something not about the scott pilgrim anime.

first written 01.24.25 0113est. edited 04.08.25 1323est.
    short preface: like most of my posts here, this is steeped in accounts of my past. the post itself is about scott pilgrim's little life and how it affected my dead end life. but it is about me foremost. which is to warn any readers seeking a more firm analysis about the comic that this is more of a vague meandering about my life as a dirt bag middle-schooler.

    In my second year of middle-school when we were first issued MacBooks and I got that Game Grumps wallpaper is when I first read Scott Pilgrim. The comic had a lot of cultural access points into my mind. so I was familiar with many of the internet's screenshots of it, and I was aware that there was a movie the fans were then so-so about. Some people who would later say shit like "Bazinga" ironically would say it betrayed the original comic's vision. But all the same it was spoken as though it was something made for us teenager scum bags on the net. Because of that I imagined Scott to be a talent-less neet a la Watamote's Tomoko, which I had watched by that point on my Pikachu 3DS XL which I had earned for achieving the honor roll in my first year of middle school. I liked Scott's hair and his girlfriend's hair. I really wanted to wear my hair long for all my life until I turned 21. But my parent's perfectly normal hair cut schedule for dirt bag youth didn't permit me to grow it any longer than  past my ears really.

fuck i didn't do it right.

    There wasn't quite a fandom like there is now. Which isn't a comment about scope but more about the existing infrastructure. I am sure on 4channel's /co/ or some forum unknown to me there was discussion and community. But to my eyes Scott Pilgrim was just a thing casually mentioned in web comics and Youtube videos. A covert way to signal: you too were uncomfortable with women.

    I sought out the fist volume on an aptly named website promoting free manga you could read in your damn browser. I read it on my dad's computer in his office. He wouldn't get home until 6:30pm -ish and I wouldn't get home from school until 3pm-ish, leaving me a cool 3 hours to use his computer. I had my own computer and even a laptop. But his computer played games better than either of mine. The irony is that most of my time spent on the device was just web browsing; something my laptop was perfectly capable of. When I finished that last page of volume I didn't really get it. I think I was more relieved to just say I had actually read it.

    I was confronted with this kind skewed semi ironic tone of Canada. A place which I was familiar with only on a very surface level because I told my middle-school peers that I was born in Toronto. Basically my only friend at the time besides the girl I loved, was this kid named Mason. He was a liar. Like me. We both knew it, and we indulged each other, I'm not sure why. He made an auto biographical YouTube video for his channel that would be called Mason the Talented (though what it was called then is lost to me) in the video he discussed also being born and raised in Toronto. We talked extensively via the Wii U video chat app about how much we liked Toronto and also how much we wanted to make an RPG together. A cute dance where we would dip and catch each other if either of  us dared to make a statement that could be retorted with any scrutiny.

    Which is to say that Canada to me was not different from Scott Pilgrim's depiction; the non existing contrast put me on heels. Basically I could smell my own shit. I stuck with the comic because of  its' cultural legacy alone. I read until the 2nd volume where after completing it my attention was sooner caught by Smash Brothers Melee. Some time later I watched the movie as an oh yeah something i read before kinda. I felt strangely ambivalent about it. It felt like something different, it felt like it wasn't for me. It felt like it was for guys who played guitar. Which maybe a more astute middle-schooler of the time would of correctly identified was also very true about the comic.

    Sometime later, which I cannot say with high certainty but in this moment I feel like that time later was after I had given up that the girl would ever love me, is when I read scott pilgrim in its' entirety. Which I sourced from a blogspot blog in the form of a FTP download for a PDF of each volume. I read through it in chunks each night, but never at school to my memory even though I had that MacBook with me. When I read it, I read it in my then bed. Which was setup out of a closet. The closet was out of the strange contraption that was my bed, desk, closet thing. I had a normal mattress bed that had just been moved into my room a few weeks before but I chose to sleep in that closet. I am not sure specifically why I did. Basically it's because I wanted to feel like the shape of unloved and relegated to a closet like Harry Potter, or it could of been some other compulsion to be sealed in. But in that closet with my LEGO blanket (its' consisting of bricks that were blue, yellow, red, and green) and plastic blue lamp that projected a blue tint to everything in that closet, I opened myself up to Scott Pilgrim's sad little life.

