The Unwritten Ending

 So I found out a bit over 5 hours ago that Kentaro Miura, author of Berserk, passed away suddenly two weeks ago from a heart attack. Acute aortic dissection to be specific, by all accounts an incredibly painful way to go but I'll spare the details of what that actually means (be warned if you look it up, it's not a pleasant mental image). 

I've kind of gone through a lot thinking about it in the last few hours, I mean honestly when someone first told me he had died I believed it some kind of elaborate hoax partly because rumors of his death had been faked before and at the time the only source of this news was written in Japanese language in an image shared to twitter by the publisher which could have said anything. But eventually news sites started to report on it, the first being a Japanese news site which google translated into a confirmation of his passing soon followed by several English sites also passing on the sad news. 

I mean for years a lot of people within the anime and manga community sort of joked that Miura would probably die before he finished Berserk based on its frequent hiatuses from regular publication over the last 12+ years. I suppose in hindsight Miura was likely suffering from actual health issues that he did not want to disclose to the public and so he just kept radio silence. By all accounts he was a great person, always seemed happy at the publication office.

So the next stage I went through was to wonder about the fate of the series. Part of me just considers it over. I know in reality that's probably not the case at all, reportedly he had been training assistants to work on the series in the last couple years of his life. He has also reportedly stated that he wished for his son to continue the series should he be unable to conclude it but I don't even know if his son can draw. I assume either his assistants or his son know of the general plan for the series events. I doubt many details are fully fleshed out, I bet it's mostly ideas with a few main outcomes stated. But maybe there's a chance something more substantial than that exists in written form waiting to be planned into a visual artistic medium. I don't even know if it'll continue in manga format, maybe they hand the script to an animation studio and ask them to interpret the conclusion but that's probably a stretch. I don't think any accomplished artist in the industry would want the pressure of ending Miura's life's work, a task that seems impossible without some level of unfair criticism. Personally I'd be fine with just knowing the outline and I'd be more than fine if they allowed any other artists to interpret that ending in their own way without calling it the definitive ending, perhaps as sort of a celebration of the series.

And around 2 hours ago it finally hit me exactly how big of a loss Miura is for not just the manga industry, but for entertainment media in general. There's so many things that exist that were directly inspired by Berserk or that reference it, several current artists and directors drew inspiration from Miura's dark fantasy world to create their own unique stories and settings. And I'm not just talking about the obvious ones like the Souls games or Dragon's Dogma (the video game and not the shitty netflix series I can't believe I live in a world where I have to clarify this), the netflix Castlevania series draws a lot of inspiration from Berserk for how it handles a lot of its brutal massacre scenes. Really the more I think about it I realize a lot of what Berserk established decades ago left such a lasting impact on its readers and anime viewers that it inspired the next generation of creators to want to make similarly dark stories in a fantasy setting. 

It's always unfortunate when someone dies before they can finish their work, especially when Miura's work was a labor of 31 years. I don't consider his failure to complete it in a timely manner to really be a bad thing though. The fact the series lasted until the day he died, that's 31 years he could reach new readers and inspire them. Yeah sure the series itself has no conclusion and leaves off on a cliffhanger with several questions about key characters up for interpretation, but the journey that had been written up to that point still has value. If it didn't,  it wouldn't have been able to inspire at least a generation of artists from around the globe. The fact some guy from Japan managed to get recognition globally for his series, even if it's in a niche market; And beyond recognition the fact his work left a strong enough impact to inspire and influence its readers and left that lasting impact on them for life. You can't call it a failure, he did something that very few creative types manage to achieve and he did it on a larger scale than most. It sucks that he's gone. I can't believe tomorrow for the first time in my life I'll wake up and Kentaro Miura won't be alive granted I guess he's been dead for two weeks nearly since they kept his passing a secret till after the funeral for the family's privacy.

This might sound strange, but I don't know if we're ever gonna see another mangaka as influential as Miura. How could we? He defined a genre of storytelling in anime. Like the next closest we have is probably how Eiichiro Oda set the standard for large scale chaotic battles in shonen comics which I still don't think that's gonna leave a lasting impact because everything that's tried to mime it so far has become a complete mess of a series or a forgettable disappointment.

