"Writers Write" but They Also Sleep

 It's true!

It's not something I talk about often unless I'm dunking on the American college system or myself but I have a Bachelor's in creative writing with a screenplay focus. That's about the extent I usually talk about this. I feel like writing something that doesn't have hours upon hours of lore or revisions attached to it, so let's dive in.

My college story is long. To paraphrase: my parents paid for most of my college tuition, starting with a semester of music education immediately after high school. Followed by that was a semester as a journalism major but might as well have been undecided because I just knocked out general education courses that semester. I dropped out and got a certification in audio engineering, looked for work, and tried to figure out what I wanted to fucking do for a few years, then decided to go to a community college for software engineering. I had an actual fucking breakdown and dropped out then decided to go for creative writing after moving out of my parents' place (finally -- there's nothing wrong with living with your parents, I just had a consistently toxic relationship with mine).

I found that I really liked writing. The process of it was relatively soothing to me and I liked that I could do it fucking anywhere. I wanted a degree in something and finally found something I could tolerate at the worst. The schooling was mostly not great with some cool moments. I met a lot of cool instructors and read the work of some students with some really cool ideas. I liked some of the challenges. However, I thought most of them were overkill. I finished all of my requirements and got my degree anyway.

As with the vast majority of my school experience, I tried to avoid anything extracurricular. In a college of other writing students, I didn't think I would really connect with any of them on anything other than a superficial "let's network" capacity. The ones I did find particularly intriguing didn't seem to have any interest in me. There were avenues for us to get to know each other despite all of my classes being online. I just didn't want to "force myself onto others". This is my problem with almost every goddamn thing I do. Wait, that's not the topic of this blog post. How did this paragraph even start? Ah! Got it. One day, I did do something extracurricular.

The school as a whole and certain programs would hold their own live chat things where we all watch some sort of talk or seminar. Many of the ones I wanted to try out, I would end up getting distracted by something else, decide I was too depressed to pay attention, they were scheduled on days I had to go to my terrible job, or some other such reason. One I finally made it to. I don't remember what the initial point of this thing was supposed to be but it consisted of a person or two that worked for the creative writing program and a published author.

Maybe I misinterpreted something but the guest author really had an air of just "well, just do things, duh." The topics thrown at him were usually "how specifically might new writers do this?" or "how do you pump out certain works that fast?" or "how often do you revise your stuff?" Most of his responses were basically "writers write; you just have to start getting into the habit of writing for at least 4 hours a day. If you can't do that, what's stopping you? Like, what are you even doing?" He proceeded to say "I write like that all the time, sometimes more, and I still have time to watch four hours of TV every night. So if you're not doing that then what are you even doing? What's stopping you?"

I did not respond in the text chat, though I could have. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Now writing *something* every single day is not necessarily bad advice. The message I felt was implied though was very competitive, which is sadder than anything else coming from a published author who has actually made some income from his intellectual property punching down to a bunch of 20-somethings gambling with their careers or single moms trying to take life by the balls. I think he even unironically talked about how the whole thing was a competition. The one or two people in the video chat we were all watching did not necessarily refute this nor completely disagree with the guest speaker. I won't get into one of the only other ones of these things I ever attended where there were about six writers and every time the woman would try to make an interesting point, the men would field questions she was already addressing. "Why even bring up this experience in your life?" is probably a better avenue for us to stroll down here.

I don't make the fucking money to write 4 hours a day. I spend many days out of the house at someplace I don't want to be so I can make money ***to*** write. Mostly writing things that, released fully or not, will make me approximately $0. Now all of this was pre-COVID-19. Even if it weren't, it's still not a neurodivergent-friendly mentality to be spewing to people that are trying to learn what the hell to do with their passions. This is especially haphazard to students, many of which had kids to look after as well.

This "constantly push things out" mentality doesn't really help anyone. Because if you think the dude from the web seminar telling college students something along the lines of "it's all a competition and you're all competing with me so what's your excuse for not constantly writing" might be a bit of a silly willy, he became that silly willy with that mentality. Probably. That or some writer's drama villain origin plot point but in real life. There are things that could be gleaned from this that could be helpful while still keeping yourself healthy. Writing a little something every day is great practice. The saying "writers write" is as true as it is redundant. However, some people, like the published author and pro student competitor I've been dishing about this whole time, kind of make "writers write" imply that you aren't a writer if you aren't writing. This might sound ridiculous on its own or at least benign. For people already self-conscious about going into a field that can be notoriously unforgiving to your sense of rejection and impostor syndrome, that benign notion can lead to thoughts like "you are not a writer whatsoever unless you suffer and constantly diminish your own health". This is what irritates me and I think part of that is because it still affects me. It's one of those things where no matter how much I am aware of it, it doesn't make it go away. I can't imagine what this could mean for people who are worse about these sort of mental habits than I am or have dreamed about writing and only writing for a long time.

Of course, there's also the fact that not everybody can find a job in writing anything. Writing things you actually like and getting paid for it is a rarity. Writing your own heartfelt story and profiting from its publication is like seeing a shooting star during a tornado next to a volcano from the bottom of a well.

I guess what I'm saying is that getting into a routine is good and all but it isn't going to be good for you your entire life. There's a rule of thumb with singing practicing and warming up. If you feel any sort of pain (that you aren't obviously forcing out yourself), just stop. Pick it up later or the next day. I feel the same with writing. Sometimes "later" is a week later. The thing is if you really love doing what you're doing or writing what you're writing, why would you just magically not want to do that anymore? Taking time to figure out what's up with that is important too. Otherwise, you're writing what you're writing to convince an imaginary college speaker that you're valid. It isn't servicing the story or your passion. Sometimes, when this happens to me, I just switch to writing something else. Sometimes, my brain just doesn't work so I play Hades for like six hours instead of working on things I "should" be working on.

I guess that's it for this blog post. Uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh! (Thanks for reading, don't spread a fucking disease)

So I played NEO: TWEWY and Can't Finish It

 The World Ends with You is a DS game from the late aughts that converted me from an edgy, angsty teenager into a teenager hoping for some greater empathetic purpose in life. If you're an adult, I'm not going to tell you the plot will have the same effect on you. In fact, the whole story is kind of all over the place. But bad? Nah. It had a really unconventional control scheme that set it apart from a lot of the shovelware and other half-assed trash that the DS library now carries around as its legacy. The characters are memorable, the theming is consistent, the art style is beautiful, and the soundtrack glues all of those things together tremendously. So a sequel came out a few weeks ago and I was really excited to play it. It's called "NEO: The World Ends with You", not to ever in a million years be confused with "The World Ends with You". Unfortunately, I wanted it on disc and have an original PS4 so I can fuck myself.

My PS4 has been having disc issues for a while. For those fortunate to be unaware of this, Sony thought it would be a fucking great, future-proof idea to make the power and eject buttons on the PS4 touch-sensitive. There's also a weird rubber piece where the eject button is that's supposed to like... protect it from dust or something? The problem is that whoever thought that was a good idea has to be dead now because there's no way they can be this stupid and survive day-to-day life for this long. Rubber expands when exposed to a certain amount of heat. Like, for instance, a compact computer with a big-ass fan attached to it because running itself makes it so fucking hot. As such, a lot of people, myself included had the issue where the expanding rubber starts fucking with the eject button, usually hitting said button repeatedly. I had this issue and decided "alright, fine, I'll take it out" which is something a lot of people have been doing to fix the issue. For me, it worked for a few months to a year. This is it for a lot of people, more or less. For some people who I guess professionally run under ladders, this doesn't fix the issue and the button is still just fucked anyway for no conceivable reason. I'm one of those. If I keep the PS4 unplugged and stash it away somewhere else for a long time and then plug it back in, it works pretty consistently. For a bit.

I streamed NEO: TWEWY for roughly 7 hours the day after it came out (I pre-ordered it like a sucker and got shafted, having to wait a day for a fucking pre-order and the pre-order bonuses didn't even work, so if you haven't noticed yet, this whole experience has been a shitshow overall). Seemed fine. Streamed it again for about 2 hours a day or two later. No issues. Played it in bed for a few days and then bam! It spat out the disk at the end of a 5-fight enemy wave. Right at the end! So I'm trying to look up ways to just get the disk license and iso onto my PS4 for it to just be playable. If you look into it, all the disc basically fucking ends up being is a license anyway. If they're just going to treat it as a collector's item and security pass anyway, then why the fuck can I not just easily save said license and play the game without the disc now that I have objectively proven that I purchased the game for myself. That's a rant for another day and for someone who knows way more about this kinda thing than I do. I could not fucking figure it out. Ripping PS3 discs for emulation is pretty fucking easy, it's the emulation itself that's tricky. Ripping PS4 discs so you can take the disc's contents and use them on the intended hardware requires knowing how to use fucking Ubuntu! Yep! So I hope to figure that out one day but I tried for like 2-3 hours yesterday to no fucking avail.

