Going over it again... Internet Regrets

started 28th Dec. 2015, finished 29th Dec. 2015

So... I found something interesting.
A few days ago, I started writing a post about "Regrets and the Internet". My self-esteem and sense of self-worth has been in a much worse and deeper pit than usual, so I'd been ripping myself apart inside almost every day about it. (Usually at night while lying in bed with nothing better to think about - yay chronic insomnia.) 'Breaking my own rules of conduct' on the internet and in social interactions in general. I know I can't always live up to those rules, but I try my best.

My particular instrument of self-torture (over the last year or two) were some posts I made at Crunchyroll. I was going to actually go back and analyse them, take them apart and show (myself) what I did wrong, and see if this could lead to my changing anything. So I got up the courage or mustered my stupidity to look up my own posts on the site. All of them. But when I read them again, I found I didn't really regret them at all. I'd been prepared for the worst, and instead I saw, almost entirely, only things that I liked. If anything, I felt, confusingly, significantly bolstered about my own self-worth. (When I'd meant to dive into the worst of what I feel about my own actions and look at them head on.) Even if it means I'm a horribly selfish, arrogant bastard, I'm apparently a selfish, arrogant bastard that I like. Even if in some cases I broke some rules of 'internet etiquette'... I still liked what I saw.

Some of my stupider posts had apparently been in topics that got deleted... from age. Saving me the trouble. So while I don't know just how bad what I wrote there was... seeing all the rest of them filled me with such a sense of "not-worthlessness" that it probably would've helped me through it even if they'd still been there.

In the end, "we're all idiots". That old thing of "imagine the audience, naked (or seated on toilets)"... it really works. So often we (everyone I've ever seen or met) get so caught up in all of these illusions, and the masks people wear, that we forget that these other people are people and we're holding ourselves, our real selves, up to an imaginary mask, a product, that these other people are holding up. An illusion that society demands and that society ('everyone', like a single animal) holds up all together.

So I ended up coming right back around in a circle again:
"It's better to try to live, as myself, than not."
Better to just go ahead and be myself, as bad as that might be for some people (and it will always be bad for some people) ...and live with the risks and consequences of that, than to waste any more of my life. Waste it for who? I don't want to feed those people's egos or their cocoon of illusions... by being... what? What would I even be being for them? More than half the time these sorts of people don't even have their minds made up inside about what they really want from others. They don't even know.
 
I'm not so bad a person, and I've even done some little things I can be proud of.

It's better to live and make my own mistakes, as myself. At least they're my own mistakes.

We're all mortal, all human, but we're apparently damned to live in a world where we're all told that, to succeed, we need to be the best liar... ha ha.
I refuse.
...and I keep finding that, even despite myself, I stay steadfast on that point.

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever been eating a salad and have some little stem or long leaf flip up when you bite it, and go right into your nostril?

What are you supposed to do with it then, eat it?
...Or just pretend nothing ever happened. Mmm... Salty.

Excerpt from personal journal that spilled over out of bounds

Excerpt from personal journal, 29th Oct. 2015

I have a problem.

I hate people regardless of whether they are gay or straight or trans. (Or anything else.)

Ha ha ha ha...

I have this unfortunate animal tendency to judge people based on their individual behaviour in my presence and in regards to me immediately rather than as a 'thing'. What this means is... I absolutely can't stand a lot of gay and trans people and can't even pretend to like them. Meaning, I hate you equally along with everyone else.

The lack of bias is interesting, but is most often misinterpreted as something else.

The amusing* reality is that this open dislike of mine... is basically flattery... in the bigger picture. However, no one is going to step back to look at that.

I've often been faced with situations where, upon stepping back from myself, I found myself flattered by someone's dislike of me, because the dislike was more honest than them fawning over me and trying to give me 'support'. (False support is something I loathe more than almost all other things.)

Sometimes being honestly hated by people leaves a person feeling more themselves, more whole, real, and open than anything else. Dangerous as that might be, at times...

I guess this is almost like some kind of useless warning to the world about my overly opinionated emotional spillover... The cup is too full. It just takes a drop. Ha ha...

This reminds me of a really eloquent story of Ursula K. LeGuin's... So, pathetically, I'm going to recommend reading it to any unfortunate soul who stumbles across this horrible blog. Collected in "Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences" is a story called "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow". (The whole thing contains my absolute favourites of her work... so, selfishly... I'd seriously recommend the book highly to anyone. If you're read other works of LeGuin's but not this, do yourself a favour and get a hold of it somehow.) Anyway... this story, it's well known mostly because it deals with "FEAR" in an almost Lovecraftian kind of a way, but that's not the part I'm getting at. The pivotal character is an empath, and there are a few very interesting lines about love and hate. (It was almost some kind of knock-down shock to me that another human being might put something like that to writing.)

