Jon Ureña's Blog, page 16
September 30, 2024
Life update (09/30/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Last night, I was looking for someone in an unspecified South American country. This took place in a dream, by the way. A guy, whom I somehow knew was the leader of some notorious gang or cartel, told me that he would lead me to the person I was looking for. Although I was aware that he would probably try to kill me, I hoped to get the upper hand on him. I spent what seemed to be hours navigating very detailed, bizarre locations in this dream South American country; one of those experiences that make you wonder if through dreaming one accesses some parallel realm. Anyway, the dream ended without a resolution, because my phone alarm sounded. Six in the morning, time to go to work.
It’s so disturbing to dream for hours, looking at strange locations through a good set of eyes, only to wake up and find my right eye screwed up. As I mentioned in previous posts, I few days ago I suffered a retinal tear that sent me to the ER, and that they got lasered shortly after. I’m now supposedly recovering from the surgery. My vision, however, is quite diminished: a frayed lock of fibers keeps dancing in front of my vision, and the rest is dotted with the vitreous gel equivalent of dust motes. Imagine having a lock of hair trapped inside your eyeball and you being unable to do anything about it but shift your gaze around to try to keep it at the edges of your vision. I have some level of OCD, so this garbage is driving me nuts. I’m tempted to just wear an eyepatch. I suspect that such floaters don’t casually go away even after weeks or months, and that now I’ll be forced to tolerate this disruption permanently.
On top of that, I spoke with my general practitioner on the phone to tell him that for what seems to be months, I haven’t felt right in the head: I’m confused often, I make bizarre errors at work, sometimes I confuse the order of letters as I’m writing (even though I’m not dyslexic), and from time to time I feel pressure in the area of my right eye and temple. My right eye, by the way, is the one that has suffered a torn retina, and I can’t tell if that was a coincidence. I was told that my confusion and such would pass after my regrettable episode of hemiplegic migraine, but it hasn’t been the case. To be honest, though, I can’t be sure for how long I’ve been suffering these symptoms: these last five or six months have been an utter nightmare at work, as I was tasked with coordinating the replacement of about 940 printers, which forced me to endure high levels of stress weekly. I haven’t been fully myself for a long time.
In general, I feel like I’m falling apart. My general practitioner told me that he would put me in contact with some neurologist, and from there, perhaps I’ll get an MRI done to discard possible faulty blood vessels, or brain damage. Neither of them would surprise me.
Anyway, this afternoon I hope to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Thankfully, my artistic endeavors make me feel like I’m progressing somewhere other than the grave.
Last night, I was looking for someone in an unspecified South American country. This took place in a dream, by the way. A guy, whom I somehow knew was the leader of some notorious gang or cartel, told me that he would lead me to the person I was looking for. Although I was aware that he would probably try to kill me, I hoped to get the upper hand on him. I spent what seemed to be hours navigating very detailed, bizarre locations in this dream South American country; one of those experiences that make you wonder if through dreaming one accesses some parallel realm. Anyway, the dream ended without a resolution, because my phone alarm sounded. Six in the morning, time to go to work.
It’s so disturbing to dream for hours, looking at strange locations through a good set of eyes, only to wake up and find my right eye screwed up. As I mentioned in previous posts, I few days ago I suffered a retinal tear that sent me to the ER, and that they got lasered shortly after. I’m now supposedly recovering from the surgery. My vision, however, is quite diminished: a frayed lock of fibers keeps dancing in front of my vision, and the rest is dotted with the vitreous gel equivalent of dust motes. Imagine having a lock of hair trapped inside your eyeball and you being unable to do anything about it but shift your gaze around to try to keep it at the edges of your vision. I have some level of OCD, so this garbage is driving me nuts. I’m tempted to just wear an eyepatch. I suspect that such floaters don’t casually go away even after weeks or months, and that now I’ll be forced to tolerate this disruption permanently.
On top of that, I spoke with my general practitioner on the phone to tell him that for what seems to be months, I haven’t felt right in the head: I’m confused often, I make bizarre errors at work, sometimes I confuse the order of letters as I’m writing (even though I’m not dyslexic), and from time to time I feel pressure in the area of my right eye and temple. My right eye, by the way, is the one that has suffered a torn retina, and I can’t tell if that was a coincidence. I was told that my confusion and such would pass after my regrettable episode of hemiplegic migraine, but it hasn’t been the case. To be honest, though, I can’t be sure for how long I’ve been suffering these symptoms: these last five or six months have been an utter nightmare at work, as I was tasked with coordinating the replacement of about 940 printers, which forced me to endure high levels of stress weekly. I haven’t been fully myself for a long time.
