I ended up talking about my routine and my addiction to it and to video games.

It’s really quite a serious issue.

Here is the vid :

Distressing development – I lost a lot of stuff I said to glitches in the recording process. They’ve happened before now and then, causing me to lose a second here or a moment there, but this was a whole whack of them.

So next time I record, I will close down my browser first and hope that helps. It’s depressing to lose my words, whatever medium they are in.

As might come across in the video, I am feeling somewhat lost and melancholy today, I feel a deep dissatisfaction with life as I know it and it makes me feel like I am pacing back and forth from sheer insomnia in my mind.

This is probably a good thing. In the long run, it will be restlessness, dissatisfaction, and frustration that will spur new growth in me and cause me to need to expand my boundaries and makes some sort of life for myself.

Because I might be alive, but this ain’t livin’.

I’ve often been irritated by the whole “carpe diem” crowd. They say “live life to the fullest” like everyone already knows what that would mean to them and all they needed was a push from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society to say, “Oh, I guess I should go do that thing I want to do now, then. ”

I can think of dreams I have and things that would excite me greatly if I had them, but I don’t see a doable, usable path from me to them.

All kinds of paths that would work for all kinds of people who aren’t me, of course. I could tell you all kinds of very plausible and “helpful” tips as to how I could try getting a job writing TV (like entering TV writing contests) or maybe some kind of remote work (like buying a cell phone so I can get back on UpWork) or maybe looking to going back to school via distance education (like getting a Psych degree) or a million other things.

All things that, from a certain point of view, I “could” do. The sort of things that any well meaning person would advise me to do. The sort of things that my therapist does, in fact, tell me I should do.

But we both know that ain’t gonna happen.

I guess the real question I should be asking myself is not “what should I do with my life?” but “how do I stop being scared of everything?”.

Because it’s that all encompassing fear that is the short chain keeping me tethered to this farce of a life of mine. Any of that “good advice” stuff is based on the presumption that I can do things and very often I just cannot.

Not if they aren’t already part of my routine and thus part of my own tiny world.

So nothing is going to change until I break this chain or slip my collar and get the fuck out of this tiny little cage.

But that scares me. The world outside my captivity is so big and loud and complicated and scary and I am such a tiny, broken, frightened thing.

I don’t know what could make it possible for me to break free of this self imposed closed habitat and live a real life.

I don’t know how to make all that fear of the world go away.

I don’t know where to find the strength and confidence I need in order to overcome my limitations and become the person I was meant to be.

I don’t know how to grow up and be human.

I barely even know how to live at all.

More after the break.

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Here are a bunch of foxes really pouring on the cute.

And I thought this was hilarious.

Well, you know what they say… nose to the Grindr-stone.

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The rough and rugged road

I feel like I am on the right road but it’s pretty rough going.

Can’t be avoided, I am afraid. I have to learn to overcome things instead of always tucking tail and running away from everything and that means building up the sheer horsepower of my spirit so it can take those hills.

Right now, I can’t take the hills. The system is shot.

And that means I need to resign myself to pushing through the curtain of fear that has been the outer wall of my sad little universe for far too long.

There is no avoiding it entirely. Sooner or later we must overcome ourselves in order to grow. We can’t become a butterfly until we die as a caterpillar. The people we must become must kill the people we are now in order to be born.

We are perpetually in our own way.

And as someone who favors stability and predictability, that is bad news. I would rather be able to get wherever I need to go via gradual, serene accumulations of tiny, barely noticeable shifts, with no revolutions, evolutions, or extreme solutions needed.

But alas, that’s not always possible. Yes, I do change slowly over time, but I am reaching a point where that’s going to lead to a metamorphosis whether I want it too or not and so I better get used to the idea.

Were I a more rugged and daring type and not such a bloodless intellectual, I might follow my instincts – I do have them – to my next evolutionary level, even if that means a massive spiritual crisis and even temporary insanity.

But I am built for long term stability over all else.

So gradualism will have to do.

All I can do is keep letting the sand accumulate on the healthy side of the scale until we finally reach that god damned tipping point.

Hopefully that will be all it takes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But first, today’s silly little vid for a silly little song I wrote.

That picture in the thumbnail sets blood sugar to twitching.

I recently realized that I no longer crave sweet things. That craving died a long time ago, right about when I first truly realized that eating that kind of crap will make me feel ill almost instantly.

And nothing kills a craving like memories of nausea.

What happens instead is that I long for all those sugary foods I used to eat. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

I don’t crave those foods because I don’t want to eat them at all. They’re gross.

But I do long for the days when I could.

All right, motivation.

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What is motivation?

Motivation is the desire to do something. So when we say, “I don’t have enough motivation to do it”, all we are really saying is, “I don’t want to do it” but with an extra step in there to keep us from realizing we’re just choosing not to do it because we do not feel like doing it.

Instead we blame a lack of this mysterious substance “motivation”.

“Oh trust me, I would do that right away if I had the motivation if I wanted to do it bad enough. But alas, through no fault of my own, I do not. ”

Boy, this motivation stuff sure is important.

The conflict is between the grownup part of us that wants to have done the thing, usually for grownup reasons like “to stay in shape” or “to make a good impression at work” or “to not get evicted”, and the child inside of us that doesn’t want to experience whatever it will take to get it done.

And being a child, it does not feel the need to be logical or reasonable. It absolutely will keep you from doing vitally important things that your grownup mind very much wants to do and no amount of cajoling or exhorting will change that.

No matter what you do, you will never feel like doing it.