Insomnia

I used to be a far worse insomniac than I am now. I still get bouts of it pretty hard sometimes but I've learned to mitigate it by trying to sleep on something that keeps my mind away from all the problems of reality. Usually for me that's sleeping after furry porn or writing some fanfiction (whether sfw or not). I think I've mentioned before that I've been sleeping with extra pillows or a rolled up blanket or anything beside me for the last few years as well just to mitigate the feeling of loneliness with the comfort of feeling something next to me in bed. I still personally think getting custom made anime pillows is a waste of time purely because if you're trying to sleep the lights are out and your eyes should probably be closed anyways so there's 0 point to wasting money on a pillowcase when you're gonna be doing theater of the mind anyways. So yes those measures have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes me to fall asleep from a 2+ hour ordeal to around 20-30 minutes on a good night (purely counting time from laptop shutdown to best guess of how long I'm laying in bed with eyes closed hoping to just kinda pass out).

When my insomnia gets bad though, it tends to be more like 4+ hours of restlessness often continuing past dawn. Usually what spurs those on is getting lured into a train of thought that takes me back to reality, more specifically to my past and all the incredibly stupid decisions I've made in life that I regret and will probably never manage to erase from my mind until death (because the amygdala is just a cool part of the brain that does this with the things you want to erase most). I've mentioned bits and pieces of my past before, some I've mentioned on this blog and others I've mentioned to a handful of people in the RS3 discord. I still absolutely never want to bring up the major ones I avoid talking about mostly because nearly all of these happened when I was literally too fucking retarded to know better but also a lot of them involve specifically illegal and/or creepy acts that I've been a part of or had done to me as a child by other children. Now that I have your attention I am gonna clarify that all of these were "resolved" to some degree by adults and I don't think anything would have warranted a trip to juvenile hall especially considering the ages involved but we're talking if involved parties were maybe 5 years older there'd probably have at least been a police report for one of these and it'd go from being a really shitty awkward peer pressure scenario to something way more nefarious and deeply troubling. I'm not even gonna pretend that I've had a rough life, by most standards I haven't and all of my problems have pretty much been magnified by my own ineptitude and poor decision making so it's not like I was put into really dire situations but more that I've taken bad situations and made them so much worse for myself whether through pure obliviousness or just poor decision making.

Let me get the big one off my chest, 4th grade I was still in catholic school (the thing I refuse to talk about because my overall experience there was bad and got to a point where even the teachers there were doing everything in their power to exclude me from their cult). I barely hung out with anyone in that school at all (oh man I could preface this with my parents literally never let me invite friends over for my own birthday but my younger brother would always have huge parties with all his friends for his), but yeah I was kind of the gaming kid and like every other kid (outside of one) in my class was strict old style parenting no games only sports or low income with druggie parents. Probably a good reason in hindsight why I never had birthday parties but they'd all basically hang out in their own groups doing their own thing, and for the most part they all lived much closer to each other than I did to them so I was completely out of the loop with anything they'd talk about. One day a bunch of the jock kids decide to approach me with a weird question. I guess they'd noticed that I was kinda just looking around at other groups of kids and not actually engaging them so they decided to ask me what girl I liked in class. Oh boy a group of jocks pressuring the outcast for which girl he likes, I wonder what could possibly go wrong here. Let's just skip names and details for the sake of it but basically they dragged me over to girl and did the whole group circle thing around the two of us and pressured me into saying it in front of her which I mean she clearly wanted no part of this and honestly neither did I but I was too stupid to know that this wasn't just a normal thing that happens to everyone. So this is already awkward as fuck when they start chanting for us to kiss, at which point she's basically in tears and I'm like "dude are you guys sure this is ok?" because I was so fucking stupid that I literally thought they were some kind of authority figure on this. It was at that point that the circle closed on us and I was literally forced against her and ofc this is the part where the playground supervision shows up when it's already like 20 seconds too late to stop anything because fuck that fucking school holy shit those teachers all sucked the students were fucking shit devils disguised as proper young catholic boys and this in hindsight was also the moment I completely stopped believing in the whole church thing. The end result of this nightmare scenario was quite literally nothing, well I mean the girl's parents picked her up from school early, I just straight up recounted everything that happened and luckily enough for me the two witnesses who happened to be her friends (who I later found out also were the ones who literally fetched a teacher because those fuckers don't do their one fucking job) pretty much gave the same account. I served detention for one recess which is fair I mean I felt fucking terrible about the whole thing and still do to this day, and four of the jocks had their parents called and had to stay after school. You can probably see how this incident kinda ruined any chance of me having a normal life at this catholic school for the rest of my hellish time here (which thankfully was only until the end of 5th grade), but yeah I obviously couldn't hang with most of the boys in my class anymore cause I literally ratted them out and I also couldn't even bring myself to be within ten feet of that girl again which I can only hope she appreciated but I know deep down she probably was happiest when I transferred schools. I didn't even want to hang with her friends even though they seemed at least understanding of the whole thing.

