妖怪世捨て人The ramblings of a recluse.2024-01-23T22:13:53http://reader.tymoon.eu/Copyright (c) 2014, TymoonNET/NexT
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Reprocessing - Confession 944342024-01-23T22:13:532024-01-23T22:13:53shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<article><figure><a href="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2719" target="_blank"><img alt="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2719" src="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2719" style="display:block"></a></figure><p>It happens frequently enough that a conversation in some online chatroom veers over to the question of privacy in the modern world, and especially to the willingness people have to share oodles of their often very personal information with complete strangers online. I certainly appreciate and understand the fears of oversharing, after all there are a lot of very dangerous people out there that, if they decide to do so, can absolutely hugely impact if not ruin your life entirely. Despite this, I somehow can't help myself.</p><p>I suppose I can't help myself in part because I lack the self confidence to even believe that anyone would read what I write, let alone find me to be attractive enough of a target to begin a harassment campaign specifically towards me. I fully realise the naivete of this belief, it doesn't take much of anything to get a pack of bored teenagers to start and continue a harassment campaign. Still, regardless of awareness of all of this, I cannot help but write about the very personal things that go through my brain. I could in some way justify it under the guise of therapy, and while it certainly has a therapeutic aspect to it, and I have claimed to do it for this reason in the past, I don't believe that that's the whole truth, either.</p><p>When I say what I am about to write, I really want you to believe me that I do not do so for the sake of appearing cool or edgy or any of those things, but simply that I lack the ability to express it in a way that isn't embarrassing in those ways. I put a lot of my own immediate feelings into all of the art I make, whether that be writing, drawing, or games, and a lot of my immediate feelings are sad, filled with hatred and self-loathing; expressions of a seemingly inescapable torment about my own inabilities, failures, all the ways I find myself to be lacking.</p><p>For all I know I've always had this kind of aspect to my personality, though its shape has definitely changed, especially throughout high school, as the stresses I underwent changed from stemming from bullying, to stemming from my perfectionism and self perception. I'm quite sure that part of this stunted self perception arose from the prior bullying experiences, but there does seem to be something deeper to it as well.</p><p>It's been about a year now since some of the fog was lifted from my brain and I finally realised that I should transition. In that time I've gone over countless of my memories from my childhood and reexamined them over and over, and this is what I wanted to talk about now. I know that was a rather long-winded prelude to get to this point even for me, and at this point I must admit that I genuinely enjoy the process of elongating a subject in prose. The kind of tedium that reading things in this way imparts feels quite apt for the way I myself feel about the things I write about.</p><p>I was born in Zurich in the early hours of the 18th of January, 1993. It was a time when November was still a cold month, filled with gentle snow. I wasn't a healthy birth, and for a while it wasn't certain whether I would survive at all. Even prior to birth my mom claims that it wasn't certain whether I was going to stick around. I was underweight, and put into intensive care for a while, but still apparently managed to recover. Clearly I have no memory of any of this, nor could I verify the accuracy of much of it, but it makes for a sort of retrospectively nicely fitting story to the kinds of struggles I've undergone since.</p><p>I have very few memories of my times during kindergarten. I know I mostly didn't want to be there. I hated having to sing. I didn't get along with a lot of kids. We switched kindergartens a few times, too. After that I was enrolled into a "Montessori" school that my brother, who was, and mysteriously to this day remains, six years older than me, attended. This was a private school, and I only have two memories of my time there, the first being when I sat alone in the schoolyard during a break and fell backwards off the bench. The second being having to make a drawing for class and me thinking it was a dumb, pointless exercise.</p><p>My attendance at the school didn't last for long. After the first year I was switched over to public education, as the tuition fee of the other school had kept increasing over the years, and my dad was sick of paying for it, especially because he didn't think particularly highly of their teaching methods, nor the teachers there. I don't remember if I got along with my classmates at the school, though considering that my only memory is of being alone during break, I imagine not.</p><p>Public school was hell. I was a smart kid for my age and had an avid interest in whatever it was that my dad, a university professor, would tell me. He taught me maths, tinkering with chemistry and electronics, and much more at an early age. And so upon entering public school, I was far ahead of class. I barely ever had to do any homework at home, instead finishing things during class. This did, as I expect many of you can guess, not enamour me to the rest of the class. Or in the very least, it did not help the image I must have already had regardless.</p><p>I stood insular throughout all of primary school (6-12). I don't want to make this too depressing of a tale, so I'll spare you the exact details of every horrible encounter I can remember, but I will note a few particular details that I think are worth pointing out. I was frequently called gay, despite the fact that I'm sure the other kids had about as much of an understanding of what that meant as I, which is to say nothing, and I was even occasionally called a tranny, despite there somehow being even less of an understanding about that. I certainly had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was meant to be an insult, so it hurt all the same, and with that the goal was accomplished.</p><p>To this day I'm not entirely sure what factor stood out the most that made me the permanent bully target, though I will also always assert that the terrifyingly ugly mushroom haircut my mom always gave me because she didn't want to pay for a barber played a significant role in that. During that time I was bullied frequently and harshly, and that constant assault made me cry a lot, which in turn made me a crybaby. Another justification for the bullying ascertained by self-fulfilling magic.</p><p>Before I move on to high school, I want to recount four particularly noteworthy moments that I know deeply affected my view on the world and relationships with other people in general.</p><p>One — Adults would *always* take the bully's side, regardless of how obvious it was what they'd done, and please understand that any attempts at neutrality in such a situation mean that they naturally land on the side of the powerful, meaning the bully. Particularly noteworthy was when I had to attempt an excursion somewhere up in the Swiss alps, where we stood in a small house and all the boys had to share the same room. This was later in primary school, so the other boys started to get an interest in sex, which is normal. What wasn't normal was that the top bully decided that they would start a "jerking off competition" and that everyone would have to participate. They bragged about how they jerked off. I did not want to have any part of this and did not feel safe sleeping in the same room, so I got up and went out.</p><p>At the time the teacher had brought her boyfriend along, and he was who I encountered first. I told him about them jerking off and being uncomfortable. He grumbled and begrudgingly dragged my mattress into the hallway and told me to sleep there instead. I overheard him saying to the other boys: "he's just a little girl".</p><p>You know, it's really something to have to stay in a remote town in the alps that you can't get away from, for an excursion you didn't want to be on, in a small chalet filled with people that all hated you, with no chance of any place you could feel safe, or anyone that would support you, least of all the adults that were meant to protect you. For instance, I always made sure to shower when nobody else was in there because I didn't want to experience anything even more uncomfortable than the gym changing room at school already always was.</p><p>Two — As is always the case, there's One Guy that is The Bully, with a few others that fall in line because they're cowards. Anyway, I guess I must have really been on that one guy's mind a whole lot, even outside of school, because at one point he wrote a "rap" about me. Please remember that this was the late 90s to early 2000s, so rap was the "cool" thing. That and skating. You had to either be a "skater" or a "rapper". I still have no idea why or what that would even mean, and I doubt they did very much either aside from both being cool but somehow mutually exclusive.</p><p>Anyway, one of his cronies, who occasionally tried to play nice with me because I guess he felt guilty about the shit he helped proliferate, gave me the "rap" that the One Guy wrote. He did so in the gym changing room after everyone else had already left. I still remember his expression and how cruddy the paper was. I don't remember the particulars of the content, but I do remember that even then I could tell it was hilariously bad and uncreative. Obviously it was meant to hurt me and show how cool the One Guy was and how Stupid and Dumb I was, but I was just kinda tired and threw it in the trash.</p><p>I'm not sure if One Guy ever realised that I had read it, or if he intended for me to read it, or what, but it never came up again. I still remember it for how pathetic it was. And if by some extremely remote miracle One Guy reads this now: dude, you fucking sucked. Even as a lonely nerd I could tell how pathetic your attempts at ripping into me were. Sure, you managed to hurt me plenty throughout my time in primary school, but it wasn't due to any particular talent or ability you had, except perhaps for your untethered cruelty, if one can even call that a talent.</p><p>Three — My older brother is a good guy. He didn't particularly get along with me, since he was only my half-brother, and my dad didn't truly accept him and always put me first, which understandably bred some resentment in him during his teenage years. In any case, at one point he came over to our side of the schoolyard and chased away the bullies from me. I distinctly remember appreciating it at the time, but also knowing that that would only make things worse. I could not tell him. If you read this, big bro: I'm sorry.</p><p>As I had expected, I was later chastised for "being too weak" and "crying to mommy". You must understand: if you're the subject of bullying it does not matter what anyone else does. They'll either be complicit in the bullying, which is the standard case, or they'll have a net zero effect, as anything they'll do in support of you is going to be turned against you again later. The only real way to help is to eliminate the bullies entirely, put them into a different class and solve whatever socioeconomic issues their family is facing that is leading to their stilted personal development. But as long as the bully isn't pretty much killing people, anything being done by the school or anyone at all is exceedingly unlikely.</p><p>It also takes special understanding of the social dynamics of bullying to know how to deal with it properly. Most teachers seem to lack this understanding and are not trained on this. I hope that this can change, but I have no particular hopes that it will.</p><p>Four — my mom always wanted me to be in extracurriculars. She wanted me to play an instrument, so I played violin for almost ten years, and saxophone for two. I had to practise daily, had to go to lessons weekly, even if I hated it. I also had to go to some other courses, one of which was a theatre class. This was a private thing, so it wasn't tied to the main school and none of the other kids attending knew me.</p><p>Despite this, pretty much as soon as I arrived I was the target of bullying again. I don't even remember if it was literally the first class or not, but pretty soon while waiting by myself outside, one of the kids grabbed my wool cap and ran away with it. I was already well adjusted to the mechanics of bullying, so I was initially quite tired of the ordeal and just asked him to stop being a jackass and give it back. This, of course, did not yield any results, and in hindsight I don't even know why I bothered. He also, of course, had an accomplice to throw the hat back and forth with.</p><p>At some point I lost my patience and chased him, managed to grab the cap, and didn't let go. He yanked the cap hard, and pulled me into the wall we were adjacent to. I slammed my face right into that wall, and chipped off half of one of my shovel teeth.