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<h1>Give Me Your Story</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-04</p>
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<p>Imagine, if you will, a <a href="https://archive.vn/x5NiF">MOGAI</a> teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with <a href="../../2019/august/consumption.html">consumption</a>, not the historical kind but the <a href="../february/consumeproduct.html">modern kind</a>, personality nothing but <del>fandoms</del> worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">gender of the week</a>, pride flags like someone put on a blindfold and threw darts at a color wheel set to random. Just as devoid of a working sense of color theory as they are of a coherent sense of self outside the internet, outside the Cathedral of Tumblr Zoomer Culture.</p>
<p>I only paint this picture so that those who have experienced the kind of person illustrated will instantly know what I mean by "give me your toes". Vague and nonsensical non-threats pointed at anyone who dares to blaspheme or transgress against their Cathedral like "pee your pants" or "I'm revoking your kneecap privileges", non-threats because the standard "kill yourself" has lost its edge (and is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200405011157/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tell-someone-to-kill-themselves-and-you-could-end_b_5945800ce4b0940f84fe2f19">also illegal</a>). Usually these are accompanied by a poorly-photoshopped image of a celebrity or fictional character holding a gun and pointing it at the viewer.</p>
<p>It is with this same sense of semi-ironic desperation that I find myself more and more pointing the fictional gun at the video game collection on my bookshelf.</p>
<p>When I was about ten or so, I got a copy of <i>The Legendary Starfy</i> for the DS. For those who've never played it, it's a platformer about a little starfish dude (the titular Starfy) who gets woken up one morning by an alien rabbit dude crashing through his roof, and then the two go romp around the underwater world trying to find the rabbit dude's memories. Apparently it's the first game in a <a href="https://tcrf.net/Category:Legendary_Starfy_series">four-part series</a> that was originally for the Gameboy Advance, but only the first one was ever translated to English and remade. Since, at the time, I was only allowed to play handheld games in the mornings or during car rides, I spent almost every moment I had to take a car ride struggling through the levels in small snatches here and there. I always got stuck on the sunken pirate ship, trying to push a button and then pass through a gate before time ran out, and only rarely did I ever get past it.</p>
<p>But I <i>did</i> get past it: I must have, because I remember doing the final boss battle. Or, rather, I remember <i>failing</i> the final boss battle in the back seat of my grandma's van and giving up and never touching the game again.</p>
<p>To this day, I still have not completed the game. Not that I could, since, while writing this post, I went to pop it in and see how long it's been sitting unfinished- and apparently the cartridge is missing. Most likely one of my brothers "borrowed" it like I'm apt to let them do when I'm in my better moods and managed to lose it.</p>
<p>There are lots of other games that I have worked my way through with virtual sweat and real tears and then had to give up because the final boss battle (or some other far-down level) was too tricky for my fingers:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Code Name S.T.E.A.M.</i>, a turn-based shooter about an alien invasion in some alternate universe where steampunk went worldwide, which truthfully I only bothered pirating and playing because my <del>waifu</del> Smash main happened to be a playable character. Default Fortnite Man just isn't appealing enough on his own.</li>
<li><i>Charlotte's Web</i>, a platformer and also the very first video game I got for the DS. There are several parts in the early levels where one has to sneak past the farmer, hiding behind boxes and tractors. If Wilbur gets seen and the farmer catches up to him, the poor pig makes a tortured face and the screen quickly goes black, which likely contributed a lot of my early nightmares about being murdered. (At least, that's what I remember happening. This timeline might be different.) I got stuck somewhere right before the Templeton levels. I have a cheat program installed on my 3DS which could give me infinite health (which really wouldn't help with the levels where you parkour to avoid falling into a barn's endless abyss), but replaying through all the levels brings back frantic memories of elementary school that I'd rather stay buried.</li>
