Welcome back, folks. Life sucks ass. What else is new. I continue to dawdle through the dark halls of reality perplexed by the actions and words of damn near each and every person I interact (and don't) interact with. Is this just a me thing? There can't be something wrong with me, right? Other people can see these things, they can see how wrong everything and everyone else is, right? Do they just not talk about it? Am I just not looking in the right places? I feel so alone. Like, really, really alone. I know it's cliche but I truly feel like I'm gonna die alone, and I'm gonna die like this, feeling this way and these thoughts, and it's just gonna be another second on the clock that ticks by and the world will continue to spin in this incongruent mess of chaos. Nothing makes any sense, not now, not ever, never and always.
I just want an explanation. I want answers. I want to understand. I'm missing the manual, I don't know where it went. What the hell is ever going on? What are people doing?? Does anyone understand? Are we all speaking different languages on an individual level? Oh, yeah- I had to rename the URL for this page because my ex-girlfriend found it. She had kept the tab for my journal entries open on her phone for two entire years since I had linked her my Evangelion writeup the very first day I met her. Eventually she refreshed it and saw my giant diatribe against her I wrote in February. Whoops. She criticized my passage from May, she said I sounded like an incel. Is it wrong that I don't care? Maybe women should be held accountable for their actions too, their lack of communication, their hostile and destructive behaviors that affect not only them but the people around them. The entire laughable concept that a woman can say "I'm not a sex object" and then two minutes later laugh at a man for being a virgin or sling some sort of "this guy gets no pussy 😂" comment out. It's so funny how fucking stupid people are. In general. Men and women. This isn't about one side even if I rant a lot about the shit dating pool and my experiences with it. I just feel like critical thinking is so heavily disavowed in our society, self-accountability has been buried beneath the house and has a golden statue dedicated to hedonism proudly placed on top of its grave. I feel like the lyrics to "Haunted" by Laura Les like, all the time. "Everybody's evil and there's bugs inside the carpet."
I've had this really interesting situation occur multiple times this year with women I'm romantically involved with- they're interested in me, things go okay, then they rapidly dissipate like smoke from a blown-out candle and every time I'm left wondering what the fuck just happened. They never communicate what the problem is no matter how much I desperately ask for an explanation, or why shit just randomly does a 180. To be honest, the answer is "I found someone better" but they never say it, because I know that's what's happening unfortunately. Some people also just treat love and sex like a revolving door- they live on a diet of one-night stands with random strangers they never intend to see again. Thinking about it stresses me out. But when they show actual interest in me as a person and my passions and hobbies and then drop me it really hurts. Compared to the guys they go with I'm probably too overzealous. I don't wanna change, tho. I want someone who likes me for being passionate, y'know? Instead of staring at me like a freak. I like to care about things, there's a lot of cool stuff out there to care about. I live alone in an apartment full of old video games and Halloween decorations. Am I really "worse" or "lesser" than the average dude with more "normal interests? I think the worst shit I've ever been told in my life was that I'm "too passionate" and "intimidating, because you sound really smart". I dunno what to do or how to feel. I just wanna be me.
I'm fucking losing it, man. I have such a deep, intense fucking disdain for people, for humanity, I am misanthropic as fuck and I have been for as long as I can remember but there are times like this where I just tip super hard into it. I start fucking drowning in animosity like the world is clutching me by the back of the skull and slamming my head underwater. I can't handle it, I can't just ignore people and "focus on myself"- I am so, so sick of feeling like a fucking alien. I'm sick of living on a planet of fucking dumbasses and errant assholes. Despite my feelings I'm always exceptionally nice to people, too nice, obsequious to an unnecessary degree at times. Am I a good person? I try to be. Am I a bad person? No, but I'm a good person who thinks bad thoughts because of bad people. I hate being angry, I hate feeling it surge through my veins. I hate frustration.
When I last wrote one of these I had just quit my last job- well, in the time since I've started /two/ new ones at once. So I've been working my ass off. I'm on the cusp of finally moving out. But I'm a fucking flaming jackass, man. My one job I learned about from a fucking Bumble hookup. Let me go off on a tangent here.
