, in fact, act directly against one another.

But they’re also both billionaires, which means it’s highly unlikely either of them is going to be picked up by the authorities and thrown in the slammer any time soon.

More’s the pity.

Trump could listen to that bargain basement gargoyle Steve Bannon and have Elon deported. But as satisfying as that might be for Dumb Donnie, in the end it’s pretty weak sauce. It would, at most, mildly inconvenience Elon the Alien.

I mean, he’s the richest man in the world. Like he cares whether he lives in the USA any more. He can be wherever he wants to be whenever he likes. I am sure he has houses all over the planet and access to the very best communications tech so he can Zoom (or whatever) with whoever he likes at any time.

And of course, it’s also possible that Elon the Elongated truly does have the dirt on Dumb Donnie and can do him way, way more harm than he can inflict on the Elonien.

The Elon From Outer Space is already threatening Donald the Dunce by saying that the reason the infamous Epstein File, with all the names of prominent pedophiles occupying the very highest levels of power, hasn’t been released is that DD is in it.

Which is like, duh. We all know he’s in there. There’s tons of photos of him at Epstein’s pedo parties for fuck’s sake.

But unless you actually have said file and can release it, that doesn’t mean jack shit.

Still, Muskie does potentially know where a lot of bodies are buried, including ones which do not lead to crimes for which Trump is currently immune from prosecution.

But unless someone has the guts to send U. S. Marshalls into the White House to arrest Trump and his confederacy of the dunces (and dunces of the Confederacy), that’s not going to mean much either.

Or hell, grab him when he’s on one of his golf trips. It’s not like he stays in the White House all the time. Bust his lumpy ass mid-stroke if you can.

He probably cheats at golf anyway.

Anyhow, what I am trying to say is it’s not clear how much actual harm these two can do to one another.

It’s clear that Dumb Donnie’s One Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill is going to have a very rough time of it in the Senate.

The knives are out for it and many Republican Senators have done the unthinkable and actually read the damned thing and found their own reasons to vote against the thing besides the fact that if the thing passed their constituents would string them up by their gonads then set them on fire.

But I guess they can’t admit that, so they need to find things to object to other than, ya know, the thousands of people it will kill, the millions of families it will shatter, the freedom and democracy it will destroy, and the human rights it will shit on.

It can’t be wrong for any of those reasons because those are liberal reasons and everyone knows that voting for wimpy girly liberal reasons makes you gay.

I swear to God that’s what is behind a lot of conservatism.

More after the break.

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Not quite done

I got a lot of my usual negatives out in last night blog entry, but after I was done I realized that there was more dreck to be expressed, and this time it was something deeper than the usual litany of frustration and self-loathing.

So I am going to take a stab at reaching it by talking about the life I never got to live.

I was well on the way to a double major in Psychology and Philosophy when my parents yanked me out of UPEI and made me come home to my childhood bedroom just as I was starting to bloom as a person and as an adult.

I then proceeded to have a total mental breakdown that left me unable to eat or drink or do much more than lay on the couch with the TV on and suffer.

I couldn’t eat or drink so I became malnourished and dehydrated and lost my marbles pretty much completely.

Clawed my way back to who I am now from there, and that’s who I’ve been since.

But it could have been so much better. I could have gone on to get my double major then from there get a Master’s in psych before becoming a psychotherapist.

And seeing as I’m an academic super-genius, I am pretty sure I would have aced the academics and shown to all concerned how amazing I am.

They might have tried to get me to go into research. But I would not really be interested. I love science and would love to be a scientist but being a therapist is my calling.

Or at least it was supposed to be.

If my life had gone that way, I might even be on the road to an early retirement by now. I certainly wouldn’t be a pathetic never-been with a crippled soul clinging to the bottom rung of the social ladder and too frozen by fear to make any real progress in life.

I could have spent the last 25 years helping people. Holding their hand and guiding them out of the darkness that grips them and leading them to a happier, saner, safer, stronger, healthier frame of mind from which they can thrive.

And who knows. Maybe I even could have done that for myself.

Hard to know how the mental injuries I had when I went to UPEI would have influenced my state of mental health in this alternate realm.

Maybe not at all.

I was pretty sane before my parents yanked the rug out from beneath me.

I guess I’ll never know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t give too much thought to that title, because I sure didn’t.

Anyhow, I did a song.

Because seriously, doing all those individual text objects is SUCH a pain.

Admittedly, part of that comes from how incredibly fussy about timing I am.

I could just plop the whole lyric sheet into a single scrolling text object and be done with it. But no, then the words wouldn’t line up with the singing properly, so I gotta do all these individual text objects and oy.

Offhand, I can’t think of what else I would put on screen while the song plays. I suppose I could be like my guy John Michael Godier and use the same much of stock footage clips for most of my videos.

But that would be lame. No offense, JMG.

I could also, of course, hunt down a whole whack of images and clips that go with the lyrics and do a montage of those.

That would also be a whole lot of work.

And I have the terrible feeling that I would still feel the need to put my beautiful lyrics on the screen anyway because watching stock footage can be boring.