<li><i>Scribblenauts</i>, yet <i>another</i> platformer for the DS (can you sense a pattern here?) that I only truly remember in hazy memories of a certain former friend's house during sleepovers. I borrowed her DSi (which was essentially the same as a DS, but this time with cameras and a funky camera app) and plowed through the sequel as far as I could in the wee hours of the morning, doing my best with everyone else not to wake up the host's parents. And I beat that one! But not this one. Because this one doesn't understand the concept of adjectives.</li>
<li><i>Xenoblade Chronicles</i>.</li>
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<p>Oh dear, good old Xenoblade. I am going absolutely batshit insane from the government-inforced COVID-19 home quarantine, and this game, which I have poured the last two months into (or, at least, sixty hours for one hour a day) has pushed me to the limits of insanity these past two weeks.</p>
<p>But no more! Because I quit today. And I was at- you guessed it- the final boss battle.</p>
<p>There was absolutely no way I could have continued, even if I had wanted to. Where I started today, I was at the final point in the game where one could save (inside the interior of Prison Island). Past that is a tough boss battle, which halts halfway-through to a cutscene, and then the same boss regains all of his health and you have to try to kill him <i>again</i>. And then another cutscene, and you get sent off to space, which isn't <i>really</i> space but apparently just a simulation. There are no edges or any kind of borders outlining the walkway between teleportation points, just a glowing line connecting said points, so theoretically you could just walk in a single direction forever (if you don't fall out of the universe, that is; I didn't try). You walk past every planet, and by every planet, you have to fight a replica of (nearly) <i>every major boss in the game so far</i>. And after <i>those</i>, another cutscene, and then the fight where the god of the world kills your entire party in fifteen seconds flat. Supposedly, according to the wiki, after that fight is <i>another</i>, even harder, final <i>final</i> boss battle.</p>
<p>But for every other boss battle in the game, if you lost, you were just revived and teleported to the last landmark you passed by. You had the option of exploring the surrounding lands and grinding until you got strong enough to survive the battle, or even teleporting to other lands where there were shops with specific equipment or a furnace to craft gems to boost one's stats. If you got frustrated, you could save right where you were and quit for the day and come back the next right where you left off.</p>
<p>This exemplifies the two major problems I have with modern story-based (as opposed to competitive) games: that you can't save before the final boss battle, and that grinding is necessary to advance in the storyline.</p>
<p>As far as I know, there is no technical reason why Shulk and friends aren't allowed to save before they go kick Zanza's ass. It's not for memory limitations, as the space simulation requires far less objects in view than every other battle: a few spheres are far less demanding for the Wii's admittedly pitiful hardware to render than a snowy mountainside with lots of jagged edges (Mt. Valak) or the inside-and-out of a fortress with plenty of walls and doors and windows (Galahad Fortress) or the entirety of a small village (Colony 9). It's not for entities, as there are only the party and Zanza there (and Xenoblade just respawns everything in an area upon loading a save, anyway). And Dunban's insistence in Prison Island that "there is no turning back from this point" or however he worded it isn't a valid excuse either because, for example, most of the modern <i>Fire Emblem</i> games allow saving <i>right before</i> said final boss battle (with the exception of <i>Fates</i>, which is a burning dumpster fire of its own, and <i>Three Houses</i>, which I don't know anything about gameplay-wise because I refuse to play it).</p>
<p>The player, shocking as this might be, has a life <i>outside</i> your game, developers. You need to respect that they might not have the time to commit to a several-hour-long stretch without saving. <i>Especially</i> if it's a console game. Do you know how infuriating it would be to be an inch away from success and then suddenly have a power outage? What about adults with jobs? There were several instances for me where I thought I'd just play a bit before a work shift, and then end up frantically skipping crucial cutscenes to get to a savepoint faster. What about kids with homework and chores to do, which can't necessarily be planned out? The game needs to accomodate their schedules, not the other way around, or else they're simply not going to be able to (healthily) play it.</p>
<p>And this might just be the /r/StopGaming in me speaking, but I am <i>fucking sick and tired</i> of having to grind in games, of having to waste my time performing repetitive actions over and over and over again for absolutely nobody's material benefit. The first time, it was about fifteen hours in, stuck teleporting among levels in the ether mine in order to evade Xord's <del>ban</del>hammer. And then it was about forty hours in, repeatedly saving and loading in the same part in Agniratha again so that I could survive Gadolt and his megalasers for more than thirty seconds into the battle. And then it was fifty hours, and I was inside the Bionis' chest cavity, acting as cancer cells razing down everything in sight for a week so I could go make explode some woman who thought turning her son into a giant telepathic bird was a good way to become immortal.</p>