     I was captured. I am not sure if it was because I was finally more familiar with rejection or if more so being captured by the fear of rejection but It had finally lodged itself into me. The MacBook was held up by a pedestal of two books at the end of that closet and I would lay on my stomach with my elbows on the floor and my hands were a rest for my chin. It was rough on my elbows because the closet part wasn't sanded and was littered with uneven spikes of wood sticking out.

    After I read it in middle-school I cannot recall reading Scott Pilgrim again. Though I did really enjoy the demo for the Xbox Live Arcade game. I did play through that demo 7 times. I credit Scott Pilgrim (the comic) with helping me get over the fact that she didn't love me. I am not sure why it helped me, it wasn't really an escape. I think maybe it was just like Scott had Romana: this girl who was sooooo cool but he also had that killer ass ex played by Bri Larson in the movie and I guess it just gave me perspective, and maybe even the confidence to believe I could love someone more than I loved this girl in middle school.

    We often look down at how small our conflicts were in our childhood. But some perspective that can be lost on us now is that when we experienced loss as kids, that was often the most loss we have had ever felt at that point in our lives. Something as silly as a girl not liking you was maybe literally the worst thing that had happened to you yet.     

bb

headaches.

first written 01.23.25 19:13est

     I frequently experience something I describe to people as migraines. What I experience are not migraines. My mom frequently experiences migraines, she has for most of my life. She takes prescription pain relievers maybe every 3 days. In between she takes Advil. For all of my life she has carried around a little Advil bottle that I would be summoned to fetch out of her purse. I hated digging in her purse, there was always so many dividers. I could suffer through the clutter of the bag, but the dividers pushed me over the edge. Something explicitly designed to inhibit my navigation through the bag.

    I don't really feel that guilty about lying about migraines. I explain it to myself as a form of short hand. They aren't quite headaches, as they inhibit my senses; my vision goes blurry, infrequently I hallucinate, but each time I have an oppressive pain on my forehead. I have come to understand that when people evoke the term migraine it basically means you're incapacitated, my mom often experiences migraines like that. She has to lay in a completely silent and dark room until her body can evict the Migraine out of her. I like to imagine it comes out through sweat. Those little migraine droplets collect into the sheets and pillow and get absorbed through the skin again for later migraine purposes.

    Migraines to my knowledge while being influenced by multiple genes are not explicitly hereditary. But all the same I have surrendered myself to the idea that just over some hill lies the world of laying down for hours and being angry all the time at everyone who comes into your bedroom just to fuck with you even though just fucking thinking hurts you. I compulsively ruminated, and I have tricked myself into believing a lot of things like that. After a lot of regimented thinking I have been able to unlearn a lot of those things.

from The Social Network (2010) Eduardo Saverin's New York dark apartment moments before being assaulted by his then girlfriend.

    People feeling bad for my self described migraines makes me feel better. A writer I really covet and envy is Max Karson; mrgirl. He takes a very stoic disposition towards pity, something I think maybe granted to him by a dismissal of all things out side of his control. For a few years in my life I sought to adopt that kind of disposition, but I have found myself returning to the comfort of pity and vanity regularly. Sometimes when I am too comfortable; too incognizant, and often when I am my wit's end; when I am laying face down into my pillow in a dark room and when I yell at anyone trying to ask me a good faith question. I think it's reductive to label that kind of disposition (one of forfeiting other's people burdens) as stoic. Sincere selfishness is something too quickly stigmatized. Take any confident guy off the street who speaks without caution, he doesn't care about himself. If he did he would employ more discretion with his words, maybe endorse figures and ideas only when he's familiar with them. In that way he is foolishly trusting.

