Jon Ureña's Blog, page 34
January 21, 2023
We’re Fucked, Pt. 84: AI-generated images
Even when you’re approaching the edge of absurdity, you can remain sure that a neural network will generate some intriguing pictures out of it.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many, many images]
January 20, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 84 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The smooth, clawlike trigger presses against the pad of my forefinger. I tighten that digit slowly, then squeeze. The hammer falls with a snick as the firing pin strikes the primer. A ring of sparks, like those churned out when a lighter's wheel grinds against the flint, spreads outward from the gap between the frame and the cylinder, then the revolver's muzzle blows a puff of cigarette-adjacent smoke that scatters in the air.
My heart throbs violently as I stare dumbfounded at the sleek frame of my weapon, that gleams alabaster white under the fluorescent fixtures. Shit, why didn't the revolver spit out a bullet? Is it jammed? Did the firing pin come damaged? Should I have oiled some mechanism? Maybe I should have carried the revolver to the woods, high up on Mount Jaizkibel, and tried it out against a tree trunk. As far as I know, revolvers should just work; I'm not holding a particle accelerator.
I pull the trigger, which causes the hammer to spring back. Once the cylinder rotates to align its next chamber with the barrel, the hammer snaps forward and clunks as if the bullet primer had been struck by a mallet, yet the revolver remains dead like rusted machinery.
I must overcome the revolting monstrosity that dares to pollute my space with its filth. I have to make this fucking gun shoot!
I clutch the revolver in a white-knuckled grip, then I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger. The cylinder clacks as it rotates and rotates chambering bullet after bullet. Although the hammer falls with dull snaps as the firing pin punches into live rounds of ammunition, it may as well be striking ghost bullets.
Are my hands shaking? No, the revolver is trembling like a tuning fork, a vibration that gets transmitted through my palms and up my arms, then races along my spine. The weapon starts emitting an ominous, high-pitched whirring sound; I picture an electrical panel bursting with frayed wires that would zap like a moth even the gloved electrician tasked to repair the mess.
I flip the revolver around and peer down its bore, a black hole encircled by the metallic ring of the muzzle. It offers me a top-down view of a turbulent, undulating pool of brass-colored liquid metal, whose waves spread in alternating crests and troughs as they slam against the walls of the chamber. The bullet must have cohered to a quantum state.
Should I wrap my lips around the barrel and blow? No, whenever the bullet snaps out of its state and becomes a solid projectile, I better be aiming my revolver at the wobbling mass of tarry putrefaction instead of my own face. I turn the quivering gun toward the audience of glistening sclerae, sewage-colored irises and deep black pupils.
I shake the revolver. With my left hand I smack the barrel as if it were a disobedient mutt. A drop of sweat dangles from my nose.
"Damn you, bullet! Quit your insolent game of quantum tag and collapse to an eigenstate already!"
While the revolver vibrates madly, its electric whirring worsens to a keening squeal. A tingling sensation like a static shock shoots up my right arm, then from the trigger a snakey white bolt of electricity, outlined in lilac, crackles as it arcs to lick my forefinger.
A deafening bang rocks the office, shaking the air around me and vibrating my eardrums, which makes my ears ring. From the barrel's mouth erupts a puff of smoke, followed by a glowing, ember-colored blast that trails a stream of flickering sparks like red dwarf stars.
The revolver kicks against the palm of my right hand like a rearing horse trying to tear itself free from the reins. Its force shoots through my wrist with a sharp sting, then my forearm complains as if a white-hot shard of pain had ripped across the slow-twitch fibers.
The bullet hurtles down the barrel and flies out of the muzzle. It streaks across the office until it plows into the blob's bloated blubber with a hollow thwack, piercing that oozing mound of black mucus like a hypodermic syringe stabbing a vein, to explode deep within the amorphous heap of putrescence. The flabby mass heaves and wobbles from the impact. Its jiggly flesh is rippling as if slapped by a giant, while the white reflections of light that mount the oily, concentric waves waver and distort. Those bulging eyeballs bob and roll about in the gunk, jostling each other. The blob lets out, as if from a mouth entombed in a quagmire, an unearthly bellow of anguish, deep and guttural. A hole bursts open in that deformed belly, a hole with a slimy rim that splays out like a black and gooey flower, and that reveals the blob's gelatinous innards: a slithery mass of vermicular guts that squish and wriggle. A belch of foul gas rushes out and swirls around me; it stinks of rotten meat, vomit, farts, and sushi. The abomination erupts in a frothing gush of gloop, spewing mucous intestines in all directions, that as they break apart into globules of tapioca-like goop, they splatter over the carpet, the desk, the monitors, my clothes, and my face, in a caustic snowfall.
A gunshot blast rips apart the air around me, and its concussive wave beats upon my eardrums like a wrecking ball smashing into a brick wall. My ears pop, my brain quakes. A billowing cloud of powder smoke wafts from the muzzle, followed by a blossom of yellow-orange flame.
My right hand explodes with stabbing aches as the revolver's kickback snaps apart my phalanges and metacarpals. The shooting pain surges up my forearm, reverberating to my elbow, while the shockwave ripples tendons and muscles along my arm until the force slams into my shoulder, where the joint dislocates with a crunch.
A bullet cleaves its way through the air. The blob is twisting and thrashing, its blubbery skin frothing and flailing like the sea in a stormy gale, and the hole in its mass is spurting slime-laced foam, when the bullet plunges like a meteorite into the sclera of an eyeball. The outer layers of the globe, white as a boiled egg, tear off, giving way under pressure, and out squirts a tongue of pulpy, pinky-gray jelly.
An ear-splitting gunshot punches my eardrums, sounding as loud as if the revolver's barrel had been ripped open by dynamite. The muzzle flares a vivid yellow-orange, then a vortex of gunpowder-laden smoke rolls out along with a jet of fire, in an eruption of shrapnel-like debris.
My right arm has gone numb except for a stinging, tearing pain. Bone fragments poke out of my hand like spikes, and the fingers, seized rigid, are curled in a claw around the revolver's grip. Blood spills from the wounds, dripping in long strings. The recoil of this gunshot jerks my wrist with a grinding wrench and makes it crack like a twig. That force also knocks me off my feet, launching me backward.
A bullet cuts through the air while leaving a trail of silver smoke in its wake, until it slams like a train into a wall a couple of meters away from my boss' office door. The brick behind the lily-white paint bursts into a pinwheel of shimmering dust, into a shower of chips, splinters and shards.
An explosion rocks the office as if a howitzer had fired an artillery round in front of me. The rippling roar shakes my bones and makes the windows rattle, penetrates my eardrums in a spike of pain and tears them apart. A red flower of flame spurts from the muzzle of my revolver as if from a flamethrower.
The fingers of my right hand are curled and rigid, like the legs of a dead tarantula, around the grip of my weapon, and my wrist is drooping at the joint, when the revolver's kickback tears my hand off. Still clutching the handgun, my severed hand flies toward the ceiling. Blood jets out from the stump of my wrist in a crimson stream.
A corona of red flame is spiralling around the bullet as it hurtles toward the ceiling, slicing through a cloud of gunpowder smoke. The bullet smashes against a ceiling fixture, that shatters in a puff of white haze and a cascade of sparks and glass shards. A cracked flourescent tube tumbles down like an icicle.
My ears are ringing when a shockwave emanates from the runaway revolver in a rush of superheated air. The reverberating force pounds my skull, slams into my chest, ripples through my limbs, and scatters papers, pens and paperclips around the office. A horizontal mushroom cloud expands from the gun's muzzle and ignites into a licking white flame.
Flung backward through the air, I'm sick with whirling vertigo as my mind spins like a top in a cyclone. Jagged bones, along with pinkish-tan tendons and ligaments pulled to shreds, protrude from the degloved and bloody flesh at the end of my right forearm.
A scarlet tail corkscrews after a bullet that is whizzing across the office like a fiery comet. It wallops a hung picture frame, perforating a hole in a photograph of Bunnyman and I at a birthday party. Cracks have spread out from the impact point and crisscrossed over each other in a spiderweb of glittery fractures.
An immense power is released in a single pulse. Its shockwaves resound through my cranium with an infrasonic warble that bends my bones like rubber bands. My teeth rattle, my eyeballs throb, a fountain of blood spurts from my nose. A nova-like flash lights up my field of vision, then from the muzzle of the revolver bursts a star-speckled spiderweb.
A bullet breaks the air around it apart into a glowing rainbow, while the projectile's path deforms into outward-undulating ripples of lilac-colored distortion like those cast by a mirage, turning the contour of a ceiling fixture sinusoidal. The bullet busts through a windowpane, catches an upward gust, ascends like an accelerating rocket, drills a hole in the night sky, and shatters a solar panel of a space station orbiting high above the Earth.
I slam into the backrest of a swivel chair, knocking it over, then I crash to the floor, hitting the back of my head hard. The blow sends a jarring jolt of pain through my vertebrae; I feel my spine crack, crunch, and snap. My legs fly straight back like a ragdoll's, and when they fall to the carpet, I lie sprawled out flat on my back in a tangle of limbs.
My brain feels swollen as if someone were pumping embalming fluid into my skull. My chest heaves, gasping for air. The smell of gunpowder smoke has mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the blob's putrefying stench.
White light wavers in my foggy vision while in front dances a swarm of red specks. But the maelstrom of a black hole yawns at the center of my gaze, and light itself falls in a spiral down that drain, which leads to an endless night.
I'm floating in the silence of the void.
---
Author's note: the song for today is "Goin' Against Your Mind" by Built to Spill (which also sounds great live).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-seven songs so far. Check them out.
Have you had trouble picturing today's nonsense? I paid a neural network to depict plenty of moments from this chapter. Here's the link.
This chapter was by far the hardest to write of a sequence that by itself has been the hardest to write in recent memory. I'm tempted to pull an "Inio Asano after Oyasumi Punpun" and never do this kind of shit again.
---
The smooth, clawlike trigger presses against the pad of my forefinger. I tighten that digit slowly, then squeeze. The hammer falls with a snick as the firing pin strikes the primer. A ring of sparks, like those churned out when a lighter's wheel grinds against the flint, spreads outward from the gap between the frame and the cylinder, then the revolver's muzzle blows a puff of cigarette-adjacent smoke that scatters in the air.
My heart throbs violently as I stare dumbfounded at the sleek frame of my weapon, that gleams alabaster white under the fluorescent fixtures. Shit, why didn't the revolver spit out a bullet? Is it jammed? Did the firing pin come damaged? Should I have oiled some mechanism? Maybe I should have carried the revolver to the woods, high up on Mount Jaizkibel, and tried it out against a tree trunk. As far as I know, revolvers should just work; I'm not holding a particle accelerator.
I pull the trigger, which causes the hammer to spring back. Once the cylinder rotates to align its next chamber with the barrel, the hammer snaps forward and clunks as if the bullet primer had been struck by a mallet, yet the revolver remains dead like rusted machinery.
I must overcome the revolting monstrosity that dares to pollute my space with its filth. I have to make this fucking gun shoot!
