I’m afraid there will not be a video today, the 6th of June.

Principal photography is complete but I do not have the energy to start editing it.

So it will have to wait till tomorrow. Sorry!

In fact, fuck off entirely. Thanks.

Another sleepy day. A doozy of one, actually, seeing as I went to bed at 9 am and didn’t wake up till almost 3 pm.

That’s around six hours of sleep, and I am still pretty sleepy. I would definitely still be asleep if I hadn’t needed to eat and blog.

And it’s tempting to blame my sleeping pill, but this shit happens whether I am taking it or not. At least I am getting better quality sleep on the pill.

And like I usually say, I wish I could just relax and enjoy being sleepy and soft and mellow, but I can’t. I am too inherently restless (so to speak) and ornery and I want to stay awake and do stuff and have fun.

For example, I would much rather stay awake and make today’s video. Dunno what it will be about yet but I have some ideas. It will probably be a talker – just me talking, with some photos here and there to keep things from being too dry.

But who knows, maybe I will get super ambitious and make something snazzier.

I need to believe that all this sleep is getting me somewhere. That I am paying off sleep debt and therefore. at some point, I will have caught up on sleep and feel a whole lot better as a result.

Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?

Man, are the words not coming easy right now. It’s like pulling teeth. From a crocodile. To whom you owe money.

And I am only half way there.

I could,I suppose.stop early and catch up later, like I did yesterday, but that was an emergency. I am not that far gone yet. I will keep typing until I make my 500.

205 to go.

Dunno the state of my diabetes since I can’t get a reading via the glucometer. I have cut back on the carbs a fair bit but I don’t think it’s enough.

So right now, my policy is to take insulin when I get the demon hunger. That special kind of hunger that feels like starvation, complete with hunger pangs, but is actually a result of all my cells starving for energy.

Nope, don’t think I am going to make it. Gonna have to stop at 400 again. This can’t get to be a habit. I can’t afford the loss of self-esteem.

But I just can’t think of anything more to say.

More after the break.

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Here I am again, with 586 words to write in the early evening.

This is not what i intended to be doing now. I meant to be doing “primary photography” on my latest video right now, but the sunlight is making weird patterns on my face again and I already used that joke about the Borg.

I could use my bit about being photocopied, but I am not looking to make that kind of video tonight. I know what I will be talking about and it’s serious. Ish.

Mostly serious. Anyhow, I am not going to talk about that topic here because, as we all know, if I talk about it here, I won’t talk about it there.

The only way this works is if the finished product, or at least the finished first draft or raw versions, is the only way for these thoughts and feelings to escape my mind.

If there is an easier and more immediately satisfying escape route, like by writing about it or even just talking about it with someone, I will take it, and that produces nothing.

That’s why I have kind of always understood why the brilliant detective doesn’t explain his theories to people in the middle of the adventure.

I mean, of course, in the real world it’s to build suspense.

But fictionally, it’s because the detective knows that explaining things will slow down the hunt, but even worse, release the impetus to drive towards the solution.

Building up to the moment of arrest must be very satisfying.

So no, I won’t discuss it here. But being the overflowing chatterbox that I am, I feel comfortable in talking about not talking about it.

After all, the Beast must be fed.

The Beast, in this case, being my blog, These days, having a mere once a day schedule for publication seems like a luxury compared to the non stop schedule that today’s journalists face.

And I am a journalist. After all, this blog is my journal, so I must be a journalist.

When you ask people what is wrong with journalism today, they will inevitably mention the 24 hour news cycle, but I don’t think people really get what that means.

It means the Beast is always hungry. Whether it’s a website or vlog or even an old fashioned newspaper, there is no period of time in which the Beast is sated for the day and you can relax.

This is compounded by the fact that in the world of the internet, if you are writing for a popular website, there is a direct relationship between publishing something new and getting ad revenue for it.

In other words, every time a popular website publishes something, they make money. So does the person who wrote it.