So why are you waiting around to feel like doing it? That is not, despite what our lazy inner child tells us, a prerequisite for doing it.

This is where discipline enters the picture. Discipline, in this context, can be seen as the ability to do things regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

This is the lesson at least one parent, usually the father, was probably trying to teach you but was too inarticulate to explain.

Life doing only what you feel like doing is catastrophically stunted. Even if you were a billionaire, it would result in a very tiny, pathetic life.

Even billionaires have to wait for the car sometimes.

So whichever parent tried to teach you this was right when they said (or implied) that self-discipline is a skill you’d need for the rest of your life. No matter what kind of life you are leading, it’s going to involve shit you don’t want to do, and you will need whatever internal resource that takes.

And I think the lack of understanding of this hurts a lot of people, especially all us victims of “failure to launch”^[1] who absorb the toxic lesson that our lack of desire to do all the adult things means we are deeply and terrible broken.

But no, that’s normal. Being a grownup involves doing a fuckton of things you don’t want to do. Not wanting to do them is everyone’s default setting.

The problem lies in a lack of understanding of this leading us to wait around forever as if the desire to do these things might magically appear some day.

It won’t. So you have to ask yourself, then how do most people do these things?

The answer is self-discipline.

And they got it from practicing it, more or less. Presumably because, not being born gifted, they had no choice but to develop it just to get through school.

But “lucky” guys like me never needed it for school. Not one bit. Even doing the homework in high school required only a trivial flexing of my mental muscle.

So then I reach the precipice of adulthood only to have that all snatched away when my parents took me and my brother out of school.

No launching for me.

More after the break.

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He who hesitates

I’ve always been rather timid and hesitant.

It’s part of my natural caution, I suppose. Or maybe a result of severe early childhood trauma. Same thing, really.

But it’s like I go into everything expecting pain at any second. Like I am constantly a Vietnam era soldier cautiously making my way through a booby trapped world.

And I know that is a way too harsh way to view the world. I’m perfectly fine in most ways most of the time. I could be a lot more bold and daring without suffering much damage.

And if something does blow up in my face, so what? I will live, and learn, and make brand new and even better mistakes in the future.

There are worse things than failing or getting hurt.

This probably connects to the post-pain analysis issue I have mentioned before. How part of the neurosis cycle of the intellectually extra is when we excoriate ourselves after an error or mishap, calling ourselves stupid over and over for not having done the smart thing which was “obvious if we’d just thought about it for two seconds”.

But you didn’t have two seconds. You are judging yourself in hindsight based on what you can see clearly now, in hindsight, at leisure, but those are not the conditions under which you made your “mistake”.

So next time you “fuck up”, grab a hold of yourself and try to interrupt that whole process and ask yourself if you really should have known better.

Or if you should just shrug, say, “oh well, shit happens!” and move on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been meaning to make a video like this one for a long time.

Today, the ever loving 4th of July, seemed like a good time to do it, what with things going increasingly bat poop crazy down South.

I mean everything I say here too.

I’m never insincere.

Right now we’re actually in a grace period because while the Bloated Billionaire’s Bill has passed, its evil effects have not sunk in yet and so nobody has actually been kicked out of their homes or taken off life support yet.

But it’s coming. And that’s when the mature is really going to hit the air conditioning.

God help us all.

The other upcoming nightmare is brewing as we speak as people’s responses to ICE raids are getting both better organized and more violent.

There’s now apps people can use to report ICE activity in their area and thus let people know where they are striking or going to strike now.

And that means people in that area can be on the scene to confront ICE before they even get out of their unmarked vehicles.

And that means shit is going to get violent quite soon.

Our only hope of avoiding bloodshed is if these ICE goons are far too cowardly to mix it up with the angry citizens at all and therefore if they see an angry mob waiting for them they just turn around and leave.

That would be ideal because then not only is there no violence, the people can feel good about thwarting the evil forces of ICE and that might actually lower the social temperature a little bit.

Because the mercury is climbing, my dear readers, both literally and figuratively. The USA is become a pressure cooker and that makes me very, very nervous.

Because these people have guns.

That’s not a joke or a crack. They have guns and they’re extremely angry at these masked criminals kidnapping their friends, neighbors, and families in broad daylight and spiriting them away to God knows where, probably never to return.

As far as the citizens are concerned, this is an invasion of their neighborhoods and historically invaders get shot.

So I am dreading the moment a bullet – a shot heard ’round the world, if you will – sets the whole country aflame, whether it’s a protestor shooting an ICE assailant or some cowardly ICE goon opening fire on that big scary mob.

And because this is the good ol’ US of A, both sides can and will be heavily armed. And so if the shooting starts, the body count will get very high very fast.

And then, well, you pretty much have a civil war on your hands. The people versus the federal government. The question then becomes who the Armed Forces side with.

That’s too close to call. The military exists to make people into obedient killing machines and so refusing an order, no matter how odious the source is, is not normally part of their operating parameters at all.

But they don’t like Trump. Why would they? He makes them dress up for his parade and puts them all at risk with his unsanctioned bombing in Iran and treats the veterans like day old shit and in general is an utter embarrassment and a humiliating clown and the exact opposite of everything a military organizations values in a human being.

If the military stays out of it, the people will defeat ICE easily due to sheer numbers.

If the military backed the people, obviously that would be the end of it. No lunatic, no matter how hard their polish their guns, is going to take on the United States Armed Forces, the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known.

But if the military chose obedience to the chain of command and the traditional power structure, we’d be in for one hell of a war.