And this is only one of many incidents I could recount from elementary school, granted this is easily the most disturbing and fucked up one. Most of the others involve fucked up things being done to me rather than me being too much of a child to understand literally anything and getting pressured into doing horrible things because of it.

The other one that I regret a lot was after I transferred and I don't even remember the full context for what led up to it but basically 8th grade I was fucking around with some of the 6th and 7th graders and just kinda being there on the peripheral as I normally am while they played tag or something with second graders. I don't know what I was thinking but I noticed my shoe was untied and for some stupid reason decided to stick my foot out and lean over to tie it rather than crouch down and ended up inadvertently tripping some random kid in the process. Kid was fine, a bit startled but otherwise fine but everyone flipped their shit because they thought I'd done it on purpose. I mean kid was fine I helped her up we move on right? Apparently wrong. I get told there will be a trial for it next recess, whatever the fuck that means. Apparently that means we'll have the kid with the best grades in his class decide how to punish you based on testimony. This apparently means no matter what I say or do I'm gonna get punished somehow over a random accident in which no one was hurt. No one was hurt, which meant the punishment wouldn't be physical. No, instead it'll be psychological because great I certainly don't have enough shit wrong with my head at this point in life. "Eat my gym sock" they said. "No." I reply. At this point I'm literally jumped by 7 people at once and force fed a gym sock because once again teachers don't exist on playgrounds because that'd make fucking sense. I'd say this continued but it didn't, literally the second sock is into mouth they're like "yep that's it we're cool now".

Fuck you Sheldon we're not cool. That's fucked up man.

Needless to say that was the last time I hung out with the 7th graders. At this point you might be starting to see where a lot of my social anxiety comes from when I literally can't trust my classmates after all the shit in catholic school and now I can't even trust kids a couple years younger than me to not punish me over a minor accident. Do you maybe see why I'm fucking terrified of anyone I know in real life learning anything about me beyond name, age, and sex? Do you maybe see why I want steer well clear of children? I mean the only thing you wouldn't see from this is why I'm such a fucking mess when it comes to my own sexual orientation cause I literally don't even know if I'm bisexual or asexual just based entirely on the fact that I don't think I'm ever gonna be comfortable enough with another human to even engage in sex (and there's a few small incidents I'm omitting for that). Maybe you see now why I latched onto furry porn so strongly as an escape from the reality tied to my own sexual needs.

I literally still to this day find myself unable to sleep at night sometimes whether it's from the non consensual mosh pit or the destruction of my oral health or one of dozens of other incidents that decided to pop into the front of my mind from literally the most difficult 5 year stretch of my life. Tonight is one of those nights and instead of immediately running away into my own fanfiction fantasies I decided to finally say fuck it and get at least some of it out and put it in a place where if anyone ever raises an eyebrow at me in discord I can just link them to this journal and they can respond with as many unsettled tom emoji's as they want.

What do I even do anymore?

Good question me from the post title. Well when I'm not literally asking myself questions to pretend as though anyone gives two fucks, I just sit at home attempting to empty my massive watch later playlist of youtube videos while playing RuneScape or something. It's almost always RuneScape, though for most of the last 3 weeks it was a lot of Pixelmon until I'd basically found every biome and got down to a point where I could complete the dex or work on breeding myself a team. Instead I decided to just say fuck it and breed every Pokemon that I used in that one shitty pokemon fanfic I'd been updating since 2014, and once I had good natured and decent IV versions of those I just bred a bunch of other pokemon that I had thought of adding to that thing until I literally exhausted that list and in the process exhausted my desire to play Pixelmon.