<p>In some alternate dimension where I did manage to finish the final boss fight, and thus the game, when I think about the positive things about the game, it's not going to be the frantic timing to every battle, or hearing the same catchphrases over and over again. It's going to be the content of the cutscenes. The framing, the shots, the <i>content</i>: you know, the <i>story</i>! I'm not in it for the fighting; I'm in it for the story! If I wanted to play a game where I beat shit up, I'd just drag one of my brothers into my room (where I have my consoles set up, since the house flooded <i>again</i>) and we'd play Smash together for a few hours.</p>
<p>I think story-based games should have an easy mode for people who value the story over the gameplay. Not skipping the battles altogether, since a lot of the story can surprisingly be conveyed through simple passive experience (the passivity of playing as opposed to the activeness of cutscenes), but easy so that one isn't spending weeks upon weeks grinding it out. If Xenoblade wasn't such a time suck with grinding in order to progress anywhere at all, I'd probably replay it again. But I won't, because I don't have the time. I'm not sacrificing sixty hours again to just be barred from collecting the payoff at the end. If you like the gameplay more and get your enjoyment from constantly fighting monsters, be my guest! But some of us just want to see Le Epic Anime Boy murder God and then move on with their day.</p>
<p>"But, Vane," I hear an eager strawman pipe up, "if you don't want to put in the effort, you should just watch a movie instead."</p>
<p>But movies don't have the same kind of natural immersion that games have. In Xenoblade, for instance, the cutscenes aren't pre-rendered. Whatever armor your party members wear in combat also shows up in the cutscenes. There was one instance I remember where my party was in Alcamoth, a stuffy imperial city full of futuristic technology, but since the last good armor drops had been in the Makna Forest region, my whole party was wearing hilariously out-of-style "tribal" outfits that made them stick out like sore thumbs against the pale pearlly sheen of everything. A few I had taken to the city's store and upgraded a few pieces of theirs, making even more nonsensical outfits.</p>
<p>Imagine you're a sheltered prince who is eager to meet the people who saved his sister's life, and then some buff dude walks in wearing a whole-ass headdress, and another dude with what looks like a metal crown put on upside-down tells you to your face that your rituals don't mean shit to him because he's a different species...</p>
<p>But I can't watch <i>Advent Children</i> and have Cloud or Kadaj wearing a funny hat the whole time but everything else the same. Not without serious video editing. And even then, it would never look quite right.</p>
<p>In movies, everything has to be prim and proper, and every facet of the experience has to be set in stone, the same for everyone. In games, developers can give the players some leeway. Reyn can walk into the royal audience chamber looking like a crackhead doing shitty (and possibly culturally insensitive) cosplay if I want him to, and by gods, Kallian will take him just as seriously as if he were wearing anything else.</p>
<p>"But what about a book?"</p>
<p>Books are slightly different. Most books sans movie adaptations don't have set illustrations for every single character and setting inside, giving the reader the freedom to imagine whatever they want within the loose confines of the author's descriptions- and even then, the reader can just ignore these at their peril.</p>
<p>Books have serious advantages, I will concede- no, I will loudly proclaim. For starters, you can bookmark a book <i>at any time</i>. Sure, there are optimal places to stop and quit for the night, like right at the first page of a new chapter, but unless you're reading on some incredibly restrictive electronic device, you can stop whenever and wherever. And books don't require your active participation, at least if you're not reading them for school. There is no such thing as grinding, stagnation- only progress, only forward through the pages so long as your brain can comprehend the words. (Academia, with its insistence that you constantly be highlighting and taking notes, ruins the immersion and the fun of books. But that's beside the point.) And if you get a paper copy, or a low-powered e-ink device, so long as the sun is shining bright enough to read, you don't have to fear a power outage blinking your effort away in a... blink of the eye.</p>