* Amusing. To me. And I'm probably actually pretty alone in having that sort of a sense of irony and gallows humour.




...Actually, maybe I should continue this... A lost bit of context here is that I'm very frustrated with something: A lot of social/cultural shields have gone up recently which prevent people from being honest about their feelings. (Due to the action of certain very irritating and very vocal groups. Groups who probably couldn't comprehend another human being even if the data were streamed directly into their brains. Groups who consider themselves to be majorities... and feel threatened in that. After all, the guy at the top of the pyramid most often thinks he has the most to lose. He probably doesn't, but he has the longest way to fall...) Uh... long story short, socially, it is unacceptable for anyone to express even mild dislike of, say, a gay person, a Jewish person, a Muslim, or a trans woman. (Although, interestingly, trans men and androgynes/two-spirit people still seem to exist in a hole of complete invisibility. (I find myself reminded of the ignorance field(?) in some of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide books... I don't remember what it was called, though...)) And the truth is, we are all people. Sometimes, we can't stand each other on a personal level. It's just how it is. And when that's disrupted and we have to suck up to people we can't stand due to their standing (whether they mean to or not) under this social aegis... very bad things start to happen. Much worse things than openly showing dislike for a person. There's a cycle of 'suppression of discomfort' with covering things over with false 'light'... and the society we're in right now is right in the thick of that cycle like some kind of crazy carnival ride. (But this gets right back into "I've never been hurt by anything more than I've been hurt by 'Light'" again... and I could just go on and on... so I'm just going to cut this off here...)

By delegitimizing 'dislike' and creating an environment of enforced false tolerance, honest 'like' and 'love' and 'tolerance' is also delegitimized.
People say there's a lot of hate in the world, and there is. But if you spend your time attacking the smoke, you never really take care of the fire.



Actually, maybe 'hate' is the wrong word to use here in the beginning, but...
Damn, I really do just keep going on and on, don't I.

Albion!

2015, Jul. 30th

Holy crap, another surprise.

I just checked GOG.com for not much of any reason in particular... (Mostly just to get the taste of the comments sections of other places out of my mind...)
...and I found Albion there.

Yeah, Albion, the RPG with the four-breasted cat-ladies and a ship named Toronto?
That Albion.
So much for my budget... I bought it immediately. (This after spending a small fortune on stuff for Poser because of Renderosity's sale on previously deleted items... ugh.)

I just posted something on Twitter on the 8th about this. It's hard not to think this might actually have been one of the drops in the bucket towards bringing this game back into the light of day. I wonder if it actually did anything??

Rambling - Compliments

"...So... apparently... I've been getting a lot of compliments lately."

My hair is one of the main focuses of this. Everywhere I go. People look at it and tell me how beautiful it is, or touch it. Long hair, it's like a pregnant woman's belly. Apparently personal space rules no longer apply. Everyone has to touch. Haha.
I don't actually mind that much, though... at this point.

Yesterday, my mother was told by a cashier that I was "so beautiful". This stuns me. I can't really comprehend it. It's hard to let go of the various self-defence mechanisms in me, and allow myself to feel good about it. In this case, it really is about letting go of them... usually, things in my life... it's more about being stuck through with the mental/emotional equivalent of some kind of harpoon. If you've ever had a porcupine quill in you or your dog... You'll know what I mean. Those things really get stuck in there good. You can destroy the tissue pretty badly by trying to just pull them out, and 'just letting go of them' is pretty much a patently insane idea. They're not going to fall out. What they will do, and what they're designed to do, is to work their way out to the opposite side of the body - - Ugh, what am I even going on about??

Anyway, my hair is one of the few joys in my life. I hesitate to use the word 'joy', but... Yeah, I love my hair very much. It brings me a lot of satisfaction, relatively speaking... Life has trained me hard to keep anything that precious to me hidden away inside. Never refer to it as 'joy', never refer to it at all. Especially since for me, 'joy' was flat-out an alien concept until maybe three years ago. Around 2011-2013, I learned about 'joy' and what it was. Interestingly, during the absolute worst time of my entire life, when I had never felt so much despair. And this is coming from a person who has been used to constant despair and the reality of being a small child who wants to commit suicide.