</p><p>I still exactly remember what the ground and wall looked like where it happened. I don't remember what happened next, but I imagine I somehow gathered myself and walked back inside, bleeding out of my mouth. My dad was called, and I was rushed to the dentist, who reattached the half of the tooth. The dentist said it should heal back up and it would be fine.</p><p>It was not.</p><p>A few weeks later I was on holidays in Spain with my mom and my brother. The entire week I was stuck in the apartment in a fever. I still remember the look of the apartment, the curtains the sun shone through, the texture of the bed. Everything else is a haze, as I was unconscious from the pain of the nerve in my tooth dying out.</p><p>When we returned, the dentist separated the tooth again, cleaned it out, and attached a fake half that I have to this day. The parents of the bully responsible for all this did not want to pay for the expensive treatment, and there was quite a bit of badgering needed to get them to cough up. Not that I ever received any compensation for all the pain I went through, or even an apology of any kind for that matter. Not that it would have helped anyway.</p><p>What sticks with me about the incident is just the immediacy of it all. I had no prior connection to these kids, and yet, once again, I was immediately singled out as the bullying target. At that stage I had already adopted all of the usual traits of a bullying victim. I tried to stay invisible and out of anyone's way. I didn't, at least in my perception, give any particular reason to even be noticed at all, and yet... I can't help but wonder if to this day I have a, to me imperceptible, aura I give off that others pick up on.</p><p>Anyway, I was very glad to switch to high school and ditch this intolerable class of assholes. My mom even let me skip the last two weeks of school, which would have included a play that I was certainly not wanting to take part in.</p><p>Now, whenever I talk about high school in Switzerland I have to include an annoyingly long-winded explanation of how our system works, because it matters for the story, and because it is so stupidly complicated. I'll try to keep it brief, because I'm honestly really tired of talking about it so many times over. After the first six years of primary school you either go to secondary school or the "Gymnasium". Secondary school has levels A, B, and C, which you get assigned to depending on your grades. Whether you go to A, B, or C also dictates the places you can intern at later, with the stigma of B being bad and C being hopeless. Secondary lasts three years with a two year mandatory practical internship at some craft. After the first year you can attempt to rise up to the Gymnasium again.</p><p>Entering the Gymnasium requires passing a rather tough entrance examination, plus a probationary period lasting a few months. Fail either, and you're out, back to secondary school. If you enter from primary school, you enter the "long term" Gymnasium which is two years first, and then you join up with the secondary school entrants for the "short term" Gymnasium lasting the remaining four years. Gymnasium also has various "profiles" such as Science, New Languages, Old Languages, Sports, etc. that determine your curriculum. There's also a "specialisation" you pick between later, but anyway.</p><p>Gymnasium is really tough, there's tons and tons of classes, tons of exams, and they really don't give a shit about you. It has the impression of being tough, so it has to be tough. A lot of things in Switzerland are the way they are because that's the way they are, not for any particularly good reason.</p><p>Having been one of those slightly smart kids meant in primary school I was woefully underchallenged and never had to do homework. And then suddenly I only barely passed the entrance exam and was hit by a truck of homework and exam difficulty in the probationary period. I was particularly bad at languages. We had French, German, English, and Latin classes all at the same time in the first two years. I still have no idea how I managed to somehow even out the scores with how awful I was at languages and geography and history and... honestly everything.</p><p>The first two years of the Gymnasium continued to be heck for me. I wasn't bullied by most kids anymore, but I was still quickly excluded, and there was still one kid in particular that did not get along with me at all from the get go. For whatever reason the teachers tried to get us to get along, forcing us to spend more time with each other, but it clearly didn't work. Fortunately for me that kid did not pass probationary period, so he was gone before too long. Just now instead of being bullied all the time I was suffering with school subjects all the time, and still had only one friend, who also only had a passing interest in me since associating with me ran the danger of being uncool as well.</p><p>I was still chastised for my girlish looks, but by that point I just didn't really care anymore. My self-image at that point was irredeemable, and I never really bothered to think about what to wear or how I looked. At the barber I just always told him to do what he thought best. I always just wore the same pants and shirts until my mom threw them away. I hated photos and never looked at myself in the mirror.</p><p>Things calmed down a lot once I entered the short term gymnasium. I think by that point most others had matured enough to just not bother with me anymore, and having filtered out most of the people that had lots of trouble at school with the entrance exams and probationary period at home also meant there was less of a bully percentage. Still, I only really had one friend, and mostly tended to my own interests, spending most of my free time programming and being a completely insufferable jackass on forums. At some point I noticed that I tended to get along a lot better with the other girls in my class. They didn't seem to judge me as much for being more reserved and not having an interest in boasting. I went out to eat lunch with them a couple of times, and particularly with one of them I started to go at least once a week. She's still a good friend of mine today.</p><p>I don't think I had a particularly strong puberty, and while my parents claim I didn't have one at all, I still think I was definitely a lot moodier and more easily offended during that time. I also developed a libido, something that would continue to haunt me for the coming 15 years. At first it wasn't really something I thought about consciously too much, it was more like a moth to a flame, really. But I very quickly felt uncomfortable about it and felt it as a nuisance. It was distracting me from what I really wanted to do, and particularly the kind of mind fog that kept popping up due to the libido was extremely annoying. I don't remember when it started exactly, but by 17 I already thought about just ripping off my genitalia and tried to abstain from masturbation, without much success. I figured I would just have to get used to it, and begrudgingly bear with it.</p><p>I made some internet friendships during that time that still last to this day, though it remains a complete mystery to me how that managed to happen, since all of them are people that are older than me, and I was a completely insufferable asshole online in that time. Regardless, I am insanely thankful to them for sticking with me for whatever reason. Several of those friendships happened due to the "Ponychan" channel board centred around the My Little Pony reboot. At one point an in-joke on that board spurred me on to make my own chan site, "Stevenchan", to which a few people flocked that would become some of those permanent friends. Stevenchan remains to this day, though mostly as a relic and a chat channel that me and my friends still hang out in.</p><p>During those early stevenchan days I would also frequently role-play as various characters. I loved to tease people, especially with allusions of love and so on. One person in particular was a frequent target of this, and at one point they emailed me saying they weren't sure whether I was being genuine or not. I still regret that I put them into that kind of awkward position, and while I don't think I was genuinely in love with them, I definitely did and still do appreciate them tremendously, and I did also tremendously enjoy exploring this kind of overbearingly loving persona. The email from them turned into a years-spanning exchange (and intermittently letter-exchange) where we talked about all sorts of things that we were interested in and going through. I still tremendously appreciate all of that.</p><p>We even at one point (at my suggestion) started writing a sort of comic universe centred around two fictional women, but set in a historically accurate Switzerland of the 1980s. We each would have a character of our own to control and design, and would then write stories about their lives, comparing our takes of them and their development. Looking back on this in particular it feels incredibly obvious what was going on with me at that time already, though when I asked them about it again recently it seems they also didn't suspect anything at the time, which I now find a bit hard to believe.</p><p>Online I had also already long adopted the name "Shinmera," which originated from a bunch of google searches until I found a name that was easy to say, sounded female, and had no results. It sounding female of course also led to a couple of times where people would address me as such, which I distinctly remember enjoying at that time already, though again I did not think anything of it at all. When the whole Tumblr space started popping up and discussions of gender became much more prominent I was still stuck in my edgy teenager phase and did not understand what the fuss was all about. "Who cares what pronoun people use," was my thinking, "I don't care if you talk to me with whatever, what's the big deal?" Ha ha.</p><p>Of course, when I played games I'd always pick a female avatar whenever given the chance. I very quickly tended to only drawing women, though I initially did so under the guise that it was "more difficult than drawing men," which is a whole bag I don't really want to get into right now, considering this entry is already over 4000 words long. I got into Touhou and quickly become infatuated with Yukari Yakumo. I'm still a sucker for the mastermind kind of character and her general style. The Yukari in my drawings is a derivation from her, as I started to use her character for more and more personal stuff that deviated from Touhou. And now my name is Yukari. Wow. How embarrassing!</p><p>My trouble with libido, the avoidance of photos and mirrors, the hatred of my genitals, all of that continued throughout university. At some point I thought I should try growing a beard, maybe that would help. Not that I cared about any other part of my looks, I still told the barber to just do whatever, wore the same clothes until they tore with no interest in what they looked like when buying. Plus, I thought, having a beard would mean having to shave less, so it was even less time to spend on my looks. Sure, the beard itched, and I had to trim it occasionally, but it was overall still less work.</p><p>During university, too, I barely made any friends. I somehow lucked out that my bench neighbour during one math class noticed I was reading about Space Station 13 and we got into a conversation that way. He already had connected with two others, too, and while he would drop out later, I still remain friends and have regular contact with one of the others to this day. But that would be the literally only friend I would make throughout all of uni. I never felt comfortable breaching into one of the already quickly established cliques, and I frequently was too much of an idiot to notice and understand when others were interested in me, only giving them bare minimum responses before returning to working on whatever project interested me at the time.</p><p>I don't think this was to the aforementioned mysterious aura, but rather that by that point I had become so utterly incapable of understanding myself as interesting or desirable in any way that people being interested in me was not something that ever entered my mind, and being shy and too conditioned by bullying to being a loner I couldn't muster the courage to ask others, myself.</p><p>At one point I tried to broaden my friendship circle with dating apps. It was utterly exhausting and I didn't make any connections with anyone except for one very nice guy, though I completely fucked up that friendship before long. Dating apps suck really bad, especially when you're not out for sex. At that point I already long knew that I was ace, but it was quite a shock to me how many people had labelled "not wanting to have sex" as a "no-go" on OkCupid. I quickly gave up on the whole deal.</p><p>Then I tried to start language tandem, since I wanted to try another way to improve my Japanese knowledge, and thought it could also be a good way to meet new people. I was incredibly lucky with my first tandem partner, and I actually visited her in Japan last year. She only stood in Zurich for a year, but I thoroughly enjoyed every session we had. Unfortunately I was never that lucky again. Most partners only showed up once or suddenly broke off contact. To this day I have never managed to find another partner as good as that first one.