Anyway, for the whopping total of fewer than 20 hours I did put into the game, would I recommend it to other people? Yeah. Not "YYYEAHHH!!!!" but "yeah".

Let's be clear: I didn't see the announcement for the sequel and think "oh, this game is going to be great and I'm going to love it just as much as I did the first game". I was cautiously optimistic because a lot of the original development team, including the composer, were returning. Still, Square Enix has been up to some weird bullshit for a long time now and no matter how cool h.a.n.d. might be, Square Enix still has their grubby claws on this thing. I was curious how they were going to implement controlling multiple characters at once and how a fully 3D environment would affect the overworld and combat. So I was a lot more excited to see, for better or worse, what they were going to do with the game more than I was excited about the actual game. Now having played it, I can't say a lot is improved but there isn't a whole lot about it that is much worse if that makes sense. 

I think chaining noise together is a lot more irritating in this one and I think, if we're not going to consider the plot here for a sec, this is the thing they fucked up the most in comparison to the original game. This is especially annoying because it isn't the biggest deal until you start figuring out how to get bigger rewards and feel comfortable gambling with big waves of enemies for item drops in the first game. It feels like a lot more of a gradual process and was a lot more daunting. I think I spent the vast majority of my time playing NEO at a lower level. For those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, this is how TWEWY's leveling system works. Like any other action RPG, enemies come at you in waves or with just one big motherfucker of a boss, or in the case of TWEWY, often two big motherfuckers of bosses and depending on the semantics of the planar rules of the original DS game, you could say four big motherfuckers. Each has their own exp. yield but you can multiply how much that is based on two factors. One is your difficulty, which you can change at pretty much any point in the game. So Easy mode gives you less exp. but the fights are a lot easier to manage. Normal is pretty standard though in the case of the original TWEWY, still decently challenging without being overwhelming. The difficulty curve in that game I remember being pretty solid but keep in mind, it has been about three years since I last played it. Hard and Very Hard give you more exp., so much so that Very Hard is a post-game unlock. Each enemy also has a drop rate for each difficulty and that's not just by percentage. The item the enemy normally drops might not drop at all on Very Hard but a much rarer pin might drop instead. This gives the original game a lot of longevity and reasons to come back to goomba-esque encounters post-game without feeling like a complete chore. TWEWY didn't work with random encounters though. You had to scan for encounter symbols floating around the city and drag them to Neku on the touch screen. This makes the encounters harder on top of the fact that you have to beat all of them one after the other. However, this gives you huge multipliers and sometimes this is the only way to guarantee rare pin-drops or even come close.

NEO - "The Matrix", okay cool I acknowledged it, I'm referring to the sequel as "NEO" for the rest of this rant and if you can't pull your head out 1999's ass, that's on you from this point forward. Though I can't blame you, it's a good movie. NEO doesn't do this too much differently except the other difficulties are locked off by this weird social network thing that I'll probably get to in a minute. That's really not terrible just something I found odd in comparison. The amount of encounters you can have is maxed out at 5. I'm sure there's a thing you can get later that either raises the cap or uncaps it. I'm not really sure what the point of this was. I guess it was not to make players overpowered as fuck during their first run of the story missions but also like, if I can stomach it, maybe just let me do it? On top of that, and maybe this is just me, I feel like the combat of NEO is significantly easier than TWEWY. So in both games, your max level is raised by exp. points (no duh, right?). In this game, you can lower your level to fight waves. This makes the fights riskier but also boost that drop and experience multiplier even more. In TWEWY, this ranged from a worthy challenge and a gauge to see how personally good you're getting at the combat to a one-hit-and-you're-dead nightmare. Even on max level, some of the late-game and post-game fights are challenging and if you want those pin drops, you have to play them on higher difficulties with your level reduced. In NEO, I felt like this pretty much just comes down to what you personally think you can handle. NEO is a lot more of a hack-and-slash. Each character in your party is respectively attached to whatever pin you have and that pin is forever set to a button. This makes the controls kind of awkward over time but your damage output becomes so high so early that it barely matters. Once I tried lowering my level, I basically only went back to max if I wanted to absolutely secure victory in a fight without dropping down to Easy. I think I did this twice at most. I was playing at half of my max level or less and just slaughtering everything. At first, you might think it's because I had so much experience with the last game but I haven't played that in years and the combat of these two games are almost nothing alike. So I think they really dumbed this down for newcomers, which I guess is fine. I think they went a little too dumb.

The social network is another example of Square Enix's boner for making weird menus that are just a skill tree that's harder to navigate than a run-of-the-mill skill tree. No, I'm not trying to make another movie reference. In the case of NEO, I think it's fine. Difficult to navigate for sure but not so difficult to read and figure out. It's pretty straightforward and doesn't affect the core gameplay enough to be a downside anyway. I think it adds to some of the theming of the game thus far and it's a clever way of combining the convoluted web of character connections that a lot of games have an obnoxious-looking menu for with the tried-and-true skill tree used by thousands of RPGs for decades.

I shouldn't really judge the story but I will say that the cast of characters in TWEWY is portrayed better than in NEO. I'm not talking about the voice-acting, just the way they're carried in the plot. I was intrigued by Neku and Shiki almost immediately. There was enough mystique behind Shiki and the main struggle to also make every other character a welcome and enigmatic inclusion. NEO feels like the straight-to-DVD Disney sequel of this concept only not as bad. Rindo and Fret are fine characters, I just think TWEWY did a more efficient and poignant job at making me care. I like watching Rindo and Fret interact with this scary world that they've been thrust into but I feel pretty disjointed from the whole affair for some reason. Part of this is because Neku and other characters would get into arguments that proposed various moral dilemmas. This might not sound that interesting on paper but given the confines of the reaper's game, it adds variables to morality that would be obvious in real life. In NEO, a lot of the character conflict just kind of feels like processed drama. It isn't completely ineffective or shallow, it just doesn't hit half as hard as the original. I could say more on this but again, haven't beat the game because my PS4 is a piece of garbage.

The whole equipping one pin to each character is something I'm not a huge fan of lore-wise but perhaps this is explained later or in post-game. Without going on a tangent, Neku uses psyches through pins while other characters channel it through other means. This is why the bosses all have unique abilities and why Shiki has a semi-sentient stuffed cat that kills enemies. Everybody using the pins wouldn't bother me if returning characters weren't also using the pins even though, for the most part, they literally wouldn't have been able to. It would have just been some Hot Topic bogo deal, impulse buy for other characters. As I already said, this is probably explained later so I'll shut up about it now. In any case, I like that the controls were awkward in TWEWY because it actually utilized the DS's gimmick to play into the sync level which also played a big part in the plot. In NEO, they're just awkward based on which pins you want to use at the time. Being able to map your own buttons within limitations would have been nice. Maybe this is a feature later but I see no reason why they should have done that if that's the case.

Reading that last paragraph over again in draft form now and I wanted to address the fact that again, this is complaining about plot points in NEO that might be wrapped up later. There's also the fact that TWEWY's plot was very existential and not fully rooted in reality to begin with and I mean that in a positive and factual way. At the same time, I played almost 20 hours of NEO before my PS4 rejected and ejected it. I feel like that's a lot of time to sink into a sequel's plot and not have this point explained but again, it's TWEWY.

Before the game came out, I read an interview that NEO was going to be like Persona 5 length. I truly cannot see that working for this game but maybe it will. I feel like Persona 5's combat was a lot more open-ended. Whether fights took one second or 15 minutes was largely dependent on a lot of choices made outside of that battle rather than just not having the right equipment or difficulty alterations. In NEO, unless something fundamentally changes the foundation of how the game plays and how the plot is being served up, there's no way this doesn't get stale after a while. I still want to figure this out for myself. Until then, I have been worried about this since before the game came out and now having played a decent chunk of the game, I am just as worried, I just now have good reasoning behind it.

The food system is snappier than in the original. The menus are weirder to navigate but they aren't necessarily worse than in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, you're at the mercy of loading everything up on DS hardware. Everything's a lot faster in NEO, y'know, except for the plot. There are a lot of things that NEO lets you have at from the beginning that were locked off in TWEWY. These include the concept of pig noise and being able to see where side-quests might be. In TWEWY, I get why these were not immediately made apparent to the player. In NEO, I guess the developers had no real reason to keep these from veteran players or new players so the game just blatantly lets you know that you can do them and I think that's cool.