I still don't really get it, 'joy'. I get it on an innate level, but as a life, I have a long way to go and a lot more saturation in 'not bad things' to go before I really 'get it'.

My goal, set in those bad times with those strange, twisted tastes of the 'truly good', what I'm living for, is to expose myself to and absorb as much of that as I possibly can.

I'm not able to think of myself as beautiful. I never have been. Really, all I see is ugly. For years, I thought... this is an ugly person who is just being prettied up by hair. I can use that. At least I have that. As far as I'm concerned, anything 'beautiful' about me is linked to some kind of optical illusion. I'm serious. I have what looks like this cute, coy smile on my face all the time - it's really because my mouth is deformed. I can't really close it properly. (I very nearly had a cleft palate, but it didn't go that far.) I have a massive, massive overbite.

What am I even saying? What's the use of putting this out there?
I have so many personal journals where I've written more or less the same... but better... and with more context included. I can't really handle going back and gathering stuff from those, and making it suitable for this. Right now, the only way for me to manage to get anything posted here is if I completely remove all expectations and standards. "Just post stuff." I hate the chaos of it, the lack of context, but - -

What I'm saying... I guess this: Basically, I'm adjusting.
I'm not used to positive reinforcement or good things and it's going to take a hell of a lot more of it, very gently and quietly, to get me used to it. I'm trying my best with this.

Even as I'm writing this I'm imagining all of the raving-asshole-type answers that it would most likely attract. (And that I'm so used to living with.) I really do not understand kindness at all... At least, kindness aimed at me, that isn't really a sneaky way of getting something from me.
It's shocking to me every time I experience it, I can't really adjust. Coming back from some things... really deep, difficult, old things... it takes a long time. It takes a long time to adjust.

Gintama episode 275 - My Evil Dream For the World

I don't usually watch Gintama much.
I've probably only ever watched a small handful of episodes.
But when I was meandering mindlessly around the internet today, I came across a review and some articles for the latest episode that... kind of caught my eye a little. Ah ha ha ha...

Gintama - Episode 275

What the heck? How could I not watch this?
This was like my evil dream for the world when I was young.

...and apparently this isn't just a single episode, this is a whole story arc. What.

I can't even think of anything else to say. Stuff came to mind, but I am too damn tired. I didn't sleep at all last night (again). Come to think of it, really, I can't even laugh. Just... what.

Well, I guess I'll be trying to catch this every week for a while.
Crap, this looks like a riot.

Not a good sign that I'm too tired to laugh, though.

100 Views

Yay.

My blog now has over one hundred pageviews.
Nearly all of them mine.

Tired

So... damn... tired.

What's up with this 'movement' stuff? Ugh.

I know!
Let's lie down on the floor and turn into a puddle of sessile goo!!

A Ghost Attached To Some Meat

I feel like I'm a ghost attached to some meat.

I'm not really 'alive'. People take so much for granted... like being able to feel. Even if it's just to get irrationally angry about stupid posts people make online, or... something.

I joke about being 'undead', but it isn't really a joke. As far as I'm concerned, I'm about as close to what it actually means to be 'undead' as it's possible to be.

And I've lived this way for almost all of my life. When I was a toddler, there were times when I didn't feel so bad. Sometimes, rarely, I still remember them. It's extremely depressing, like getting crushed by a building, emotionally speaking...

I keep saying to myself that what I'm doing in life and have been doing all of this time is "clawing my way out of my own grave". Wow, it feels so bad to just put that here, in quasi-public, in something like this, for the first time. I wish it had been something with more context and depth.

...and really, I haven't clawed my way out of it yet, in the roughly three decades I've been alive, and it doesn't look to me as if I have any real chance of accomplishing it for real in this lifetime.

I've lived for so long using every possible tactic to make the best of everything. Constantly. Everything. No matter how bad it got or how 'dark' my 'sense of humour' got, underneath of it I was engaged, ceaselessly, in a massive battle to attempt to get the best I possibly could out of my situation, no matter what. To still be able to think, somehow, to read, to have something to enjoy, something, to be able to enjoy anything, in any way. To have even the tiniest wisps of some kind of excuse for a life. It wasn't a life that I had, but I tried to make the best of what I did in fact actually have... underneath and throughout however incredibly fucked up it all was.



It's frustrating... I've written things before in my personal journals and files that express how I feel pretty well. But here, what have I really written to describe it? Pretty much nothing. It's just "I feel bad", with nothing that really shows how.

Some Thoughts on Skepticism

At this point, I don't think that true skepticism exists in the world anymore.

