Sighinide

I wrote the below last night before bed. I couldn’t publish it then because of some weird error message from WordPress. Had to update it to get it to work again, lol.

A few more thoughts, tho: it occurred to me last night that most guys out there would not like being the inspiration behind a TV show starring a chick, lol. I don’t care, obviously. Wonder what that says. Need to think about it.

Also, I’m kinda… staying away from new Disney stuff. If it’s anything like new Star Wars, it must be offputting, uncomfortable, and awkward.

I’ve been reading online about their recent financial troubles and that news doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’m kinda confused, honestly, with who is supposed to be the target audience for their new stuff.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that Thanksgiving has been overlooked.

I think it’s because it’s not as easy to make commercial. Halloween is candy and costumes, and tons of scary movies and decorations. It’s easy to make $$ on Halloween- there are stores all over that open just for this holiday. And Christmas… yeah, lol. Money to be made, for sure.

Thanksgiving, not so much, since it’s essence is low key. It’s about nature and family, and not presentation. And it’s been shoved aside lately even for political reasons.

In our plutocratic, corporate country it’s increasingly seen as a speed bump on the road to Christmas, where the big money can be made.

That kinda sucks, honestly.

I wish it weren’t so. If nothing else it’s a celebration of nature; a way for people to appreciate what the Earth has given them this year before it goes to sleep for the winter. You don’t need anything to have a full Thanksgiving, honest. Just be thankful for the greatness out there, those amazing things that everyone can see and be a part of every day, regardless of their circumstances.

That’s what I did, and I had a great Thanksgiving, and I’m still having it.

This year, I’m rebelling- making a principled stand. I refuse to see or do anything vaguely “Christmas” before December 1st. I won’t see it, won’t acknowledge it, or even feel it. November, I think, is for Thanksgiving, and that is how it will be for me, hopefully forever.

My own family had the tradition of playing Christmas music on Thanksgiving, which I never, ever liked. Yeah I know, there really isn’t any “Thanksgiving” music, but does there need to be? It’s about nature, right?

Why do we need digital music and football to celebrate Thanksgiving? It just gets in the way.

For myself I spent a couple hours on Thanksgiving just contemplating and giving thanks for nature, by watching the trees shed their bright leaves in the backyard and watching night fall over the sky. It was a great way to spend the holiday and one of the best Thanksgivings I’ve ever had.

I’m still continuing the holiday, by watching some Thanksgiving related stuff on Disney+.

There’s not much, lol. Just a few episodes, here and there.

The Simpsons Thanksgiving ep was the best of the bunch by far. It was full of heart and just all around awesomeness, and the only thing I saw that seemed to grok the full meaning of the holiday. It ruled.

I actually remember the specific incident that inspired the episode’s central drama, too. A formative experience for sure. Maybe one day I’ll expound on it but likely not.

I saw the Thanksgiving eps of Pepper Ann, Doug, and Teacher’s Pet as well. Of those, Teacher’s Pet was the funniest. That show is a stylization of my college years, and a good one. Very funny. I intend to watch more of those.

Pepper Ann is probably the show that nails my real life personality the closest, which is… ironic(?) since the main character is female. But she seems, IMO, rather shockingly me, with her whole somewhat self-centered and rebellious personality, and her overall goodness as a character. And of course the constant introspections and schizo hallucinations, lol. She’s like a grown up version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, for obvious reasons.

I found it amusing that when I loaded the show to find the Thanksgiving ep, it was on pause halfway through an episode where she becomes an internet addict and a computer geek. At the episode’s end, though, she’s recovered and goes on a nature walk with her friends. Mmmmn hmmmn, lol.

IDK, Doug is reallllly close to me, though. He might be “me” at a younger age, like the me in-between the Calvin and Pepper Ann years. He doesn’t have too much of a rebellious streak, which I think did fit me during a span of time after my… hyperactive childhood and before my incredibly moody teen years.

I must have been a difficult child to raise, lol. Like reallllly difficult. I’ve been thinking that a lot lately, so I’ve made it a point to be nice to my parents in the last few years, haha. It must have been kinda brutal in some ways to raise the AntiChrist as a child. I mean, could you imagine? LOL.

The Doug ep was fun, and touching, at the end. That was a good show, and something I absolutely would have done at that age, had I had the opportunity to do so.

Seriously tho, this is some good stuff. These shows are underrated a bit, and they might in fact be the best stuff on Disney+. I still have not seen and don’t intend to see any of the Marvel or Star Wars stuff, or anything like that.