The clothing equipment system works about the same. The only thing I'm worried about late game is that they added a lot of different brands to this game. Making different outfits actually affects a lot in the game and this changed a handful of things in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, wearing all of one brand made you more powerful. In NEO, there are so many brands that I feel like being able to do this would be more difficult. At the point of the game where you might be able to do this, you'll have so much exp and other equipment that this brand boost would be fairly pointless to even use anyway. Didn't get that far though so this is just speculation. Thanks, Sony.

The soundtrack isn't as consistently good but it's still fitting to the setting and all that. The new inclusions have their bangers and stinkers. The stinkers still fit the atmosphere. The new versions of songs from TWEWY are fucking cool too.

All things considered, NEO is a competent action RPG with a competent plot so far. It has enough unique stuff going for it to set it apart from what people would expect from a modern, anime-looking-ass action RPG. In comparison to TWEWY, I think it doesn't do enough to set it apart from the pack to recommend everyone go buy this thing right fucking now as opposed to the original TWEWY, which I still recommend to people to this day. I can also do that with confidence because for an RPG with as complicated of a plot as it has, TWEWY doesn't take up that much time. NEO fucking does.

NEO is just kind of going for something different and I think it pulls that off. I kind of hinted at this earlier but it's just not as poignant as the original in any regard. Still, I don't want to give off the impression that this is a huge disappointment or total trash. I would love to keep playing the game, hardware willing, and I don't completely regret my purchase. Had I known my PS4 was going to physically reject the fucking thing, I probably wouldn't have pre-ordered it or waited for Switch reviews to get that version instead but you don't care about that so why am I even talking about it? NEO definitely takes characters and ideas from TWEWY in a way that is fun for veterans of the original game. However, I think I could still recommend NEO to newcomers because it does have its own story going on. In any case, I still recommend the original way higher than NEO. I still haven't played the Switch version of TWEWY but maybe I should finally do that sometime. That's still an option by the way if you want to play that first without dusting off your DS Lite or one of your 3 different Zelda-branded 3DS's. Or 2DS's. Nintendo's fucking silly. If you can play it without either console actively fighting back against you, I guess I soft recommend NEO. It's a solid action RPG with plenty of style to possibly make up for all of the things it really doesn't improve over my nostalgia-blind pedestal-hog vision of the original. If you already like the first game but are wary of trying NEO, ehhhhh. I think you'll like it but see if you can wait a bit longer for it to be like $40 or less.

Sorry, I drama'd (disjointed OneyPlays rant)

 https://twitter.com/RandomringsYT/status/1424442798099607557

That thread, assuming it still exists as you are reading this, is really all I have to say. But I'll say more because this is a blog!

So it's not a big secret to a lot of people that Oney or Chris O'Neil, or the guy that makes fun of Channel Awesome, or the Crash Bandicoot "woah" meme guy has had a history with some shit that some might call.... "problematic". I say that as a goof but also it's true.

Why am I ranting about this? Because I have no fucking life.

So here is the rant I made in case that thread I made gets yeeted:

Whhhooooops! I didn't even know about this when I made fun of his racist, misogynist let's plays with that one video I made. Nobody told me this. This was way back when.

So, I don't know why this is the last straw for me but like, I don't want to think about this guy anymore.

"This" is referring to a tweet Chris made on March 10th, promoting his brand-spanking new rarible account!

It sucks because I feel like he's not the worst person in the world. Like, his heart's in the right place but his brain is stuck in 2008 newgrounds and youtube.

Anyway, he's a stranger on the internet and I just wanted to rant about this before I shut up about him forever.

I have publicly said I watch "too much *neyPlays" for a few years now. I know it's easy to say this now but I mostly just like the people who aren't Chris? If that makes sense. Almost every time I've been annoyed with the channel is because of Chris.

Also, you can look up his screenname and "black lives matter" where he tries to back up calling the movement a "cult" and an "organization" that was attacking old men sitting in their cars or something? Yyyyyeah... It's yikers all around and I feel like a dumbass.

On top of that, I follow artists/animators who have been like "no, I indirectly know the guy and have seen him argue racist shit". One had discord screenshots. Way to be an ally to your POC friends and then do all that at the same time.

I couldn't find the discord screenshot but I found a conversation talking about middle eastern culture and Chris being a cunt about it. The fact that I believe this either means I'm an idiot or one dude kind of dug his own grave in terms of looking like he's learned anything from online criticism and the person I heard this allegory from is someone who does not have a history of using slurs for a quick lawl.

I don't know. Normally, I'm not that vocal about this sort of thing but I feel like I've mentioned Chris publicly a few times, some recently, and I just feel like a dumbass for not forgetting about the fucker sooner.

I genuinely hope he figures his shit out and gets better but he's a stranger on the internet so I'm not worried about it.

It just sucks that someone so genuinely multi-talented can also manage to be this stupid while calling other people "stupid ugly bitches" in the process.

If there's a positive to this, it's more inspiration for me to work on my let's plays and Randomrings videos. People can feel included or at least safe (hopefully both) with my stuff.

Theeeeeeeee end of the thread! :]

I don't have much to add to this other than I guess "evidence" in one place. Not all the evidence, mind you. When I said I don't have a life earlier, I was kind of exaggerating. Just a few things I want to document. Fun fact, I stumbled upon the NFT post looking for one of these specific things to edit into a video. Weirdly, not a lot of this stuff is the easiest to find. It's weird. When a Hollywood celebrity or queer YouTube creator does this stuff, you can find at least find 8 different posts about this kind of thing or whatever else but not much else. But I will put this here in case anyone is like "that didn't happen" or "he's an innocent baby boy, and I luv him!" or "it's the cansel coltcher!" Now others can go "well, I found this". I guess.

 I can't find the original tweet in anything that's not cropped or blurry like this but I've seen people talk about it in the past year and I saw it myself when he said it. It was in 2020 so read into that how you fucking will. Or tell yourself it's not racist because he didn't say the n-word. In this specific instance. I dunno. The point of this blog post isn't to convince you that he's a bigot, it's just to sort out my feelings on the guy after a long time of sitting on it. I'm happy to be the libcuck throwing themself under the bus to do so.

If you want more proof, watch any fucking Oneyplays that lasts 3 or more episodes since the channel's inception and you will find something ableist, racist, sexist, or a good ol' fashioned sexual assault joke!

https://youtu.be/3KMUtX8rwO4?t=1044

I particularly think of this one a lot because people use a certain excuse that this kind of debunks. "Well, he's friends with this person or these people and they're (not cishet white man) so he's fine! If he was a bigot, you would know" (literally just saw this as an actual argument on Tumblr AND Reddit by two separate people or a very dedicated idiot with different screennames). Well, that particular clip is with two gay people and he's just blurting the f-slur. This wasn't terribly long ago so you can't even make that bullshit excuse for him either, you know the one. There are multiple episodes I remember watching at least twice where they both call him out for this behavior. He still used the f-slur and r-slur in 2020 and 2021 episodes. Unfortunately I know that from directly watching them.

Anyway, this was too much time spent on a person on the internet I don't know personally. It's just weird because this is a guy a lot of people have been aware of for nearly 20 years now and I have found way more people defending his "political views" than I have found anyone going "nah, he's a bigot." Like, very VERY rarely do you see anyone just outwardly call him racist. I've seen it happen from some badasses but it's like once every three years where he does something stupider. I have also seen many people say today "he's just really stupid when it comes to these sorts of issues." What sort? Race? Then they continue to say "he should run his posts by someone else so he doesn't land in hot water". Bitch, I don't care how he *looks* in the public eye, it's about what he says and does as a public figure. If he wants to throw other people under the bus and goof on them for being idiots because "they're in the public eye and should learn how to take a joke" then I guess dunking on him should be perfectly fine. By his own logic. So anyone who tries to "defend" him or "debate" me probably just can't take a "joke". "Quotation marks".

Alright, time to expend my energy on literally anything else. This felt good. All I have to add is I have talked about OneyPlays specifically a few times, whether or not I have been critical of Chris's bigotry within the same instance. I guess I never really went out of my way to defend him in the past but I didn't outright condemn him until recently and I feel guilty for not starting a lot sooner I suppose.

Don't worry, you won't be hearing about this again. Thanks for your time and I hope this did something for you too. I say that a lot but this was a lot to take in with no real payoff from mentally consuming this. So I uh... superhope you got something out of this blog post in particular. Be safe!

