doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc

@eris this is me attempting to overcome my loss of wonder. i went through a series of understandings that led me into believing that the world was already understood, that things are what they are and are never anything else, and that it was all useless anyways because everyone dies, everyone suffers, everyone and everything has been successfully integrated into the capitalist machine.

now i can see how much salvage and translation is necessary to even pretend that everything has been "successfully integrated"

i've been burnt out too - but i realized i was building my own burnout. chasing what could never satiate me. pushing against immovable objects. it doesn't have to be like that.

the other day i posted about thinking about how i want to dedicate my time moving forward - but i didn't really have an answer, and i still don't.

what i know is that i want to draw connections. i want to learn how things have been connected, both the "proper" connections and the connections others call "tainting". i want to see the connections between even disparate localities. i want to explore the gaps between translations. there are so many gifts out there, waiting to be found, waiting for a new connection to be drawn.

Dust/Sand storm in Spokane, WA earlier

my digital ocean info says i pay for 80+100gbs wtf

wait, i don't even have 500 gigs of disk space how is this possible

i do really love that the first scenes of Haunted are set in the rain, with every character but slade having the rain bounce off their body - the first indications that he's not real.

hey i dont know who needs to hear this but you don't actually need to post about the annoying people all the time. it attracts more of them.

of course it's exciting to be in the thick of it but it really solves nothing. if someone cares they'll come to you privately to discuss things 9 times out of 10.

and yeahyeah, metaphor, i get it. but this was not setup like a metaphor.

the next episode i watched (s3e6) is about Raven wanting nothing more than to read a book alone in her room, only to discover The One Guy Who Understands Her is literally magically trapped in the book and if she just listens to him they'll get to be together forever..... but it turns out The One Guy Who Understands Her is actually an evil dragon a la Sleeping Beauty; and that she got used and thrown away.

that's clearly Not Actually About Magic Guys In Books, the metaphor is lived out through the episode, not tacked on at the end.

today i watched season 3 episode 5 of Teen Titans - "Haunted"

the episode is clearly about Robin having PTSD from being in an abusive relationship with Slade. He's hallucinating, he's certain he has to do it on his own, he gets angrier and angrier at his friends for being incompetent because they're telling him that they're not finding evidence of what he's claiming. they even give him a health-scan mid-episode and are like "nothing is wrong with him from what we can see" and starfire is like "no there must be something wrong! he wouldn't yell at me like that! that's not the robin i know!" and we literally get a scene where Raven goes into Robin's mind and is like "oh shit, slade might not be real, but he's real to robin, and slade is winning"

overall it was a good episode - though, the last moments in the episode are a reveal that it wasn't actually PTSD at all, it was actually a secret dust that puffed out of Robin's "Slade Box" which was a chemical that hijacked Robin's nervous system.

strange way to end an episode that dedicated so much time to building out the fact that this was PTSD only to not have it be PTSD lmao

we also have yarrow but i can differentiate that from the others

turns out that all of the stuff i thought was Queen Anne's Lace in the neighborhood is probably poison hemlock

i hate when people use my positivity to ignore what i'm saying and make assumptions about why i'm saying it!!! stop it!!! i'm trying to give good, well rounded advice!!!!!!!!!

can not overstate enough just how much i hate being relegated to "optimistic" when im trying to talk to someone in an advisor-context

oh man i didn't know i was using half a terabyte for media storage on this instance lmaooo i should clean this up

i got into streaming, political discourse, and philosophy because i wanted to learn my world, but instead i have mostly gotten myself further and further away from the world, and only recently have i been learning how to conceptualize the reality of world creation which i was so blind to for so long. i've been making my own world this whole time, attaching myself to things which could not fulfill me, and i don't want to do it anymore. i'm ready for something else.

been thinking a lot about how i want to dedicate my time moving forward. i've been going through a lot of memories - thinking about what child-me thought about the world and their place in it.

at a certain point in my youth i wanted to be a "scientist" - which, as my memory serves, was conceived of as a sort of "innovative problem solver". But of course, the more i grew up, the more i learned that a great deal of science was often not about innovative problem solving, or at least not in the naive view i had initially. the bureaucratic/academic side of things continued to feel further and further from the reality of the situation on the ground. solutions proposed from capitalist funding, and thus, a capitalist framework, felt more and more constricting before i even got started anywhere.

at a certain point i was heavily inspired by certain characters like Gandalf; wizards, knowledgeable and wise, with a heart towards good living together. i still, also, enjoyed the more naive side of magic users and finding ones place with certain witches like ghibli's Kiki. these sort of influences certainly had a part in encouraging my own initial work of witchcraft. but still, even then, i had failed to live up to any standard. i had fallen into some of the exact problems of disconnection. i started my witchcraft journey while i was a software developer. it was part of a naive attempt to imagine something better than the endless days of software development, instead of being part of an attempt to learn any of the land i was living on (because i didn't believe the apartment complex to be any sort of complex living), and the different overlapping lives infinitely smaller and larger than mine which make any of it possible. my witchcraft was mostly just me doing some practices of self-reflection and attempts to access knowledges of emotional association between objects.

for a long time in my youth i thought i would make music. it was a life rhythm i could connect to, it had it's own flow i felt like i could follow - but when i learned no one close to me wanted to follow that flow with me, i felt forsaken and disconnected from the only part of the world i had any strong connections to... then i got into software development as a way out. and ever since then i've been looking for something to make the world feel real again.

only in the last few years have i felt like i've gotten close. and i'm ready to chart the next course.

we don't make our own luck, but sometimes we make it for other people

forever riding off the high of the time that i found a penny tails side up on the floor of a pizza place that was hosting a metal show - flipped it over to it's "head" side, and not 60 seconds after someone walking into the building, seeing the penny, picking it up and excitedly exclaiming to me "it's on heads! that means its good luck!"

@maia sorry can't think about that rn, i'm surrounded in delicious dirt that i need to start eating pronto