<p>Games don't translate well into books (or movies either, now that I think about it), but there are a few that have tried anyway, most notably a handful of the <i>Zelda</i> games as Americanized manga. (And what with Sonic and Pikachu up on the big screen, it's only a matter of time before Ninty gets hungry for money and poor old Link gets shoved up there too.) And while this example I've found to be superior to playing the actual games, it's uncertain whether this is because of the method of storytelling actually being superior to how the game presented it or because the <i>Zelda</i> games that were manga-ized I just didn't like playing because of their aging mechanics. (Without the save states that an emulator affords, old games <i>suck</i>. Imagine not being able to save <i>at all</i>. <del>this post was sponsored by RetroArch gang</del>)</p>
<p>"But what about someone livestreaming the game? You get the best of all worlds!"</p>
<p>Do I really? Because then I often have to put up with some obnoxious person screaming into their microphone every few seconds in a pitiful attempt to be "funny". Or I'm just watching straight-up gameplay, and then I feel silly. I don't want to watch someone play the game. I want to play the game myself. I just don't want to be playing it <i>forever</i>.</p>
<p>I want to point a poorly-photoshopped gun at the game and yell, "Give me your <i>story</i>!"</p>
<p>But until developers get their heads out of their asses and stop making their players waste unnecessary time, we have wiki pages. And the wiki pages are a poor substitute for the actual experience.</p>
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<h1>Immortality</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-25</p>
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<p>Do you remember the Temple of the Vampire? The cult that believed that sacrificing themselves and their energies to undead gods was the key to achieving salvation, and then turned around and berated humans for having "prey instincts" of willingly sacrificing themselves to their "prey"?</p>
<p>Since the rest of the books are also available on archive.org, and since this quarantine has gone on too long for me to hold on to sanity, I thought I might read some of them. Maybe there was some detail not revealed in their Bible that would shed more light on the insanity I reviewed, or some fact I overlooked that would prove me wrong.</p>
<p>Four of the books, each marked "Bloodlines", are collections of old messages from their mailing list. It’s chilling to read the few entries that are timestamped and think, "This was happening while I was in elementary school. These people were speaking of apocalypse and of worldwide human enslavement while I was bickering with the higher grades in my school over who got to slip around and pretend to ice-skate on the ice patches underneath the playground structures." Which wasn’t even worth doing anyway, since soon the whistle would blow and those higher grades would be pulled inside, leaving the younger kids to run riot over the playground all by themselves.</p>
<p>In those days, I had hardly a conception that they would ever end. Intellectually, I knew that, come the end of sixth grade, I would "graduate" to the junior high. I would say goodbye forever to the students going to different schools than I or to private academies, and we would never return to that playground. Or, at least, not in the same capacity, for the playground was within biking distance of my old house, and sometimes my father would bring me and my brothers there to play. The swings would always seem so desolate without the teeming masses to fill them, to jump off and fly for a few precious seconds and then get a free ticket to the nurse’s office.</p>
<p>But in the moment... my friends and I planned that day’s recess’ crusades like they would go on forever, each day assured after the next.</p>
<blockquote>...in order to be admitted to the Second Circle the applicant must answer without qualification the question, "Do you want to physically live forever?" <br /> The Vampire without any hesitation replies, "Yes!" The human being will hesitate or suggest he or she only wants to live forever if they have this or that condition as well. <br /> For the Vampire this seems insane. Why would anyone say no to immortality for any reason at all? <br /> <a href="https://archive.org/details/JBloodlinesTwo/page/n49/mode/2up">(Bloodlines: Volume 2, page 53)</a></blockquote>
<p>For any reason at all? What about eternal slavery at the hands of a ruthless lord? What about eternal torment in the flames of hell? (Not that I believe in a hell, of course.) To have one’s skin flayed over and over, or their eyes plucked out? To be chained on a rock and replay the myth of Prometheus for all generations?</p>
