The year is coming to a close at the same time as I’m about to finally make this website go live, and I’ve been thinking if and how I should tell a bit more about myself. Doing it while looking back on the past year seems like a nice way of killing two birds with one stone.
I like killing birds with stones (proverbially).
The previous year is a vague blur to me, for what reason I don’t know because I can’t remember, but I can only assume it wasn’t a very good year. Come early 2024 and things are looking good. Too good. I started singing in public. I was thinking about applying to school and for the first time in years I had some kind of plans and dreams. I reached out to the world after a prolonged period of isolation. Most of those dreams feel foreign to me now, like they were dreamed up by someone else or I was temporarily placed under a spell by a nefarious witch.
I should try singing again.
Winter and early spring I spent mostly reading. It came time to say goodbye to the pagan Greeks and Romans as I finally decided it was time to move on to the Christian era and early medieval period.
Kind of. To get better acquianted with Christianity I started with Genesis which meant I had to go back to around atleast the 5th century BC. I read most of the Old Testament in about three weeks and found it more interesting than the four Gospels. Later in the year I would finally read Paul’s letters. He’s an interesting character. I didn’t grow up in a religious environment but I thought I had a pretty good understanding of Christianity through cultural osmosis. Turns out I didn’t. I’d barely even heard of this tentmaker but apparently he’s practically the inventor of Christianity as we know it. I fell down a rabbit hole trying to find out more about the early church but we know practically nothing with any certainty.
So I moved on in history. Byzantium. What a place. Europe seemed a bit boring in the late antiquity and early medieval period but luckily we atleast got Augustine.
St. Augustine’s Confessions was the best book I read this year. Meditating on his idea of evil has been fruitful for me. To summarise, for Augustine evil does not exist, being a privation of good (as we might think of cold as a privation of heat) by our willfully turning away from God. Everything is good since everything comes from God and He is the ultimate good. Being the ultimate good He is incorruptible. What cannot be corrupted is greater than what can. For something to be corrupted there needs to be something good in it to corrupt. If something is wholly corrupted and is without good then it is incorruptible and as great as God. But nothing can be as great as God. Even if by my whole will I turn against God, I cannot be wholly corrupt since I am good by virtue of being, for if I stop being then I am no longer anything, and if I am but I am without good, and thus incorruptible, then I am equal to God which nothing can be.
That’s the gist of it from the top of my head anyway.
Other books I thoroughly enjoyed were Life Is a Dream, a 17th century spanish play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and I re-read eight or so of Philip K. Dick’s novels and, for the first time, the first two books in William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy. And some scraps of poetry. I didn’t read all that much this year but there might be some books that I’m forgetting right now.
February rolled into March and my high spirits came crashing down. Sleep disturbances, suicidal ideation and, for the first time in the nine years I’ve been depressed, intrusive thoughts about nonfatal self-harm. I think? Or am I remembering things that happened the previous year? Either way I didn’t act on those thoughts but again my memories are a bit hazy of the next few months.
In summer I got really into wristwatches. For a while every waking second was spent devouring information about wristwatches. But like most my interests it was an intense but short lived obsession. They come and go in waves. I bought a few watches for different purposes; notably a Casio G-Shock GMA-S2100 and a Vostok Komandirskie. The former’s durability and digital alarms make it great for exercising and generally doing chores. The latter is an affordable mechanical field watch with a rich history. The watch that has seen the most wrist time is probably the Casio AQ-230. It’s the only one that fits under a shirt cuff and I’m fond of the quaint look of ana-digi watches.
I’m too pragmatic to get into collecting but if I were to get one more watch it’d be a nice small dress watch ‘cause I have tiny wrists. I generally hate buying stuff though.
Speaking of which. For four years I wore practically always the same clothes every single day. One uniform for rotting at home and another for when I would leave the house. All good things must come to an end. My clothes were starting to get distressed and having such a small wardrobe was a source of unnecessary anxiety; since I don’t have my own washing machine I would prolong the gap between washing my clothes because I dreaded using the public laundry room. But what if I suddenly had to leave the house? At home I was fine being dressed in dirty clothes but I would have to meticulously plan ahead so I could squeeze as many wears out of my “going out” clothes before having to wash them.