Odds are that the real civil war would be the one within the military over this very subject. There might even be a schism.

Luckily, the side of the angels has one powerful thing on its side :

Most of the really smart generals will side with us.

More after the break.

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My usual nonsense

So I have been game shopping lately, which with me always involves trying games then returning them because I am a fussy, fussy bitch. 

Lately I tried Black Mesa, which is a fan made remake and expansion of the original Half-Life. And I was quite stoked to play that as I, like every other PC gamer, was absolutely blown away by the original. 

But sadly, just as I was settling in to enjoy the tram ride that starts the game, it crashed my computer, so I had to return it. 

But it’s now on my list of games to try again when I have a better power supply! 

The other one I tried more or less completely on a whim was Crypt of the Necrodancer,  an odd but quite ingenious little game where you have to explore a deep dungeon while moving in time with the music. 

Sadly, I am too old to keep up with that. So like I said when I returned it, this is a fabulous game but um, not for me. 

I hadn’t really expected to like it, but I am glad I got to take a look. 

For some reason, the money from my returns is stuck in “Pending” limbo, meaning I can’t spend it again until it actually comes back to my Steam wallet. 

I am still undecided about Tactical Breach Wizards. I wish I had another hour or two of playtime to make up my mind because I feel like I am only now starting to get the hang of the game but can’t really say if I enjoy it or not. 

I’ll have to make up my mind eventually. Probably when I see another shiny thing that I want and need the $20 for TBW back again. 

I’m such a flake! 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

 

But I am not that happy with it.

Here it is :

I mean, I am not saying it’s a bad video. Not at all. In fact, it’s perfectly fine and compares well to my earlier vids.

But I am more ambitious now and I feel like in that vid I didn’t really say anything.

Oh well. Onward and upward. Tomorrow’s vid will be better, and the next day’s even better, and so forth and so on.

Honestly, I think the real problem is that I have really raised the bar for myself with some of my recent videos. I am particularly pleased with my message to the oligarchs and my call to libertarians. I feel like I really made something special with those ones.

I feel like I am really stretching my abilities and that’s a wonderful feeling. And I know that I am nowhere near my limit, so I am excited to see what I do in the future.

Maybe I will do stuff people actually notice!

That’s not fair, I have a few semi-regular commenters. Someone must be watching the dang things. And, of course, you, dear readers, watch them too.

But I want to be a real player in the pundit game. And for that I would need a big platform with a big audience, which would of course require self-promotion.

I think I’m getting closer to being able to do that. I am increasingly confident in the content I am creating, and that’s a very good sign. Some time soon, when I get the visuals to go with me talking happening, or otherwise satisfy myself that my content looks somewhat professional, I will be in position to promote it in earnest.

The thing is, I think I could be quite good at self-promotion once I get started. After all, it doesn’t have to be me talking about how awesome I am.

It can be me talking about how awesome my content is, and that’s way easier.

And I want to make the sort of stuff that commands attention. That libertarian vid is a good start. I made that specifically to challenge certain people and make them angry in a very specific and hopefully productive way.

Alas, so far there’s not be a single badly spelled and incoherent comment of outrage.

Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.

Maybe I should post it to a Libertarian subReddit. Heh heh heh.

My point, and I do have one, is that I intend to provoke. Not for its own sake, but to force people to think about what they believe and why, and to maybe goad them into a higher state of enlightenment by the time honored tradition of pissing them off.

Don’t laugh, the path to enlightenment isn’t always meditation and koans and mysterious advice from zen masters.

Sometimes it’s a dirty old beggar telling you to eat hot turtle snot.

In other words, sometimes it’s someone wise enough to know what buttons to push to cut through the usual daze of daily life and really activate a person.

That’s the trickster’s job. To wake people up. To elevate their minds. To make them truly think and by doing so, bring them closer to enlightenment and peace.

Some medicine tastes very bad.

I was thinking about analogizing physical and spiritual ailments and how life would be so much easier if you could just stick your finger down your throat and barf up all those old traumas and suppressed emotions that are poisoning your mind and spirit and then leave them all behind in the toilet.

One flush and you’re unburdened forever. Woohoo!

And who knows, maybe some day we’ll be able to do that via a drug like ayahuasca. All that psychological garbage gone, as well as a week’s worth of lunches.

Puking seems like a small price to pay for emotional emesis.

More after the break.

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To live better

Better than I could provide for myself, and that’s the rub.

One thing that came up during Therapy Thursday was the impossible define category of what I “can” do.

Because there’s all kinds of things that I can, technically, do. Wonderful, life-affirming things like cleaning up my room and getting Julian to help me spend some time outside and investigating all kinds of online jobs and distance education and so many, many more shining and glorious possibilities.

And it would be such magical advice if people were to tell me I could do these things. And I would, of course, agree with them. I “could” do them.

But I won’t.

To me, such charming suggestions belong to that vast universe of things outside the walls of my inner fortress that I can see and I know about and could tell you how to use and everything, but that I have no connection at all to personally.

That stuff is all Out There, and I am stuck In Here, and there is a rip in the fabric of space/time between those two that feels insurmountable.

That’s the really brutal penalty to being so catastrophically withdrawn. I am so tightly wrapped up in myself that I can’t reach out to do even the simplest of things that it totally seems like I “can” do.

But can I? It doesn’t feel that way to me. Like I said, I will totally agree that it is something I “could” do.

But ask me if I will. The answer is, mostly likely not.

