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August 17, 2026 - Paradigm Death

Well, to hell with update consistency, however much it was worth to begin with. I think site views have actually been coming in more frequently. Of course, shit's been going on with me in real life. But when I'm not in the active midst of it, I would sooner do nearly fucking anything than think about it more. Also, be fucking real, as much as you're "supposed" to say you care about whatever anyone else is going through no matter what forever, you naturally don't most of the time, and by forcing yourself to stretch out your empathy as wide and thin as possible you are both fatiguing yourself and to a variable extent lying to the other person. Now for whatever unrelated and far more entertaining-for-both-sides bullshit flies through my head.
You always see nuclear waste depicted in cartoons and shit as, like, chartreuse goop. That's not real. Nuclear waste is anything with too much radiation stuck to it, generally due to exposure to radioactive particles or, of course, a nuclear explosion. Look around wherever you are and pick a random object. If that had a bunch more beta particles on it, it would be nuclear waste.
A while back, I found out about the problem of nuclear semiotics. Essentially, nuclear waste needs to be stored somewhere, as far away from civilization or water or transit as possible, to minimize exposure. This generally means colossal pits lined and covered with hundreds of meters of concrete. The areas around these are marked with barbed wire and stuff, of course. But what if there was some sort of non-nuclear apocalypse, a very long time passes, and those kinda just fall over and decay or are buried in sediment or something, and then the far-future descendants/replacers of humanity who are starting society over with no knowledge happen to come to the area and settle down, not knowing they are above a reservoir of the most dangerous invisible killer they can imagine? They wouldn't know current language, so a big carving in the concrete or something explaining it would be useless (and even if they could understand them, it's basically equivalent to an ancient civilization telling you not to go into Great Leader Aghasjjjb's tomb because of the terrible one-billion-trillion-year death curse that will be placed upon any who enter). Pictographs, like the nuclear hazard logo with the three triangles surrounding a circle, would have no reason to have the same meaning. This is the question nuclear semiotics seeks to answer; how do you communicate across unfathomable, unknown distances of time and culture? There are some really great answers out there. Most of which haven't really been put into effect. But whatever. The most famous, in ascending order of how much I like them:

August 6, 2026 - Aimlessness No. 3 (Verne/Posting)

This'll be the third of a running type of blog post wherein I have no set topic but have the urge to write, so I'll just trust that once I am "in the flow", topics will come naturally. And I'll add what this one goes over to the post title in parentheses so that, in the future, you can tell which is which at a glance.
I started reading Jules Verne's Journey To The Center Of The Earth recently. It's kind of mind-bending seeing tropes and ideas I've only seen hundredfold-iterated done just normally and upfront. And it's fucking good, too. Fuck me, man.
I do actually have some ideas on what to do, even though I'm doing an Aimlessness. But I need to research far more on one of the ideas, wait until a specific day in fucking November for the second one, and technically I could do the third one now but it's very topical and loaded and I want to be in the right headspace, which is hard considering I'm officially diurnal now. That fucking sucks.
There's also the elephant in the room (on my end), the thing I've talked about too much rather than none at all, the iterativity of writing about not writing or ideas or whatever. I already said I wouldn't do that anymore. But damn is it hard.
Those are the things occupying all of my thoughts right now, and so my mind is positively overflowing with old, muddy water rather than empty so I may put it outside and let it gather rainwater slowly, as is the typical fare for an Aimlessness.
GODDAMNIT. Now it's basically another recursive non-writing shitshow. I never got in the flow, and topics didn't come naturally.

So, uh, yeah. I guess I'm posting this since I'm close to having written nothing in four days. That is fucking phantasmagorical, dude.

August 2, 2026 - Einaudi


This is Experience, by Ludovico Einaudi. When I first heard it, I basically fucking transcended. And then I listened to it so many more times that I became absolutely sick and intolerant of it. I stopped listening to it, took it off my playlists, and eventually randomly found it again and was like "this is the best shit I've ever heard in my life, why did I ever stop?". This has happened several times with this song. I don't know, I'm just thinking about that.
Also, one time, I went to an orchestra Summer camp and was part of a small group who would be together for the whole duration of being there, and at the start, the person supervising us had us all come up and name a song that's important to us or that we just like or whatever and they would play the whole thing and we would talk about it or whatever. This is the one I volunteered, and the extreme Classical fans there were immediately like "oh, Ludovico Einaudi? Heh. Yeah, this is really thin and illusory and he just layers on instruments and tempo for cheap emotional heightening. Typical." And I think that, at least subconsciously, was when I knew that even though these were the only people I'd really met that understood and loved the things I understand and love, they were not my people, because they looked at art and saw science. The main person in question was literally also going into chemistry and was going to write a thesis on some kind of hypothetical intersection between that and music theory, I'm pretty sure. And he was extremely, ridiculously, incredibly good at orchestra, including the fucking business side of things, which he was already going into. He's probably going to be the most famous person I knew before they were famous. He was, like, cool and nice to hang around with too, usually. The absolute spitting image of someone that knows what they're talking about; everyone else is going along the path that, ideally to them, turns them into him. And this is bad music to him. The best fucking shit you've ever heard in your life is unworthy of notice because, instead of music, you hear a series of structures and data and then look at it abstractly from above rather than inside. Cities look different from above rather than inside. They look much worse from above, I'd say. But since you see more at once and understand more at once and you can't comprehend that art, that which interfaces with all the parts of your brain, should be focused upon with more than just the overclocked, shiny, exercized prefrontal, you just keep staying atop your massive tovering telephone pole as news helicopters swarm you for your ideas and opinions and forget about all the people below who aren't obsessively fending off the magic of music and art and the universe.
Since I have all this written out, I might as well throw it out there that this is also what I think about the theorizing portions of any fucking fanbase. Honestly, I'm considerably more salty towards them than the guy from orchestra camp, but whatever.
Also, shoutout to RJ Zaskerf. Their relation to this post is confidential but existent. To be clear, they're also not the guy from orchestra camp.