And if there is something capitalism loves, it’s things that make money for you every time you do them.

Turns even highly talented and respectable writers into lever-pressing rats more interested in getting that next sweet, sweet reward than maintaining any kind of standards or integrity.

A saint would crumble under that level of temptation.

There is a limit, of course. If standards get too low, the audience will go elsewhere and the cash cow will die a fast and messy death.

But if you are wondering why your favorite website has gone way downhill lately (I am looking at you, Cracked.com), now you know.

It’s because every time they press that lever, money comes out.

So who cars whether you are pressing it well, so long as you are pressing it often.

And now ya know.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Remember what causes me to stop taking my sleepy pill right now.

Because I am all sleepy and groggy right now and it’s very annoying.

Then again, that happens sometimes when I am not taking my nightnight pill. so I really should put the blame on my Mirtazapine.

Makes it hard to think of things to write, though.

Maybe I will make a video today. Maybe not. Depends on how I feel when I wake up after i go black to sleep.

Wish I was asleep right now. This forcing my mind to focus is very taxing.

Soon. Soon I shall regain my slumber.

I dunno. Maybe I will just go back to sleep once I am done eating and taking my meds. Resume doing this segment when I am more awake.

Then again, the Diet Coke is kicking in, so maybe I will hang in there after all.

But what the fuck do I write about?

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Enjoying playing Assassin’s Creed : Unity lately. Great game. Good enough that it has turned me back into a one game at a time gamer after a few months of having a bunch of games on the go.

This means I haven’t played other things like Doom Eternal and F.E.A.R. in a while. Dunno if I will go back to them any time soon.

Great games, both of them, but I have a new bright shiny object now. And patient readers know that when I stop doing something, I always never start up again.

Still, such things can be overcome via a sufficient application of will. Might be an interesting experience. My stupid compulsions can’t rule ALL the time.

I hate those fucking things.

And yet, I also cling to them because they keep me from having to make decisions. Just do what the compulsions say. And they are the closest thing I have to motivation.

Motivation is bullshit anyway. All it means is “wanting to do something” and life is too short to wait for this nebulous mental force to arise.

Compulsion makes a poor substitute. It’s too erratic and uncomfortable and tends to drag you off unwillingly.;

Better to decide what you want to do then do it, whether you feel like it or not. That, as far as I can tell, is what being an adult is all about.

I think I will go back to bed now, 90 words or so early, as I am fading fast.

More after the break.

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On deciding to do it

OK, time to commit : I will make and publish a video tomorrow.

In fact, it is becoming clear to me that I can’t operate without some kind of schedule. The paroxysms of indecision I go through trying to decide whether to make a video make it impossible for me to produce if things are too open-ended.

So I am toying with the idea of putting out a new video on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Those are both days where I have nothing going on all day and all night, so they make great days to really get down into the guts of video making and all that details.

I am not quite ready to commit to that yet, but it seems like that I will.

But I want to make one thing abundantly clear, both to you wonderful people and especially myself : Two shows a week is a minimum, NOT a maximum!

If I want to make videos on other days, that’s fine too. Never shall I use the fact that it’s not the right day as an excuse to not make whatever video I feel like making.

This bar does not close.

In fact, what I am hoping to do is develop my techniques and discipline to the point where I can make a video about whatever is in my head whenever I feel like it.

My inner monologue is highly didactic. I am quite often explaining some idea of mine to an imaginary inner audience. If I handle it right, I might just be able to translate that directly into high quality video content.

Kind of like a Ted talk. A Fru talk, if you will.

I am so happy that video essays are popular now. In fact, people specifically want deep dives into complex subjects that go into great detail and that examine issues thoroughly and from all relevant angles.

I can totally do that. In fact, a lot of my videos from Way Back are exactly that.

Relatedly, I have noticed that a lot of the YouTubers I like mention scripts now and then.

As in, they write a script before they make an episode.