In general, I feel like I’m falling apart. My general practitioner told me that he would put me in contact with some neurologist, and from there, perhaps I’ll get an MRI done to discard possible faulty blood vessels, or brain damage. Neither of them would surprise me.
Anyway, this afternoon I hope to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Thankfully, my artistic endeavors make me feel like I’m progressing somewhere other than the grave.
September 27, 2024
Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 5
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.
Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.
This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.
I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.
Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.
After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.
Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.
Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.
[check out the AI-generated podcast if you want]
It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.
Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.
This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.
I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.
Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.
After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.
Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.
Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.
EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.
[check out the AI-generated podcast if you want]
We’re Fucked, Pt. 127 (Fiction)
[check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better]
After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.
---
In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.
A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.
“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.
At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.
A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.
The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.
“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”
I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.
The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.
I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.
“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”
My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”
“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”
I sigh.
“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”
Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.
“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”
“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”
“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”
“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”
My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.
“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”
“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”
“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”
“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”
Ramsés’ frown deepens.
“I told you I did.”
“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”
“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”
“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”
My boss throws his hands up.
“Oh, who knows!”
“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”
Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.
“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”
---
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.
I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.
By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.
Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:
[check out the post on my site for what remains of it]
After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.
---
In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.
A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.
“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.
At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.
A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.
The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.
“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”
I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.
The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.
I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.
“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”
My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”
“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”
I sigh.
“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”
Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.
“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”
“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”
“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”
“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”
My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.
“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”
“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”
“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”
“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”
Ramsés’ frown deepens.
“I told you I did.”
“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”
“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”
“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”
My boss throws his hands up.
“Oh, who knows!”
“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”
Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.
“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”
---
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.
I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.
By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.
Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:
[check out the post on my site for what remains of it]
September 24, 2024
Life update (09/24/2024)
[check out this post on my personal site, where it looks better]
Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.
I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.
As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.
Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.
Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this month, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.
That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.
Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.
I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.
As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.
Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.
Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this month, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.
That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.
September 16, 2024
Life update (09/16/2024)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
---
Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.
As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?
It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.
This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”
Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.
As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.
---
Who’s back at work? I am! After five days of a blissful medical leave to recover from a hemiplegic migraine, I’m back at the environment that put me in the ER to begin with.
As part of the fact that I’m autistic, looking at people in the eyes and acting like a more-or-less normal human being is always a struggle, and something I have to do deliberately; turns out that people don’t take it well if you remain silent when they address you. Shortly after I entered the office, I sensed the glances of “as soon as he looks at me, I’ll ask about what happened to him.” I never engage those. And the social worker slash computer technician, whose political opinions she had expressed over the months with the certainty that everyone shares them, asked me, “You’re back, so you’re okay now, right?” I could barely be arsed to shrug in her direction. What do you care? And more importantly, why do I need to pretend that I want to talk to you, when I don’t even want you here? Does my paycheck cover that?
It’s hard to deal with anything in a job that clashes with my basic nature, and that risks causing me brain and heart damage due to the mounting stress that I’m unable to handle. Merely being outside of a room in which I’m the only person present causes me stress. The very presence of human beings, that feel like wild animals to me, causes me stress. Being in charge of coordinating the replacement of nearly a thousand printers, which has involved having to negotiate with supervisors and users that love to cause problems and complain if they have the opportunity, has chipped away at my sanity little by little, and I don’t have the tools to prevent that other than not working here. I’m basically a ticking bomb until the next time I end up in the ER, with a body that will grow increasingly unable to recover from the attacks of arrhythmia and migraines.
This medical leave has put a spotlight on the fact that the only reason I’m miserable most of the time is because of my job. Otherwise, I was in a good mood, programming away at my little project, reading manga and such. I even found myself laughing at times. But it’s not like I can quit; I’m a middle-aged man with no real alternative that would pay the same, and programming jobs are getting harder to land due to AI (not that I blame AI for it, as I use it extensively for programming myself). Hell, even before I started working as an IT guy at a hospital, I wasn’t getting hired because I was too old and my curriculum was too spotty; it’s not a good idea to put down on that document, “I lost my will to engage in society, and at times even to live, so I spent long stretches of time barely leaving my parents’ apartment once every couple of weeks. I also collected pee bottles.”