</p><p>Finally in another bid to try and expand my circle of friends I looked for meetup groups around games and attended some of the local GameSpace meetings. I again felt intensely uncomfortable being in a space where I didn't know anybody at all and I hardly managed to join any conversation at all. Still, through one session I managed to hear about Zurindies, a sorta hackathon kinda thing on Saturdays, which I still attend to this day. Zurindies is exactly my kind of speed, a small group of folks that get along, but don't need to be socialising all the time. And yet... despite all of the people I've met through Zurindies that I like and appreciate a lot, I don't think I could really call them my friends. I've invited them to plenty of dinners, and have even met a couple of them outside of the Zurindies meetup for coffee, but we still don't ever do anything else.</p><p>I know adults are busy and all and I'm probably being overly conservative with my definition of a friend, but unless we chat online regularly and talk about private worries and affairs with each other, I don't think we're really friends. Good colleagues, people I appreciate and like a lot, sure, but friend... well, it's a tough label for me.</p><p>And so after my initial sort of friend group on Stevenchan formed in my teens, there's barely been any growth. I've managed to recruit one more good friend from Tumblr at one point, and have tried but so far utterly failed to recruit another from Cohost, but both of those attempts are about 6 years apart, and between that there's absolutely nothing.</p><p>Even now that I'm working at a coworking space for game development and I'm active in plenty of Discord communities, I have no clue how to advance any of these acquaintances into anything more than just that. Not to mention that what I've been longing for more than anything for over fifteen years is even more than a friend, a proper partner in life I could talk to about anything and at almost any time, that I could be close to frequently and hopefully sometime also live together with. But the older I get, the more I learn about myself, the less I can believe that that's still possible.</p><p>Who knows, maybe my transition advancing is going to change some things, but I somehow doubt it. So far I don't think very much about my personality has changed at all, and I don't really expect it to. Sure, I indulge more in some things, I let myself express things more freely, but I'm still the same self-deprecating, sad sack of shit.</p><p>I know, believe me I know, how important it is to "love yourself" and "be kind to yourself" and that doing these things would be how to fix my self esteem and self deprecation and with that so many of my other problems, but... I've known this for years. I've tried, oh have I tried to be kinder, to stop these intrusive thoughts. To stop myself from writing them out, from writing about them, but yet they still come with all the veracity and intensity they always have. Just this morning I had a therapy session. It was good, but we talked about money problems, and thinking about that always puts me on edge. I started to feel depressed when I arrived at the office. Then I saw someone posting their "art improvement" meme and I was instantly thrown into the abyss. I hated myself so much, for not being good enough, for not measuring up, for not being able to produce anything of worth, for having the audacity to have thought I was worth anything at all before.</p><p>I'm very glad that I finally managed to figure some things out and started the transition, despite how long it is taking and is going to take and despite how impatient I am about everything. But I can't help but feel like it took me way too long to figure out. That I was so stupid for so long and didn't notice it for such a long time, when it was so obvious. I've talked to my friends multiple times, years and years ago, about how "I wouldn't mind being a girl" and "I wish I had been born a woman" or "If I could choose I would have been a woman" or "It sure would be cool if you could swap bodies like in Ghost in the Shell" and yet somehow I did not understand.</p><p>If I'm this stupid about something this blindingly obvious, how do I have any chance of ever figuring out all the other things that are undoubtedly still very wrong with me? I know that that's not really how this works at all, and some people manage to just hit a breakthrough, but I also know that some never do, and I can't help but worry that I might be one of those people.</p><p>I am a worry-wart after all.</p><p>There's a lot of other experiences I haven't gone over in this, like how I liked to watch cartoons for girls even in primary, or how I played house with bears with my mom as a kid, or how I always have and still really love plushies, or how I'd always had an interest in fashion but could never imagine myself wearing anything that I actually found interesting, or all the new complexes and fears that transitioning have instilled in me, but I think I will have to cut it here, both because this is already very long, and because it is now rather late at night and I should head off to bed.</p><p>Maybe I'll write even more revealing things about my life that should not be on the public internet in another article in the future. Who knows, though I certainly wouldn't deem it unlikely despite how bad of an idea it is to publish such a thing.</p><p>I hope you've gained something out of my ever longer and ever more drawn-out ramblings. Perhaps a sense of kinship, or some form of understanding, or perhaps some kind of twisted entertainment from reading about the hardships of a dumb little girl. Whatever the case, if you've made it to the end here, thank you very much for reading.</p><p>– ❤ Yukari</p></article>Selbstsamkeit - Confession 924312023-08-08T21:11:522023-08-08T21:11:52shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<article><figure><a href="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2518" target="_blank"><img alt="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2518" src="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2518" style="display:block"></a></figure><p>If you've read any of my preceding entries I would expect it to come as no surprise to you to see me write "accepting who you are is really difficult." Though today I want to write about a few different facets of that than just the one you may be thinking about right now.</p><p>Naturally, for only recently coming out as trans, accepting that I am a woman is a large part of what's been coursing through my brain. I know with absolute certainty by now that I'm not wrong on this, and yet it's still not easy to fully come to terms with it and not just know it, but also understand it completely. I know that coming out as trans did not change me, but rather let me be who I've always been, even more so. Despite that it's still not obvious even to me which of the many fragments of my personality that were buried until now are going to come to the surface and flourish. Really letting those fragments play free, not succumbing to the ingrained repression, and fully accepting them as part of me is really hard. I know I'm still repressing things, I know I've still got anxiety about so, so many things, and many times I don't even notice it at all, especially not in the moment. It's frustrating to say the least.</p><p>For a long stretch of my early life I barely had any friends. I know I played with neighbours as a toddler and occasionally visited them later as well, but all throughout the 12 years of primary school I did not have a single person in my life that I could have considered my friend. I was bullied rather relentlessly, for reasons that still mystify me to this day. I'm not saying this to garner any sympathy, but rather to use it as a way to illustrate a point later, so please just bear with me. I still remember quite strongly actively trying to work out how I could change so that people wouldn't hate me anymore, or in the very least just leave me alone. Nothing I could come up with changed, and it took until high school for things to take a different way, though even there the first two years were very rough, and I never ended up as someone well-integrated all throughout. I tried to get away from school as quickly as possible.</p><p>And even though I did have two or three people I did consider my friends in high school, I still didn't spend all too much time with them. By that point I had already become so thoroughly poisoned that pretty much all of my free time as well as time I should have spent studying was taken up by personal interests and projects. In primary school that was making really terrible games with Game Maker, and in high school that was making really terrible programs with Java. I'm sure the impetus for me to become obsessed with personal projects came earlier than primary school already, but not having any social connections definitely pushed me into that niche even more. The fact that my parents also had no understanding or interest in what I was doing only furthered my still deeply ingrained impression that nobody could possibly care about any of what I'm doing, let alone consider it worth anything.</p><p>I think this childhood trauma, if not fabricated it in whole, at least strongly contributed to my continued inability to believe and comprehend that people not only tolerate me fine, but can actively like me. Even just today I caught myself thinking that my colleagues at the coworking space must be speaking badly about me behind my back. I know for certain that that's not the case, they're all wonderful, genuine, kind people. And yet, the poison that clouds my psyche produces these impressions all the same. It's not fair to me, and least of all to them. Accepting that people can and do like me is very, very hard for me. Even with close friends I've had for many, many years, I can't help but think that they must be insanely annoyed by my behaviour, that they only stick with me out of a sense of obligation or misplaced debt. I know this is not true, either, I know they are strong enough to tell me off or just ignore me if I were bothering them, and that they are sticking around out of their own choice.</p><p>These feelings are especially strong for new people I connect with. If I like them I tend to grow a little obsessive; I want to know a lot about them and talk to them a lot, all the time. Certainly a large part of that is simply that I enjoy the act, but I also know that there's a growing worry that if I don't, the connection might wither and die again, something that is a catastrophic scenario for someone like me who already has desperately few connections. I've talked about that at length in #91 so I won't repeat myself here. But still, if the connection is not reciprocated I very quickly get the feeling that I <em>must</em> be bothering them and that I should just stop annoying them. I know this, like everything before, is not fair to anyone.</p><p>I'm not sure how best to describe this impression that I have of myself. It's not exactly hatred. It's not exactly disgust. It's not exactly disappointment. But it is definitely a mix of all of those feelings. If there is love anywhere in that mix, I don't know where it could be found. Sometimes I think I can be funny, but for how hard I try I certainly am not funny enough. Sometimes I think I can be clever, but for how much I do I certainly struggle with far too many trivial problems. Sometimes I think I can be insightful, but most of the time it's little more than surface level observations mired in a shroud of mediocre prose. Sometimes I think I can be diligent, but there's far too many projects I've abandoned, promises I've not fulfilled.</p><p>And yes, I know that even diligent people have broken promises. Even insightful people don't always find something new to say. Even clever people struggle with the trivial and mundane. Even funny folks don't always land. The problem isn't that I'm not getting all of these things perfectly right all the time, it's that I cannot recognise or accept the successes I have had. I've talked about this at length before, too, but it really is insanely hard for me to look at something I've done and consider it an achievement of any kind, something noteworthy, something to be proud of. Not just insanely hard, practically impossible. It happens far more often than I'd like that folks on social sites send me a message with something along the lines of</p><blockquote><p>Wow! You're so productive! How do you get so much done?