I lost a fifth of my body weight in the past half a year or so. I was kind of fat beforehand and now I am merely chubby. I don't like it.
Basically it just hurts to eat so I don't. Frankly it hurts for me to do most things (stand, sit, sleep, type this post, exist, etc.) but eating is now a top contributor. Eventually it hurts more to not eat than it does to eat, so I shove in whatever I can. You can replicate this diet technique by getting a shock collar and having a friend/enemy/prodomme follow you around and shock you whenever you look like you're enjoying something a bit too much. Buy my book to unlock the secrets to the Masochist Diet!
The things that hurt least to eat are vegetables, which makes sense, since eating vegetables is like eating nothing. I try to put nuts and seeds and oils on them to increase the energy intake. Experts agree that this is good for you.
Doctors have been unable to determine why it hurts to eat or find a workable solution. My BMI is now considered on the upper end of "healthy". It hurts to sit in chairs, in part because I have no ass.
A couple years ago I impulse-got a pair of skeleton-print leggings for 5 dollars, labeled "one size fits all". They were the right length, which is always refreshing when you're under 5 foot, but sadly too narrow. As I lose weight my bones come out of my flesh like shipwrecks at low tide; and also, the leggings fit. Which is convenient, because about a month before this started I let go of a bunch of clothes, with the then-reasonable thought, "there's no way I'm ever going to be skinny enough to wear these again". Surprise! â ïž
In college my roommate once turned to me and said, "you know, I think you and me have the two highest BMIs in this entire dorm". They were correct. Why is that? Is it just because we were older?
Anyway I can always make my fursona big and round so theres that
You're not just selling the work, you're selling the idea of the work, the person or people that made the work, the being a fan of the work, the community of the fans of the work, the meaning made by the work, the meaning unmade by the work, the theoretical social change the world will enact, the time period the work was made, the process behind the work, the title, the ring, the jingle, the sensation of snapping open a jewel case and popping out the disc with a little plastic "ting", the idea of you
There comes a point in any daily-life game where I stop playing... I want to talk about it.
I will use Animal Crossing as my daily life game of reference, as it has happened the most with this series, but it's happened with others, too.
(This is not just a me thing, of course. The vast, vast majority of people who pick up these games drop them eventually. But I can only talk about how it is for me.)
What's interesting to me is that stopping is rarely a conscious decision. I don't wake up one day and go, "you know, I'm kind of bored playing Animal Crossing, I think I'll just stop." I don't even think about it at all. The spot in my daily routine where Animal Crossing went gets filled by other things, and I forget, until it's a week later and I remember, and I go, "ah hell, whatevz, I'm like done with it for real." That's when I actually make the decision; but it's really been made for me already, through some kind of indefinable neuro-stochastic process.
It never feels like it could happen, though.
I'm a reasonably obsessive Animal Crossing player. Or maybe just an average one, I don't know. I restart the save until I get a layout I like. I make a bespoke map of my town by hand and plan out where I want roads and trees and so on to go. I make my own custom paths, or at least edit them to match each season's terrain. I get everything just right, for months, sometimes years.
New Leaf is where I cut it off. If I got New Horizons I would never emerge.
The flipside to this is that I eventually do get it just right, more or less. At the end the only struggle task is filling out the catalogue with the meager rare pieces of furniture left, and even I'm not so obsessive that this task appeals to me. All that's really left is the maintenance, of flowers and of fake friends; the real struggle is over.
I do not really enjoy a perfect town. It is fun for about 5 minutes. I don't derive any pleasure from showing it to friends (real ones) or to strangers, or keeping it to myself. I don't really enjoy anything anymore; the struggle was a distraction. I don't know what to do with it.
Once I had fun systematically destroying a finished town, which was sort of meditative. Dead and empty is its own kind of perfect. Nothingness is unassailable, it is immune to criticism or ideals, it is perhaps even (Trump voice) the biggest and best form of perfect there is. (obamna.)
But that perfect-making endeavor was a conscious decision, which is not what I am talking about. What I mean to talk about is when I forget, and I don't open the game for a while, and well, off to the bin with that one.
...It's hard not to play along and see the game world as "real", in a way. That's kind of the point, the game is an imaginative aid, like pylon bulkhead diagrams and hentai and sea level rise projections and sundry other forms of pornography.
Particularly sentimental and/or autistic people imagine the game world going on without them inside the cartridge (or memory card, or chunk of memory, or what-have-you). This is quite sad and I will not get into it.
