I have had SUCH a week!

And it ain’t over yet.

Here’s the vid.

Right now I feel pretty sore. All that squishing and squeezing, plus my unusually high activity level over the past three days, has left me achy and cranky.

It’s a good thing I am alone right now because I might snap at someone if they got on my nerves right now.

And that would not be acceptable. Not coming from me.

For one thing, I know that with my sniper’s wit, a casual cranky comment from me could really hurt somebody.

For another thing, I place a lot of value on self control. As patient readers know, my late father, Larry, was an angry, impatient. short tempered man and I will forever hate his memory for his inability, and/or unwillingness, to restrain his anger so that he did not end up hurting his wife and children.

Would that have been too much to ask? Apparently so.

And I know that having made it this far without turning into him is no guarantee that it will never happen. I can feel that anger and impatience within me. There are times when it’s like having a pack of barking dogs in my head and the easiest thing in the world would be to set them loose.

But I will never do that.

Or at least not until I am rich and famous and spoiled.

Because unlike good ol Larry, I have the empathy to feel my effect on others and that means that to hurt others is to hurt myself.

Luckily, that also means that to make others happy is to make me happy. So that’s the kind of thing I try to focus on.

I really should try to get back to doing standup.

Still, as patient readers also know, this leaves me with vast oceans of unexpressed anger that no doubt wreaks havoc on my mental health.

So let’s quickly go through my usual bullshit on this subject :

1. I have a lot of untapped rage
2. It’s very bad for me
3. I would be a lot better off if I found a way to express it
4. But expressing it means maybe hurting others
5. That is completely unacceptable to me
6. I need a non-destructive outlet for my latent furor.
7. But that involves dealing with my anger and all that anger scares me and makes me feel like if I open the door to it even a tiny bit, I will go all Mister Hyde
8. So I guess I will just keep suppressing it forever

That gets the basic idea across.

And it’s not like I can’t think of healthy outlets. Sex could be one of them, if body and mind cooperated. Getting into political discussions online could also provide some way to vent my bile. Or I could buy an old mattress and beat the stuffing out of it.

But those are just more pearls on my ever so long string of things I could do and probably should do but don’t, and I have to live with that.

What I can’t afford to do is drive myself crazy by trying to brute force my way through the problem because that only creates enormous tension within me as my mind attempts to force a jammed mechanism.

Much better to go the opposite direction and try to relax the whole system so that the jam just falls right out on its own.

If you catch my drift. And by drift I mean metaphor.

This is a lesson I have been trying to learn for a long time now. A deep part of me wants to be active and activated and be able to, at long last, harness my unprocessed id energies and get them working in my own best interests.

As opposed to having them all jammed up inside me and causing me pain.

I just have to find a solution that is right for me.

All these “shoulda/woulda” scenarios are just ideas that did not fit and therefore were not executed by me.

If I want to do more things than I need to find way more things that I not only could do and should do but WOULD do.

And that requires knowing myself a lot better.

More after the break.

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Late addition : Here’s blood in your eye!

So I happened to glance in the mirror as I washed my hands earlier today and boggled because there was something in my left eye.

Literally. As in, inside the eyeball.

Turned out to be a triangle shaped patch of BLOOD, with the point of the triangle pointing at the center of my pupil.

This alarmed me.

So being me, I then sat down to play video games while I thought the whole thing over. Basically, I needed time to talk myself into doing what I had to do.

Which was go to the ER. Blood in your eyeball is not the sort of thing one ignores, even if one is as lazy and reluctant to do that as I am.

Because the ER sucks.

And boy did it suck tonight. I was there for FIVE AND A HALF FREAKING HOURS before a doctor finally saw me, gave me like a ten second exam, and told me it was no big deal so I should just go home.

YOU COULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT HOURS AGO.

I had a couple of books with me, so it wasn’t a total drag. And I am sort of quantum proud (both proud and not proud in superposition) of the fact that at around the three hour mark I marched up to the triage window and told them how pissed off I was.

After which the nurse I bitched at came out and talked to me. It was… civil. He explained to me that they only had one “eye room” and so I had to wait for it.

I call shenanigans. What, one person was monopolizing the one “eye room” for all of those hours? Plus I had been in that “eye room” before (when virtually the same thing happened) and apart from one piece of equipment (which is ON WHEELS), there is nothing particularly specialized to eye work in there.

Doctor Cheng could have seen me in the waiting room and saved us all a lot of time.

Oh well, it’s over now. Next time I will check out the new Urgent Care over on Shellbridge. According to an old fella I talked to in the waiting room, when he went there there was nobody in the waiting room and he was seen right away.

Well that explains why the one on 3 Road is still absolutely slammed and there’s no point in going there after 10 am because they’re already booked up for the day.

Clearly people don’t know about the new one at all yet.

Really wish I had done that instead.

Oh well, next time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Patient readers know what this is all about.

I got another needle in the eye today.

And that includes the hair on my head, not just the hair on my face. I should give myself my usual crudely effective (ish) self haircut so I can optimize head loss for the summer.

Invention idea : heat sinks for your head.

Look, I didn’t say it was a good idea.

I wish I could just radiate my excess heat back into my environment in the occasional soft burst of light.

That’d be a conversation starter.

Been pondering wackiness lately. You know, zaniness. The urge to be weird and surprising and funny and mentally stimulating in an energetic and surprising way.

It can be a form of redirected anger.

At least in me it can. There’s been a number of times in my life where instead of getting mad, I got weird. Started bouncing off the walls, metaphorically speaking, being all perky and funny but in a slightly scary way.

Scary to me, anyhow.