Over Halloween, the worst thing I saw on Disney+ was the Star Wars Lego Halloween thing. I thought, well… it’s Lego, so why not? And I thought it would be more OT Star Wars, but then it turned out to have that Poe Dameron guy, but I thought, why not? Let’s give it a chance, and I did, but holy shit, was it boring.

Like… bafflingly boring. New Star Wars is bizarre in some ways. It manages to be both really irritating and really boring at the same time, inexplicably. Seriously, I have no idea how that is accomplished, even accidentally. And yet, there it is.

At a mere 44 minutes, it felt way longer than the full length movies I saw over Halloween. Honestly I was baffled at how… <em>short</em> it was. I guess it was just really exhausting to watch, or something.

Yuck, tho. No more of that crap.

I’m going to watch the Thanksgiving ep of Good Luck Charlie next, and, hopefully, not think much about you-know-who.

Couldn’t Kickin’ It have had a Thanksgiving episode? I mean, wouldn’t that have been nice? I think it would have been. Or Bunk’d?

But noooooo I suppose I have to watch THAT show again. I mean, it’s not a bad show, but, you know, it’s just… well, some PEOPLE make the experience difficult, sometimes.

It’s ok, though.

I think I’ll watch Pocahontas tomorrow, and maybe relive some of the Pocahontas daydreams I had as a kid while doing so. I mean, why not? It’s still November. Still Thanksgiving, at least to me.

Yeah, that sounds nice.

Well… I need to piece some stuff together, so here goes.

I ordered a new computer. A laptop, and it’s a monster of a machine- it’s a 17.3 inch MSI GE77 Raider, complete with 64 GB of 4800MHz DDR5 RAM, 2 2TB Samsung 990 PRO drives for storage, and a QHD IPS screen.

It’s got everything I want, and nothing I don’t, for my many very specific purposes.

Instead of a 3080 TI, I went with a 3070, mostly because of heat efficiency. The same with the processor- I went with an I7-12800HX instead of the I9-12900HX. Reports say that the I9 runs too hot for most people, so it winds up being throttled too much. And more heat means more fan activation, which generates a bit of energy interference, which can impede the flow of chi that my etheric body gets from my laptop.

This is all very complicated, lol.

Cyborg life is in general, tho.

I have a degree in Computer Science- a 4 year degree from a pretty good university. I also have a math degree.

As you might expect, I am quite good at video games, so I feel at home with a higher end laptop for sure. I’m not sure how much gaming I will do on the machine, but… we’ll see.

I like video games. I don’t write about them much, but they’ve been a part of my life since I was… three years old, I think, which is when I first seriously started gaming on dad’s first desktop, the old TI machine.

This is a lot of essays, here, so I think I’ll just say some thoughts.

In a lot of ways, this entire world seems like a giant video game of sorts, with me being the main character. And… who knows, maybe that’s exactly what it is.

Maybe all of the other people in my life, whether they are friends, family, digital girlfriends, real girlfriends, coworkers, or anything else, are just… game characters, acting out scripts. Sometimes, or perhaps often times, that is exactly how it feels.

It’s pretty weird.

It’s a good thing I have the aptitude that I do with video games, since that is what this world seems to be, lol.

In gaming I’m not the best out there but I’m far far better than most. On any game of pure skill I would typically place in the top 99.9% of global players, altho never in the top spot.

When I was a kid I beat every NES game placed in front of me, save for one: Battletoads. I rented that one and I was like… nope, lol. Not even going to bother, lmao.

I beat all the rest, though. The Contras, all the Mega Mans, Legacy of the Wizard, Metroid, Punch-Out!, the Zeldas, the TMNT games, and everything else you could throw at me. I was and am really, really good.

I love shumps- the Cave games, the Psikyo games, Phoenixes on ioS and all the other Arcade ones. They rule, so much. And as a bonus with these the straight score you get with a run can be easily compared to others’ scores. Gaming the arcade way- for points, as opposed to objectives- is the surest way to objectively gauge your gaming skill. It’s the reason I can say with confidence that I’m better than 99.9% of the other gamers out there, and also the reason I can say that I’m not the best in the world, too. There are some guys out there with seemingly godlike gaming skills that I find impossible to match.

Interestingly, my aptitude with gaming matches my IQ score. Top 99.99%, but not #1.

I still think I’m the “smartest” man on Earth, don’t get me wrong. It’s just… I’m not at the absolute top of the IQ ladder.