    Drink more water is such an annoying phrase. It's very judgemental, it carries with the assumption not just that you don't already drink enough water it is a judgement of your ability to even live inside your body. As if I can't know when my body isn't hydrated; as if I'm not responsible enough to walk around inside my fucking skin.

    i don't have a migraine

 

 

bb

building your own buddy.

 first written 01.01.25 1131est

    I have never made friends in my life. I am in no way saying that I don't have friends. Just that I have never participated in the active process of making friends. The whole breadth of my life I have been gifted friends by circumstance. Not that I am under any impression that people venture deep into the jungle to find friends. I have never made a friend of my own.

    Some friends have been given to me by mutual friends. That is the case with most of my friends. To be given to me doesn't just mean that I meet them and thing kick it off, these people more than not are prompted to be my friend. No matter how many times this ritual occurs, I don't feel guilt even though I should.

    I have tried many times to no success at just meeting someone. It is an embarrassing short coming that I dwell on frequently. I find being shy to not be a quirky trait of mine, but a fundamental short coming. For me I find that this inadequacy is rooted in sociopathy. It is a form of labor to me, to listen to people who I am not already familiar. On the chance I have forced myself into a situation where I am maybe expected to speak, I prefer being silent. I find that I rather stand in the doorway just creeping rather than confronting.

    I don't know if I live conflicted because of this. In the moment I am usually content with my situation, but when I can't take anymore I loathe having no where else to go. But that's maybe less conflict and just resenting the consequences of my lifestyle.

    Relationships because of this are always strained. I have made a show of leaving every one I know out of frustration only to come pathetically crawling back in a month. In that month of exile, I try to make it on my own. To which I am quickly reminded of my complete inability to make new friends. And so it is that since 2016 when I started highschool I have maintained roughly the same friend group.

    How this friend group was given to me was because I had made a discord server for a then fringe manwha called "Suicide Boy" authored by Parkgee. The server was mostly a place to facilitate the translation efforts to which I also contributed but I believe exclusively burdened. Being a server  owner I was introduced to a lot of people, and those people having organized out of a 4chan thread were a very certain kind of character. A kind of terse and entitled character, but one who wants to be understood.

     In no other circumstance would that many people wanted to talk to me. For a long time I felt guilty about that. I felt undeserving of attention, especially when the contributors to the project were right there. Now I don't really feel anything about it. Which I don't know if that's any better. People just kind of organize themselves like that, and the tribe elder will always have some buy in to most community activities.

    That server has long outlived me. Staffed by unfamiliar names, and home to people who aren't familiar with mine. This anonymity has granted me a sense of security. I don't have to feel embarrassed because no one remembers. I have a tendency to dwell on the past; like all men. But to me it is compulsive to a degree that it interrupts my ability to live in the moment. I truly do miss being around all those people. Not just the community fame, but the moments shared in chats, calls listening to music, playing Minecraft in chunks of 48 hours.

    Overtime this friend group has been eroded by the tides of egos, molestation, and drugs. what remains is only a loosely connected web of people who are held together less from cohesion and more from tension. I think that's maybe ok. Its ok to not like your friends. I do, but it is ok when I don't. 

"The minute you let her under your skin
Then you begin to make it better" Hey Jude

     Friends can often outpace us. I think when friends move on from us, they go to heaven and live happily with where our childhood pets go. 

    A lot of media wants to validate us being happy with our friends no matter what. Describing the most trivial of connections as unbreakable bond. But maybe you shouldn't be happy with your friends; and certainly not all the time. When you are mad at your friends it shouldn't be the end either. I have a terrible problem with forgiving people, not because I am selfless, but because I don't care enough about them.

in memory to my M3 pro macbook.

first written 09.30.24 2203est

    On September 11th 2024. From the Apples website's refurbished store front I purchased a M3 pro MacBook for roughly $1500. This was the most expensive single transaction I have had made in my life so far. embarrassing I know. I have never owned an Apple product before this. I was diving deep into a pool which in my circles was very unpopular.

