i'm either hungry, or i'm still dreamin

Writer figuring out what Love means, in both romance and pursuits.

[chipmnk]

Hoping things calm down soon for my brother. This was supposed to be his last couple weeks in Oregon before he went to Texas to be with my folks, save up some money. He was going to come up for the weekend, hand over the cat (I guess I'm fostering until he gets back), and then be on his way.

But his ex is apparently crashing out (rubber banding between "it's okay, I can do this alone" and "I can't believe I have to do all this on my own"), so he's taking the kids before she "does something stupid" (his words), coming up to drop off the cat, and then heading back down with the kids until ????.

Basically ALL of his money has been going toward taking care of her, saving her from her own bullshit. She already found a new apartment for herself that my brother is paying for despite the fact that he's technically homeless right now (he's thankfully been able to stay for a few days at their old house, technically squatting). I've had to help him out with bills because he ends up with nothing in his bank account every month the past few months.

I'm...frustrated. Because he's trying to be a good person, a good man, and she's frankly...insane (like actually insane) and leeching off of him, taking advantage of his goodness. She's also drawing out this uncertainty about how he's moving on from all this, starting his new life, and honestly preventing herself from doing the same.

[chipmnk]

hummingbird

He felt like he should have recognized these homes, the dirt roads. But: the tree lying on its side, the empty windows, the ghosts shivering against broken walls they could never step over.

She pointed at a pile of greying bricks, asked, Is that the school you went to?

He half-nodded, willing himself to taste chalk air or pencil lead against his teeth. Instead: the smell of gunpowder, iron, rainwater pooling.

But still: she inched their truck until he said, Stop. I think it’s this.

A skeleton of wood, carpet rotting. A window that he’d once remembered as stained glass, that he’d stare up into and pray to something he couldn’t ever understand, now blank.

He took the shovel from the truck bed. The door still stood firm, the knob rusting orange in his hand as he turned it.

Here: the kitchen, flower tiles cracked.

Here: a bedroom, stained sheets puddling in the floor.

Here: a living room.

I don't know, he said, None of this is where it's supposed to be.

They guided each other to the backyard. She said, We can go back. Maybe there's something else.

But he shook his head, said, No, this is it.

He walked to the center, a patch of dry dirt, and began to dig, the shovel's handle smooth and warm in his hands.

He pressed his ear to the small hole, listened.

This one is me, he said, When I broke mom's vase and lied about it.

She smiled, asked, Do you need help?

But he dug again a few feet away. He cupped his ear to the earth.

I think we're getting closer, he said, I hear him. A whisper about school, I think.

And here: the apricot tree, bare and wrinkled.

He pulled at the mud in front of the roots, the ground sticking under his fingernails. He dug past his wrist before he leaned down, head to the side, listened.

He's telling me, he said, He's talking about the hummingbird we found on the ground. I thought it was dead, but he leaned down, saw its chest moving. He took it in his hand and said, 'We can help it.' But when we got home, the bird wasn't breathing. I thought we should bury it, but he shook his head, said, 'It needs to be high up.' So we climbed the biggest tree and put it in the branches. We made a nest for it, canola, grass, balloon flower. We put it there. I asked, 'Do you think it's happy here?' and he nodded. He said, 'You can see everything from here'.

She wiped the water from his cheeks, said, That bird wasn't alone.

He put his mouth to the dirt, whispered short words, covered the hole and marked it with the shovel.

We can go now, he said.

They stood at the apricot tree, limbs raised to the sky, an antenna or jubilation.

[chipmnk]

Fuck man, I’ve gone from never getting sick to getting sick every other month this year. Prior to this year, the last time I got sick was September 2024, when I got covid. Couldn’t even tell you when I got sick before then.

I don’t know if it’s the bonkers weather or the fact that pollen counts have been insane lately, but I seemingly have another sinus infection. No cough. No real symptoms even. It hurts to swallow, and I can feel every swallow in my ears.

But I have a fever. I had chills this morning. I’m a little dizzy. I def have that general malaise.

Def gotta see a doc once this one passes.

[chipmnk]

3 things to be happy about this week

Got tagged by the lovely @madmoths.

Had a really lovely day yesterday celebrating a friend's birthday. We went wine tasting, hit up Powell's, went to one of my fav bars in town, and went to a pretty solid Italian spot. (Sort of proof of concept that I just can't do daydrinking anymore. But even with nausea that hit me by dinner, it was a really delightful time.)

Got some scans back from a recent roll. The whole roll was the wrestling show I went to on my birthday, and even though a lot of it was underexposed, there were still some cool shots.