This suggests being weird can be a form of aggression. Emphasis on “can”. It usually isn’t, it’s usually just an oddball person being themselves, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t recognize that sometimes being weird and wild and kooky can be a way of low key messing with people’s minds while also advertising your weirdness to other weirdos who might want to join in.

I adore anyone I can be completely wacky with.

It’s one of the main reasons I love my buddy Maelkoth. We can be completely out of our minds with each other and deliberately try to throw the craziest, most messed up verbal curveballs at one another and love every moment of it.

Reminds me of hanging out with my brother Dave. I miss him.

What got me onto this wackiness kick was the feeling that I should be trying to invest my videos with that wild and wooly energy I brought to Drive Uno.

Admittedly, for Uno, I had someone animating my scripts, so I could be as crazy and random and Python-esque as I wanted to be with no consequences to me.

These days, until I finally bite the bullet and subscribe to one of these AI video generating sites, I will have to execute whatever I think of.

Which seriously limits my ambition level, to be honest.

I checked out Invideo yesterday. They claim they can straight from my script to finished video. And not just in the lame “explainer video” way.

Of course, they also want $35 USD per month, and that’s for the “so shitty it’s almost insulting” level plan.

They know what they have, dammit.

And there’s the fact that I also want to finally solve my power supply issues. And that’s not going to be cheap. Probably at least 80 bucks.

So I feel like it’s a real “choose your destiny” fork in the road kind of thing. I could choose video games, and buy the power supply, or I could spend that money on Invideo or LTX or Descript or something else that can help my actual creative output.

Clearly the latter is the smarter choice. Not being able to play the latest games is a bitch but this computer of mine can still play lots of things, so it’s not like I will go gameless.

Even though going gameless would, quite frankly, probably do me a lot of good in the long run. It would force me to find other things to do with all that energy.

But I don’t think I am ready for that yet.

I’m proud that I have added making a video every day to my routine and found more and better use for my energies that way.

Already, my videos are getting me more visibility than this silly ol’ blog of mine ever will.

But who knows, maybe I will get royally sick of video games some day and truly go on a hunt for more interesting things to do with my time.

Until then, baby steps.

More after the break.

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The game I might get

It’s this game with a very irritating name.

It’s called Atlyss and about a year ago it was absolutely red hot everywhere. Especially with furries, naturally, as it’s a heavily anthro animal oriented game, but surprisingly also with the wider gaming audience.

There were a lot of pro reviews along the lines of, “I didn’t expect to like this game at all but it’s actually, surprisingly, super fun. Also, I think I might be a furry now. ”

And it has a “overwhelmingly positive” score on Steam, which is the second highest rating, right after “universal acclaim”.

Shockingly, it has no Metascore on Metacritic. What D. Fuck? If it has enough reviews to have an “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam then surely there’s enough for there to be a Metascore for the damned thing.

Oh well, whatever.

I just wanted a more quantified measurement. Numbers soothe me.

Anyhow, all signs point to Atlyss being an excellent game. And yet, when I look at this trailer for it, all I can think of is “meh. “

‘Those are some pretty “old school” graphics, and that is not a selling point for me because I was around when those kinds of graphics were the new hotness and that, for me, means they will never look “retro”, just “old and busted”.

I hate to think I have become a total graphics snob. But when things look old and janky like that, I find it depressing.

Now it could easily be that if I get the thing and start playing it, I will love the Dickens out of it and the graphics won’t matter.

I’ve played graphically primitive games and enjoyed them before, after all.

But for now, I feel conflicted. All available data says it’s a great game and yet my impression of it from the trailers is very poor.

So I dunno.

But I need to find a new game because Elex mysteriously stopped working for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, for the pulse pounding excitement of me talking to my webcam.

So yeah. I have one fucked up leg.

There are no other symptoms that I can detect. That area doesn’t feel hot, there’s no discharge or lesions or ulcers, i don’t feel faint or out of breath, and so on.

And that’s a good sign but by no means a guarantee that there is not something further wrong with that area.

Knowing me, it’s entirely possible that a doctor or nurse will ask me about a symptom and I will be like, “Yes, in fact, I think I’ve been experiencing that for some time, now that you mention it. ”

My bizarre brain just filed it under “noise” and filtered it out till now.

I’m convinced that said filtering is a big part of intelligence and/or genius. The sorts of abstract and symbolic reasoning tasks favored by the modern Western definition of “intelligence” require you to tune out both the sensory world and your own emotions in order to listen to the inner voice of that section of your subconscious mind that handles that kind of thing.

Hence the correlation between intelligence and the thickness of that region of the brain responsible for suppressing emotion so that we can think clearly.

Speaking of thinking clearly…

Something I have been pondering lately is my own prioritization of mental clarity. Over the years I have invested considerable time, energy, and emotional capital trying to hold myself apart from what is going on so as to not be overwhelmed by emotions and stimulation, all so I can keep my precious “clarity”.

Hence the fear of overstimulation. If too much is going on I can’t think clearly and I might have to actually make a decision based on emotion.

And surely that could only ever end badly.

Or so my overly cerebral outlook seems to think.

But now I am heavily rethinking that. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be in the scrum of emotions and passions and impractical concerns with everyone else. Maybe maintaining an icy cold detachment from everything is actually extremely bad for the soul because it’s cutting me off from all that is warm and wholesome and good in the world, and all to be sure to see the “truth”.

Sure, I’m a broken down emotional wreck of a human who has never gotten within a country mile of adulthood and who can’t get his life moving because he’s too scared of everything to do anything, but hey, it’s all worth it to know I have the right answer!