So I dunno. I think I might have reached the limit of what I can do by myself. Anything more elaborate and/or higher production value will take a team.

That’s definitely part of my YouTube dreams : to be one of these YouTubers that makes so much money off YouTube that they can pay entire squads of people to work on their videos for them.

Like, there are YouTubers who employ an animation studio with like 30 employees just to make their animations. All they have to do is write them and record the voiceover.

That seems like Heaven to me. And the VIP part of Heaven. Heaven Plus, if you will.

The premium service is worth the price for the concierge alone.

It would be so nice not to have to do everything myself. Of course, money is only one part of why I work alone.

Another big part is being a big under-socialized weirdo who doesn’t play well with others. I honestly do not want others involved if they are going to slow me down. I would hate it if I couldn’t move forward on something because I am waiting for somebody else to do their part of it.

Fuck that. I will do it myself. Badly.

So if I did have a studio, I would have to develop a relationship with them where I can just give them my part and then trust them to do the rest.

And I do not trust easily. Especially when it comes to other people’s competence.

Which is odd, because thanks to dyspraxia et al, I am not competent in most physical ways myself. Which is sad.

But the sort of competence I don’t trust in others is things like being able to stay focused on a goal, solve problems with common sense and creativity, being able to keep the big picture in mind, and other such busybody things.

Which means I would make a pretty good manager. I’d take all that on mysef and then my workers could concentrate on just doing their job well.

Maybe I should run my own studio. Hmmm. 🙂

Went to physio today, which I was dreading because I had to admit I had not been doing the exercises my physio Ekta had assigned me last time.

Forgot all about them. D’oh.

This time, I am going to try to make them part of breakfast. I will stand a better chance of remembering them if I attach them to something I already do.

And I don’t currently have anything I do during breakfast. So what the heck.

It was a bit depressing how much doing the very simple exercises she was teaching me took out of me.

Not a surprise, but still sad.

More after the break.

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I hate my stupid fucking life

Yeah, we’re back here again.

I tried to scratch this particular itch with that song above but I guess that was too indirect to get the job done so, fuck everything everywhere eternally.

I feel cranky and unstable. This straitjacket of a life is so fundamentally pathetic and radically unfulfilling and filthy and stupid and humiliating and disabled and lame.

I want – I need – so very much more than this. Nobody should have to lead a stunted half-life like mine. I have so much human potential locked up inside me itching to get out that it’s a wonder that I haven’t gone completely berserk yet.

I’m not meant to be so limited. I’m a genius, I should be flying high above the crowds and creating spectacles and wonders and showing the world what an incandescent wonder I am, not rotting away in this shithole of a bedroom as death looms ever closer and every day makes my inability to get anywhere even more humiliating.

I am so ashamed of how my life has turned out. I’m such a loser. Even other losers look down at me because they have at least had jobs, or work some McJob, or have some other way of being some use to society.

But no, I am a rare breed of total fuckup that hasn’t even really tried to make it. I’ve made some ill fated attempts at securing employment more than 20 years ago and since then I have been a burden and a drag to the rest of the world.

And I struggle, but I don’t get anywhere. All I ever really do is dick around pretending like I am making progress without ever really doing anything of substance.

And all because I am so damned scared of everything, especially that big bad world out there, that I am compelled to hide in video games all my free waking hours rather than spend one precious second having to figure out what I want to do.

I’m sick of it all and I’m sick of this life and I wish I could just slip my skin and run away and become a completely new person, with no baggage, a suitably non-pathetic synthetic backstory, and no way for the unspeakably awful demon that is the truth of who I really am to ever catch up with me.

I just want to be normal.

I just want to have self-respect.

I just want to be a grownup.

But I can’t even manage that.

A generational intellect and talent and no way to do anything with it.

Man, I really am a loser.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

There. Hopefully that’s enough of a discharging of negatives for now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

How so? Watch, and find out.

It’s kind of my way. I stumble through life doing everything wrong, as the song says, and yet somehow it kind of works for me.

Emphasis on kind of. I mean, it’s not like I’m awash in accolades and success or anything. But inasmuch as I have been educated and so far as I have made my silly little creative projects, I have been improvising my way through life without the slightest clue as to what I am doing and yet somehow coming out of it unharmed.

None of what I talk about in the vid should be possible.

So I guess I’m just impossible.

Or at least highly unlikely.

Well, I did defy my mother’s tubal ligation to be conceived. She was under the impression that her getting pregnant was impossible.

Not so, said I.

The must be a way to harness my improbability to get myself out of this rut. Maybe I should just hitch it to my strange boldness and just email famous and/or powerful people out of the blue looking for help getting my career started.

That sounds like the sort of thing that a sweet summer child like me would do.

There is a certain advantage to doing what others would never dream of doing, provided you do it in a polite, respectful, charming way.

I can do that.

Perhaps that should be my entire approach to looking for a job. Just ask for what I want. Or better yet, ask for advice.

Most people love having their knowledge and expertise called upon. It must be part of our instinct to share information with the rest of the tribe.