Had a long game sesh with my best friend. Which ultimately just means we had an almost three-hour call while playing the game poorly. As ever, it's just good to talk to him.

[existencebringsonlypain]

i need data for a statistics project for school, so be my sample data, worms. i need thirty people minimum so if there aren't enough voters yet i'd love if you could help. thank you very much. worms.

take this test (https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/), then come back here:

what's your JND?

.00030-.00099

.0010-.0017

.0017-.0024

.0024-.0031

.0031-.0038

.0038-.0045

.0045-.0052

.0052-.0059

.0059-.0066

.0066-.0073

.0073-.0080

.0080 or greater

Voting ended onMay 13

it doesnt have to be a good score, you dont have to take it multiple times, you dont have to get on a good screen, etcetera. just gimme your score please this is my final project grade :)

i'd love if you could reblog for reach

[chipmnk]

Yesterday was this big photo show at the old camera store, and I went and had a good time.

One of my former coworkers got married on Friday. It was a bit of a surprise (partly because I already thought she WAS married to her very sweet, very kind partner), and honestly, everyone was really happy for her. She's like the one manager I actually genuinely liked chatting with when I worked there.

After the show, I was hanging with friends, walking to the next hangout spot. One of them (I've written before about this really miserable person) was like "How long are we going to hear about Manager's wedding and how cute and happy everyone was?".

And like:

a. It had literally been less than 24 hours since the actual wedding. I think it's okay for Manager and other folks to be talking about a major life event that literally just happened. Much less one that everyone is finding such light and happiness in.

b. Her saying that just immediately killed the vibe. Like, we were all enjoying the sun, the slight buzz of drinking some beers, talking and goofing, and then she said that and everyone was immediately quiet.

c. I don't know how you go through life with such an intense self-centeredness AND a true misanthropy. This friend ostensibly likes Manager! They get along at work! I get if it was like your work nemesis, but it's someone who you actually kinda see as a work friend! Like, another case of me wanting to say "grow the fuck up". The world doesn't revolve around you!

This is also where I continue to hammer the fact that therapy is (generally) good, but that doesn't mean every therapist is good. From what friend has said, her therapist feels like the type of person who just validates her insecurities, instead of encouraging her to do the work to move past her insecurities.

(She's also someone who frequently talks about "the trauma of being chronically single", which like...no, sorry, we can't throw the word "trauma" around like that. Yes, being single can suck in a lot of ways, but we can't just call that trauma. And it's also NOT an excuse to be shitty to other people.)

[chipmnk]

molded growth

Spot: It reminded him of a caterpillar he had seen in a textbook once, dark and furry, an omen for birds. I’m poison, so killing me will kill you. You should know this.

But here: the fuzzy spot lay quiet on his wall, still, ignorable.

The woman on TV said, This is something new. Don’t catch it. Don’t put it in a cup and spill it outside.

No one knew how fast the spot could grow. He wondered at what he was breathing, what spore now mixed in the tree air and planted itself in his throat, his lung.

He scraped at it with metal, with water, with chemical, and still it grew, swaying now in some breeze.

Night: he could feel the shape of it even in the dark, pulling away from the wall. He imagined it reaching to him, whispering.

But morning: the spot held firm, now more oval.

The woman on TV said, There are so many now. We know they’re alive. We know that they’re familiar.

Full moon: he pressed his palm to the spot, now as tall as him. He expected soot or dirt, but it felt like fresh mown grass. It felt warm.

And through the warm, he said, I miss you. I wish we’d had more time.

And the mold pushed at his fingers, tasted the spirals of his fingertips. The mold said, We can have it all right here. We can give and take and become something whole. We can call you at 3am to tell you that someone at the grocery store reminded us of you.

And by sunrise: the spot had grown, taking the whole wall, the side of the house, the smell of burnt orange and nail polish.

[chipmnk]

It's none of my business, but I frequently want to tell Gen Z/Gen Alpha dudes to grow their sideburns. I know it's a continuation/variation on the undercut, but the shaved sideburns is such a specifically bad look.

(The other side of this is me wanting to tell millenial dudes who are balding to just go whole hog and shave it all off. Bald head straight up *always* looks better than whatever weird combover situation you're trying.)

[k-artspace]

[chipmnk]

cut

Broken: I cursed, watched the blood already welling, dripping from hand to sink. I didn’t look, didn’t want to see flap of skin, exposed tendon, white bone. I stared at the glass, warm and clear, newly sharp.

The rag: already sticky, already praying for clotting, for scarring.