Yeah. Maybe the absolute truth ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Maybe at times it’s positively antithetical to human happiness. Maybe my relentless, shark-like hunger for The Truth is a misguided attempt to force a chaotic world to make sense to me in a way I can accept.

Namely, a super cerebral way.

Maybe what I really need is to hunt down that truth shark and get it under control so I can live a more warmly human life and feel like I am a part of everything good and alive instead of feeling cold and dead all the time.

Of course I’m cold. I’ve been keeping myself in an arctic freeze just to keep the lens of my mind crystal clear.

For all the good that’s done me.

I think I’d rather know less of the truth and be more of a person instead of being the bizarre and otherworldly creature I am today.

So what if things become somewhat muddled?

On the whole, I’d rather be happy.

On the whole, I’d rather be alive.

More after the break.

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I don’t wanna be awake

Wah, wah, wah.

Because of the unusual addition of a doctor’s appointment to the day’s routine, I am more tired than usual.

Honestly, my whole routine has been thrown off, but whatever. I’m smart, I’m hip, I’m adaptable. I will survive.

I just need to catch the fuck up on sleep, that’s all.

I have another medical appointment tomorrow. In addition to the Wound Care I ususally have on Tuesdays, I have another appointment with my ophthalmologist, Doctor McKay.

Probably gonna get another needle in the eye. Joy. Oh well, beats blindness.

Depending on how I feel after, Julian might drop me off at the LifeLabs right around the corner from us so I can get that bloodwork done.

We will see. I might be in a grumpy mood after getting a needle to the eye and not really feel like dealing with that whole deal.

We’ll definitely be going to the LifeLabs around the corner and not the one over on 3 Road, though. The 3 Road one is cold and impersonal and always super crowded.

The one next to our pharmacy on the corner of Cook and Buswell, on the other hand, has a comfortably old and warm vibe.

And I am all about the vibes.

The only problem with the one around the corner is that it has pay parking. But that’s easily solved by Julian dropping me off then coming back to pick me up once they have taken my blood.

Watch out for those phlebotomists, they’re out for blood!

That would be a great name for a blood drive at Pride. Or some kind of mixer event for gay vampires and people who want to “donate”.

What? You just know that there’s fags out there who dream of a tall dark mysterious stranger who wants to suck their… blood.

It really is just a metaphor for sex, isn’t it?

If I don’t get the lab work done tomorrow I will get it done the next day, Wednesday. I am determined to get it done ASAP so I don’t forget all about it.

When you are chronically absentminded, you have to find ways to compensate if you hope to lead any sort of a life.

So until I have a personal assistant to remind me of stuff like that, I will have to strike while the iron is hot.

You can strike when it’s cold but all you’ll get is a loud clanging sound.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Holy crap, am I tired.

Here’s what I made today :

I wish I had been able to do the whole lyrics on screen thing I usually do in order to give the video some kind of visual interest, but like I said, I ran out of gas.

To the point where taking a shower when I am done here seems like a big chore.

I put considerable time and energy into today’s doggerel and so it was all I could manage to make some sort of video for the song.

Perhaps tomorrow’s video project will be to make a better video for it. Something more befitting its potential as an anti-Trump viral hit.

Hey, it could happen.

There’s a neurotic little voice in my head that’s worried that without the lyrics on screen people might miss out on some of my hilarious lyrics.

Another reason to make a better vid for it when I have the energy.

I knew I was in trouble when I generated the song then glanced at the clock and it was 2:30 pm and I hadn’t even started the video yet.

Like I said, I think I am going to have to start making these things earlier in the day. Right now, doing a video at 2 pm when I will be blogging at 4:05 pm is starting to seem like I am not giving myself enough time.

Maybe I could do a rough version in the morning, at say 10 am, then polish things up as best as I can at 2 pm.

That sounds doable.

And it would give me more to do with my time than just wasting time with video games.

Maybe I really am growing up, because it increasingly feels like I play video games just to pass the time before I get to make stuff.

And that’s silly, right? Why not make stuff whenever I feel like it? It’s not like I am waiting for someone else to be ready or anything.

It all comes back to routine. My routine is the only structure in my life and I am increasingly aware of how desperately dependent on it I am.

I’ve never thought of myself as the kind of person who needs to do the same things and the same time and the same way every day, but I am, kinda.

Not to a Sheldon from Big Bang Theory extent but if something kept me from doing things on my usual schedule, I would find it very upsetting.

Here is my day so far :

8 am – Breakfast and hanging out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries.
2 pm – Make a video
4:05 pm – Blogging part 1, plus eating lunch
8 pm – Blogging Part 2, plus eating supper
Midnight : hanging out with Julian watching Colbert on the PVR and having my snack

As you can see, it’s a frenetic, madcap existence that’s bound to put me in an early grave from living such a dissolute life.

Seriously though, there’s room there for more productive things to do. I mean, the whole stretch of time between midnight and noon is wide open. I could fit something or other in there, maybe to coincide with breakfast.

Or maybe I should keep that as a relaxed stress-free time to hang with all my fuzzy friends and not turn it into something that has to be “productive”.

I dunno. I’m new at this whole… doing things… thing.

I really do want to improve the quality of my videos. They still seems sloppy and halfassed to me now and I want to get to 3/4 assed at least.

It’s something I’ll have to think about.

More after the break.

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Subscribe to Daddy Magazine!

And get your first three Daddy issues absolutely free!

I used to think I couldn’t have Daddy issues because I had no relationship with my father any more.

Which is stupid right on the face of it.

The fact that at one point I froze my father out of my mind did nothing to change the underlying truth that every boy needs a father and for the most part I didn’t get one.