Perhaps the right people would find my combination of sweetness and perspicacity oddly appealing and I could get somewhere that way.

The other thing on my mind today is how I’ve always been..

An island unto myself

A solitary fortress in a large and lonely sea.

It never seemed like I was choosing to be that way. I grew up terribly lonely, so lonely sometimes that it physically hurt. I wanted friends, I wanted closeness, I wanted people in my life who saw me and took care of me instead of throwing me to the wolves.

But I don’t think I knew how to let people in. I still don’t. Perhaps I missed some vital developmental window in which one is supposed to learn human connection and because I was neglected and ignored (and resented) at that time, I didn’t get my proper dose of it.

I’d hate to think that’s permanent. But it might be.

On the whole, I think I’d rather be alive.

That would make a great line to start a short story with. I’ll have to remember it.

Now I come back to the idea that it would take something really big to overwhelm my fractured mind’s stupid defenses and actually set me free from this prison fortress that has grown up around me over all these years.

But I know the truth. Door’s wide open. I can leave whenever I want to.

This is not a secure ward.

What keeps me locked into this sad little insufficient life of mine is fear. Simple fear, as in anxiety, and a much deeper and more telling fear that flows from that broken boy of long ago who was shattered by a rapist and then filed it away in his mind as something too big for him to deal with and there it has stayed.

The person I became is made of whatever was left behind.

I could be so very much more.

But not without help.

More after the break,

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Ordering in again

Crunched the numbers and saw that I was around $40 ahead, ergo I am eating me some Chipotle right now.

And it only cost me $20, so I am still $20 up. Awesome. I like having a buffer.

Still three weeks to go on this festering sore that is 5 week month : the Revenge. I will be so glad when this bullshit is over.

I just checked and the following month is definitely a normal four week month. Phew.

I’m not taking anything for granted any more. If there could be two in a row, there could be three just as easily.

Son of a bitch.

I’ve been doing okay other than financial stress. Life keeps clicking along and dragging us into the future and every day my lack of life progress gets a little more sad.

Not the healthy way to look at it, I know. Hopefully putting it that way here will help me exorcize a bit of that energy.

Sometimes I have to let the bad thoughts out in order to feel better. So what might seem like I am getting worse because I am expressing such dark thoughts (and in my own particularly evocative way) but it’s actually the opposite.

I’m getting better by venting my toxins.

It’s conceivable that some distant, future version of myself would be able to deal with his emotions in realtime in such an effective and healthy way that I don’t build up the negative feelings in the first place.

Until then, I gotta purge now and then.

Not right now though, so you can relax. Some time when the darkness is a lot closer to the surface. Right now I feel somewhat summer-mellow and okay and I am not about to ruin that by sticking a metaphorical finger down my throat.

I suppose there’s a little melancholy in my soul right now. Maybe I could use a good cry.

Maybe I will even be able to have one once I lay down again.

Maybe I still have too much invested in predictability and not nearly enough in being able to handle whatever, whenever.

And I still compulsively take shelter in video games most of the time. I feel like I am slowly prising myself away from that habit but I haven’t truly challenged the addiction yet and when I do, it’s going to be rough.

Just keep thinking of job hunting as a game.

That should help.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A fat guy talking about video games on the internet!

Arguably the subject that would most “make sense” in a simplistic sense for me to blog and vlog about would be video games.

And I am positive I could create decent video game related content. The usual stuff, reviews, news, stuff you can use. My theories about what makes a game good.

But I don’t really want to. My vlogs and blogs are how I get away from my video game addiction and have some time when I am not involved with them at all.

I’m trying to wean myself off gaming, so far with little success. It’s still how I spend most of the time I don’t spend making and editing videos and writing on this blog o’ mine.

That’s why the videos are a good innovation. They are one more non video game related thing for me to do with my day. Something even vaguely productive.

I mean, people DO see my videos, both on YouTube and on TikTok. And I am pondering posting them to Instagram as well.

What the hell, it’s not like it’s a lot of work.

And the fact that there are people who see my vids who don’t even know me personally expands my “reach” compared to this blog, where I can greet my readers by name.

Hi Julian! Hi Felicity! Hi spuug! Love you all! *enormous hugs!* Thank you so much for reading my “not written with entertainment in mind” blog.

The youths call that “shitposting” but I’m far too refined and sophisticated motherfucker to call it that.

This very circuitously rings me back to the subject of taking my videos more seriously by trying to make them seem professional and even telling people to like n’ subscribe.

I’m still divided on that. I kinda like that my videos don’t pester people like that. Being so needy and pushy with promoting yourself is very anti-Gen X. We’re the generation that hated being advertised to or at.

Like, fuck off. Seriously. I don’t give a shit about your stupid craptacular product.

Stop trying to engage my non-existent enthusiasm.

So it feels really wrong to become a carnival barker for my own “brand”. I would much rather just do what I do and say what I say and if the power of my self-expression and my ideas and my vision attracts followers, great.

But I kind of also want money.

The usual Gen X dilemma, just reached far too late in life : money versus integrity.