July 31, 2026 - The Game Cliff

If you're reading all these earliest to latest (in which case you're a raging completionist and you should read the last post again), you know that shortly before starting this website, I started playing Minesweeper a lot. It hasn't come up much again, but that's still happening, and I've gotten to 45.07 seconds on the 16x16 medium board. Whatever the fuck I thought was impressive back then, 70 seconds or something, is the kind of time I get when I actively give up now.
extremely impressive. start clapping and stamping your feet and cheering.
I wonder when the improvement will asymptotically become so slow I'll get bored and stop forever. I used to be known for being an amazing Connect Four player. Yeah, so good that that's what I was known for to some people. Then it all kind of felt the same and I stopped getting better with practice, and I kinda just stopped thinking about it. I could probably still do damn well at it against an average person who only played it a few times as a kid or whatever. But yeah. I don't even think about Connect Four anymore. I'm thinking about it right now, and I don't really feel much of anything. That sucks so much.

July 28, 2026 - Aviary

I don't think there is an "easy way" to learn the lessons of life or whatever. Knowing something consciously is completely different from having that shit imprinted as a core part of you; you learn things from the lessons at the end of TV episodes, you get things from years of futile effort culminating in the most intense catharsis you've ever felt when you realize it was all for fucking nothing. I always thought I would "know it when I see it" when it comes to where to stop, where to settle down and let myself fucking loosen up. Don't fall into that trap. It's always. The time is always, it's all right there around you, man. Stop refusing its calls. And no, taking a break isn't stopping, you cannot be truly present if you envisioned your departure upon the moment of your arrival. They say money doesn't buy happiness, the other they says that it does because when you have money you're not in poverty and pain and you can buy things that make you happy also, but it's impossible to learn the easy way that it really is all right fucking there. Life goes fast because you rush through it and cope by forgetting you're doing so, under the impression that if you teeter off the tightrope, you'll fall eternally through the abyss, when really there is a huge pit of foam below the leap of faith, and it's so, so much more comfortable that you can ever imagine constantly tensing and adjusting yourself up there. That medal you always walk towards but that you never seem to get closer to might seem enticing, and it's true that if you keep going for your entire life, you'll win. But you still won't be in the foam, your muscles will be cramped and sore from the exertion for who-knows-how-long. "Who" is me, I know how long; it's however long you hold out. Money is not a thing, it is a number in a server somewhere, and so are grades and hours. Is this "future" you speak of in the room with us right now? Is it taking a corporeal form and literally, physically, non-metaphorically marching you along like a marionette? No? It's not here at all? Then what is doing that? A pattern in your brain. Kill it. Kill the grind. Do you have a snack you've been saving for a really long time when you "deserve it" or "have something to celebrate"? Under what framework? Eat it now. If you aren't doing all the things you want to do in life at a rate that you'll have them all done by the time you die, then you are going to die unhappy. And fucking recontextualize what you consider "life goals" too. Does the idea of skydiving scare you absolutely shitless but you want to try it just to try it? There are infinite activities humanity has not invented that are undesirable to try, like, random word salad here, throwing four cans of Lysol and a battle axe with one hand perfectly so they land at Fibbonacci-sequential angles while sucking your own dick through a mechanic's uniform. That's very impressive. Will you learn how to do it and do so "just to say you've done it"? No. In a world where skydiving is one of those nonextant activities and you came up with it one day, would you want to try it? No? Then don't fucking do it, man, clearly you don't want to. Buy honey and apple pie spice from the store and mix it in when you pour yourself a glass of milk, it's amazing, cheap, and uses only a small amount of those ingredients each time. Build your Minecraft house in the most mainstream, Grian-ass style, you know deep down it's popular for a reason, and the reason is everybody likes that shit, including you. Read a book from the Victorian era and don't look up any of the words or make sure you're constantly thinking about the historical context, just go with the fuckin' flow man. Or don't. Laws are threats. Obligation is the Pavlov-training effect, the shadow, of violence that has been inflicted upon you in the past. And is the past here right now, non-metaphorically, in your room, not at work, as you read this? No. It's a concept. And everything that lived there is dead or moved out. You're free.

July 28, 2026 - For My Far-Future Readers

I just posted this to the Neocities homepage thing, but since it's not technically on the website and I want it to be, I'll paste it here:
Thanks for 1,000 views, everybody. Far less than 1,000 people were in the auditorium during what I considered my greatest accomplishment two or three years ago. I wonder if I'll look back on this post in the future and be amused at this humble beginning, or if I'll be like "Damn, I had something going for one month". Shoutout to all the archival viewers; you're keeping my legacy alive, and I think about you too.

As a kid, I would watch videos from my favorite youtubers starting from the top of their videos page and just going down. I'd get to multiple years ago, and I'd occasionally see a video beginning with a long preface about why the Youtuber hadn't uploaded in a long time. I never liked those.
As a teen, I would never watch streams from streamers, I would watch the final video or the VOD. I still do that, actually. And by never, I do mean never. I just don't see the appeal.
Oh, I like that music, but it's so old. I played that game when it was popular, but now it's dead and I don't care about it. I wish GENRE would come back. I can't believe SERIES is over.
These phrases are of a culture completely alien to me. I don't like classical music because I'm trying to be "dark academia" or own CRTs because I am going for a "retro aesthetic". I like classical music and own CRTs because I just fucking like them, man. Those terms describe me, yes, but descriptively rather than prescriptively, as Linguistics God fucking intended. Are you so scared of what you will find if you turn your full focus and resolve inwards that you pretend subconsciously to be a tabula rasa so you can pretend consciously to not be one, in the image you think you desire?
I love the past. To some degree, because of the feeling of escape; to some degree, because of the feeling of adventure; to some degree, because of the feeling of secondhand permanence and salvation in my soul as someone from the future looking back with wonder, taking something forward with me that could've died in obscurity and hoping someone does the same for me one day; and to some degree because of simple appeal. Are these in some combination not the reason every Neocities webmaster does what they do?
I don't know what might become mainstream at any point in the future, but because I've never seen anyone else say it, I'm going to say it now. To someone browsing the old web far enough or more in the future that this site is as old to you as Dante's Inferno or Beowulf are to me, thank you. Please don't forget.