Oh, he was there, more’s the pity. We all lived in the shadow of his rage. He was a short-tempered, impatient, verbally abusive asshole who hilariously wondered why he didn’t have a closer relationship with his kids.

Because you weren’t safe to be around, ever, Larry.

Do the freaking math.

And because he wasn’t safe to be around, he didn’t really fill the job of father for me on an emotional level. I couldn’t go to him with problems. I couldn’t ask his advice. He never taught me or encouraged me to take (smart) risks. I certainly couldn’t share my deepest darkest secrets with him.

For most of my childhood I avoided him as much as I could. It was like living with some kind of fairy tale ogre. A particularly petulant one.

And now, yup, I am definitely attracted to older men, which is a bit rich coming from a 52 year old. I long for someone strong and competent and confident and calm who can take my hand and soothe my anxiety and gently lead me forward as he helps me sort through all my thoughts and feelings and guides me past the road blocks in my mind.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing I didn’t get from Larry.

And maybe that’s why I am so high strung and anxious and weak. I did not get vital infusions of positive male energy in my formative years and so I ended up being an overwrought hand-wringing “mama’s boy” type.

On the other hand, I could be really good for that “daddy figure” I described. I could be the soft, feminine, understanding, empathic feminine energy to go with his masculine energy and give him the comfort and gentleness he can’t give himself.

I could be his “mommy figure”.

In fact, I think I’d enjoy that a lot.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, I’m starting to get used to never truly being happy with what I make.

Did another song. Here it is.

Like, I know there’s things I wanted to put into that song that never made it in. And I know there’s aspects of that metaphor that could be expanded on to better flesh out my feelings on the matter. And so forth and so on.

But I learn by doing, not by getting it perfect the first time. I can only tell myself that the next song will be better and so on ad infinitum until the day I die.

Would that be “ad mortem”?

Not that I think today’s song is terrible. Far from it. But as the creator, I can feel how much better it could be and it occupies my mind.

Eventually this “little dissatisfaction” will burrow itself deep into my subconscious and inform the inner workings of my petulant but brilliant muse and that will, in time, lead to making better songs.

It’s kind of amazing, really.

Today’s been okay so far. I enjoyed writing the lyrics to that sad lil song up there. I think I am slowly getting to the point where I can stick with things and fuss and fidget over them as I try to make them better.

You know, the way sane people make art.

I’m still pretty impatient. I want to blaze across the sky, not tinker and labor away in some subterranean atelier.

But I’m learning. And I am growing impatient with feeling embarrassed by what I make and its slipshod and sloppy half-assed nature.

I am tired of “getting away” with turning in first drafts. I know that I could do so much better and that I should stop resting on my enormous laurels and coasting on my ability to impress people and start turning out some seriously professional work.

I mean, most of the time I don’t even remember to stick my “like and subscribe” thing at the end of my videos. That’s got to end.

I should even start putting a link to my Patreon in the descriptions of my videos. And come up with some sort of reward tier thing.

Gah, it all seems so needy and pathetic. Self promotion is always hard to do but it’s especially hard when you are from a generation that hates promotion in general.

Look, like my shit or don’t. Whatever.

But I want money and that means getting the fuck over myself and doing the things other, way more successful YouTubers do to drum up support.

I could make merch, I suppose. Very snarky merch. T-shirts and coffee mugs and decorative wigwams with sarcastic, cynical slogans.

Or maybe a very obviously fictional T-shirt for my “band” (which doesn’t even have a name yet) with tour dates at like, the gates of Hell and Magical Pony Land and so on.

No idea what I’d call myself, and it’s not like I’d tour. I’m not even a real recording artist, I’m just some AI aware poet making songs with Riffusion for fun.

Still, it would be awesome if some actual band wanted to play one of my songs. Riffusion could be seen as the ultimate way for songwriters to demo their songs when they can’t sing or play an instrument.

I’ve Googled whether there’s a tool out there that will generation backing tracks based on existing vocals and the answer, astonishingly enough, seems to be “no”.

It’s so counterintuitive! AI can generate entire songs based on my lyrics but it can’t do the seemingly much simpler task of making music to go with my singing.

Oh well, I am sure someone is working on it. It could easily be something every aspiring singer is going to want, especially if it comes with vocal cleanup and autotune.

I mean, what the hell, the professionals use them!

More after the break.

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Life at the bottom

My mood is fairly “down” right now.

But like I told Joe recently, being “down” doesn’t necessarily mean feeling “bad”.

There are few assumptions engendered by modern society quite as harmful as the idea that we should be happy all the time and if we’re not happy, something is wrong.

Either with us, or with the world, or both.

And this assumption causes us to fight the natural downshift in our mood cycle and it is this futile fight that does us the most damage.

Smart, sane people just let their mood go up and down. They know, intuitively, from their life experience, that moods go up and down. Sometimes we’re “up”, and sometimes we’re “down”, just like sometimes we’re energetic and sometimes we’re tired.

In general, we in the West need to make peace with the cyclical.

The world turns. The sun rises and falls. Night become day, day becomes night. The seasons change as the Earth goes ’round the Sun. The Sun goes ’round the galaxy, and the galaxy dances with all the other galaxies in an endless dos-y-dos.

Even our very lives rise and fall and wax and wane, just like the Moon.

We live in circles but we think in arrows.

Especially me. I’m a future oriented pragmatist and that inherently means that I want to move from absolute position A to absolute position B via “progress”.

This is deeply fundamental to how I think. There has to be at least the possibility of improvement. I can’t imagine living in a world where everything returns to first position and the same things happen all over again.

But I recognize the cyclical nature of things. No matter how hard we try to travel in a straight and logical line, the best we can hope to do is go up the spiral staircase.

