I have to begin this post by admitting that I’ve been censoring myself for a good while now. That might seem strange on the site where I say fuck all the time and occasionally make posts about porn, but it’s true. This post is an attempt at ending that. It should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the update schedule, but I’ve been having a hard time getting those weekly posts out consistently. Every couple weeks, I give out some vague bullshit about mental health holding me back before I find some way to force myself to write or draw something the next week. I don’t say what’s bugging me, I close myself off to others, and I keep all the bad feelings down until something stupid and inconsequential gets on my nerves and I explode. This is a pattern I am growing extremely tired of.
Most of the time (about 98-99% of the time), whenever I’m pissed off or upset, it’s always at myself. I was raised in an environment where, in addition to all of the physical and sexual abuse, it was drilled into my head that if you don’t immediately succeed at something on your first attempt, you’re a big loser who sucks and should stop doing things before you embarrass yourself any further. Turns out that this, uh, isn’t good for you. Leaves you with a lifetime of self-doubt that you never truly get over. You beat yourself up when something isn’t perfect; I have had to rewrite, reprogram, redraw, or completely scrap things that were probably completely fine, but weren’t good enough to me. That means delays. That means excuses. That means I’m failing to live up to a standard I set for myself because I have something to prove. I don’t know what exactly I have to prove, but I have to prove it! That little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that I always have to be working on something, and that something has to be the best thing I’ve made since the last thing I’ve made. Then there are other things that I get mad at.
This is the part that I always have to delete; the part that I get even more upset about. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last Monday, but I can remember every word of every message board post, every Twitter thread, every pseudonymous Medium article about me. I can remember years of being run down, my every word and every interaction analyzed, to either try and make me feel unsafe in any digital public space, or to try and make me out to be a member of some nazi sex cult that doesn’t actually exist. I remember every death threat. I remember every threat made at people simply for knowing me. People who have never known the joy and beauty of life wanting to make others miserable. People who see the term “peaked in high school” as a concept to romanticize and not the insult that it is. Bad enough I have an internal voice providing a steady stream of shit talk directed at me, having multiple external ones doesn’t help! This bubbling paranoia and perpetual inability to be satisfied in my own abilities likes to completely take over from time to time, and it’s been real fucking bad this year. This then leads to me having to examine myself, then examine all the external bullshit that compounds all of this.
need to break up large sections of text with images again. hope you all like old taito arcade games.
I’ve been having this growing frustration at not only myself for my difficulty in performing and letting myself get into my own head, but I’ve been getting more frustrated at the world at large. Everything feels fake, more than it ever has. Nobody believes in anything, and anybody who does is considered a stupid moron bitch faggot retard that’s deserving of mockery and exploitation. Social spaces are loaded with South Park Republicans operating on a double-digit level of irony, all promoting ideologies that are simply different flavors of fascism underneath all the good-sounding buzzwords to attract suckers like me. Everything is a hustle. Everything has to be a controversy. Everything is this cold-war-like game of chicken where the first person to show a genuine emotion loses. Anarchists who pal around with right-wing dopes that quote Jordan Peterson the way you and I quote an episode of The Simpsons. Feminists who are knowingly, willingly, and happily married to men who have committed multiple acts of sexual terror. People that express a desire for a utopian “gay luxury space communism” who will call your minimum wage retail/service job to try and get you fired because for 43 seconds at 9:23 PM on April 12th, 2009, you were the “wrong kind of queer.” Hell, there’s a guy who did a political 180 because “Hangman” Adam Page accidentally hit a landlord too hard. Seems like everyone, especially those who give themselves a megaphone, are one minor inconvenience away from taking off the mask and joining the alt-right. Nothing means anything, and you’re made to feel like you’re going crazy for having a sincere system of beliefs and values. That makes it hard to make something.
