phywreks

[phywreks]

sipping on a peppermint tea

my date is two hours late

cooling warmth gently reels me out

"abandon your annoyance" i tell myself

its caramel depth, its slick sheen

it's easy for me to want to forgive

my revulsion to lateness,

emergent from years of guilt at my own inadequacy

astringent seeping spreads

[phywreks]

fuck it im gonna start posting poems who cares

[phywreks]

we need everyone feminine to stop shaving the body hair we need pit hair on sabrina carpenter I want to see meg thee stallion’s leg hair we gotta stop with the no body hair circus

[phywreks]

IS THERE AN EMPATH ON THE PLANE

[phywreks]

oddly enough, i feel relieved. i know now where we stand with this country. i know now that this is a nation that, despite her protestations, does not want to be saved. at this point, i am not sure she can be anyway. but what i do know is that there are people here who still need protecting. there are disabled people here, trans people here, pregnant people here, brown and black people here, queer people here, and as long as my feet rest on american soil, those people are my family and they are worth protecting. so, like, maybe this nation doesn't want to be saved. that's fine. trump and his friends can have whichever parts they lay claim to. but they can't have us. so. if you have breath in your lungs, you're my people, you're my family and i am going to fight for you for as long and as hard as i can. that's all i've got at the moment. we'll figure out the rest together, okay?

[phywreks]

[phywreks]

got a new journal a couple of days ago and ive been enjoying using it but its newness was creating an obstacle preventing freeform, careless expression (the whole point of a journal) so i singed it a bunch and threw some water splotches around to try and get a more interesting texture thing going on and i think i might just have an obsession with wear and tear?

it feels wrong when something i use has barely any visible evidence of its being used! every little mark becomes a history i can get lost in- a prompt for thought in a direction and space i enjoy occupying- evidence of life.

the act of modification, getting lost in some sort of menial task with a tangible result, has become one of my most cherished life flavors. its pretty nice!

[phywreks]

games is not real btw

no such thing as game design

im majoring in nothing

[phywreks]

last time i moshed i ran in a circle pit and crowdsurfed for the first time-

tonight i started a circle pit during the snööper set-

assuming we maintain this level of escalation, in a year i expect to be coordinating an intricate Castell to disassemble the lighting rigs, gradually surfing them to the stage to concentrate their light on a single spot on the ceiling, burning a hole in the roof through which we will escape into the night with our goods, the crowd bonded for life through the majesty of the spectacle.

[phywreks]

Go my yuri

[phywreks]

subject and object broke up with each other over a land dispute around ten thousand years ago, and now i have anxiety about perfectly constructing my language so as not to be misconstrued and then. i get misconstrued anyways. its fucked up.

get subject and object back together PLEASE this divide is really ruining the friend group (humanity). theyre supposed to be cuddling and everything sucks because they arent doing that.

subject/object yuri save us all

no ones been able to figure out what anyone means ever and this is the cause of basically 99.999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999% of problems

[phywreks]

i'm afraid to live my life, i feel guilty, i feel—shut the fuck up. step 1. shut the fuck up. step 2. shut the fuck up. step 3. focus on your breath. ruminating doesn't do shit. it just makes you feel bad. you're not accomplishing anything, you're not even being introspective, you're not being a 'good person' by telling yourself that you're a bad person; you're just sitting there exacerbating your anxiety. feel the cool air going in and out of your nostrils. feel your neck, arms, legs, shoulders, jaw, and whatever else that is tense. relax that shit or at least release some of the tension, if possible. stop clenching things. remember breath. remember cool air. fix posture. relax shoulders. sit or stand or lay comfortably. remember breath. remember cool air. don't try to avoid the thoughts but, rather, acknowledge them and move on lightly. it's ok if you can't. but remember that they are just there. they are guests who have overstayed their welcome. they are just thoughts. you will be ok. remember breath. remember cool air. you will be ok

[phywreks]

the end of rain world

written on 10/1/24, lightly edited 10/23

(vague spoilers for the end of the video game rain world)

the ending of rain world has been fucking with me. it’s deconstructed the patch of stability i spent a big chunk of my summer building for myself.

the night i finished rain world, i walked a friend home. she hadn't been doing great- her usual routines for emotional regulation weren't working, her creative work often more frustrating than fulfilling, stuck at a point of being unable to match her skillset to her aesthetic tastes. she talked, i listened, i tried to ask helpful questions, i stumbled over my own words, i lost cohesion. i felt like i'd maybe managed to distract her from a spiral, if only through confusion. we lingered for a while outside her building. we hugged good night.

i felt like i'd failed her. this chance i had to be there for someone important to me, to help them, to offer a lifeline, and all i could think to do was cry and say i’m sorry i can’t give you better advice but i care about you. 

so i quietly sobbed my way home. i stumbled into playing rain world at 3am because i was grasping for more of the kind of meaning and joy and love for its design, grasping for the emotional state playing rain world had come to embody- escaping and spending time with this friend i felt like i'd failed. i finished it. i spent half an hour climbing through tunnels and temples and threw myself into the golden void. the culmination of a journey only possible through acts of random generosity from pebbles, the void worm, this friend. all of this generosity, and the thing it was leading towards was what? suicide? ending the cycle? becoming a big worm and swimming in the void with the other big worms? seeing myself and dozens of my other selves who have all died eventually make it to the end, escape the mortal plane, and leave behind a world destroyed, ravaged, full of suffering?