And I am like, “What’s a script?”. LOL. I honestly cannot imagine writing a script for an episode before making it. Not only do I clearly not need to do so, I know damned well that if I wrote the script I would lose all interest in making the episode, so doing so would be worse than pointless.

That’s just me, though. I don’t think any less of other YouTube people for using a script. I know that some people could not operate any other way. They have to have worked out all the details and made the script as good as they possibly can before they could even contemplate actually shooting it.

That’s not how my mind works, but I am one very weird dude and very little of what I do or how I do it makes a conventional kind of sense.

What can I say, I march to the beat of an entirely different porcupine. I have my own way of doing things that makes sense to me and works for me and that is all that matters in the long run.

Genius is, after all, often misunderstood in its own time.

I’m only half kidding. Ish.

I know that if I can get my juices really flowing, I will produce a staggering amount of content because I have been stockpiling ideas and insights for decades and they are all still there in my head, waiting to be expressed.

And I produce more all the time,too. It’s as natural as breathing to me. So it’s not like I am worried I will run out.

I might just build me a pipeline from my brain to the world.

If so, watch the fuck out, world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

There are times when the idea of life being utterly void of meaning and value can be quite comforting to me.

Because that nihilism annihilate my anxiety. When the pressure is building in my mind and my anxiety level starts rising and it feels like the teakettle in my head is about to start screaming its effing head off, and I am on the verge of totally freaking out, a somewhat crazed butch voice in my head yells ‘FUCK IT. None of this matter. Nothing matters. Fuck it. Fuck everything and everybody everywhere forever. FUUUUCK IT!”

Or something to that effect.

Kinda like this :

And then the anxiety goes away, Cold,heartless, merciless nihilism is the ultimate countering force to my anxiety because my anxiety is powered by my feelings of impotence and inadequacy being magnified by the echo chamber of depression until it feels like I am going to explode, but if nothing matters and everything is meaningless then there is nothing to worry or stress about, is there?

It’s the angry id shouting down the neurotic ego, and it can be a godsend.

Had therapy today, which is how I got on to this topic. Talked about my plan to make videos and having to choose what side of me should do the talking.

I have so many!

There’s Happy Silly Fru, and Secular Messiah Fru, and Angry Bitter Sarcastic Fru (aka Satirical Fru), and Sexy Fox Fru, and High Powered Intellectual Fru, and Brilliantly Strategic Fru,and Avuncular Funny Charismatic Fru, and Lazy Tiger Fru, and….

…and a whole lot more!

And of course, standard disclaimer, these are not separate personalities and then don’t conflict with one another and I am crazy but I ain’t that crazy.

They are the facets. I am the gem.

In fact, the problem is not that they fight or that they all take up space in my head,the problem is that in general,I can only show one facet to the world at a time and so now I have to pick which side to show in my videos.

But you know what? Nihilism to the rescue again : fuck it. Whatever side of me happens to want to talk when I sit down to make the video is the one that gets the microphone that day and gets to have its say.

And I know that is poor branding. You are supposed to have a distinct, recognizable, consistent voice that people can understand and choose to follow.

Well I ain’t there yet. So until I figure myself out as a YouTuber, I am going to just throw stuff out there and see what sticks.

So in a sense, YouTube will choose which voice dominates. It will be whatever one gets the likes and subscribes. Whichever one seems to be working. Whichever one gets me some god damned attention.

And if people can’t handle that I seem like different people on different days, fuck them.

I have waaaaay too much personality to be just one person.

I am,in fact,a million different people from one day to the next.

My name is Legion, for I am many.

And they all like to watch when I pee.

More after the break.

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The problem is…..

The problem with giving myself a “Whenever” schedule for making videos is that now I have to decide, on a day to day basis, whether to make a video or not.

This is a whole new level of option paralysis. One of my biggest problems is that I find it so hard to decide to do something. Once I stop dithering about it and actually decide to do it, I do it,no problem.