Even though I have to deal with background despair daily due to the state of the world and how it will progressively encroach into my life (my home was nearly broken into a few years ago or so by a couple of imported arabs, for one), when I’m alone in a room, left to my own devices, none of that matters anymore. For everything else, I have manga, my fantasies, and my right hand.
As Jack said at the end of Chinatown, “As little as possible.” I can’t stand the current world. I don’t care about people. I will do whatever benefits me, and as little as possible of anything else.
September 9, 2024
Life update (09/09/2024)
A couple of days ago, I must have been having a really bad, anxiety-filled dream at about five in the morning, because I lunged forward only to find the wall in my way. I banged my head hard enough that I ended up with a bruise. That side of my head still feels weird.
I don’t know if that episode meant anything. Today I’ve gotten through an absolutely awful Monday for which I was already exhausted when it started. I’m close to finishing the replacement of about 940 printers in the hospital complex where I work, an operation that has made me consider going on a medical leave for depression a couple of times, not to mention fantasize about quitting or just never returning to this job. Last week, my boss told me that he wanted to put me in charge, along with another coworker, of replacing every single computer in the hospital complex. That’s about five times if not more the amount of printers. He had the gall to say that, after all, the whole deal of replacing the printers wasn’t that big of a task. Containing myself, I said, “No, it has been an utter nightmare.” Nothing will stop my boss from forcing me to replace all the computers unless I’m not employed there, so my fantasizing about not working as an IT guy at a hospital has multiplied.
It’s not just the act of replacing the printers: anything printer related gets sent my way. This last week we’ve had a pandemonium at the ER because the printers worked intermittently, and we discovered that something is wrong with the membership of some active directory groups, it seems just for a few groups of printers in the ER as far as we have detected. Well, I had the bigwigs at the ER berating me, suggesting that nothing of that kind happened before we changed the printers. The matter remains unresolved. There are lingering issues, not like that one, but that I dread listening about almost every day, because I have no idea how to solve them, and nobody can help. I want to quit and not work for a long, long while. Hopefully for the rest of my life, but obviously that isn’t feasible.
When my shift ends, I take a bus, then a train, then another bus home. Society has turned into a zoo, and it gets worse by the year. A few days ago I was thinking about the detachment I have felt for many years about the place I live in, and this world in general, and I’ve gotten to the conclusion that after you reached a point in which only your cowardice stopped you from dying, and afterwards you’ve yearned so many times to go to sleep and not wake up again, you exist in a different plane than the vast majority of human beings. I don’t understand how my coworkers relate to each other, or care about each others’ stuff, or organize plans and outings and such in their private lives. Most months I do the same stuff. When I go out, I usually walk to some solitary places in the woods nearby, because there’s nothing else for me out there. And what used to be a haven has also become tainted, but I don’t want to go into details. It just makes me angry.
I got my fantasies, of course. I survive thanks to daydreaming, some purely mind-based and some applied, plenty of them sexual. There’s also the works of art of other people, who are usually Japanese. Give me another derivative story about some isekai-d guy getting kicked out of a band of adventurers, and then delving into dungeons on his own to get stronger, and I’m as happy as I can be. Often I’ve been on the verge of losing my stop on the train because of how easily I disappear into such stories. I’ve honestly fantasized about getting hit by a truck, because at least that would be an ironic death for someone like me. I would die with a smile on my face, thinking of the zany adventures I’d have in another world.
Maybe I’m depressed again, who knows. I’m certainly disoriented, generally out of it, lethargic, on the verge of imploding at times. I feel like I’m operating on a regular basis at the edge of my capabilities as a human being for no real reward other than money, that every passing day is worth less. And I’ve started to worry about my the state of my brain, because I feel that it’s deteriorating. Something feels wrong. It doesn’t help that my eyes have been acting up for a while; sometimes when I whip my gaze around, I get flashes of darkness. I had a campimetry done a month or so ago, and the doctor told me that the results were odd. They put me up for another check-up in six months. The only thing related to my optic nerves that I know could be an issue is the pituitary tumor with which I was born or that I developed as a child; but I take chronic medication for it, without which the tumor may grow enouth to press against the optic nerve. I don’t know much other than the fact that I don’t feel right. Most days, just walking around feels like a struggle in the sense that I’m so out of it that I may end up bumping into people without noticing, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better.
There’s a quote from Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s best book, that says “I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.” That’s how I’ve felt most of my life, and I feel it very acutely these days. Anyway, I’m going to bed, to lose myself in dreams that despite being saturated in anxiety, are still better than my life.