July 26, 2026 - Me On Myself On I On Argo

It has dawned on me that my July 21 post, "Writing", my July 7 post, "The Woes of the Webmaster", and my post from July 1, a mere one day after this website was created, "Bursting", are all the fucking same. I did not realize as I was writing them that I had already written the same shit before, but I did end up doing that. All three of them are about me not being able to write about anything. Y'know what the kicker is? I always hated those meta posts when they're on something I'm reading or whatever. But as it turns out, when you have no fucking life outside the computer, and you need to write about something going on in your life, you write about what's going on on the computer. And since you're writing it on the computer, the subject that's right there and ready to go is that it's the only subject that's right there and ready to go. So that's what you write about. And it changes nothing but the amount of words on the page. Nobody cares, including you, really. But hey, years of having a terrible life has conditioned me to always have an excuse ready when I'm not being maximally productive for one second, and "there's some kind of unfathomably strong dam preventing the thoughts and words from entering my conscious mind" is a damn good one. It's even true. But excuses are excuses, and I need to get something down. So I grab whatever's nearest. Over and over again. It's the only subject that really does grow legs and come straight back to me.
If I write one more post like this before August, fucking kill me.

July 24, 2026 - You Are Not Immune

I don't remember ever being a kid, thinking about Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, and being like "yeah, they're real." I remember being about six and my dad trying to dissuade me from eating more ice cream by saying that if I eat too much, I'll turn into ice cream; I didn't believe it for a fraction of a second. I remember being about eight and stumbling into what I think was my first virus ad; I was elated I had won the Google 1 million customer raffle for an IPhone or whatever, but I saw the weird, long URL, smelled something awry, and decided it couldn't hurt to ask my dad for a second opinion about this. From my preteens to now, I'm basically the Carmen Sandiego of internet piracy and cracked APK acquisition, I do that shit every day even when the thing I'm getting is free just because I can do it through Duckduckgo instead of official channels where your data being collected is seen as a universal truth; I've only screwed up and installed a malicious fake thing one time ever in my life, and it was weak-ass adware you could just delete like any other app. I have always had the most efficient, precise, effortless bullshit detector of anyone I've ever met in my life. It's not a good life, as it involves constant, immutable wariness, but it has many silver linings.
None of you will have heard of this, which will serve only to make me look more ridiculous. But tell me why I fucking believed unquestioningly in Evelyn Tucci, the paternal grandmother of beloved performer Stanley Tucci, who emigrated to America from Northern Ireland and worked her way up from rags to start a small bakery, who went far out of her way to attend every one of Stanley's off-Broadway, non-union shows growing up. Years ago, I saw this motherfucker Vic Michaelis say all this completely non-apropos on a game show segment where you name facial hair or something despite the host begging them to stop, and it was the funniest fucking shit ever. There were callbacks to it in later episodes they were involved with and everything. And yesterday, the Youtube algorithm had gone dry and bare, the most compelling thing I could find to watch was some behind-the-scenes thing about that fucking show. It wasn't even about the same episode, Vic Michaelis had only tangential involvement in this one. At one point, I don't even remember what led into it, but they were like "it's kind of like that one time I made up a fake grandmother of Stanley Tucci as a joke on the show" or something, and that shit hit me harder than a train and has caused me more distress than if everyone I ever loved got hit and splattered into red mist by that train. I've never been fooled like this in my entire life. I don't even know who in the fuck Stanley Tucci is, but I believed in Evelyn. It's all a lie. It was always all a lie. It wasn't even anything that I thought might be a lie. I just believed it. How do all you people out there without crippling trust issues live like this?

July 22, 2026 - Hadean Mollusk

I still feel the fatigue from the tribulations described in the last post. But I'm tired in more ways than one now; a faint light is coming through my curtained window, I can start to make out the silhouettes of the objects in my room, and I really should get to sleep soon. Despite being more tired, I feel better. Probably something to do with many different feelings being crammed under the word "tired"'s semantic umbrella, some of which cancel one another out. The soft, domestic sleepiness and the battered, untiring fatigue are two of the best and worst feelings out there. Well, there are far, far worse feelings I have experienced even more regularly in the past, few of which are ones you'd expect, which makes them all the worse. But nonetheless.
I feel like such a total fucking stereotypical edgy maverick loner alpha wolf basement-dweller emo saying this, but the darkness of night is the one place and time I feel myself. When there is nothing happening at all, when the world is still and silent and hours could pass without change, nobody's bothering me, are they? The absolute timelessness is so comfortable. When I can't see anything except my computer screen, hear anything except the quiet music from the speakers, and feel anything except the cold wind of the fan, I could be anything, anywhere, at anytime; and I am. Without the constant subconscious feed of peripheral-visual information about my arms moving when I grab something or my torso being at a different angle when I move the angle of my head, I feel like some sort of sapient post-physical alien/deep-sea creature. It's delightful. Yes, I feel happy during the day when, say, I'm hanging out with friends of mine or attend some sort of event I've never gone to before, but it's like it's all being cached and approximated to my slumbering true self in real time. Approximated very well, but approximated, like a 4K screen approximates a tropical seaside or a bunch of colored balls bouncing in slow motion or whatever, as opposed to if you were actually there, in which case it would have that crucial bit of extra subconscious verisimilitude that tells you it, and therefore you, are real. I wish the Summer never ended so I could stay nocturnal forever.
Is this otherkinity?