And you know what? That’s good enough for me. Straight lines are overrated. As long as we’re trending upwards, I can learn to accept the highs and lows.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey look, a topic! Let’s see if I get back to it after today’s vid.

Warning : I sang again.

And yup. I definitely sing better without the karaoke music distracting me.

In theory, I could now add the music from the karaoke version I found online and try to get it to sync with my acapella version and make a more complete version that way.

But meh. I kind of like my stripped down version.

Plus I only have so much energy I can put into these things.

Makes me really, really wish I had a partner or assistant in all of this so that it wasn’t all dependent on my own personal resources.

I need a team, dammit. Or some really advanced AI. But preferably the AI because I am sick of my mental illness forcing me to do everything all by myself all the time.

I can work with others! No, really!

I just hope that having a team wouldn’t make me go mad with power.

Speaking of which….

Yes, I’m gonna take another crack at my feeling of being so much more powerful than the other humans with which I share this globe.

I know I’ve felt this way since I was a child. Like I was towering over others intellectually, in not just a quantitative but also a qualitative way, and that I had to step very carefully so I did non end up crushing the Lilliputians that surrounded me.

The sense of responsibility, therefore, is overpowering. Crushing, even. It’s left me scared to make a move a lot of the time.

Or that I at least need one of those “truck backing up” sirens.

The obvious answer to this crushing sense of responsibility for the power I wield would be to decide that I don’t give a shit about the Lilliputians any more, they can look after themselves, and I am going to walk the planet like the gargantuan genius I am and screw the consequences to other people.

And I still hold on to that as an option. At the very least, I should consider just how much of my sensation of enormity is justified as oppose to, say, insane.

I can’t really see a way to escape the truth of my own power. It could very well be that if I go out into the world that someone will finally put me in my place and show me that I am not all that smart after all and quite frankly that would be a huge relief.

But my life’s pattern has been the opposite. Not even university offered me a challenge. I thought rings around my professors just like I did with my teachers. Nobody I met there was remotely in the same weight class as my big bad brain.

I can’t be the smartest person in the world, can I? It’s so unlikely.

Speaking of university, I took a stab at figuring out a distance learning solution for myself yesterday only to come up upon a rather huge problem :

If it’s distance learning, I could theoretically go to literally any university in the world.

So how the hell do I pick one??

I know I want to study psychology, with the aim of become a therapist. Although there’s a lazy side of me that just wants to be a pampered academic somewhere.

Why yes, I’d love to work for your think tank. Tell me what you want us to recommend.

Oh well, at least I have moved my playing piece one square closer to the finish line by looking into the matter.

I just want to get paid to be smart, dammit.

Surely a mind like mine has some sort of economic value.

I wanna get paid.

More after the break.

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Quick product review

More of a warning, really.

President’s Choice Mini Poppadoms Creamy Garlic Flavour are delicious but they are not, I repeat, NOT SUBTLE.

More like getting kicked in the mouth by a horse made of flavour.

I should have known. After all, this is a product aimed at people from India. Of course it’s going to be rather intense.

Their taste buds are not calibrated like ours.

Have you ever tried their “sweets”? Holy diabetes, Batman.

Like I said, they’re delicious, so I will finish them.

But like…. very slowly.

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About my education

Off the top of my head, I have no idea how I would decide what university to get my remote learning psych degree from.

I guess I could look for a list of the top schools for psych and then apply to the number one school and work my way down the list.

I’m not afraid of rejection. I can live with it. I’m um, not to everyone’s tastes.

But those who like me like me a LOT.

Of course, it would have to be a school that offers remote learning. Looking back in time, I really should have tried this during Covid, when ALL learning was remote.

Attending classes via Zoom is okay with me. I wonder if Zoom has the equivalent of raising your hand when you want to ask a question?

Then again, presumably raising your hand would still work too.

I’m always so um, “eager to contribute”.

Watching prerecorded lectures is fine by me too. Better than fine because it lets me go back and see bits I’m interested in again and really make sure that the knowledge sinks into my capacious noggin.

Obviously I am not worried about grades. I test well.

I suppose it’s possible that I would find some challenge in the work, at least once I got into junior and senior years.

But it’s also possible I would breeze through effortlessly like I always do. Maybe if I went on to get my Master’s, I would find challenge there.

I’d want my Master’s if I planned to be a therapist.

Still not sure on that. I’d make a good one but I might be too old and tired to get into something fairly intensive like that.

Perhaps the life of pampered academia is my true calling after all.

It certainly has a nice ring to it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More stuff from my past, but it’s just cat stories.

I miss all those kitties. They’re long gone, obviously, I grew up in the 70s and 80s and cats don’t live that long.

But I still remember them all, their lovely fur patterns and little personalities and how much I loved petting a purring cat in my lap while I watched TV.

I had some very lovely Zen moments like that where I felt very cozy and content and like all was well when I had a happy lil cat in my lap.

I have way, way more cat stories to share, of course. The vid is barely an intro to them. Maybe the fact that the Internet loves cats will attract attention to today’s vid and that will encourage me to make more cat story videos.

Or maybe it’ll just be what I do when I can’t think of anything else. I dunno.

The cat thing was actually my plan B. I spent the first hour of my usual video making time trying to do a karaoke vid that I could live with.

No dice there. It’s weird, I actually sing better when there’s no musical accompaniment, just me acapella, than when I try to do a karaoke.

Part of that is performance pressure, no doubt, but I also think it’s because the music distracts me from my vocal performance.

When it’s just me, I’m not trying to read lyrics on a screen, I am not subconsciously straining to be heard over the music, I’m not being surprised by little things in the karaoke version of the song that I don’t remember from the original song.