What am I leading up to? Since I had to go shopping for new clothes anyway, I thought I might as well do it properly and fully step out of my comfort zone. I never paid attention to my appearance and thought caring about such things was too superficial and I was too good to care. But I’m open minded. And bit of a doubting Thomas. Atleast once in my life I would have to try what dressing well is all about, see if the grass really is greener on the other side, or I could not hold my opinion with any conviction.
Months of research, anxiety about committing to a purchase, weighing all the different options and running simulated scenarios in my head about every aspect of buying a garment, receiving it, putting it in the closet, taking it out in the morning, putting it on, washing it; considering how versatile it is, on what occasions I can wear it, in what weather, is it low or high maintenance, can I alter it, would I alter it, does it go with my trousers, does it go with my shirt, does all my trousers go with all my shirts, what’s the cost per wear, do I need it or do I want it, etc, etc.
I hate shopping. Sometimes I wish I could be a little more impulsive. But in the end I managed to learn a great deal about men’s wear, its history and what different clothes can be used for and how and why. I built a small capsule wardrobe suitable to my narrow circumstances out of (hopefully) quality clothes that will last for a long time.
Most importantly though my prejudices were proven wrong. Caring about one’s appearance is anything but shallow. To have style you’ve got to be socially and culturally aware, and dressing well is respecting others. Even if I didn’t like dressing up it was something I had to do every single day of my life. Why not do it well? It is a skill that can be learned and you’ve got to only learn it once and you have it for the rest of your life. Now that I’m dressing with purpose I feel much more confident. If I can’t tell you why I chose to put on the clothes I did this morning then how am I able to talk about anything with confidence?
At the very least surely I’ve got to grasp the basic or shallow aspects if I want to be consistent, and holistically approach life with the same seriousness and maturity that I wish I always had the energy and fortitude to afford other endeavours in my life that I deem less shallow.
Focusing on the exterior things for once also alleviated some of my anxiety by getting me out of my own head. I’m too intellectual for my own good. Intellectual in the sense that I’m aloof from the world, always rationalising, ruminating alone in my head to the detriment of my psychological well-being. The things of this world have always disgusted me. Maybe that’s why I liked the Old Testament, it pushed me to consider another way of looking at things. The Hebrews have a very holistic view of the world and humans as bodily beings in the world. The division between the natural and supernatural, the mind versus the body, is a very Greek way of thinking.
I was always teetering between reactionary ascetism, a sort of impotent nihilism masquerading as a quest for spiritual enlightenment, and relapsing into excessive hedonism of binging YouTube and doomscrolling imageboards, as a desperate remedy for an illness of the soul that I couldn’t identify. When one pursuit would start to feel hollow I would switch to something completely different, until I’d burn out on it, moving again to something else, so that in the end everything felt hollow and meaningless.
Most of the above stems from low self-esteem and alexithymia. Vacillating between the resolution that I ought to do one thing or another, just because I believed it was imperative, instead of doing what I really needed for my well-being at the moment. Now I’m trying to steer toward the middle, take the holistic approach, both merciful and judgmental toward myself, accepting the world and affirming myself in it.
Later during the summer I switched away from Linux to FreeBSD.
By accident.
I’d been using Arch for four years (funny how that coincides with autistically wearing the same clothes for four years) but my use case had changed significantly. I no longer had an interest in a cutting edge rolling release distro plus I wanted to get away from systemd. I looked into other distros like Devuan and Void but settled on Slackware of all things as my next OS. Fiddling around in VMs is rather boring so I wanted to get it running on real hardware as fast as possible, but after I’d already reformatted my drive and begun the installation turned out the damn iso was corrupted.