But the dithering can go on for days, weeks, months. That can’t happen with this video thing. I don’t want to be yet another thing I started with a burst of energy then gave up on when that initial burst of energy runs out.

I am going to have to make people with committing to things that require a constant ot repeated injection of energy.

That’s a direct challenge to my depressive regime, which no matter what will continue to insist that my energy is extremely limited and only the most severe austerity measures will allow me to survive.

That is, of course, total bullshit. My real problem way too much energy and it has nowhere to go so it turned into depression and anxiety and obesity.

Hey, you eat way more calories than you use, you get fat.

It’s the austerity regime’s harsh restrictions that are making me miserable. If I could only get it to unclench and let my energies flow freely and without inhibition, I could finally live my life and enjoy it too.

It’s like I am in dire need of a personal energy laxative. Or at least, a muscle relaxant to get the mind’s sphincter to stop clenching and start releasing.

Talk about having trouble letting go.

Hmmm, perhaps this is where marijuana comes in. The only way I can think of to force my mind to chill the fuck out is via chemical intervention, and weed is legal now and has a pretty good record on that front.

Like, tune me in to the universal harmonic so I can surf its sound waves, dude.

So maybe I should order myself up a bag of CBD gummies and see whether they do the trick or not.

Of course, I could also try meditation or yoga or both. At the same time.

Pretty sure if you’re good enough, you can still AUM in Downward Dog.

But of course, that kind of thing takes focus, drive, and energy, and if I had all those, I wouldn’t need meditation et al in the first place.

No, first I need to clear the blockage. And I could keep doing that by using blogging and therapy to erode the blockage slowly over time.

Or I could get stoned and try to clear that shit out the fast way.

Heck, I would even be willing to try low dose LSD. Just enough to make the walls in my mind more permeable and allow my deep consciousness to heal itself without a lot of interference from my fucked up conscious mind.

Whatever it takes to get me moving again.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Queue is a fun word to type.

Anyhow, what I am talking about is the result of procrastinating by default. Eventually, you have so many things you “should” do that your mental “in” tray has been crushed under three tons of tasks and tackling any of it can seem impossible, or worse, completely and utterly pointless.

Because what’s the point of doing one task when there will still be so many left?

I think that describes my current mental space. There are, of course, billions of things I could be doing, and millions I should be doing, but at this point I can’t even imagine having the strength to choose one, let alone actually do them.

Why? The main culprit is an inability to delete tasks from the queue. If I had the intestinal fortitude to simply say “That’s never going to happen and I am fine with that” and clear things off this inner list, I could hack it down to a manageable size.

Or just delete the whole thing. I guess that’s what my attempts to tell myself that there’s no such thing as “should” amount to.

But the real deep down dirty secret is that I don’t know how to deal with life without that infinite queue to hide behind. As long as I am crushed under the weight of possibilities, I don’t have to deal with life and I don’t have to figure out an actual path for myself.

And that keeps me warm and safe under all these possibilities.

Whenever I try to select one possible path and follow it, I feel all the other possibilities pulling back on the one selected and back it goes into the pile.

Like I have discussed before in this space, I can envision so many possibilities that it makes it hard to ever believe any choice I make would be the right one.

I mean, what are the odds? A million to one, right?

But that’s specious bullshit too. Because it’s not like I literally have a list of possibilities in my head. It’s more a sense of possibilities, and given my mental illness, such mental sensations are suspect as hell.

So maybe it’s all just my usual concatenation of bullshit excuses for not getting on with life. Maybe all my reasons for not doing things are nothing but lies I tell myself in order to keep my mind busy and to produce the feeling of progress without really changing anything at all.

If so, I have no idea what to do about it, and I am pretty sure that’s the truth.

I can feel the sick part of my mind trying to spin up so it can weave a new web of bullshit to keep me from dealing with life.

But I don’t want to do that this time.

I want to find out when I am out of excuses.

Maybe it will be my salvation. Maybe it will be my annihilation.