It’s just me singing, and I can concentrate on my voice.

So maybe I should skip the karaoke part and just record acapella versions of the songs I like. Maybe put the lyrics on screen in a text format just to consult.

Heck, if I did that, I would even be able to edit the video properly. Right now, I don’t edit my karaoke vids (and it shows) because I don’t think I could get the music in the edits to line up properly and trust me, with my keen sense of timing, if it doesn’t line up perfectly I will know and it will loom large in my mind.

But if it’s just me singing solo, I could probably make that work. Do sane and normal things like using the best of multiple takes for each verse.

And maybe even figure out how to put the whole thing through autotune, or some other kind of filter that makes it sound like I can actually sing.

I’m not too proud to accept that kind of “help”.

I mean, I only sing because I like to sing anyhow. I shouldn’t be worrying about the quality at all.

My fault for making karaoke vids in the first place, I guess.

I can always let Riffusion do the singing for me, or something similar. I know there’s apps out there that let you write the lyrics right on the piano roll with the rest of the sample based music and it just sings it for you in whatever voice you like.

That kind of power could go to my head pretty fast!

I’m telling you, it’s a golden age for use creators who don’t have any manual artistic talents. I can’t play an instrument or sing, I can’t paint or draw, I’m too clumsy and crippled to dance, and so forth and so on.

But thanks to modern AI, I don’t have to be able to do those things. I can bypass my dyspraxia entirely and let the computer handle that part while I handle the design and creation and writing of things.

I swear I was born to do things top-down like that.

And thanks to AI, I don’t even need people skills to do it!

More after the break.

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Today’s bit of adorableness from BlueSky comes in the form of dogs sitting weird.

Or otherwise assuming unusual postures.

One of the many charming things about our canine companions is their complete and total lack of self-consciousness.

They have no idea when they look stupid.

It’s quite refreshing, really.

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I can hear clearly now

The hum is gone! Hallelujah.

See, many months ago, the device driver for the sound card on my motherboard spontaneously decided to uninstall itself.

For some reason, my system interpreted, “I lost connection with this device a few seconds ago” to mean “begone, foul contrivance, and never return!”

So I had to scramble for a new way to get sound on my computer.

Then I remembered there was an audio jack on the back of my monitor. And luckily, that worked. Going through the monitor meant my system could use THOSE drivers instead of the mysterious vanishing normal ones.

So yay, I had sound again. But boo because that jack on the monitor was apparently completely unshielded because my new audio came with a constant hum like you’d get from being too close to a power station.

You have, no doubt, heard it on my videos.

The human also made my speakers only able to do half the volume. This was particularly bothersome when I wanted to listen to a YouTube video while on the toilet or have music on while I showered.

Showering with my music on is another thing which makes me feel very Zen.

Well today the jack on the back of the monitor was acting up. So out of frustration, expecting nothing, I plugged my speakers back into the normal jack, and lo and behind suddenly it could find the drivers again.

So, phew. The hum is gone. My volume is back. It should be a lot easier to hear me in my videos now. Our long national nightmare is finally over.

I can’t help but wonder if I could have fixed the problem a long time ago if I had only thought to plug the speakers back into the proper place way back then.

But who does that kind of thing? Checks to see if something spontaneously fixed itself? It’s like when a doctor asks me if I have tried walking lately.

Why no, Doc. The way my legs feel after just walkering back forth from the kitchen tells me all I need to know.

Some people. I tell ya.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I never went. What’s it like?

Here is today’s vid.

It’s a great story (in my mind) because it so deftly illustrates both what a strange child I was and what a little smartass I’ve always been.

But seriously, I can’t imagine having reacted any other way. For me this “test” was insultingly easy and back then I basically didn’t have a filter – I was so damned blunt – so the idea that I should conceal my reaction was many a parsec away.

I might have learned to read at an absurdly early age (3) and I talked like a tiny professor but tact would not make an appearance for some time.

Presumably, the test was not so simple for the kids around me. I don’t know that for sure – I find it hard to imagine what being a normal child that age is like – but presumably these grownups had some idea of what they’re doing and were, say, child psychology professionals and they had just never encountered a kid like me before.

Trust me – neither had anybody else.

Well, okay, I don’t know that for sure. Sheer probability suggests that I can’t possibly be a completely unique human being. There must be someone out there like me.

One has to assume there’s a whole bunch of us, actually.

It’s kind of like the question of alien life. No matter how improbable you think the rise of life on Earth was, compared to the vastness of the universe it’s a virtual certainty that it has to have happened more than once.

But I suppose that means my own improbable existence compared to the nearly 8 billion human beings on this planet has its own Fermi paradox :

Where are they?

Where are the other people like me?

Do I really, truly have a tribe somewhere or am I a bespoke weirdo and completely unique and doomed to be alone in my strangeness forever?

And do I really want to know?

Of course, it’s not quite THAT stark, although it feels that way sometimes. I have my wonderful nerdy friends, both RL (love you so much, Felicity, Julian, and Joe) and VR (way too many fuzzies to list) and we and they are enough alike to relate to each other on at least some levels.

And maybe that’s really as close as anyone gets to another person.

But I don’t think so.

I know much greater closeness is possible. The media is full of close loving relationships far more intimate and interdependent than anything I have known.

And I worry about that. I’ve been alone on this cold little island of mine, touching no one and no one touching me, for almost my entire life.

I’ve never been any closer than friends with anyone, and even my friendships, while precious beyond measure to me, are not the close kind some appear to have.

We enjoy one another’s company and we do things together and we talk and laugh and have a lot of fun, but that’s it.