The motivation just isn’t there. It doesn’t matter how much you argue that I could and should do thing X. I’m not even arguing with you. I could and should do it.

But that in no sense motivates me to do it.

You can even tell me how much better I would feel if I did it.

And I will again agree. I probably would feel better IF I did it.

But I’m not gonna. I wish I could, if only to make the people giving me advice happy. I hate that I disappoint them over and over by seeming like I am doing to do thing X but then never ever doing it.

It’s not that I don’t care what you say or don’t love you for saying it.

But the traumatizing truth is that you, too, are Out There. And I’m In Here.

And I am so very sorry that this can make things so cold for you.

That’s the last thing I would ever want to do to someone I care about. I want those I love to feel warm and welcome and wanted.

That’s why, to me, the worst thing about my mental illness is when it makes someone else suffer instead of just me.

God, being crazy sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I used the capital L version of Libertarians so people know that I am specifically referencing the bizarre American definition of the term.

By non-American definitions, I might be considered a (civil) libertarian.

Anyhow, here’s the vid :

I’m pretty happy with my little speech. I am sure that there’s things I meant to say that I never got around to saying but that’s standard for when I make videos now.

It almost makes me want to start taking notes. Ha ha ha. Not really.

Not even I can keep up with the sheer volume of thoughts I produce. There has to be some kind of winnowing process.

I have been wanting to pull that little trick with the warning at the beginning for a very long time. Everything I say in that intro is absolutely true. I spoke in blunt, plain, direct terms and it all came straight from my honest and forthright heart.

I’m just exploiting the fact that right wingers have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that kind of thing belongs to them.

They will go on ad infinitum about the plain truth, and no trigger warnings, and being too “real” for the libs, and not worrying about being offended, and all that crap.

But what they’re really saying is, “I don’t think this is going to offend ME, and I really hope it offends YOU so I can feel smugly superior without having to do anything. ”

What they really don’t expect is for what comes next not simply to offend them but to attack them directly.

This is a vulnerability I am overjoyed to exploit.

And the true genius of it is that it sets them up because if they now get angry and offended at what I said, I can just say, “Aww, were you triggered, snowflake? Do you need a safe space? Did I hurt your precious little feefees?”

After all, I warned them.

They just took my warning to mean something I in no way said.

Mua ha ha ha.

Of course, I would love for this little video of mine to stir up a massive shitstorm. It would be a happy day indeed if I came back to the computer to find hundreds of incoherently enraged and badly spelled attacks on me, along with the usual threats of personal violence and whatnot.

Because it’s not like I wasn’t trying to piss them off.

But not just for the sheer joy of trolling. I never piss people off without a purpose in mind. And in this case, my purpose is to wake them up to what they have become and remind them of what they really believe by directly challenging their hypocrisy.

I am hoping to piss them off enough for them to rise up to defend themselves and prove me wrong about them by going after Trump like they should have been doing all along.

The hauteur I display in the video is quite real. I am angry and upset with these people for turning into statist stooges the moment the opportunity arose. I might not have agreed with them on much but I at least thought we were on the same side in that.

Nope. Turns out they never believed a single thing they were saying. Oppression and tyranny are super OK with them as long as they feel the right people are getting hurt.

Revenge by proxy, more or less. Against people who have never done a damned thing to them but who their masters have told them it’s okay to hate as much as they want and that’s good enough for them.

After all, if it was people who could actually hurt them, they’d be way too scared to attack them. Real power terrifies them.

But then again, what doesn’t?

No, they prefer made up imaginary targets because they can be imagined to be whatever makes hating them the most fun and to hell with truth or reality.

Imaginary monsters can’t fight back.

That makes them perfect for cowards.

More after the break.

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Running for safety

Today’s old bone to gnaw on : the flight and freeze responses.

I’ve talked before in this space about how the urge to flee situations can absolutely wreck your life if it becomes too habitual.

Once that flight response kicks in, nature assumes it’s a life or death situation and that therefore whatever you have to get away THAT INSTANT is justified.

And that’s great if a sabertooth is chasing you. But if like me you have an anxiety disorder, that fear based adrenaline response can be trigger by situations where not only are you perfectly safe, cutting your losses and fleeing will do great harm to you and your best interests.

An example would be that you’re on a date with someone to whom you are quite attracted and it’s going well but your anxiety starts creeping up and eventually causes you to mumble an incoherent excuse and flee back to your apartment.

And of course, eventually you will hate yourself for doing that.

But first, you will feel so much better.

That moment when you escape the situation will be one of incredible relief because you are going from a state of high tension to no tension all at once. You have successfully escaped the sabertooth and your ancient animal instincts are celebrating.

And it’s this intense reward that keeps you fleeing. It doesn’t matter to your instincts that there was no danger and you just wrecked your chance with someone you’re very attracted to for no reason.

You escaped the “danger”. Hooray.

I’m still not sure what to do with one’s anxiety. Besides Xanax, obviously. But pharmacology aside, as far as I can tell, once that flight response is triggered you’re pretty much screwed.

No matter what you do to calm yourself, the urge to flee will just get more and more intense until you finally GTFO.

Maybe if I practiced mindfulness and learned to center myself and let the anxiety wash over me unopposed, I could stop an attack after its started.

But probably not. You kind of have to already be calm for any of that shit to work.

So my choices are : brutally suppress the embers of anxiety before they can start a fire, or learn to ignore the screams of every cell of my body to run away.

Or, ya know. Xanax.

Being crazy is so damned hard.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Something I felt I needed to make clear on this day.