I hate dating, I hate romance, etc., it's an exercise in stress and the limits of my mind. Dating apps are fucking horrendous and belong on a list of "Worst Inventions Ever", the people on these apps are atrocious shitbags and there's this absolute fucking deluge of them. I match with women who preach about hating creepy perverts but all they want is sex. Lol. Okay! It's bad when you're disposable meat, but it's totally okay when I am? How about you go fuck yourself? How about you literally go fuck yourself? So I match with women like this all the time, I've been ghosted more times than I can count, I can go off on a never-ending rant about the shit I've experienced through these apps. These apps are not for commitment. You know what I want? I want to love and be loved. I am an extremely passionate person. I fall in love and crush easily, I want to express love and I want to eventually get married and life a normal, ooey-gooey domestic life. Lol! Lmao! Good fucking luck when every girl in the tristate area only wants to fuck! Wow, how empowering! No, you're not meat of course! Great idea running through every man you meet and then dropping him, because that's good for you, that's okay, truly this is what you were made for right? Truly these shallow fucking experiences are what you need, right? Truly every fucking woman I meet who either wants to fuck or rejects me and then meets someone else and talks to me about how their new relationship is focused on sex are living their best lives, right? Come the fuck on. "What do you do with your new boyfriend?" "fuck and play video games". Awesome.
I literally hate these people. "Why do you think you can judge adults for how they live their lives!?" Because I can. Go fuck yourself. I can say whatever I want. "Why do you feel entitled to attention or affection from others?!" I don't, but I can desire it, and I can criticize the horrible people they give it to. I can criticize the horrible people giving it. I am blunt as hell and rough as fuck, I'm aggressive and I have a bite buried under 30 layers of defensive shielding in the form of abject kindness. I meet this beautiful girl with cool interests, cool passions, and I want her. I want to love her. I want to trust her, I want to find comfort in her embrace, I want to connect. But all she wants, like always, is sex, and I can't keep up this stupid fucking charade, these forced smiles I give when I see her at work. If I ignore her she runs after me to talk, she gives a pained frown if I walk away- then fucking TALK to me then!! ANSWER YOUR FUCKING PHONE!! I can't handle these stupid fucking flipflop games, if you LIKE me then EXPRESS IT without ignoring my messages, without keeping me in this dumb fucking Snapchat-only purgatory. What am I?? Am I a backup?? Am I just kept in reserve in case she needs attention?? I don't fucking understand. She told me she's "a brat" which is always a major red flag, any dumb fuck girl who tells you that when babbling about their kinks and showing you one of those stupid fucking BDSM charts is to be avoided at all costs. Treat me with respect and I'll do the same in kind. I am not an object, I am not meat, I am not a backup plan. Fucking Christ.
Life has been rough. I had to quit my job last week because I had something along the lines of a mental breakdown- something in me just snapped so I went to my supervisor and sat down and explained that I just couldn't do it anymore. I feel like a lot has happened in the past several months to where I've struggled to even compartimentalize it into words and decided to just... not talk about it. I got into a relationship with a close friend, things didn't go that well, and within a few months we broke it off. The problem is that I worked with her, and it felt like this roulette wheel spin as to how she would act and feel towards me on a given day. The day I "snapped" she was giving me the cold shoulder and acting aloof and I couldn't fucking take it anymore, I couldn't take being her emotional punching bag. I am not an object to possess, I am not an object to use, I am not a peg to plug into whatever void she feels. I am not her savior, I am not her hero, I am not here to fix her fucking problems. I just can't do it, and I can't do it while bearing the weight of her words and actions towards me despite the fact that I never did anything in retailiation against her. I would cry to my friends in Discord calls and preface intensely that I loved her and I cared about her and that I couldn't bear to just cut her out or say anything negative. Despite this she seemingly has no issues with lashing at me in direct and indirect ways, subtweeting me on Twitter and retweeting and liking specific posts to make me feel bad, guilt-tripping me heavily and bombing me with negativity towards herself, even confessing outright to me that she intentionally manipulated me. It's like she doesn't fucking get it. She claims we can be friends again, that she can change, that everything will be okay- in what fucking world? In what fucking world? Her actions and words don't align at all, she's doing nothing but actively trying to reclaim me in her life, to use me, a living prescription for her loneliness. I don't care anymore, all the good things mean nothing, the laughs and the smiles and the hugs and everything else mean fucking nothing. They're lies to me, it's nothing but fraud, I fell in love with a girl who doesn't exist.
She actively retweeted one of the posts she had previously just liked, a post that I told her upset me prior.
What a total joke. You put the final nail in the coffin. These are the consequences of YOUR actions.
I can't tolerate her aggression, her anger, her nasty attitude. Her misery, her self-centered behavior, her self-proclaimed "god complex". If this is the way she treats me after how I've treated her then I am too good for her. I am the hero of my own story and the pages of my life are reserved for better people.