And I am very worried that it’s no longer possible for anyone to get closer than that to me at all. That if you don’t use your capacity for real connection, it dies off forever and that my lonely little island is all I will ever know.

I could fake closeness, probably. And maybe that would be enough.

Maybe fake love is better than being lonely.

Maybe fake closeness is the best I can hope for. Maybe for me, life can only ever be a performance, a show, because my real heart closed for business a long long time ago and all I can do now is simulate one and then maybe, just maybe, you and I can pretend it’s real for a while and share some imaginary warmth.

There’s probably a song in that somewhere. Hmm.

More after the break.

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Brace your heart for warming!

Because this is just about as wonderfully life-affirming as it gets!

I might have posted that to my blog once before. If so, I’m sorry.

But I mean, come on! It’s the story of a man meeting the lioness he raised as a cub on the savannah seven years after they parted ways and now she’s a fully grown lion and she greets him with such evident joy you’d think she was Dino greeting Fred!

How can you not love that?

I should probably put a sentence break in that paragraph but ehh.,

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My meaty marinara

Crunched the numbers and found that I had enough slack in my budget to order in, so I am now quite happily stuffed with my beloved Meaty Marinara pasta from Pizza Slut.

I will finally exit this second of two 5 week months a week from now, and my financial ship is just fine. I’m not exactly rolling in dough (any more) but I have money for groceries, Denny’s, and McD’s, and that’s all I need.

So being financially OK and full of meat, I feel pretty good.

I’m happy with how today’s vid turned out. I still long to do things which have a higher production value and/or a more professional look, but for now my eccentric little talking head videos will have to do.

By the time I am done editing a video like today’s I am usually quite tired. So that suggests that at least if it would involve more effort than that, it is not on the table.

Not for now, anyhow.

But who knows, maybe I will stumble upon a formula for high impact low effort content, maybe something with comedy, and be able to up my game that way.

I mean, I have all this comedic genius lying around. Might as well use it for something. I am sure that modern AI tools could help me make another webcomic.

Surely artificial intelligence can handle generating text balloons by now, right?

Or I could do audio skits via one of those AI text to speech sites. Have Mark Rubio argue politics with LBJ to the tune of MacArthur Park or something.

Who knows. It all depends on how many spoons the day gives me.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I never consciously decided to keep going with this whole “more nuanced inner narrative” thing today but clearly some part of me was thinking about it.

Here it is, the first section of my life story.

Patient readers know that… well, see the trigger warning.

Clearly I am going to have to make more videos.

I mean, I haven’t even gotten to where I start school yet.

But making vids about my life does me a lot of good. It feels good to transmit my life experiences like an old guy should, even if it’s via indirect means.

And relatedly, it feels good to sort of go through my memories and re-index them. Our memories are not quite the file folders we imagine them to be. Instead, when you remember something, it discharges the memory and if something interrupted the process right then, you’d lose the memory forever.

Your mind has to re-encode the memory when you are done.

And as the file system of our memory grows as we age, the memories start to degrade over time and your brain needs you to unpack and repack the memories.

And that’s why it feels good to remember the past. Nostalgia explained!

And the older you get, the better it feels to refresh old memories like that. And above a certain age your mind is forced to compress your existing memories to make room for new ones, and it’s not a lossless process, so you forget things after a while.

It starts with the least important (going by how strong the emotional impression is) memories and works its way up.

Only the strongest memories shall survive!

Today was…. odd. Originally I was suppose to go to some sort of group exercise program for seniors at a place with the charmingly pretentious name the Kismet Center (seriously?) at 1 pm, but then first Julian then my wound care nurse Marie noticed that my right foreleg was quite swollen, to the point where it’s like 40 percent bigger than normal, and that plus the blister Marie found just above my wound suggested to me that today was not a good day to exercise.

And that was disappointing but also kind of a relief.

Because to be honest, the social anxiety was starting to creep up on me. It would have meant going to a brand new place and dealing with people I didn’t know, quite probably a large group of them, and so that anxiety gauge just kept going up.

So I already knew I was going to need a Xanax just to get there.

And it just struck me how easy it is to forget you are mentally ill when nothing in your life is triggering the illness.

Usually, when I leave the apartment, it’s to go to Wound Care at the CHAC^[1] or Denny’s, and those are both super familiar locations and situations.

Going to see the physiotherapist was slightly challenging but not Xanax worthy at all. It helped that the building it’s in is quite small and used to be an elementary school so it has a comforting childhood vibe to it.

But this thing today would have involved me possibly meeting an entire class of elderly people as well as the instructor, all in a place I’d never been before, ergo Xanax.

If I am to make it out into the world in some fashion, clearly I am going to have to learn to deal with people.

I mean, have you taken a look out the window lately? They’re EVERYWHERE!

And I think I could do that just fine if I had a role. Even if that role is, say, cashier, or accounting clerk, or whatever.

When you have a role, you know what it is you’re supposed to be doing and what people will asking of you and expecting from you and so the whole awkward no man’s land of social interaction is bypassed.

So if I have a role, whether it’s lead singer or assistant fry cook, I’m good to go.

More after the break.

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Unhappy all the time

That’s just not a thing.

Nobody is unrelentingly miserable all the time. Even when I was at my most depressed, when I was lying on the couch half-dead and in constant pain and being driven nuts by rapidly metastasizing hypochondria, there were better moments.

Times when I didn’t feel so bad, and I could actually watch the TV instead of just having it on, and when I felt relatively okay.

Nothing is all bad. Nothing is all good. The search for purity is toxic. Everything’s mixed.

And life is not a cartoon, with a simple and easy to follow plotline, clear and distinct themes, and readily identified heroes and villains.