Maybe it will be both. The self is dead, long live the self.

But I am so god damned sick of this bullshit life of mine that I can’t wait to find out.

More after the break.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back on YouTube!

… I am back and bigger than life.

Unless you have a very small monitor.

Presto chango ta da!

I swear to God, I was not sitting too close to the camera this time. The original video has me at a safe, respectful, normal distance.

But somehow, when I uploaded it to YouTube, I got an involuntary close-up.

Anyhow, whatever. Point is, I made a video – a real video – for the first time in ages, and wow, does it feel good.

I’d forgotten how much fun making and editing video can be. And this is only the beginning. This was the video equivalent of clearing my throat. Many wild and wonderful things will be forthcoming.

I’m not sure how often, exactly. I know I don’t want to lock myself into a “one a day” timetable again. That led to a lowering of quality.

So as much as it goes against my deep seated need for predictability, I guess my schedule for the future is “Whenever”.

Damn, I hate that.

Of course, I had also forgotten what a pain in the ass working with video could be. In order to make the simply offering above, I had to go through three or four free webcam recording problems that flat out did not work to find one that does, then use that to record myself a bunch of times (took a while to get it right), and then discover that Video Studio doesn’t like the format the webcam thing uses, so then I had to download a video format converter, and then I accidentally deleted the main video and had to start all over, and only after all that could I edit the thing into shape and then upload it.

But the important thing is, I fucking won. I took on the forces of fuckery and bad juju and kicked their ass to actually make a frigging video.

And the great part is that a lot of the fuckery I had to go through today is the kind of thing you only have to do once, so future videos will be way easier to make.

And that’s good, because I hate – hate – having to fuck around with technical BS when all I want to do is create.

But that’s part of the price of being an artist.There is no such thing as a purely abstract art. There is always some technical BS to deal with, whether it’s making your programs work together or leaning how to mix paint.

It’s always something. I think one of the things I like most about writing is that it is very nearly completely abstract. The only technical skill is being able to type, and then with just these words of mine, I can paint pictures in people’s minds.

Assuming I can get them to read the frigging thing.

But now I am moving into video, and therefore I am taking on a greater technical burden in exchange for creating something that is both more readily accessible than a thousand words of text and allows for a much, much, much richer form of self-expression.

It’s an entirely different level of storytelling, and I look forward to fucking around with it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Why isn’t it enough?

Why do I have this deep restlessness that can’t accept this life of mine and make the best of it?

Why can’t I just relax and enjoy life instead of being tormented by this constant gnawing sense that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing?

Why is being me never enough?

Part of it is ambition throttled by indecision. I have a lot of pent up need to make my mark on the world, but without the ability to pick a path and stick to it, there is no way for that ambition to lead to action and hence release.

And part of it is the Machiavellian machinations of my malicious inner prosecutor. Part of me is always looking for ways to torment and punish me, and hounding me about all the things I could be doing but don’t is like, its favorite game.

Makes me wish I was one of those people who respond to being harrowed by their demons by throwing themselves into their work and achieving great success.

I mean, at least then I would get something out of this nonstop inner Blitzkreig.

And to be honest, it’s the only way I know how to live. Time and time again, I use this space to tell myself that there is nothing I am “supposed” to be doing and that just making it through the day is totally fine, and that this inner persecution is the very definition of counterproductive and that I would actually be more prouductive if I just relaxed and stopped attacking myself for a while.

And when I do that up as one of my nice little bold affirmations, I feel good for a while and I do my best to live that way but over time the old familiar terrible regime seeps back in to its old position and eventually I am right back to hating myself and playing video games incessantly to escape that self-hate.

And to escape the infinite hallway of infinite doors, and life in general.

Clearly, I need something to replace the inner prosecution. Otherwise the empty space it leaves will eventually be filled with the same old self-loathing and escapism.

But I don’t know what goes there. I just don’t. I can feel that this is a case of my depression blocking my ability to visualize a better solution but that doesn’t make the situation any easier.