July 21, 2026 - Writing

Since I started the new Yaptrium wing on nonconformity, like, three or four days ago, I've been seeing absolutely amazing subjects for posts there constantly. Usually just coming up with ideas, let alone happening to have them be good ideas, is a massive problem for me. I often felt like, if I just had the perfect idea; broad, near to my heart, with lots of original takes and angles by me; I would be able to brute-force through every other hurdle of the creative process sooner or later. This is all of that. And, well it has been only a few days, actually. I guess it just fucking sucks and has been weighing on my mind that, for once, I've had something I was bursting to write, that I knew I could do well at writing, and that there's a world in which someone is already reading what's there; and I open the new HTML document and I just don't feel like it. For once in my life, the stars align perfectly and I have the best dark-calibrated camera and the clouds frame the best constellation like something out of a movie, and when I'm about to click the little button that takes the photo, something inside me just checks out and I end up standing there all night without ever doing it.
Writing these blog posts actually has made me feel much better about my ability to write at all, as one of my problems is quantity and I've beat all my cohorts on here in that department by a mile. But practicing the things you know you're bad at until you're good at them only does so much when your brain is a mad genius trickster with a catalogue of new, unheard-of problems to throw your way immediately when you feel any semblance of cathartic security.
The two times I can think of when I really popped off at writing, I pulled them completely out of my ass in one session. Which is what I do here, too. I can't do fucking projects, man. I don't know why. I've tried to do comics and it's like, what do you even do now that you've started it? If the whole thing as it currently exists on the page isn't envisioned perfectly and fully in my head without any effort, it gets away from me and that's the beginning of the end. And if I have plans? Really good ones, ones I don't try to come up with but that, if they were to come to fruition even a little, would be the most beautiful biblical-scale epic you ever saw in your life and redefine everything for everyone forever? Death and stagnation upon it one thousand times over instantly!
It probably also sucks that there's a huge disparity between what I want to be good at writing and what I am good at writing. Namely, fiction vs. nonfiction. That's a pretty wide chasm to bridge. You'd need a billion dollars and a trillion engineering professors to make that happen. I don't have those. Unless I practice and never ever give up again. It's the wise thing to do. You've just gotta keep practicing and getting better and better. And then why stop at being good enough that you just can write? Why be good when you can be GREAT? What? No, that's a rhetorical question, you're not supposed to answer it, shut up, you're making me look wrong. Anyways, what you've gotta do (according to all the brightest minds in history, who I assume agree with me because it sounds right) is keep honing your skill for your entire life until you're perfect, and also dead. Retirement? Why would you want to retire if you love what you do? WHAT? You fucking hate what you do now? Psh. Typical quitter mindset. (I am saying this in the hopes that it will reverse psychology you into agreeing with me.) Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run on a treadmill until I fucking collapse and my heart stops, and then say an affirmation which restores me to full health and then do it again. No pain no gain. But you, like, know I'm right, right?

July 19, 2026 - Aimlessness No. 2 (Roaches/Webkinz)

This'll be the second of a running type of blog post wherein I have no set topic but have the urge to write, so I'll just trust that once I am "in the flow", topics will come naturally. And I'll add what this one goes over to the post title in parentheses so that, in the future, you can tell which is which at a glance.
I'm listening to Build God, Then We'll Talk, by Panic! At The Disco. Kind of just over and over again. At 5:49 AM. It's a great song.


Post-posting note: This is not the same fucking instance of the song. I copied the link into a spotify to MP3 comverter, put that in Filegarden, linked it here, and it sounds totally different and half the instruments are missing. That same process has worked totally fine twice before on this site. It's not a left ear/right ear thing, this song sounds the same on both sides, and I know that because both my speakers (connected to one direction channel each) were separately flickering out here and there and it didn't change anything when just one was playing. What the fuck? End post-posting note.

It's funny; I never was a gossiper, and this, the epitome of gossip in lyrics, is the strongest earworm I've had for a while. It's probably the syncopated placement of those lyrics. And the homage to The Sound of Music. I last watched that as a kid, with my now-late father. I remember he mentioned it took place in Austria, and I mentioned something about German being spoken there but not in the movie or something, and he said he was pretty sure there was a distinct Austrian language before it was taken over by Germany around WWI. I know now that that's totally false.
That part of the song also mentions roaches, and the apartment we lived in did eventually get infested with roaches. I, being a weird kid, got upset when he blowtorched them and wanted to find a way to just lure them all out the door without killing them. Even nowadays, although I consider myself as compassionate as I've ever been, I Raid the shit out of any bug I see indoors. I think it's a negligible qualia loss, for all the people out there that know what the fuck that means. Though the apartment roaches were considerably smaller than normal ones, as I've found out. From what I understand, the apartment roaches were of a type known as German roaches, while the more typical ones are American roaches. Something something portion sizes.
I also love the cello section in this song. I love orchestral strings in songs you don't think will have them. Which is any music that isn't classical, really.
I haven't thought about having watched that movie with my dad in so long. Whenever I try to just "remember something from my childhood", a rapid-fire compilation of the worst, most embarrassing things that paint my childhood self, my father, and my old life in the worst light flashes before my eyes. Probably because I tried to push those down at some point, but thoughts follow "no publicity is bad publicity" logic, so they just got stronger and now they're the cover slideshow of the entire first ~half of my life. But then I'm thinking about some random thing, and a related childhood memory naturally comes up and it's not bad at all, and I'm like "damn". This is another instance of the phenomenon I described in my last post, about the thought channels. Why is my mind such a fucking maze?
I also had, literally, hundreds of stuffed animals back then, and they were all named and given at least a little bit of a personality. I can remember, like, just a few of them now. Lars, Larsette, Jack, Charity, Biff, Poshy, Lemeon (pronounced like Simone), Larsina, Diane, Stripey(?), Moonlight, Bubblekitty, Marble(?), Gardy(?), Hennrietta, Hans, and I think that's it. Damn, I thought it would be less than 10, but that's 16, or at least 13. And one of the people I've followed on here (shoutout) bases their entire personality and website on virtual pets, including Webkinz, which a handful of those listed were (for those who don't know, Webkinz are stuffed animals you buy with a tag with a code inside that you enter into the Webkinz website and they join your house in the site too). When I saw it, I didn't even have a spark of recognition; it took quite some time. Leafkinz, if you're reading this, I apologize for failing you. Also, I'm 100% going to join Pixel Cat's End when the next registration period starts. From what I've gathered, it's dark and bizarre and vast and frustratingly insular, all exactly what I look for in anything.
Despite the nature of the Aimlessness of this post, there is actually something I kinda meant to talk about here and never did. I'm not going to shoehorn it in, though. You all will hear about Chris someday, and the scale associated will far surpass one little blog post.
If you're gonna read past this one post, this is when you should turn off the music. Unless you wanna have it playing in the background for an entire hour while you write a blog post of your own. Keep the cycle going, maybe. Probably not.