I could make merch. Step right up and get your very own “I’m a fat guy on the internet” T-shirt. Hot off the Cafepresses!

Actually, that might catch on. Hmm. Add some cute (and non-hateful) aimage of a fat dude bathing in the glow from their monitor and typing.

He could become my mascot.

But it’s so hard for me to imagine picking one aspect of myself and going with it as who I “really” am. No matter what I chose, it would feel like I was killing a big part of myself.

And I don’t think I can do it. No matter how I try to frame it in my mind, it still feels like I would be choosing one version of me to survive while jettisoning the rest into space.

Hence my never ending quest to come up with a single identity for myself. It seems hopeless sometimes. How could one unify so many aspects of myself?

Just the contrast between my warmly loving side and my coldly calculating side seems to make unity impossible.

I guess I’ll always be somewhere in between.

More after the break.

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On the other hand

Maybe it’s okay to have no idea who you are.

It certainly leaves your options open. Which might be the point. Maybe my lack of ability to decide who I “really” am really comes down to not wanting to be “trapped” in one identity and therefore not be able to shapeshift into what I need to be in the moment.

That kind of makes sense. In my own warped way.

And very patient readers know I have trod this road before. Talking about being “goo” and not wanting to be stuck in one particular form, but also knowing that my lack of internal structure comes at a very high cost in terms of stability and security and having a freaking skeleton to my embodied soul.

And yet I can’t imagine having that structure or that skeleton any more than I can imagine choosing one of my many sides to be “the one”.

I think I have always assumed, way WAY in the back of my mind, that life would somehow choose for me. That I would putter around doing this and that and eventually one thing or another would catch on with people and that’s what I would become.

I’ve read celebrity bios that went something like that.

But of course, that kind of assumes that you’re putting your work somewhere where it might be found. And until recently I have not been doing that.

The videos, though, are at least discoverable. When I have the wherewithal saved up, I will try to make them at least a little more than that.

Somehow. In some way that I can live with. Le sigh.

It’s hard being Gen X if you have literally any ambition. We’re the Slacker generation, ambition was for idiots and corporate drones and lick-spittle keeners and preppies and type-A yuppies and other kinds of undesirables.

In that sense it’s kind of a wonder that any of us got famous.

And yet, we did. Presumably without ever looking like we really cared.

In fact, I was always a tiny bit of an outlier in that I did show open enthusiasm for some things. Maybe us Gen X nerds were the exception, I don’t know.

But no generation can resist getting married and having kids and thus having to get your shit together and get a real job so you can raise them right.

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing how nobody is forcing us to get married and reproduce and yet we do it anyway, almost universally, all of us making the exact same decisions for our own individual reasons.

Some things no amount of individualism can erase and our need to pair-bond and have kids seems to be one of them.

We think we’re so autonomous and individual yet we all end up doing the same things.

It’s something to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m glad I did this.

Because it felt really good to get some stuff off my chest. I felt distinctly unburdened when I posted that video to YouTube. I feel better now.

So expect more things like that down the line. It did me a lot of good to make myself vulnerable and be real with people today.

I want more.

I think part of why it did me good was that I confronted the long freeze that my emotions have suffered over these years.

I’m finally ready to admit it : my Midnight Tundra has been Paxil all along.

And I have come up with the opposite of Midnight Tundra : Twilight Summer. It’s that wonderful time of a summer day where the sun has started to go down so you don’t have the burning heat of direct sunlight beating down on you, but there’s still plenty of heat coming up off the pavement, so things are still toasty warm.

I love that time of day. It’s the best.

So that’s my opposite of all that Midnight Tundra inside of me.

I’m on my last week of my current month of meds and next month my Paxil will go down another level. Six days a week on 30 mg instead of five

And I am a little worried about that. My emotions are already pretty rough and raw and a lot of bad stuff is coming out of hibernation as things warm up inside me.

But mostly, today, I am excited about the prospect because talking about my Paxil freeze for the video has made me keenly aware of the glacier that still resides within me and how it’s been holding me back and I want the fucking thing gone yesterday.

Obviously I am not dumb enough to just quit Paxil cold turkey. Part of me wants to do that, but I know that is, shall we say, inadvisable.

Don’t want to end up falling all the way down to the “institutionalized for my own safety” level of crazy, though part of me feels like nobody would know or care.

I try to keep those feelings safely contained. I can’t erase my feelings that nobody loves me and nobody gives a god damn about me, at least not yet, but I know them to be demonstrably insane and completely false so I can safely ignore them.

Aside from needing to let them out now and then like they’re animals that have been cooped up too long in the winter.

An apt metaphor.

It’s weird to know you have feelings that are crazy and yet knowing they are crazy does not get rid of them.

They must stem from some kind of deeper pain that has yet to be addressed. Some level of emotional damage that merely expresses itself that way and therefore trying to completely suppress them will only make the same emotions pop up elsewhere.

No point in playing whack-a-mole with your feelings.

I know I am very deeply damaged and have been since I was raped when I was 4. None of that primary trauma has ever been treated and I have no idea how one would go about it after all this time.