I clutch the revolver in a white-knuckled grip, then I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger. The cylinder clacks as it rotates and rotates chambering bullet after bullet. Although the hammer falls with dull snaps as the firing pin punches into live rounds of ammunition, it may as well be striking ghost bullets.
Are my hands shaking? No, the revolver is trembling like a tuning fork, a vibration that gets transmitted through my palms and up my arms, then races along my spine. The weapon starts emitting an ominous, high-pitched whirring sound; I picture an electrical panel bursting with frayed wires that would zap like a moth even the gloved electrician tasked to repair the mess.
I flip the revolver around and peer down its bore, a black hole encircled by the metallic ring of the muzzle. It offers me a top-down view of a turbulent, undulating pool of brass-colored liquid metal, whose waves spread in alternating crests and troughs as they slam against the walls of the chamber. The bullet must have cohered to a quantum state.
Should I wrap my lips around the barrel and blow? No, whenever the bullet snaps out of its state and becomes a solid projectile, I better be aiming my revolver at the wobbling mass of tarry putrefaction instead of my own face. I turn the quivering gun toward the audience of glistening sclerae, sewage-colored irises and deep black pupils.
I shake the revolver. With my left hand I smack the barrel as if it were a disobedient mutt. A drop of sweat dangles from my nose.
"Damn you, bullet! Quit your insolent game of quantum tag and collapse to an eigenstate already!"
While the revolver vibrates madly, its electric whirring worsens to a keening squeal. A tingling sensation like a static shock shoots up my right arm, then from the trigger a snakey white bolt of electricity, outlined in lilac, crackles as it arcs to lick my forefinger.
A deafening bang rocks the office, shaking the air around me and vibrating my eardrums, which makes my ears ring. From the barrel's mouth erupts a puff of smoke, followed by a glowing, ember-colored blast that trails a stream of flickering sparks like red dwarf stars.
The revolver kicks against the palm of my right hand like a rearing horse trying to tear itself free from the reins. Its force shoots through my wrist with a sharp sting, then my forearm complains as if a white-hot shard of pain had ripped across the slow-twitch fibers.
The bullet hurtles down the barrel and flies out of the muzzle. It streaks across the office until it plows into the blob's bloated blubber with a hollow thwack, piercing that oozing mound of black mucus like a hypodermic syringe stabbing a vein, to explode deep within the amorphous heap of putrescence. The flabby mass heaves and wobbles from the impact. Its jiggly flesh is rippling as if slapped by a giant, while the white reflections of light that mount the oily, concentric waves waver and distort. Those bulging eyeballs bob and roll about in the gunk, jostling each other. The blob lets out, as if from a mouth entombed in a quagmire, an unearthly bellow of anguish, deep and guttural. A hole bursts open in that deformed belly, a hole with a slimy rim that splays out like a black and gooey flower, and that reveals the blob's gelatinous innards: a slithery mass of vermicular guts that squish and wriggle. A belch of foul gas rushes out and swirls around me; it stinks of rotten meat, vomit, farts, and sushi. The abomination erupts in a frothing gush of gloop, spewing mucous intestines in all directions, that as they break apart into globules of tapioca-like goop, they splatter over the carpet, the desk, the monitors, my clothes, and my face, in a caustic snowfall.
A gunshot blast rips apart the air around me, and its concussive wave beats upon my eardrums like a wrecking ball smashing into a brick wall. My ears pop, my brain quakes. A billowing cloud of powder smoke wafts from the muzzle, followed by a blossom of yellow-orange flame.
My right hand explodes with stabbing aches as the revolver's kickback snaps apart my phalanges and metacarpals. The shooting pain surges up my forearm, reverberating to my elbow, while the shockwave ripples tendons and muscles along my arm until the force slams into my shoulder, where the joint dislocates with a crunch.
A bullet cleaves its way through the air. The blob is twisting and thrashing, its blubbery skin frothing and flailing like the sea in a stormy gale, and the hole in its mass is spurting slime-laced foam, when the bullet plunges like a meteorite into the sclera of an eyeball. The outer layers of the globe, white as a boiled egg, tear off, giving way under pressure, and out squirts a tongue of pulpy, pinky-gray jelly.
An ear-splitting gunshot punches my eardrums, sounding as loud as if the revolver's barrel had been ripped open by dynamite. The muzzle flares a vivid yellow-orange, then a vortex of gunpowder-laden smoke rolls out along with a jet of fire, in an eruption of shrapnel-like debris.
My right arm has gone numb except for a stinging, tearing pain. Bone fragments poke out of my hand like spikes, and the fingers, seized rigid, are curled in a claw around the revolver's grip. Blood spills from the wounds, dripping in long strings. The recoil of this gunshot jerks my wrist with a grinding wrench and makes it crack like a twig. That force also knocks me off my feet, launching me backward.
A bullet cuts through the air while leaving a trail of silver smoke in its wake, until it slams like a train into a wall a couple of meters away from my boss' office door. The brick behind the lily-white paint bursts into a pinwheel of shimmering dust, into a shower of chips, splinters and shards.
An explosion rocks the office as if a howitzer had fired an artillery round in front of me. The rippling roar shakes my bones and makes the windows rattle, penetrates my eardrums in a spike of pain and tears them apart. A red flower of flame spurts from the muzzle of my revolver as if from a flamethrower.
The fingers of my right hand are curled and rigid, like the legs of a dead tarantula, around the grip of my weapon, and my wrist is drooping at the joint, when the revolver's kickback tears my hand off. Still clutching the handgun, my severed hand flies toward the ceiling. Blood jets out from the stump of my wrist in a crimson stream.
A corona of red flame is spiralling around the bullet as it hurtles toward the ceiling, slicing through a cloud of gunpowder smoke. The bullet smashes against a ceiling fixture, that shatters in a puff of white haze and a cascade of sparks and glass shards. A cracked flourescent tube tumbles down like an icicle.
My ears are ringing when a shockwave emanates from the runaway revolver in a rush of superheated air. The reverberating force pounds my skull, slams into my chest, ripples through my limbs, and scatters papers, pens and paperclips around the office. A horizontal mushroom cloud expands from the gun's muzzle and ignites into a licking white flame.
Flung backward through the air, I'm sick with whirling vertigo as my mind spins like a top in a cyclone. Jagged bones, along with pinkish-tan tendons and ligaments pulled to shreds, protrude from the degloved and bloody flesh at the end of my right forearm.
A scarlet tail corkscrews after a bullet that is whizzing across the office like a fiery comet. It wallops a hung picture frame, perforating a hole in a photograph of Bunnyman and I at a birthday party. Cracks have spread out from the impact point and crisscrossed over each other in a spiderweb of glittery fractures.
An immense power is released in a single pulse. Its shockwaves resound through my cranium with an infrasonic warble that bends my bones like rubber bands. My teeth rattle, my eyeballs throb, a fountain of blood spurts from my nose. A nova-like flash lights up my field of vision, then from the muzzle of the revolver bursts a star-speckled spiderweb.
A bullet breaks the air around it apart into a glowing rainbow, while the projectile's path deforms into outward-undulating ripples of lilac-colored distortion like those cast by a mirage, turning the contour of a ceiling fixture sinusoidal. The bullet busts through a windowpane, catches an upward gust, ascends like an accelerating rocket, drills a hole in the night sky, and shatters a solar panel of a space station orbiting high above the Earth.
I slam into the backrest of a swivel chair, knocking it over, then I crash to the floor, hitting the back of my head hard. The blow sends a jarring jolt of pain through my vertebrae; I feel my spine crack, crunch, and snap. My legs fly straight back like a ragdoll's, and when they fall to the carpet, I lie sprawled out flat on my back in a tangle of limbs.
My brain feels swollen as if someone were pumping embalming fluid into my skull. My chest heaves, gasping for air. The smell of gunpowder smoke has mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the blob's putrefying stench.
White light wavers in my foggy vision while in front dances a swarm of red specks. But the maelstrom of a black hole yawns at the center of my gaze, and light itself falls in a spiral down that drain, which leads to an endless night.
I'm floating in the silence of the void.
---
Author's note: the song for today is "Goin' Against Your Mind" by Built to Spill (which also sounds great live).
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-seven songs so far. Check them out.
Have you had trouble picturing today's nonsense? I paid a neural network to depict plenty of moments from this chapter. Here's the link.
This chapter was by far the hardest to write of a sequence that by itself has been the hardest to write in recent memory. I'm tempted to pull an "Inio Asano after Oyasumi Punpun" and never do this kind of shit again.
January 14, 2023
Life update (01/14/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
It's a quarter to midnight over here and today I've gone through a surreal nightmare. Granted, most experiences feel like surreal nightmares when your neurological makeup is as screwed up as mine.
I woke up at seven to get on a taxi to get on a train straight to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Álava, a neighboring province, because I had to take a bullshit public exam that would determine if in three years or so, for a period of about eight months, they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at some hospital (usually the main hospital at Donostia).
Whenever I travel somewhere new or that I don't visit often, I love the sights on the way. There's a curious mountain somewhere between my city and Vitoria-Gasteiz that looks like hundreds of meters of gray bones sticking out of the ground. The surroundings are flat, and the couple of neighboring towns look quiet and peaceful. I wonder how it would be like to live in such places.
There's a sequence in my beloved previous novel, "My Own Desert Places", when the main guy/girl and his/her love interest take a trip to Asturias. I wrote that sequence in a single Sunday (I have no clue how I managed to write so quickly back then; I wrote the novel in a couple of months). Along the way, the protagonist slowly loses her mind, with hilarious slash disturbing results. I felt pretty much the same on the way back home today, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, I reached Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is a pretty cool city. At least the architecture is intriguing, but my experience, as usual, went something like this: "What a nice and spacious avenue. But why is that retard blasting the morning news so loudly?" "What a picturesque little shop that sells antiques. Oh, that man just hacked up a phlegm and spat it onto the pavement." "Look at that lovely, centuries-old plaza. But why do these people have to speak so loud?" In short, human beings are the worst part of every single fucking experience. Just imagine how lovely a sudden lack of human beings would be. Or at least if they had learned to keep quiet and reproduce responsibly along the way.
I ate a greasy combo plate at some restaurant that turned out to serve huge portions, but whose patrons were, expectedly, obnoxiously loud. I was seated next to a woman in maybe her mid to late thirties whose husband looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. They had three young boys who wouldn't stop annoying each other. The mother looked exasperated. At one point she leaned towards one of her boys and said something like, "do not snatch the toy out of my hand like that. Do you understand me? If you want it ask for it. Say, 'can you please give me the toy?' Do not forcefully grab it from my hand," in a voice that sounded like she resented the kid. A bit later, the youngest of her crotch goblins started bawling. The mother went, "I wish I had come alone, that I had left you three at home so I could have a good time for a change," or something to that effect. The husband wasn't around to witness these interactions.
I will never become pregnant no matter what kind viscous experiment I may partake in, but if I were a woman, I think that one of my worst fears would be to have children only to years later resent having to spend my precious time dealing with them. I've been near a few women when they gave off that impression (another one I remember was a tired-looking woman in her thirties who was writing on a notebook at a coffee shop only for her son to topple her cup, then wander away non-chalantly as the mother was berating him. The woman then started crying softly), and it made me sad. I wanted to stand up and tell those women to shoot their kids in the face and then ride into the sunset with me. I would become their new son if they so pleased. I tend to fantasize about having sex with virtually every moderately attractive woman I come across.