"So wait, you just sit at home and play video games and watch youtubers?"

Yep, welcome to the results of my college education. To be fair that's not exactly all I do, I do have part time jobs that pay minimum wage and have low hours a week which enables me to do things like not live on the street and not starve to death, but that's about it. Honestly if I wasn't renting from my parents I wouldn't even have internet access because my monthly income would need to probably double to be able to afford my own internet connection. I could get back into doing youtube videos but I'm not monetized and also I'm not good at being a youtuber and that's both a personality thing and an equipment/software thing. But to be real that's not why I don't upload videos again. It's entirely because I haven't put in the effort to test the capture capabilities of whatever software came with my laptop, but also movie maker is dead and fraps doesn't work with the photos app because photos hates .avi files for no good reason and when I tried to run it through vlc's file converter it nuked the audio and only kept the video but I can't tell if that was my fault or just the limitations of vlc. The whole reason I even used movie maker was because fraps makes massive 4gb files every ~10 minutes of video and that's way too big to upload directly but also even if I disabled the 4gb split option in fraps then I'd have just a massive video file that'd take like a week to upload to youtube and also I'd have no software capable of editing the file to find and fix mistakes. This in a nutshell is the layers of issues that made me realize that continuing my uploads and stuff wasn't even worthwhile anymore as self therapy to pretend I have a place in society.

"Welp that took a turn. You ok?"

I've answered this before kinda in another post. As far as my physical well being goes I'm fine. Mentally I've gotten scary good at ignoring my shortcomings and problems purely to avoid completely melting down. A few people from discord know this about me but the summer before I went to university I started to notice I was having weird involuntary reactions to being out in public. Like if I went out to a restauraunt with family that I'd always feel nauseated after a meal no matter how much I did or didn't eat. The first couple times I just dismissed this as either food poisoning or illness but then I had it kick in at my grandmother's funeral which was full of people I'd never met before, and then again when someone related to my grandfather invited us to dine with his family. I never bothered seeing a doctor about it because I already knew what it was. My great grandmother suffered from horrible anxiety attacks that she had to take pills to suppress but as far as I know that was the only person in my family who suffered anxiety attacks. I guess my reclusive nature caught up with me and brought it out and it's gotten worse over the years. I wouldn't say so much it's that I enjoy being alone, more that I like to know when people are around me and I only feel comfortable around people that I know on some level. I've literally jumped out of my seat from people entering my room and saying hello just because I couldn't hear them approaching. I'm already socially awkward enough as is without having ridiculous panic attacks over an unanticipated greeting. It goes beyond this though as within the last year I've had panic attacks from things I never expected would impact me in that way. One of my fears is working retail, not because I can't do math or take orders, it's because I don't like making mistakes and there's no undo button for social interactions. An artist on furaffinity that I'd been paying attention to mentioned an rpg maker vore game thing with a retail theme and I figured I'd check it out. That decision ended up keeping me up all night because the stress of counting change and checking returns with a  timer present made my heart beat out of my chest and I was literally sweating from head to toe. My reaction wasn't as violent when I went back to the game days later just to try and force myself to get over it but it still didn't feel good to play. A game I checked out purely because it involved the one fetish that inevitably always gets me hard ended up having the complete opposite effect on me entirely because of setting. That's when I realized that maybe it's not normal that I've always had to psych myself up to go to work or go to the store or even go to the bank  to deposit a cheque in a machine. Maybe I've always had this problem and it's only coming out now as a symptom of my prolonged self isolation from others.

"Prolonged self isolation?"