I kinda almost exclusively use this page to vent about sad shit or write down things I'm thinking about but I'm gonna try to use it for its intended purpose right now and just detail some life stuff.
I started a new job within the last few weeks working for the county library network. It's definitely work, there's not much really going on but it's my first "real" job in five years. Which is insane. Like genuinely insane. It's crazy to remember how different things used to be, I quit my last job in mid-2018 and then spent 2019 basically just fucking around and doing fun shit (my last trip to NYC, walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn gave me this rush of freedom that I still sorta really fondly look back on). Then in early 2020 I was super hyped and excited to grab life by the horns and take control of my destiny, figure shit out and fix all of my problems. And then covid happened and I essentially blinked and all of a sudden I'm 27 instead of 23 and my eyes are baggy now and I look permanently tired and my hair is falling out but at least I'm still alive. Hooray!
I think the depression I've been in since 2020 is legit the worst I've ever felt. At least I have a job again and money and a general sense of purpose, somewhat, but I'm crazy jaded nowadays compared to how I used to be.
I've been getting really into 100 Gecs the past few weeks. I knew about them when they were brand new but somebody, not sure who, described them to me as more or less a parody or mockery of old pop music tropes and I thought "that sounds fucking dumb, I like autotune, why would I wanna listen to people who make fun of it?" Clearly that's not the case because 100 Gecs is, from as far as I can gleam, more of a celebration or exaggeration of pop elements alongside just general fun through music. Having grown up obliterating my eardrums with nightcore and goofy shit like S3RL and Raver's Fantasy I am a colossal idiot sucker for whatever specific flavor of hyperpop that Laura Les and Dylan Brady do. It fucking rules and it's got a lot of genuine soul especially from a songwriting angle. I drew this picture yesterday in Procreate:
Another cool thing I did recently- finally got a TurboGrafx. I recapped the system, replaced the voltage regulator, and installed the TurboNanza mod for better video and it looks great. Here's a blurry out of focus photo that does a poor job of conveying any of this but still looks aesthetically cool at least:
A friend of mine died a few days ago in a car accident and I just learned about it earlier today. I wasn't super close to them but they were very kind to me and I really appreciated that kindness. The more time passes since I was told about it the more it sorta sinks in.I have that heavy feeling in my chest. Like it feels really wrong, like reality isn't making sense or something.
I can't apply reason or rationality to death. I can't look at it with a lens of faith. I want to and I've wanted to for years but I can't, something in my brain just struggles. Like I'm an outsider looking in. I understand why religion or faith or so forth exist because it's hard to understand life and death without some sort of meaning but to me it's just senseless chaos. It just happens with no ounce of understanding possible. It's uncaring, like some sort of mindless animal.
A truck slammed into him, he didn't even do anything. He was young as fuck, in his early 20s. He was always really nice to me. He was just starting to go places in life, he had just gone on a trip to visit a friend of his and he had just bought his new car. I fucking hate shit like this.
I hate how life makes no sense. I hate how we adjust to fiction and the sort of storywriting way of how books or movies go, things have a plot and pacing and climaxes and resolutions. Life has none of that. None of it at all. It's a fucking madman's incoherent blabberings realized through senseless action. It's all random with no rhyme or reason.
It's all so transient and temporary. We're all so transient. I'd say "it'll be okay" but I'm tired of lying to myself to feel better. It'll never be okay. It'll be like this until it's over, and when it's over it doesn't matter. Life is a story of death and survival. Who still stands when someone dies? Who continues to carry the memories of their existence? What lives have they touched and when will those lives end too?
I get really frustrated sometimes at the state of animation in America, both literally and culturally. I've been frustrated for as long as I can remember at people downplaying animation as a whole as just "kid's stuff" despite it being an entire medium of storytelling. The fact that we reject the concept of sequential artwork as anything other than just childish or comedic genuinely boggles my mind. I think a large part of that response is nothing more than a cultural plant forced on us by Hollywood to avoid undermining live action film- to avoid undermining profits, more than anything, or the concept of fictional characters and artists overtaking established actors and directors in the field of live action. It just astounds me regardless how many people don't get it- how many people live their lives like hamsters on a wheel with zero appreciation or understanding of creation and the many forms it can take.