I was dealing with acid reflux and lots of gas when five in the afternoon came around. I joined a few dozen people at some local college to subject myself to the harrowing experience of having to pass some bullshit exam. Turns out that whoever was in charge of choosing the questions for this exam was an idiot, incompetent, or both: about forty percent of the questions were only tangentially related to anything we do at work as IT guys for hospitals. For example, they asked shit like "what is the Spanish authority that provides guidelines to audit the security of information systems?" Bitch, we have nothing to do with network security nor audits. Those are engineers at a completely different job. I don't recall even reading about most of that stuff in the books they told us to buy for this exam.
As if the infuriatingly ridiculous questions weren't enough, the dickhead they put in charge of my classroom only informed us of the remaining time when there were only fifteen minutes left. I didn't even have time to reread all the questions I had left unanswered. In all the other exams, the examiners started informing us of the remaining time with forty-five minutes left. This, along with the questions they chose for the exam, is the kind of shit that happens when both the jury and the examiners are chosen by lottery.
When I got out of that campus, it was dark outside. I was sure that I had flunked the exam. Seated at a coffee table in the mostly deserted train station, because I had to wait an hour until my train back home arrived, I felt utterly miserable. It's not the kind of miserable that someone as broken as me felt back in the day; I'm fully aware that I'm not built for this world, that most of the sensory information it provides on a daily basis feels like nails on a chalkboard, and that I will never feel comfortable among human beings. I have long ceased to fight against any of that. I was just exhausted, defeated, and wanted to go home.
The ride was a blur of pitch-blackness outside, me wanting to have sex with the stylish fake blonde that was seated in front of me, and me wondering how such sexual encounter would work, given that I had spent the last hour and a half holding my farts.
When I got home at about eleven at night, I found out that I actually passed the exam. Barely. So instead of writing an utterly miserable entry, I've written this crap because I feel a bit better. Tomorrow I'll go back to focusing on writing my novel, which is the only thing that truly matters in this world as far as I'm concerned, at least until I finish it and move on to the next thing.
---
It's a quarter to midnight over here and today I've gone through a surreal nightmare. Granted, most experiences feel like surreal nightmares when your neurological makeup is as screwed up as mine.
I woke up at seven to get on a taxi to get on a train straight to Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of Álava, a neighboring province, because I had to take a bullshit public exam that would determine if in three years or so, for a period of about eight months, they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at some hospital (usually the main hospital at Donostia).
Whenever I travel somewhere new or that I don't visit often, I love the sights on the way. There's a curious mountain somewhere between my city and Vitoria-Gasteiz that looks like hundreds of meters of gray bones sticking out of the ground. The surroundings are flat, and the couple of neighboring towns look quiet and peaceful. I wonder how it would be like to live in such places.
There's a sequence in my beloved previous novel, "My Own Desert Places", when the main guy/girl and his/her love interest take a trip to Asturias. I wrote that sequence in a single Sunday (I have no clue how I managed to write so quickly back then; I wrote the novel in a couple of months). Along the way, the protagonist slowly loses her mind, with hilarious slash disturbing results. I felt pretty much the same on the way back home today, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, I reached Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is a pretty cool city. At least the architecture is intriguing, but my experience, as usual, went something like this: "What a nice and spacious avenue. But why is that retard blasting the morning news so loudly?" "What a picturesque little shop that sells antiques. Oh, that man just hacked up a phlegm and spat it onto the pavement." "Look at that lovely, centuries-old plaza. But why do these people have to speak so loud?" In short, human beings are the worst part of every single fucking experience. Just imagine how lovely a sudden lack of human beings would be. Or at least if they had learned to keep quiet and reproduce responsibly along the way.
I ate a greasy combo plate at some restaurant that turned out to serve huge portions, but whose patrons were, expectedly, obnoxiously loud. I was seated next to a woman in maybe her mid to late thirties whose husband looked like he was in his late forties or early fifties. They had three young boys who wouldn't stop annoying each other. The mother looked exasperated. At one point she leaned towards one of her boys and said something like, "do not snatch the toy out of my hand like that. Do you understand me? If you want it ask for it. Say, 'can you please give me the toy?' Do not forcefully grab it from my hand," in a voice that sounded like she resented the kid. A bit later, the youngest of her crotch goblins started bawling. The mother went, "I wish I had come alone, that I had left you three at home so I could have a good time for a change," or something to that effect. The husband wasn't around to witness these interactions.
I will never become pregnant no matter what kind viscous experiment I may partake in, but if I were a woman, I think that one of my worst fears would be to have children only to years later resent having to spend my precious time dealing with them. I've been near a few women when they gave off that impression (another one I remember was a tired-looking woman in her thirties who was writing on a notebook at a coffee shop only for her son to topple her cup, then wander away non-chalantly as the mother was berating him. The woman then started crying softly), and it made me sad. I wanted to stand up and tell those women to shoot their kids in the face and then ride into the sunset with me. I would become their new son if they so pleased. I tend to fantasize about having sex with virtually every moderately attractive woman I come across.
I was dealing with acid reflux and lots of gas when five in the afternoon came around. I joined a few dozen people at some local college to subject myself to the harrowing experience of having to pass some bullshit exam. Turns out that whoever was in charge of choosing the questions for this exam was an idiot, incompetent, or both: about forty percent of the questions were only tangentially related to anything we do at work as IT guys for hospitals. For example, they asked shit like "what is the Spanish authority that provides guidelines to audit the security of information systems?" Bitch, we have nothing to do with network security nor audits. Those are engineers at a completely different job. I don't recall even reading about most of that stuff in the books they told us to buy for this exam.
As if the infuriatingly ridiculous questions weren't enough, the dickhead they put in charge of my classroom only informed us of the remaining time when there were only fifteen minutes left. I didn't even have time to reread all the questions I had left unanswered. In all the other exams, the examiners started informing us of the remaining time with forty-five minutes left. This, along with the questions they chose for the exam, is the kind of shit that happens when both the jury and the examiners are chosen by lottery.
When I got out of that campus, it was dark outside. I was sure that I had flunked the exam. Seated at a coffee table in the mostly deserted train station, because I had to wait an hour until my train back home arrived, I felt utterly miserable. It's not the kind of miserable that someone as broken as me felt back in the day; I'm fully aware that I'm not built for this world, that most of the sensory information it provides on a daily basis feels like nails on a chalkboard, and that I will never feel comfortable among human beings. I have long ceased to fight against any of that. I was just exhausted, defeated, and wanted to go home.
The ride was a blur of pitch-blackness outside, me wanting to have sex with the stylish fake blonde that was seated in front of me, and me wondering how such sexual encounter would work, given that I had spent the last hour and a half holding my farts.
When I got home at about eleven at night, I found out that I actually passed the exam. Barely. So instead of writing an utterly miserable entry, I've written this crap because I feel a bit better. Tomorrow I'll go back to focusing on writing my novel, which is the only thing that truly matters in this world as far as I'm concerned, at least until I finish it and move on to the next thing.
January 10, 2023
Life update (01/10/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Today I have travelled to the hills of Donostia for a cardiology appointment. I had sought a second opinion because the first doctor that treated me had performed an echocardiogram then failed to share the results (he was already ending the visit when I reminded him), had gotten annoyed at me when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very same day I received the latest "booster vaccine" (he told me, "[manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccines have nothing to do with heart issues, erase that from your mind"), and in general behaved like a prick.
This second doctor looked close to retirement, and was cold and abrasive. He simultaneously seemed to believe that patients shouldn't research their symptoms on their own ("because Google mostly lies") and that details about cardiological afflictions and their treatments should be common knowledge.
He told me that acid reflux likely triggered my latest episode of arrhythmia, that I possibly have some esophageal hernia too close to the left ventricle of my heart. It may be the reason why I felt like some pressure was coming up my esophagus, only to "inflate" in the general area of my heart, and then break out into an arrhythmia the moment the pressure deflated. However, he told me that I shouldn't bother to get my esophagus looked at, because the treatment would be the same. Or some shit like that, I'm not sure on that point.
He clarified that I can lift weights, but not heavily (low weights, high repetitions), and that I should focus on cardio instead (I hate cardio). I also shouldn't consume alcohol, caffeine, carbonated beverages or even too cold stuff (like ice cream) preferably ever again. I can't think of anything that has kept me running as much as caffeine has for the last couple of decades, so I don't know how I'll handle that.
What infuriated me was the following (paraphrased) exchange:
Doctor: "When was the first time you experienced such issues with your heart?"
Jon: "Well, the last doctor who wanted an answer to that question got pissed at me when I told him, but here it goes: my heart was healthy until the day I received the latest "booster vaccine," as I was burning up a fever, and I have experienced palpitations ever since."
Doctor: "[Manufactured virus of unspecified origin] is known to damage the electrical functions of the heart, and therefore the vaccine does as well."
Jon: "The other doctor told me that these vaccines are unrelated to heart issues."
The doctor leaned forward.
Doctor: "That's what they are saying because they don't want to discourage people from getting it. But of course the vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, because the virus itself is known to attack such tissues. I have treated, for example, many young women that come from other doctors because they are experiencing what is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); other doctors have told them that it was anxiety related, but these women could tell that the only factor that changed in their lives was getting jabbed."
I would like to put the following text in all caps, but it would look ugly as hell, so I'll use italics instead:
Even though these vaccines don't prevent contagion, don't prevent transmission, don't prevent mutation, that at the most (supposedly) they make the symptoms less severe, even groups that aren't at risk (such as young people) have been mandated to receive them, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of them will develop permanent health issues as a consequence, issues that could cause their deaths. In addition, some doctors, by lying about the dangers, are deliberately stealing their patients' right to make an informed decision regarding whether or not they should get jabbed.
In case you didn't know, Musk divulged emails from some big shot at Pfizer that used government channels to push for censorship of other doctors that stated that the index of mortality regarding this virus in young people was less than zero percent, and that therefore they shouldn't get vaccinated. So many people's heads should roll, but I'll be extremely surprised if any of them end up defending themselves in a courtroom.
Anyway, my doctor emphasized that I should never get a [manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccine again. I suspect that the next time some people order us all into lockdown with whatever excuse, I'd need some signed exemption, or else I would likely lose my job.
This doctor prescribed me three different drugs: one to handle my acid reflux (that I should take every day before dinner), a beta blocker that is supposed to reduce blood pressure (and that could make me seriously dizzy on top of how out of it I generally am, partly thanks to the drug I take for my pituitary tumor), and flecainide in case I find myself out in the wild when the next arrhythmia hits. If my heart rhythm doesn't revert in four hours after taking flecainide, I should visit the ER.
In the end, this new doctor was a bit of a prick, but an honest prick, and that's the best kind. In addition, he didn't fucking charge me for the visit.
I'm unemployed as of last Friday, and I have nothing going on until this Saturday, when I'll have to travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz and pass some bullshit exam. Hopefully in the meantime I'll manage to make enough progress with my novel.
