Lately

I haven't been feeling like myself lately. Morosity.

I think it has to do with dreams. I don't dream much anymore.

It's a conscious decision not to: I know I could just quit MJ and I would eventually dream again. But for some reason, I prefer the daydream reverie moments over the possibility of having nightmares. And I know that nightmares and dreams are good, because they allow the brain to process things while you sleep. And I generally don't have nightmares when I do dream, but now I'm afraid I have a backlog of nightmares because again, I don't dream anymore...

It sounds kind of sad, right? But it's not. It's not, because when I did dream, long ago, well, those dreams are becoming reality. I'm actually enjoying playing music with my piano, djembe, & Rockband drumsticks. I'm actually enjoying fixing my Yu-Gi-Oh cards into various combinations to make the perfect deck. I'm enjoying the hell out of cooking while I can still afford good ingredients. I even made a coconut/tapioca-base pizza last night that I couldn't eat (I'm going dairy-free for a while - acne has cleared up so far) for my housemates that was, according to them, absolutely delicious. All these things feed into my reality and my reality is anything but solipsistic, which was a grand fear of mine when I was younger.

I lost my job this week. 

I'd been working at a grocery store for over a year, stocking shelves and directing traffic. Taking expired food home and not getting sick from it. Being content that I wasn't working a typically "stressful" job - relishing in that fact, actually. I think that was a mistake. Thinking: "oh, this isn't a stressful job, so I don't need to worry about stress". I did try to eat well, but... the ice cream. The doughnuts. The sugar-laden breakfast cereals. The bread. The juices. The cheap sugary bacon. The chips, oh god, the potato chips... The vast majority of it, I didn't buy; my housemates did. I cannot blame them - I understand those things are at an equivalent level of addiction to heroin. But, I think I finally need my own space, a space where the toxicity cannot enter and where I leave on my own accord.

I must apologize for my somewhat unclear writing. Like I said, I haven't been feeling like myself lately. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I didn't snap this time. I didn't snap. I was fired, but I didn't snap. I was fired because I took one too many sick/personal days, not because I sucked at my job. Can you imagine how horrible it would be to feel like I got fired because I sucked at placing objects on shelves? It was actually a decent part of the job, the placing of the objects on the shelves, because in the moments between the cart and the shelf, there was silence. A tiny moment extending beyond infinity until... the yogourt was stacked.

I'm afraid of publishing this. What if my next employer uses an algorithm to sort through things a potential employee has said online, and it comes across this post, and it sees that I took one too many sick/personal days? And yet, now that I write this out, my mind changes perspectives. Would I want to work for an employer that fires me for trying to take better care of myself? No!

But I understand, capitalistically, why I was fired. People need their food, and if there's no one there to deliver the food to the place where they can then pick it up to take to the cashiers, well, no one has a job.

I will miss the people, and because I didn't snap, I'm totally able to go back and shop for bespoke food items here and there, and I'll probably do that because it's one of the reasons I wanted to work there in the first place. To be around quality food.

For now, I'll take better care of myself. And I'll leave you with an overdue SotD (Song of the Day), and a singer that I haven't written about in decades:

Paraweakspell

All that I want is to wake up weak;

---

Kitchen freewrite

There I was none the wiser kitchen department thanks for calling I've got three balls in here that are not out of bounds but they are definitely out of play; there's a reason I poured the green tea into another container to contain the bblue grey speckles of dust gathered at the bottom of the first cup; there is clearly no way these glasses are of good q - TIME TO PLAY OVERWATCH 2 AND COOK AT THE SAME TIME YAYYYY!

 

03/29 Edit: You know, I always find it kinda fun to look back on my crazy illegible freewrite rants.

Illiteral truth

Daydreams into nightmares

Nightmares into nought

Dreamless slumber

for

a nimbus of beauteous exercise

On terrible growing practices

My ex-employer caused social isolation.

I'm somewhat of an expert on this, you see: I was their best salesman.

I have it on good authority that it's up to 20.

20 = u

u is the last generation.

u is not the one I want to smoking/consuming.

26 - u = 6

3/29 Edit: Despite the chaos of the previous lines, there is in fact a logic to them. I won't explain it further because I'm not really sure why I'm sharing these lines, but there is a logic.