</p><cite>Several people online throughout the years</cite></blockquote><p>I know they mean well. I know they want it to be a compliment, perhaps even an expression of admiration. But to me it is inscrutable. I can process it logically, but I cannot process it emotionally. For me when I think about my body of work I think about all the missed chances, all the wasted time, all the work left undone. I think about the hours upon hours of every day that I spend decaying in my chair or bed just watching videos online or reading inconsequential blathering. And besides, I don't even know how to reply well either. What do you mean "how"? I just went and did it. It's not like I went to "Getting Work Done Academy" or found some magical Chi that lets me squeeze out work. The answer I always end up giving is some variant of "I have no social life" or something of a similar self-deprecating nature. And that's not untrue, either, but it completely sidesteps the original intent of the message. It's not really replying in kind, or with kindness.</p><p>I've certainly done a lot in my life up to now, but I still am always left thinking about the chorus of the Metric song, "Gold, Guns, Girls:" is it ever going to be enough? If I can't accept the things I've done now, when will I ever be able to? When will I finally have something worth being proud of? For a while I had hoped it would be Kandria, given how much time and effort has gone into it, but I certainly am not proud of it now. I can't even really say I like it. If I can't accept something as large as that, what will I ever be able to?</p><p>At the core of all of this I think lies both a lack of acceptance of who I am and what I've done, and an inability to stand by that and present it with the confidence it deserves. I'm always the first to crack a self-deprecating "joke" whenever the opportunity comes up. I can feel my brain instantly kick into gear to try and twist anything anyone says into some way to beat myself down, to reinforce the farce of uselessness, the lie that I'm unlovable. It certainly doesn't help that my generation's insane overuse of ironic detachment has normalised this kind of behaviour. Instead of generating shock, it's just a blase remark, barely worth noting. Don't get me wrong, though, I don't want to lay the blame at the feet of my fellow crippled survivors of this heck of an earth. I'm just saying that this kind of environment made it all the harder for me to realise that it was stupid to act that way, and all the harder to revert the habit now that it's become so deeply ingrained.</p><p>It will be hard to try and undo all of these faults of mine. I don't even really know how to begin. Trying to stop myself from posting self-deprecating comments is one thing, but it's not going to be enough to fix anything. I wish I had a plan, some kind of guideline to follow, yet I know with a certainty that the only thing that could even pretend to provide me one are cults and religions. I need to figure this out for myself, find some way to be kinder to myself, to become more trusting and accepting of the people that have already poured so much of their hearts into me, to stand – and I have to emphasise here how ridiculously hard it was for me to even just <em>type this word out</em> – proud for who I am and what I've done.</p><p>I don't want to continue treating those who love me with the lack of kindness I have done so far. And perhaps I'm once again being too harsh with myself on this, too, but at this point I still do not know how else to be.</p><p>I'm sorry.</p></article>Die Toteninsel - Confession 914302023-07-22T08:59:012023-07-22T08:59:01shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<article><figure><a href="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2537" target="_blank"><img alt="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2537" src="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2537" style="display:block"></a></figure><p>I don't like sleeping. I like <em>the idea</em> of sleep, but the practise of it seems all too often fraught with issues for me. I do consider myself fortunate that I don't suffer from any major sleeping disabilities like insomnia, but my quality of sleep is nevertheless far from ideal, despite adhering to a rather strict and regular sleeping schedule.</p><p>I frequently grind my teeth during sleep, and so have started wearing a denture during the night. The denture makes things permanently uncomfortable, and I honestly don't know if it's the major cause of me grinding my teeth at this point. I definitely wouldn't be surprised at all if it exacerbates the problem. I don't know why I grind my teeth, though I figure that since most of the time I can't remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they're usually nightmares, I probably have a pretty stressful time during sleep.</p><p>Still, one of the nice things is that I'm not actually conscious of that stress, so it's not like it has much of an effect on my life except for when it causes my rest to be so bad that I remain tired all day. That's been happening a bit more often than I'd like recently, but I honestly don't really know what I can even do about it.</p><p>Don't get me wrong, though, I <em>do</em> like beds, and I love to just cuddle around before sleeping or in the mornings after waking up. There's almost nothing that compares in comfort. It's a very... serene experience.</p><p>For a long time now, probably since some time in high school, I've grown used to hugging up to a large plushie or cushion when falling asleep. It really helps a lot falling asleep to feel the touch and warmth of something else. I do have my own misgivings about that, of course. I'm well aware that it feels immature to own, let alone hug up to plushies at my age. You know, no matter how much I keep trying to forge my own path I do still feel the innate social normalcy pressure to have a real human partner, instead.</p><p>And it's not like I don't want a partner, either. But, at this point though I know myself well enough that I'm quite certain I'm not going to find any partner except via extremely lucky circumstances. Part of that is definitely that I'm painfully oblivious to people's interest in me, to the point where it can take me years to realise that I've squandered an opportunity to make another friend. Though I think a far larger part of it is that I'm just very easily emotionally drained, and even the thought of going to parties or whatever fills me with dread.</p><p>This isn't anything new, I've never felt comfortable in large crowds, and the times I've attended parties, I usually ended up standing somewhere to the side, feeling like a gigantic idiot because I have no idea what I should be doing with myself. Joining groups and listening in, I usually don't really have anything I want to contribute or say, so it's just standing around, listening to folks go on about stuff I don't care about.</p><p>I'm sure I'm not alone in this, and I'm not trying to posit this as some giant revelation or anything, that's not the point. The point is simply that, given my past experiences forging connections, I consider my chances of ever finding a life partner practically nil.</p><p>Honestly, my behaviour online isn't much better, either. At least there I don't have as much of an issue just jumping into conversations I can contribute to, or run my mouth about whatever, since there's just so much less pressure. I'm not forcing anyone to listen to me going on, and I have no obligation to join in on a conversation either. After all, the default position for people in online spaces is to lurk.</p><p>But even with all of those advantages, it is exceedingly rare for me to make new friends online. I've been with the same handful of friends for a decade now, and that pool hasn't really grown at all in that time. If anything, it has shrunk, since people have gotten busy with their own lives.</p><p>In the past three years I've somehow managed to finally join a couple communities that I didn't make myself, but still feel comfortable being a part of, which is fantastic, thrilling even! However, even though I think I'm a pretty present and known quantity in those communities now, I still don't think I would consider anyone there my friend. They're good people, I like them, and I like talking with them, but at least to me friendship requires something a little more intimate than that.</p><p>I've also noticed that even for online friendships, all of them were forged with the spark coming from the other person rather than myself. The other person somehow noticed something I'd been doing and decided to join in or take up the contact, which I then reciprocated. But I don't think I've ever actually done things the other way around, where it was me that made the first step to reach out and contact someone.</p><p>I could go on at length about why I think that is and elaborate on all sorts of boring childhood trauma or whatever that could have lead up to it, but I think I'll spare that for now. What's important is that I don't think that's going to change. It's not like there aren't people online that I admire and whose works I follow closely. It's more that I just <em>don't even think of reaching out to them in the first place</em>.</p><p>You could of course say that, since I'm aware of this, I could just force myself to do it, which is a fair enough point. I can't deny that being aware of it means I could, in theory, force myself to reach out to folks. The problem with that is that it is extremely emotionally draining for me to do so, to the point where even thinking of doing it makes me tired.</p><p>That's been a big issue for me when I was thinking about and working on marketing for Kandria, and I think also a large part of why that failed. I just don't have it in me to put myself out there like that. I'm not even sure that that's something I could get accustomed to or learn, since my experience so far has just pushed me more towards staying isolated.</p><p>I'm comfortable just posting about what I'm working on to select channels, and letting interested parties decide for themselves whether they want to seek it out or not. And for the most part that's worked fine for me, too. I say only for the most part, since being lonely has been a major grievance for me for many a year now. Even as I'm writing this, being in a far better situation than I was just four years ago, I still long for a close partner that I can just talk to and share my interests and worries with at any time.</p><p>And besides my personal grievance, it's absolutely not a strategy that works for selling games.</p><p>If you were expecting me to go on a tangent rant about capitalism at this point, I certainly don't blame you, but I think, or should I say pray, that anyone reading this can easily enough fill that in for themselves, so I'll just save both of us the trouble of typing it out in excruciating detail.</p><p>So in a way my social issues have now turned from merely being things that are emotional inconveniences into ones that are financial inconveniences as well. I'm still not sure what to do about that, much in the same way that I don't know what to do about my own loneliness.</p><p>I suppose at least compared to friendships I <em>can</em> hire other people to perform marketing for me, but so far my experience has been that the cost of this is far larger than I can afford, and I'm still unconvinced that it would even be possible to get a return of investment on that, let alone an actual net profit.</p><p>Have I mentioned capitalism yet?</p><p>We've now very solidly landed in the rambling stage of this article, where all structural coherence has been lost, and all I'm going on is further and further diatribes. I apologise for that. I've never been good at keeping a structure in my writing or being able to construct a narrative with a proper tension arc.</p><p>That <em>is</em> making me rather worried about my next game project's story, but I really want to try it for real for once. It's also a story that's very personal to me, so I don't think I could hand it off to anyone else, even if I really wanted to.</p><p>For now however I'm still stuck in pre-pre-production of the project, mulling about with engine features and trying to keep my sanity in face of the insane amount of work left to do. I'd honestly love to just dig away at engine stuff for a while longer and only start building the game when I feel ready to, but the financial pressures looming over me don't really make that something I consider viable.</p><p>I've been thinking about alternative sources of income ever since I started on Kandria, and I might finally dip my toes into Patreon sometime soon. Still, I have no illusions that Patreon will somehow be able to cover my own expenses, let alone those hiring other people would incur. The amount of money required to make even comparatively simple games is baffling. I keep having to remind even myself of how much Kandria cost to make.</p><p>If I had a UBI then I'd probably be fine just doing projects almost completely solo, learning the necessary skills over time as I hammer away at it. But alas.</p><p>Capitalism?</p><p>That reminds me, when I was much smaller my older brother said that when he's older he wants to marry a rich lady. I'm sure that even at the time he was just joking about that, and it's probably much harder to find someone like that than it is to do any of the other things I already struggle with anyway.</p><p>But as I lie uncomfortably awake in bed at night, hugging my Blahaj, trying to fall asleep, these are the kinds of thoughts that endlessly circle through my brain. Wildly jumping from one tangent to another, all of which worries of mine, insecurities, anxieties.