Randomrings Streams Future and Past

 I've been keeping track of this so I guess you have the right to do so too. I've made it easier, I guess? This is also just to be a list of "hey, I'm going to stream this game at some point" for anyone who might want to know what kind of stuff I'm into streaming.

at https://www.twitch.tv/randomrings

You can also just go to my Backloggery profile to see this more in-depth

Last update: July 15, 2023

Current main series:

Lunistice

Lunistice is an indie collectathon platformer and it is really pretty.

Stuff I plan on streaming:

Pokemon Omega Ruby randomizer nuzlocke
Pokemon Ultra Sun randomizer nuzlocke (probably 2024)
Pokemon White - Mudkip's Path (randomizer nuzlocke) (continued)
Wandersong (continued)
More multiworld randomizers with my friends
    - I'll probably mostly play Sonic Adventure 2 but can also play the following:
        - Pokemon Emerald when it releases
        - The Messenger
        - Timespinner
        - Super Mario 64
Hades II whenever it goes into early access
Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster
Vampire Survivors (continued)
NEO: The World Ends With You (continued)
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line DLC
Cat Quest (continued)
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - 100%
Some new Multiworld game that I need to play vanilla
    - Hollow Knight
    - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
    - Super Mario World
    - Slay the Spire
    - Wargroove
    - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Games we have beaten on stream with links to the VODs in a new window:

Pokemon Emerald (technically randomized but vanilla logic) - April 2023 to May 2023
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (PS1) - March 2023
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age - January 2023 - February 2023
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg - December 2022
Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (Phantasy Reverie Series) - November 2022
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile (Phantasy Reverie Series) - November 2022
Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment Again - October 2022
Bastion - September to October 2022
Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck - September 2022
Super Mario Sunshine - September 2022
Pokemon SoulSilver - July to September 2022
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity - June 2022
Spyro Reignited Trilogy
   -Spyro 1 and Spyro 2 - Mar 2022
   -Spyro 3 - Mar to May 2022
Pyre - Jan to Feb 2022
Transistor - November to December 2021
Panzer Dragoon: Remake - September 2021
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - August 2021
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing - August 2021
Undertale - July 2021
Sonic Colors - June 2021
Crash Bandicoot: Warped - June 2021
   -guest: Brad (B-Boi McB on YouTube)
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back - May 2021
Final Fantasy IX - May to November 2021
Timespinner - April to May 2021
   -guest: Satellite (thesatellite54 on Twitch)
Pokemon Diamond Nuzlocke (lost to Cyrus) - February to April 2021
   -occasional guest: Brad (B-Boi McB on YouTube)
Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment - Oct 2020

Accountability by Association rant I made

 I made this Twitter rant after I streamed last night. I don't know if I want this big wall of text on my Twitter for that long, especially something that people could easily misconstrue in tweet form. So I'm moving it here and then deleting it from Twitter.

The text is a little blurry on my end so to future-proof this as much as I can, I'm going to type out what they say here too:

Okay, maybe I'm fucking stupid but I feel like "you need to address this terrible thing this YouTuber did because you have kind of associated with them in the past or you are *just* as bad" is stupider than I am.

Probably not that black and white but a thread, if you will:

It's weird if they're *really* quiet about a certain topic. Like, if they're online friends with someone and have done a lot of videos and stuff together, then it turns out the one is a pedo. That might be worth addressing or at least cleaning up the channel.

What made me think about this enough to tweet about it is this; someone I follow is an artist who makes cool YouTube videos too. She was friends with and inspired by some popular asshole that I don't know much about but a lot of people liked this fucker who was recently outed.

Hey! Present-tense me again! Since we're not on Twitter anymore, I can address this without fanning a fire. The artist is Thumin. She makes really cool stuff. The "popular asshole", as I so eloquently put it, was Creepshow Art. I don't even know much about that one. I never followed her because everytime I hear about her it's just drama on top of drama. Turns out she has recently outdone herself in 2021. Thumin has been publicly linked with Creepshow so fans are lobbing questions and hatred at Thumin left and right instead of... y'know, the person actually being transphobic. Even beyond the transphobia and outing her own fucking sibling while they were in the ICU, I can't even follow the Degrassi bullshit she's been known for prior. So like, if you don't already know about it, feel free to look for Creepshow drama on your own. I don't even want to put out a source because I feel like anything I find could be misinformation. I have no idea what's up with this dummy. Thumin, however, I recommend following.

People are DMing and freaking out about this creator I follow that... isn't a freak by any means? They're yelling at her and sending racist shit to her trying to get her to address this other channel. They have cut off ties with their channel and the freak's channel anyway.

So here's the kicker of that story.

The event happened recently and this creator HAS addressed it on at least two different platforms, INCLUDING fucking YouTube where it would be the most publicly relevant.

To clarify because this seems so stupid that you might be thinking "no, I clearly read something wrong here". I would be. Thumin tweeted about this and put out one of those YouTube messagey thingies. Not a video. You know. That text thing you can do on YouTube so all your subscribers can see it.

The response was so prompt that it was how I found out about it happening

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for fans. At least up until yesterday, people have still been pestering her about the situation. I read her take on the whole thing. It isn't like 9 pages long or anything but I felt it was thorough enough. To loop back into the point of this whole blog post, I thought Thumin's post was more than what should have been expected.

Another reason I've been thinking about this kind of sensationalism recently, other than personal drama that doesn't need to be unleashed onto you guys, is that I've been pretty into Continue? recently.

If it isn't obvious, I have no connection to any of the channels or creators I am talking about here. My "personal drama" is what it sounds like and should be taken as such.

Continue? seems like a group of decent dudes. As far as white, cishet bros on the internet go, I feel pretty comfortable with them as an audience member and on a moral level.

But you probably know where I'm going with this:

n*rmalb**ts

"Normalboots".

For those of you too young to know about N*rmalb**ts; good. Half of the fuckers involved with it were shady at best. Two very popular ones are still going strong, one of them on Twitch as well. One is a white supremacist and the other sexually manipulates women and followers.

This is referencing "JonTron" or Jon Jafari who argued pretty strongly for strongly enforced immigration laws for the US and/or ethnic cleansing. When he caught flack for trying laughably to back up a lot of racist ideology, he made an "apology" video where he basically still tried to reinforce his points and said he would "stay out of politics". Idiot. The other idiot I'm referring to is ProJared or Jared Knabenbauer. That guy cheated on his wife with another YouTube creator who was, at the time, married to yet another YouTube creator, so the drama really splattered on all the walls that month. His wife partially found out about the events regarding the cheating because Jared also likes using his influence to solicit nudes from fans, some of which are under the age of 18. Back in the day, they all had this network called "Normalboots". JonTron, ProJared, and Continue? were all a part of this network. Normalboots basically kicked JonTron out by wording it in the most professional (i.m.o. pussy) way possible. Years later, people finally caught on to Jared's stink en masse. This caused Normalboots to disband entirely. Now you're up to speed on that. You can look up more details on your own but I think that was pretty comprehensive if I do say so myself.

Unfortunately, there are still videos with those people on Continue?. However, they have been increasingly making jokes against big conservative/centrist talking points for years, including all of the things those people and their current fans do.

Don't know why I worded this how I did. Probably just because I was in physical pain, it was late at night, and I was in full rant mode. Continue? had this thing back in the day called "Drunkstravaganza" where they would try to do their normal video game shtick but with guests. The first one was with JonTron. That's still on the channel. The second one was with a bunch of people, some shittier than others. If I remember correctly, JonTron was in that too but really all I remember is Satchell Drakes being there, a dildo on the wall, and Will Stamper's ass. Though it might be cool to see Continue? condemn Jon Jafari in a more specific way or see them at least remove the videos they are all in together, the points that make Jon Jafari's entire existence controversial are made fun of pretty frequently on Continue? They have progressively been harping on bigoted bullshit. I feel like if you know their heart is in the right place or at least they publicly condemn that behavior regularly, the argument of whether they should or shouldn't do something with their channel seems trivial to me. Vaguely irresponsible at worst.

Although I don't think Jared was ever in any of their videos, they mention him in a supportive fashion once or twice. I'm not sure if they still have those videos up. I wouldn't be surprised if they even remember mentioning him. However, after Jared's specific controversy, they make fun of him extensively for the specific bullshit he did in an episode not long after the public dust settled.

When the two were outed, they unfollowed the accounts and didn't say much. They don't directly talk about it (I'm unaware if they have) but they also don't condone the behavior actively. Unlike most big sketchy YouTubers, they make fun of similar idiots.