    I have had only touch an Apple device thrice before. When I was very young, I was forced to wander the campus of EDU while my dad worked. In the biology labs, one of the offices I frequented housed an iMac g4. I had pulled up the LEGO website on it, to play a LEGO Star Wars flash game. The lab second nearest to that office had an Apple PowerPC. It was hot and loud. Much louder than my dad's and I's PCs at home. It felt like a crude piece of machinery. I made it a point to never touch that PowerPC. I wasn't supposed to touch any of the lab computers, but that hadn't been a concern to my discretion.

    In my 2nd year of middle school my school district was given a big flashy grant, that the admin made a constant big deal about. A large portion of that grant was spent buying a 2012 Mac book Air for each student. A decision by the staff, that confused me greatly at the time and only makes sense to me now if I am in my most cynical state of mind. Our school was quite ran down. Blinking fluorescent lights illuminated each sterile hallway. Our lunch table seats had been whittled down to only a little more than a pole. Our teachers were stretched thin and were of course poorly compensated. 

    But all the same I was issued a MacBook Air with a user profile that forbid me from touch files outside of the User folder. I could still run executables, but I couldn't install them into ~/Applications/. I liked it. When I first got it, the first thing I did was download a Game Grumps wallpaper. After leaving middle school, I didn't give much thought to that laptop. The subject of my ruminations during this part of my life was much about my new custom built PC and living with Linux permanently in my life.

    In current day, I was lured into the possibility of buying a MacBook by two Youtubers who I respect for their level headed endorsements. First was Wolfgang's analysis of his M1 MacBook air vs his previous X1 Carbon (the laptop I used before ordering the M3). Secondly Livakivi's intricate anecdote of taking a risk on a M1 Max in the face of expensive prospective GPU prices and the need for a device that could be easily taken while moving to japan (Which funnily enough was the same spot I am in too).

    I frequently checked the provided shipping information page. I would close it and have to find the email and pull it up again, this ritual usually occurred twice a day after each meal. While waiting I reviewed both of the previously mentioned videos thrice over and studied the complex and nuanced analysis by the ghouls on 4channel's /g/. 

    My conviction in this purchase was shaky. Even before it had been in my life, I was already of thinking about how to rid myself of it. Just compulsive and unstoppable stream of scrutiny and self doubt. A complex allotted to me by Apple's 14 day return policy. I could risk free, get my money back. As long as I could make up my mind by the end of that return period.

    I was very certain on the outset that this laptop would be cleaned up and dropped off at the closest Apple store (a 40 minute drive) within the first 4 days of the return period. That day lined up on when I would be on my way to Magic: The Gathering tournament. But that day had come and passed. 

    It still sat on my desk in an erratic and way that did not convey stillness. This being the living testament of my inability to come to a decision on the value of having this burden follow me around. It had sprouted roots, and planted itself into my desk; into my time.

Pictured my M3 a few days into using it. It had adopted the form of an octopus with its wires splaying all across my desk.

    If I were to concisely organize my feelings on this slab I would offer this dichotomy. 

I love the hardware; loathe the software.

    The relation with Mac OS and this device can't be un-tangled. To get ahead of it, as a self described Linux advocate: I will not be a beta tester for Asahi Linux. Asahi Linux for those not familiar is the most developed distribution on Apple's ARM (Mx?) platform. As of writing Asahi is bootable on my device, but does not support  many of the features. I do eagerly follow progress and I commit before publishing this post I will have contributed a small donation of $25 to Hector Martin via GitHub's sponsoring feature. If you're interested in using Asahi on your device and you haven't already I would encourage you to make a donation within your means.

 My receipt of a one time $25 donation to Martin through Github's sponsorship page.

    After kind of covering my ass, with my preface on why I am not using Linux on this device I would like to delve into everything I loathe about the software of Mac OS.

Mac OS as software

    While certainly not required reading I would love to recommend the previously mentioned video by Livakivi on his experience with his M1 Max. In the video he catalogues the laundry list of issues he experienced as a power user transitioning to using Mac OS. I have almost entirely agreed with all of his assessments. So in an effort to avoid treading in already treaded ground and because I think a kind of bullet point list of grievances is a lazy form of writing. I want to approach my issues with Mac OS as a bigger picture issue and litter in a few concrete examples to ground it out.