It would probably take a much deeper and more intensive level of therapy than I could get from Doc Costin over the phone.

And the province doesn’t spend that kinda money on mere depressives.

So like I said in the video, I will just have to keep plodding along.

But who knows what self-therapy via YouTube might bring?

More after the break.

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Here’s some awesome stuff I found on BlueSky today :

Eat the rich : A highly appetizing idea for a game show. Unless we’re eating Elon Musk, because that just sounds gross and I can’t think of a cannibalistic pun for him.

A Three Elon Musk-eteers bar? Nah.

Bowser is bi : Bowser from the Mario games makes a big announcement that surprises absolutely nobody. Least of all me. Even if he didn’t start off bisexual, the sheer heat of a million pieces of gay Bowser fanart would have turned him that way.

How to catch a mouse : This person has truly built a better mousetrap!

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A comity of errors

So I forgot to order a snackable to mix in with my microwave popcorn last week.

No big deal, I have a jumbo size box of Cheez-Its and know from experience they actually do the job quite well.

Turns out I also forgot to order 2L bottles of my favorite sodas.

That’s harder to replace. Normally I have half of one of those (so, 1L) when my have my snack and oops, nope, not this week.

Well I guess now I know where my last three precious cans of soda will go.

I didn’t forget to order those. I skipped it on purpose, to save money. Like I said before, I was going to see if the cans were something I could do without for now.

I have yet to actually run out, so technically, the experiment continues.

Now they will be the soda portion of my midnight snacks.

And so it goes.

You know, I don’t know why I fear change. I’m a fairly adaptable guy.

Took a look over that list of agents. Realized that they are, indeed, literary agents and that I don’t write much fiction any more.

Hardly any at all, really.

Which begs the question of what exactly I would be handing to an agent for them to represent. It’s not like I need an agent to be a YouTuber.

Maybe pay for an afternoon of a marketing expert’s time to get the thing off the ground.

And do them with a touch more professionalism. Like asking viewers to like and subscribe, and even directing them to my Patreon.

All three of those things go against the grain of my nature, but one can only assume people do them because they work, so I really should swallow my pride and my Canadian aversion to tooting one’s own horn and do it too.

I mean, I could just keep making my content and hoping that I will be noticed some day and my channel will take off like a rocket carrying me to fame, fortune, and loads of sex.

And part of me prefers that method.

But the more sensible part of me knows that there’s nothing wrong with giving my odds a bit of a boost with self-promotion.

After all, everybody else is doing it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I wrote another song.

It’s soft and sweet and a little weird, just like me.

I don’t think I can explain or justify the lyrics except that I was going for a kind of Leonard Cohen in a gentle mood kind of feel.

To me, it’s a song about two lovers playing around with one another being goofy and talking about this and that and just enjoying one another’s company.

In a broader sense, it’s about the deep, quiet pleasure of being with the one you love.

In my case, that means someone you can be weird and wacky and warm with.

It all makes sense to me, anyhow.

It occurred to me earlier today that I could use Riffusion to make a children’s song. So now the back of my brain is working on what sort of song I would write.

Something gentle and warm and maybe slightly naughty, just to give the kids a little giggle. Something to maybe help lonely kids feel less alone.

Originally that was my vision for a children’s book but a song sounds way easier to put together thanks to Riffusion.

I wonder if this is how famous lyricists like Tim Rice feel, because to get away with only having to write the words feels downright scandalous to me.

Like I am really getting away with something outrageous.

I quite like that feeling.

Of course, if I was to try my hand at a children’s song, I would put it in its own channel far away from my usual YouTube output.

Not that I talk about anything smutty on my main channel or anything, but I would absolutely insist anything I do for children be in its own little walled off world so both the kiddies and their caretakers feel safe there.

I don’t want some kid going from one of my nice safe kiddie songs to one of my foul mouthed rants against Vladimir Putin, or whatever.

Hmm. Maybe I could write something about an adorable magical pet. Kind of like Puff the Magic Dragon, but without the bummer ending.

Because my song would be an actual children’s song, not something written by spoiled boomers who miss their childhood.

Not that I’m bitter.

Hell, while I’m at it, maybe I could reform that god damned unicorn song.

It’s a sweet, charming song for the wee ones about how there’s no unicorns any more because they were too stupid to go on the Ark so all drowned.

Yes, children, they swam and swam until they were too tired to swim any more and then their proud and noble heads slipped beneath the waves and they DIED.

As did every single other living thing on Earth! All the kittycats and puppy dogs and big strong horses and giraffes and lions and of course, also all the mommies and daddies and children and babies and literally everything else that lived.

But that part is the Bible’s fault, not the Irish Rovers.

And I think the worst part of being bombarded by that song everywhere when I was a child was that I seemed to be the only one who noticed how horrifying a tale it told.

To this day, I don’t get how people can miss that. I mean, sure, the whole thing sounds all sweet and folksy and child friendly but the implications are brutal.

And the fact that I was the only child who understood that feels emblematic of some fundamental disconnect between me and any chance of being a normal child.