</p><p>Is it really any surprise then that I don't get good sleep a lot of the time? Maybe if I could just eliminate the falling asleep period, things would be a lot better.</p><p>I have been doing a lot better in terms of my own happiness since I started with my transition, but that whole thing is far from over, and it has of course brought its own new set of worries, insecurities, and anxieties, both emotional and monetary. At least in regards to the transition I'm convinced that things are going to be a lot better in one, two, or even three years from now. I'm just not convinced of the same when it comes to everything else.</p><p>About a year ago I was dooming a bit about the looming 30s, feeling that I hadn't really accomplished anything yet, let alone established a solid base of living. I don't think that's an unusual feeling for people of my generation at all, which is a whole other can of worms (.... capitalism ...?) I'm now feeling a lot more at ease about it, though I still do have some reservations, especially social ones.</p><p>After all, it only tends to become harder to forge new connections the older you get.</p><p>Anyway, I've now written some two thousand words about the kinds of things that I'm worrying about, and I think that's more than I can humanely expect anyone to subject themselves to reading through. If you have read through it, HELLO! Thanks. You're a real champion, and I'd give you a star if I knew who you were. Contact me at this webzone if you want a pizza roll.</p><p>But yeah, this is going to be it.</p><p><strong>THE END, NO MORAL.</strong></p><p><em>*click*</em></p></article>Here we are, where we always were4102022-05-19T11:20:172022-05-19T11:20:17shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<article><figure><a href="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2166" target="_blank"><img alt="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2166" src="https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=2166" style="display:block"></a></figure><p>It's been a long time since I wrote anything just for myself. There's been updates here, but they've all been either for Kandria, or of a very technical nature, to announce things to the few out there that land in the nichest of niche intersections. Thanks for reading, by the way!</p><p>Anyway, when I was younger I used to write far more regularly, both just stories that I felt like putting down, and also a lot of rambling about my own state of being, driven by a sense that doing so would be therapeutic for me. It's all still there, if you're morbidly curious to find out what that was like. I'm not sure what facet of myself has changed since then, but I have fallen out of the habit of writing either type of prose, and despite an ever present longing to return to them some day, I never really did. </p><p>I'm sure like any adult I could blame the same things as always: I've just been very busy. I've had other things on my mind. I've been too tired. I just forgot about it. And while all of these things are certainly true, and I wouldn't be lying if I said them, I don't think it's really ever the real reason why we stray away from continuing these kinds of endeavours either. The truth of the matter in my case is connected more with exactly what I used to bemoan in my personal entries back then.</p><p>A lack of confidence.</p><p>A lack of confidence in my own writing to be good enough to be appreciated or worthwhile, the lack of confidence in my ability to come up with new and interesting perspectives, takes, and topics, the lack of confidence that I would be able to have the energy to write it in the first place. All of these things aren't even just restricted to my writing, either. The same goes for my drawing, though quite obviously I've kept up with that somewhat better than I have with writing.</p><p>Regardless, forever within me remains an uncertainty about what I can do. Looking at what I have done recently, if it doesn't look outright bad and makes me want to shoot it in the face with a shotgun on sight – in my mind ever accompanied by the iconic Doom shotgun sound immediately followed by the demon pain scream – then in the very least it looks like it isn't much better than what I've been doing for the past however many years that live in my sieve of a memory.</p><p>Now I'm sure many kind individuals I have encountered on the internet that may in fact be reading this right now (hello!) would vehemently protest at this point, if they hadn't already been protesting from the moment they caught the scent of an article like this being written. I want to stress that this isn't me trying to put down some kind of objective measure on whether I actually have improved or not, or whether my stuff is actually any good or not. The point is that this is what my mind perceives, instantly, instinctively, immediately. When you have a goal in mind, and lack confidence, then all you'll ever see is how what you've done is shying short of that goal. This is also why I don't think I'm a perfectionist, my problems with my works don't come from them not being perfect by some outlandish measure, but simply from my inability to just believe in what I can do and accept it for what it is.</p><p>This lack of confidence also doubles back in a bad way, as in any form of art you can often make up for a lack of technical skill by fully committing to a style and loudly, boldly go with it wherever it may go. But in order to do so, you really need to either just stay completely oblivious as to what you're doing, or have the confidence to believe in it and just pull it through. Mind you I would love to pretend that I never succumb to spouts of obliviousness, but I definitely remember many occasions on which I thought I was doing well, simply because I lacked the perspective on it that I do now. Remembering these moments even now, many years removed from them, as a very different person to who I used to be, I am burning with shame. Sitting here in a cafe I can still feel my cheeks reddening and my heart racing, remembering the faults of my past. Knowing these bouts of obliviousness though I am now cursed with the foreknowledge that should I ever land in a situation where I'm happy with what I did again, it's likely just another setup for embarrassment in the future.</p><p>With this lens, creating something with bold extravagance becomes a gateway to negativity no matter what; either in the very moment as I'm immediately unhappy with what I've done, or in the far future when I've realised the faults I was unable to see at the time. And so I've become stifled. Afraid to try. And I really want to emphasise just how stressful it is for me to try new things, not just in art either, the same applies to food, relationships, clothing, and I'm sure to many other areas that I'm not already explicitly aware of. It takes many days of concerted attempts to even just get started on a first attempt.</p><p>And so with all of these factors combined, why even bother? Why would you continue to pursue these things, if it's all fraught with so much trouble? That's the real crux isn't it. The short answer to this is that I succumb to severe mood swings very quickly if I'm not creating things every day. If there's not enough output, I start to feel ridiculously bad, so there's always a sort of pressure to do things there, since the alternative is to just have a shit time. Clearly though that isn't the entire picture either. Sure these mood swings exist, and sure they suck real bad, but they alone would just lead to a continuous depression, rather than a frantic drive to keep making things. The best I can say about this is that for as long as I can remember, whenever I see something cool, I want to be able to make that thing myself. Eat something nice? I want to cook it. Play a cool game? I want to make one.</p><p>That answers the question to some extent, but it doesn't feel satisfactory, right? Why does seeing things make me want to replicate them myself? There's an infinite flood of art available out there. Even if I spent every waking moment looking at art or playing games I would never run out of even just fantastic works. And so it can't just be the desire to keep having cool stuff, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I would get that regardless of what I did.</p><p>At this point I struggle to come up with good answers. One idea that's been floating around in my beehive of a head is that it might stem from my inability to build any friendships in my early life. Lacking the connections to others that would have led me to more group activities and indulging in others' abilities and personalities instead led me to set my sights completely inwards, needing to satisfy my own needs by myself. There probably are other factors as well, and perhaps I simply do possess some innate drive to create in me, but I can't help but feel that this experience in primary school is in large part responsible for how things have turned out for me.</p><p>This also extends further into self-image issues, something that I don't think I've ever explicitly written about, or even talked about. It's no secret that I've never liked the way I've looked, and those that are closer to me also know that I've often indulged in the fantasy of becoming a full-body cyborg, or rather: being able to completely choose my physical appearance. Typically this fantasy involves a female body. At this point some things about my behaviour and creative output might click into place for you, and some very specific works might make a lot of sense. You may also think that this makes me trans. Now, I'm not so sure about that part myself, mostly because I feel ok in my current body. I may not like it, but I think that's again more connected to a lack of confidence. My desire to become a woman I feel has more to do with this inward gaze. Unable to properly form connections with what I desire, I look inward and try to turn myself into that instead.</p><p>At this point I'm once again burning up with embarrassment. There's a lot of reasons why I'm embarrassed about this; it feels disrespectful, cowardly, stupid, childish, and just outright pathetic. I'm not sure how you may perceive what I just wrote down, but I hope you can at least fathom in some respect why I've never written about this before or talked to anyone about it explicitly.</p><p>Well, now I have, and it'll soon be out there for anyone to read, and for the internet archive to download into its eternal memory. Talk about sealing your fate!</p><p>Whatever.</p><p>I'm not even sure what, if anything, I expect to come of this. I could go on for far longer, in far larger circles, ever spiralling inwards and outwards on my relationship with my lack of confidence and the consequences of it. And still, no matter how much I talk about it, both in articles here, in conversations with my far too patient, kind, and accepting friends, and in talks with my psychologist, I still feel like I have the same problems as I have had since ever. And that feeling, too, is in itself caused by my lack of confidence. Not even the confidence to have dealt with my confidence any better. </p><p>Still here, where I've always been.</p></article>Winding Down - Confession 813672018-08-17T13:37:112018-08-17T13:37:11shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="http://filebox.tymoon.eu//file/TVRZd01RPT0=" alt="header"><br>
After an excruciating two months of impending exam, I now finally have proper holidays; time during which I don't need to do anything in particular. No deadlines, no requirements. And yet, I can't seem to relax. Why?</p>
<p>It should be no secret that I'm not someone who usually goes on holidays. I haven't gone on holidays in over five years. And even when I did, I usually had plans for projects I wanted to work on during that time. Winding down and just doing <em>nothing</em> is very difficult for me.</p>
<p>This week was supposed to be one where I calmed down from the exam stress and just did nothing – maybe read a book or draw some stupid shit. But as it turned out I spent Monday through Wednesday coding things and finishing off projects. Only yesterday did I manage to barely do anything worthwhile. The unfortunate news is that by the end of the day I felt terrible about it.</p>
<p>Today I wanted to try again, but in a different way. Instead of just watching videos and playing games I didn't really feel like playing all day, I decided I should just go and read a book. Maybe one of the many that I bought over the years but haven't had time to read yet. Sounds good, right? And yet I can't get myself to commit to it. None of the books look as interesting or inviting to read as they did when I bought them. Some books look too long and tedious, others look too much like I'd just be programming again, and yet others just don't seem appealing anymore.</p>
<p>And so I'm sitting in my room, bored out of my mind because all that I can think of doing is even more work, and any second I spend not doing work is painful. But yet at the same time I know full well that I <em>need</em> to do nothing every once in a while to let my body and mind recover so that I can work efficiently again later.</p>
