Hipster Arcade

[opossum-handz]

[64mpg]

guy who has a mental health condition that comes and goes: i’m cured this time actually i can feel it

[64mpg]

same guy when they start having symptoms again: what the fuck is happening and why

[paper-wounds]

[woodrider]

ma'am, I'm going to place you on a brief hold while I look for a reaction image

[bitchontheprairie]

carved into a cobblestone in brussels, photo via maarten inghels

[theglasschild]

Everyone's out of focus when they're moving too fast to be seen

Here's the thing about everywhere: it's nowhere specific.

The words you want are heavy? Fine. You're thirty-two and running out of money. You check your bank balance obsessively like it might change its mind. You haven't had a real address in two years.

Listen. Everyone's out of focus when they're moving too fast to be seen. You want clarity? Stop moving. You want sharp? Stand still long enough— I don't know how that sentence ends. I don't know how any of this ends.

You say you want your fire back like it's something someone took from you. Like it's not right there in your chest, burning through every city you run to. You're not faded. You're overexposed. All that light you're looking for? You're bleeding it. That's the clarity. That's the shape of it: You, hemorrhaging light in another rented room, calling it darkness.

– Charlotte Eriksson

[fairycosmos]

ping ponging back and forth between seeing immense beauty everywhere and feeling deeply like i am in hell

[duckdotcom]

I love using "by the way" as a segue into topics that are completely unrelated to the matters at hand. it isn't remotely by the way, quite a ways out of the way in fact. a little adventure

[erzvolnes]

certain kind of tragedy i think in still following your childhood best friends online. like once upon a time you knew me better than anyone. i thought we would be friends forever. now we are Adults and Different and even despite that I so badly wish we could still Talk like we were 13. i dont know who you are. I miss you.

[lazyydaisyyy]

The problem is that beginnings and endings overlap, so you think something is ending when in reality something else is getting its start.

Fernanda Trías, Pink Slime

[theglasschild]

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.” ― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

[theglasschild]

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.” ― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

[hipsterarcade]

When I attempt to post something after an extended period of time I find myself questioning every aspect of this page, from my writing style and amateurish photos down to the layout and the name. How much of who I am is in a name? I've been "HipsterArcade" for a decade now. Does one outgrow a moniker and get to change it or is it something we live with and carry with us?

This probably sounds silly as you, dear reader, understand well that I can and have changed my name with a few presses of the smartphone screen but somehow it feels disingenuous. I'm not sure I have a real point to what I've said so far except to say that I'm not sure how to identify myself anymore. Not that I've ever been too sure of that but lately I feel even less so. I find myself mentally weak. Crippled by addictive tendencies and poor impulse control. I've wasted years running the same laps on the metaphorical treadmill.

I want to revive this blog, try to post semi regularly again. I'm not sure how much of a community Tumblr has these days but I've had this account for nearly a decade and so much of who I am is embedded in this blog. So whether anyone is out there reading or not, here is my shout into the void.

Last month, in August of 2022, I bought a new camera. A Canon EOS 80D which I named Milo, a worthy upgrade to my decade old Canon Rebel T2i (aptly named Gertrude). Now I am working on learning this camera in and out and figuring out how to do new and creative things with it. For someone who has been doing photography this long, I'm pretty piss poor at it. But I'm learning and adapting and upgrading my hardware and soon I'll be trying to learn to edit. In the meantime my girlfriend has inherited Gertrude and her high school photography classes have proved to have not been a total waste as she takes some really great photos. Though I've had Gertrude for over ten years she only just yesterday took her 10,000th photo. Whereas my 80D was bought slightly used and passed 10,000 last month. I'm not sure Gertrude will ever catch up in terms of shutter count but it's always good to have a backup.

I've been in a committed relationship for nearly two years now and it is going better than any I've ever had before. I fully believe I've found the one for me and that someday I'll be calling her my wife. Sometimes I find myself wondering, though. The negative thoughts creep in.