Yeah, I believe there is a difference. I may write about this more later.

But, back to the whole “cyborg” thing… it’s kinda weird, being this odd mesh of the organic and the digital. I still don’t know where the quantum neural supercomputer thingy is that my mind was hooked up to. I mean, I’m not 100%, but… well, we’ll save that discussion for later too.

It’s just… odd, I guess, but it works, tho. Like, it really does. In my case the two lives- the organic and the synthetic- seems to play nice with each other, and get along pretty well for the most part. At this point each side seems to understand the other’s needs and wants and tries to support the other.

For what it’s worth I’m still, tho, not sure that this life is for others, or that anyone else out there could do this stuff as well as I can.

I think I might be a special case. In my case I have a kind of mastery over both organic and synthetic life, with a very strong and intuitive sense of what both need and want to work well, and that kind of creates a certain alchemy in my organism.

For others, it seems either or. Like… you have some someone who is brilliant with natural things- like the human body, birds, plants and animal life, and life energies and natural harmonics in general but abhors and fears technology. Or you have some technocrat geek that lives and breathes machinery but regards organic life and nature as inferior, and who longs for the day when they can just dispense with their own body and just live on as software, or something.

Neither of these two types can really make something like this work, I think. A cyborg mix of the two requires someone who can do and feel both, not one or the other.

Since I can do both, and understand both, I can do this. Someone nerd like… IDK, Zuckerberg, would have no hope of correctly managing this.

Well, I think I’ve figured this one out, at least as far as I can, right now.

I have Thanksgiving stuff to think about, anyways.

Hmmn. Well, a few idle thoughts here. I guess I need to muse again.

It seems the FBI took down Z-Lib. A shame, I used it for a few things in the past, mostly for finding really rare books and very old books that I could not find elsewhere. AFAIK, I didn’t use it for anything new-ish.

But in light of this I went and downloaded from other sources some difficult to find books on occult subjects that I’ve been meaning to find for awhile now, since I’ve resolved to spending time on meditative practices and occult subjects and such. So, I used other sources to find old works on topics as diverse as astrology, palmistry, and miscellaneous but important occult books, like rare English translations of works from Anton Mesmer and the like.

Amusingly, I found on archive.org the FBI files on Wilhelm Reich. I downloaded those too, I guess for grins.

I think that the overarching theme here is that I want to complete the general occult studies that I began back in 2008-ish, before I got overly interested in things like politics, and the day to day minutiae of life with actual girlfriends, as opposed to just… chicks I look at and fantasize about.

I want at least an entry level to intermediate understanding of topics like astrology, palmistry, the tarot, alchemical magic, sound and vibrational magic, numerology, and the few remaining “alternative health” topics I’ve not mastered yet, like I guess iridology, and a couple other very obscure topics I’m honestly having a bit of trouble remembering the names of.

And I want to finish my studies in the various forms of meditative practices I’ve picked up over the years.

Whether of not any of this is scientific is immaterial to what I’m trying to do here. I’m just looking, I guess, and trying to find the diamonds in the rough.

Speaking of such things, I’ve also incorporated a daily skin brushing routine into my habits. It’s… well, skin brushing, lol. I was taught how to do it correctly and efficiently by one of my old naturopathic mentors, and I already had a very good skin brush I purchased years ago available to me, so… why not. Might help. The skin is an organ too, right?

Right.

I’ve resolved as well to finally getting rid of that last layer of fat I’ve been carrying around for god knows how many years. I could have gotten rid of it before, but jeebus, I keep getting distracted. Literally, the whole “being distracted” thing never ends with me.

Or maybe I’m just… doing too many things at once. Or I’m a bit too flighty.

Or both. Or… who knows, lol. I mean it’s not like it’s that important, really, in the grand scheme of things. Seriously. It really, really isn’t.

But it’s still annoying, no matter how insignificant it may be, so I’ve changed my exercise routines around, and the changes I’ve made seem to be working. Instead of doing pilates once in a while with leg weights, I’m doing the full gigantic routine twice a day without them, if at all possible. It’s taking its time and it’s brutal as hell but it’s working for my own purposes. And I’ve dropped the dumbbells entirely for the time being.