By morning, the rag stiff against my palm. I held my hand under the warm tap, the sting of a wound remembering.

But here: the color of autumn spilling, numbing. I thought of apricots, peach meat placed onto a plate.

But here: skin ripening. I pushed at the cut, felt it give even as it didn’t feel like me anymore. Out: a seed, a pit, jagged as bark, hollow in its center.

I swallowed it, a scrape against my throat, my stomach, my heart. I said, Where do we go now?

Outside: I clawed open the tree, spilling more autumn leaf. But desperate: the seed already sprouting, pushing away spleen and gall.

I nestled in the trunk, a church echoing in my shoulders. I breathed in the sunlight, sugar on my tongue. The roots had already broken through. I said, This is what I have left to give.

[chipmnk]

It's not lost on me that I have the ability to just walk into a room and immediately improve the vibe.

I'm in this creative group with friends, and we were talking about how to communicate with the group. I threw out there that I prefer email, and I've never felt so much like I live in completely a different world. Everyone else was like "No no, let's stick with Instagram DMs". Which like...I think DMs are fine one-on-one, but once you get a group going, especially one that involves organizing things, it's stupid and actively inefficient. It's impossible to find shit, and I've somehow become part of several group DMs that have slightly different permutations of people, so I have no idea how to find, say, the time and date of a meetup.

My allergies have been crazy this past week. Today is the first day in a while that I'm not just actively producing slime out of my face, but I still feel the pollen in my system. x_x

[socpens]

Fart ,

[chipmnk]

So last month, my brother and his longtime partner finally called it quits. It was messy, v messy, but I feel like their relationship has been eroding for a bit. They opened up their relationship last year, which was really already them going from being in a relationship to them just coparenting and cohabitating with zero feelings of romance or sex.

Anyway, my brother has since gotten kicked out. He initially stayed with me for a week. He then housesat for his neighbor, which worked out because the kids were out for spring break and he needed to help with parenting duties. The plan was to stay for my birthday and then go to my parents in Austin to save up some money.

Now: I guess his neighbor is coming home early, so now my brother is staying with me until the 27th. I’m annoyed, more at the general situation than with my brother. (Though also genuinely annoyed with his ex, who I think is actually insane and needs more than a therapist who validates her weird paranoia.)

It doesn’t really matter. I do love my brother, and I’m not gonna turn him out on the street (he’s also a guy with a good paying job who now has all of $50 to his name until Monday because, again, his ex is insane and only really wants to squeeze money out of him). It’s also just a big change to my already fragile routine. I don’t live in a HUGE space. I also just don’t want to leave him alone because he’s still going through the dissolution of a long relationship.

And man, 17 days is a long time. Having someone around just naturally means I have to shift myself.

It’s also my birthday month, and idk. This is v indicative of why I have trouble telling people what I want or knowing what I want. When in my life have I ever been allowed to want for myself?

[chipmnk]

Find someone who loves you so much that they’ll fly to the moon and name a crater after you.

[saidbyastoner]

Stoner Gossip #3

Eminem joined ISIS

[chipmnk]

I know I'm at a point of burnout when I get annoyed at my best friend for an ultimately fair (if not, like, wildly naive) opinion on a game.

[digsdigsdigs]

Kill Chain

On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

precise writing about "AI" as a bureaucratic problem as well as some military history of precision bombing

[digsdigsdigs]

i usually try to share articles with a pull quote because i know a lot more people will read it than will click through. but Baker writes in a densely argued way with a bunch of references to other writers and all my pull quotes were like a thousand words long. let's try something else since it's getting more reblogs than expected. my brief summary:

large language model ai like Claude and chat-gpt has been taking up all the attention around discussions of AI technology, but there are other kinds of AI too, that can't be understood by the discussion of LLMs.

Maven is an example of a technology that uses AI that is not large language model AI. it's a tool made by Palantir for the US military to conduct operations more "efficiently." He cites that the volume of strike coordination decisions that took two thousand people during the war in Iraq in 2003 can now be done with 20 people using Maven.

Maven is the tool being used right now to bomb Iran.

Baker goes into some detail about the history of how making bombing decisions more quickly became a priority of the US military, and criticizes how prioritizing speed means de-prioritizing anything that might slow those decisions down, like checking information for accuracy, or checking whether it was a good idea to bomb at all.

Baker explains how the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was enabled by this type of "efficiency." He criticizes the media for discussing this as a case of "AI error," as if it were similar to an incorrect chat answer from Claude, and letting the people responsible for these decisions go unchallenged.