There’s a lot of people in my childhood who could have done better by me. Arguably some of them should have done better by me.

But I’m not easy to approach and I can be hard to deal with and I can see how I could be downright exhausting to deal with as a kid.

So those people are not villainous. They failed me but I was not an easy test.

And in many ways I shut myself off from those who tried to help me. I was my own worst enemy in that way. There were people who tried to let me in but I was far too scared and withdrawn and socially clueless to take them up on it.

It was a terrible tragedy all around, really.

I’m not sure I can say I forgive all those teachers and others for not being able to help a weird little fat kid who’s unkempt and way too intelligent and like a big energetic dog is liable to accidentally hurt you when he’s just trying to be friendly.

It would have taken an expert to handle a kid like me.

As for my family, well, they ignored me and resented me but I was severely withdrawn (still am) and so I am not sure they could have reached me if they’d tried.

And maybe they did try but couldn’t get through so they gave up.

And I was too far gone to notice or understand.

So yeah. My childhood was not good but it wasn’t all bad either, and a lot of the players were not so much villains as people who failed to be heroes.

And I can accept that.

One day, I hope to be able to forgive them for it.

But I am not quite there yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, here’s something to make your heart glow.

Sorry to get political on you.

But today’s main project was this bit of video nostalgic by yours truly :

It’s all about my childhood, and is therefore rather depressing.

Also heartwarming, I’d like to think. But the depressing part is pretty god damned dark so thank you for enabling me to share that with the world and get some catharsis.

What strikes me about the whole thing now is how adult I sound. Almost like a real grownup. Almost like someone who has processed all the old pain.

Almost like someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.

And I do! Sorta. Kinda. Some of the time.

The rest of the time I just kind of wing it.

You’d be surprised at how well that can go.

Anyhow, as you might (or might not) imagine, that thing was a heck of a lot of work to edit. It was quite the project.

Another thing worth noting in passing : I removed so many ums and ahs and y’knows from the original raw video and yet there are still so many of them I missed!

I guess I was not fully focused today. I do think that over time I have been trending towards fewer verbal fillers like those but like most trends, it’s not a straight line.

Plus I was doing a lot of remembering. Awash in reverie, like I said. So my mind was not entirely on what I was saying.

I’m glad I got to “it wasn’t all bad” before the end. Most of the non-school memories in there are pretty nice, if not exactly thrilling.

And patient readers know that I have been trying to correct my terrible inner life narrative for some time now. I know that viewing my past like it was some kind of unrelenting hellscape is extremely bad for me and I know that, factually, while it wasn’t a great childhood, it wasn’t all bad, so I need to bring my unhealthy inner narrative more in line with what I know to be the literal truth.

But I guess there’s a certain narrative satisfaction to having your life story be easily reduced to a pithy caricature, even if that caricature is incredibly bleak.

The true depth and complexity of our lives doesn’t fit into our stories, and so we tend to strongly prefer the stories over messy, complicated reality.

The truth is that school wasn’t always horrible, not even elementary school. Sure I was a very lonely child but the bullying tapered off and there was times when class would be somewhat enjoyable or even fun.

And yeah I didn’t get a lot of attention at home. Which sucked. I often felt quite alienated from my own family.

But I had TV, books, and video games, and I got a lot of enjoyment from them.

So it wasn’t all bad. It had its good points and its bad points, just like everything else. It could have been a hell of a lot better but it could also have been a lot worse.

I can feel my attachment to the dark false narrative trying to keep it from changing, as though it’s clinging to it with inky tentacles.

Well it’s going to have to let go some time. The truth must win. The reality was more complicated than any cartoonishly simple narrative and no amount of longing for compact storytelling is going to change that.

And if I can just accept that there were good times too, then I might just be able to draw on those good memories when I feel down.

And that’s got to help.

More after the break.

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From our So Cute It Hurts file

We have this very adorably obedient lil pupper.

I don’t know what it’s real name is but to me they will always be Bright Eyes.

For obvious reasons.

I just wanna scoop that lil doggo up and give them a smooch on the ears!

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A brand new era

In other words, I finally got around to trying the new Thermos that Joe and Julian got me for my birthday almost a month ago.

It’s a pretty neato Thermos because not only does it feel good and weighty in my hand, and hold a surprising amount for its size, but it has an outer lid that doubles as a bowl and the cap has a built-in foldable spoon in a compartment on it!

That’s so cool. I love gadgets like that.

Patient readers know that I wanted a Thermos so I could transport wet things like soups and stews and chili from the kitchen to my lil den here in front of the computer.

Well the whole reason I hadn’t tried it out yet was that I kept forgetting to order anything like that when I got my groceries! D’oh.

But last Friday, at the last moment, I remembered.

Yay me and my eventual competence!

So tonight I heated up some No Name brand chicken noodle soup in the ol’ microwave, stuck it in the Thermos, and brought it to the computer in a saddlebag of my walker.

It has two.

And that operation was a success. But I can’t say I think much of No Name’s chicken noodle soup. I found the flavour to be pretty flat and thin and nowhere near as good as the Campbell’s Chicken Noodle I grew up eating.

I just looked it up and the No Name is $1.10 and the Campbell’s is $1.85, so I think I will be spending the extra 75 centers for flavour in the future.

I didn’t use the collapsible spoon. Try that another time, I guess.

All in all, the operation was a success. The Thermos, in all likeliness, played no part in the underwhelming flavour of the soup, and it was aces everywhere else.

I like my new toy.

I find the best toys result in food.

That’s why I have a slow cooker and a bread machine in storage!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. Wow, slides from my childhood and the epic story of my new Thermos.

I am really maxing out the banality today!