For me, what being a 'true skeptic' entails is being open-minded to every possibility, without blind belief in any of them. This doesn't exclude passion or conviction for a subject; ideally, it should just mean a calm lack of single-minded obsession with proving only the preferred thing to be true or false.

For me, Arthur C. Clarke was a hero for this:

Clark's Three Laws:

1. 

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction is some of my all-time favourite. To me, it really stands out for its open-mindedness... without falling into tepidity or mindlessly exploring topics the author had no passion about (usually accompanied by a great deal of academic self-importance and pomp). Each thing was sculpted almost preciously and was a personal interest of the author. The stories also never sought to 'prove absolutely that God didn't exist', nor to prove that the 'God' that did or didn't exist was the 'God' from the Old Testament that so many people are blindly and automatically fighting for or against. (I can't say they're fighting 'thoughtlessly', because part of the problem is that there is way too much 'thought' going on.)

The guy seemed to me to basically explore this stuff with a kind of almost-childlike joy, beautifully mixed together with and supported by his adult intelligence. Rather than artificially limiting things in an attempt to make them "realistic" as people would accept it at the time, he explored as far as he could in each direction. He also didn't fall into the trap of trying to not offend people by making his explorations artificially 'open' enough to be 'interpreted how people want'. Instead, we're presented with something that we can interpret how we feel like interpreting it, with all of our natural or unnatural personal bias, but it's also depicted as just what it is. There is almost no needless, cowardly ambiguity here. The author's personal beliefs are present as a part of the exploration and theorizing, in whatever forms. To me, this is beautiful; this is what makes his works feel so whole and appealing.

What I see now, mouthing off loudly all over the world, are not 'skeptics', but "rabid or fundamentalist non-believers" or "anti-believers", who are only 're-acting' to or against people who are "rabid fundamentalist believers". People calling themselves "skeptics", but think of everything as rigid, already-decided, dead and inert, in a loud social war against people who obsessively refuse to think for themselves. And this 'loud social war' is almost totally monopolizing the ability for any human being to think independently and scientifically, with any degree of freedom.

What makes you a 'skeptic' if your whole life is rabidly devoted to the highly emotional quest of proving that the universe is a dead, empty pile of randomness? Proving that any deviation from your preferred social norm is rooted exclusively some kind of mental illness? In reality, the people doing this are as mindlessly, emotionally, blindly devoted to the topics they condemn as the people trying to get us to believe that "God" is a hirsute male human giant on a throne in the sky, and that the Earth was made a few thousand years ago.

I suppose I could just blurt "I mourn for Science"... because I see it being extinguished in the world, and replaced by nothing more than the flipside of the coin of fundamentalist religion, or even simply  an expert part of a marketing scheme.

The original dreams of the founders of "scientific thought" basically seem to stand dead now.

When a person goes into an experiment, one has to be truly open-minded. What I see, almost universally, are people going into an experiment not to 'learn', but to prove something. E.g., "transsexuals suffer from a mental illness", "spiritual experiences are real/false", even things as ridiculous as "ferrets aren't weasels, they're cats" and "birds did not evolve from dinosaurs". We may be totally over the "bird-dinosaur argument" now because of China's archaeological discoveries, but when I was growing up in the nineties it was a huge deal, and people were getting their livelihoods ruined for trying to prove that turkeys and tyrannosaurs were not so different from each other. The viciousness and closed-mindedness of the arguments against the bird-dinosaur connection wouldn't be out of place in an argument in the church or among fanboys. And really, that's what it's all about, isn't it... Those things aren't actually different from each other at all.

They go into it completely without joy. Without that 'childish joy' of discovery, there can be no scientific thought.

Just Write Stuff

So... I'm setting myself a challenge.

Just write stuff.
Just write stuff, and post it.
Don't try to work on all of the essays and opinion pieces sitting around gathering figurative dust on my hard drive, don't even try to do anything 'organized'. Don't try to make any one thing.
Just  write  stuff.
Write stuff, and post it. Whatever comes to mind.
It doesn't have to really 'be' anything. (Yeah, sure...)

Whenever possible. Just some little thing.

It really frustrates me that this little post is so without context. There's so much behind it, and all of that is invisible. Invisible unless I somehow manage to translate it into something communicable. Most of the time, I don't have the energy or clarity of thought for that. My memory is a foggy mess, my ability to concentrate feels like a lost cause, and all of the mental jury-rigging that I have in order to compensate for it is now falling horrifyingly short, no matter what I do.

I really wanted this to somehow be something almost upbeat, but it seems I wasn't able to manage it. Again.