---
Today I have travelled to the hills of Donostia for a cardiology appointment. I had sought a second opinion because the first doctor that treated me had performed an echocardiogram then failed to share the results (he was already ending the visit when I reminded him), had gotten annoyed at me when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very same day I received the latest "booster vaccine" (he told me, "[manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccines have nothing to do with heart issues, erase that from your mind"), and in general behaved like a prick.
This second doctor looked close to retirement, and was cold and abrasive. He simultaneously seemed to believe that patients shouldn't research their symptoms on their own ("because Google mostly lies") and that details about cardiological afflictions and their treatments should be common knowledge.
He told me that acid reflux likely triggered my latest episode of arrhythmia, that I possibly have some esophageal hernia too close to the left ventricle of my heart. It may be the reason why I felt like some pressure was coming up my esophagus, only to "inflate" in the general area of my heart, and then break out into an arrhythmia the moment the pressure deflated. However, he told me that I shouldn't bother to get my esophagus looked at, because the treatment would be the same. Or some shit like that, I'm not sure on that point.
He clarified that I can lift weights, but not heavily (low weights, high repetitions), and that I should focus on cardio instead (I hate cardio). I also shouldn't consume alcohol, caffeine, carbonated beverages or even too cold stuff (like ice cream) preferably ever again. I can't think of anything that has kept me running as much as caffeine has for the last couple of decades, so I don't know how I'll handle that.
What infuriated me was the following (paraphrased) exchange:
Doctor: "When was the first time you experienced such issues with your heart?"
Jon: "Well, the last doctor who wanted an answer to that question got pissed at me when I told him, but here it goes: my heart was healthy until the day I received the latest "booster vaccine," as I was burning up a fever, and I have experienced palpitations ever since."
Doctor: "[Manufactured virus of unspecified origin] is known to damage the electrical functions of the heart, and therefore the vaccine does as well."
Jon: "The other doctor told me that these vaccines are unrelated to heart issues."
The doctor leaned forward.
Doctor: "That's what they are saying because they don't want to discourage people from getting it. But of course the vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, because the virus itself is known to attack such tissues. I have treated, for example, many young women that come from other doctors because they are experiencing what is called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS); other doctors have told them that it was anxiety related, but these women could tell that the only factor that changed in their lives was getting jabbed."
I would like to put the following text in all caps, but it would look ugly as hell, so I'll use italics instead:
Even though these vaccines don't prevent contagion, don't prevent transmission, don't prevent mutation, that at the most (supposedly) they make the symptoms less severe, even groups that aren't at risk (such as young people) have been mandated to receive them, despite the fact that a sizeable percentage of them will develop permanent health issues as a consequence, issues that could cause their deaths. In addition, some doctors, by lying about the dangers, are deliberately stealing their patients' right to make an informed decision regarding whether or not they should get jabbed.
In case you didn't know, Musk divulged emails from some big shot at Pfizer that used government channels to push for censorship of other doctors that stated that the index of mortality regarding this virus in young people was less than zero percent, and that therefore they shouldn't get vaccinated. So many people's heads should roll, but I'll be extremely surprised if any of them end up defending themselves in a courtroom.
Anyway, my doctor emphasized that I should never get a [manufactured virus of unspecified origin] vaccine again. I suspect that the next time some people order us all into lockdown with whatever excuse, I'd need some signed exemption, or else I would likely lose my job.
This doctor prescribed me three different drugs: one to handle my acid reflux (that I should take every day before dinner), a beta blocker that is supposed to reduce blood pressure (and that could make me seriously dizzy on top of how out of it I generally am, partly thanks to the drug I take for my pituitary tumor), and flecainide in case I find myself out in the wild when the next arrhythmia hits. If my heart rhythm doesn't revert in four hours after taking flecainide, I should visit the ER.
In the end, this new doctor was a bit of a prick, but an honest prick, and that's the best kind. In addition, he didn't fucking charge me for the visit.
I'm unemployed as of last Friday, and I have nothing going on until this Saturday, when I'll have to travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz and pass some bullshit exam. Hopefully in the meantime I'll manage to make enough progress with my novel.
January 7, 2023
Life update (01/07/2023)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
My latest job contract has ended, so I'm currently unemployed. I always used to feel relief whenever I found myself jobless, because that meant spending far more time away from people, and conserving my energy to write. However, in three days I have a check up scheduled with a cardiologist (a new one, because I wanted a second opinion), and next saturday I will travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz on train for a public exam that I have been preparing (and dreading) for months, although in the end it will only determine for less than a year (whenever the results come into effect in this weird system they have set up) whether or not they will call me to work at some hospital as an IT guy.
Ten days from now I'll have to visit my previous cardiologist for another check up; when I first met him, he got pissy when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very day I got the latest "booster vaccine" (I have experienced palpitations and weird electrical sensations since, which progressed into two episodes of atrial fibrillation that landed me in the ER). The guy told me that the [manufactured virus of unspecified origen] vaccines are unrelated to heart issues, even though journals of colleges of cardiology say otherwise. After he performed an echocardiogram on me, he was already ending the visit when I had to remind him that he hadn't told me about the results. He said that my left ventricle was too big, and that I should never ever drink alcohol again (I don't drink). I don't trust the prick.
Yesterday I woke up exhausted and with a headache. By four in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, so I took a nap. I woke up at half past six. I wasted the rest of the day visiting shady websites to watch grim videos of pedestrians getting hit by vehicles (mostly in Russia, because they have cameras in their cars, and also because they're nuts), and of other ghastly occurrences such as people getting electrocuted or getting involved in deadly firefights. Sometimes I become entranced by such moments in which, for example, a woman is absentmindedly crossing the train tracks, only to lift her gaze toward her impending death in the form of a rushing hunk of machinery: someone was living their normal life only to suddenly switch and become something else entirely, whether that means dead or crippled in some way for the rest of their lives.
I also watched a few videos of a paraplegic woman from Ontario who has to stimulate her sphincter digitally to poo, and who was so horrified by that propect that she convinced her mother to do it for her from her paralysis at thirteen years old until she moved out.
I have been using VR porn for a few years. Regarding masturbation, nothing so far has beat being able to choose the environment, the "doll," what she's wearing, how she sounds like, the pose, and the rhythm, etc. It tricks my mind so well that I have consistenly had better orgasms through VR porn than those I remember from having actual sex, with the added bonus that I don't have to deal with a flesh-and-bone person. Last time, I loaded a room with a Christmas tree and jingles playing, to make it festive, and as the woman I chose a slim, doll-faced blonde who moaned in French. She mounted my avatar in cowgirl. After I came down from the blissful break from reality and I took my headset off carefully to avoid staining it with cum, I got reminded of the most recent reason why I chose that look for the doll.
Back in summer I visited Hendaye, a French commune within walking distance (I live in the border). It was the first time in my life that I walked around in that town, even though my parents used to drive through it every year to go to the beach. The experience was haunting, partly because it felt like I was traversing through memories, and because the layout of the town itself feels ancient and the town in general uninhabited.
Anyway, as I was approaching their local train station, I lifted my gaze and found myself staring back at a woman in her thirties, perhaps late thirties. She was blonde and slim, and wearing a modest summer dress. Beautiful pale gray eyes. She gave me the impression some women give off: as if yesterday they were in their late tens, only to blink and find themselves aged and not knowing how that happened. But what impacted me the most was that she looked sad, with the kind of haunted resignation that often yearns for an easy way out. The poor woman was likely wary of me, a 6'15 tall, bearded, broad, crazy-looking guy.
I'll likely never see that woman again, not that it would particularly matter if I did. But the thing is: although VR porn takes care wonderfully of a man's sexual urges, I still find myself going to sleep and having to run some elaborate scenario in my mind, complete with settings and clothing and dialogue, of me or an avatar getting to know some woman and ending up cuddling in bed with her. You can't recreate hugs and cuddles through VR, I'm afraid. And it must be important to me, given that I regularly rely on such simulations just to fall asleep, and the protagonist of my current novel, Leire, got infatuated with her lover, Jacqueline (who's also French, but that's likely a coincidence), because the latter hugged and comforted the protagonist after she was found crying.
I was born with a very similar mind to that of writer Patricia Highsmith; after I read a single one of her books (I don't recall which), it became obvious to me that she was autistic and likely had OCD as well. I went straight to reading a biography of hers (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by an author who was clearly infatuated with her), which solidified my certainty. Patricia died before doctors were detecting most cases of autism, but a friend of hers diagnosed Patricia post-mortem as having had Asperger's.
Famously, Patricia worked at a retail store for maybe a few weeks. One of her clients was a beautiful blonde with a regal demeanour. I doubt that Patricia talked to this woman more than once, but it was love (or more accurately, obsession) at first sight. She figured out where this lady lived, and without this woman's knowledge, Patricia observed her from a distance. The woman was married and had kids. Years later, Patricia mentioned this woman as the love of her life, and even became the subject of her novel and later movie The Price of Salt (also named Carol). Autistic people, even more when they also have OCD as comorbidity, can build up in their minds such elaborate fantasies that they overwhelm reality to the extent that the person no longer sees any point in interacting with anyone or anything else.
I also have a savior complex of some kind. It's part of why my mind tortures me with memories of girls I knew growing up and whose troubles I didn't manage to fix (of a couple, I wonder if they are even alive), why my favorite manga is Asano's Oyasumi Punpun, maybe also partly why I sometimes go down the rabbit hole of watching pedestrians getting obliterated by vehicles, and why the moment last night when I rested my head on a pillow and closed my eyes, I pictured myself walking around in Hendaye and coming across a softly crying blond, slim woman who told me about her woes and who then later sobbed in my arms, before inviting me to her apartment to give each other warmth under a blanket throughout the night.
Too bad I'm an old, crazy, dead-eyed loon.
---
My latest job contract has ended, so I'm currently unemployed. I always used to feel relief whenever I found myself jobless, because that meant spending far more time away from people, and conserving my energy to write. However, in three days I have a check up scheduled with a cardiologist (a new one, because I wanted a second opinion), and next saturday I will travel to Vitoria-Gasteiz on train for a public exam that I have been preparing (and dreading) for months, although in the end it will only determine for less than a year (whenever the results come into effect in this weird system they have set up) whether or not they will call me to work at some hospital as an IT guy.
Ten days from now I'll have to visit my previous cardiologist for another check up; when I first met him, he got pissy when I told him the objective fact that I had never experienced heart issues until the very day I got the latest "booster vaccine" (I have experienced palpitations and weird electrical sensations since, which progressed into two episodes of atrial fibrillation that landed me in the ER). The guy told me that the [manufactured virus of unspecified origen] vaccines are unrelated to heart issues, even though journals of colleges of cardiology say otherwise. After he performed an echocardiogram on me, he was already ending the visit when I had to remind him that he hadn't told me about the results. He said that my left ventricle was too big, and that I should never ever drink alcohol again (I don't drink). I don't trust the prick.