<p>After much deliberation I have decided to settle for a compromise of sorts, which was to write something. I've been meaning to write more again as I have been slacking a bit on that front as of late. Unfortunately, in writing I'm facing a similar headache as I do in drawing: I have lost most of my inspiration and ideas. There's no interesting story premise that jumps to mind, not even anything technical that I could write about to continue my series. The best I seem to be able to do is write long rants like this one, outlining my grief.</p>
<p>It really does appear that most of the things that other people do to wind down – reading, writing, drawing, even just playing video games, is very often much more exhausting and problematic for me than I thin kit has any right to be.</p>
<p>Perhaps I've gotten this constant work attitude so ingrained in my head that doing anything else is instantaneously worrying because of all the time I would be spending not working. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a form of Stockholm syndrome, after all I do legitimately enjoy working, but I suppose my brain has conditioned itself so far down this line that diverging from the norm is just very hard to do. After all, even writing this article is a form of work to me, not really anything I do to relax.</p>
<p>Or maybe the problem isn't that I can't relax – after all I do play plenty of video games and I do spend a lot of time just floundering about on the internet, watching videos and so forth. Maybe the problem is that I can't relax <em>on command</em>, and not for long stretches of time.</p>
<p>Ideally I could just sit down and indulge myself in something – anything that isn't work. Unfortunately I currently don't know of any series that I could marathon or any game I could sink hours into that I have any interest for.</p>
<p>Well, in any case I hope something will come to mind before long. Otherwise I won't be rested up enough for next week, which will be <a href="https://events.tymoon.eu/6">full of work</a>.</p>
Where's the Pressure Coming From - Confession 803662018-06-05T20:10:192018-06-05T20:10:19shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="https://filebox.tymoon.eu//file/TVRVMk53PT0=" alt="header"><br>
Man, it's been a good while since I sat down and wrote one of these whine entries. Well, I guess it's time again. It being such a long time since I last had to write about something like this naturally seems like a good thing, but I think matters are a bit more complicated than that. I suppose I should elaborate on that.</p>
<p>First, though, let me just get out of the way how I got here in the first place. Well, here being just me feeling like a complete turd, and getting here meaning just the short span of the day, as elaborating the entire background behind it would probably require writing up my entire life up until this point.</p>
<p>Anyway.</p>
<p>I've already been kind of down in the dumps the past couple of days, so there's been a predisposition for me to start feeling worse still. Today I then got onto another one of my classic trains of thought about all the things I feel like I should be doing, and how I'm massively unqualified for all of them, and how thus it will take me eternity to get them all done. Naturally, both the feeling of inadequacy, and the feeling of impossibility of the entire affair don't exactly lead to a positive outlook on things.</p>
<p>I spent my morning dwelling on that. Attempts at distraction didn't work until I had to set out for lunch where I would meet one of my old high school classmates. The lunch was good, and got my mind off of things for a while. Unfortunately, that wasn't to last either, as right around dinner time my mood started worsening again. This time it wasn't so much the impossibility of all my ambitions that bothered me, but yet another old friend of mine: the feeling of inferiority.</p>
<p>Often when I look around me, look at the friends and acquaintances I have, all of those that are following a similar career path to me (academia) are farther ahead than I am. I haven't even gotten my Bachelor's yet, and most of my old classmates, and many of my friends are working on, or already have their Master's. Most of those who don't follow academia already have stable jobs and are working hard to earn their pay.</p>
<p>By comparison it always seems to me like I'm some kind of complete wanker, wasting away all this precious time accomplishing nothing worthy of note, taking forever to finish my basic education, and always whining about how bad I have it to boot.</p>
<p>As you can probably tell, despite my general tendency to try and stay as realistic and truthful as possible, when I'm depressed that all goes out the window and my mind switches to a fully selective mode where only the negative points are highlighted. Anything that might make me look bad – anything that makes me look like a failure and a whiny piss baby – is choice material for me to think about until I feel so sour about it that the pH goes below zero.</p>
<p>It doesn't really matter that, from any rational point of view, all of these things I'm telling myself are dumb at best, and completely false at worst. When I'm depressed I can still rationally think about things and try to tell myself that it's all wrong, but it doesn't help. My brain just wants to feel sad, and so I feel sad.</p>
<p>But, let's come back to the original hook of this entry for a bit. Let's try and think less about the symptoms and what immediately caused this episode, but rather about a more long-term view on things. Specifically, I have not had very bad mood swings in a long time now. I've still had some, but they've all been comparatively minor, and comparatively rare, when put against how things used to be. I used to become depressed much more often and much more severely than now.</p>
<p>But… that's great! Less sadness! Less pity! And most of all, less annoying whining that others have to listen to! Those are all good things, right? This is a positive change, right?</p>
<p>Well, maybe so on the surface. But on another level I also feel vastly less productive than before. I haven't kept up with my studies at all in the months since ELS, and even before then I didn't manage to do the exercise sheets. And that's despite the fact that I only have a <em>single lecture</em> this semester. I haven't really worked on my own projects either, and especially art has taken a huge nose dive to the point where I don't know if I can even consider myself to be drawing at all anymore. So where has all that time gone? What the hell have I been doing?</p>
<p>For one part I guess I have the excuse of the Bachelor's thesis that was going on until the end of April. But that's not that good of an excuse as that's been leisurely for the most part, and it's been over for well over a month now in any case. Other than that I suppose I've been streaming a lot. I don't know how it happened, but video game streams have increased from once or twice a week to almost every day. Sometimes even multiple times a day.</p>
<p>So far I've been able to keep this up under the guise of relaxation – it's one of the few things that I can do to relax without actively feeling guilty about it. But I feel like I've been taking it too far. I've gotten too lazy. Too much of my time has been taken up by playing and streaming games. It's not even like I have an audience either; just my two friends – bless their pure hearts – that I coerce into watching so it doesn't feel as god damn lonely as it really is.</p>
<p>You have to understand that streaming games, while relaxing, isn't fulfilling for me. It's not satisfying any particular kind of need or desire of mine. I've just been doing it because it's easy, and because it's convenient. But it doesn't do anything for me like programming, drawing, or writing can. It doesn't feel productive. At best I have a good time playing a good game. At worst it makes me depressed because my commentary is boring and nobody else cares to watch – I honestly can't blame them!</p>
<p>I don't know if streaming is the major force behind this whole change, but I do think it is a major factor. It has caused me to waste a lot of time on unproductive things, but because it is relaxing and I didn't feel guilty for doing it – quite the opposite sometimes – it just slipped by and crept into my life more and more. And because I'm more relaxed I've been less volatile. I almost always streamed in the evenings, exactly during the times I'm usually most susceptible to mood swings. It really explains things quite nicely.</p>
<p>If this assessment is accurate, if it is <em>true</em>, then that means that I haven't grown at all as a person. I haven't learned to deal with my problems any better, and in fact I've only been dodging them all this time, simply sweeping them to the side along with my productivity. Now, to some this might be an acceptable trade. To some, less depression would be something to take at any cost. But for me, I'm not so sure at all.</p>
<p>The days that I feel really good about, exceedingly rare as they may be, have always been ones where I got a lot of good, solid work done. They have never been days where I didn't do something productive.</p>
<p>A lot of people that meet me online and see my profiles or whatever are initially impressed by my output. (This isn't me boasting, it's merely an observation I've made, though I do feel bad for writing it out anyway.) I, on the other hand, have never felt like I've been particularly productive at all. Sure, I've done things. I mash my keyboard and I scribble on my monitor, but that all doesn't really culminate in anything impressive. Put in another way, yes, I do produce things, but they're not really noteworthy or good, so it doesn't feel like I've been productive in the proper sense of the word. After all – slinging shit around you sure is doing things, but that shouldn't be taken as being productive. Maybe that's painting things a bit too extreme, but the point is that I don't feel any particular sense of accomplishment when I do work on things. This in turn means that the pressure to be productive doesn't really let up. I need to keep working on things or I'll start feeling really bad.</p>
<p>At this point I'm afraid I don't really know where I was going with my train of thought anymore. I think the crux of what I was trying to say is that there's a lot of very peculiar circumstances that drive me to produce as much output as I do. They all have very heavy downsides, the biggest of which is a large amount of pressure under which I occasionally crumble. But, I think this is all a large part of what makes me as a person. Trying to suppress this stuff by streaming games, or doing whatever else that keeps my mind off of it does lessen the immediate problems, but it also denies me a large part of what I feel is important.</p>
<p>This struggle between the two opposing views on how I should live my life – not stressing out, or keeping productive – is something I've been trying to work out for a long time. So far I have not found an answer, but I have always tended towards keeping the pressure up and taking the punches.</p>
<p>If there's anything at all that I'd like to have changed about me, it's not my stress about productivity, but my seemingly endless supply of envy. Envy gets to me much quicker and much harder than anything. Seeing someone do very well, when I'm struggling really hard, always gives me a punch to the gut. It's such a loathsome and despicable thing, too. I can't even congratulate people and be happy for what they've accomplished, no, my mind immediately makes it about myself and about why I'm not the one doing these great and amazing things. And of course, because I know how pathetic this is, and how stupid it is too, it's just an immediate spiral down to sad town from there.</p>
<p>Ahhhhhh. Hah.</p>
<p>Well, I have no idea where I was going with all this. It seems like I just spent a good two thousand words describing how I loathe myself and how knowing why only makes me loathe myself even more. I certainly have no idea how to deal with this mess. Any possible solution seems to have other penalties that I don't want to incur. I guess I'm just a bitter perfectionist to the end, even when it comes to my own disposition.</p>
<p>A bitter, lonely perfectionist.</p>
<p>But hey, at least I shit out some code every now and again and some (crazy) people seem to like that. So I guess that's good or something?</p>
<p>Bah, who even cares. I could go on with this entry forever, there's so many more stupid things that come to mind that I could write down, but I think this has been more than enough for tonight.</p>
<p>Hopefully I'll get some actually interesting article written again one day.</p>
Off the Cliff and on into the Abyss - Confession 743552017-06-26T21:45:362017-06-26T21:45:36shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="https://filebox.tymoon.eu//file/TVRNMk13PT0=" alt="header"><br>
I'm not sure how far back it goes exactly, but I think it's been now about a year or more since I started doubting my skills heavily. More heavily than usual. Anything I attempt to do either slips out of my hands and ends up a shoddy mess, and even if it doesn't it feels like a flimsy rehash of something I've already done before. There's no improvement to be seen, no end in sight, no goal reached.</p>