It's 2am as I write this, and my chamomile tea is finished brewing. I will go pick up the plate that is covering the teacup, and my tea will be warm. It will be good to drink this before bed, because I've had it before and it helped me get a bare minimum of two hours of sleep.

The moon is to my right. I know because I went for a walk less than an hour ago and it was there, above the housetops and the condos and the firestation and the pumping station and the stars I saw were particularly bright because there were only two of them visible nearby the moon.

Nearby the moon is a two dimensional plane. Because I don't think the stars are nearby the moon.

The moon might no longer be to my right, because I've been writing for what feels like minutes and I don't usually feel that way; but at 2 A.M., I'm usually fast asleep.

I feel like going to bed; but I cannot. I cannot, because my sleep routine is completely upside down from the lack of nature.

A Bitcoin exposé

21 million Bitcoin.

Okay; fine.

I get that.

... but why quit asking why because of it?

P.S. I'm stressed out; why does it matter that there are 20 million or 21 million, ultimately.

P.P.S. Oui, Bitcoin est à 72 milles de dollars américain, approximativement au moment où j'écris ces mots. Mais mon capital n'augmente pas aussi vite que je le voudrais.

Pourquoi?

Parce-que je suis dans le système fiat, le système "pas tes clés; pas ton crypto.", et parce-que mon cerveau mathématique se fait endommager souvent par la malbouffe et ma colère intérieure.

A Paramore brief

For a self-described Paramore superfan, I sure don't write about them often or with great depth, often linking their music here and there but never doing a deep dive into why I love them so much. I say this... but if you've been here for a while, you might have caught one such deep dive a while back.

Noncomprehensive list of things that (slightly) annoy me

Alternative title: some pet peeves and some really annoying shiz

Some are more niche than others. In a rather random order:

• When my shoelaces are uneven
• When I find a single sock after doing laundry
• When I keep getting Doomfist (I'm so bad with him) in Mystery Heroes in Overwatch 2
• People who are rude & toxic in Overwatch 2 (and other online games)
  
• How difficult it is to cancel auto-renewal subscriptions
• Cat dandruff getting stuck to my clothes
• When iTunes decides to give an album in my library 5 gray stars out of nowhere
  
• When a pen doesn't write well, but still writes so it's difficult to justify throwing it away
• When someone walking toward me on the sidewalk doesn't walk on their right side (barring exceptions like snow, pushing a stroller etc.)
• When I buy medical cannabis online and it has a package date more than 8 months old
• Shrinkflation (when the price of a product stays the same or goes up, but the quantity diminishes)
• Related to the above, skimpflation (when manufacturers cheap out on ingredients/components but the price doesn't go down)
• When my phone gets sluggish for no reason except age i.e. planned obsolescence
• When people at the grocery store leave their shopping cart in the middle of the aisle and obliviously create a traffic jam
• When another department at work is understaffed and it causes me more stress
• Loud pickleball noises, and pickleball courts that don't have enough space between the baseline and the wall
• When people pronounce "badminton" as "badmitten"
• When people meanly mock other folks' accents
• When I accidentally take my anti-reflect instead of my anti-fog glasses to work
• Mosquitoes and the rest of the pests (black flies, wasps etc.)
• That sheet music isn't de facto free & freely shared
• When my housemates leave their clothes in the washer/dryer on my laundry day
• Dog walkers letting their dogs unleashed in a specifically designated on-leash zone
• Dog walkers not picking up after their dog
• Forgetting really interesting knowledge learned during university cram days
  
• When I get a spot on a red seat on a bus, and someone just in front of me is taking up 2 blue (accessible) because of their backpack, and then someone who could really use a seat hops on
• Candles that don't burn well
• An otherwise quality product that doesn't need sugar that has sugar in the ingredient list (e.g. bacon)
• When people assume I'm Québécois when I consider myself Torontonian first and foremost (this is the most slight of annoyances on this list as of March 12th because yeah, I get why)
• Computer hardware that still works fine, but not well
  
• Motorized leaf blowers
  

Edit March 12th: added some more to this list

These few are definitely not "slightly" annoying and veer more on the "dangerously" annoying:

Sparse rhymes

I have the beats going on

I write a line; I beat a line

Chillhop messed up pop true dialectic hip-hop

Code switching to different levels

Right now I'm thinking about the meta

The place where I keep things digital

This place I call home is only pixels

But I want it to be more liminal; scratch that, I want it to be joyful

Am I alone in this metaphysical?