Yesterday I woke up exhausted and with a headache. By four in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, so I took a nap. I woke up at half past six. I wasted the rest of the day visiting shady websites to watch grim videos of pedestrians getting hit by vehicles (mostly in Russia, because they have cameras in their cars, and also because they're nuts), and of other ghastly occurrences such as people getting electrocuted or getting involved in deadly firefights. Sometimes I become entranced by such moments in which, for example, a woman is absentmindedly crossing the train tracks, only to lift her gaze toward her impending death in the form of a rushing hunk of machinery: someone was living their normal life only to suddenly switch and become something else entirely, whether that means dead or crippled in some way for the rest of their lives.
I also watched a few videos of a paraplegic woman from Ontario who has to stimulate her sphincter digitally to poo, and who was so horrified by that propect that she convinced her mother to do it for her from her paralysis at thirteen years old until she moved out.
I have been using VR porn for a few years. Regarding masturbation, nothing so far has beat being able to choose the environment, the "doll," what she's wearing, how she sounds like, the pose, and the rhythm, etc. It tricks my mind so well that I have consistenly had better orgasms through VR porn than those I remember from having actual sex, with the added bonus that I don't have to deal with a flesh-and-bone person. Last time, I loaded a room with a Christmas tree and jingles playing, to make it festive, and as the woman I chose a slim, doll-faced blonde who moaned in French. She mounted my avatar in cowgirl. After I came down from the blissful break from reality and I took my headset off carefully to avoid staining it with cum, I got reminded of the most recent reason why I chose that look for the doll.
Back in summer I visited Hendaye, a French commune within walking distance (I live in the border). It was the first time in my life that I walked around in that town, even though my parents used to drive through it every year to go to the beach. The experience was haunting, partly because it felt like I was traversing through memories, and because the layout of the town itself feels ancient and the town in general uninhabited.
Anyway, as I was approaching their local train station, I lifted my gaze and found myself staring back at a woman in her thirties, perhaps late thirties. She was blonde and slim, and wearing a modest summer dress. Beautiful pale gray eyes. She gave me the impression some women give off: as if yesterday they were in their late tens, only to blink and find themselves aged and not knowing how that happened. But what impacted me the most was that she looked sad, with the kind of haunted resignation that often yearns for an easy way out. The poor woman was likely wary of me, a 6'15 tall, bearded, broad, crazy-looking guy.
I'll likely never see that woman again, not that it would particularly matter if I did. But the thing is: although VR porn takes care wonderfully of a man's sexual urges, I still find myself going to sleep and having to run some elaborate scenario in my mind, complete with settings and clothing and dialogue, of me or an avatar getting to know some woman and ending up cuddling in bed with her. You can't recreate hugs and cuddles through VR, I'm afraid. And it must be important to me, given that I regularly rely on such simulations just to fall asleep, and the protagonist of my current novel, Leire, got infatuated with her lover, Jacqueline (who's also French, but that's likely a coincidence), because the latter hugged and comforted the protagonist after she was found crying.
I was born with a very similar mind to that of writer Patricia Highsmith; after I read a single one of her books (I don't recall which), it became obvious to me that she was autistic and likely had OCD as well. I went straight to reading a biography of hers (Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by an author who was clearly infatuated with her), which solidified my certainty. Patricia died before doctors were detecting most cases of autism, but a friend of hers diagnosed Patricia post-mortem as having had Asperger's.
Famously, Patricia worked at a retail store for maybe a few weeks. One of her clients was a beautiful blonde with a regal demeanour. I doubt that Patricia talked to this woman more than once, but it was love (or more accurately, obsession) at first sight. She figured out where this lady lived, and without this woman's knowledge, Patricia observed her from a distance. The woman was married and had kids. Years later, Patricia mentioned this woman as the love of her life, and even became the subject of her novel and later movie The Price of Salt (also named Carol). Autistic people, even more when they also have OCD as comorbidity, can build up in their minds such elaborate fantasies that they overwhelm reality to the extent that the person no longer sees any point in interacting with anyone or anything else.
I also have a savior complex of some kind. It's part of why my mind tortures me with memories of girls I knew growing up and whose troubles I didn't manage to fix (of a couple, I wonder if they are even alive), why my favorite manga is Asano's Oyasumi Punpun, maybe also partly why I sometimes go down the rabbit hole of watching pedestrians getting obliterated by vehicles, and why the moment last night when I rested my head on a pillow and closed my eyes, I pictured myself walking around in Hendaye and coming across a softly crying blond, slim woman who told me about her woes and who then later sobbed in my arms, before inviting me to her apartment to give each other warmth under a blanket throughout the night.
Too bad I'm an old, crazy, dead-eyed loon.
January 2, 2023
We’re Fucked, Pt. 83: AI-generated images
Working on this sequence of my novel has meant that for weeks I have spent at least an hour every day feeling queasy, thanks to my fruitful imagination. So congratulations to me, I guess.
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
[Check out this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
January 1, 2023
We're Fucked, Pt. 83 (Fiction)
Check out this chapter on my personal page, where it looks better
---
As if I had been transported to a movie theater in an inverted dimension, humming fluorescent lights are shining down from the ceiling, and the opposite wall has been covered with a three-dimensional black canvas made of gooey tar in which floats the audience: a score of world-globe-sized eyeballs with sewage-colored irises and pupils that dilate and contract as they glare at me, the protagonist of this demented pageant. The scene is swirling like a lava lamp; when the floor seems to tilt and I teeter, the eyeballs swimming about in the blob's expanse of gelatinous muck, which keeps rippling and squelching, follow me with their gaze as if they were scanning my mind to pry it apart.
My bowels gurgle, my stomach turns somersaults. A wave of nausea, accompanied with an unbearable chill, floods over me as if I had ingested a bucketful of diarrhea.
At the back of my throat forms a knot of spoiled meat marinated in bitter bile. My esophagus clenches around it as if trying to reject an intruder, but the knot threatens to rise further. Although I swallow it down, hot saliva fills my mouth with an acidic and coppery taste. I tighten my clammy right hand around the grip of the revolver, lest I drop it, and I raise my left hand to cover my mouth while my ribs heave with spastic coughing. A geyser of vomit is about to surge up my esophagus.
Fuck, I'm retching! I can't heave my guts out onto the aluminum-gray carpet; I would ruin the austere and sterile elegance of our office. But mainly I'd dread explaining such a stain to our porcine overlord. I can already hear that piggish braggart's hoarse rasp issuing from his slobbering snout, calling me a dirty slut. Maybe he'd force me to pay for the cleaning expenses.
As my eyes water and my cheeks bulge, I rush to Jordi's wastebasket and drop to my knees. When I attempt to grab its sides to pull the basket closer to me, I bonk the wire mesh with my revolver. Doubled over, I groan with pain, then puke a torrent of yellowish and thick vomit that contains scraps of my internal organs as well as gobbets of liquified intestines, while my nostrils spew a poisonous froth of gastric acid that inflames my sinuses. The vomit is splattering onto the corralled rubbish: crumpled papers and tissues, disposable coffee cups, ballpoint pens, wooden stirrers, plastic bottles, sandwich wrappers, empty cola cans, polystyrene containers, dead insects, dirty syringes, tied-up condoms, and murder weapons.
My eyelids are twitching and my skin has broken out in goosebumps as I retch again and again like a sickly goose. The walls of my throat and mouth are burning, my tongue has caught fire. The fangs of my tears are carving holes into my cheeks. Splatter, gag, spit, puke, regurgitate, spew, barf, drool, swallow, pant, cough, retch, breathe, gag, belch, groan, puke, splatter.
I have become a churning cauldron of filth and corruption, and my mouth a spigot that discharges a flow of sewage in an excruciating exorcizing ceremony. I'm alone and lost in a wasteland of viscous misery. I need to find my way back to mommy's womb. I shut my eyes tight to retreat into my shadowy mind-theater, and I render a close-up in candlelight of Jacqueline's vagina. I see every pore of its satiny skin, the sweet pink labia glistening with her cream and my saliva, the engorged rosy nub that protrudes from beneath its hood of flesh. But her holy pussy stares back with hatred. The umbilical cord has been cut from my navel, and instead it has coiled around the trigger of a machine gun poised to annihilate me. The cord gets yanked taut so that the machine gun pumps round after round of flaming lead slugs. They rip open my bowels and stomach, turning my flesh into tatters and pulp. They pierce through my heart, my lungs, my spine. My cranium bursts in a bloody fountain that scatters my neurons into the void.
After the spate of uncontrollable fits, at last the urge to puke subsides and the acid recedes from my sinuses, although my stomach remains a quaking ball of nerves. A long stream of ochery matter dribbles over my chin and splashes onto the sodden morass that has covered the heap of garbage like with a toxic tarpaulin.
I spit out foamy saliva until I'm sure that I have hurled away all the spoiled remains inside of me. My face is numb and flushed with heat; I rest it against the cool rim of the wastebasket. I keep panting, and fever-like chills are setting in.
I sit back on my heels. An insectoid buzzing has filled the space between my ears as if a wasp were beating its wings inside my skull. But the vibrations are coming from my brain, that keeps thumping like a kettledrum, causing my mind to whirl with dizziness. Arachne, blessed be Her name, lodged in some knot of my neural matter the ability to weave narratives from random sensory inputs, and it's translating, as if using the sticky silk of my psyche to bind my awareness, the echoing noise into voices that are chattering gibberish.
A shiver slithers down my back like an icy serpent. I keep getting racked with chills. I'm soaking wet, hot and slick with sweat that has covered a rash of goosebumps. A salty drop from the ones that have beaded on my brow rolls down into my right eye. It stings; I squeeze my eyelids shut.
My sinuses are caked with mucus, and I can barely breathe through my nostrils. A blessing, because the air is laden with a stink that makes me feel like I have wandered into an abandoned slaughterhouse during a stifling summer day, only to find myself amidst piles of shit and steaming cow carcasses. I barely distinguish the sickly-sweet stench of my vomit from this oily reek that could knock a gorilla out. A small-boned lady like myself, who rolled low on endurance, should have suffocated already, but I guess that my lungs adapted to breathing fetid miasmata thanks to Spike's intrusions, as well as the one time I confronted that bunnyman bastard while I avoided gazing down at his torpedo-sized cock. These days I can handle any stink, any degree of madness, even the specters of guilt and self-loathing that accompany this odor of decay, because that's what I am: a creature of putrefaction, a human plague, a biochemical nightmare spreading throughout this cursed world.
I lean on the edge of the desk for support, then I push myself to my feet. I stagger away on my rubbery legs. When I straighten up, my skull feels as heavy as a block of lead.
Vomit has spilled out of the wastebasket, leaking through its wire mesh. The viscous mixture has spread its corrosive contagion over the carpet in splattered streaks. They look like a spiderweb that has been sprayed with a gunky, yellowish-brown sauce. The acidic filth gleams dully under the fluorescent lights as it soaks into the gray fibers.
Why didn't Jordi put a trash bag in his wastebasket? I should grab handfuls of paper towels from the bathroom to mop up the mess. I picture myself on all fours as I rub, rub, rub the stains with ferocious pressure, although I'd prefer to rip out the carpet and bury it. I also imagine myself pressing my lips to the synthetic fibers and lapping up the sickly-sweet substance with my tongue, which causes my gut to heave. For now I'll have to erase from my mind the gooey stew that has soiled my boss' carpet, or at least I'll have to convince myself that I stained it with easier to explain liquids, like coffee from a clumsily dropped cup, or blood from a stomped-on rat.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my trembling right hand, that still holds the revolver. My heart is churning blood like an over-revved engine. The paroxysm of puking has coated my tongue with the taste of an overripe banana dipped in battery acid. I'm lightheaded and drained as if my body were struggling to knit back together its ruptured tissues, and my psyche, that is traversing the narrow border between consciousness and delirium, risks wafting away toward the all-encompassing darkness.