<p>This most heavily relates to my artistic efforts, but it also relates to programming. A lot of the projects I've undergone in the past year have ended up incomplete, never to be finished, utterly broken, or in the very least underwhelming. With time ever advancing and my age increasing no matter what I do, it is now that I feel more like a child than ever. I'm not improving the world in any meaningful way, nor am I standing on my own two feet. All I'm doing is just playing around, hoping that I could just get away with this childish attitude of simply doing whatever I want with no regards for anyone else, and still expecting to be praised for it somehow.</p>
<p>All of the articles I've written before, lamenting my difficulties in finding a way to go, a solution to my problems, just all boil down to the same, impudent delusions. I'm not doing anything anyone else might find useful, I'm not offering anyone else my help or skills. Hell, most of the time I even outright reject them, and specifically avoid trying to do anything anyone else might want from me. Instead I just revert to the same idiotic attitude over and over. I do what I believe I want to do, realise I can't do it, end up frustrated, and then hope that someone will pity my sorry ass and at least pretend to care about my petty bullshit. Obviously this hardly ever actually ends up happening for obvious reasons – I don't do anything for anyone else, and don't put myself out anywhere because I'm so scared of getting my ass blasted. What a joke.</p>
<p>The worst part is that I'm writing this knowing full well that this entry is nothing more than another whine in an endless series of articles that serve no purpose than to illustrate how pathetic I am, all the while I never actually improve on any of my issues even in the slightest bit.</p>
<p>How does one even achieve change? How do I get better at the things I'm so awful at? I have not even the faintest glimmer of an idea. Hell, I've even lost sight of how to improve at the things I knew to before. My art is stagnant, my projects unfinished, and everything else I've ever wanted to get good at hasn't progressed any either. Naturally, the way to get better at anything isn't some kind of magic incantation. It simply boils down to “just do it,” in some way or another. I've been “doing it” for as long as I remember, it's just that my returns have completely diminished by now, and no matter how hard I seem to try, it just doesn't get any better.</p>
<p>I don't know if I'm actively not getting any better, or not seeing that I'm getting better. Asking other people about this has proven practically impossible too. They either can't tell just like me, or say “yes you are improving.” Unfortunately whenever I try to ask further and nudge them to explain where they see the improvement things get uncomfortably silent. I can thus only conclude that they said what they did out of a faint hope that it'll somehow cure me of my sad brain, rather than being actively honest. Perhaps that's unfair of me, and they simply don't have the means to express what they see, but I can't help but call bullshit on that front. This also loops back to my concerns about feedback being genuine and from a “trusted source” as I've outlined in a prior entry.</p>
<p>What I think this all comes down to in the end is that I don't have enough friends. This is incredibly embarrassing to write and I am frankly ashamed to admit that I don't really have any idea on how to make friends actively. Sure – I do have a select few people I count as my friends, but I've stumbled towards them more or less by chance, or by them coming to me in some fashion, rather than me coming to them. Furthermore, most of my friends are far from “ideal,” though not through any fault of their own. The problem lies much more in their interests, in that they don't align too well with my own. I don't know anyone else who wants to draw and actively practises it, for example. I also pretty much only have one friend I can talk programming stuff with on a regular basis. Two more of my friends do know how to program, but we barely talk at all, so their “usefulness” in that regard is rather limited.</p>
<p>This lack of people to talk to about my interests, endeavours, and problems results in a lot of isolation, in a lot of my thoughts compounding in on themselves. Because I have no way to validate that what I'm doing is Ok and acceptable, my brain easily latches on to heavy self-criticism, which at sufficient levels only ends up hurting me instead. Adding on to this, because I have no one to talk to regularly about what I'm doing or want to be doing, motivation often fluctuates wildly and my productivity suffers from that. This in turn then makes me feel worse and induces a downwards spiral.</p>
<p>There's this saying that goes “beggars can't be choosers.” I've never agreed with that saying. I justify this by a simple rebuttal analogy: if you give a beggar a pile of shit, he should refuse it. Thus he is a chooser. This is of course an extreme example, and I feel bad for even making it. However, the point remains that authenticity is something that is incredibly close to heart for me. As such, I am incredibly wary of unfounded praise or support. I can't help myself but to be a choosing beggar, or to look a gift horse in the mouth. If I were to have friends that would solve the issues I outlined above, they would have to be people that are knowledgeable in the areas I'm interested in, such that I can trust their judgement.</p>
<p>I'm well aware that this is a very, very tall order, and an incredibly, disgustingly selfish way to be. If I were to read something like this entry, I certainly wouldn't be encouraged to want to be their friend. I would think that it couldn't be worth the hassle– after all, what could they possibly offer me to compensate for the fact that I have to put forth a lot of effort to get them to trust me? Well, the answer to that is that I don't know. I do know that I care a lot about honesty, which is why I'm writing this openly, rather than just trying to get people to like me.</p>
<p>If you are one of my friends and are reading this entry: thank you very much. I thank you from the bottom of my crusty, beaten heart. I'm very glad to have you at all. Every single person I've had the pleasure of calling my friend I've spent countless great memories with. Even if you may not be able to fulfil the roles that I so desperately need filled in my life, that's alright. Putting up with all the bullshit I put forth, all the unfounded accusations I make, the horrendously unfunny, rude jokes I crack, and generally all of the things I do so terribly wrong, is much more than anyone could ever expect. Thank you so much. I couldn't ask for more of you, and I won't.</p>
<p>While I don't want to ask more of anyone, it doesn't change the fact that I do need more if I have any hopes of getting better. After years of struggling with these chronic mood swings, I don't think that I can simply overcome them on my own, or with the help of my psychologist. I need people that I can rely on more often, and can talk to at length about the things I care most about. Whether I'll ever be able to find those people is currently a complete mystery to me. I'm not at all confident that it will come to be, but I do sincerely hope that it will.</p>
<p>I think it's about time that I closed off this incoherent rambling though. I've largely calmed down now, so writing this has already fulfilled its primary purpose. If it has any effect beyond that, I will be very surprised.</p>
<p>I leave you with the music I was listening to while writing this. Perhaps it will be able to calm you too, should you ever find yourself out of sorts.</p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ptiPK7Cdi8Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></p>
It's Been So Long - Confession 713492017-02-09T23:56:122017-02-09T23:56:12shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="https://filebox.tymoon.eu//file/TVRJMk53PT0=" alt="header"><br>
It's been a good while since I last wrote an entry. I didn't write anything all January for a multitude of reasons, at the forefront being that it was exam season again. That's over with now, fortunately, so I do have some more time on my hands to goof off. Unfortunately though, I only have one more week left of this precious “free” time before university strikes me in the back again. I best use it wisely.</p>
<p>The first week of my holidays now I've spent on a heavy reworking of <a href="https://shinmera.github.io/portacle/">Portacle</a>, a portable, multiplatform, upgradable, install-less Common Lisp development environment project. I've only just now finally got it to work properly on all three platforms and differing versions thereof. It has been an unbelievable struggle, as every platform posed unique problems and nasty edge-cases that were hard to catch without testing everything on a multitude of virtual machines all the time. If you look through the <a href="https://github.com/Shinmera/portacle/commits/master">commit history</a> you can find plentyful examples of the borderline insanity that I reached at points. I might write an in-depth article about my adventures another time.</p>
<p>During the exam session itself I was mostly occupied with working on <a href="https://shirakumo.github.io/lichat-protocol/">Lichat</a>, my own light-weight chat protocol. It has the nice properties that it is very uniform and rather simple to implement a client for. Among the nice aspects of the protocol are that everything goes over a channel, even private messages, that each update is associated with an ID and failures or responses can be tracked even if they happen to be out of order, and that connection multiplexing is provided directly by the protocol, so you can log into the same user account from multiple machines or instances simultaneously. I've written both a TCP and a WebSockets server, and a CL and JS client for it as well, so you can easily set up your own distributions of it. These CL and JS clients also have respective user interfaces as well, namely <a href="https://github.com/Shirakumo/lionchat">LionChat</a> and <a href="https://github.com/Shirakumo/lichat-js">Lichat-JS</a>. Lionchat might turn into a generic chat client at some point in the future.</p>
<p>I've also continued work on <a href="https://github.com/Shirakumo/maiden">Maiden</a>, and finished a Lichat client for it as well. It's now running as a bot alongside the previous Colleen and I'm intending on switching over fully soon. The only thing that I haven't switched over yet is the chat logging, as I haven't had time to test that extensively yet. I've also been using its Text To Speech module to provide some fun interactivity for my video game streams. Before I can unleash Maiden onto Quicklisp I'll need to heavily document everything though, as it is quite a lot more complex –and capable– than Colleen was.</p>
<p>Then, I've also taken the time to switch over TyNET to the new <a href="https://shirakumo.github.io/radiance-homepage/">Radiance 1.0</a>. Radiance is now complete and ready for release as far as I'm aware. I've been holding off on releasing it for good as I've been waiting for some feedback on its <a href="https://github.com/Shirakumo/radiance-tutorial/blob/master/Part%200.md">tutorial</a> from a couple of friends of mine. Once they get ahead with that I'll type up a good, long entry to announce everything. If my paper for <a href="http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/editions/2017/">ELS</a> 2017 gets accepted, I will even be presenting it at the symposium in April. Speaking of the symposium– I've been working on a new website for it on and off, to which it will be switching in a while. You can get a preview peek at it <a href="https://shinmera.github.io/els-web/">here</a>.</p>
<p>For Christmas I gave my father a Raspberry Pi 3 and installed Emacs and CCL onto it. He's been using it, and a DAQ board, to interface with a Korg synthesizer, since he's interested in making music on a more low, analog level. To do this I've been trying to teach Lisp to him since Christmas. While it's been a hard road so far, he's slowly getting into it and making advances. Given that he's been a Fortran programmer for almost all his life, with probably close to forty years of experience or more in it, I'm actually surprised at how well he's been doing with something that probably seems very different and alien to what he's used to. As part of this, though, I've had to write a few libraries, namely <a href="https://shinmera.github.io/cl-gpio">cl-gpio</a> to interface with the Pi's GPIO pins, <a href="https://shinmera.github.io/cl-spidev">cl-spidev</a> to use the serial port interface, <a href="https://shinmera.github.io/cl-k8055">cl-k8055</a> for the DAQ kit he's been using, and <a href="https://github.com/Shinmera/pi-plates">pi-plates</a> for the pi-plates extension boards. The last library isn't done yet as I haven't had the time to test it yet, but the other three should work just fine.</p>