Without the rape I might have been a far healthier child, but normal was never in the cards for lil ol me.

More after the break.

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The nature of the leak

I think I’m leaking prostate fluid.

That’s my conclusion after realizing that the inside of my foreskin is constantly wet and what I thought was a small amount of urine dripping from me like a very slow faucet leak was in fact something that was clear, oily, and a little sticky.

And when I try to masturbate, a great deal more of this fluid comes out.

And I have pondered what it might be and I came (snrk) to the conclusion that it must be the fluid secreted by my prostate gland.

In a normal ejaculation, this fluid is combined with sperm from the testicles in order to form semen as we all know and love it.

It definitely should not be leaking out on its own.

I wish I had realized this before I had my talk with Doctor Kwok. This seems like ther exact kind of thing my GP (or his locum) should know about.

Also, I just came home from our usual Denny’s night out, and while there I found that I had started to shiver.

And it did not feel like a healthy kind of shivering. It felt more like the “I’ve caught the chills” kind of shiver. The kind you feel all the way into your very soul.

Then I noticed I felt weirdly hot and cold all over. Too warm in some places and too cold in others. And overall I have that feeling of malaise I’ve talk about before.

So I am not feeling well right now.

I will see how I feel after a nap. Earlier today, I was quite sleepy, but I had no other symptoms so I assumed it was just me needing to catch up on sleep.

Now I’m not so sure.

I still feel hot and cold all over. I’m not shivering but I feel like I could start at any moment. I feel vulnerable and cranky and a little paranoid.

I know I need to figure out what to do about the prostate thing.

At the very least, I know this is one thing I can’t blame on dehydration, though I suppose it might contribute to it.

God, getting old sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I eventually made a somewhat redundant video.

Well, some of the points are new, anyway.

Let me elaborate on my journey.

I wasted a frankly stupid hour and a half trying to convince AI video generation platforms to output a useful video and failing completely.

Many of them, it turns out, are quite skilled at making it seem like they’re going to do it only to yank the football away at the last second and want money.

I should have given up after maybe 45 minutes but I am a stubborn and persistent cuss and sometimes that takes me to very dumb places.

It’s a pitfall all us Taurus types know all too well. Only once we do whatever it was we were trying to do does the stubbornness fade away and leave us thinking that was a stupid waste of time.

But oh well. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

That’s how I ended up with good ol Steve AI up there. That’s one seriously low effort video I generated, but it was free.

I’m going to play around with different settings to see if I can generate something a bit more presentable. As far as I can tell, good old Steve there is not keeping track of “computing minutes” (LTX) or “transcription minutes” (Descript) or “credits” (nearly everybody else) or whatever.

Whoops, I was wrong. Got one vid for free and that’s it forever. Le sigh.

The thing is. I totally want to pay these amazing websites for access, although at this point it would be hard for me to pick one because I’ve tried so many of them that they have started to blur together.

I rally should have been keeping notes. (Yeah right. )

If I had to choose right now, I guess it would still be Descript. Their suite of features is pretty good and I am dying to see if it can put clips to my voice and make me the happiest lazy documentarian in the world.

Although if I was forced to find the clips manually all by my little old self, it would at least encourage me to keep my videos very short.

That reminds me : I should give making YouTube Shorts a try.

But if I had loads o’ cash I would also throw some LTX’s way because their engine is spectacular. It makes such high quality stuff with just a few words.

I wish I could have platinum plus memberships in them all. I would have so much fun.

Other than pointless stress, I have had a quiet day. Discovered an obscure game called Elex in my Steam library that I didn’t remember and looked pretty decent so I decided to give it a shot.

And I’m enjoying it. It’s a decent attempt at a science fiction/fantasy blend and I find the world surprisingly convincing and engrossing and there is no shortage of quests.

And I finally remember to buy some armor, so the combat should be a little easier. I have gotten savaged to death by monsters a LOT.

But meh. It’s interesting enough to keep playing and it’s less frustrating than the original Pillars of Eternity, which I was playing before now.

I just cannot keep up with real time combat, even with plentiful pausing. I can handle the small normal battles but the big fights are completely beyond my poor brain.

I just can’t handle chaos.

But I am definitely enjoying Monster Hunter 2. The original was great and the sequel is just as much fun.

So there’s that.

More after the break.

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The fading away of a sad child

I think I have written before about this “fading away” feeling I get, like my internal combustion engine is trying to start up but the engine just ain’t turning over.

And the first question is always whether or not it’s an emotional or physical issue.

Probably a little of both, to be honest.

I know that I have lived under the tyranny of mental illness for a very long time. That I have been afraid of life and afraid of leaving my far too tiny comfort zone and afraid of getting truly excited or engaged about anything apart from the very thin gruel I can derive from video games.

And underwriting it all is that irrational feeling that I can’t possibly make it on my own. That if I go out into the “real world”, I will somehow perish.

Which makes no sense. I can do all the components of being a grownup, at least in theory. But when I imagine myself taking it all on, I just shrivel up inside.