Fat drops of rain keep thudding, thudding, thudding against the windowpanes like the rapping of a thousand tiny knuckles, ghost kids waiting for someone to let them in. Thunder crackles, and the fluorescent ceiling fixtures flicker, as stroboscopic flashes tint the desk, swivel chairs and computer screens with lily white and iceberg blue. The barrage of lightning must be lashing apartment buildings, splitting their roofs, widening cracks in their walls to force open the seams of their bricks and surge through. Jagged spears of electricity will strike the targets inside, charring both furniture and flesh until they explode with a sizzle and a pop in puffs of ash and vaporized skin. As the smell of burning meat, hair, fabric, wood, plastic and rubber drifts down on the storm's wet breath, the ceaseless rain will engender an apocalyptic deluge that, in its rise, turning the streets into raging rivers, will sweep away like toy boats in a bathtub the burned-out cars, smoking bricks, cracked masonry, uprooted trees, wrecked furniture, blackened bodies. Those who escaped into dreams will wake up to find themselves soaked under their blankets. Donostia, located during pre-Roman times in the domain of the Varduli, reduced in one fell swoop to a wasteland of ashes and mud, will vanish under an expanse of grasses, plants and flowers grown on their own amid birdsong.
The Stygian blob has settled in this dimension like a bloated turd that refuses to get flushed away. Its slime-slick bulk, a mound of quivering folds scattered with tumorous protuberances, squelches as it pulsates obscenely like some spasming uterus. From its underside hang half-congealed cords of goo in a stringy lacework. I refuse to count how many eyeballs are bulging on the gelatinous lump of grime and disease, in an orrery of sentient planetoids that have glued their bloodcurdling stares to my face. The corneas are glistening like made of pliant glass. Those eyeballs are judging me, scolding me, singling me out as a creep, a degenerate, a pervert, a sluglike fiend unworthy of breathing the same air as them. Their loathsome glares gnaw at me, scratch me, pinch my nipples, pry at my labia, bruise my clitoris.
My brain is boiling like a cauldron of tar. My clammy and feverish skin has become a hotbed of tickling spiders that are crawling around behind my ears, down my neck, under my armpits, inside the crack of my ass. What else could I expect from the confining, decaying sack of flesh and guts that I call my body? This hellscape must have been devised by Arachne Herself. Does She want to extract a sacrifice from me? Has She set the test up so that I must murder the blob or go mad? I shouldn't have to tolerate being stared at by any creature against my will; that alone warrants a little murder. Besides, I'm dying to shoot this dick-substitute at anything that breathes.
I hug the revolver with my sweaty palms, locking my fingers together around the wooden grip. If I squeezed this hunk of metal until my hands hurt, the revolver wouldn't get squashed. Is that how it feels like to have a dick, once the penis, engorged with blood, has swollen out of its velvet sheath, and has blushed with a crimson hue that rivals the brightest flowers in their blossoms? If I were a guy and I possessed a thick, meaty cock, I'd show it off proudly like a royal scepter. I would parade it around, flaunting its majestic magnificence. I'd stick my dick in any available orifice, even if that meant stuffing it in the gaping maw of a snarling dog, or sliding it between the pages of a novel as a bookmark.
I raise my revolver to eye level and aim at the center of that gelatinous mass, the inflamed carbuncle, the pus-oozing blight, the inescapable festering festering festering. The blob wobbles like a water balloon about to burst. Its eyeballs roll in sync, shifting their gaze to the revolver's barrel, that looks like a toothpick poking up against this tide of nightmare.
My skin prickles with goosebumps under a film of sweat. The blob understands that the device I'm holding can dole out death.
I try to keep the revolver steady, but an undulating vibration courses down my spine, and my forearms start to tremble. Who cares about this slimy intruder's sentience? Plenty of primates could recognize themselves in a mirror, yet they also deserve to die.
I curl my forefinger around the trigger. The revolver's hammer is cocked, its cylinder loaded with bullets. I'm a motherfuckin' gunslinger, a badass with a mighty six-shooter and a pair of leather chaps. All my life I have wanted to murder somebody. After I blast that slime-skinned, flesh-waddling, eyeball-plagued horror to bits, a splash of rain will quench the flames in my brain.
---
Author's note: today's songs are "Black Math" by The White Stripes, as well as "Brave as a Noun" and "People II: The Reckoning," both by AJJ.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-five songs so far. Check them out.
A couple of neural networks were kind enough to render moments from this scene (for a price). Check these out too.
Some years ago I dared to attend a few writing courses (never again), and one of the writers suggested that my stuff was like verbal diarrhea. He meant it as a compliment.
---
As if I had been transported to a movie theater in an inverted dimension, humming fluorescent lights are shining down from the ceiling, and the opposite wall has been covered with a three-dimensional black canvas made of gooey tar in which floats the audience: a score of world-globe-sized eyeballs with sewage-colored irises and pupils that dilate and contract as they glare at me, the protagonist of this demented pageant. The scene is swirling like a lava lamp; when the floor seems to tilt and I teeter, the eyeballs swimming about in the blob's expanse of gelatinous muck, which keeps rippling and squelching, follow me with their gaze as if they were scanning my mind to pry it apart.
My bowels gurgle, my stomach turns somersaults. A wave of nausea, accompanied with an unbearable chill, floods over me as if I had ingested a bucketful of diarrhea.
At the back of my throat forms a knot of spoiled meat marinated in bitter bile. My esophagus clenches around it as if trying to reject an intruder, but the knot threatens to rise further. Although I swallow it down, hot saliva fills my mouth with an acidic and coppery taste. I tighten my clammy right hand around the grip of the revolver, lest I drop it, and I raise my left hand to cover my mouth while my ribs heave with spastic coughing. A geyser of vomit is about to surge up my esophagus.
Fuck, I'm retching! I can't heave my guts out onto the aluminum-gray carpet; I would ruin the austere and sterile elegance of our office. But mainly I'd dread explaining such a stain to our porcine overlord. I can already hear that piggish braggart's hoarse rasp issuing from his slobbering snout, calling me a dirty slut. Maybe he'd force me to pay for the cleaning expenses.
As my eyes water and my cheeks bulge, I rush to Jordi's wastebasket and drop to my knees. When I attempt to grab its sides to pull the basket closer to me, I bonk the wire mesh with my revolver. Doubled over, I groan with pain, then puke a torrent of yellowish and thick vomit that contains scraps of my internal organs as well as gobbets of liquified intestines, while my nostrils spew a poisonous froth of gastric acid that inflames my sinuses. The vomit is splattering onto the corralled rubbish: crumpled papers and tissues, disposable coffee cups, ballpoint pens, wooden stirrers, plastic bottles, sandwich wrappers, empty cola cans, polystyrene containers, dead insects, dirty syringes, tied-up condoms, and murder weapons.
My eyelids are twitching and my skin has broken out in goosebumps as I retch again and again like a sickly goose. The walls of my throat and mouth are burning, my tongue has caught fire. The fangs of my tears are carving holes into my cheeks. Splatter, gag, spit, puke, regurgitate, spew, barf, drool, swallow, pant, cough, retch, breathe, gag, belch, groan, puke, splatter.
I have become a churning cauldron of filth and corruption, and my mouth a spigot that discharges a flow of sewage in an excruciating exorcizing ceremony. I'm alone and lost in a wasteland of viscous misery. I need to find my way back to mommy's womb. I shut my eyes tight to retreat into my shadowy mind-theater, and I render a close-up in candlelight of Jacqueline's vagina. I see every pore of its satiny skin, the sweet pink labia glistening with her cream and my saliva, the engorged rosy nub that protrudes from beneath its hood of flesh. But her holy pussy stares back with hatred. The umbilical cord has been cut from my navel, and instead it has coiled around the trigger of a machine gun poised to annihilate me. The cord gets yanked taut so that the machine gun pumps round after round of flaming lead slugs. They rip open my bowels and stomach, turning my flesh into tatters and pulp. They pierce through my heart, my lungs, my spine. My cranium bursts in a bloody fountain that scatters my neurons into the void.
After the spate of uncontrollable fits, at last the urge to puke subsides and the acid recedes from my sinuses, although my stomach remains a quaking ball of nerves. A long stream of ochery matter dribbles over my chin and splashes onto the sodden morass that has covered the heap of garbage like with a toxic tarpaulin.
I spit out foamy saliva until I'm sure that I have hurled away all the spoiled remains inside of me. My face is numb and flushed with heat; I rest it against the cool rim of the wastebasket. I keep panting, and fever-like chills are setting in.
I sit back on my heels. An insectoid buzzing has filled the space between my ears as if a wasp were beating its wings inside my skull. But the vibrations are coming from my brain, that keeps thumping like a kettledrum, causing my mind to whirl with dizziness. Arachne, blessed be Her name, lodged in some knot of my neural matter the ability to weave narratives from random sensory inputs, and it's translating, as if using the sticky silk of my psyche to bind my awareness, the echoing noise into voices that are chattering gibberish.
A shiver slithers down my back like an icy serpent. I keep getting racked with chills. I'm soaking wet, hot and slick with sweat that has covered a rash of goosebumps. A salty drop from the ones that have beaded on my brow rolls down into my right eye. It stings; I squeeze my eyelids shut.
My sinuses are caked with mucus, and I can barely breathe through my nostrils. A blessing, because the air is laden with a stink that makes me feel like I have wandered into an abandoned slaughterhouse during a stifling summer day, only to find myself amidst piles of shit and steaming cow carcasses. I barely distinguish the sickly-sweet stench of my vomit from this oily reek that could knock a gorilla out. A small-boned lady like myself, who rolled low on endurance, should have suffocated already, but I guess that my lungs adapted to breathing fetid miasmata thanks to Spike's intrusions, as well as the one time I confronted that bunnyman bastard while I avoided gazing down at his torpedo-sized cock. These days I can handle any stink, any degree of madness, even the specters of guilt and self-loathing that accompany this odor of decay, because that's what I am: a creature of putrefaction, a human plague, a biochemical nightmare spreading throughout this cursed world.
I lean on the edge of the desk for support, then I push myself to my feet. I stagger away on my rubbery legs. When I straighten up, my skull feels as heavy as a block of lead.
Vomit has spilled out of the wastebasket, leaking through its wire mesh. The viscous mixture has spread its corrosive contagion over the carpet in splattered streaks. They look like a spiderweb that has been sprayed with a gunky, yellowish-brown sauce. The acidic filth gleams dully under the fluorescent lights as it soaks into the gray fibers.