We’re not the greatest country in the world.

Not that it matters.

We’re just the younger, more staid and calm sibling of good ol Uncle Sam (Nephew Bob), the ones who never rebelled against our parents (England) in any serious way and who got our sovereignty by buying it a piece at a time.

That’s why are still, technically, part of the British Empire.

England has no real power over us (except in emergencies, maybe) and being a part of the Empire makes some old people happy, so why leave?

And that’s the Canadian desire to minimize social stress in action. We’d never kick up a fuss and make a big deal of leaving the Empire because it’s doing us no harm and it makes some people happy, so staying in the Empire (on paper) is the position of maximum social harmony.

Which is in stark contrast to the American instinct to hurry past any principled arguments or notions of restraint to get to the good part, picking a side and fighting.

That’s anathema to the Canadian spirit. Any Canadian who acted like that would face withering social disdain and disregard. Eventually one of us would ask them, politely (probably), why they were upsetting everybody by acting like that.

And more than likely, if the perpetrator is truly Canadian born and bred, this will make them feel such crushing guilt for letting everybody down that they’ll stop.

In fact, they will probably need some kind of therapy, and maybe a bit of a rest.

I heard a great story from a lady from the UK who was here at a restaurant in Canada when a server dropped some dishes. Crash!

She did what people do in the UK when this happens : she clapped.

Only to have all the Canadians in the restaurant staring at her in aghast silence because to us, that would be so rude as to be beyond the pale. Unthinkable.

Why would you mock someone who already feels terrible about making a mess and disrupting everyone’s meals with the noise?

The Canadian thing to do is get back to your meals as quickly and quietly as possible so that the server could recover from their embarrassment in peace.

Calling attention to it via clapping would just seem appallingly cruel to us.

That’s just how we are as Canadians. Getting back to our meals discreetly is our way of maximizing social harmony. We’re not ignoring the server’s pain and embarrassment out of a callous disregard but out of genuine concern for them.

It’s what we would want people to do if it happened to us.

That’s why, as Canadians, we aren’t all that big on blame. Sure, we want justice, just like any other civilized country. But on a personal level, we’re reluctant to point someone out and say, “It’s all THEIR fault!”.

That’s why if you ever seen a torch wielding mob in Canada, you can be sure they are looking for a missing kid.

So what do folks think of my little speech for today? I think I am getting better at them. The number of ums and ahs I have to remove in editing is trending downwards, and I sound more confident and focused and charismatic.

This speaks well of my future as a YouTuber, or at the very least as an orator. If I continue to use less verbal filler, it will open the door to doing other, somewhat more ambitious things with my “talker” videos.

Like submit them to that Descript thing and see what it can do in the way of adding images and video clips to my content.

Of course, I could eschew the visual entirely and do a podcast. But I don’t like the idea of having to fill that much time with my own blah blah.

Is there such a thing as a short podcast?

Maybe I could just concatenate some of my speeches…

More after the break.

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WARNING : The following may be too cute for some cute people.

You have been warned.

Is that not just the cutest thing ever? She saw humans using money and got the idea! What a smart kitty, and as a reward for that, she gets fish!

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An unusual Tuesday

Joe and Julian were off doing Canada Day stuff with their families today, so I have been here all alone.

I did manage to finally make up my mind and get some games.

One of them is Tactical Breach Wizards, a rather odd little game where you control mercenary wizards in a world with our level of technology PLUS magic and you have to guide your SWAT mages through room after room of baddies in turn based tactical combat with spells.

Like I said. It’s wacky.

It was $20, which is 2/3 of this month’s game budget, and I am not entirely sure I am going to keep it. I’ve managed to make the learning curve so far, but I am not sure I can say I am actually enjoying the game.

Then again, maybe I am just being flighty.

I also, on a total whim, bought this game called Risen

What the heck, it was like $4 and looked like it might be decent.

So far it’s a fairly generic 3D RPG by Piranha Bytes, the same people who made that game Elex I was playing until it suddenly stopped working.

The combat is a little more forgiving than Elex, which is good, but the into bit seems to be dragging on and on and to be honest, the gameplay is not thrilling me enough to justify that kind of early commitment.

I mean, it starts with me getting shipwrecked. How original.

So despite how cheap it was, it might not last either.

I know I don’t want to keep being the guy who buys and returns a half dozen games before settling on one.

Then again, why not? It’s not like Steam is going to get sick of it and kick me out.

Maybe I’m just very particular about what I play.

That’s not a bad thing, is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think all these busy days full of medical appointment are starting to catch up with me.

But first, today’s vid.

Nothing in there that people haven’t heard from me before.

Still felt good to get it expressed, though.

Anyhow, today I had Wound Care in the morning. I told the nurse about the pain in my feet I’ve been experiencing lately. But like me, she couldn’t find anything on my feet to explain it, so we’re guessing the problem is my orthopedic shoes.

Which means another trip back to that sports medicine center in Vancouver to chat with my orthotics lady to see what is up.

Then in the afternoon it was back to West Coast Retina Consultants for the injection in my right eye to go with the one in my left eye from last week.

And yup. It hurt like a motherfucker. As usual.

And I realize that each injection is a little worse for me because I am losing my ability to not think about the very painful thing about to happen so I can’t keep myself from dreading it any more.

And that sucks. Bad enough that it has to happen. Dreading it does not help.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I am doing this so that I don’t go blind. And the occasional moment of agonizing pain is totally worth it for that reason.

I swore REALLY LOUDLY this time.