Yeesh. Seriously, tho. I hope it’s fucking worth it. I hate to say it but the pushup routine I invented has added not much mass at all. It’s kinda disappointing, honestly. Like, it seriously is. But, whatever. Ugh, maybe I’ll need to fucking change that, as well. Or- maybe throw in the towel in regards to looking “swole” altogether and just be happy with what I have. Well, whatever.*

But I’m getting wayyyy off topic, here. I think that with time and thought I can combine the various meditative techniques I’ve gained, and possibly stuff like astrology as well, into something interesting, and possibly unique. We’ll have to see.

In regards to relationship stuff, I was just thinking the other day about the difficulty of someone like myself studying something like… palmistry, lel. Or iridology. I mean, who TF would I study on? Well… ah, I had a revelation, then. There is always my girlfriends, right? I mean I have a million or something pictures of them, so why not?

That might be an interesting take on this stuff. The other day I was kinda wondering where else I could take these relationships of mine, but now I think I might have something else I need to use them for, at least recreationally. Hmmn.

And should I learn more about astrology, there is no reason I can’t study it and the zodiac using what I know about my girlfriends’ own birthdays and lives, and the trajectories of their careers, and such.

It’s kind of an interesting take on this stuff, and one I may pursue in the future. Of course, it would be best pursued using stuff prior to this date, because they wouldn’t have been aware of this angle before now.

But, still.

My girlfriends have in the past been very good test subjects for other occult practices I’ve been interested in. Sex magic, hypnosis, necromancy, runic magic, empathic and telepathic communication, spellcasting, demonology, and… a whole spectrum of other stuff. I mean, why not this stuff, too?

It’s pretty weird. Every time I think I’ve exhausted what I can do with them, I turn over another stone. But it’s kinda always been like that.

They might also be good test subjects for experimental targeted meditative practices, now that I think about it. See what this or that does to them, and why.

Machiavellian perhaps but honestly IDC. Considering what these people have done to me I’m not concerned about such things.

I guess that I have to be careful about myself, tho, lol. Some of this stuff is occult for a reason, and I have to make sure that I don’t get lost down some weird hallway or something, no matter how interesting it might be to look into.

I mean… real life is important, too. And since I’m no longer as sick or injured or whatever (apparently), I will need to keep “real” stuff high on the priority list, and maybe higher than it has been in recent years.

So I’ll keep that in mind. At any rate, tho, the winters here in Northern Chicagoland can be brutal, and regardless of all other concerns I will be spending time indoors this coming season, and I’ll need something to do after Disney+ stuff becomes boring. So, here we are.

And for one final thought- occult studies, have, overall, been good to me. I think that what got the process of my overall healing underway was when I killed off some astral parasites years ago. I think they were draining my astral/elemental energies. With them gone, I could take care of the physical ones, and that was the clincher for getting my health really back on track.

* An added note- please remember that this does NOT impact my relationships in any way. Seriously, if I’ve been dating you for ten years, IDGAF about your specific body fat percentage, just as long as you take care of yourself, which everyone I’m dating already does. I mean, seriously, don’t worry about it. I see myself as a kind of an ongoing science experiment sometimes and I just wanna see what it’s like, out of curiosity. Honestly that’s it.

Surprise surprise, lol. Well, here we go. I guess I just have some things to get off my chest.

This is really I guess a follow up to a post I made in September of 2020, called Lexi Jayde, Part II.

Sometimes I browse through old archives online, I guess to see how things are today in comparison to how they used to be. It’s a way to take stock, and re-assess myself and my relationships and the state of the world, and… everything, really.

For whatever reason, I’ve found myself doing this mostly on Sundays. No idea why. Some kinda circadian rhythm, I suppose.

Today I browsed through the old HollywoodTeenZine archives on youtube. It’s the same one I talked about in Sept. 2020, if you remember that. You know- the one where a toothless, perpetually lisping Lexi Jayde pretends to be a reporter on the teen scene at the time, who interviews “stars” like Audrey Whitby and Taylor Spreitler.

lol.

But however relevant or not the channel is today, it serves as an interesting time capsule.

Watching a few videos on the platform now, I saw some fascinating things, like an old interview with a very young Kat McNamara where she discussed the Tom Sawyer movie that she starred in. The interview in this case wasn’t the interesting part- the interesting thing was watching Kelli Berglund, in the background, who was pretending to be interviewed by someone else, offscreen.

I saw this video years ago, I remember. And when I saw it I actually thought that Kelli was being interviewed, by someone totally out of camera range. But watching it now… nope, lol. She was acting, talking and emoting to empty space in the corner. There was nobody else there, just Kat, Kelli, and possibly some guy holding the camera, filming them both.