Why didn't Jordi put a trash bag in his wastebasket? I should grab handfuls of paper towels from the bathroom to mop up the mess. I picture myself on all fours as I rub, rub, rub the stains with ferocious pressure, although I'd prefer to rip out the carpet and bury it. I also imagine myself pressing my lips to the synthetic fibers and lapping up the sickly-sweet substance with my tongue, which causes my gut to heave. For now I'll have to erase from my mind the gooey stew that has soiled my boss' carpet, or at least I'll have to convince myself that I stained it with easier to explain liquids, like coffee from a clumsily dropped cup, or blood from a stomped-on rat.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my trembling right hand, that still holds the revolver. My heart is churning blood like an over-revved engine. The paroxysm of puking has coated my tongue with the taste of an overripe banana dipped in battery acid. I'm lightheaded and drained as if my body were struggling to knit back together its ruptured tissues, and my psyche, that is traversing the narrow border between consciousness and delirium, risks wafting away toward the all-encompassing darkness.
Fat drops of rain keep thudding, thudding, thudding against the windowpanes like the rapping of a thousand tiny knuckles, ghost kids waiting for someone to let them in. Thunder crackles, and the fluorescent ceiling fixtures flicker, as stroboscopic flashes tint the desk, swivel chairs and computer screens with lily white and iceberg blue. The barrage of lightning must be lashing apartment buildings, splitting their roofs, widening cracks in their walls to force open the seams of their bricks and surge through. Jagged spears of electricity will strike the targets inside, charring both furniture and flesh until they explode with a sizzle and a pop in puffs of ash and vaporized skin. As the smell of burning meat, hair, fabric, wood, plastic and rubber drifts down on the storm's wet breath, the ceaseless rain will engender an apocalyptic deluge that, in its rise, turning the streets into raging rivers, will sweep away like toy boats in a bathtub the burned-out cars, smoking bricks, cracked masonry, uprooted trees, wrecked furniture, blackened bodies. Those who escaped into dreams will wake up to find themselves soaked under their blankets. Donostia, located during pre-Roman times in the domain of the Varduli, reduced in one fell swoop to a wasteland of ashes and mud, will vanish under an expanse of grasses, plants and flowers grown on their own amid birdsong.
The Stygian blob has settled in this dimension like a bloated turd that refuses to get flushed away. Its slime-slick bulk, a mound of quivering folds scattered with tumorous protuberances, squelches as it pulsates obscenely like some spasming uterus. From its underside hang half-congealed cords of goo in a stringy lacework. I refuse to count how many eyeballs are bulging on the gelatinous lump of grime and disease, in an orrery of sentient planetoids that have glued their bloodcurdling stares to my face. The corneas are glistening like made of pliant glass. Those eyeballs are judging me, scolding me, singling me out as a creep, a degenerate, a pervert, a sluglike fiend unworthy of breathing the same air as them. Their loathsome glares gnaw at me, scratch me, pinch my nipples, pry at my labia, bruise my clitoris.
My brain is boiling like a cauldron of tar. My clammy and feverish skin has become a hotbed of tickling spiders that are crawling around behind my ears, down my neck, under my armpits, inside the crack of my ass. What else could I expect from the confining, decaying sack of flesh and guts that I call my body? This hellscape must have been devised by Arachne Herself. Does She want to extract a sacrifice from me? Has She set the test up so that I must murder the blob or go mad? I shouldn't have to tolerate being stared at by any creature against my will; that alone warrants a little murder. Besides, I'm dying to shoot this dick-substitute at anything that breathes.
I hug the revolver with my sweaty palms, locking my fingers together around the wooden grip. If I squeezed this hunk of metal until my hands hurt, the revolver wouldn't get squashed. Is that how it feels like to have a dick, once the penis, engorged with blood, has swollen out of its velvet sheath, and has blushed with a crimson hue that rivals the brightest flowers in their blossoms? If I were a guy and I possessed a thick, meaty cock, I'd show it off proudly like a royal scepter. I would parade it around, flaunting its majestic magnificence. I'd stick my dick in any available orifice, even if that meant stuffing it in the gaping maw of a snarling dog, or sliding it between the pages of a novel as a bookmark.
I raise my revolver to eye level and aim at the center of that gelatinous mass, the inflamed carbuncle, the pus-oozing blight, the inescapable festering festering festering. The blob wobbles like a water balloon about to burst. Its eyeballs roll in sync, shifting their gaze to the revolver's barrel, that looks like a toothpick poking up against this tide of nightmare.
My skin prickles with goosebumps under a film of sweat. The blob understands that the device I'm holding can dole out death.
I try to keep the revolver steady, but an undulating vibration courses down my spine, and my forearms start to tremble. Who cares about this slimy intruder's sentience? Plenty of primates could recognize themselves in a mirror, yet they also deserve to die.
I curl my forefinger around the trigger. The revolver's hammer is cocked, its cylinder loaded with bullets. I'm a motherfuckin' gunslinger, a badass with a mighty six-shooter and a pair of leather chaps. All my life I have wanted to murder somebody. After I blast that slime-skinned, flesh-waddling, eyeball-plagued horror to bits, a splash of rain will quench the flames in my brain.
---
Author's note: today's songs are "Black Math" by The White Stripes, as well as "Brave as a Noun" and "People II: The Reckoning," both by AJJ.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-five songs so far. Check them out.
A couple of neural networks were kind enough to render moments from this scene (for a price). Check these out too.
Some years ago I dared to attend a few writing courses (never again), and one of the writers suggested that my stuff was like verbal diarrhea. He meant it as a compliment.
December 27, 2022
Life update (12/27/2022)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I haven’t been doing well recently. My writing is progressing at a glacial pace because I’m having a hard time focusing on anything. I haven’t recovered psychologically, and perhaps even physically, from my latest episode of arrhythmia; psychologically I’m dispirited, burned out, unable and unwilling to look at people in the eye, getting annoyed by everything and everyone, and generally paranoid towards humans. Physically I’m getting weird electrical/stabbing pains in my upper torso, pains that sometimes reach my hands, and that cause involuntary muscle contractions. I feel like I can’t breathe as freely as earlier, but I don’t know to what extent I’m just paranoid about the possible damage to my body that the arrhythmia may have caused. I’m struggling with a brain fog that may be due to the medication I take for a pituitary tumor, as well as due to stress, anxiety, and depression. All that is on top of the random palpitations I’ve gotten almost daily since I received a certain “boost” last year.
In general I feel like my heart is going to fail me at any moment, and that I have no justification to spend my time in any way other than writing (the only stuff that provides meaning to my life), because my life expectancy has been shortened (quick google: atrial fibrillation raises your risk for problems like a heart attack, stroke, and heart failure). Instead of that, I’m writing this entry from the office, partly to avoid facing my responsibilities.
This afternoon (I’m on that shift until ten at night) I sat down at my workstation and read an e-mail from my boss: someone important from general management had complained that a spare PDA involved in blood transfusion safety has broken. Our company no longer works with those suppliers, so my boss told me to bring them a 10-inch tablet instead. He left me the tablet, but turns out it hasn’t been configured. I have never been in charge of configuring these devices; I likely lack the credentials to register them in whatever internal system they had set up for that purpose. Hell, I don’t even have a spare USB-C charger to give them along with the tablet, because I have no clue how that inventory is handled. The person who usually does this shit is on holiday. I’m never on holiday because I haven’t had a stable job in my thirty-seven years of living, partly because I’m fifty-two percent disabled according to our government, partly because I can’t give a shit about anything other than my obsessions.
So as someone who is locked almost daily (and for years) in the mental state that Albert Camus summarized perfectly as, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, I have to go through the absurd, let’s say Sisyphean, task of trying to configure this tablet from zero just to figure out if I can, then email my boss to ask if I should even bring general management the tablet when we can’t provide them a USB-C charger for it. In my current psychological state, I can barely handle buying groceries.
On top of that, I have to study for a public exam that takes place on the 14th of next month. Today I found out that some bullshit political stuff going on has resulted in them setting up a second exam for next year.
I’m exhausted of everyone and everything. I want to quit it all and move somewhere where I could spend days, weeks, or even months without being forced to stare at a human face, let alone interact with any member of the species. Instead of that, the moment I post this entry, I’ll have to figure out how to do someone else’s job just because he’s on holiday.
Let’s pretend that this entry ends with an infinite chain solely consisting of the word “fuck.”
---
I haven’t been doing well recently. My writing is progressing at a glacial pace because I’m having a hard time focusing on anything. I haven’t recovered psychologically, and perhaps even physically, from my latest episode of arrhythmia; psychologically I’m dispirited, burned out, unable and unwilling to look at people in the eye, getting annoyed by everything and everyone, and generally paranoid towards humans. Physically I’m getting weird electrical/stabbing pains in my upper torso, pains that sometimes reach my hands, and that cause involuntary muscle contractions. I feel like I can’t breathe as freely as earlier, but I don’t know to what extent I’m just paranoid about the possible damage to my body that the arrhythmia may have caused. I’m struggling with a brain fog that may be due to the medication I take for a pituitary tumor, as well as due to stress, anxiety, and depression. All that is on top of the random palpitations I’ve gotten almost daily since I received a certain “boost” last year.
In general I feel like my heart is going to fail me at any moment, and that I have no justification to spend my time in any way other than writing (the only stuff that provides meaning to my life), because my life expectancy has been shortened (quick google: atrial fibrillation raises your risk for problems like a heart attack, stroke, and heart failure). Instead of that, I’m writing this entry from the office, partly to avoid facing my responsibilities.
This afternoon (I’m on that shift until ten at night) I sat down at my workstation and read an e-mail from my boss: someone important from general management had complained that a spare PDA involved in blood transfusion safety has broken. Our company no longer works with those suppliers, so my boss told me to bring them a 10-inch tablet instead. He left me the tablet, but turns out it hasn’t been configured. I have never been in charge of configuring these devices; I likely lack the credentials to register them in whatever internal system they had set up for that purpose. Hell, I don’t even have a spare USB-C charger to give them along with the tablet, because I have no clue how that inventory is handled. The person who usually does this shit is on holiday. I’m never on holiday because I haven’t had a stable job in my thirty-seven years of living, partly because I’m fifty-two percent disabled according to our government, partly because I can’t give a shit about anything other than my obsessions.
So as someone who is locked almost daily (and for years) in the mental state that Albert Camus summarized perfectly as, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, I have to go through the absurd, let’s say Sisyphean, task of trying to configure this tablet from zero just to figure out if I can, then email my boss to ask if I should even bring general management the tablet when we can’t provide them a USB-C charger for it. In my current psychological state, I can barely handle buying groceries.
On top of that, I have to study for a public exam that takes place on the 14th of next month. Today I found out that some bullshit political stuff going on has resulted in them setting up a second exam for next year.
I’m exhausted of everyone and everything. I want to quit it all and move somewhere where I could spend days, weeks, or even months without being forced to stare at a human face, let alone interact with any member of the species. Instead of that, the moment I post this entry, I’ll have to figure out how to do someone else’s job just because he’s on holiday.
Let’s pretend that this entry ends with an infinite chain solely consisting of the word “fuck.”