Is that not enough?

If you are actually a fan of the person or people, do you actually want accountability or do you want drama because you are on the internet and stirring the pot is something to do?

This is why I bring up Continue? In relativity, they are accountable for any remote association???

I won't bring up the one person I follow because that discourse is still burning. It is still current because people are perpetrating it. I don't see a logical reason why because again; they already addressed the fucking issue point-blank.

This is just bringing it all full-circle. I'm reiterating that Thumin was in the crosshairs of this sort of stupidity even after doing everything she could have done with the situation. What more do people want? Is it a video? Because that seems like you really want the spectacle more than you want some ambiguous sense of accountability.

In the case of Continue?, there is a greyer discussion. Although (to my knowledge) they didn't directly acknowledge everything, they still did most of what the end result would have been and try to culminate a diverse community that hates right-wing bigots.

For me, that's obviously enough or else I probably wouldn't still be watching and smmmmashing that liek buttin on Continue? videos.

They didn't "talk about it" but the end result is the same if they kinda do that all the time.

Even if you're going to argue "when it happened they shouldn't have stayed silent", they were still a part of Normalboots when both major controversies started actively buzzing. They helped come to the conclusion that action should be taken against them or at least stood by those actions. You wouldn't be wrong though. They could have done more. Still, unlike politically and morally ambiguous channels with a big following, Continue? have made their stances on a lot of issues pretty well known in their regular content. This is why I thought they were such a good example to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I dunno. Just something I've been mulling over.

I truly don't believe there's a concrete right or wrong answer to any of this.

On the other hand, I feel like some people are just not satisfied with what strangers online do in reaction to other strangers online.

Some are irresponsible (like p*wd**piss). I get that.

Just mathematically, I bet a lot of you went through a shitty fucking Pewdiepie, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, Cryaotic or however you spell that, CinnamonToastKen phase. People don't fucking call Markiplier or Jacksepticeye nazis for not calling Pewdiepie anti-semitic, even though Felix is definitely anti-semitic. So either we're all flawed and this whole "guilty by association" mentality is pretty fucking toxic and pointless or you are the god of morality and I deserve to burn eternally for even going down this line of thought.

That's my soapbox for the night. I can't think of any more points to add that aren't kind of redundant. Hopefully, you got something out of this spiel. Something to think about.

Yeah, that sums it up. I figured it would be easier to clear some of my points up on almost anything other than Twitter. I'm going to go delete those tweets now. Stay safe and healthy out there. I mean on the internet but I guess that goes for your life not spent on the internet as well.

If you tell me why I'm stupid, I'll feel bad (CW: kind of mentions pronoun refusal)

 This is purely a rant. My hair is drying because I am currently too lazy to get up and dry it faster. Maybe this rant will help me. Maybe it will help you with something. That college essay isn't going to distract you from doing it all by itself.

I don't know a one-to-two-word term for this so I'm going to make up a fake quote here. I think, once you read this, you will know exactly what I'm trying to say:

"This is an interesting conversation about this heated topic. I can kind of see all of your points. Just so you know though, for future reference, if you scream 'you're an idiot' at someone and mob against them, it becomes a lot harder to take your point seriously."

NOW...

Some people will read that and go "lawl, I see idiots like this pretty often. I know exactly what you're talking about". Others will agree with the statement above. I feel like this is part of the reason I'm making this rant.

This is partially inspired by the showrunner of an undisclosed, animated, and frankly, infantile YouTube video series that has been going on for way too long and has far too much twerking for my tastes. Again, the inspiration will go undisclosed. I'm usually not afraid to name names but I have not really watched this stuff. That is to say, everyone has probably seen this if they have spent a lot of time online in the past decade but I have never been a fan. Because it looks like something I would fucking hate. 

Anyway. The only reason I bring the showrunner up is that they were like "hey fans, you like my series that I pay a bunch of people to work on because I'm not actually very creative? NFTs of this brand are coming soon!" This was also in the heat of the more recent NFT discourse, despite the fact that NFTs are not a 2021 thing at all. Not throwing anyone under the bus here. I have done a little research into crypto but it wasn't until 2021 that I really looked into NFTs and learned more specifics on how crypto is made. For anyone wondering; I am against NFTs. I wouldn't murder someone or stop being friends with someone for having a passing interest in crypto, in a very general sense. I do, however, give these friends shit for being into crypto because I have personally always found the entire thing to be shady. If we're going to talk about NFTs, which we won't be after I'm done with this paragraph, I take a much harsher stance against it and am actually glad so many people took so many large L's on that one. This post isn't about crypto though, it's probably not even the best example for illustrating my point.

A lot of people, including fans of this undisclosed series, dogpiled the creator on social media. This is pretty warranted given any and all context I can fucking think of. The creator was like "okay, I'm all ears, but give me GOOD reasoning that isn't whiny or meanie, or else I won't listen!" Again, this was at the rise of the recent NFT discourse where a lot of people didn't even fully understand what they were mad about anyway. They were right, they were just kind of misinformed is all. I am still no expert myself. After a few hours of this, the guy pretty much said the made-up quote I gave a bit ago. So basically, for being mad about publicly being okay with destroying the environment and then being a smug douchebag about it after the fact, the people with actual factual information are the assholes because they raised their Twitter voice.

So that is what I want to rant about. Not crypto.

There are extreme examples we can give to what's a bit too much and all that. Threatening somebody's family over this sort of thing is an obvious example of "a bit too much" or at least I fucking hope that's an obvious example. But let's change one of the variables in the equation I spent too long explaining above. If it wasn't crypto, maybe it is whether or not we should care about other people's pronouns and whether or not saying "whatever" to the whole thing is problematic or not (it is).

So MinecraftFabio265 (not checking to see if that's a real screenname somewhere, if it is, I apologize, this isn't about you, and if it accidentally seems like it is, continue reading; you've got some learnin' to do, Fabio) makes a post saying "lol imagine being bent out of shape about having obvious breasts and people don't call you he/him". Most of us know, they would use a harsher phrase than "bent out of shape" but I digress. So this post is directly transphobic to transmasculine people who have not had top surgery and strictly do not use "she/her" pronouns, as many transmascs do not. Also weirds me out that tits are the deciding factor in respect for a lot of people considering literally everyone has them or is a dismembered corpse but this is also beside the point. A bunch of people get together and call out MinecraftFabio265 for his stupid post. So as I have explained so far, on paper, these people are in the right and MinecraftFabio265 is in the wrong. If you can't tell from the tone of this whole post up to this point, no matter what transpires, MinecraftFabio265 is still absolutely in the wrong. That said, let's move on.

I personally feel like most people would see the responses and point at the responders as the bad guys here. This melts a lobe in my noggin. Let me take you down the Willy Wonka chocolate cruise for a second here, just humor me. Let's go down the hypothetical train of thought that the naysayers in this hypothetical scenario are whackjobs and bullies. The original poster ever so simply said that if a transmasc person has not undergone top surgery or has other features that another individual may see as feminine, it is okay for the individual to refer to the transmasc person staunchly as a woman. It is then implied that it is the job of the trans person to deal with that responsibility. That any assertion that the person might heavily prefer other pronouns is absurd and/or none of the other person's business. So how do we respond to this?

Angrily? Yes!

It can be well-articulated or it can be CAPS LOCKED and feral but I honestly don't blame anyone for getting fucking infuriated at the OP for regurgitating such nonsense. "Well, he didn't say that! Never said that! You're making up drama for clout!" In such few words, MinecraftFabio265 absolutely implied a lot of things there. The "lol" is actually important here, you see. He finds it laughable that someone would expect someone to give this person basic respect. I was thinking about this earlier today. MinecraftFabio265, who we have established is a man, would probably start feeling kind of blue if a lot of people started referring to him as "her". I mean, this is the MinecraftFabio265! A man of notoriety. Surely, this trend would catch on, and bam! Now you have a couple thousand people calling MinecraftFabio265 her royal majesty; queen of pronouns. None of these people ever consider the shoe being on the other foot. Isn't that strange? Genuinely. Is that not just a very weird thing that these people never consider?

Also, a lot of transmasc issues are swept under the rug constantly. Transfemme people still face many scary issues in 2021 but at least in 2021, these issues are gaining more visibility. I rarely see anyone in any position of power doing anything to boost transmasc people. This is part of the reason why everyone freaked the fuck out about Elliot Page. He was worth freaking out about. Name another transmasc person even one tier of popularity down from Elliot Page. Yup? Yup. All this to say that I am of the opinion that saying things like what MinecraftFabio265 has said this very day are very arguably hate speech. I think a lot of people would say "that's not even an opinion, you are absolutely right". I have my moments.

