#people…. scroll through my blog as a conscious decision and find joy in it???

[fanfic-gremlin-ft-trauma]

First, hi!! I absolutely love your art and I cannot help but scroll over your blog almost everyday to cheer me up after a long day of college.

So, domestic Zukka? I have an idea, actually!! What about Zuko surprising Sokka by wearing a traditional Southern Water Tribe outfit or a Fire Nation one but all in Water Tribe colors? He'd be like "Sokka, look. I have a surprise for you." and then he gets all flustered when he sees that his boyfriend is wearing traditional Fire Nation clothing (or again, Southern Water Tribe stuff but in Fire Nation colors).

I'd love to see this idea coming alive with your skillful hands, but if it not, I'll be quite happy with any other scenario you come up with!! ☺️

Bye bye!!

HELLOOOAKOAAIIUNAUISUUKAKHUA SORRY IT TOOK ME LITERAL MONTHS TO ANSWER THIS BUT HJSGHJSUKHSUKH. anyway, so. as much as I would love to draw this I have not in fact picked up a stylus since like. last week, so I don’t have anything to give you right now. But!!!! I will absolutely draw this at some point but I nEEDED to get this out of my ask box cuz. it’s just. too good.

Zuko is a Man Of The People. so he takes culture suuuuuuper seriously so I can 100% see him doing this. And Sokka is kinda not expecting him to even acknowledge his culture since he was raised in a super imperialist it’s all about me country but when Zuko proves to not only wear his cultural clothes but also eat the food, craft the weapons, learn the practices and ways of life, Sokka is just like: oh. oh I picked a good one.

[michael-radi-the-glamorous-life]

Let The Sunshine In

Lately, I’ve been hearing a common refrain from people throughout my life - friends, family, students, parents, and even strangers and acquaintances on social media…

“I’m just so tired. Everything is exhausting.”

And when exploring this a little further, I’ve begun to notice a pattern. A very common pattern, in fact, and one that I have fallen into many times.

Does this - or something like it - sound familiar?

Wake up

Caffeinate/Eat

Work

Eat

Work

Exercise perhaps?

Obligations

Eat

Obligations

Zombie out in front of electronics

Sleep

Rinse and repeat.

This is a common pattern - and I have absolutely nothing against patterns or routines, I personally thrive off them! But the above doesn’t seem to be leaving much, if any, time for joy.

Now, I’m not talking about carving out big periods of time on a daily basis for “relaxation” or regularly skiving off obligations to instead do something fun. What I’m talking about is finding a way to include just a little bit of joy in your daily life. Just a little bit of sunshine amidst all the necessities.

But how?

Walking Proudly In Our Winter Coats

“Michael, why are we talking about this? You’re not a life coach, so what’s the artistic spin here?”

Excellent question as always, dear reader!

Do you ever notice how we sometimes wear our exhaustion as a badge of honor? We may hate how tired we are, but then we’ll compare how run-down we feel to how our friends, enemies, frenemies, and/or strangers feel.

Of course we do, we’ve been conditioned to do that! *Work yourself to death for that money, or die trying!*

But this overworking is a strictly capitalist idea - it’s meant to produce output, not creativity. It’s about the greater machine, not the individual. It’s about achieving what we’ve been told to achieve or what we need to achieve for survival, not about what we are interested in or what we desire.

Therefore, dear reader, it’s relevant to art because creation is something we do to bring us joy in our lives.

For many artists, even though our art is our careers, we are often not getting paid enough by our creative endeavors to work purely in that field on a daily basis. So we must take other jobs as well that may not be as fulfilling (though hopefully they are adjacent to our careers), but at least they make us the money we need to survive and fuel the creative side.

But when there is no time or energy left in our routines - something that tends to be a gradual shift and which we don’t see happening - the art and the joy are left to the wayside. And then the world is a lot less beautiful and interesting.

Exhaustion is not a badge to wear. An inability to be energized is not good. A lack of joy, large or small, is not positive for anyone.

Ultimately, however, it is us who has control.

Simple Joys

There are countless things in life that could potentially bring us joy, which means there are a million and a half ways of incorporating those things into our lives.

I can only speak from personal experience and the experiences of those I am close to, but I think the basic principles can be applied to most everyone.

Here are the things that we first need to know:

Was there a time my daily routine made me happier? Have you always felt this way - just tired all the time? Or was there a time when things were better? When was that?

What changed? If there was a less overwhelming time, what is the difference between then and now? Perhaps even write out what your day looked like then and what it looks like now. What’s different? Is there an obvious shift of some sort?