I fade away. I surrender. I run away on the inside.

And I can talk about needing to stay and fight and while I would definitely be better off if I could do that but I don’t know that I can do that.

It’s so hard to tell.

There will always be that rough, manly voice in my head telling me that I just need to man up and stop being such a pussy and get in there and get things done.

But the man stands on the shoulders of the child and my inner child is not at all well. He’s been terribly damaged for his whole life and has lived in muted misery inside the seemingly impregnable fortress of my smooth persona for so long that the very thought of leaving its protection and joining that exciting world outside its windows seems both impossibly exciting and just plain impossible.

Maybe it truly is physical. Something wrong with my heart, something the stents didn’t fix, and my body is actually just defending itself by keeping me from doing things which might trigger a heart attack.,

But I somehow doubt it. This is a disease of the spirit and I don’t know what to do about those. All I can do is live my life and try my best to heal that sad little boy inside.

He’s doing better now.

But he is still very sick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yup. Another dang karaoke vid.

In retrospect, this was inevitable.

Eh. I don’t know why I do these karaoke vids. I am always deeply dissatisfied with the results, to the point where I feel a little ashamed for even doing one, let alone posting it where the whole world will see it.

I have a song cooking in Riffusion but this time I wrote the lyrics then set them aside so that I can look at them again with fresh eyes and tinker with them as needed.

At least I can dodge a little shame that way.

I keep telling myself, “of course it’s not perfect, it’s karaoke!” but it doesn’t help much.

The problem is that I can’t edit audio nearly as well as I edit video, so I don’t know how to take my vocal track and spruce it up with Autotune and taking the best of multiple takes and so forth and so on.

I mean, cutting and pasting is easy but I have no idea how to splice music of all things together so that it doesn’t sound like multiple takes stitched together.

I could try looking it up, I suppose.

Or maybe there’s some kind of magical AI vocal cleanup tool now that does it all for you.

That would be nice. I am very comfortable editing video but I only do pretty basic stuff. Cut, paste, add titles, maybe some music. Easy.

Anything more technical is beyond me.

I almost sort of have technical skills, which is frustrating. I have been saying for decades that I am a nerd in all ways that aren’t job skills.

Nobody is lining up to pay me for my ability to remember obscure songs or my scattered knowledge of science or my socially awkward introversion.

But I somehow missed getting all the technical skills that are supposed to be our compensation. I am not a programmer or a sysadmin or an engineer. I don’t have an intuitive grasp of system design or higher math. I don’t think in code.

I also don’t have Asperger’s, which is something I suppose.

And, of course, I’m incredibly talented, creatively gifted, and sparklingly charismatic.

I just need help turning those into, ya know, money.

I keep coming back to the idea of needing someone to hold my hand through my journey into relevance. My problems are both emotional and practical but the practical ones I could solve myself given time if I only had that strong, sure hand to hold to help me calm down and focus and deal with the chaos in my head.

I’m such a fragile, sensitive thing. A hothouse flower through and through.

Now where’s the hot guy with a house?

What I really need is Robin Williams from The Birdcage. A smart, competent, organized, driven person to manage and handle a super talented bundle of nerves like me.

It would be amazing to be able to just relax and concentrate on being me, instead of having to do everything myself.

Obviously what I need is an agent. And I have a list of 38 Canadian agents open in a tab, just waiting for me to apply for one. ^[1]

But so far I am still too damn timid to try. When I try to imagine myself applying to be a client of one of them, this crippling voice inside me asks, “And just what do you have to offer them to convince them to take you on?”.

Nothing, I meekly reply. I have no publications of note. The fact that I’ve written millions of words on this blog since 2011 is impressive but it doesn’t prove to an agent that someone else thinks my work is worth something.

And that’s what they are looking for. They are far too busy to figure out if you work is any good by themselves so they rely on other gatekeepers to approve you for them.

Which means getting myself published.

Which means writing things worth publishing.

And a whole new set of gatekeepers. Sigh.

I need an agent to get me an agent.

More after the break.

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On managing me

I’m pretty sure being my agent would be a fairly easy gig… at first, at least.

I’m not that complicated. Give me a task and I do it, and odds are, if it’s a writing task, I will do it both faster and better than you thought possible.

That’s the payoff for all these years of building up my writing muscles on this blog.

And I am not fussy. If I can do it and it pays, I will do it. In fact, I can see myself telling a prospective agent, “Give me all the really crappy tasks nobody else will do. I will clear them off your plate lickety split. ”

And I will. I would relish the challenge. I don’t care what it is. As long as it pays, even if it pays way too little, I will do it.

And obviously, that would be my way of tempting the agent into taking me on as a client. Just think of all the stuff you’ll finally get done!

And I know I probably wouldn’t be calling my agent in the middle of the night to talk me through my latest nervous breakdown nor would I throw a hissy fit if my intricate and fussy demands aren’t met.

Well, probably not. There’s only so much of people screwing up simple things when they were told exactly what to do one man can take.

But I can roll with the punches.

Plus writers often work alone, and that reduces the chances of drama.