So then (this is where it all comes full circle) one has the goddamn gall to even remotely insinuate that the person saying "bad take, Fabio" is the toxic one; the hateful one. MinecraftFabio265 is most likely to say something like "yall are just haters lol I am just voicing a simple opinion and all these sjws come to attack me lol". I really hate that this MinecraftFabio265 quote is not one that took me more than one minute to make up because I see stuff so close to it all the fucking time. I would say at least once a month and my timeline is fairly clean of bigoted dummies. To my knowledge, it is as clean as it can be. I still see "hoes mad" when it comes to just hatred. I think passive hatred is one of the worst things I can think of. It is the notion that because "you didn't mean it" erases hundreds of years of history behind a sentiment. MinecraftFabio265's post wasn't even fucking funny. There isn't anything about it that qualifies as a "joke".

People post problematic stuff, especially with 0% added creativity or nuance. Other people see this and either calmly or angrily call them out. OP and the OP's fans blame the people sticking up for basic human respect or their own basic human respect for this getting "out of hand". "Cancel mob".

I could have summed this up in a tweet but here we are, like a half-hour of writing later. If you didn't take this journey with me though, I would have gone one day of my life not conjuring MinecraftFabio265 into your psyche. Very subtly, I may add. I was very good at it. Now you can never forget the character. MinecraftFabio265. From YouTube. Who plays WoW 40 hours a week. So I thank you all for experiencing this moment with me. For those who originally were okay with this:

"This is an interesting conversation about this heated topic. I can kind of see all of your points. Just so you know though, for future reference, if you scream 'you're an idiot' at someone and mob against them, it becomes a lot harder to take your point seriously."

I hope you learned something today and realize how easy it is to just listen when a bunch of people from a community gets mad at you. For one second, entertain the thought that when a swarm of people comes at you with what may look like pitchforks and torches, you are not fucking Belle from Beauty and the Beast so these farmers might have something worthwhile to say to you tonight. They might even know what they're talking about and wish to share such wisdom with you. I hope you accept it.

Lexi Karma: Self Titled Synth Medley is out now

Hey, you like links?

https://open.spotify.com/album/0rVIFPhNA6pIzsEbf1zid0?si=c7kfEdZyRN6oHjTkIOGdug&dl_branch=1

Self Titled Synth Medley is out on Spotify now. It's also out on almost everything else you could think of but I like to advertise it on Spotify because you can listen to it for free.

The title is long and obnoxious to look at due to CD Baby's distribution stipulations. In order to keep the word "Medley" in the title, I had to point out all of the songs in the medley. The format examples seemed to imply upwards of three songs. Not eleven. But okay, I didn't argue.

Self Titled Again and Fake and Stupid are still coming out later this year. Mixing is going pretty alright, slowly but surely. In the meantime, enjoy my strange attempt at chiptune.

Burnout While Still Inspired as Gosh Dang Hecky

 This is going to be kind of stream of consciousness. I feel burned out. I don't know what else to define it as other than "burned out". Lately, my days have been consisting of fucking around with things I shouldn't be working on until mid-to-late afternoon, forcing myself to eat dinner, and then trying to sleep so I can have the same defeatist cycle the next day. A few days ago, I woke up around 9am and didn't do a whole lot of anything until 8pm. I worked on mixing the music I'm putting out this year for about an hour and then Reaper crashed a few times. That broke my entire source of energy. I was just done and this is not the first time something like this has happened. Probably even within the last year. Incomplete sentence. Oopsum.

This is not going to be a "woe is me" blog post. This is just a genuine thing in hopes to inspire someone to overcome this or realize that you don't have to go 200% every day. And people will say "there has to be a balance" to which I say "no, there fucking doesn't". I think if there is any point to this post, that's it.

Time was invented by humans as an organizational tool. Because we don't have a definition for what we perceive as the foregoing of existence, we just call that feeling time. I actually think there is a term in-between there but I don't feel like looking it up right now. You probably don't know that term. Most people don't know it. On the other hand, if I say "the old 9 to 5", you know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about. Time is something everyone fucking loves. Time is a thing the government, corporations, and the 1% of people sucking the dicks of those two fucking love. They love time because they don't need as much of it as you do. As I do. Don't worry, this isn't going to get political. Not that there would be anything wrong with this post if I were to go down that route, of course. I just need to set this up to prove my point that labor has been pegging time for centuries. Some people would deny that statement if I just said it outright. I had to preface it with all those other words to nullify that denial. Until time stops or humanity goes extinct, this is probably going to be true. That's just the way this goes now and I cannot do anything about it. Sorry.

So I write stories and blog posts. I write, record, and mix music. I used to make videos and want to make more. I stream on Twitch. These are things I enjoy doing but none of this can take me anywhere on its own. Where is a place I would want something that is not a vehicle to take me to? None of these things I do can take me to a physical place, so what state of being am I striving for? One with money? I suppose because again, the whole 1% thing. If "the 1% thing" wasn't an issue, I wouldn't have to put up such a fight to do things that people would benefit from.

When I'm not writing stories, writing blog posts, writing music, recording guitars, recording singing, mixing music, mastering music, editing some video, or streaming on Twitch, I'm grinding a job I do not want to do. I tolerate this job because it fits where I am at right now. It is as comforting as it is fucking sickening, tedious, obnoxious, and in my case, physically destructive. This has been a decent approximation of my state of being for the past four years.

"Take some risks". "Make a change". "Do that grind". "Go somewhere for a nice vacation." "Go on dates". "Buy a house". "Change your diet".

Shut the fuck up?

I do not think, for a goddamn minute of any given day, that I am the only person currently hitting this wall. Still, I think the fact that I cannot overcome it every minute of every given day is part of the reason why it takes me longer to put out things that I am genuinely passionate about. See "take some risks", "buy a house", "move to a new location", "see the world", "get laid", okay maybe not that last one; these are all things that would actively hinder me from what I want to do. Now, I think that these things would be good advice for someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Not in a quirky millennial "lol I have no idea what I'm doing with my life so I bought a gummy bear the size of my golden retriever" way. I know what I want to do and at this time, I know why I cannot do half of it. Outright. Cannot. I have a decent grasp on why a lot of it can be done but for the same reasons I cannot do these other things, this half of the aspirations will take so much more time. Unfortunately, a lot of this simply boils down to money.

So I should work more hours. Welllllll fuck it is physically hurting me. I'm weirdly physically resilient for a human stick bug. That said, I have started noticing pain that I haven't noticed before and it doesn't go away after one day. A lot of the time, it takes two or three days. I only get three days off at this. The other four days of the week are spent getting ready to spend my entire fucking day at this place and then spending the entire fucking day at this place. So my three days off must require some form of work on Lexi Karma or anything else I might want to get done. In between, I also have to do basic stuff we all do like basic hygiene and cleaning up my living space. I have been slacking on the latter. I'm still weirdly hygienic for being this fucking depressed. 2020 didn't even keep me from that. Laundry kind of sits between those two doesn't it? I drive to a laundromat to escape my awful neighbors. Other than the trek, it would cost about the same anyway. When I wait for the washing and drying cycles, I'm on my iPad, often working on something. Not thinking about breathing in fresh air. I am not thinking about mindfulness or how in love I am or where my "career" is heading. I am just thinking "I have to do these things I want to do because they will not be fucking done if I don't do them and nobody can help me because I can not afford to compensate these people fairly". This isn't an invitation for free work, by the way, fucking respect yourself.

I am dropping down from full-time to part-time at my job because I got a raise. I will now be able to afford basic living expenses while breaking my body less. Note: "less". I have a degree now but it's like, what am I even supposed to do with that? Get a job that will fire me in three weeks anyway? This is my mindset. The real thing holding me back from job-hunting is that even with a Bachelor's, I'm still underqualified for shit I know I could do. The tasks needed to perform these jobs with flying colors are tasks I could knock out of the park but I am "underqualified". So I stick to physical labor.

The other day, there was a guy there I had seen around. They had him in a wheelchair for a bit. He was on a walker that day and it looked like he could barely keep it together. The guy had to have been no younger than 70 years old. I don't think I'll be that guy but I also don't have any solid proof that I won't be at this point in my life and that kind of scares me. I'm not trying to be a tough guy here, it doesn't keep me up at night. It really just scares me at the "kind of" level.