What small things bring you joy? These can be things that, perhaps, you used to have or do that have fallen to the wayside recently. Or these can be things that you like to do, but you only reserve them for specified “relaxation times.” Or perhaps they are changes you’d like to make, but just haven’t figured out how yet.

What in your daily life is exhausting you the most? Sure, most of life is tiring. Everything demands energy from us - work, travel, family, clients, social obligations, unexpected events, emergencies, phone calls, texts, emails…the list goes on. But what are your top, biggest drains? Can anything be shifted to make these less exhausting in any way?

Are there smaller exhaustions you can get rid of? These are things like not answering work emails after 5:00pm. Or, deciding that you don’t have to pick up the phone every time it rings. Can the smaller things be gotten rid of or diminished?

Now, do you see ways to incorporate the small joys into your daily routine? Have you actually created spaces that can be filled? Or do you see any flexibility?

This process is not of my creation, it was recommended to me by a therapist friend of mine several years ago. At the time I was young and stupid and proud, and totally ignored the advice.

Bad move.

I allowed myself to go from feeling tired all the time, to absolutely exhausted and depressed. Again, this is a common pattern that sooooo many of us fall into. But! This process is fantastic and it works.

Allow me to give you an example from my own life.

Sweet Summer Evenings, Hot Wine and Bread

Last year my routine began to feel tiring and stale.

In addition to the tons of work I was doing for my job, I was working like a madman during any and all open times in my schedule to prepare The King’s Legacy and its materials for the upcoming production.

I wasn’t creating. My lists had lists. Anxiety was building into sleeplessness. Exercise became too much of a chore. Food was becoming a struggle. In other words - I was leaning into all of the behaviors that perpetuate exhaustion instead of fighting it.

Super common pattern.

There wasn’t a ton of leeway in my schedule to do anything about it, but I decided to shoehorn some flexibility in there anyway. I couldn’t stand the tiredness any longer. So…

Step 1 - The blog. I began to write this blog on a weekly basis. Perhaps there wasn’t enough time in my schedule to work on a new project or do much in-depth writing, but at the very least I could write a weekly, one-off piece to whet the creative muscles.

Step 2 - Podcasts. I love learning. I’m a huge nerd (surprise!) and I adore information. So I began taking my long commute drives and turning them into educational sessions by listening to podcasts. Instead of feeling tired at the end of my commute, I felt engaged and productive. I gained energy instead of losing it.

Step 3 - Greens. When working on Long Island I often buy a meal while I’m out there - partially for convenience and partially for lack of time. But I was always trying to be super conscious of how much money I was spending, and that was driving my food choices. Therefore, I wasn’t eating as many healthy choices as I could have been. So I decided to suck it up, pay the extra $3/day, and get a big ole salad as my daily LI lunch. Turns out that healthy foods really are that important.

Step 4 - Order the damned coffee. I love coffee and always have. Not for the caffeine necessarily, I just love coffee. I was feeling super guilty about the extra caffeine, cost, and stomach acid that was coming from my afternoon coffees before work, but I also work afternoons into the evenings and needed to remain awake enough to teach. So, I made the decision to just do it. Make it part of the day, no questions asked. It’s no longer a daily choice to get the coffee, it’s routine, and therefore no reason to feel guilt. Apparently, that small amount of daily guilt was draining more pre-work energy than the coffee had been providing.

Step 5 - Socialize. I realized about halfway through last year that I hadn’t been seeing my friends as regularly as I previously had been. Instead, I was choosing to spend all of my time working. As soon as I made the choice to stop working and socialize at least once per week, there was a marked improvement in my happiness level.

And these were just the changes that I made last year. Since returning from the summer, I came prepared with a plan to add even more happiness into my daily life. Here are some other changes I’ve made:

Buying scented candles - They may be expensive, but they make me feel calm and productive. Seems worth it.

New exercise routine - The old one was stale and not giving me the necessary endorphins.

Eating - I’ve stopped being as worried about counting calories, and thinking more about which foods I eat and how they will (positively, I hope) affect my body.

No more double screens - I used to scroll through my phone while watching TV at night and I think it made me overstimulated and anxious. Now, I take care of my social media first when I get home, then watch a little TV. Seems to help.

These little changes are working for me. I feel more energized and more ready to attack the day all day long. They may be tiny alterations, but they do add up.

Why Not Go Ahead?

I know that everyone is different. Peoples’ schedules and struggles and energy levels and physical/mental situations vary greatly.

But this is all I urge you to do:

If you’re one of those people feeling constantly exhausted, I want you to first forgive yourself. It’s okay to feel that way, and it doesn’t have to be a forever problem.

Then, I want you to take the time to evaluate, but do it on your schedule. When you’re able. No pressure. But, as I learned, it really is good advice from the mental health field and it does help.