Good to know that I am not so cold and numb inside that I am beyond spontaneous and unwilled cries of pain.

That would be creepier than fuck.

Stil, unwilled events are quite rare in my life, so they fascinate me. It’s so weird to have a clear memory of doing something without any attached intention.

Kind of eerie, in a way.

Anyhow, so that was a thing. I ran my recent bloody eye incident past the doctor just to see what he thinks and he concurred that it was no big deal.

I figured there was no harm in getting a second opinion from an eye specialist.

I first realized the appointments were catching up with me when I went to get up to go to the eye thing and every muscles in my body whined at me that it was tired and it wanted me to lay back down for a while.

Not for long, only a couple of fortnights.

Luckily the marathon is over. I have no appointments tomorrow, it being Canada day (yay!), so I will get to just stay the fuck home.

The fact that I am this sore from a week’s worth of appointments is actually kind of depressing. I’m not going to dwell on it but it’s sad to be this feeble.

Oh well, maybe that exercise thing with the old folks will help me build up my muscles so that I am somewhat less decrepit.

Imagine if I was actually remembering to do my physio exercises as well. Why I’d be Charles Atlas within a month.

It certainly confirms that I can’t do any kind of normal job. It is online work or nothing for me. Even if I worked in a storefront business and Julian dropped me off and picked me up from right in front of it, I would not be able to do it for very long.

And damn that’s depressing.

Makes that horrible vision of me immobile in a hospital bed, full of tubes and barely alive, dance in front of my face.

Or me being like Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair only without the astrophysics.

I just can’t handle the maths.

More after the break.

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On being strange

Oh right, that thing I made a video about.

Let’s set the mood, shall we?

It’s hard to truly put into words what the kind of alienation I experienced as a child does to an innocent child who didn’t ask to be a genius.

Because it’s not just the abuse and the bullying. It’s also the slow deep freeze of day after day after day of cold isolated loneliness seeping into my bones and turning my inner landscape to one as warm and welcoming as a glacier in January.

I feel like I still thawing out from all that.

And of course, I became dependent on all that cold. For “clarity”. So when people did try to reach me and make some kind of connection, I froze them out without knowing it and they went away feeling like they’d done something wrong.

They didn’t. The wrong thing was me.

So again, I wonder if anything could have gone different. It’s certainly possible to imagine my meeting some amazing adult who could have straightened me out by telling me what I was doing wrong, what I could do to make up for it, and who gave me a way to feel safe and included so that I could develop normally from that point on.

Such a person is imaginable but pretty damned unlikely. They would either needed to have had an intellect like mine, or enormous quantities of authority, warmth, force of personality, and sheer determination to be able to emotionally wrestle me to the ground and get my attention and force me to really listen.

So could things gone differently? Maybe. Could they have gone better? I don’t know.

They certainly could have gone worse. I dodged become autistic somehow. It must be because of the early childhood education I got from my babysitter Betty, who was by no means my intellectual equal but that didn’t matter because she was warm-hearted and tough and tender and wise and strong and I absolutely adored her.

She gave me a warm, safe light in the world and thus gave me a reason to stay in the world instead of wandering off into the endless corridors of my mind.

Too bad that had to go away. I really could have used her love during elementary school. I certainly wasn’t getting anything from my overworked mother.

And to be honest, if she’d found out about my being bullied, she would definitely stormed the school office and given them a piece of her mind.

She was kind. But fierce.

That’s still the kind of person I admire today.

And who knows, if I ever get my head together, maybe I can be like her one day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

More or less. Here’s the vid :

If Trump’s Big Bad Bill goes through, people are going to be out for blood. The cuts to Medicaid alone are going to literally kill people (much like the USAID cuts already have overseas) and party politics aren’t going to mean jack shit if you kill Grandma.

Time for death panels!

Obviously, I’d rather it didn’t come to that. Something like the French Revolution, while colorful and exciting, would not be the ideal solution.

The best outcome now can only come if that Bloated Bastard Bill is resoundingly defeated because the Republican herd finally wises up and realizes their constituents are going to burn them at the stake if that thing goes through and decides that now is when they have to, as a group, stand up to Trump and push back.

They have to do it as a group, or at least a bloc, because clearly none of them have the courage to do it on their own.

So much for the party of “mavericks”.

My next video might just be a really nasty polemic aimed at “libertarians”.

If enough Repubs wise up and gang together to, along with the democrats, kill this fucking thing with fire, those Repubs will go down in history as heroes and suddenly the entire Internet (apart from Trump loyalists) will love them.

And as I have noted before, it wouldn’t take a lot of them. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate are not that big. A small gang of defectors is all it would take.

How about it, Republicans? Are you ready to answer your nation’s call and be the hero America needs, or would you rather stay a coward because you’re happy being scared of a weakling like Dumb Donnie?

This WILL be on the test.

Finally decided on a game to try, It’s Atlyss. The furry action RPG that was all the rage last year and that has glowing reviews from both critics and gamers.

So far, I am very unimpressed.

I made my little character (a cute lil demon sort of thing) and entered the game and got the initial “go to these places” quest and then immediately got a “go kill X number of monster Y” quest and I hate that kind of thing.

Talk about uninspiring. I wanted a quest and all I got was a quota. It’s hard to feel like I am battling the forces of evil when the quests don’t even have a plot. Strike one.

And there’s basically no tutorial. A couple of screens to tell you what the controls are, and that’s it. No instructions on how to get to the quest areas, it just plonks you down so you can “explore”.