I don’t know if that episode meant anything. Today I’ve gotten through an absolutely awful Monday for which I was already exhausted when it started. I’m close to finishing the replacement of about 940 printers in the hospital complex where I work, an operation that has made me consider going on a medical leave for depression a couple of times, not to mention fantasize about quitting or just never returning to this job. Last week, my boss told me that he wanted to put me in charge, along with another coworker, of replacing every single computer in the hospital complex. That’s about five times if not more the amount of printers. He had the gall to say that, after all, the whole deal of replacing the printers wasn’t that big of a task. Containing myself, I said, “No, it has been an utter nightmare.” Nothing will stop my boss from forcing me to replace all the computers unless I’m not employed there, so my fantasizing about not working as an IT guy at a hospital has multiplied.
It’s not just the act of replacing the printers: anything printer related gets sent my way. This last week we’ve had a pandemonium at the ER because the printers worked intermittently, and we discovered that something is wrong with the membership of some active directory groups, it seems just for a few groups of printers in the ER as far as we have detected. Well, I had the bigwigs at the ER berating me, suggesting that nothing of that kind happened before we changed the printers. The matter remains unresolved. There are lingering issues, not like that one, but that I dread listening about almost every day, because I have no idea how to solve them, and nobody can help. I want to quit and not work for a long, long while. Hopefully for the rest of my life, but obviously that isn’t feasible.
When my shift ends, I take a bus, then a train, then another bus home. Society has turned into a zoo, and it gets worse by the year. A few days ago I was thinking about the detachment I have felt for many years about the place I live in, and this world in general, and I’ve gotten to the conclusion that after you reached a point in which only your cowardice stopped you from dying, and afterwards you’ve yearned so many times to go to sleep and not wake up again, you exist in a different plane than the vast majority of human beings. I don’t understand how my coworkers relate to each other, or care about each others’ stuff, or organize plans and outings and such in their private lives. Most months I do the same stuff. When I go out, I usually walk to some solitary places in the woods nearby, because there’s nothing else for me out there. And what used to be a haven has also become tainted, but I don’t want to go into details. It just makes me angry.
I got my fantasies, of course. I survive thanks to daydreaming, some purely mind-based and some applied, plenty of them sexual. There’s also the works of art of other people, who are usually Japanese. Give me another derivative story about some isekai-d guy getting kicked out of a band of adventurers, and then delving into dungeons on his own to get stronger, and I’m as happy as I can be. Often I’ve been on the verge of losing my stop on the train because of how easily I disappear into such stories. I’ve honestly fantasized about getting hit by a truck, because at least that would be an ironic death for someone like me. I would die with a smile on my face, thinking of the zany adventures I’d have in another world.
Maybe I’m depressed again, who knows. I’m certainly disoriented, generally out of it, lethargic, on the verge of imploding at times. I feel like I’m operating on a regular basis at the edge of my capabilities as a human being for no real reward other than money, that every passing day is worth less. And I’ve started to worry about my the state of my brain, because I feel that it’s deteriorating. Something feels wrong. It doesn’t help that my eyes have been acting up for a while; sometimes when I whip my gaze around, I get flashes of darkness. I had a campimetry done a month or so ago, and the doctor told me that the results were odd. They put me up for another check-up in six months. The only thing related to my optic nerves that I know could be an issue is the pituitary tumor with which I was born or that I developed as a child; but I take chronic medication for it, without which the tumor may grow enouth to press against the optic nerve. I don’t know much other than the fact that I don’t feel right. Most days, just walking around feels like a struggle in the sense that I’m so out of it that I may end up bumping into people without noticing, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better.
There’s a quote from Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s best book, that says “I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.” That’s how I’ve felt most of my life, and I feel it very acutely these days. Anyway, I’m going to bed, to lose myself in dreams that despite being saturated in anxiety, are still better than my life.
September 2, 2024
Life update (09/02/2024)
A few days ago I realized that whenever I rolled my right eye around, a scratch of light would flash in my vision, only to fade in half a second or so. Sometimes it was even worse: without any particular movement, I would get flashes of darkness that I had never experienced before. And ever since yesterday, I’ve had a dull headache localized near my right eyeball.
