Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Contrary to my recent posts... I know there is no hope, because "I Can't Fight This Feeling Any Longer" by REO Speedwagon just came on the cafe PA system, and if inhumanity like that can still exist in this world, we can have no future.

Saved from a pretty scary mood crash by timely conversations with several friends. I'm glad I had the sense to ask, I really hope I didn't impose too badly on anyone, and I am *incredibly* grateful to have you around.

The three best things in my life right now are work, an insane snarling dragoness who bites me (a lot), and two blobs of talking fungus*. Just what in the fuck.

*i.e., Kurt and Noah from Parallax (Red), admittedly two very charming little blobs of talking fungus

Still rolling this idea around.

You know what'd be neat? Grounds of a 1930s carnival that just closed. A *comedy*, for fuck's sake. Maybe kind of a Music Man/Marge Vs. The Monorail story, a big farce, where you discover all the foibles and dirty laundry of the townspeople by rooting in the shambles, and find out what comical series of misunderstandings and little personal follies wrecked the place.

Anything but death metaphors. FFS. >_<

Meanwhile, am binging on classic SNL. The current sketch is about Nixon at Watergate, and somehow it's really reassuring, especially the references to *his* lying and scapegoating.

This too shall pass. We might have to help it along, but it'll pass.

Haruki Murakami on clickbait and post-capitalism... IN 1994.

http://www.uncomfortablemoments.com/2010/05/cultural-snow.html

Largely succeeded in goal of naps, TV, and video games today. Tomorrow's going to be a long day, but I'm up for it, I think.

Still turning things over in my head, wondering which of the things I said pushed this past the point of reconciliation, still sorting out how much was me and how much was them. I'll be doing this for a while.

But I'm stable. I don't want drama, I know them well enough to know they just want peace too, so... it's just a matter of staying distracted.

If one more of these motherfucking games turns out to be an extended ham-fisted metaphor for death, I swear to god, I am going to crowdfund them a second theme to play with myself. Why can't we have more indie games set on a mysterious island where a nameless traveler just... discovers a bunch of wonderful things and has a poignant encounter with something supernatural that doesn't stand for anything Very Profound at all, it just is?

We can't be caught and
Can't stay here while
Guilt sets in with
Night's cool chill

--American Analog Set, "A Good Friend Is Always Around"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN2apEd2-9o

Hopes pretending. It's timber on the fire
Embers free the cinders
And send them ever higher
I dreamed I saw you
When you're old and tired
Afraid to move your hands
And expose the wires
We can't be caught and
Can't stay here with
Heat close by and
Your insides spilled
And do your friends know the way to go
When they leave your hands
The chamber's empty glow
It's a lonely ending
When your heart's grown cold
The kid is bored pretending
Now you'll never grow old
...

I've lapsed back into the Filmation cartoons. Clearly, my condition is worsening. Either that, or my muse is guiding me to work on that pitch for a gritty urban-fantasy reboot of Fraidy Cat.

#HopingICanGetCharlieBrookerAsFraidy

Currently watching game shows from the 1970s on Youtube. It is the closest thing to cryogenic suspension I can get with available technology. It is also the closest thing to a noble self-banishment to Limbo I can get with available theodicy. It is exactly like David Byrne's description of Heaven, and if I don't leave it in two or three days, I might have to ask as many of you as possible to physically abduct me and take me to a sleazy diner at 4 am for the sake of my own remnant soul. 😐​

I don't think any headline from the past 10 years has been as perfect of a #moodsnapshot as this.

I sympathize with ya, buddy. It happens to me all the time: you're just sitting around trying to be friendly, suddenly somebody panics, and next thing you know, Animal Control is up your arse.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/stuffed-tiger-causes-45-minute-police-standoff-at-scottish-farm/ar-BBINgoP?li=BBnbfcL

(thanks to @001zlnv for the link!)

#DescendedFromStHobbes

I can't help thinking back to all the counterculture literature I read back in college, stuff like On The Road. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Ray Mungo's Famous Long Ago, which was an autobiography by the co-founder of the world's first underground press news service. They all fell apart one by one. Sometimes it feels like there's a Subculture Community Failure Flowchart and we've not only failed to avoid following it, we've spent this year speedrunning it.

#ThingsFallApart

Let the record show that the thought of forgetting all about them triggered my first really good cry over this. Nothing else has moved me, but for some reason the idea of forever losing the whole emotional tickertape, good and bad, was too much to take.

Everything is so eerily... normal this morning. Everyone's been supportive but low-key, I'm having no trouble joking around with people, it's like nothing has really changed. Except there's this enormous, unyielding black censor bar over a part of my life that was recently very important, and is now completely barred from my view. It is, to borrow a painfully familiar image, like a big glitch in the Matrix. And things just warp around it, like they do. Will I forget too?

That moment when, after a lifetime of thinking you were being groomed as a Cleric, your dump stat was WIS all along.

Where do you even go from there? You can't fight worth shit, and mages are just tedious. 😽​

See, this is why I like GURPS. I can have Empathy AND Bad Temper AND Charisma AND an Odious Social Habit AND Philosophy:14 AND Weak Will.

And another level of Shyness, gained through good honest relationship failures and a series of critical misses.

C'est la guerre.

I have made a healthy, informed, democratic decision to spend the entire day as stoned and drunk as possible and accomplish absolutely nothing today, except for binging bleak British comedy and piling up mutant corpses in the interdimensional wastelands.

You would do the same, and woe betide they who think ill of it. Except my boss, to whom I'll make it up tomorrow.

Yeah. So, for those of you who didn't piece it together, a very long-standing and once-close set of friendships basically ended yesterday.

There's no need for details. If you know the people involved, you know. I wouldn't want anyone to treat them any differently, anyhow. This is between me and them.

I'm still hurt by the circumstances, and the sense I'd been put in a tremendous double-bind all along, but right now I'm okay and almost glad for the closure.

DENIAL

ANGER

BARGAINING

DEPRESSION
<----- YOU ARE HERE
ACCEPTANCE