But I suspect that once I was famous some ugly sides of my personality would come clawing their way to the surface of my mind and I would have to contend with that.

As does anyone who “makes it”, I would imagine.

Society does not prepare us for large differences in status between us and those around us. We grow up roughly equal to others.

Fame and/or money can fuck that up completely. There is a lot of primal primate programming that we have no idea is lying latent in our brains until it rears its ugly head when we get power or status.

Will Smith has been saying that he wishes everyone could get everything they always wanted so they can see how it doesn’t really solve anything.

I’d like the same thing, but as a test to see if someone can be trusted with power.

Real character is what you do when nobody can stop you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow

Maybe I should have called the video that.

It sounds clickable.

Anyhow, so I bitched about people being stupid about automation.

If your job necessarily involves interacting with physical objects, which is most jobs, trust me, you’re not getting automated any time soon.

In fact the whole idea that automation is coming for all our jobs is deeply bourgeoisie. When people say that, they’re not thinking about jobs like carpenter or nurse or managing a Stuckey’s.

No, they are thinking of nice soft middle class jobs. Info work. Creative work. Middle management “work”. The sort of things real people do, ya know?

Only people in that socioeconomic strata could even begin to imagine that automation is somehow going to take “all the jobs”.

Plus, the fact that business A doesn’t need you in order to generate profits any more doesn’t mean business B can’t exploit you.

So to speak.

Human resources are far too valuable to go to waste. It’s still possible that if you’re a middle class person, your job will go to AI and your highly specialized skillset will become obsolete and, well, you’re not exactly going to be able to switch to waiting tables or flipping burgers.

The social descent alone could kill you. We human beings tend to view loss of status as something only slightly better than death and so some people would rather starve while still technically being a lawyer than live as a fry cook.

Plus those jobs tend to be a lot more physically demanding, which is a problem if you are not used to physical work any more.

If you’re middle aged and fat, is what I am saying.

Anyhow, point is, automation and AI aren’t going to eliminate most jobs.

Just the ones people who went to college tend to want.

Switching subjects, I have been pondering what it means to take this whole YouTube thing more seriously.

It’s not an easy equation to solve. Of course, I could emulate the successful YouTube channels that I am subscribed to, and do things like exhort people to like and subscribe and join my Patreon and all that crap.

Oh gee, is my Gen X disdain for doing things like that shining through?

Another possibility would be merch but I don’t exactly have like a logo and a mascot and a (ick) “brand” yet.

I suppose I could take something I’ve said that I think is particularly pithy and slap it on mugs and T-shirts but that seems a tad premature.

Like I keep saying, I know that the product is essentially me. I am the one constant amidst all the random things I talk about. My personality, my charisma, my POV, my wit, and so on are basically what I have to offer the world.

And they’re pretty amazing.

But it’s pretty hard to imagine building a brand around myself. I don’t even have a catchy name to call myself and I doubt I ever will because I instinctively resist attempts to reduce me down to something easy to understand.

That’s not necessarily permanent though. I might figure myself out enough eventually.

My first thought was to name the channel, “Hey, it’s that guy!”. Then I would become known as That Guy.

I could then get all cute and steal something from Friends and call every episode of my show, “That Guy talks about… ” or “That Guy goes on and on about… ” or the like.

Eh. Maybe. That could work but I’m not in love with the idea.

Then again, that still sounds better than trying to market myself as some radical truth spitting iconoclast who tells it like it is.

I mean, I do, but… I don’t know if I want to make that my identity.

I would hate to get boxed in as some kind of angry firebrand and end up having to make up new things to be mad about all the time.

I dunno. Maybe I am just unable to imagine promoting myself at all.

In fact, it highlights one of the conflicts in my nature, where I know that I am pretty fucking amazing, and yet, I am still kind of meek as well.

Too meek to imagine saying,. “Hey world! I’m amazing! Gimmie money!”

I am cringing internally just thinking about it.

And that’s essentially what telling people to go to your Patreon amounts to.

I got some issues to work out.

More after the break.

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You could be a big star

And I want that. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.

Or maybe not.

I would definitely be the sort of celebrity who would make occasional appearance here and there and be all warm and charismatic and cool with my fans, then disappear into the limo and vanish for a while.

That’s the problem with being where I am on the whole introvert/extrovert thing. I am definitely not a pure introvert – I love attention too much for that. And I definitely have magnetism and appeal beyond the usual bounds of introversion.

But I am still fundamentally an introvert and being “on” like that is very draining for me so I would need to rest before I could shine, shine, shine again.

That’s subject to change, though. Could be that with the right social therapy, I would come out of my shell further and find that I can, in fact, derive energy from social interaction and not have to go back into my shell nearly as often.

But I will always need an avenue of retreat, I think.

Of course, this is all just theory. I will be lucky if I even become known let alone famous. I want to be a YouTube star and make a living doing videos, but like I demonstrated in the first half of this blog entry, that’s going to be hard for me to pull off.

So I will just keep plugging along doing what I do and trying to figure out a way to promote myself that I can live with.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.