<p>So, I've been slowly, but surely, working off my long stack of projects that need to be completed someday. With Maiden out of the way soon too, I'll finally be able to get back to two of the remaining major projects: Trial, my game engine, and Parasol, my painting application. I'm still undecided as to which I'll tackle first, though. If you have a preference, let me know!</p>
<p>Finally, aside from programming work, I've gotten back into the swing of drawing. Before I was constantly feeling down and unmotivated about it. Everything just seemed to suck and I could never come up with ideas for things that I actually wanted to draw. I'm still not exploding with ideas now, but at least I've found something that inspires me a lot. Specifically, I was reading through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kikō">Yokohama Shopping Trip</a> and it was filled with exactly the kind of scenery-heavy, romantic drawings that I always wanted to make. “Romantic” referring to the Romanticism art movement. For the past few days then I've been trying to get a scenery drawing done every evening. You can see them on my <a href="http://tumblr.shinmera.com/">tumblr</a>. I still have a very long way to go and I'm painfully aware of all the things I do badly at or can't figure out how to draw properly, but I just have to keep on keeping on. It's too late to throw it all to the wind now.</p>
<p>In the near future I'd like to focus some more on writing things again, and perhaps also on actually reading some of the <a href="https://library.shinmera.com">books</a> that I've started accumulating over the years. But then, I'd also like to continue streaming video games, as I've been enjoying that quite a lot. Ah, there's just so much I'd like to do. If only someone were to figure out the age-old problem of finite capacity. Or in the very least: if only I didn't have to worry about earning any money to make a living, I could just merrily focus on being as productive as I can be instead of having to focus on what's marketable. Ah well, you can't have everything, eh?</p>
<p>So, in the more immediate future you can, if you want to, look forward to a full release announcement of Portacle, Radiance, and Maiden, more drawings, and hopefully more articles and stories as well. No promises, though. I'm not very good at keeping to deadlines for projects.</p>
Where to Go - Confession 683442016-10-05T20:57:542016-10-05T20:57:54shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="https://filebox.tymoon.eu/file/TVRFMk1RPT0=" alt="header"><br>
Well, here we are. Here we are again. About three weeks ago another semester of university began for me. Since then I've been feeling a lack of interest and motivation in most things. None of the projects that are open right now seem inviting or exciting to me, and I don't know what to do.</p>
<p>As I've written about plenty of times before, this is not something unique– it has happened before, plenty at that. Still, every time it does my perceived productivity takes a dive and I inevitably start spiralling down into the pit of self-loathing and depression. There's several things that can trigger this phase, but the most sure-fire way to do it is to put me into an environment where I feel like I've been severely stripped of my freedom to do as I please. The “shock” of that manifests itself strongly in my desire to work, which then leads to a rapidly tightening feedback loop.</p>
<p>I'm not sure if there's anything else that I could write about this that I haven't written about over and over again before. It just sucks. It sucks major dick. There isn't anything I know to remedy it except to somehow find a way to work on things despite everything, while at the same time being able to juggle the additional responsibility put onto me by my university duties.</p>
<p>Therefore the first task seems to be figuring out what I should be working on. Given that every possibility I could think of so far hasn't been one that I actively want to work on, this isn't such an easy task. I suppose it might be worthwhile iterating the potential work areas though– maybe, hopefully, this will give me some kind of spark of inspiration and my decision will be made once I'm done writing this.</p>
<p>So let's see. I'll be listing things as they occur to me, in no particular order of preference or urgency.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Markless</strong> is a project that has been in the works on and off for a few years now. The intended goal is to have a fully standardised ASCII text markup language that is fast to parse, intuitive to write, and extensible by implementations. I'm close to done with this and have been trying to get a JS implementation going, but I haven't been having much fun with that at all.</li>
<li><strong>Maiden</strong> is my penultimate attempt at writing a chat bot framework. It is probably one of the most cleanly designed things I've done so far, and I've been meaning to replace the running Colleen instance with it for a long time. However, there's still some important features missing that I need to implement and test properly before I can really do that.</li>
<li><strong>Trial</strong> is the game engine Shirakumo has been using for the previous two Ludum Dare entries. I've been meaning to move it to OpenGL Core, but that requires a lot of very fundamental changes to how things work and I haven't been enjoying the attempts I've made so far at all. It all seems incredibly tedious and unrewarding.</li>
<li><strong>Autobuild</strong> is a Continuous Integration system that is being used to build Clasp. There are several outstanding issues that should be fixed, but whenever I think about working on it I immediately get put off. I'm not sure why.</li>
<li><strong>Parasol</strong> is yet another old, old project. Intended on being a useful digital painting application at some point it has been stalled for months and months so many times. Mostly because every time I start to work on it I immediately get into trouble trying to figure out the necessary base architecture to make things extensible and dynamic.</li>
<li><strong>Radiance</strong> is my web application environment that actually offers some features that I have never seen anywhere else before. However, it is in severe need of cleanup, documentation, and rethinking in several areas. It also needs a lot more modules that implement generally useful functionality.</li>
<li><strong>Portacle</strong> is the portable common lisp development environment. Before I can release it for good though there are a few problems that need to be fixed, most notably automatic upgrading and testing on OS X. All of this is always a huge pain though, so I've been very reluctant.</li>
<li><strong>Introduction to Programming</strong> is a very long and ambitious writing project idea that I've been having for a while. Portacle is a prerequisite for that. The idea is that it would be a series of lengthy article that should be usable for people wanting to pick up programming or lisp for the first time. I don't know if I'm capable of it though.</li>
<li><strong>式神の物語</strong> was a somewhat lengthy story of mine that I wrote about a year ago. I wanted to put it into comic form and got started drawing a storyboard for it, but never completed that, nor any full pages beyond the cover.</li>
</ul>
<p>As you can probably tell, most of these projects are long, or even old ones. I am horrible at keeping to long-term projects. I inevitably lose interest, or get disgusted with myself for all the mistakes that I've made. And so they all end up unfinished, maybe indefinitely so.</p>
<p>But I don't want to leave them unfinished. Knowing that I have started journeys that I have never managed to complete bothers me a lot. It feels like an unfulfilled promise, as if I've somehow betrayed everyone– let everyone down.</p>
<p>Even after writing this I don't know what to do next. Everything still seems as unpleasant as before. What's worse, I've now incited my brain to think up countless of prior examples of projects that I've abandoned or never even started in the first place, increasing my feeling of guilt ever more.</p>
<p>Writing this entry was a mistake.</p>
<p>There's a first for everything, I suppose.</p>
I Am Broken - Confession 653372016-06-29T22:08:542016-06-29T22:08:54shinmerahttps://shinmera.com/shinmera@tymoon.eu<p><img src="https://filebox.tymoon.eu/file/TVRBNE9BPT0=" alt="header">
It's late in the evening and I'm not feeling all too jolly. About an hour ago I was once again frustrated with my drawing attempts as I had failed to produce anything whatsoever in an entire hour. I decided that it was enough. I am broken.</p>
<p>For months now, my inspiration has been almost nil. I haven't had a single idea that I felt excited about, a single image in my mind that I could form clearly. The vague ideas that I could muster I could not get done well, if at all. I don't know what's happening. I know I need a change, but nothing that I can think of works. Nothing is fun, none of it is interesting, and no part of it works. I am broken.</p>
<p>But this entry is not about that. I am not even certain why I am writing this. Perhaps it is some sliver of righteousness that compels me, or some other form of misguided idea that I've been lying to everyone. It isn't so much that I've been lying to people about this, but rather that I've been too ashamed, too embarrassed about it to talk to anyone about it at all.</p>
<p>As far back as I can remember– even as a very small child, I've had these fantastical daydreams that my mind would like to think up every now and again. They all followed the same kind of idea: that I would be accidentally involved in some kind of grand scheme, or that I would somehow discover something world-changing, something to put me above people. I always dismissed these thoughts as stupid after a brief moment, and as I grew up I became increasingly embarrassed and ashamed of them. Yes, they are mere dreams my mind randomly conjured up, but they are still representative of my personality in some way.</p>
<p>How shallow and utterly pathetic of me to long for such things. How could I ever hope to achieve anything even close to what these dreams were about? I am not good and certainly not exceptional at anything. This simplistic idea of “accidentally being brilliant” disgusts and repulses me so vehemently because it is entirely selfish, egotistical, and worst of all, the only purpose it serves is to fulfil the fantasy of allowing me to look down on people. I have never told anyone about this before– not my friends, not my parents, not even my psychologist. That is the extent of my hatred and disgust of that aspect of myself.</p>
<p>Despite being aware of this severe flaw of my character for such a long time, I don't know if I have improved at all. I still catch myself being spiteful and looking down on people I don't even know. I still catch myself longing to one day make some form of ridiculous, fairy-tale-like breakthrough.</p>
<p>Yet on the other hand I dismiss praise and try not to advertise my projects or myself; in fact, I shy away from publicity or even actively try to alienate people. Often I do this because I feel like I do not deserve attention, that the things I have done are not worthy. I am certain that a part of this feeling exists solely because I am so afraid of this other part of myself that I do not want to allow any of its ridiculous fantasies to become reality.</p>
<p>I honestly believe that what I have done in my life so far is not worthy of any praise. The drawings I've made are lifeless, boring, the same thing over and over again. So many parts of each of them are executed badly if not straight out wrong, and the things that are not certainly could not qualify as pretty, unique, interesting, or inspiring. It's all mediocre and plain, through and through. The articles and stories I've written are not even worth mentioning. How could I ever believe even for a second that I am any good at writing?</p>
<p>I've asked myself many times “why do I keep going?” Well, I think I have an answer now. This idiotic, repulsive, glimmering hope of one day striking gold and being praised as some sort of genius is what keeps me going. I really don't want that to be the reason for my perseverance, but I cannot imagine any other. Nothing else makes sense.</p>
<p>I feel nothing but hatred and shame for so many parts of myself, and yet it appears that I am unable to change any of them. I have the patience of a six-year-old on a sugar-high and about as much compassion and care for the world as a rock at the bottom of the ocean. My tolerance for stupid bullshit is so low even nitroglycerin would withstand more before exploding than I do. The only jokes I can come up with are crass, crude, and have already been told a million times over. I don't know how to entertain people and being a wise-ass certainly doesn't help in that regard either. And that's just some of the things about my personality that I loathe.</p>
<p>One could find plenty of reasons to explain my psychology and would most likely end up blaming it mostly on growing up with an academic genius of a father and thus setting extremely high expectations, but none of that actually matters. It's too late to change any of it. I'm here now, and I'm a horrible person with nothing to excuse or justify that. I don't know how to go on, or even if I should go on at all.</p>
<p>I am broken.</p>