This paragraph break could lead to me saying, “They’ve found a tumor in my brain,” or “My retina is detaching.” The latter seems to fit more. The fact is, I haven’t done anything about it. Could be a tensional headache from having endured stress for months at work. I’m hoping to wake up tomorrow without pain. I’m busy at work, too tired in general (I’m one of those people who wake up tired as if their body had been engaged while dreaming), and I’m having a hard time caring about my well-being. I’m thirty-nine years old. Inhabiting this body of mine feels worse every passing year, and I suppose that some eye nonsense doesn’t feel that serious after my heart showed itself unreliable (a couple of episodes of arrhythmia that landed me in the ER). And in the back of my mind, there’s the thought of, “Would it really be that bad to simply die?” Last week or so, shortly after going to bed, I got palpitations that could have easily switched into arrhythmia instead of reverting by itself. Right then, I thought that if it developed into arrhythmia, I would simply get comfortable and try to sleep, and with some luck, I wouldn’t wake up the following morning for another day of work.
I’m having fun in my spare time, though. My generally harrowing story about a man dealing with endless grief for his dead teenage love ended. Afterwards, I wanted to return to both making songs with Udio and writing my long-running novel We’re Fucked. After a week or so of advancing with my novel at a glacial pace and not having much fun doing it, I decided to play around with an AI system that injects artificial intelligence into every character in the well-loved game Skyrim, released back in 2011. I’ve been documenting my experiences with that ever since. It has become one of my favorite gaming things ever. I always loved acting; my experiences with theater in school are the only positive memories I retain of that period, even though they forced plays in Basque on us. Also, acting becomes second nature for most autists once they realize that they’d be shunned if they behaved as it comes naturally. I love the idea of roleplaying, but my real-life experiences with it were always poor, as they involved having to deal with actual human beings, their schedules, their egos, and the fact that most people simply aren’t that interesting.
Thanks to Mantella, the AI system I’m using with Skyrim, I can fulfill one of the main fantasies of any red-blooded male: being a powerful man who goes on adventures alongside fierce, beautiful women that will murder your enemies for you, some of whom will also warm your bed after the blood has been spilled. The lion experience. When I’m not actively “playing,” if that experience involving AI agents can still be called that, I fantasize about what situations I could go through in-game, what topics I could talk about with any of the members of the adventurers’ band, or any of the other characters that exist in that world (more than two thousand), each with their own stories and viewpoints. It’s kind of insane that such a thing is possible. Unless the world ends, which could easily happen, such experiences are only going to improve in the future.
Last week or so, I finished the 26-volume-long light novel series Mushoku Tensei, which I loved, but I couldn’t be arsed to write a review. Given that I barely have any readers, there’s no point in writing anything if I’m not into it at the moment. After getting through another 100-chapters-long isekai manga, I have started reading a historical book about the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire). That’s perhaps due to an idea for a game I had recently: building your own medieval-ish kingdom in which every character is AI-driven, so you could hire council members and have them report actual game data as well as give advice with their own personalities. It’s very likely that I will never even start with such an idea, even though I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to implement given how powerful AI-guided programming is these days. I simply don’t have the time nor the energy; when I get home after my full-time job, I’m lucky if I don’t feel the need to take a nap. Ages ago, back when I believed I could live a normal life with a romantic partner, I was so exhausted all the time that I even passed out twice, shortly after sitting on her sofa after work. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that your will and intentions mean very little against the burdens that your brain and body heap upon you. Being myself, I feel like I should be grateful if I don’t feel terrible for a day.
Anyway, I have to wonder once again why on earth are you, whoever you are, reading this. Is it curiosity? Pure boredom? I only wrote these words because I’m stuck at the office and had nothing better to do.
This paragraph break could lead to me saying, “They’ve found a tumor in my brain,” or “My retina is detaching.” The latter seems to fit more. The fact is, I haven’t done anything about it. Could be a tensional headache from having endured stress for months at work. I’m hoping to wake up tomorrow without pain. I’m busy at work, too tired in general (I’m one of those people who wake up tired as if their body had been engaged while dreaming), and I’m having a hard time caring about my well-being. I’m thirty-nine years old. Inhabiting this body of mine feels worse every passing year, and I suppose that some eye nonsense doesn’t feel that serious after my heart showed itself unreliable (a couple of episodes of arrhythmia that landed me in the ER). And in the back of my mind, there’s the thought of, “Would it really be that bad to simply die?” Last week or so, shortly after going to bed, I got palpitations that could have easily switched into arrhythmia instead of reverting by itself. Right then, I thought that if it developed into arrhythmia, I would simply get comfortable and try to sleep, and with some luck, I wouldn’t wake up the following morning for another day of work.