Yeah, I can't remember if I mentioned this on here before but I don't see it in part 1 of my "how are you doing" post so I guess I should get into it. There's easily a book that could be written on my elementary and high school experience and this book would have an ambiguous non ending with a lot of really stupid shitty things that I've both done and had done to me. To save time I'll just say that I didn't have that many "friends" coming out of grade 8 and a large part of that was a sixth grade school transfer for reasons I could literally write a book about. I did keep a few though, for anonymity's sake we'll call em T Mic  and Stevie B (and not because I was into rap/hip-hop as you're about to find out). The three of us were basically the outcasts of our class heading into high school, T Mic having spent all of his time on the internet finding country classics then watching porn and talking about it at school. Stevie B had a much more normal upbringing other than being extremely into dubbed anime and also 90's classic movies like Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park which he'd watch religiously every other week from the comfort of his YuGiOh bedsheets. I never really had much to add to either of their conversations, not being as huge into media as Stevie B and being way too innocent to look up porn on my parents pc (especially cause I thought my dad actually knew how computers worked at the time and would find out immediately). There's tons of dumb one off things I can remember happening with us but nothing particularly bad or incriminating, mostly just jokes at our own expense. Eventually as high school went on T Mic stopped hanging with us as much as he had started working a few jobs and Stevie B went on to college at some point to do whatever. They both ended up changing and doing their own thing while I stayed behind waiting for a change that never came. I always had something to say in response to all their antics but I never had anything to share back then and thinking about it I still don't really have much to share to the point where I have to just expose myself and leave it all out there just to have something to talk about. I'd mentioned before that I stayed for 13th grade just to get more science credits, during that whole year I  had no one to really talk to and I just ended up being a third wheel in a bunch of in class conversations with people a year younger than myself. I ended up mostly just listening to whatever they'd talk about, maybe chipping in every now and then on rare occasions but otherwise silent. I didn't really mind it that much, I mostly didn't want to bother what were essentially strangers who were already part of their own group. I'm the kind of person who'll never initiate conversations but once you get me talking I won't shut up because I'd been repressing possibly weeks or months worth of things to talk about. So yeah if you can imagine not having anyone other than family to talk to about anything for around 10 years? That's basically where I was before discord and before I started using this blogspot again.

"what the fuck it wasn't 10 years you'd have gone full on cabin fever"

It was 2009 to present day pretty much, I literally don't know anyone irl other than family and my employers and I definitely don't feel comfortable talking to them about anything going on in my life purely because they actually know me and know where I live and what I look like right now and they have the power to basically make me disappear if they have reason to. The main reason I havent' gone full cabin fever is I still am in contact with humans, it's not actual true isolation cause my current living situation basically requires me to be in proximity to other people daily. I'd probably be full on suiting and writing erotic smut for pay if I didn't have to worry about people finding out what I'm into. Honestly I don't even care if they find out, I just care about not living on the street cause I'd sooner end it all than have to be cut off from the only method of communication I have with others. That's pretty much where my life's at right now, just waiting for the day I inevitably die and trying to enjoy whatever time I have left until then.

200m Mining xp

Oh hey time for me to talk about that thing I did last week. Those who know me (who am I kidding no one really knows me) know that I've played RuneScape off and on as an f2p pure since 2005 and that the accomplishment I'm most proud of was reaching the 85 mining milestone in the last quarter of 2006. Mining's changed a lot since 06, but even as recently as 2015 I still felt some level of accomplishment from reaching milestones in the skill (2015 being when I 99'd mining followed by half my other skills). 13.034 million xp, that's a pretty big number and it's around 4x larger than the xp required to hit 85. 200m is numerically equivalent to getting 99 mining over 15 times (200m also being the hard cap on experience in one skill in RuneScape). Yet despite finally achieving the thing I always considered to be a far off goal for the future, I still feel like I've achieved nothing of value.

For the better part of the last 4 years I've played RuneScape daily, averaging probably 3 hours a day.  That's a lot of playtime in a game that as is already doesn't have that much engaging content beyond community interaction, and I intentionally limit myself to free to play simply because becoming a member at this point would devalue the entirety of the time spent to reach my milestones without membership. There's other reasons as well, probably the biggest of those being that I don't actually like MMO's at all and RuneScape is the only one I know of that doesn't completely paywall you after x time playing and lets you continue to rack up experience among other things just for the sake of leveling. It also helps that most of the leveling is just low effort time consuming stuff which makes it the perfect game for me to just boot up and play casually while I watch other things. It's very low effort multitask friendly gameplay is a huge part of my playtime, most other games require too much focus to effectively play while trying to watch visual media.