Countless people are blind to creation- they're blind to the beauty of creation, the beauty of art, the art of the world itself and the art of the human experience. Creation is our greatest gift from God second only to love itself. Creation is art, music, film and literature. It's poetry, performance, and dance. It's conception, birth, and parenting. It is life itself and although not everyone is an artist or a musician everyone is a creator in their own way, their own right. Every existence is creation in itself, every soul is born to create, the fabrics we weave and the relationships we form through existence itself are creation. Some people argue that they lack the talent or imagination to create on an artistic level but the truth is that anyone can be an appreciator. Anyone can recognize beauty or art. Denying this is denying a part of your humanity and wasting one of your greatest gifts.
I've been thinking a lot today about "continuing tragedy"- how the mistreatment and sensationalization of tragedy is a tragedy in itself. The countless YouTube video essays about the Junko Furuta case, for example, and how stories of very real people who experienced very real suffering are reduced and repackaged into something akin to an urban legend or boogeyman. YouTube is flooded with this glut of videos that treat the graphic deaths of countless people like campfire ghost stories with absurdly photoshopped thumbnails that are so disrespectful it practically borderlines on parody.
Why do we do this? Why do people do this? It's so dehumanizing. Is that not obvious? I was up a lot last night tossing and turning thinking about Yukiko Okada, the showa idol that died by suicide, in this context. Her death has completely overwritten her accomplishments. The suggested searches on Google related to her are morbid and her music and recorded life have been sidelined by her fate. I really don't know what else to say about it beyond the fact that it's just tragic all around. The world has failed these people and continues to fail them. I'm sorry, Junko and Yukiko.
What are we doing? Like on here. In general.
I was wondering I guess, what's the true goal of nostalgic web design? I guess it varies based on the person obviously. I love old internet stuff but sometimes I get kinda depressed and I start seeing it as "chasing the dragon", like trying to revive or relive fuzzy, distant time periods. Not that it's necessarily living in the past but it feels that way sometimes, in a way that's just kinda sad. In a way that feels reflective. Like staring into a mirror while the clock ticks.
I guess it's this feeling of everything being a replica. A copy, or an attempted recreation. Sometimes these sites feel like museums, but in a way that just feels kinda hollow. Like a reminder of time, of loss, of culture's constant shifting and changing. Of mortality, of age. etc. It's inevitable, I guess. But it's depressing.
A lot of my interests and hobbies are parties I was late to. Sometimes there's other people in the room with me, in the empty remains of a party long gone, and I pick up the pieces and study them, trying to understand lost aspects of what once was. The 20-somethings that played DDR in 2000 are 40-somethings now. Their slang, their customs, etc. just burn away with time- so things like that, finding bits and pieces of something old like that, really interests me. In the spirit of keeping it alive.
But it'll always be a replica. If I play DDR now and I choose a difficult track and set it to Expert but I verbally call it "heavy" and say "I'm playing this track on heavy" it's just a replica. I wasn't there when people did that, I wasn't there when they said that. I wasn't part of that culture. I'm just imitating it, recreating it to try and feel included. Like I'm part of a party that ended a long time ago. So sometimes it makes me feel like a poser.
There's a double-edged nature to age also- I can sit around and envy twenty-year-old kids who are young enough to still have the energy I used to have but why would I? I was alive and present and cognizant to witness and experience things they can only imagine, know what I mean? So I guess there's that benefit. The parties I actually was present for, even if it feels strange and discordant to see younger people with an interest in older things I was around for, in a way that feels sorta distorted. Like an aesthetic appropriation of what something was. It makes me wonder if I'm doing the same with anything retro that I like- and seeing people shift and morph and recontextualize the past that I witnessed is disorienting. It blurs the lines in my head, it makes it hard to remember- was this the way things were? Was it always like this? Was it really like this? What was it like again? How did it feel again? Make me feel it again. I don't want replicas. I don't want the shattered remains of a lost world, repurposed and rebuilt into a facsimile- a biased approximation. I want the real thing. I want the air I used to breathe. I want the warmth of the sun on my skin, the way it felt 15 years ago- not the way it feels now. It feels so different now. I feel so different now. There's too much in my head. I've been overexposed, I've born witness to too many things. Memories of a thousand yesterdays stack endlessly on top of fragmented bits of a world I'll never see again, a world that can't be defined by just blinkies and MySpace gifs. A world that just doesn't exist anymore.