<p>Am I presumed to be lesser if I weigh my potential future pain against my potential future pleasure, and judge that the former far outweighs the latter? Isn’t one of the main totems of the Vampire Bible that you exalt your reason? You who would see me as an animal to be enslaved and slaughtered and sacrificed for the pleasure of your gods, blindly running like a beast at <em>any</em> chance to prolong your life, regardless of the circumstances.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why your cult got <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20191003105932/http://www.vampirewebsite.net/vampirecults/">exposed</a> as a <a href="https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,64749,page=59">ploy</a> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170602121051/http://www.vampirismforum.com/t60-question-with-some-comment-temple-of-the-vampire">gain</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150708090858/http://www.the600club.com/topic28487-1.html">clients</a> for <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422182009/http://hoaxes.org/weblog/permalink/vampire_sites/P2160">cryonics</a> companies.</p>
<p>Would I like to live forever? Perhaps. But certainly not under the aforementioned torture. Does my body age? Do I stay young forever, or does my body eventually shrivel up and I return to sentient dust, forever condemned to be painfully aware of every atom of myself scattering to the reaches of the universe?</p>
<p>Granted that I stay young forever, how is a human embedded in society supposed to deal with the reality of never aging? One could either allow others to be aware of their immortality, in which case one would be hounded by scientific researchers forever, or be forced to both throw away their identities and remake new ones every few decades, but also evade the government’s oversight? Maybe that would have been possible two hundred years ago, but as technology progresses and the surveillance state encroaches ever farther into our lives, immortality becomes much more of a burden to upkeep than a blessing to enjoy.</p>
<p>If I also got to be a shapeshifter, able to take animal form and hide away from civilization whenever the need came to me, immortality could be quite fun. But in my human skin I have now, the eternity would drive me insane, maybe more than I already am.</p>
<p>I say, it is the human’s nature to think critically about any major choice and pick what they feel is best, to be a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200422184056/https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational">rational actor</a>. And it is the so-called vampire’s nature to seek to be a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422183219/http://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/32t048/a_laminated_paper_towel/">laminated paper towel</a>.</p>
<p>What a pathetic fate.</p>
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<h1>The Outside: An Introduction</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-20</p>
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<p><a href="../../2019/april/run-every-day.html">A little over a year ago</a>, I didn't know how to start a post with some crazy ideas in it, either. Although, granted, I was at my grandma's house at the time, a visit from my cousins freshly ended (or about to start; I can't remember which) and for whatever reason, whenever I'm sitting in that purple-walled room, so impersonal since I moved out over a decade ago, I always feel numb. I feel nothing except the endless stretch of time before me, blank, possessionless. At least, when pacing back and forth in my room from the sheer anxiety of being pent-up with nowhere to go, I feel sorrow, I feel grief, I feel feral rage. But in the Purple Room? I feel nothing.</p>
<p>Like a trial run of the likely nothing after death, but with more obsessive playing on my Switch to pad out the time between meals.</p>
<p>But the “likely” is not “absolute”, is not “certain”. For one day many years ago, curled up on the floor in front of the closet doors, my eyes closed, I had my first contact with the Outside. I left my body for a few seconds.</p>
<p>I remember my first thought: “Cool! I wonder what it would be like to be a wolf.” And I leaped forward, hands coalescing into paws, and bumped into the footboard of the massive bed that takes up most of the room.</p>
<p>And then I heard a booming voice from everywhere and nowhere: <a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, a premonition ignored">"Do not presume to take a form you do not have."</a></p>
<p>And then I was sucked back into my body, and I woke up. Spooked for a few minutes, but I eventually shrugged it off and went about my day. Went about my week, month, maybe even a year.</p>
<p>I don't remember much of what happened in 2015. 2014, I remember obsessing over a shitty overrated boyband I won't sully my website with the name of, and a friendship I cherished against all reason turned into a relationship and then went nuclear when she cheated on me. 2016, I nuked all of my social media accounts and wrote <i>The Samhain Files</i> and <i>The White Line Fever</i> and transferred to a new school practically overnight and made preparations to move out of the house I'd spent about a decade in. But 2015? Practically a blank slate.</p>