July 18, 2026 - Scrabble

Last night, I played the best move I've ever played in online Scrabble; GEOPHONE, the first O being from the opponent's last move, and with the second O and second E both being blanks (there are only two blanks in the Scrabble tile bag, and I happened to have both), all spanning two triple word scores (which do stack), with the P on a double-letter score, and, of course, with the 50-point bonus from using all seven tiles in your rack at once. It was 185 points, and I was losing by around 40 points before making this move, if I remember correctly.
Only after giddily cackling for a good minute did I realize what I'd been doing.
A month or two ago, I stumbled onto the Youtube channel of Will Anderson, a very accomplished Scrabble man doing Scrabble things in the Scrabble scene. I picked up a thing or two from his videos, and thought, "eh, why not," and installed Scrabble and started playing Scrabble. However, I did make a promise to myself. I wanted to be able to play Scrabble, like, in real life, too. So I wouldn't rely on any meta tactics, and the biggest part of that is that I wouldn't just put down good-looking letter sequences and see if it happened to be in the Scrabble dictionary; I would look at my letters, decide what to do based on all the words I already knew, and only then put down the word I was going to play. Because in the app, you can't mess up; if you try to play an invalid word, it just doesn't let you, and you can keep reconfiguring until you have the perfect play that does work, no matter how fucking insane it looks to a normal person.
And so I started playing Scrabble. And I assume what must've happened is that I tried to play something I thought was valid but wasn't at one point, and I just changed it a little and then it was valid and then I played it. And that planted a seed in my head, a part of my head that just happened to be outside of the security patrol zone of the promise I made to myself. I didn't realize what I was doing. But slowly, I Pavlov'd myself into doing exactly what I planned to avoid doing, constantly, every single move, no matter what. I never thought much of it or felt anything wrong with it. It was like it was happening along a totally different channel of thought than the one being regulated.
P, G, and H are a very clunky set of consonants, and there aren't very many eight-letter words at all with O as the third letter specifically. But I was determined; I had two fucking blanks, and if it was ever gonna be possible to get a triple-triple, it would be right there and then. I tried so many permutations, so much stuff, it must've taken 10-20 minutes of messing around and seeing illegal move after illegal move until, magically, one of them glowed green. GEOPHONE. I actually let out a fucking whoop of joy into the night. I switched the E's around so the blank would be at the end for just that little extra defensive factor (it was positioned in a more usable spot than the first E for the opponent, and blanks alone count for no points), and then I sent it.
And now my greatest Scrabble achievement is marred with the realization that everything was a lie and I would be completely incapable if I was playing non-digitally.
I'm freakishly good at so many things until I remember I never took off the training wheels. I used to play the viola in school, and in school, they put little pieces of tape on there so you know exactly where to put your fingers so the notes are in tune. There were six levels of school orchestra, and I went from the beginner course to the third-highest one, one of the ones they bring to interscholastic competitions, by year 2. That was 6th to 7th grade. In 9th grade, I figured I'd finally take the tapes off. And I was just such absolute fucking garbage all of a sudden, and for the first time, I somehow did NOT get better with practice. Now I was that one fucker messing up the sound everyone else had practiced to perfection, the one everyone else is silently seething at as I had for years prior. That, combined with the fact that that was my first year of high school and so I had a new teacher and this was her first exposure to my abilities, led to it being the first time I didn't advance a level the next year. And then, more or less, it was just a matter of time before I left.
What was I gonna do? Put the tapes back on? In high school? Then what? Should I audition for my city's professional symphony orchestra and still have those fucking things on there? Go on America's Got Talent with labelled fucking strings? Enter a Nascar race with a remote-controlled $20 Nissan from Walmart? Open an airline with one of those wooden toy planes?

July 17, 2026 - Requiem For A Greater Website Than Mine

There are some things that, by nature of circumstance, are never shared publicly, no matter how great or worth sharing the thing is. Like if you had a really funny credit card number, like 6967-4200-9011-2001 or something. Or you met your biological brother you discovered on Ancestry, and it turns out he was your overseas military-grade illicit arms dealer the whole time, and you have to act like you've never seen each other before because other people are around, even though both your and his minds are blown.
The greatest piracy site I've ever seen, freecouchtuner.com, unceremoniously stopped working a few days ago. There were literally no weird ads on there, or ads at all really; There was an easily-closable popup every page refresh, and one skippable ad every 20 minutes of whatever you're watching, and both of those were just non-flashy requests for you to get premium. I have no idea how they stayed afloat with, ostensibly, nobody ever buying adspace there even once. But they did. I waited to make this post, just in case. But every good copyright-perverting site comes to an end someday. I think I knew deep down that it was gone forever as soon as I saw the browser's "not found" page.
Three goddamn years. I remember watching the leaked, unfinished Minecraft Movie on there, thinking it was the finished one and telling my friend it sucked because the CGI was bad. I remember watching the entire Good Place on there and crying at 2:30AM when I finished it, then trying to watch people react to it on Youtube but it wasn't the same. I miss that dark teal color, the symbol with the gear and the hollywood tape thing. I have more loyalty to freecouchtuner.com than I have ever had to any brand, country, or indeed person.
The last thing I watched, the night before it ended, was Game Changer Season 8 Episode 5, Count The Rice, as soon as it came out.
It was delightful.
Being a crazy motherfucker, I do have countless other free streaming sites in reserve. But they all fucking suck. How could anything not suck when you've been accustomed to perfection for years and had it ripped away from you without warning?
The current replacement I'm using is the one with the least amount of ads I could recall. It's more than zero. And there are bandwidth issues like I've never seen on anything before; I have to refresh a couple times before I guess I'm far enough up in the queue to watch more than five seconds of anything. Once I have the video full-screened and going, it kind of feels the same. But the emptiness just won't go away.
I looked for the logo on Google Images on the off chance it actually had it. But it was all other Couchtuner variants.
Of course it's not there. That's just so freecouchtuner.com, isn't it. Heh.