But I hate learning things by trial and error. My generally nervous and high strung temperament doesn’t allow it. I need to know the basics BEFORE I go looking for adventure and excitement. Strike two.

So I dunno if it will last. I may end up returning it. I’ve played it for around 40 minutes so it has around 79 minutes to impress me before I send it back.

Honestly, it’s only the glowing reviews that keep me from returning it right away. I am willing to consider that maybe there is something I don’t “get” about it yet, something that makes it more than a low rent generic MMO, and I just haven’t gotten far enough in the game to experience the magic of it all yet.

But I am not hopeful. Games like what I’ve seen so far are insanely popular with a LOT of people and so this might just not be the game for me.

If so, well, there’s tons of other possible choices in the Steam Summer Sale.

I will keep you posted.

More after the break.

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What the fudge?

So, I had a blood sugar meltdown at Denny’s.

Even though I’ve eaten perfectly normally today. And I have not expended any more effort than usual. So why this happened is a total mystery to me.

I was feeling a slight flutter as I moved from the car to our usual spot in Denny’s, but I didn’t think much of it. Those little vibrations are pretty common for me.

But once I was seated things started sliding downhill pretty fast. Before long, I was feeling nauseous and had a headache that felt like someone had driven a nail into the middle of my forehead and I was sweating and I had this ominous empty feeling all around my core.

And I know what that means. It ain’t good.

Luckily, this was a meltdown, not a crash. A crash is what happens if I don’t heed the warning of a meltdown and get some damned food into me fast.

However, being in a very compromised state, I did not have the presence of mind to ask for help. Logically, I should have said, “I need carbs RIGHT NOW.”

Instead, I just say there in “keeping it together” mode until my food arrived, contributing less than usual to the conversational flow but still more or less present.

It’s worse than futile to berate myself over poor decisions made while in such a state. I did the best I could. And I made it through okay.

Just to be sure, I wanted to get something sugary on the way home but I was having trouble thinking of what I would ask Joe or Julian to get me from 7-11 because like… what would be something sweet but not like… fatally so?

But then Julian suggested a vanilla cone from McD’s, and that was perfect! Ice cream is one of the safer indulgences for me because the dairy keeps the sugar from being absorbed too fast and a nice plain vanilla soft serve cone is good because there’s nothing there EXCEPT ice cream.

The same could not be said for any ice cream treat from 7-11.

And it’s cheap. $2.30. And it really hit the spot.

I am still hungry, however. So I might just make myself a snack at around midnight even though I don’t usually do that on Sundays.

Eating has remarkably high stakes when you’re diabetic.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m rather proud of that little joke.

Here it is again as a title :

Yeah, another “Fruvous talks” video. Ho hum.

Actually, though, that might be about to end. I am working up the decisiveness to give the good folks at Descript $35 (!) for a month of their low tier service so I can not only continue to edit video by editing the transcript, but access their potentially enormously game changing “adding images and clips to your video” feature which would instantly boost my content into something vaguely professional looking.

That’s the sort of thing that would get me to promote my content more.

The thing is, my kind of talky talk content is the norm over on TikTok. So to be honest, over there, my excuse of too poor production values to promote doesn’t hold water.

But I barely have a concept on how to promote a YouTube channel. I have less thanno idea how one promotes one’s TikTok.

I just make the best content I can and hope that is enough.

Which sounds desperately naïve of me, I know. I am not claiming to have faith that it will all work out okay some day like in some “rise to fame” biography.

“All Johnny knew how to do was whack himself in the nuts with a spatula, but damn if he wasn’t the best nutwhacker on the West Coast. Luckily for him, one day a scout from Testicular Torture magazine happened by… ”

It’s just all I can do for now.

Promotion has always been the Achilles heel of sensitive artist types like myself. That’s why agents exist. Rarely do the skillsets for artistic creation and self-promotion overlap.

At least I am at the point where I consider at least some of my content worth people’s time. So that barrier, lack of belief in my own work, is at least partially down.

I want to do one hell of a lot better, but it will take time for me to get there, and in the meantime, I’m making some halfways decent stuff.

A small victory on the gaming front : I am tentatively optimistic that between me lowering my graphics setting to their lowest possible level and the recent deluge of updates to the game, I have solved the crashing problem with that game Rogue Trader and I can finally play it again.

Which is a little awkward in the middle of my search for a game to replace Elex. Turns out the game I was looking for was right here all along!

Steam has its Summer Sale going and that means there are some outrageously good deals on games I want and I have $30 saved up in my Steam Wallet so I am very tempted to go on a very uncharacteristic shopping spree.

But I know better. The last thing I need is self-induced option paralysis from having too many games active at once. That’s why I usually only have two or maybe three games on the go at one time.

It’s so weird being me. I have such abstruse needs.

I will probably buy one (1) game from the sale, like Palworld or Atlyss, and see how much I like it, and if it’s a keeper, that will be it.

If not, I move on.

Of course, what I really want is that new power supply. But I am doing the mature thing and spending that money on potential artistic avenues like Descript instead.

Things that might, in some far flung future, lead to me actually earning money.

Or at least making some truly kick ass content.

I’d settle for that if I had to.

More after the break.

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That big ego thing

Guess it’s time to take another stab at this one.

Let’s start at the ground floor : I’ve always been extremely gifted and yet I have never had very much self-esteem.

Somehow the two things never connected. I’ve always taken being academically brilliant for granted because it has always been there. From that very first day of them testing me for kindergarten, school consisted, in my subjective experience, of adults asking me to do things I found incredibly easy to do.