<p>But I remember, <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">in 2015</a>, I started MayVaneDay. The few memories I have of 2015 are attached to that, and even then, little to nothing resurfaces.</p>
<p>Maybe nothing happened. Maybe the Outside hit fast-forward. Or maybe something catastrophic happened, and I'm repressing it so hard that everything else got buried with it.</p>
<p>2017, I officially moved into my new house and wrote <i>Me Before You</i> in the wee hours before class and <i>Living Wasteland</i> over the summer.</p>
<p>2018, I touched the Outside again. Or, rather, the Outside touched <i>me</i>.</p>
<p>It was the eighteenth of December, bedtime. The fans were on full speed in my shitty dorm room in college in an attempt to <i>not</i> drown in a pool of my own sweat. I already knew I'd drown in the anxiety and dread, cursed concoction like blood and pus leaking together from a healing wound, since the next morning would be the calculus exam I'd convinced myself I was about to fail. (Later I learned that I'd somehow <i>just barely</i> passed the class.) There was no point in studying since all the other tests had been structured so that one had the opportunity to make up passing marks missed units on any other test, and if I hadn't understood the material <i>then</i>, I certainly wouldn't have been able to learn it all in a night. There was nothing I could have done except go to sleep and accept my fate come morning.</p>
<p>And then I woke up in the middle of the night. Or, rather, some part of me had, but the rest of my body was asleep- and I was fully aware of what was happening all around me, seeing with closed eyes, hearing crystal clear with ears smothered by pillows. There were people arguing in the hallway somewhere near my dorm room. A child's voice interjected a few times, young, confused at the fight. My roommate was fast asleep, snoring like booming thunder.</p>
<p>I turned my head back to the foot of my bed. Blapi was standing right at my feet, his arm outstretched to me, hand open. And, trusting him- or, rather, trusting the facsimile of the character whose skin he'd chosen, as my head was still scrambled from the Lucine Saga and I still actively thought, on some other plane of existence, fictional characters could be real- I took his hand. And he tugged me fully out of my body, pulled me close.</p>
<p>I saw a circular portal embedded in the closed closet doors directly facing my bed. About the size of a standard car tire, dark waters swirling like a toilet bowl into the void.</p>
<p><a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin.html">We jumped through. And then events occurred</a> that I won't repeat on this page, and then he returned me to my dorm room. And I lay there, wide awake in the wee hours of the morning, wondering what the hell had just happened. The rest of that day, much less the exam, didn't feel real.</p>
<p>I've never been able to consciously, <i>purposely</i> trigger the separation of consciousness and body like that. It either happens spontaneously, like that one day back in 2015, or whenever some agent of the Outside comes to me and pulls me out. Usually it's Blapi- or rather, <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html"><i>Kurosagi</i></a>, as the appearance is not the identity- but sometimes it's someone else. Usually we go through a portal to breach the barrier between the Inside and the Outside, but other times we go out through my bedroom window, or just stay in my bedroom altogether.</p>
<p><i>But what are the Inside and the Outside?</i></p>
<p>To answer that, first I have to define the wakescape and the dreamscape.</p>
<p>The wakescape is, well, what you and I can experience while we are awake and in control of our bodies. The internet that you're reading these words on lives here. The wakescape is like a tree with infinite branches, each one a different timeline. Like <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144119/https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/3du9dh/synctv_the_owls_of_eternity/">a TV with channels</a>, only one of the branches can be experienced by any given person at a time, but they all play at the same time. People with magical theories and abilities far more developed than mine can switch among these at will.</p>
<p>The dreamscape is what you dream. I'm still not entirely sure what the dreamscape is consisted of. To be sure, some dreams are purely constructed by the brain: after all, that lump of flesh in your head is an incredibly powerful thing, capable of luring the rest of the body into completely disregarding reality. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144330/https://www.webmd.com/baby/false-pregnancy-pseudocyesis">False pregnancies</a> are one example of the brain going absolutely <i>wack</i>.</p>