    Mac OS in many ways is defined in opposition to Windows instead of maybe a more natural delineation. Repeatedly while working on the device I would instinctively use some short cut (usually related to window management.) and it would of course not work. That's not inherently a problem but what is is that when I would look up Apple's solution they would either not exist or be touch/trackpad focused. I won't labor you with why its annoying, but the bottom line is that its not compatible with me.  

The Case for Mac OS: a side note.

    I think one of the better arguments in favor of using Mac OS is the credibility of apple in holding all of my sensitive information. ( >:O <-- probably you right now). This is a bit of a nuanced argument. If any private entity holding your information is a no go, I find that respectable. But I believe that of all the private companies Apple is probably my third most trusted to hold my data (The first and second being Mullvad and Signal. But if only for the reason that it has been proven in the courts that they don't hold any information on its' users :P ). 

    I think as described Mac OS being a very pointer focused OS is simultaneously an upside. Just given the context of the use. While at my desk getting work done, it infuriates me to no end the hoops I must jump through for simple navigation. But while lying on my bed where my hand is almost always resting on the track pad, I find it quite blissful. Which is almost to be expected because this is clearly the designed use case not just for Mac OS but all apple products. Which importantly is one of the conditions of using a laptop, so I find it often inappropriate to disregard the couch based accessibility of mobile devices.

The M3 Pro as hardware

    I love this machine as a piece of hardware. Though this machine is not immune from the litany of computer enthusiasts, I love it all the same. I feel like one of the big complaints among the ThinkPad ilk are the soldered components of all MacBooks. On this I just feel like I don't personally value non soldered components that much. I don't plan on upgrading the storage or ram, because simply I do not really value having excess of either. There is much to say that if one of these components were to fail that I would shit out of luck. But as someone who has owned 5 ThinkPads through my life, I do not feel this is something the enthusiast class of laptops is immune too. Lets face it ThinkPad parts (especially for the x230 and earlier) are not in sheer abundance anymore. If something on your main board breaks you're pretty much just having to buy a new ThinkPad.

    None of what I have said is to admonish ThinkPad owners. I don't have any plans currently to sell my x230 or my x1 carbon. I just think the community at large has become too comfortable with the dated talking points of 2014. If you find my judgement poor I will save you the time in reading and promise that my judgement does not get any better.

    What has done the most work to keep from dropping this laptop on the doorstep of the closest apple store is the sheer power efficiency of the chip. Which may not seem important as someone who currently resides in America where energy is cheap and abundant. But inefficient hardware design has two big visible bruises. First heat. Heat comes with two inconveniences. sweaty palms and thighs during extended use and fan whine. I am very sensitive to noise. I dread the whine of fans. I find fans to be much more preferable to the erratic gurgles of water cooling, but I hate both all the same. Especially on laptops it hampers my peace of mind when the fans kick in. This is all to say that the M3 Pro almost spins its fans. While this concern my come off as vain to some, it is very important to me. The second main benefit to power efficiency is battery life. Which is kind of self evident why that's valuable. I have used my M3 Pro without charging for a day and half on two occasions now and it hasn't dropped under 30%. Not having to keep in the back of my mind the state of the battery and my proximity to an outlet is such a relief to my admittedly paranoid mind.

Saying goodbye.

     On the 24th of September, I sat with my macbook preparing it to be returned to my nearest apple store. Which required that I disconnect my Apple ID from it, an appreciated notion of good faith; though tedious. My last day to return it being the 27th, but I required to give myself time to prepare a suitable solution for a traveling computer so I moved in advance of that date.

 My last screenshot taken on my MacBook before I sent it to the long sleep. ):

    Through out my usage of this device I felt very tortured. But I feel like it's ultimately in the hands of the ARM platform. While undoubtedly has a bright future ahead in its current form it is burdened by a lot compromise. For a machine that I need to do work, I am not willing to compromise on a handful of features. For a machine that was supposed to replace my desktop.