Because I play the game so casually nowadays I honestly stopped feeling like my increasingly high xp values had any meaning to them beyond just being numbers that kinda reflect time spent playing but not really. Even as early as 2017 I was self proclaiming myself as a casual player within the f2p community despite my rapidly increasing rankings. Others seem to agree that rankings within RuneScape itself mostly comes down to consistent time played per day, but then how does one climb the ladder to even have a hope to catch people who've played for 10+ years? Well the answer is you start to break apart the game mechanics and figure out exactly how much you can do at once in game to gather xp across multiple skills in the same time, and you start figuring out xp rates for everything. I'd started tracking my xp rates for doing various actions as early as 07 and still have an old outdated notepad file from 2010 on xp rates that are no longer even relevant.

I ended up eventually finding more like minded people who had already figured out all of this stuff for old school and had brought some of their methodology to RS3. They use EHP (efficient hours played) as a rating to determine playtime by taking your experience in individual skills and dividing it by the optimal xp/h for your level (taking into account that a level 30 woodcutter will cut slower than a level 90 one and can't access higher level tools, amongst other things). The xp/h is subjective to being "within reason" which generally means anything that costs more than 25gp per xp as well as methods that are incredibly taxing and difficult to execute over long periods of time. Rune platebodies pre smithing rework were not considered EHP due to absurd cost, and cutting willows while both fletching and firemaking but also alching while proven doable for an hour at an optimal rate was by consensus agreed to be far too ridiculous to maintain for any significant length of time purely because it took the person who submitted the method about 22 attempts to even record herself doing it for an hour.

For the last two years I've adapted my playstyle to take EHP into consideration, and since then my playtime average per day has probably been closer to 5 hours a day. Hell I was even using methods that are faster than EHP with shooting stars and evil trees (neither are considered EHP due to limited availability and daily caps). I kinda fell into this trap where all of a sudden I felt compelled to play as efficiently as possible for as long as possible to reach my goals. I'm still only playing when I have things to watch but what ended up happening is I just found more things to watch to make up for how fast I was burning through videos. I literally follow four different D&D/tabletop campaigns and have a fifth queued that I meant to watch months ago but literally ended up having a never ending 20+ videos to watch later in queue due to the best friends disbanding and me then following them individually and taking on like 10 more hours of video content per week on that alone. I could literally watch videos for 12 hours a day for the rest of the week and I'd still probably have a few things queued in my watch later playlist. I'm basically stuck in this never ending media cycle to the point where I'm literally picking and choosing from my sub feed and still ending up with too much on my plate.

With all that in mind, since the start of January I've mined the equivalent of 800+ hours of gameplay. Yes that's right, 800 hours. In the final month and a half leading up to 200m I was legitimately doing 8-12 hour days every day of the week even going as far as to wake myself up at 8am for the first time since university just to get an extra hour or two in. I actively pushed myself close to my limits for a whole weekend where no joke I was sleeping in 4 hour shifts just to capitalize on a rotating xp multiplier (which included me literally waking up at midnight to play 4 hours then sleeping and waking up at 8am for another 4 hours, there were other instances of this including a 2am wakeup and a 6am wakeup). The day after that I legitimately slept 11 hours straight and still woke up feeling drained. Despite all this crap I put myself through just to get to get myself to a stupid number, when I finally got to within a few hours from it I didn't feel pride or accomplishment, I honestly just wanted to get the number purely so I could stop pushing myself this hard. And that's what I did, I got my 200m and didn't even really plan a party, people were given two minutes of heads up and whoever showed up was there. What did I do an hour later? Did a daily challenge and then just finally took some time to play games I'd been itching to play for the last few months.

What did I play? Pixelmon's apparently back from being Cease and Desisted and I've wanted to jump back into that since forever so the next day I did Pixelmon, for 18 hours straight. Here's the kicker, the only reason I stopped playing Pixelmon after 18 hours is because the sun was literally rising because it was 6am. I literally wanted to keep playing otherwise. That's when it hit me, for over 4 months of my life I had literally forgotten what it was like to enjoy playing games. I haven't binged a game like this in a very long time, I wanna say Borderlands was the last game I pulled all nighters playing and that was back in 2013 I think. Yeah sure gen 7 of Pokemon I did some late nights but I never played through the night with it. Hell even before Borderlands all I can think of is the very first night I found Minecraft and ended up playing it from 8pm to 8am on a night where I had classes that afternoon. But now I feel myself even drained from that somewhat, and today I ended up doing some gardening outside for over 4 hours straight and probably would have kept going at that if not for me also needing to both cook and then shower because I smelled like ass after those 4 hours. I still want to try my hand at Sekiro, and to a lesser extent DMC 5 but I can probably hold off those till my birthday.