art reflects us. it shows us, without us realizing, who we are. what we believe. the feelings we stuff away. i get from rain world an indictment of the concept of afterlives. they are a technology, a concept we invented in pursuit of how it might enhance our ability to live in this world here and now. this is all there is. despite this goal of creating a philosophically airtight seal on motivation, a framework that tells us that at all times, the best thing we can do is to continue living and giving everything we have to the world because otherwise there will be nothing that remains of us when we die. 

this framework is not enough. in rain world (this is my understanding of the world of the game after a single playthrough, i’ve certainly got substantial parts of this wrong and am thus filling in the gaps), the ancients live deep spiritual lives which connect themselves to the world and create a desire to protect it, to live in harmony with it. their desire to escape the cycle of death and rebirth which traps all living creatures trumps their desire to make life worth living for those creatures, though. they construct artificial intelligences who require a resource load so intense that it completely transforms all ecosystems on the planet. the surface of the world is now pelted by rainstorms so intense they kill anything not able to find shelter. they move above the clouds, away from the danger, and ramp up their consumption even more.

rain world says that no matter what we say, believe, how we cloak our beliefs, how we justify our actions, we’re still acting without a plan for long term sustainability for those who live here. now.

i woke up after going to sleep with all of this rolling around in my head, sobbing silently so as to not wake up my two roommates, and spent three hours in bed staring at the atrocities of the world. algorithms designed to rewire your behaviour so they’re the first thing you see in the morning dominate most of us. they curate what you see to maximize the amount of attention you give them. i went to sleep emotionally raw, scared, unsure of my ability to maintain faith that humanity will survive the hell we’re constructing for ourselves out of our home. i woke up confronted with damning evidence that hell must be what we’re searching for. why else would we ruin the climate? escalate the frequency of environmental disaster to the point that towns flood monthly? to the point that millions lose their homes every year? 

reckoning with reality inevitably drives us insane. the only way to remain productive, to climb up in society and gain power, is to conform, in the depths of your soul, to the metrics established by those in power before you. 

massive societal shifts happen not as a reaction to injustice, but as a power move from those just under the top, to put themselves on top.

i don’t want to kill myself. i don’t want to live. i want all of us to be free from the threat of death if we aren’t able to work. i want us to be able to live good lives for the simple fact of our humanity. i want all creatures to be able to live good lives for the simple fact of their existence. i want beauty to flourish. 

wealth accumulation, rent seeking, capitalism, techno-feudalism, whatever you want to call it. it preys on our fulfillment at seeing lines go up. it conveys power to those of us most capable at making lines go up.

a metric can never capture goodness, or beauty. there is no metric which, on its own, is sufficient to allow universal morality to hinge upon its continual increasing. the world, the universe as we live in it and know it, is a constant flux, it breathes: expanding, contracting, always. since i was young, i’ve never believed in a god, but the idea of the expanding and contracting of the universe as analogous to the breathing lungs of a god as being the reality we live has been inescapable.

i have nothing else but this angst, currently. 

everything is insufficient, so far. no process, no belief, all eventually run up against a situation where they prove insufficient at providing an answer, or worse, provide an answer which causes pain. 

from this, do we maintain the path, forever carrying the weight that at any point it may cause us to hurt ourselves or others, or do we jump to a new path? do we trudge through as many disparate paths as possible, hoping that if we’ve devoted ourselves to the construction of wide webs of heuristic knowledge, we’ll be able to find connecting patterns across them all which we can give to others. that we can increase the possibility space of human thought, action, possibility, and reach something better than this?

do we continue to love, despite the fact that sharing our most intimate fears, desires, embarrassments, leaves us necessarily vulnerable to having those secrets break containment in a moment of carelessness on the part of our beloved? 

of course we do. my instinct is to try and justify the act of loving from first principles. i do not want to do that today, so instead i'll just say that we should love to understand each other. we should give ourselves not just to the euphoria of knowing and being known, but also to the inevitability of crushing pains and betrayals, so we may know and comfort others. experience everything, so you may empathize with everyone.

living is not conscious-reminiscence is. i believe this, now. i may not believe this tomorrow. belief is a shaky thing right now. 

i’ve often dreamed of living forever. free from the restrictions of time, i escape into the fantasy of being able to study to my heart’s content. i want to spend my days reading, thinking, writing, and being good to the people in my life. nothing else really matters to me, at this point. even making “good” art is something i’ve sort of given up on. i’ll keep making stuff until i die, but i can’t care if it’s good. i don’t control whether or not it’s good. the process of creation necessitates that my relationship to my own work isolates me from those who experience it. i can never experience it how they can.

i won't live forever. i'll live imperfectly, die imperfectly, and hopefully contribute something to this world in a way which honors the grace i have been given, while doing my best to give that same grace to others.

anyhow, play rain world if you get the chance. it gave me this, it'll give you something Else.

[phywreks]

Not only are there never enough women singing rock music there’s never enough bands with a female lead singer who just sucks

[phywreks]

taking away the phrases "critical thinking" and "media literacy" from you guys until you all develop some uhh. uhhhhh