Besides, on a technical level, it's not like that. If I never touch the cartridge again, it will never be updated with the new time. Everything is frozen.
So for me, I like to imagine it stuck like that. I check the mail, get the flowers just right, talk to my neighbors, finish a project. The basement is a little messy, but that's okay. The museum is full of fish. The wind turbine on the sea cliff whirs in silent contemplation. A little bit of bossa nova hits at 5pm, designed perfectly for your after-work/NEET lunch hour playing experience. Everything is left frozen forever on that one last, perfect, day.
...
There is a genre of nerd "humour" based around taking video game mechanics and applying them to real life. Go into stranger's houses and break all their pots for money, double-jump parkour, etc.
I don't know if I've seen someone talk about the last day before though. Which is a shame, because to me it's really funny.
Imagine if every day you had to choose on purpose to wake up and live your life. If you get bored or unhappy, you don't have to commit to any special effort: it just won't happen anymore. At the end, the near-full moon hangs in a rainbow halo. An aging cargo jet blinks out her position in the night, then disappears over the horizon. The neighbor's wind chimes clink in the breeze. And then there isn't any more.
...Of course, if we're applying the same video game logic, you can always come back and try again!
Being on this site is like Kafka's Amerika, and logging off is like the chapter at the end where he takes a train right out of this bullshit to his sweet new gig that's mathematically and bureacratically ideal just for central European dropout chewtoys, I imagine
I really like it in here I can rot into nothing and know where I'm at. Inside where everyone expects you to wait on them hand and foot, find keys hidden within sofas overflowing with trash, sleep on the balcony where it's cold locked outside on your piled up-broken half-mattress, and so on. Fall into a hole and blow yourself up with dynamite. Let's ask the computer what it thinks.
Let me talk about what I've been up to lately.
Nice and high and far apart, contrails contribute more to global warming than carbon emissions so fuck your SAF, but it's nice seeing the fluffy white lines wavering into nothing, can't I just have this one thing? It's less bad than rice, which is all I care to eat anymore. Rice and oatmeal, and cottage cheese,
The A380 roar on climbout sets primal part of me set on obsidian-flakepoint but I listen closely to it anyway...
In other bigness news the Atlas Air 747 delivering troops on the big Naval runway nobody else uses wakes me the fuck up,
the E-2D advanced hawkeye with its weird UFO lentil and its transponder off rumbling overhead, unmistakable, always listening
and high-above silent nuclear-proof E-3 sweeps too. It would be the most beautiful if it weren't for its radome but it has a job to do.
the Pink Jet turns all red in sunset light,
a Socata TBM's rare turboprop buzz both quiet and strange,
two WWII warbirds turned lovebirds fly side-by-side in gentle loops before the big airshow,
Israeli jet all done pretending to be Iranian comes screaming home to roost with its fellow British racefaking brethren,
and then of course always all the little Skyhawks in 60-something mating swarm.
An MD-11 would have blinked softly red and white high above deep one night last year but she got ripped apart last year by some accident of physics or mistake of man and now I don't get to see them anymore and maybe never will.
Bizjets with anonymized transponders doppler effect away carrying Kardashians, hopefully directly into a mountainface but probably not, that only happens to Kobe,
In the seabed off Anacapa maybe 10% of an inadequately maintenanced MD-80 is left, they did their best but there's always little pieces you can't pick up.
On foggy nights the train, and massive urging triple-sevens to Taipei, and my neighbor with a flashlight rooting through the dumpster.