"Just some little thing." It's really not that simple, though.
Even so, I'm trying the best I can... and am deeply resolved (maybe 'immovable') to continue doing so.

This is humiliating. Why am I bothering to do this?
I guess my answer for myself is that even if I stumble around like this, getting caught and tripped up on all of these things, doing something is sometimes, importantly, better than doing nothing.

Sometimes I Learn Something New

Sometimes I actually learn something new. For me, that's pretty unusual. Usually, I would have to work pretty hard to come across something I had no clue at all about before. However, most of the time, when this happens, it's not because of any work of my own.

For instance, today, I was messing around online (looking for pictures of blue footed boobies) and was wandering sort of aimlessly through Wikipedia again, and in those meanderings discovered that gannets, apparently, have no external nostrils.

Cropped from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gannet4.jpg

Whoa. It's true.

I didn't even notice that before. Should I be embarrassed??

Anyway... they have no external nostrils because of their extreme adaptation to hurtling into the ocean at incredible speeds. (Also includes protective air sacs in their chest to cushion against impact.)

But it's always weird to do a double take and realize that I did not notice that at all before, ever, and it's not like I haven't spent some time staring at gannets. Or at least videos of gannets. Gannets, boobies (say what you will...), and albatross are some of my favourite animals.

Well, they say you learn something new every day. I don't, so... there you go. It's an occasion for me. "Today, I learned gannets have no external nostrils!"
I can picture the anniversary.
If only I could remember what happened last year.

Pointlessly Posted Personal Junk

19th Mar. 2015
(Edited 2nd May 2015 for clarity and typos.)

I hate how my life has become "just get through this week".
Get through it? For what? It's never shown any sign of getting better, no matter what I do. No matter what I change, or what treatment I go through or don't go through, the decline is flawlessly steady.

I've been 'just getting through the week' for months now. Autumn of 2014, my life clamped down on me and hasn't let go. It makes everything else I've suffered through up until now look very preferable. But there's no going back.

For the past few weeks, I got into desperately, frantically, trying to do 'creative' things, even though my brain and the rest of my body aren't anywhere close to being up to the task, mostly to try to reassure myself that I still exist. Trying to force myself to do them. Dare myself. No matter how fucked up they turn out. To try to somehow replenish my own soul, when there's nothing in my life that fills it, and an endless onslaught of things that deplete it.

I've run out of the energy now to be able to 'make the best of it'. I've spent my life doing that. My whole life, trying to 'make the best' of what I had and was still able to do. Even as I was losing my mind and my ability to remember things moment to moment, or hold on to glasses and forks without dropping them about a third of the time, I was constantly trying to find ways to make it still worth it. As much as I complain about wanting to die, I was doing my best to try to do something like live.
..."Wanting to die". I don't want to get into that subject right now. I can't handle regurgitating all of the necessary context.

What I'm experiencing now isn't 'life'.
I exist... and that's it.
They say a shared burden lessens the load, but I find myself stuck, because the only people who understand what I'm going through that I'm aware of are all people in old age homes, or people in ICU on life support who are not going to make it out again.
So as far as my limited little life is concerned, there is no one on Earth that I can really talk about this with... (At least if we take what I mean by 'talk' as meaning something that actually involves some kind of mutual understanding. Talking 'with', as opposed to talking 'at'.)
Until I completely lose my ability to speak, (always the last thing I lose, even when I start to lose my sense of sight or hearing,) no normal human being will pay attention to what's wrong with me.

It's too big and too complicated and too weird.
So, I've fallen through the cracks again.
I'm human refuse.

Oh well.

This isn't what I'd intended to write here.

I'm watching my life disappear.
I had a sort of a "bucket list" of things that I wanted to do in my 29th year. I was set on trying to do them. Somehow. Now I'm going to have to throw them out... because I can't even walk through a grocery store.

I can't even get through a trip to the grocery store without wiping out completely. Much worse, from my perspective, is that I've lost the ability to judge when I am able or "not able" to go... because I've spent my whole life 'pushing past' everything, and just bulldozing my way through everything no matter how I felt. I found ways to bicycle forty kilometers a week even when I felt like Hell had come to live in my tissues and my soul was going to disintegrate.

I live on ibuprofen now and can't stop taking it or I go totally insane. (That isn't a joke.)
I forget, entirely, why I've walked into a room, and none of my coping mechanisms, none of my mental jury-rigging is working anymore.

There's a movie called "Still Alice"... I really don't want to watch it.

I wish I could resume my life for the first time.