Maybe I don’t need to know. Maybe I just need to imagine some benign substance – bubble soap, for instance – filling that cavity to keep it open until I figure out what the heck to put there.

So here it goes :

There is nothing I am supposed to be doing.

There is no “should” in my life.

The only thing I need to do is make it through the day with as much fun and as little pain as possible while doing my best to get better.

That’s all a sick person need worry about.

And even when I have not being doing so great at doing the things I need to do to get better, I am still okay,

I am a good person.

I love myself.

And some day, this will all be over.

More after the break.

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Bummer in the morning, perkier at night

That seems to be the pattern lately, at least.

The morning – who am I kidding? the AFTERNOON – portion of my blog happens when I am groggy and sleepy and feeling emotionally raw and vulnerable.

That makes it a very good time to grab a piece of that emotional shrapnel that riddles my soul and give it a good hard tug.

This same principle explains why weird, uncomfortable. invasive medical procedures are always scheduled for some ungodly time early in the morning.

They want to get it done when you are too sleepy to be difficult.

As for my shrapnel, perhaps it’s due to early childhood exposure to M*A*S*H, but I have a very clear image in my head of me digging into my own flesh with forceps and painstakingly removing bits of jagged metal then dropping them into a surgical tray with a distinct “clink” sound.

A gruesome image to some, I supposed. I’m not squeamish that way.

In fact, I’ve never even been to Squeam. Or Gibber.

But to me, the image is quite comforting. It makes me feel like I am truly making progress at dealing with all my damage, even if it’s only a tiny bit at a time.

It’s hard to keep hope alive when progress is glacially slow. It would be easy to throw up my hands and then puke up my legs…. just kidding.

It would be easy to throw up my hands and say it’s hopeless, but I know better. When I look back at who I was even a year ago, I realize that I am far more awake and aware and alive than I was back then in June 2019, and that gives me my hope back.

The fact that you can’t see the hour hand of a clock move doesn’t mean that it isn’t moving, and all you have to do is stop watching for a little while then look back to see that this is true.

Besides, with every little fragment I extract, I can feel myself growing lighter and my star shines a little bit brighter.

And one day, I will reach a tipping point where enough of my burden will have been removed for lift to exceed drag and I will soar up into the sky to shine and shine and shine my warm rays of light and love to all the other lonely souls out there who have forgotten what it feels like to feel the sun on their face and be warmed.

That is my highest ambition. I want to create art that warms, encloses, and comforts others the same way good art did for me.

I want to use my talents to make art so good that it makes people feel better about life.

You know. In all modesty.

And the thing is, I know I can do it. I have this power. I have that knowledge.

The trick is to get myself to a place where I can make it all come true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I hereby vow to post some kind of movie today.

Right now, I am still too sleepy to think of something to do, let alone do it, but I swear to Gosh I will put something or other together and post it here before the day is through.

As usual, I am walking a tightrope here. I want to capture my enthusiasm and my desire to play in a fruitful way, but I don’t want that to turn into the kind of pressure that makes me want to abandon the whole thing.

The key is to endure. Face the fire. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Ride the wave to where I want to go.

Dunno what I will make. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is ignoring the crazy little voice in my head that says that because this is my first video in a long time, it has to be something enormously and radically amazing.

Nope, too much pressure. It just has to be something. Period.

But that part of me means well. It’s just my pent up creative energies yearning for release, along with my ambitions and my eagerness to make an impact.

The fact that those forces can so easily turn into toxic pressure that makes me quit so I can run away and hide speaks volumes about the nature of my issues. There is still a flaw in the system causing a break in the linkages between enthusiasm and action.

So when enthusiasm builds, it has no way out and ends up backing up and clogging the pipes and that shit is painful and scary, y’all.

But I will turn and face the strain.

Been having fun in Assassin’s Creed : Unity. Climbing all over Revolution-Era Paris is hella cool. There’s a wide variety of missions, and I think I might even be getting some of my French back just from hearing the incidental conversations.