I’m having fun in my spare time, though. My generally harrowing story about a man dealing with endless grief for his dead teenage love ended. Afterwards, I wanted to return to both making songs with Udio and writing my long-running novel We’re Fucked. After a week or so of advancing with my novel at a glacial pace and not having much fun doing it, I decided to play around with an AI system that injects artificial intelligence into every character in the well-loved game Skyrim, released back in 2011. I’ve been documenting my experiences with that ever since. It has become one of my favorite gaming things ever. I always loved acting; my experiences with theater in school are the only positive memories I retain of that period, even though they forced plays in Basque on us. Also, acting becomes second nature for most autists once they realize that they’d be shunned if they behaved as it comes naturally. I love the idea of roleplaying, but my real-life experiences with it were always poor, as they involved having to deal with actual human beings, their schedules, their egos, and the fact that most people simply aren’t that interesting.
Thanks to Mantella, the AI system I’m using with Skyrim, I can fulfill one of the main fantasies of any red-blooded male: being a powerful man who goes on adventures alongside fierce, beautiful women that will murder your enemies for you, some of whom will also warm your bed after the blood has been spilled. The lion experience. When I’m not actively “playing,” if that experience involving AI agents can still be called that, I fantasize about what situations I could go through in-game, what topics I could talk about with any of the members of the adventurers’ band, or any of the other characters that exist in that world (more than two thousand), each with their own stories and viewpoints. It’s kind of insane that such a thing is possible. Unless the world ends, which could easily happen, such experiences are only going to improve in the future.
Last week or so, I finished the 26-volume-long light novel series Mushoku Tensei, which I loved, but I couldn’t be arsed to write a review. Given that I barely have any readers, there’s no point in writing anything if I’m not into it at the moment. After getting through another 100-chapters-long isekai manga, I have started reading a historical book about the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire). That’s perhaps due to an idea for a game I had recently: building your own medieval-ish kingdom in which every character is AI-driven, so you could hire council members and have them report actual game data as well as give advice with their own personalities. It’s very likely that I will never even start with such an idea, even though I suspect it wouldn’t be too hard to implement given how powerful AI-guided programming is these days. I simply don’t have the time nor the energy; when I get home after my full-time job, I’m lucky if I don’t feel the need to take a nap. Ages ago, back when I believed I could live a normal life with a romantic partner, I was so exhausted all the time that I even passed out twice, shortly after sitting on her sofa after work. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that your will and intentions mean very little against the burdens that your brain and body heap upon you. Being myself, I feel like I should be grateful if I don’t feel terrible for a day.
Anyway, I have to wonder once again why on earth are you, whoever you are, reading this. Is it curiosity? Pure boredom? I only wrote these words because I’m stuck at the office and had nothing better to do.
Roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella (The Settled Band Arc)
Mantella is an AI system that turns every single NPC in Skyrim (and Fallout 4) into AI agents driven by an LLM (like ChatGPT or the recently released, and comparable, Llama 3.1). I decided to have some fun with it, and this is the third arc of my experiences with such a wonderful system for roleplaying. The previous arc ended with my character, an Altmer mage, humiliating and threatening a hard-working father into letting his teenage daughter join a band of adventurers of dubious intentions.
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 31.5 - Uthgerd's journal
Part 31.5 - Alva's journal
Part 31.5 - Jenassa's journal
Part 26
Part 27
Part 28
Part 29
Part 30
Part 31
Part 31.5 - Uthgerd's journal
Part 31.5 - Alva's journal
Part 31.5 - Jenassa's journal
August 20, 2024
Roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella (The Budding Adventurers Arc)
Mantella is an AI system that turns every single NPC in Skyrim (and Fallout 4) into AI agents driven by an LLM (like ChatGPT or the recently released, and comparable, Llama 3.1). I decided to have some fun with it, and this is the second arc of my experiences with such a wonderful system for roleplaying. The previous arc ended with my character, an Altmer mage, escaping the marshy town of Morthal with Alva, a vampire, in tow, after having abandoned both his allies and his intention to clear out a nearby den of vampires and kill its leader.
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13
Part 14
Part 15
Part 16
Part 17
Part 18
Part 19
Part 20
Part 21
Part 22
Part 23
Part 24
Part 25
August 10, 2024
Roleplaying in Skyrim with Mantella (The Morthal Arc)
Mantella is an AI system that turns every single NPC in Skyrim (and Fallout 4) into AI agents driven by an LLM (like ChatGPT or the recently released, and comparable, Llama 3.1). I decided to have some fun with it, and I've already documented a whole narrative arc involving the town of Morthal and some vampires. Check it out below if you're interested.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