Would she still love me if she knew the totality of who I am? Would anyone? I truly don't think so. I struggle to reconcile who I've been with who I am and who I want to be. Who I've been is most unfortunately not too different from who I am, while who I want to be is so far off it feels unattainable. Yet still I feel compelled to try. Because I'm not sure I can take another day of the mediocrity I subject myself to. I have notebooks and web pages full of ramblings just begging myself to be better than I have previously been and I continuously come up short. How much of my life will be comprised of the same pathetic plea to myself to be accountable and to be better?

There's so much I don't remember. Years of my life that I remember less than a dozen memories from. So many people I've let down by not showing up when I said I would. So many events I was supposed to be at that I instead ended up flaking on. I can't bear to think of all the people I've let down, the ones I remember and the ones I've forgotten. As I've said so many times before, I want to be more than I am. But who am I?

For now I am Ryan. AKA HipsterArcade, and tomorrow, September 12th starts my journey. Who knows who I'll be at the end of this. Still Ryan, of course. Too much hassle and paper work to change that at this point. But maybe my URL will be different. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in my core I'll be different too.

I hope so.

[theglasschild]

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

[saturninefilms-deactivated20240]

I was talking to Celina either and she recalled a conversation she’d had with her mom earlier this morning.  She said that her mom reassured her cabin fever and obsessiveness by telling her that, “everybody is kind of losing their minds right now.”  And while it made me feel happy that she got something out of that sentiment, it also took me aback because there’s, at least PART of me, reassured about who I actually was before COVID-19 took effect.  All those punk rock ideals that I’d spent years trying to talk myself out of?  Those little peccadilloes that I’d deemed childlike and uninformed?  Well, it turns out that they were fucking right all along.  

Every day that goes by, I find myself wondering what the landscape of the country (and abroad) will look like once we discover a vaccine, when the virus eventually goes the way of the Dodo bird and all we are left with is a very vivid memory of a time where the whole world just kind of stopped moving.  You can literally look at pollution maps and see the effect that this virus is having (which is contradictory too, because for every day that it gets worse for us, it seems to get better for the planet herself).  How does one reconcile that?  I personally find myself loaded with a philosophical ammunition that had many years ago left me.  All of my childhood heroes were right all along.  I’ve been wrong trying to make it work in a system that doesn’t value me (or literally any of you with less than, say, $1,000,000 in your bank account, and even then, I’m being generous in that assessment).  

I wonder if any of these conservative fucks that spent entire years bloviating that minimum wage workers didn’t deserve more money are eating crow yet.  You know, the only people left that are making sure you can get your food and gas and general day-to-day services?  The ones that unlock the doors at Wal-Mart and offer you hand sanitizer as you leave?  The ones assuming ALL the risk so you can go home and make shitty Facebook posts about how they don’t deserve a working wage to begin with while safely in quarantine?  Has your opinion changed at all?  The worst part for me is knowing that, with almost certainty, most of them haven’t altered their opinion at all.  I can’t help but feel like the vast majority of people have been duped.  But I also have this lingering, odd optimism that if this bullshit continues as long as the experts are saying it will, that it will soon become impossible to deny the truth:

They don’t give a shit about you.  They’ll force you to expose yourself to a disease that could kill you AND AT THE SAME TIME cut your wages.  Whatever it takes to maintain their bottom line, lives be damned.  "Fuck them all!“ They say.  And so far, there’s been so much to distract people that nobody has been listening to them speak (and for a long time, myself included).  But I really do have hope that the one net positive of this COVID-19 epidemic will be, just maybe, a greater awareness of social consciousness. Maybe some empathy for our fellow human being.  Maybe that’s just wishful thinking and maybe it’s unbridled arrogance in a place where nobody can really check me on it, but I don’t care either way.  I’m running with it and it’s working.

So yeah, sure, in some ways I am definitely losing my mind.  I miss my friends.  I miss hanging out and having things to do.  The social part of me is going a little mad.  But my inner dialog?

For the first time in my life, I’m convinced about what I believe in.  And it sure as fuck isn’t anybody in the one percent. Eat the rich.  Compost the rich.  Fuck them.

[horseman-bojack]

I think there are people that help you become the person that you end up being, and you can be grateful for them even if they were never meant to be in your life forever. I’m glad I knew you, too.

[kyda]

mood