See, the way the game works is that all the important conversations – the ones you have to be able to understand for the plot – are in English.

British English, to be exact, because as we all know from our historical dramas, all Europeans are secretly British.

Oh well, at least we’re used to it. At this point, it would be twerky as hell to hear some European from long ago speak with an American accent.

We’d be like, “But they’re not American!”.

Yeah, well, they’re not British either. But whatever.

Anyhow, so the main conversations are in English, but the random conversations people on the street are having are in French. And real French, the language as she is spoke, not something from a language lab tape.

And besides making me homesick, the bits and pieces I hear as I walk the streets are starting to make a little sense to me. My ear picks out words here and there. Moreso as time goes by.

It would go a lot faster if the French was subtitles. But I guess I am going the natural language route. Fair enough.

Maybe my subconscious mind can sort it all out.

For now, I need more sleep.

More after the break.

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Everything always fails me

No wonder I get so depressed.

So it turns out I will not be making a video today. Here’s why :

I was all ready to make a video at roughly 5 pm. I had decided to do an anti-wealthy rant where I warn them that we, the people, are coming for the money they stole for us via tax cuts and corruption and that if they wanted to continue to be wealthy, they had better submit meekly to the will of the people or we will take everything.

So make nice with my proposed 100 million dollar cap on personal wealth, with everything above that taxed at 99 percent.

Because you want to keep the 100 million…. right?

And so forth and so on. I was ready to start recording, but there was this annoying sliver of sunlight making it through my blinds and after futzing around trying to fix it, I decided to just wait it out instead.

And while I was waiting it out. I got kinda silly.

And now you can see the problem. The audio and video are wildly out of sync and I don’t know how to fix that.

I know I had the problem before, but I don’t remember how I fixed it. It’s been too long.

So I got onto the online help chat for Corel,because I am very close to buying the damn program but this is a bit of a dealbreaker.

First the chat person asked me what the problem was when I had already typed it into the form that opened the chat in the first place. So, bullshit. But I typed it in again.

Then they asked me what program I was talking about. Also bullshit, as I had already told them that, too. So I told them Corel Video Studio 2020.

They then come back with “Oh dear, you were accidentally routed to the help for (Painter)! We will transfer you to the area of concern. ”

Now I have brown flags popping up everywhere because unlike the younger folk, I remember the era of telephones and all the bullshit actual operators used to pull in order to trick you into believing they were doing something.

And sure enough, about five minutes later, the “person” comes back and tells me gosh darn it, all the operators in “area of concern” are busy, so my chat has been converted into a help ticket and they will get back to me via email.

And that’s a triple decker bullshit sandwich with sprinkles, because that was clearly what was always going to happen. That “person” I was “talking” to was clearly a script and the entire “conversation” was just a waste of my time.

And sure, in this fucked up era, there’s a lot of people not making it in to work, but remote online chat is one of the easiest jobs to do from home imaginable, so I don’t buy that there’s a manpower (personpower?) shortage.

No, they just don’t feel like paying people when, from their point of view, a rather simple script does the job “just as well”.

Hopefully their support techs are real people and someone will be able to tell me how to get the damn thing to record properly.

If this proves unfixable, though, I will move on to trying to write for Cracked.

I will make my debut somehow, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, America’s on fire.

Dunno much about the specifics.That’s deliberate. What little has filtered through to me unbidden is scary enough. Any more, and I may freak out.

I still might, actually.

What I know is that there is rioting in many American cities. It was triggered by yet another cop killing an innocent, non-resisting black guy, this time my kneeling on his fucking neck until he suffocated, despite people in the crowd (including medical professionals) begging and pleading to let the poor dude breathe.

The officer who did it has been fired, arrested, and charged. But the riots continue, because while a real world event is required in order to trigger riots, once that fire starts it follows its own rules and logic.