I guess if there's anything to take from this its that when I set myself to do something I'll basically destroy all semblance of schedule to get it done, but also I tend to lose myself in doing things a lot. I actually enjoy being busy, it's probably why everything I write ends up being 700 pages long.

So how are you doing? Part 2

The year away from school was awkward for me, I had two choices before me and one was to just work dead end jobs the rest of my miserable existence or to take the last year worth of college savings I had into a one year course to try and turn this shit around. I went with the latter and opted for something completely different. I took a one year chef training course. Cooking is something I kinda knew how to do before even going to University and after my grandmother's death I was in the habit of cooking literally every day to feed my grandfather anyways and it was the one constant in my life during those 3 years where I could just forget about how bad I was doing in school for an hour a day. I didn't retreat into cooking like I did with gaming, it was a more constructive and healthy hobby.

I get accepted into the program and once again I find myself back with my grandfather who at this point is being taken care of by my aunt and uncle and their grandchildren because of the progress of his dementia accelerating to the point he can't actually leave his own home without getting lost. By the way when I say grandchildren I mean a toddler and a four year old who are in protective custody because my cousin has a knack for picking coke addict boyfriends to have unprotected sex with and it's not a good look when child protective services checks in only to see the father cutting lines of coke on the dining room table next to a preschooler and a toddler. But now I'm off topic again. I take the program, I do well in my classes and am consistently top of my class in all the written assignments and tests but I'm rather middle of the road in the kitchen itself. I started to get comfortable in the program and once again subconsciously found myself slipping into that zone where I'd be fine spending the rest of my life in this situation even though I only have maybe 2 hours to myself every day and those two hours I wasn't in any position to be recording which is why I took that nearly year-long hiatus in 2014-2015. It wasn't till the final practical exam that I once again had life bitch slap me in the face.

Chef training practical was simple, just create a three course meal and dessert  to be graded on with a $25 budget. So I get my ingredients in place to be ordered and everything's on track until I get a phone call the day before my practical. It's my parents, apparently my grandfather on my mother's side had terminal cancer, with multiple tumors in his brain, colon, and kidney. Yeah needless to say that completely destroyed me so thanks for timing that reveal. I went into my practical the next day completely distracted by that, so when the chef who supplied us all with our ingredients cut corners on the stock and gave everyone a flawed stock on purpose to fuck with people I straight up wasn't even thinking of tasting the stock before and was in full autopilot. This oversight combined with a few technical errors under pressure almost cost me my practical exam which would have seen me fail the course. I got a pity 50% on my practical which dropped me from an 85 to a 70 for the class and lowered my gpa to below 4 but I still graduated the program and as it turns out a restaurant in my hometown was looking for a chef from the program to come in and work for them. So I'm set up to actually work in a kitchen and get decent wages right?

Well it's never fucking simple because fuck you I guess. That's just how life is. For context I never actually had a job up to this point, with my social anxiety and desire to avoid being in uncomfortable situations I straight up avoided anything that required interacting with customers directly. I just can't see myself being the face of anything, I've always wanted to be a behind the scenes presence and let the people who have the patience and will to interact with others do that stuff. Turns out this chef job in town they just threw me in cold thinking that I was working in actual restaurant kitchens in college or something and not realizing that it was a 50 person program and the actual restaurant setup in the program had at least 15 students cooking within at all times so there was never a one man scenario back there. I was not prepared for the sheer volume of orders and through this experience I realized I have a massive inability to multitask effectively across orders. It's one thing when you have a minute to sort out order of operations for what you need to complete one order, it's another entirely when you're alone and have a waitress breathing down your neck bringing another order every three minutes and you just don't have time to stop and think you just gotta do it or sink. I sank and after not even a month I was fired. Turns out good grades are not a reflection of your ability to function in society. To this day this still pisses me off even though it's been almost 4 years since I last had a full time job. I actually enjoy cooking and life once again basically told me that I can't be successful at the thing I enjoy. What the fuck do I do then? I tried applying to other restaurants in town but they all turned me down so I can only assume I got blacklisted by my last employer. So yeah there goes the one shot I had at getting a job I could not only tolerate but actually enjoy on some level.