If you're reading this, live with me. And when I'm dead and gone and you're still here, remember me and the things I've said, the things I've done, and the thoughts I had. Just please don't forget. I don't want to be forgotten like everything else, and I don't want to be remembered in a distorted way- I don't want a replica to reside in the minds of those that knew me. I want my true self to be remembered, at least until I'm not, and I fade away just like the millions of others who've walked this same earth.
I finished Evangelion today. I really enjoyed it. I've got a lot swirling around in my head right now but I kinda wanna mention a couple things that I keep thinking about. I might migrate these thoughts over to a dedicated page eventually, it depends on how deep I wanna go into this stuff. A lot of the story itself is kinda secondary focus for me, what I care about the most is the psychology of the characters and how it's portrayed. The stuff with the angels and Seele are neat and all but they make my brain go into "bloodborne mode" where I end up violently trying to connect dots in pursuit of a greater understanding and to be honest I'm too exhausted right now to even consider it.
One of the things I wanted to talk about especially is the "alternate reality" scene in episode 26. I've seen people online treat this scene as comedic or funny, etc. and in some ways it is but in a lot of ways it's also haunting and deeply unnerving- I think because, after 25 episodes of complex psychological drama, seeing the same characters presented in a very cliche and generic comedy anime setting is kind of genuinely horrifying. It's really, really freaky to me- Evangelion is a two-dimensional series with three-dimensional characters, if that makes sense. The alternate reality is so harrowing because it shows you a glimpse into a world where everything, characters and all, are completely two-dimensional and devoid of greater meaning or greater humanity. Everything reduced down into disingenuine tropes.
Shinji's alt-reality bedroom. At least he still has his cello.
Poor Pen Pen, reduced to a bobblehead.
Rei, one of the most interesting and tragic characters in the series, watered down and diluted into a generic schoolgirl archetype. ADV gives her kind of a dumb and goofy voice in this sequence, which is equal parts amusing and depressing.
The golden-hearted and compassionate Toji, reduced into a blabbering meathead idiot.
It's all really sad. Even sadder I guess is that, for years of my life, these scenes were one of the only things I had been exposed to from Eva. You know what I wanna say real fast? The internet does a fucking terrible job of portraying Evangelion. Seriously. I've never seen a series more flanderized in my fucking life by randos online. These cutesy generic tropefest sequences have been gifed to hell and back and plastered all over Tumblr, 4chan has been shitted up with Asuka/Rei threads literally since the dawn of its creation, everyone and their grandma has seen the "CONGRATULATIONS!" bit already in much the same way that anyone born after 1980 knows that Vader is Luke's dad without having ever seen Empire, etc. It's all such a mess and it explains literally nothing. It portrays literally nothing positive or interesting about the series, it puts fuckall focus on the psychological aspects, it completely ignores any of the tragic elements just for sake of "LOOK HOW AESTHETIC THIS GIF OF MISATO CRYING IS ON MY BLOG!!!!!!!!!" It's such a joke, man.
Also:
I don't even know what's going on in my brain right now. I'm gonna dump a lot of thoughts here.
I've been watching Evangelion for the first time and it's effectively both ripped me completely from whatever cognitive void I've been in for god knows how long while also making my brain feel paralyzed to the point of inactivity. I'm having a really hard time trying to describe it without using platitudes but it feels like the kind of scenario where I'll never be the same after I finish this series. I'm not sure I've ever thought this deeply or so complex about psychology, about trauma, about people and human relationships before. It's never been presented to me in such a direct way because I've spent my entire life basically running from these thoughts that Eva has effectively beamed into my retinas, like it's picked me up and shaken me by the shoulders and forced these thoughts out of me that I've never thought before. I see myself in these characters, I see my friends in these characters, I see my family in these characters. I see past sexual partners in these characters- aspects of Misato and Asuka, especially- pained, damaged women. The way the series portrays sex in general has completely erroded away what years of shlock ecchi anime have done to my perception of how sex in anime is presented. It's just insane. All of it is insane, but in this deep, complicated, fascinating way that feels unlike anything I've ever seen before.
Asuka's self-hatred, her attention-seeking behavior and her unjust cruelty to others... man, I dunno. It just blew my fucking brain wide open. There's a lot of aspects of Shinji I relate to, but Asuka especially is the one where I just feel really vulnerable or exposed when she's deep in her own mind. It hits close to home in ways I didn't know were possible. I see bits and pieces of myself and my own trauma in a lot of this story, laser-focused and zeroed in in such a way that I've never really felt before. A way that years of therapy never made me feel before. Like my mind has been unlocked in some way. I don't even know how to describe it. It's so hard to describe.