Meh. Fell into and out of a big self-hatey and snappish depression this past week. Ended up sulking at Peg pretty fiercely on Sunday, which she handled with consummate serpentine grace and patience.

Doing well enough to handle the daily routine, but still feeling like the magic's gone away for good. I've lost that one foot in an imaginative world, and lost my capacity for sudden joy.

I miss cannabis, which was always my Royal Road to that place, but I think there's more to it than that. It's just hard to find the stimuli these days. There's a certain level of creative chaos that's no longer present in my quiet little life.

Food's really good, though.

In the meantime, I've been... fighty again. Like, online and politically. I really hoped going back to Birdsite would put me back in touch with my kink life, but mostly it just puts me in touch with obnoxious right-wingers looking for a good sarcastic pranging.

I don't like that side of myself, it's not who I really *wanted* to be and I really don't know if it's doing any good—not even when my research and logic are _exquisite_—but I can't pretend I'm not enjoying it anyhow.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly learning how to play Europa Universalis 4. In the immortal words of Grandmother Sengir: "It helps to the pass the time until I die."

Meanwhile, Parallax is going slow and I'm in another low-hope phase for it. I think it's pretty good, in terms of individual panels and script beats, but I'm still worried people are going to read it and go "Um, what the hell just happened?!" Like, in a bad way—there is a _good_ way that could happen.

Got some neat stuff planned for Chapter 2, even if I can't figure out how to make the Vek-10 ("the science monks") half as weird and interesting as the Mixolyne ("the space dryads").

Last chapter, I _almost_ hit that magical point where all my characters were telling me what they wanted to do. (Heh, I also had access to weed at the time. :p ) But all Baron K wants to do this time is sulk in his quarters and practice passive-aggressive ikebana at everybody.

@zebratron2084

So what is your favorite part of the science monks?

@001zlnv Well—and I do hope to bring some of this into Chapter Two—I do like the fact that they're a fundamentally rationalist religion. Their gods objectively existed. The archaeological record is pretty clear about this. And their religion's entire methodology is to get closer to them by recreating their science, in hopes of someday following them wherever they went.

The Vek-N faiths are still full of ritual trappings, arcane symbolism, theological disputes, and internal politics... but it's all (supposedly) in service of becoming better engineers—and accepting that the process also requires getting the irrational parts of your society in order instead of just suppressing them.