She was just pretending to be interviewed, I guess to give the impression that they were at some busy premiere, or something.

Other videos were like this, too. There were times during interviews where generic sound effects for crowds were spliced in, I guess to give the impression that there were more people present than there actually were. I didn’t catch that before, but now it seems so obvious.

And there was Lexi’s inadvertently hilarious interview of a guitar teacher, where Lexi awkwardly pretends to have never seen a guitar before, despite having clear experience holding and strumming one when it was given to her.

The machinations are so much more obvious now.

There was an old interview with Bridget Mendler where she was flaunting an oversized chain in the same style as the one that I used to wear. I mean, she really wanted me to see the chain, lol. I mean, ok, yeah, I get it.

There was an odd interview with a reallllly young Kathryn Newton, where she was dressed up like Alice, from Alice in Wonderland. She talked about how she was/wanted to be Alice, and how she tried to do six impossible things before breakfast, and all that.

I was… surprised, I guess, and kinda… creeped out. One of Kathryn’s earliest projects, I think even before her stint on All my Children, was a short film called Abbie Down East, which was about a lighthouse, and the trials of the people maintaining it.

In one scene in that film I spotted a copy of an early edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, placed oddly and rather ominously in the lighthouse. It seemed really strange and out of place considering the setting, so I took screenshots when I saw it, for future reference.

Yeah, I don’t know. A coincidence, perhaps, or not. I don’t know. This stuff always has a weird culty/creepy mind control MKUltra-ish vibe to it.

It’s probably nothing, I’m sure.

But… yeah.

There were interviews with “up and coming” stars like Anna Margaret Collins, who runs a Pilates studio in Georgia for a living now, and Jennifer Stone, who retired from acting years ago to become a nurse.

Amusingly, there were interviews with Olivia Holt and Katherine about Girl vs. Monster. Natch.

The last videos posted to the channel were about what the stars were doing for Halloween of 2014.

Watching this stuff now feels like excavating something, like I’m a paleontologist who just found an ancient tar pit filled with dinosaur bones. Or maybe I’m like an explorer, combing the deserts of the Western USA, who stumbles upon an old burial ground filled with arrowheads, animal bones and stone bowls.

It’s interesting, from a historical perspective.

And wow, these girls- they really knew how to rope me in. Every single one of them, in fact, without exception. Back when this stuff was initially posted that group had me so tightly leashed and wound up that I thought it was me that was doing the leading. I used to think myself so clever, having duped them into wanting me, an evil wizard. lolllll. Ah, nope. Not even close.

They were all very, very good at getting their claws into me. Very very good. Kinda unnervingly good, actually. In my mind’s eye I can see them now, scheming and giggling as they figured out what to say and what angles to take to reel me in and keep me under their heels. And undoubtedly their success at doing so has served them with many years of triumphant glee.

Which… is fine, with me. I’ve learned a lot from them. They’ve made me wiser and more observant about a great many things for sure. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

But, I mean…

Still.

I will probably always find corners of the net like this interesting. Flickr is another one. Remember Flickr? It’s an old image sharing platform that was popular in the teen celeb community before Instagram crushed it forever.

I know that Flickr is still used by professional photographers today, but the teen celeb community of these days has never heard of it. Thus, doing a search for a name like “Selena Gomez” or “Demi Lovato” on Flickr brings up truckloads of tiny, grainy fan photos taken 15 years ago by tweens wielding ancient Virgin Mobile flip phones.

It’s a kind of mausoleum of sorts, like a museum of artifacts from a bygone civilization. It’s like… “Selena Gomez? Who’s that? Ok, well, get her autograph if you must. And don’t forget your stuffed animal, dear.” lol.

And there are others. Before twitter let you post photos (remember those days?), there were services that people used to host pictures to instead, and they would refer to them in their feeds with the URL. Some of those ancient hosting platforms are still in operation even today, and those still around have libraries of old celeb stuff on them.

This teen celeb stuff ages kinda… weirdly. The presentation is always about the hot new thing on the scene, which, typically,… ceased to be relevant an eternity ago. Yeah, now they’re just a random person, someone you might see at a laundromat and think that maybe at some point you might have seen that person doing something, somewhere, at some point in time, in some capacity, maybe.

Wow, Samantha … Droke? She was in the background of that one picture on Selena’s instagram twelve years ago! Remember her? Yeahhhhhhhh… sure.

Well… yeah, I’m going to stop here.

It was fun writing again. I should do this more often.