July 15, 2026 - Futurism

For all I lack, the one thing I have real hope for is the long-term future of humanity. Controversial, I know. If I was to go into everything that led to this, we'd be here all night. But I generally accept that other people are not going to be easily convinced, and that for as long as I live (unless cryonics pulls through), general public opinion will stay the same, and earnestly, fully trying to make random people take the hopepill will be a fruitless endeavor, not that I have great inclination to do so anyways.
But maybe I should.
Today, I was checking up on a couple of other Neocitiers who I followed when I started doing this so as to give myself some sense of being in this with others. One of them, the most prolific updater, is a cutesy, maximalist, otaku, kaomoji-using, aestheticist who had been inspired to start this via Tiktok. I didn't mean to make assumptions, and didn't look down on her for it, but I had assumed she was kind of an airhead. Today, I read her most recent blog post (posted July 11th). And it was vicariously like watching the spark of hope crackle and glow for the first time in years in myself again. She had watched a 10-minute Youtube video about a part of the concept known to any Yudkowskian rationalists reading this as Friendly AI; wherein every tedious and undesirable aspect of life which we currently consider unavoidable is taken care of by robots and programs, rendering work and money obsolete and freeing humanity to spend all their time and effort on art and beauty and whatever they want in life. The following is a direct passage from the post:
"its only 10 minutes and so so life changing. i now have hope. the first thing i did, was feel i had to tell someone of this in some way"
It's like a goddamn mirror. My awakening toward this was from posts on LessWrong, a site whose glory days were during the era we're all emulating here, and which I found by chance some years ago while looking for old websites my school firewall hadn't blocked. I remember trying to reconcile this with all the views I already had, before they crumbled away like soggy paper. One of my ideas for things to do with this website was to make a less sesquipedalian, more publicly-understandable explanation for the concepts talked about on there, but believe it or not, I'm terrible at both explaining things and simplifying things, and in all likelihood it would end up combining the worst aspects of my writing and that writing. But as it turns out, someone already did it. And it has a million views and is reaching random Tiktok people and changing their entire fucking lives around. That's amazing.
Shoutout to yumyumcookie1. I don't know if this shoutout will help at all, since she has triple the amount of site views I do, and the chance of any overlap in our audiences is laughable, but still.
yumyumcookie1

July 14, 2026 - Mouse

Warning: computer talk ahead. I don't know any of the terms at all whatsoever, I just fuck around in my spare time. If you are either uninterested in computers or interested in computers, this will likely not be an enjoyable post for you.

It's been a few days since I last posted, rather than merely a couple. This is because my mouse, the cable of which has been fraying and twisting weirdly at its connection to the main body for a long time, finally stopped working. First its connection started flickering, and my cursor would disappear briefly as the little reverberative ping that indicated a device disconnection played a couple times in rapid succession, but that quickly became one of many, many inconveniences I endure, refuse to fix, and come to look forward to due to my masochistic love of shitty dying computers. Then, at one point, I was taking a partial-frame screenshot, and right as I was about to select the segment of the screen I wanted shot, as quietly and immutably as a candle being blown out, the mouse died for real. I said, "Welp.", unplugged it, and checked the tangled trove of older computer parts under my bed for a new mouse.
I had five other mice. Tell me why every single motherfucking one of those things failed to work for a different, unique reason. Two of them required a port my computer (which is from ~2009) is too modern to have, one of them did have a more modern and present version of that port but its connector was so fucking busted it had three of the eight pins it was supposed to have, one of them had the same port and wasn't damaged but it was one of those ones with a physical ball in the bottom and the ball was missing so it wouldn't ever detect any movement, and the fifth one was nahhhhh. The inputs on that thing actually still work, you just have to press them manually instead of pressing a huge button which presses the tiny, secret button for you. It did get plugged in, and I could click with it. But I couldn't move it either; that function was busted on that one too for some reason, so shit.
I ended up having to get a new mouse, which is a bit shameful to admit. But if it makes it any worse, it wasn't totally new; the USB-A plug was a bit misshapen for some reason, and I had to beat it repeatedly with a broken wrench to get it back to being rectangular so it would fit. It worked perfectly. I love my life sometimes.
Oh, also, I brought my only LCD monitor out of disuse. I've been physically unscrewing and rescrewing the connector of my CRT into my 2 PCs when I switch between them. This should make things easier. Of course, I still have to do that with my mouse, keyboard, and speaker, and move which monitor is on my bed because I'm a fucking freak who puts all my computer stuff on my bed because it's so comfy, and also find a non-terrible place to put the monitor I'm not using that's in range of its cable and put it there every time without destroying everything. And switch the LCD back out for the CRT when I do anything the slightest bit atmospheric or cool, to set the mood that's been completely killed by this thing's presence. I don't know why I did this.
Yeah, I'm looking this over and this is easily the worst of my blog posts. It's even less enjoyable to read than it was to write.
But it's been a few days since I posted, and I'm starting to feel that feeling where you stare your passions and opportunities in the face as they swirl all the way down the drain, just like ten days ago. So I'm not really in any position to cull the weak posts, am I.

July 11, 2026 - Strange Occurrence

Hi. Writing this about ten minutes after my last post. I always read my updates after I post them. I was just doing so, playing violent music in the background, and as soon as my internal monologue finished saying "I wonder if I'm responsible for any terrible disasters", my computer did a glitch straight out of a movie where the audio suddenly started looping the same half-second over and over and the screen (a CRT, may I add) went totally frozen. You have to understand that, as I just said, it is currently 3AM, the so-called Witching Hour, and it is pitch-dark in my room. Move cursor, nothing happens. F11, nothing happens. Sleep button, nothing happens. Ctrl+Alt+Del, nothing happens. Power button on the PC tower, nothing happens. Unplug it, finally it turns off. I plug it back in and everything's just fine.
I know what this fucking looks like from a reader perspective. I swear on any given thing you say that, if I was to start an ARG, I wouldn't make it this clichè. Is this it? Is something cool finally happening in my life? Other than the skull thing, I guess? If I don't meet a gruesome staticky demon because of this, I'm going to be so pissed. If you're out there, thanks for waiting until I finished my blog post.