I had an ancient Arch iso along with a Linux Mint, Debian and Void iso on the Ventoy thumbdrive. I didn’t want to go back to Arch, Mint and Debian use systemd and I didn’t like Void. But I had also thrown a FreeBSD iso on the thumbdrive just because it had the storage space for it. I’d meant to play around with it in a VM but never got around to it.
It was decided. I was going in blind. I plugged the USB stick back into my computer. My heart was pounding. My palms were sweaty, my knees weak and arms heavy.
I blazed through the ncurses installer in a matter of minutes. A wave of relief washed over me but I could hardly believe it. There’s no way it was this easy. What next?
I was staring at the void known as the tty. Where do I go from here? How
does the wizard open the door? What magic words does he use? “Open
sesame.” I chuckled as I typed pkg install vim in certain belief that it
was all in vain.
The black void spat some white text back at me. “You must first update
pkg,” it said something along those lines. Wait, the package manager is
actually just called pkg? Holy shit. If only everything in life was this
intuitive.
And so I spent a good part of the summer just learning FreeBSD and setting everything up the way I wanted inbetween watching episodes of Non Non Biyori and Taiho Shichauzo. I’m not going back to Linux.
My low mood persisted all throughout summer and into autumn. In fact it got a lot worse as I fell into another spiral of mindlessly binging four hour long retrospectives on video games I’ve never even played on YouTube and masturbating once or twice a day to exquisite Japanese pornography. It’s a shame the moments we have slip away like raindrops on a window and we’re not even looking.
Now we’re getting to the most recent events: November through December. Mostly I’ve been playing games and fiddling with tech stuff. I dusted off my old modded 3DS and have been moving away from gaming on the PC to separate my “work” from more frivolous pursuits that are meant to be a relaxing break for myself.
Writing this log over some days, I’ve remembered more and more things but I don’t feel like going back and adding them in. A lot of the things already mentioned could be expanded to have their own dedicated posts, which I’ll probably do sometime down the road. So far this website is fulfilling its purpose, for me, which is healing.
I’ll end with a rapid fire of the games I’ve played this year. Here we go.
PC
Need For Speed Underground 2 Replayed this childhood racing classic after 15 years and it’s still the GOAT.
American McGee’s Alice A 3D action platformer with a twistedly charming take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Love it.
Quake 3 DeFRaG A mod that turns Quake 3 into a singleplayer speedrunning experience. Endless skill ceiling, community driven, great for getting into a flow state.
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne I play mainly custom singleplayer Tower Defense maps on patch 1.27b. Also deleted my Battle.net account this year ‘cause fuck Blizzard.
Tomb Raider (2013) An overly ambitious AAA game that somehow works. A comforting gory mess with campy horror B-movie vibes. A guilty pleasure, if you’ll pardon the use of such a moronic term.
The Typing of the Dead A lightgun rail shooter released in arcades as The House of the Dead 2 in 1998 became a typing game that was ported from the arcade version a few years later to the PC and fucking SEGA Dreamcast. Worth playing for the voice acting alone. It’s so bad it’s good.
Nintendo 3DS
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (NDS) Really good visual novel adventure puzzle type of game. Can’t wait to play the sequel.
Chrono Trigger (NDS) I’ve started a few CT playthroughs of the original SNES version but never finished it. And I still haven’t this version either. I’m right at the end before the final boss battle. Brb.
Pushmo/Pullblox (3DS) A fine little puzzle game, not too difficult, not too easy. Wouldn’t replay.
Puyo Puyo (Genesis) MegaDrive port of the first game in the tile matching puzzle series by Compile. I’ll play this for 10-15 minutes while cooking or if I get bored of being bored, which is quite rare.
Kirby’s Dream Land 1 & 2 (Game Boy) I like Kirby. I’m shit at 2D platformers. That’s why I like Kirby.
Mario Kart 7 (3DS) Fuck Mario Kart.
LovePlus (NDS) Dating sim released in 2009 only in Japan but has an english patch available. Designed to be endlessly playable after “beating” the game. Played in real-time. One day in real life equals one in game day. God I love this game. And my wife. She’s in the game.
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