Six months go by, my grandfather passes away of terminal cancer followed a month later by my great grandmother who literally outlived all of her friends in life including her own son before slipping into a deep depression and succumbing to a common cold that she lacked the strength or will to fight off anymore. There's a lot of details in this part that I've mentioned to a couple people before, I think? The gist of it is my social anxiety with public functions kicked in super hard for both of these events to the point I almost couldn't even be a pall bearer for my grandfather's funeral due to stress related nausea, and I outright couldn't even get my suit on for my great grandmother's before dry heaving uncontrollably at which point my parents were just like "yeah no you literally can't do this". More resumes to restaurants and more lack of callbacks, and by summer 2017 my sister is going off to art school for a graphic design degree or something leaving a job opening at my parents church for a custodian. That's how my chef training degree got me a part time custodial job. Literally overqualified for a job that can only pay employees for up to 4 hours of work a week at minimum wage. I barely make anything with this job, basically enough to pay rent to my parents and have almost nothing leftover. I do cater a bit on the side for the same church but they're not very busy so at most I might make like an extra $240 a year on top of that piss poor weekly rate and that cash is basically what I use to buy stuff for myself. Yes effectively I only have about $240 in actual spending money per year at the moment and once that's gone it's gg for me buying anything for the year. This doesn't count the actual government tax returns and stuff I get for being in low income hell, and every day I'm just glad I didn't fall into the student loan scam because I'd have been homeless over 3 years ago if that was the case.

And this is where I remain to this day.

If anyone's even still reading this here's my advice on post-secondary education. Don't bother unless you know what you want to pursue, and even then fund it with your own money or borrow money from your parents, don't do loans unless you want to risk going homeless if shit fails. Even if you know what you want to do, make sure you are as prepared as possible to actually do it. Learning how to do a job in school isn't the same as actually having experience in the workplace and it never will be. No amount of post-secondary education is going to teach you how to cope with workplace pressure because school pressure is very different and you're given a much wider window to get your schoolwork done than you'd ever be given in the workplace.

I'm not arrogant enough to claim my failure is a result of the education system alone. Not at all, I actually am very happy with the stuff I learned and I still use everything I learned in that chef training program daily to cook for my family. The program actually improved my life from where it was before. However, the program does not guarantee you'll be able to hold down a job but it can guarantee you'll get job offers even before graduating officially. Those are two very different things. I'm just not an ambitious person by nature and have always settled for less under the stipulation that I can maintain access to basic utilities and internet. That's literally all I need to remain comfortable.

Sure I get lonely sometimes which is usually when I slip into writing either fiction or talking to myself through a public blog and pretending anyone's reading it this far past the purgatory of my youtube channel. I believe I've already covered a number of the side effects of my loneliness in prior posts, you know between the furry porn and 5+ years of the same pokemon fanfiction that I think I'm officially killing because of how insanely repetitive and unfollowable it became which just makes me all the more glad I never sent it to anyone.

Well I guess I can mention one I never really talked about here which is with the advent of Smash Ultimate I finally got back into Smash after not touching it since literally subspace in brawl back in like 2008? Either way I mained Lucario through most of spirits mode just because he was one of the earlier unlocks I got and I got used to using him. As you can probably guess the little furry bastard force palmed his way into my dreams and I started doing something I hadn't done since college which is sleeping with a pillow beside me just to feel like I wasn't alone. This time though I went a step further and wrapped the pillow in the warm fuzzy blanket I got as a Christmas gift alongside smash ultimate which is like the AR version of my one weird pillow trick as it now feels like I have something warm and fuzzy at my side. Yeah I'm at the point where I pretend to be sleeping beside figments of my imagination for comfort, because I've 0 confidence in anyone existing out there who'd even want anything to do with me let alone be able to satisfy what I want in a partner. Depression and social anxiety coalescing in an unholy union to make me a permanent undesirable in the eyes of modern society which only furthers my escape from reality.

I'm not at rock bottom but I can see it from here.

And that's my answer to "So how are you doing?"