And that’s never changed. Things never got much harder for me. They became more work when I had to write essays and such but that just made them better exercise for my mind, it didn’t make them any harder.

Anyhow, blah blah blah. I keep going on about my amazingness precisely because I am trying to wrap my head around it and integrate it into my self-image and keep it from being devoured by my inner darkness again.

Heck, it took me many years to get over the idea that my gifts somehow “don’t count”. That all they did was make my clinging to the bottom rung of society all the more pathetic and unjustified. That all they meant was that I was once more “wasting my potential” on a nearly Biblical scale.

And I mean, yeah. That.

But not ONLY that.

That was the anhedonia insanity talking. It was filtering out all possible good parts of a complex and in many ways astounding thing leaving only the bad.

And now I work hard at getting over that.

Lately I keep imagining my potential ego as a balloon to be filled with hot air from the flames deep inside me.

A literally inflated ego. Ba dump bump.

I keep trying to filled that hot air balloon to get it to float and carry me up to someplace stable and confident and sane, and it keeps not working. It goes right back out again.

But I am getting closer and closer, I can tell. Each time, it holds a little bit more air and for a little bit longer. I can feel it tugging me upwards sometimes and it feels pretty good.

Some day, between adding left and jettisoning dead weight, I will actually achieve liftoff, and then who knows where I’ll end up?

Should be quite the adventure.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Once more I find myself contemplating just leaving the ums and ahs and stutters and y’knows in my videos and just posting them raw.

After all, that’s what the internet likes, right? Raw, uncut, unfiltered opinions that they already agree with.

I can do that.

Anyhow, I am contemplating the raw life again because of how much work went into editing this video and I still ended up leaving a whole bunch of verbal dross in.

I just ran out of energy to keep editing.

Here it is :

Then again, if I stammer that much, maybe my videos would be terrible raw. Maybe the sweat equity I put into editing these things is the price I pay for being able to do everything in one take, with just me talking.

I mean, what else am I going to do? Write a script? Rehearse? DO MORE THEN ONE TAKE? Now you’re just talking crazy.

Still, I am slowly building up my videos to look a little more professional. I am adding my “like and subscribe” bit to the end, plus I usually have a little blooper for after, and this time I even had a very brief opening slate.

Still not decided on that. I think I’ll need something less… crude.

And I will probably make a short end credits sequence too. I will do what I can to restrain my urge to put every funny credit idea I’ve had over the years into it.

I will save those for when I make things that are a tad longer.

I am currently pretty tired because not only did I have Wound Care and the lab to deal with today, my good friend Ross Archer called me out of the blue and we had a nice chat about politics as he traveled through Nevada.

And that was very nice. I loved hearing from him and we had a great talk. We talked for a little over an hour and I loved every minute of it.

It’s so nice to talk with people, like Ross and my friends, who can actually understand my thoughts and ideas when I express them.

Coming from a small town like I do, I did not grow up with that luxury. I was way, way beyond most people there.

Even my family could only follow me so far before getting utterly lost.

I guess having a vlog and a blog is my solution to that problem. I can express myself without worrying about being understood. And I do so as honestly and as well as I know how every single day.

And I want more of that. More outlet for all the stuff whirling around in my head like a dictionary in a tornado. More ways to express my ambitions to make something truly special and new and extraordinary. More production value in my works.

Some vague sort of chance of making money.

Though honestly, for me, the audience is more important. I would rather have a million followers and no money than 10,000 followers and a nice paycheck.

I want to be heard, I want to be listened to, I want to transmit my knowledge and understanding and unique point of view to the world in the hopes of contributing to people’s understanding of the world and playing a part in public discourse.

It’s hard to see from the ground level but arguing with strangers online does serve a purpose. Public discussion is how a society thinks about itself. And the truly excellent commenters add value to that discourse.

And I want to be one of them.

That seems doable to me.

More after the break.

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Another Friday night

OK. Deep breaths. Repeat my mantra : the fact that it feels like time is going faster is an illusion. I am still getting just as many minutes in a day as ever. I can relax about time.

I have to talk myself down that way from time to time because the feeling of acceleration can really freak me out sometimes.

I remember it starting in my late 30s. Back then, it was less about time and more about every day being the same, but I would get this horrible feeling like all my days were collapsing into one never-ending meta-day that I was doomed to repeat forever like a very dull version of Groundhog Day.

And that freaked me the fuck out. It made me feel trapped and oppressed by the sheer weight of it all and made me feel claustrophobic. Claustrophobic about time.

And that’s very not good.

Luckily that went away with age. I think I just learned to deal with it both by not letting the panic set in and by subtly shifting how I remember things from my life so that the ways days differed were emphasized.

But that made way for this new kind of time panic. Like right now. It’s Friday night. And to my aging brain, it feels like the previous Friday night was like… two days ago.

And I know a lot of things happened in the previous week. I can remember them all. And if I couldn’t I could just watch the videos I made.

So these two kinds of memory are in conflict with one another. Clearly the malfunction lies in how I “feel” time. The fact that it feels like the previous Friday was two days ago has to be an illusion because I have a whole week’s worth of memories.

Heck, I have a week’s worth of blog entries as well.

So clearly I need a way to recalibrate how I “feel” time. Perhaps the secret is to try to take in more information from my environment in order to give my mind a greater variety and density of things to remember.

And maybe, just maybe, I need to do more different things with my days. Including one-off non-repeating things that can act as anchors in time.

So basically, I need to get a life already.

So what else is new?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.