All this to say, what the hell do we do with this wall then? You sat through all these words and it can't just lead to nowhere. It can't just lead to nihilism. Well, it can but it won't. Most of the time, like right now, I'm really stuck on something that I really want to show the world. But there's that wall. I guess I pick out pieces of that wall that I put there myself. That's my best advice. It might not sound like enough but you would be surprised. I can't do anything about the US having a fucking inhumane health care system. I can't do anything about the pompous fortress that is trying to make a big production out of something with other people. I can't help that I don't have the money to hire people to help me do these things. I don't have that ability because of the problems I pointed out right before this issue. So you see, it trickles down. You break down more and more of this wall or at least outline how to. Then you start to see "fuck, this brick is made out of tofu". That tofu brick might be sexual trauma or just a basic fear of failure. Tofu's a bad analogy because those two examples can be absolutely paralyzing.

And here's another important point: sometimes making a blueprint of what to do with that wall is okay. Some days, that is what you had to do and you can bulldoze tomorrow because the weather today isn't good for it.

The main inspiration for writing this is that I feel lately, it is getting harder and harder to start that bulldozer up. I guess if you're reading this, you are also having ignition issues. Especially after 2020, I think a lot of us feel like we need a blueprint day every fucking day. For this, I don't have an answer and even if I did, it wouldn't work for every person. No way in Hell. For me, and hopefully, this works for a lot of people if not for everyone... For me, I have a day like this and realize I didn't do the dishes, I didn't vacuum the carpet, I didn't record voice-over, I didn't record that one guitar track, I didn't write a single fucking word of this glorious web-comic that will probably never fucking come out at this rate but when that day hits I remember that person who will berate me for this. I remember the cloaked man with a hook for a hand and a pistol in the other and he's just waiting outside my bedroom window waiting for me to fuck up. When I finally have mold growing in the sink while I'm watching the 80th let's play video I watched that day, that dude is going to come in here and wear my face on his abdomen. If you haven't caught on yet, this guy doesn't exist and you probably don't know him either. So any version of that is all in your head. Fuck that guy. He doesn't get to exist but you do so you're not the biggest waste of flesh in the universe. You just want to watch that kid's cartoon you've already seen five times all the way through. That's fine.

As an end note, I don't like telling people how to live their lives. If you want to amputate one of your hands and replace it with a fucking hook, buy a gun, and hang outside my apartment with a clean shot for when you can see the dishes from the next building over, fucking go for it.

The Queerness Saga Ep182: Face Goop

 There aren't 181 other episodes of this, I fucking lied to you all.

I just tried makeup for the first time ever. Unfortunately, I don't really like putting my face online in public spaces anymore. This is (probably) not for dysphoric reasons, I just don't particularly like doing it.

As of now, I get pretty bad beard shadow. My facial hair is fucking violent. I shaved around noon or so and just put on makeup around 7:15??? Close enough. So here are the results. And what I did. If you're reading this far, you probably have some passing interest or you're looking into something like this for yourself.

It has been about 45 minutes now and my beard hair decided to say "fuck you" and starting poking out a lot more than it did when I finished applying makeup. So there is a noticeable bit of darkness there or at the very least little hairs. However, it's still better than nothing to a point where I can tell. Makeup doesn't magically make your facial hair cower in fear at the idea of feminization and I knew that going in. Given that this was my first time and I haven't even ordered makeup brushes yet, I am pretty pleased with the results.

I ran some room temperature-ish water on my face and neck first because I had been out for a bit earlier. I wasn't filthy or actively sweating, I just thought that a bit of water would be better than sweat or some other gross thing I'm unaware of.
I used my CeraVe daily moisturizing lotion "for normal to dry skin" as a moisturizer. I've been using this stuff for a long time anyway. It's pretty great stuff. Works like magic as long as you use it consistently and it's non-comedogenic so it can be used as a moisturizer in the makeup process.
I used setting spray that is designed to be used as a bit of a primer. It's called Black Radiance long lasting setting spray. It claims it can be used as a primer and a setting spray. Again, this is my first time so I can't say much about the validity of this. I just got it as a cheap thing to know how this whole process works. As far as I can tell, which is not very far, it did its job on both accounts.
Next was Covergirl Clean Matte BB Cream for oily skin. BB Cream is pretty multitalented. I feel like most people would recommend using a dedicated foundation instead of this or using both. But hey, I don't know what I'm talking about and this worked for me. I still haven't ordered makeup brushes. As such, I just kind of took a finger or two to rub the stuff in. It probably looks a little trashy to an expert but I think it worked out really well. One side note of advice: check and see which skin type your BB cream is made for before you order it. I goofed on this one. I honestly don't even remember if my skin constitutes as oily. It probably doesn't. Do some more research before you pull the trigger on something like this. It's actually important.
Next up: Covergirl Smoothers concealer stick. I'm not sure how much of this stuff to use but after I put this over the BB cream I was like "ah fuck, now we're doing makeup, bitch!"
As soon as I could after that, I spritzed on more setting spray. This is where I feel like I don't know what I'm doing the most. It kind of wet down some of the stuff I laid down so much that it kind of fell off. Weirdly, I just kind of rubbed the stuff in again and it was fine. I just wasn't expecting that. I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong. In any case, I let that do its thing for a few seconds and then sent some video/pics to my friends.

All of the items I mentioned are relatively cheap except for the CeraVe lotion. That lotion will last you a long-ass time though so I recommend that above anything else here. Also, I'm enby and probably won't go for anything too fancy anyway. That is to say, everything mentioned here is probably pretty great for newly-hatched trans girls or other people wanting to go all out with pretty makeup. I don't know jack about that but I wish you luck anyway. These products I mentioned should be a good starting point though.

CeraVe Daily Moisturizing Lotion for Normal to Dry Skin
Black Radiance Long Lasting Setting Spray
Covergirl Clean Matte BB Cream for Oily Skin (though I probably should have got one for normal skin)
Covergirl Smoothers Moisturizing Concealer Stick
Black Radiance Long Lasting Setting Spray again
Get some form of makeup remover or you will fuck your face up

There ya go. I probably won't post too many makeup posts because it isn't my forte. I would not be in the least bit surprised if this is the last makeup post I ever make. However, researching this for myself has been kind of a pain in the ass. Most of the articles and YouTube stuff you can find on this sort of thing, though informative and perhaps adorable, is useful for the same reasons it's overwhelming. These people have done this a million times over. Today, literally day one, no idea what the fuck I'm doing, and I got results I liked. You can do this too and you can probably get everything you need to start out for less than $50, shipping included. Do it. Look luvly.

Lexi Karma Releasing TWO New Projects in 2021

 Lexi Karma is my music moniker. My one-man-band, if you will. I haven't released any actual music under Lexi Karma since 2017 and there was about a three-year gap between releasing anything on the Lexi Karma YouTube at all. But 2021 is the year it comes back, as announced this past week on May 6th, 2021. Why is the prose of this like a press article for Lexi Karma? I don't know why it came off like that. Let's stop that now.

tl;dr:
Sometime in Autumn 2021, I will be releasing a full-length album and an EP under Lexi Karma, hopefully on the same day or at least in the ballpark. The full-length album is called "Self Titled Again" and is a remake of the first album from 2016. The EP is called "Fake and Stupid" and will be comprised of all synths, vocals, and various sampled instruments. If neither is done by Dec 31, 2021, I'm just going to bounce them both and release them before the year ends.

That's all you need to know. I guess I'm going to keep going though.

Fake and Stupid

Fake and Stupid is an electronic EP for lack of a better term. It will have six songs on it, none of which have any guitars on them. I say "for lack of a better term" because compositionally, they are still pretty much rock songs. The first song is called "Clingy", which I showed a demo of last week. "Clingy" is about the closest thing to what most people would expect from electronic music on the whole EP. They are all electronic by the pure instrumental definition but it probably won't feel that way to people who frequent the genre.

The reason the EP is called "Fake and Stupid" is that this is probably what I would have called it if I could go back in time and show this music off to myself in high school. I was a stupid metalhead and listened to a lot of rock and metal. I thought the only good keyboard and synth stuff was stuff that was technically impressive or fast like Children of Bodom. Yet I still didn't listen to jazz until after high school. Idiot. The title also falls in line with the story being told across the EP.