Unknowing of its ugliness a Spirit A320 lands at LAX like it could do it every day for the rest of its life. Nobody tell her
When it rains it pours and when it burns so come the last DC-10s, or they will, or they won't, we won't know until the dust is settled on the sad MD-11 thing. three-holer problems
And they are all so beautiful, and so evil, so much so that it hurts to even look at... Time for me to log off for another 3 years or maybe forever. But you do have to keep in mind that every moment has existed forever, and what's coming for you has already happened
âEli Jacob Crowley, the famed pioneer figure who spearheaded Americaâs westward expansion by blazing the Crowley Trail in 1838, was an awe-inspiring figure of a man, as stout as a four-century-old oak, as intellectually complex as the fronds of a Florida palm, as singularly focused as the trunk of a Giant Sequoia, though in all other respects, not like a tree at all.â (John Hardi)
âIt wasnât fair to call Michael a scum-sucking monster from the deep, the miserable, fetid descendant of some unnamed demon who, after centuries at the very depths of the ocean, had somehow surfaced and found his way to Wall Streetâit was accurate, of course, but he preferred Michael.â (Allison Bryski)
and my personal favourite:Â
âOnce upon a time, there was a place where things happened; allow me to be more specific.â (John Wallace)
just fucking remembered contest again so nobody asked but here are some 2019 winner highlights
âIt was a dark and stormy night, and since this was Miami in July and everyone had left their convertible tops down, the rain fell in Cadillacs.â (Andrew Lundberg)
âWhen the tall dark, handsome, buff, and wealthy cowboy moseyed into my âBlazinâ Six-gunsâ novelty shop, I felt a wave of heat flood through me, as if I had accidentally swallowed my sub-lingual nicotinic acid lozenge, causing the niacin to be released instantaneously, rather than in a more controlled, extended, low-potency dose, for which means the prescription had been written.â (Randall Card)
âZajaxian Planetary Law required that war, if it must be fought, be fought not with bombs, bullets and blood, as on our own primitive Earth, but with serried banks of immensely powerful mainframe computers, even though they were bulky to carry and unwieldy to throw.â (Jeremy Das)
âThe High Gondonderil gazed on with horror as the Elgaborian legions marched at a single, pitiless pace into the once peaceful streets of Sar-Andrada, the capital city of the kingdom of Xanthil, located in a fantasy universe which might seem extremely confusing at present but which will doubtless make perfect sense to you, dear reader, once you realize that, like most fantasy universes, itâs basically just Tolkienâs Middle-earth with different names for things.â (Harrison Glaze)
would you look at that its time to talk about my favourite bad fiction contest!! here are some 2020 winner highlights
âThe first thing I noticed about the detectiveâs office was how much it reminded me of the baggage claim at a nearby airport: the carpet was half a century out of date, it reeked of cigarettes and cheap booze, and I was moderately certain that my case had been lost.â (Paul Kollas)
ââYou may know my true name,â gloated Archmage-Emperor !GfĆattâ BdĂșnĆáčœiobfhĆr to the foolish traitor who had dared try to end his glorious mage-empireâs reign, âbut can you pronounce it?ââ (Gideon Gordon)
âThe sound of his raspy voice and the feel of his chilly hand on her shoulder made her shudder, like the wooden things on the sides of windows, but a verb rather than a noun, and with two dâs rather than two tâs.â (Kagte Minyard)
âJarrod, lying in the bed next to Selina, on his side with his head in his hand, asked, âWhat would your husband do if he saw me right now?â and Selina, who was watching her husband sneak up on Jarrod holding a tire iron with two hands raised above his head, replied, âProbably sneak up on you with a tire iron raised above his head, preparing to use it for something other than its intended purpose.ââ (Randy Blanton)
itâs 2021 winner time and i want to be clear this time that âbad fictionâ is not a judgment on my part, itâs the whole goal of the contest. the about page says, ââŠthe Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.â iâm not insulting them. anyway here are my faves <3
âIt was a dark and stormy ⊠morning, Gotcha! â this is just the first of innumerable twists and turns that you, dear Reader, will struggle to keep abreast of as I unfold my tale of adventure as second plumber aboard the hapless SS Hotdog during that fateful summer of 1974.â (Louise Taylor)
âOur story begins in the cozy cottage of Bynnoldh-Dyr, son of Asgwitch-Torgwyr, in the idyllic elven village of Myrthffolwrd, but our book actually begins some two hundred pages earlier, in which you are pummeled by irrelevant history and unpronounceable names, because my publisher is paying me by the word.â (Neil B Harrison)
âAs the dawn begin to break, Debby and Robert, their arms tightly wrapped around each other, watched in awe as the sky turned a brilliant pinkish red as the sunâs rays inched their way down the slopes of the craggy peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but this was Canada so the rays were centimetering their way down the slopes.â (Daniel Leyde)
âShe had a deep, throaty laugh, like the sound a dog makes right before it throws up.â (Janie Doohan)
Do consider submitting something; thereâs no entry fee, no prize (sans bragging rights) and you can submit as many times as you want.
https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/submit
I have a paperback of entries from the very first contest. Not a winner, but my personal favorite:
Staring at the starkly white sheet of paper in his typewriter, John wondered - is it possible to write a novel, even the first sentence of a novel, in such a self-conscious and hyperreflective age?
John D. Glenn, Jr.,
New Orleans, Louisiana
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