That’s because its fuel is people’s anger and until the anger runs out, the fire keeps burning far beyond the originating incident.

That’s why every riot sees otherwise moral and upright citizens turned into violent monsters by the group emotion of it all. Riots engage a part of our minds meant to respond to violent outside threats by unleashing a killer rage.

But when that threat is too abstract and remote to be present, all that unleashed rage has nowhere to go, so you get the random acts of violence riots are known for.

Honesty, I was worried that riots would break out in the ol’ USA, but I thought they would come from the anti-lockdown protesters. I figured eventually, they would fuck with the wrong police officer, someone would get shot, and we’d have police having to deal with a bunch of pissed off heavily armed MAGA types.

But then some cop straight out murders someone, it’s caught on camera and goes viral, and now shit’s burning down.

The latest thing I saw was cops in Minneapolis arresting a CNN anchor live on CNN.

Wanna guess what color his skin is?

And you can see the cops’ confusion when he fails to give them a clear reason to beat the shit out of him. He repeatedly asks the cops where they want him and his crew to move and the cops just stand there silently, like they have no idea what to do in this situation and it’s breaking their brains.

Finally the cop in charge says he’s going to arrest the CNN anchor, who (without resisting) repeatedly asks what the charge is.

They don’t respond because they can’t. There is no charge, their can’t be, the guy has done nothing wrong. Basically, he’s being arrested because Minneapolis cops arrest black people by default.

Those cops knew no other way to resolve the situation.

The real charge would be something like “making a cop think while black”.

The whole thing has me pretty scared. I mean, deep down, I know that these things are like forest fires and therefore will burn themselves out over time and that this doesn’t mean the USA is about to descend into anarchy, but still, this outpouring of rage makes the world seem even scarier than usual during these mad times.

It’s a fucked up time to be alive.

More after the break.

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Eminem is evolving!

And turning into this guy :

Found him via a YouTube ad that played this video :

That makes it the most effective YouTube ad ever for me, because I was instantly riveted to the spot by it and watched the whole thing, then looked up the song so I could listen to the full version then download it.

Because holy shit. Every word’s a bullet, every line’s a bomb. He raps so hard it leaves me feeling dazed and I am fucking loving it.

That also means that I have become a new fan of a particular artist in what feels like forever. Normally, even if I like a song, I don’t feel compelled to go look for more stuff by the artist. And when I do, I usually look up one or two tracks and find that either all their songs sound exactly like what one song I like, or that none of them do and I don’t care for their other stuff at all.

But this guy blew my socks off and they are staying blown. Yee freaking haw.

He’s so good I am actually pretty jealous of him because he raps exactly like I would rap if I was a rapper. That non stop brutal assault style, every word like a punch to the gut, is pretty much exactly how I would rap.

Now, if I do it, people will accuse me of biting his style.

I swear I have been rapping that way in my head for years!

Oh well, I still have the fact that I would be unashamedly not from the hood, a product of the middle class, nerds as hell and smart as fuck to fall back on.

I could definitely see myself being an in your face gay nerdcore fat fucking rapper.

Of course, like Tom, I would be producing my own stuff, because fuck collaboration.

Which segues neatly into my opinion of the new Corel Video Studio 2020, which is : I fucking love it.

It has everything I love about the program, just in a slicker and better organized interface, and most importantly, it has the most important thing of all…

..multi-trim! I won’t go into the details, but it is the absolute best way to edit video that I have ever tried. Everything else is clumsy and complicated by comparison.

So the odds are very good that I will buy the thing, even though it will cost $90. It will be worth it to have a totally legit copy of my fave video editor.

And yes, that means I will soon be making videos again. Not sure what kind or on what schedule yet, but they will be far more professional looking and slick than before so that they no longer embarrass me when I watch them.

Besides, making videos is fun, and far more productive than video game playing.

So why not have fun and be productive at the same time? It’s the best of all worlds!

So stay tuned, folks. Good things are coming soon.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.