The concept of Fake and Stupid is my love life but wait yeah I know it's fucking lame wait just hold on! I'm a virgin in my late 20s who has been tossed around and fucked up for as long as I can remember. At the same time, I wasn't perfect in this field either and I wanted to throw some elements of that into the lyrics too. The EP is organized to reflect how a lot of this works psychologically. It also linearly tackles a story that lasts about a decade and attempts to sum it up in under thirty minutes. So the EP takes adolescent obsession and slowly injects ideas of abuse and gaslighting as I grow into my early-to-mid 20s. The end of the EP takes place around 2017-2018 where I spend almost an entire year trying to undo a lot of psychological damage others did to me as well as damage I did to myself. I'll talk more about that later this year when it's all out though.

"Clingy" is a perfect intro to this concept. It is a kind of first-person sarcastic vantage point of a lot of men I knew in romantic/sexual relationships that would fuck up the ABCs of dating at every turn. Imagine the lyrics are being sung by a bunch of puppets at a puppet show and I am giving them all voices. This is more accurate to how the lyrics to Clingy work. I feel like a lot of people are going to misconstrue the lyrics as me being quite the filthy misogynist. This is understandable. I just think it was a fun way to depict it. Sometimes we don't understand how stupid or harmful some of the stuff we say is until we hear someone else say it, which is a large point of the song. I should probably release that demo on YouTube sometime soon.

When it's done, I will probably release "Clingy" in its finished form on YouTube and perhaps another song as finished promotional material to tell people to go listen to this thing already. Don't hold your breath for a second song though. It seems kind of weird to release two songs before the whole thing since the whole thing only has six songs. It will be on Spotify. I am also going to try Bandcamp this time. You can support Lexi Karma in advance on Ko-fi but you can always do that. Bandcamp has a kind of "pay what you want" feature and I want to play with that. I'm not sure why I shied away from it when I released that album. Oh, speaking of that thing.

Self Titled Again

I'm remaking the Lexi Karma debut album Self Titled. It will be called Self Titled Again because there's only so much you can guess from that title. I will probably talk more about why I decided to make this when it comes out. I showed off a demo of "Crystal" last week. That has always been one of my personal favorites from the album. Someone somewhere might find it interesting that it was also pretty much the inspiration for making Lexi Karma and committing to it. I think it might have been the first song I actually wrote for the purpose of being a Lexi Karma song but I don't remember that for sure.

Anyway. Self Titled is something I'm proud of myself for making but I'm always kind of embarrassed to show it to people. The vocals are mostly on key but they suck. There's no pitch correction. The guitars are typically layered pretty okay because I at least understood subtractive EQing but beyond that, I didn't really know what I was doing with mixing. I'll be honest, as a certified audio engineer, I'm still flying by the seat of my pants. Every time I sit down with the express purpose of mixing something, I feel like the biggest fucking idiot on planet Earth. This is one of many reasons why I decided not to do it for a living early on. Anyway, the problem with Self Titled is that I love the songs. I hate that I'm embarrassed by them because I think if money was no object, I would have put out a great piece of art in 2016. But studio time is expensive and I was making less than $9/hr at the time. The fact that I put that out with almost no help and a budget of $1k was impressive. Unfortunately, that spirit doesn't make the mix any fucking better. The mastering engineer I commissioned tried but he could only do so much with that awful mix.

So Self Titled Again will come into the fore-front with the hopes of at least remedying the sonic quality of the music I released in 2016. I miiiiiight put out "Masked Appeal" as a kind of "almost finished" tease since that and "Crystal" are the ones closest to "finished". A lot of quotation marks, I know.

"So what makes it new? What makes it better? Isn't it just a remaster lol?"

It's a remake. Calling it a remaster ignores what I'm going to be spending the vast majority of my time doing for this album along with what I have already done. Over 90% of the vocals and guitars will be re-recorded, all of the bass tracks will be re-recorded, all of the synths will be re-programmed/re-arranged, and all of these tracks will be mixed and mastered with an entirely different digital setup than what I was using in 2016. Oh, and now I have pitch correction.

As of writing this, I still have a decent amount of vocals to record. However, that's the perk of these being previously released songs. I don't have to mull over "should I add this, should I take away that" so much. As is apparent on the "Crystal" demo I released, I am making a few minor changes to some of the arrangements but I'm not doing anything compositionally drastic. Easily 93% of the guitars are done being recorded. I think there are only two songs left that need any more guitar work. About 99% of the bass is done. There's a really bad take on the beginning of "Selfless" that I still need to re-record.

That said, most of this is really going to come down to me being consistently happy with the mix and how fast I might come to that point. I have no idea when that point will come. As I said with Fake and Stupid, I am placing a hard deadline for Dec 31, 2021. Wherever I'm at with Self Titled Again and/or Fake and Stupid in December is just what you all are going to end up with. Then we can move on to more new stuff.

Normally, I'm the kind of fuck that says "never say never" when it comes to just about anything. In the case of Self Titled Again, I can safely say I'm never going to do anything like this again. At its worst, Fake and Stupid will sound "okay". In their unfinished forms with a little bit of leveling and panning, some of the stuff I'm doing for Self Titled Again already sounds arguably better than the versions that are currently out. So it's going to be very hard for me at this point to slap out anything that sounds more amateur than Self Titled in its original form.

One other major difference I want to mention that some people might honestly not even fully notice: key changes. Four of the songs are going to be in a different key, I will probably talk about this more in-depth when the album comes out. I used a pretty decent amount of different physical guitars along with two different basses on the original Self Titled. None of these are current gear anymore. I now have an Ibanez SIX7FDFM, a Chapman ML1, and some cheapo Ibanez 5-string bass. They are all tuned a half-step down from standard tuning. I could have tuned them to different tunings for different songs or just learned new fingerings for the songs that relied a lot on open strings but I didn't want to. So without going into every single tuning of every single instrument I used in the original version; "Mendax" will be in Gb min (was in F min), "Selfless" will be in Bb min (was in C min), "Masked Appeal" will be in Eb min (was in E min), and "Six Minutes" will be in C# min (was in C min). "Six Minutes is the only one out of these four that I feel sounds significantly different because of the different chord voicing. Perhaps, most people won't be able to tell either way, they'll just know that the song sounds better than the original. The other three sound just as different as the songs that didn't go through a key change, except for the blatant key change.

Release

They'll be on Spotify and hopefully Bandcamp. I might put them both out elsewhere too depending on how I do distribution this time. I might release each individual track of Self Titled Again on YouTube as well. I probably won't do that with Fake and Stupid, or at least not right away.

Future Lexi Karma

I already have the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Lexi Karma projects fueling up on the strip. The 3rd one is going through little tweaks in writing but is almost done as far as writing goes. I haven't written all of the lyrics yet. A good portion of them is done though. I have fucked around with recording the vast majority of these songs already. That said, I wouldn't be shocked if another major Lexi Karma release drops in 2022. Just set a more realistic expectation of 2023. The 3rd Lexi Karma project is more of a progressive metal kind of thing. Other than the fact that I made it, it has a gratuitous amount of vocal harmonies at times, and there are synths and fake drums, it is nothing like Self Titled or Fake and Stupid.

The 4th Lexi Karma project will be another prog-rock project but then again, arguably all of my stuff is. It won't be as aggressive sounding or spastic as the 3rd project. However, it will still try to cram genres into each individual song. This one is more jazz fusion-y than it is trying to be particularly heavy. It still has its heavy moments but it will be significantly more melodic than the 3rd project. The 4th project is also a concept album that I'll talk about more when it becomes relevant. Almost none of the lyrics are finished for this one but roughly 75% of the music is. I'll end this point by saying this; I have written a lot of music in my life thus far and this stuff is collectively some of the best I feel I have ever made.

The 5th Lexi Karma project will be some prog-rock but with a lot more synth implementation. It will be much less stand-offish than the 3rd project. It will have plenty of heavy moments but that's not really the point. The 5th project is mostly songs I have already been pretty much done writing for years. I won't lie, I just felt more immediately inspired by projects 3 and 4. Originally, I wanted this to come out around the same time as Fake and Stupid. I am glad I held off on that idea because both this project and Fake and Stupid had some true garbage on them at the time. Thus, this fifth project is almost 100% done being written across the board. This statement will hold true until I finish the lyrics and the melody line for one part of one song. I might also write and add a new song into it since right now, it isn't a very long thing. I really like these songs and in much worse condition than they are now, friends I have shown them to thought they were really cool. I wouldn't expect this one to come out for quite a few years though.

After that, I'm going to start making Lexi Karma releases with more specific gimmicks, namely "what if this genre was tackled by Lexi Karma" kind of releases. That won't be all though. I have other ideas that aren't just genre-bending.

That's it for now. Damn, this one's long. I'll come back with another update sooner than later.

-Ayden
sleepy musician and insane person