On top of my self-doubt and my frustration with the state of the world, I’m also pretty frustrated regarding this endless fucking discourse about “which social media site are we going to next, ya’ll?” Hearing this shit from people I used to be friends with, people who used to shout from the mountaintops that they loved my work and they loved how eloquent and smart I can be. In one fell swoop, every last one of them proved to be liars who think I’m a fucking idiot with shitty ideas. For years, I have been beating this drum over and over again: get away from algorithms and make your own web site. Take some form of minor action to at least attempt to make the internet, this beautiful tool for communication and ideas, not owned by the same three shark-toothed billionaires. This idea has been thoroughly rejected, hard. Someone, no shit, used the term “emotional labor” to describe signing up for something like Neocities and learning extremely basic HTML, something that used to be taught when I was in high school. Emotional Labor. Those two words used in that context opened my third eye. I realized then and there that I had wasted years of my life reading, following, even being friends with people who talk a big game. They don’t want change. They don’t want the world to be better than it is. They simply want something to fucking complain about. Without Twitter, how can one build a brand and get the much-needed endorphins you get from landing a spicy zinger on some republican senators’ unpaid intern? So let’s all join Threads, and buy more land in the Metaverse. Let’s all beg for invites to Bluesky, the cool kids club where it’s just like Twitter the way we remember it: where you still get death threats for being a minority, but the guy who runs it is merely a dumbfuck libertarian and not a direct beneficiary of apartheid. Let’s sign up for Hive, and give all of our personal information to God knows who. Let’s join the site founded through performative spite, Cohost, great for leftists who will say “Kiwi Farms serves a purpose” with a straight face and great for every white person who keeps posting uncensored videos of police brutality, and when black people tell you to knock the shit off, you can smugly reply with “heh, I guess some people don’t care about racism in America!” Fuck the idea of making something with your hands, sharing your interests and thoughts with people with similar tastes. Fuck art, fuck love, fuck unity. Let’s all just keep hating each other so a fucking heart under our name will have a bigger number next to it. Makes it real fucking hard to want to keep writing these blog posts, if all I’m going to do is yell into a void.
I keep begging myself to stop caring. Stop giving a fuck. Simply retreat into this world of retro video games, Japanese cartoons, cool wrestling matches, and deviant pornography. Finally cash in on all that privilege I have; you know, all that privilege I get accused of having every time I tell some asshole to go fuck themselves after they call me a groomer. Let everyone grift, rape, and kill each other, while I stay home and get my mind blown by some Japan-only Famicom Disk System game from 1987. But then I have to read the news. I have to click the political channels in the Discord servers I’m in. I get an eyeful of the world, the width and breadth of the hate that exists in the people that live in it, and I remember that nobody cares. Social justice is nothing more than a side hustle these days, and it frustrates me. Nothing means anything.
There’s that logical part of my brain that reminds me that I’m not the one with the problem; I’m trying my best to get through with what I’ve got. All the bullshit me and people like me have had to go through was not and is not our fault. I get mad at myself for my own perceived failures, then time passes, I calm down, realize that all of this shit is coming from external sources, then I get mad at myself again for getting mad at myself! It’s maddening, and it is burning me the hell out. Since about 2020, I’ve been writing. Mostly writing about games, but still writing. Just putting my ideas down where they can exist. Half the reason I do this is because I want to; I like to share my thoughts, and the small audience I have gained in this time seems to dig it too. The other half of why I’m doing this is because I wanted to prove to people that it’s possible. That anyone could create, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant that creation is. You don’t a special skill, you don’t need permission, all you need to do is do it. Nobody wants to do it. I’ve been struggling lately because I don’t know if it’s worth it to keep doing this. I didn’t get into writing or video games to be a millionaire with thousands of devoted followers or something stupid like that, but I still want to feel like this is rewarding somehow, like I’m not spending all this time putting my words together if it’s going to be the equivalent of a tree falling in the woods. I say, but I have zero plans to actually drop this site. Maybe not force myself to do stuff every week? I think that’s the point of this super long rant? That I should give myself a break for multiple reasons? That I should try to have some goddamn fun while everyone else can go to hell? In any case, I had to let out a lot of feelings I’ve been holding in, but now it’s very late and I’ve written over 1800 words, so I’m ending this and going to bed.
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