<p>But some dreams… Some dreams I've had have had continuity. Some of the same people I've met purely in the dreamscape, with the same memories of before, with the additional memories of what we've done in my previous dreams with them. Some of the same places with the same details; none of these places I've ever seen in the wakescape. They remember who I am. I remember who they are with less to none of the haziness or irrational thought of typical dreams.</p>
<p>Maybe they're pocket dimensions in the Inside. Or maybe they're genuine places in the Outside. That's kind of the thing about the Outside: I have absolutely no reliable frame of reference to interpret what it is, and what it isn't. Could it be that we're all living in a simulation? If so, what's doing the simulating? A group of college students? Some bored kid in their room? A government? A would-be god getting their power kicks from having total control over theoretically infinite lifeforms?</p>
<p>The Inside is everything you and I can directly observe with our bodies, our senses, our (admittedly currently limited) understanding of how science and physics work. The Inside is everything we think we know. It is, except for the occasional glitch (the more contact one has with the Outside, the more glitches occur), stable and with a continuity. I can “go to sleep” and be reasonably sure that I will “wake up” in the same bed, in the same house, with the same family, with the same job and everything else I've come to expect from the wakescape.</p>
<p>But who's to say that this “life” you and I lead isn't just another dream with continuity? Drifting between the channels, always returning to the same one- or close enough to the original channel that one fails to notice any difference- at somewhat-regular time intervals? If you achieve lucidity in a normal dream, with practice, you can shift the dream to your will. Maybe there's some version of lucidity in this dream, and none of us have quite figured it out yet. Or maybe someone has, and that's who we call our gods.</p>
<p>I don't know! I know nothing for sure. As I said, I have no reliable frame of reference to interpret anything.</p>
<p>The Outside is everything that is not directly observable and testable by you and I or any scientists or other human experts in knowledge that you and I might not have mastered. Obviously I'm not a physicist, but there <i>are</i> physicists in this world, so their provable (as close to provable, anyway) knowledge of the world is not the Outside (and anyways, it's Inside since it happens in this realm or dream or whatever).</p>
<p>If we are living in a simulation, the Outside, as I stated earlier, is everything outside this iteration of simulation. Maybe there is another machine simulating the machine simulating this one, or another machine simulating the world that the machine simulating this one exists in. The outward recursion is theoretically infinite, but it's all Outside since we currently can't know for sure what it is. Kurosagi could be a sentient program or the avatar of one of the people running said simulation, with the ability to break the laws of physics and pull me into areas usually inaccessable to everyone else being simulated. Other spirits or supernatural entities could be other sentient programs, or maybe the people running the simulation messing with us to see what would happen.</p>
<p>If we are living in an infinite realm of dreams, of which our "reality" is merely one popular selection that we unconsciously return to, then the Outside is all the other “realities” with continuity. Kurosagi would be a visitor from the Outside, pulling me into what could very well be <i>his</i> Inside. (No innuendo intended.) And so would be other so-called supernatural entities. Discontinuties among people, like vastly different views of reality often fueled by extremist ideologies, could be partly due to slightly misaligned dreams, like a camera nudged the tiniest bit while taking a photo, connected by a common internet.</p>
<p>But nothing is set in stone, and these are but mere conjectures, attempts to explain the strange presence of something Other, something… <i>Outside</i> in my life these past two years. Maybe it's an attempt to cope with the fear of death or the fear of all my accomplishments being washed away into the void after my death. I don't know.</p>
<p>I don't know for sure.</p>
<p>But I can try to find out.</p>
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<h1>Vow</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-30</p>
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<blockquote>"In choosing one's economic position in society, one should always bear in mind that it should be such as should leave the individual uncrippled - an all-round person, with both productive and preservative capacities, a being pivoted within."<br />
- Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>They Who Marry Do Ill</em></blockquote>