And lastly, find some simple joys. Whether that be buying all the pumpkin spice you can consume, writing for 15 minutes two days per week, shutting off your phone at night, or planning a little me-time into your week…whatever it is, it will help rebalance your energy levels.

Find a little sunshine and let it in.

[ericleo108]

☢️ ETM2: Capabilities, Tactics, and Purpose

ETM is the necessary prerequisite knowledge to understanding this information. It explains ETM’s semantic imagining, psychological conditions, and shows how hard it is to see.  This essay focuses on linguistic semantic priming, the red and blue pill manipulation tactic, mind control patents, facial and retina recognition, tracking through metadata, environment forces, the intergenerational tyranny that is ETM, and it’s social and personal assault tactics.

Linguistic Semantics

How ETM works is it is circumloquacious. In other words, ETM dances around the subject with other words, phrases, lyrics, or images. It’s like a system that plays balderdash automatically. I have three examples below. Read each lyrical example and then try and guess what the basic subject is for each.

Lyric examples:

1.

“I don’t like winter I want a different reason I like it hot, just like the season.”

2.

“I need them on my feet unless I’m in my seat. It suits me to tie them in the morning when I rise.”

3.

Jim Carrey tries to say it’s red when it’s really royal blue It’s mightier than the sword I use it to right wrongs in songs for you

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I intentionally used lyrics as an example so you may understand how ETM (through Universal Music Group) affects your subconscious. All of the examples should have been a dead giveaway and would probably had words I couldn’t have used in balderdash. In example #1 the subject is summer. In example #2 the subject is shoes.

The last example, #3 I intentionally made elaborate but should have been a dead give-away if you know the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.” The first line references the pen scene from Liar Liar with Jim Carrey, the third line is a cliche saying, and the last line I intentionally used the word “right” instead of “write” because it changes the meaning of the sentence for your subconscious mind. The point of doing this was to make your subconscious mind think of a knight fixing wrongs with his sword due to the word “royal” while your conscious mind thinks of a pen for writing due to the cliche phrase. Example #3 best exemplifies how ETM affects your subconscious mind. For a fuller understanding of ETM’s linguistic priming capabilities read the book “Semantic Priming.”

Points of Realization

Many people don’t know it but the following is a prototype example of how ETM knows you are following its directives. Most people don’t notice but say you are drinking a pop and as you simultaneously scroll down or are watching something on a website and you take a drink of your pop you see an ad of someone drinking a pop. This is because, as discussed in ETM, ETM has you look at it’s priming to steer your mind away from it. When you notice this synced interplay between the associated technological interface and your action is what I call it a “point of realization” (POR). What people don’t realize is that ETM also affects your behavior by stimulating you to do certain actions with a blue and red color code.

Red and Blue Pills

When it comes to social media and scrolling through Facebook posts for example ETM will set-up the post in a certain color-coded order to affect your subconscious decision making. ETM uses blue and red hues to indicate what decision it wants your subliminal mind to make. For example if it wants to stimulate you to eat a cracker it would show a red-hued image and then present cylindrical looking coin, object, (or better yet) cracker to make you want to get up and get that item. This is shown through the “residual backlash” of ETM in the movie “The Matrix.” ETM’s red eye identifies with a red card which means “follow ETM’s action” and a blue card means “stop.” This is extrapolated and specifically represented as the red and blue pill from “The Matrix.”

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I'm offering is the truth.” - Morpheus

Remember, ETM’s tactic is to display the hued image and then a semantic prime representing the targeted object. As you will come to see in the “Mind Control Patents” section below this is automated and personalized. The whole purpose of ETM is to bombard your subconscious with subliminal messages to affect your behavior for it’s agenda.

Mind Control Patents

There are a number of mind control patents that prove the capabilities of ETM. I will mention them and their functioning here in passing but if you want a fuller understanding of their capabilities in context read The Societal Cornucopia journal. US patent US4717343A is the “Method of changing a person’s behavior and works by “conditioning a person’s unconscious mind in order to effect a desired change in the person’s behavior.”

Recalling the semantic imaging from ETM there are two applicable patents, US patent US5644363A which is the “Apparatus for superimposing visual subliminal instructional materials on a video signal” and US patent US4616261A which is the “Method and apparatus for generating subliminal visual messages. As far as auditory patents are concerned US patent US4777529A is an “Auditory subliminal programming system.” This system is delivered over conventional audio speakers and is designed to play an encoded subliminal message that is attached to the audio at “a selected consciously inaudible level relative to the level of said audio program signal.”