Crack into the independent; leave the corporate muck behind is the goal

My first OW2 backcap

Ahhhh I'm so excited right now! Okay, bear with me: if you've never played Overwatch 2, it might be difficult for you to understand why I'm excited. But I'll break it down for you if you're curious, and I'm assuming you're not a gamer.

Okay. So Overwatch 2 is an online-only multiplayer First-Person Shooter (FPS). You play games of 5 players against 5 players (it used to be 6vs6...) on different "maps" that are fictional, but loosely based on futuristic versions of real-life locations like Toronto, Havana, and Chongqing, China.

Different maps have different objectives. For the Toronto map (New Queen Street), you're trying to push a giant robot in a sort of tug-of-war battle against the other team. In Chongqing (Lijiang Tower), you're fighting for control of a specific area in a king-of-the-hill style battle. In Havana, you're trying to push a payload into the enemy's base and they're trying to stop you (or vice-versa).

One of the best parts of Overwatch 2 is the cast of characters. During a standard game, you can play and switch to any character in the role that you queued for, and there are three roles: Tank, Damage, and Support. I tend to play either damage or support, because I don't like the added pressure that comes from being the only tank (it's always 1 tank, 2 damage, 2 support on any given team).

This is more advanced tactical discussion, but one way to look at the roles is that tanks create space for the team, damage maintains the space, and support, well, supports these 2 roles in doing that. Creating space means taking tactical and strategic positions on the map to make it easier to get eliminations, and eliminations are how you get rid of the enemy team before they inevitably respawn and try and stop you from completing objectives.

ANYWAY. With that gloss-over of the game over with, I just finished playing a Quick Play (the non-competitive mode that I prefer) game on King's Row (based on London, England) as Zenyatta, a support character that does high damage and good utility, but with very little mobility. As Zenyatta, you're really reliant on your team to not get ganked. So on King's Row, I was on the side trying to push the payload, and I had a really good team so we got through the first 2 checkpoints without anyone dying (which is pretty rare: dying happens a lot in this game). King's Row, however, is notoriously difficult on the last checkpoint because the defenders respawn pretty much right next to where you're trying to push the payload. If there's even 1 enemy player near the payload, it doesn't move; so it's difficult to eliminate the entire enemy team faster than they can eliminate you on checkpoint 3.

Overwatch 2 is a game of teamfights. These are battles that happen naturally as the game progresses, and it's not uncommon for a team to get a "team kill", which is when everyone is dead at the same time before anyone has a chance to respawn.

My team fought a hard teamfight and used their "ultimates" (a powerful but rare ability unique to each hero), trying to push the payload the last few few metres, but everyone on my team finally died - except me. Usually, you want to get eliminated with your team when this happens so that you respawn as a team. But in this case, I saw the opportunity to hide behind enemy lines. The enemy had a burst of confidence from having eliminated my team, so they pushed forward, leaving the payload (and me!) behind.  One thing you should know about Zenyatta is that because he floats, he actually doesn't make footstep sounds, which is one of the best tells that an enemy is nearby.

So the enemy team forgot about me, and can't hear me. I sneak up behind the payload and get it moving, while my team distracts the enemy team by trying to push forward through the front line... the payload slowly moves toward the goal line. I eventually see the enemy's tank realize I'm about to cap the point, and they rush back but it's too late: I cap the point and win the game for my team. My team is ecstatic and thank me profusely in the in-game chat, and I cannot believe that I managed to pull it off. It was a hell of a rush because these kinds of wins are really, really rare. Someone on the enemy team usually notices and then the entire team can easily pick you off the payload.

I tried to make a video clip of all this from the replay file, but it seems I can't through GeForce Now, so the best I can do is a screenshot of the setup.

Red circle is the payload and the direction I need to push it in, green are the outlines of my teammates, and I'm in the blue circle. Notice the enemy team focusing their attention toward the green.