<p>I do not believe in getting married. I feel that marriage is too restrictive on both sides (I will pretend for the sake of argument that polyamorous people do not exist), as the transition of a relationship from a voluntary association between people to an obligation, from two people freely enjoying the company of each other to slaving away for the sake of maintaining the relationship itself, cheapens and degrades the bonds between. And if the process of breaking up is painful and traumatic (a pain which I can personally attest to), then the more torturous it is when their financial assets are tangled together, when one has likely become dependent on the housing of another, when they have gotten the State involved and signed a legal contract for the purposes of a different taxation situation. The couple would, until separation, be slaves to the past feelings that got them into such a cursed predicament, sunk-cost fallacy flipping heaven into hell.</p>
<p>But even still, I cannot deny the romanticism of the wedding vow. The shared commitment, binding between both parties until death (and in some belief systems, even beyond). It pains me that even this, which <em>should</em> be the most sacred part of the wedding, is yet another set of shackles that the couple willingly puts on each other, another death knell for what in these modern times will likely be another unhappy relationship. Another honeymoon that degenerates into boomer-esque "I hate my wife" complaints over beer and reified "wine moms" glorifying addictions to caffeine and antidepressants on Facebook.</p>
<p>But I bring you readers here today on my twentieth birthday, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me make my own vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words spoken at the altar to hoped and hopeful.</p>
<p>It is said that a person who enters into association with any group, codified or not, will inevitably end up assuming at least some of their values. This happens regardless of whether or not the person wants this to happen, or if they are even aware that they are slowly being absorbed into the collective.</p>
<p>When I was with the Tumblr otherkin, I simped for the Tumblr otherkin. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared pining for an inaccessible past.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200430180226/https://regularflolloping.com/posts/chippies/">chippies</a>, I simped for the chippies. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred of <a href="../../2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">software bloat</a>.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200425015851/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/circumlunar.space">Gopher Gang</a>, I simped for the Gopher Gang. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred for the excesses of the modern internet.</p>
<p>Over and over and over again, I find myself joining groups and communities in the vain hopes that they will augment myself, allow myself to be more than what I envision I can be. Sometimes I even do it on purpose out of boredom. I tittilate myself for hours on end with treatises and theories on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, wandering from anarcho-capitalism to their communist-and-adjacent brothers to the rolling plains of nomadism, coming home to agorism, falling down a stone well into the underworld and anarcho-nihilism and accelerationism. I wander in the shadowy valleys of state-ambivalent egoism and I crawl in the harsh nigh-blinding light of the Kybalion.</p>
<p>But they are all as a spider inviting a butterfly into its web under pretenses of holding a lovely conversation. A beautiful guest enters a beautiful house, slowly being bound and prepared for annihilation all the while.</p>
<p>I've had enough! I've had enough of trusting my inner self, my Unique, to those who expect me to just assimilate myself without resistance into their groups! I've had enough of being trained to expect salvation from every self-proclaimed savior! And I've had enough of putting my trust in so-called "major thinkers" and "founders" and "intellectuals" to know what they're talking about, to have a heart modeled after my own, only to be spat on by them and proclaimed to be the teeming refuse of the earth!</p>
<p>I care not for ideologies anymore. If I see a good idea, I'll steal it, regardless of its origin. I care not for culture wars or economies or any false sense of "solidarity" across any lines you want to slice and dice me by: gender, class, sexuality, race... From this moment on, I fight only for my own happiness. The only burdens I will shoulder are my own.</p>
<p>I hoist this black-and-rainbow flag into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: to find the truth in all and none, and to write it and the future for naught but myself.</p>
<p>I see and recognize no higher purpose than this: not any gods that dwell in the heavens, nor masters that dwell on the earth, but myself.</p>
<p>I am an individual, self-sacred and free. And I will no longer drown myself in the collective in search of what the collective can only destroy.</p>
<p>Long live Vane Vander!</p>
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