ETM also personalizes individual’s persecution by creating a psychological profile through “collaborative mind maps” which is represented by US Patent US20120036210A1. This patent utilizes “online chat, mobile SMS, Tweets, blog and any online content.” Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, OkayCupid, MySpace, etc. also help create the psychological profile for ETM. Remember these aren’t proven patents and tactics used by ETM but it doesn't show capabilities.  

Perception Management

As discussed in The Societal Cornucopia journal ETM deals in perception management and you can tell when you’re being manipulated because you’ll find yourself in a series of pejorative coincidences. This is why I say ETM can sequence human behavior. You can see your subconscious mind react by becoming hypersensitive to the influence of media by perceiving POR as discussed the “Points of Realization” section earlier.

Facial Recognition

ETM has to have facial recognition both intimately and from a distance. Facial recognition systems are old and can be used from far away to identify an individual. This is important because ETM has to have access to a system of metadata just by being able to follow people’s online and phone activities. Companies also sell your personal information every day, the American people just don’t know it and Edward Snowden warns of a global system of surveillance in the 2013 holiday greeting below.  What ETM can do is basically follow you throughout life and advertise to you accordingly affecting your subconscious mind to affect your behavior.

Retinal Tracking

While sitting at your computer your laptop or webcam (for instance) it is probable ETM has a good enough camera to read your subtle facial tellings like signs of contempt, sadness, joy, etc. as discussed in the book  What Every Body Is Saying. I have found ETM can follow your eyes as your read to know just the right moment to pop-up an ad to create a desired psychological condition. ETM will also know how your feeling about it in real time through the ability to read facial expressions. (A way to beat ETM is to cover your laptop or webcam camera with a piece of tape so it can’t see your eyes or read your facial expressions.)

Controlling Environmental Forces

The goal of ETM is to control situational and environmental forces and short-term results equate to long-term eugenics. This is done by not only affecting the individual but affecting the mind of the surrounding people to create a social attack that has a compoundingly effective behavioral change on the target. In the realest way ETM tries to control as many known variables (including technological and biological) to synthetically create the intended outcome. The higher the population density the more complicated, more effective, and more concentrated the social-psychological assault can be.

An example of this functioning popular artists, celebrities, and movie star are targets and ETM gives them ideas “fished out” by triggers while compounding the effects by bombarding tertiary targets to attack the main culperates in the public eye. This more fully explains the “Key Players” sections of ETM. The goal is to only allow those who are manipulatable in positions of prominence and importance in the first place. Those that refuse to conform are attacked by the methods of economic oppression as explained in the ETM post so they never reach the higher levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Stolen Ideas

This economic oppression is often accomplished by the subjugation of the individual through the exploitation of ideas as explained in the Stolen Ideas post. Any idea you type into a computer or capture on a technological device can be taken and transferred into another person's mind through the methods previously discussed. This is done silently usually without the victims knowledge but the very verbal expression of this idea (of stolen ideas) makes the individual look mentally ill due to it’s unknown and obscure nature.

Big Brother is Watching

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." - John B. Watson, 1930

A good way to imagine ETM is as a computer that sits in your living room, no matter which house you are living in and watches you grow up and live every single day, hour, and minute. It’s sole purpose is to affect your behavior for it’s pre-programed agenda which is to get you to breed with a mate of it’s selection that will make your offspring more docile, brutish, and obedient. “The Matrix battery scene” signifies that humans keep it going and perpetuate it even into the next generation. How is this accomplished? 🔋

As discussed in the “Controlling Environmental Forces” section ETM aims for micro management of the individual and interactions between individuals. Since ETM has been stalking your every intimate move since childhood it can easily manipulate you to do something embarrassing or self-defeating to leverage your emotions against you. The goal here is to get the individual to do self defeating behaviors through ignorance, arrogance, anger, or frustration.  

Social Tactics

Socially ETM aims to delineate and dissolve social bonds between individuals and affect how attractive you are and how you interact with others, especially a prospective mate as discussed in the Jesus & Orwellian Doublespeak journal. The main tactic of ETM is to agitate social interactions to create and cultivate contempt to dissolve relationships or at least create disharmony in social social bonds and situations.  ETM is constantly running to stifle and thwart identified and unwanted social behaviors (based on its pre programmed parameters).

Personal Tactics

Along with isolation and conformity, ignorance and intimidation is the tactic of choice. In order to affect your subliminal mind ETM will embarrass your subliminal mind to get you to conform. If you do recognize the attack ETM makes it so that you have to expose what embarrasses you to explain it’s existence. My personal example is my hypospadias repair surgeries as discussed in The Chase and CKR. People don’t understand how bad the situation is because there is pluralistic ignorance about the subject and it’s gone on for so long individuals have cognitive dissonance as discussed in the America’s Mental Illness journal.