July 11, 2026 - Aimlessness No. 1 (Fan/Skull)

This is going to be the first of what will likely be a running type of blog post wherein I have no set topic but have the urge to write, so I will just trust that once I am "in the flow", topics will come naturally. And I'll add what this one goes over to the post title in parentheses so that, in the future, you can tell which is which at a glance.
I could write about why I am doing all this, of course, but the post directly before this would explain it perfectly as it is. So I suppose I will just look around and see what is in my room that I could talk about. Oh, wait, it's 2:42 AM, everything's pitch-black except my monitor and the three little blue dots that indicate the power level of my fan. I've had this fan for a good year or so now. It's small and sleek, not really my style, but goddamn does it get the job done. If I were to put it to setting five right now my house would collapse. The story of the Three Little pigs was actually about this fan; the wolf was never real and was imagined afterwards as a traumatic coping mechanism on the part of the pigs, for they could not fucking believe just how powerful that thing was. I'm not telling you what model or company it is unless they offer me a sponsorship, which is obviously not going to happen. Though, I'm sure it was very expensive and some relative of mine got it for me for Christmas or something of the like. It was very possibly, not, like, a deal.
It's the middle of Summer right now, of course, but it's actually pretty manageable at times with this thing. In the Winter, the combined efforts of the fan and dying Mother Nature make it so it's actually cold enough to be able to snuggle under my blankets with a warm glass of tea and wearing a sweater and beanie and all that.
One time I found a beanie in the ~20-acre forest area near my neighborhood. It was just there on the ground, pristine. I've also found a deer skull there once. I ended up not being able to take the skull home. I didn't want to touch it (at least before I could wash it), and I hadn't had the foresight to bring a bag or wear cargo pants or anything, so I ended up hooking it onto a long stick, like a staff. Of course, this would not be a permanent solution; I couldn't very well walk through Suburbia back to my house carrying that fucking thing. I walked around for a long time looking for any discarded plastic bags or other vessels, but the one time there wasn't litter everywhere was when I needed it most, of fucking course. I ended up emerging on the far side of the forest into, ostensibly, a vacated construction zone, which I found out later was for a power plant. There were wide pipes large enough to conceal it, and carrying a pipe all the way home is much more understandable than an animal skull on a stick. I found the best corner pipe piece to put it into and lifted it. Believe it or not, that thing was fucking backbreaking. But I was determined enough to bring that skull back to my fucking house that I would walk all the way with it.
Before I left the construction site, I caught sight of someone decently far away. I got out and was on the other side of the chainlink fence before they came back to confront me. It was some guy that was working there, apparently, even though nothing at all seemed to be going on. He asked the obvious question: "Why are you taking that?" I pretended not to be able to understand him due to his accent. It's, frankly, a miracle he gave me any sliver of the benefit of the doubt. By the way, for this entire story I was also walking my dog and had him on a leash; perhaps that's what subliminally made him trust me. We had a bit of the most pathetic back-and-forth I've ever bore witness to, and then I agreed I would just leave the pipe where I was and him and his guys or whatever would come around and grab it. Luckily, the distance from his location to the construction zone's exit back to my location was long enough that I could, at a believable brisk walking speed, disappear around the corner a decent amount of time before they probably picked it up. They probably also didn't even notice there was a skull in there, since it was basically weightless compared to the pipe.
I wonder if I'm responsible for any terrible disasters.

July 7, 2026 - The Woes of the Webmaster

Like many other mayors of a Neocity, I went into this with very little HTML knowledge. Like many in that category, I started feeling the inertia set in a good few days in, and as of yet, it has only grown. I've been through this in other fields before, and so I know this is the crest of a hill. But if knowledge of a task's difficulty made it any less difficult, we would be frolicking among the stars by now instead of being in form ~9,999 of societally-induced semi-slavery.
I wanted to make a blog post every day. A quick glance at the screen you're already reading from should tell you how that's been going.
I also wanted to quickly pump out my lessons on basic color theory, as I was able to do with their non-public Google Doc-based predecessors, but I did those in school, and back then, the alternative to writing them was schoolwork instead of literally anything in the world. Yesterday, I tried to start writing the second one, but I ended up making a "Projects" page, adding a button for it with a custom logo to the main page, and figuring out how to do tables so all those buttons would look a little better (they didn't). I have no "projects", by the way. Then I went to sleep, as it was four in the morning.
I guess the HTML medium makes it more tedious to write all that colored text, but not way more tedious. I suppose it's also an added layer of pressure to know that, given that I am very averse to going back and continuing from previous points after making progress on something, I must do it well the first time. But that is a topic I have been intimately familiar with for years, and I actually could fix a bad part and get back to the same point in no time; it's just another little weight on the chain. And yet, knowing all that, here I am, writing this instead of that.
Also, separately from what could be, I've started feeling weird about what is. I've been making this website with no plan since the beginning, since I know if I started planning the whole thing out I would never stop. I've just been doing whatever. You may notice some URLs, titles, tab titles, and other things that don't match up with one another. The Yaptrium's URL (at least until I'm willing to change the links everywhere) is "dissertationindex", which was going to be a placeholder. But as it expands and interconnects more, unity is going to get more and more important. I already know there will come a day I will be raring to work on something, with the only obstacle being that I have to do some tedious fix that will take hours and break the whole site until it's done. In the present, it is a sprawling unincorporated town that needs to be one apartment building. I never understood other Neocities' disclaimers and requests for forgiveness that the site was still under construction. Obviously it is; that's part of the nature of the hobby and the charm of the medium. But now that my site is a construction zone with no blueprint itself, I understand the feeling of anticipated aversion. It's endless setup with no punchline. Ornamentation for a tree that hasn't been delivered.
Also, this background. In case you're reading this in the future after it changes, it's the three Radiant Simulacrum Asylum colors in subtle low-opacity 1-pixel diagonal lines, with mid-opacity 2-pixel orthogonal yellow lines that illuminate the diagonals in their path, all over black, with the end result kind of looking like weird, gilded plaid.
yeah
However, several cumulative hours of looking at it has made me see in it other things, as would anything. It looks like a tessellated stained-glass window, catching the light behind you and coloring it in rainbow, a perfectly-framed view of nothing but darkness. It looks like scaffolding, endless, structurally perfect scaffolding, holding up nothing but more and ever more scaffolding.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
I want to leave a permanent mark on the world. I don't want the timeline when I never existed to be largely the same, I want my ideas to shape generations to come, I want a Wikipedia article, I want to stay alive in spirit after everyone who knew me moves on, I want a hall of fame entry, I want my name engraved in the center of the Earth and encoded into the human genome, I want my brain uploaded and cryopreserved, and here I am doing fucking nothing to make any of that happen. Is it ridiculous to fear being forgotten? Is it normal to be fine with your ideas dying alongside you?
I started writing this two hours ago. It's, like, one page. Fuck me.