December 21, 2022
Life update (12/21/2022)
Check out this entry on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I have returned to work after it took me a week and a half to recover from my latest episode of atrial fibrillation, which somehow made it difficult for me to breathe. I'm writing this at the office. I'm not well: I remain very tired, I'm dealing with a pretty overwhelming mind-fog, and I feel that at any moment, as if as switch had been flipped, I'll suffer heart problems again. It's just a matter of when. I'm probably in shock to whatever extent.
I have yet to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my novel. The notes alone are 3,100 words long, which is bad enough: it's taking me a week and a half to write two thousand words-long chapters due to the obsessively fastidious way I work. I haven't touched the notes at all in the last couple of days, and I'm already feeling the psychological effects of wandering away from writing for about 48 hours; writing for me is psychological masturbation, necessary to release the build-up of tension and general insanity due to the way my fucked up neurological make-up works, and if I don't release that tension daily to a certain extent, I feel like I'm rolling down the slope of despair towards obliteration. I'm an unhinged human being, barely able to keep it together on a day-to-day basis, unable to hold down any kind of complex relationship with any person, because I can barely deal with myself.
I spent plenty of hours yesterday, to distract myself from the general panic of knowing that I had to return to work today, playing Morrowind, a twenty-year-old game that remains the best Bethesda-y game (I don't know what else to call the Morrowind, Skyrim and Bethesda's Fallout games' genre) that has been made. The video game industry is in decline in general because of the same reasons that the movie industry is: they have become dominated by morons that are more interested in cult behavior than in creating good things. We can't expect the next GTA to be good (the people responsible for those great titles, as well as Red Dead Redemption 2, have left the company), and Bethesda itself has a lot to prove with Starfield after their disastrous Fallout 76.
Anyway, an amazing team of modders have been working hard these last few years developing an engine from scratch that runs Morrowind using Bethesda's assets. It's called OpenMW. They have improved the original game in many ways, supporting "modern" capabilities such as normal mapping, shaders, etc., not to mention that the game is far more stable now. And fortunately they are now working in a way of de-hardcoding the original sound effects so modders can replace them with sensible ones. Here's a video of the current state of their project.
I gathered about 400 mods for the game, following a Total Overhaul guide, and two days ago I started playing the game from zero. I used to love the game as a teen, although I understood little of it (I understood very little of anything as a teen, as I existed in a semi-constant state of psychosis); I only remembered hanging out in Seyda Neen, walking around Balmora, and getting pestered by cliff racers.
For one, cliff racers no longer assault you as if they were suffering from late-stage rabies; the mods have made it so that animals are trying to survive instead of attacking you for no reason. Through the experiences I had in the game during the hours I played these last couple of days, I got reminded of how much fun it can be to escape reality through one of these all-encompassing RPGs.
I played as Leire, the protagonist of my current novel; I pictured her getting sent to a fantasy world through some sort of isekai situation. Made her a mage with reality-altering abilities through Mysticism and Alteration, and enough skill to bonk people over the head with staves (a huge deal in Morrowind; your chance of hitting enemies in that game depends on your skill and how fatigued you are. It doesn't matter if the 3D model of your weapon is passing through your enemy).
Anyway, the most interesting chain of events so far was exploring the outskirts of Seyda Neen and coming across a shipyard, where a shady Dunmer called me out from his hiding place and tried to convince me to drive the shipyard's guard away so the Dunmer could threaten the owner of the place into selling it to a pawn of House Hlaalu. Typical Dunmer anti-occupation stuff; plenty of them are very rabid against Imperials. The Dunmer gave me a couple of scrolls that would make the guard invisible, silent, and pliable enough that he would follow me out of his post.
I was playing as a Breton, I'm generally on the Imperials' side, and I dislike gray-skinned people, so instead of obeying the Dunmer, I talked with the owner, who hired me to guard the place. I told the other guard that I had seen a shady individual on the other side of the shipyard. When we walked over there, the Dunmer killed the guard, and I found myself having to flee from the guy while he kept calling me a racial slur. Fortunately I had come across a ring that shoots lightning; after about ten minutes of taking potshots at the Dunmer, he finally fell dead. I looted a nice glass dagger from him, and then I disposed of his body. The owner of the shipyard fired me because he no longer needed a guard.
My travels led me to Balmora. After I met a bare-chested skooma addict who enlisted me into his organization, I visited the nearby Imperial fort because some guy there was looking for me. Turns out they were having trouble rooting out corruption in the city because a local gang, called the Camonna Tong, were bribing the local governor to pardon all kinds of crimes. I visited the hangout of this gang to talk to them and figure out if they were that bad; they were very open about the fact that they intended to murder every foreigner in their sleep the moment the local Imperial governance seemed weak enough.
The Imperial officer wanted me to murder five of these gang members. A very tough job for an early-level character, made more difficult because those gang members never leave their hideout. But turns out that the Dunmer from the aforementioned shipyard-related misadventure never took back his scrolls. I used them to render a couple of those gang members silent, invisible and pliable. One by one, I drove them to the outskirts of Balmora, and on the deserted stretch of road between the city and Fort Moonmoth, a conjured ancestor ghost and I fought the two gang members to their demise. Don't know how I'll deal with the remaining three, though, now that I'm out of date-rape scrolls. I'll probably have to figure out who can teach me the Command spell, then I'll visit the local Mages Guild quarter to create three semi-equivalent scrolls.
Anyway, this afternoon after work I'll focus on writing. It's better to use unproductive stuff such as gaming as a reward for hard work, which is what I'll do tonight for an hour and a half or so.
---
I have returned to work after it took me a week and a half to recover from my latest episode of atrial fibrillation, which somehow made it difficult for me to breathe. I'm writing this at the office. I'm not well: I remain very tired, I'm dealing with a pretty overwhelming mind-fog, and I feel that at any moment, as if as switch had been flipped, I'll suffer heart problems again. It's just a matter of when. I'm probably in shock to whatever extent.
I have yet to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my novel. The notes alone are 3,100 words long, which is bad enough: it's taking me a week and a half to write two thousand words-long chapters due to the obsessively fastidious way I work. I haven't touched the notes at all in the last couple of days, and I'm already feeling the psychological effects of wandering away from writing for about 48 hours; writing for me is psychological masturbation, necessary to release the build-up of tension and general insanity due to the way my fucked up neurological make-up works, and if I don't release that tension daily to a certain extent, I feel like I'm rolling down the slope of despair towards obliteration. I'm an unhinged human being, barely able to keep it together on a day-to-day basis, unable to hold down any kind of complex relationship with any person, because I can barely deal with myself.
I spent plenty of hours yesterday, to distract myself from the general panic of knowing that I had to return to work today, playing Morrowind, a twenty-year-old game that remains the best Bethesda-y game (I don't know what else to call the Morrowind, Skyrim and Bethesda's Fallout games' genre) that has been made. The video game industry is in decline in general because of the same reasons that the movie industry is: they have become dominated by morons that are more interested in cult behavior than in creating good things. We can't expect the next GTA to be good (the people responsible for those great titles, as well as Red Dead Redemption 2, have left the company), and Bethesda itself has a lot to prove with Starfield after their disastrous Fallout 76.
Anyway, an amazing team of modders have been working hard these last few years developing an engine from scratch that runs Morrowind using Bethesda's assets. It's called OpenMW. They have improved the original game in many ways, supporting "modern" capabilities such as normal mapping, shaders, etc., not to mention that the game is far more stable now. And fortunately they are now working in a way of de-hardcoding the original sound effects so modders can replace them with sensible ones. Here's a video of the current state of their project.
I gathered about 400 mods for the game, following a Total Overhaul guide, and two days ago I started playing the game from zero. I used to love the game as a teen, although I understood little of it (I understood very little of anything as a teen, as I existed in a semi-constant state of psychosis); I only remembered hanging out in Seyda Neen, walking around Balmora, and getting pestered by cliff racers.
For one, cliff racers no longer assault you as if they were suffering from late-stage rabies; the mods have made it so that animals are trying to survive instead of attacking you for no reason. Through the experiences I had in the game during the hours I played these last couple of days, I got reminded of how much fun it can be to escape reality through one of these all-encompassing RPGs.
I played as Leire, the protagonist of my current novel; I pictured her getting sent to a fantasy world through some sort of isekai situation. Made her a mage with reality-altering abilities through Mysticism and Alteration, and enough skill to bonk people over the head with staves (a huge deal in Morrowind; your chance of hitting enemies in that game depends on your skill and how fatigued you are. It doesn't matter if the 3D model of your weapon is passing through your enemy).
Anyway, the most interesting chain of events so far was exploring the outskirts of Seyda Neen and coming across a shipyard, where a shady Dunmer called me out from his hiding place and tried to convince me to drive the shipyard's guard away so the Dunmer could threaten the owner of the place into selling it to a pawn of House Hlaalu. Typical Dunmer anti-occupation stuff; plenty of them are very rabid against Imperials. The Dunmer gave me a couple of scrolls that would make the guard invisible, silent, and pliable enough that he would follow me out of his post.
I was playing as a Breton, I'm generally on the Imperials' side, and I dislike gray-skinned people, so instead of obeying the Dunmer, I talked with the owner, who hired me to guard the place. I told the other guard that I had seen a shady individual on the other side of the shipyard. When we walked over there, the Dunmer killed the guard, and I found myself having to flee from the guy while he kept calling me a racial slur. Fortunately I had come across a ring that shoots lightning; after about ten minutes of taking potshots at the Dunmer, he finally fell dead. I looted a nice glass dagger from him, and then I disposed of his body. The owner of the shipyard fired me because he no longer needed a guard.
My travels led me to Balmora. After I met a bare-chested skooma addict who enlisted me into his organization, I visited the nearby Imperial fort because some guy there was looking for me. Turns out they were having trouble rooting out corruption in the city because a local gang, called the Camonna Tong, were bribing the local governor to pardon all kinds of crimes. I visited the hangout of this gang to talk to them and figure out if they were that bad; they were very open about the fact that they intended to murder every foreigner in their sleep the moment the local Imperial governance seemed weak enough.
The Imperial officer wanted me to murder five of these gang members. A very tough job for an early-level character, made more difficult because those gang members never leave their hideout. But turns out that the Dunmer from the aforementioned shipyard-related misadventure never took back his scrolls. I used them to render a couple of those gang members silent, invisible and pliable. One by one, I drove them to the outskirts of Balmora, and on the deserted stretch of road between the city and Fort Moonmoth, a conjured ancestor ghost and I fought the two gang members to their demise. Don't know how I'll deal with the remaining three, though, now that I'm out of date-rape scrolls. I'll probably have to figure out who can teach me the Command spell, then I'll visit the local Mages Guild quarter to create three semi-equivalent scrolls.
Anyway, this afternoon after work I'll focus on writing. It's better to use unproductive stuff such as gaming as a reward for hard work, which is what I'll do tonight for an hour and a half or so.
December 19, 2022
We’re Fucked, Pt. 82: AI-generated images
AI-san had trouble picturing some of the descriptions that I included in this goo-infused chapter. I loathe incompetence, so I broke the neural network’s neck. What sets AIs apart is that with a little blood, they’re right as rain again. Neural networks have no rights here. When I was little, I used to break my toys a lot, because I was too strong. Always wanted toys that could take a beating.
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
[Check out the rest of this entry on my personal page; it contains many images]