July 5, 2026 - Stubborn Stagnation

Yesterday (as defined by the typical clock format, as opposed to "my previous span of wakefulness") was another of those days you can't really say all that much about. Nothing really happened, one way or another. It was the fourth of July, of course. I totally forgot until, like, 1PM, though, at which point my neighbors informed me that our other neighbors were having a pool party and I could come, and that the first neighbors were firing up the barbecue and making some prime ribs and other stuff like that. As always, I responded impersonally, involuntarily, politely, and untellingly. I might come.
As they left, I didn't have a "first instinct"; my two instincts emerged equally strongly and quickly, for they were the same two instincts I always had, and you know what they say a wheelbarrow does to the path it always takes. I should go, because I never do anything outside my own house and if I keep this up I will die having lived the most unsatisfying life imaginable; I shouldn't go, because I know fully well I will spend every torturous second there wishing I had not gone, and when I come back I will be relieved and swear to take my own feelings into consideration more often. Being a Neocities user, it also crossed my mind that I shouldn't go because of all the atrocities the United States has been committing lately. Before that thought was even done being thought, I knew it was immaterial; my neighbors are normal, kind people. Hanging out with them as they laughed and partied would be an arbitrary pixel's difference in the vast static of the Butterfly Effect and its presence or absence would be too stochastic to be worth serious consideration. This was local. I had to decide for myself.
Of course, it was a while until the pool party began, so I could do something else to take my mind off of it until it happened, and decide later while in a different state of mind. I watched Youtube videos of other people watching other Youtube videos, not once ceasing to think about my dilemma. I was in the same state of mind an hour and a half later. Except, I was just starting to settle into the Youtube video. And it's not like I was going anyways, in all likelihood.
I did not suddenly miss my window; I had my eyes locked on it for the entire time it was passing me by. And I felt the same deep, corrosive regret I always do, and I also felt so relieved I could finally stop thinking about it. I actually remember smiling a little bit despite myself.
A good hour or so after, I did actually go over to the house of the neighbors who made the food. They still had some out, and I got a small plate of boudin and pasta salad that I immediately took home. The pasta salad was bad. I ended up throwing it out. I felt so guilty, but what else was I supposed to do, leave the plate of it out in my dining room to mold forever? Preserve it in resin as a keepsake?

I had mellowed out a bit more once night fell, and I was as much past the whole thing as I was going to be. I was paying full attention to my Youtube videos, until I heard the first fireworks.
I love fireworks, by the way.
I got up to look outside, but the view from my room's window was awful, and the only thing I could really see without being at a terribly awkward angle was the neighbor's house, with their yard and pool and decorations.
I've done it a couple times before, but not recently. I decided, not with any particular bravado, that I was going to go outside and walk around the neighborhood, looking at the fireworks. This would be my adventure for today. This would be the thing I'd do instead of staying shut in during a holiday.
I took my phone to play Panic! At The Disco songs in the background, a knife in my pocket just in case, and nothing else. I walked around, gawking in the darkness at the beautiful explosions in the sky, and between them I'd try to get lost even though I knew the neighborhood like the back of my hand, so that I would have to figure out a way back and have fun doing so. I actually did get lost, for about a minute. It was delightful to put myself in the hands of chance, instead of my own, agonizingly predictable hands.
I want to do that more often. Historically, every time I think that phrase, I end up trying to force myself to want to do the thing in question, and then I hate it and never do it again. But maybe, if the fireworks are what tipped it into being worth doing, if it can only be done like this twice a year, I'll be excited instead.

July 1, 2026 - Bursting

One of the reasons I started this website has been to have a place to just yap my absolute ass off about anything. As you might be able to tell from the numerous "and long story short"'s in my last post, I haven't really been doing much of that thus far. There are so many things I need to say but it's like my subconscious's titanium grip will only let up if I satisfy some secret condition completely unrelated to anything you'd imagine would be inducive of the flowing of the brainwaves. Perhaps it has something to do with the scope of each of these subjects, and my history of completely abandoning everything I don't finish in one go.
If anyone reads this shit, then expect a new section on the site by tomorrow. It will be the beginning of Radiantsimulacrumasylum's crown fixture.
Oh, also, my Minesweeper record has already dropped to 66.54 seconds. I am a god and you all are less than ants to me.

June 30, 2026 - Minesweeper

I've been playing a lot of Minesweeper recently.
I have two PCs, the far more fast and modern of which is unable to connect to the internet due to some truly convoluted bullshit I might cover if I ever get a PHD and have no other ideas for what to write the dissertation on. The other one is from, like, 2009 or something and I found it years-unused in my house recently. I factory reset it and decided that, since it was from the Frutiger Aero era, I might as well go full retro with it. Among other things, I installed Minesweeper.
A habit I picked up from being a terrible student in school is blasting music into my earlobes while fully locking into some simple computer game to keep my fingers busy. Tetris was the classical choice. I tried looking for a really nice, chill retro Tetris, but unfortunately, I succeeded, and the Tetris I latched onto required an emulator for this strange thing called a "DOS", which led me to a whole rabbit hole I eventually bailed on and am uneager to resubmerge into. As such, my go-to earrot game is Minesweeper now.
That was just, like, a week ago. Now, my best time on medium-difficulty Minesweeper is 71.79 seconds, which is absolutely fucking ridiculous. If I was so inclined, I could keep doing this for a few years and probably become a big head honcho in the professional Minesweeper speedrunning community or something. Why do all the things I'm good at have to be stupid bullshit?

June 30, 2026 - First ever blog entry

Oh man the pressure's on. This is gonna be the first RSA blog post, FOREVER. This'll always be the first one, the one people that sort by oldest see first, the one the authorities will see first if they ever do a full top-to-bottom investigation here, the post people in the far-flung future will see first if they click the earliest little bubble on Internet Archive... Ummm... I have no ideas dude. What the hell. Goddamn. This is it. Just a self-deprecating joke. I am straining my brain and I think my neuron connections are going to snap. Man. This fucking sucks. This is bad. Fuck me. Fuck this shit. I didn't do it.



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