[cliques] and menus

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Happy New Year! Hope 2023 is kind to everyone reading this and all your families and friends. I've always liked Chinese New Year, but in these times I feel like I need to disclaim that I am not a CCP sympathizer. I really feel bad for people still being locked down in massive control measures and counter measures. So many people in the world have suffered for many years, becoming aware of it is probably a very good thing.

I've been rolling a few thoughts around for awhile.

We all like belonging to a group, a niche, as a friend used to call it. We all like looking at menus of some kind. In the olden days in my life, this would have described going out to a restaurant with friends and family.

I've been thinking for awhile about interactive clicks and dropdown menus in gaming. The particular game I've been playing for awhile is Elvenar. I'm sure all gaming is full of this kind of coding, but since it's so over the top on Elvenar, I think about it while I play. Of course there were countdowns in Minecraft for various productions, the days and nights passing, how many 'tics' until something dropped but not picked up dissipated or until produce ripened, etc. Elvenar is 100% tic countdowns. There's no running as an avatar 'physically' building a structure you can walk through in game. Elvenar is more like a ledger game, constantly keeping track of hundreds of countdown timers and the cost/benefit of real time choices against all those countdowns. 

Since I'm a time-disoriented person who winds up at appointments at wrong times, wrong days, even wrong weeks or even months once in awhile (despite calendars and a pocket planner), learning to stay focused through all those countdowns has been a bit grueling, but after right around 3 years of playing, it has really sharpened my awareness. I still don't actually feel time passing, sometimes finding by accident that several hours have gone by and I've forgotten to eat or do something important, but I'm learning to gauge time passing by countering that with real life productions. If I can list a number of things I've gotten done during the day, I can fairly accurately guess how much time as passed without once looking at the time. I was never able to transfer that kind of application from Minecraft to real life.

I used to gauge my time by TV scheduling, but notoriously smashed my days together so badly that I usually got it wrong. I don't do that any more. I barely look at clocks any more. The only time I need clocks is to sync into other people's daily schedules, like knowing when to make a phone call or something. 

Everything in my life is either clickable or nonclickable. Finding a recipe is clickable. Actually cooking food is nonclickable. Productions in interface are clickable. Productions in real life are nonclickable. Ordering chicks and seeds online is clickable. Actually growing either one is nonclickable. 

We already had the equivalent of drop down menus in our heads. I've been aware since I was young that I constantly run loops and counters. If this, then this or that. In game isn't very different. 

The niche is easier than real life. Compatibility sorts itself online. People look for groups that already fit their own agendas. If an oddball refuses to fit, sometimes a group will banish to reclaim a more peaceful production level. It's fairly impersonal for the most part unless a person has trouble not extending their emotional life into whatever group they wind up in. Sometimes peer pressure wins out, sometimes a bossy person becomes a group leader, but mostly it's about how advantageous is peer pressure to your gaming style. A person can reflect a bit on real life if they notice how that works. 

It's a litte different on social medias, which I've become extremely tired of. Information and funny things are fine, people having meltdowns and getting into fights is ridiculous. I don't have time for that.

One thing I've been noticing for awhile is that AI-guided intraction or interface seems to be as much about group sync as anything. Who is right or wrong doesn't matter so much as how quickly a mass will fall into sync with either side and the methods that work most efficiently and reliably. Most people don't notice how quickly they line up on their own without much persuasion. Trigger a familiar phrase or color pattern and they're sorted in minutes, not bothering to vet the trigger source, which is sometimes directly contrary to what they believe. People are easy like that. Give them familiar clicks and menus and they nest wherever you trigger them to. 

For the most part, I'm not against easy organization, easy interface, and smooth experiences, but I guess it's become the cult rage to notice that the easier it all is, the easier we are to control as real world populations, even when we aren't online in some form. I've been naturally irritatingly roguishly but mostly accidentally rebellious all my life, thanks to austism spectrum, and my first and biggest fail trying to join a crowd is how quickly I rile feathers and throw wrenches in monkeyworks and pretty much blissfully irk people around me so badly that they're happy to see me leave. I don't mean to be like that, I'm just naturally constantly backward engineering how everything around me works, which is very laborious and distracting but also an incredible joy to me. If my mind isn't busy figuring something out, I get so fantastically bored that I start all kinds of trubbas.

Here is a simple true story to illustrate how I affect not just the people around me, but entire franchises. I worked at Sonic one year, which I very much enjoyed, but I couldn't help coloring out of all the lines. This was many years ago. If you've ever had a cherry vanilla soft drink, that was just the beginning of my experimentation. I did things with limeades that had our little town in a tizzy, including floats. I put limes in everything with every flavor and the drink orders coming in after I started work there grew so complicated that the boss started charging for every single additional flavor. My favorite snack to order was a cheese sandwich with added bacon, which was over a dollar cheaper than a bacon sandwich with cheese, which was identical. I had the entire town eating cheese sandwiches with bacon, and the boss finally put a halt to it. No more additions to cheese sandwiches, because there was no way he could charge so much extra for bacon to make it equal to the bacon with cheese. These things rippled through the franchise and became corporate menu decisions. I don't know if that is still a thing after so many years, but back then it was a big deal.

Imagine me fixing a $7M tagging mistake in a retail store. In one hour flat I affected a worldwide manufacturer and a nationwide retail chain, and I got in trouble because I bypassed my manager to make the phone calls. I never got a promotion or even acknowledged. My manager got a very nice salary increase. I can't tell you how many times I was called into the office to be told I'd be fired if I didn't stop doing something. Everything I did fixed problems, but I didn't follow protocols or go through proper channels, so I was a bad person. The only way I survived 5 years in that store was by dumbing down my work ethic, although I was told that the entire middle pad fell apart for awhile after I left.

I've corrected college professors for being vague enough on test questions to allow either/or answers and automatically raised scores for entire classes. That, by the way, isn't cool in a chemistry class. Many people don't realize how vaguely they word test questions. But yeah, I don't mean to be irritating. I was born to be a natural pointer outer of incongruity. You'd think that would be valuable somewhere, but I've never found a real niche where that is actually valuable. I've even got stories of getting a hospital locked down several times over massive error of contagion that no one else caught, and that irritated so many people that my boss tried to pull me into administration just to calm everybody down. Meh, I just left.

Now I'm going to leap a weird fence and look at this inside out.

We can see our online activity just about anywhere we log in, like banking, gaming, shopping, writing, social medias. Logging in is like stepping into another world, a world within our real world. There are many worlds that we pop in and out of every day, even if it's not online. When we engage in a phone call, we create a temp world with an activity log. Everything like that is recorded. What about our real lives? We can't just pull up an activity log for what we did walking around our house or neighborhood for several hours. Or can we?

Many of us are nearly continually surveilled through smart tech in and around the buildings we are in, and sometimes around our neighborhoods if we are in smart cars, carrying phones or wearing fitness tech, in traffic, etc. That's a given. We all know this.

There is a place where our activity isn't measured. Maybe. Where is that? Well, if you have tech on around you, we're at the place now where it can 'read' your bio output and electrical activity to the point where even your thoughts can be discernable. If you are not aware of this, maybe it's time to go read up a little but on that kind of stuff.

Some of you know that everything is measured, even our thoughts, and it's not tech. We are all readable. Those of us who've had out of body and near death experiences understand that there this no such thing as real solitude or aloneness, and that our thoughts and feelings aren't secrets. We can interact from the inside of us without using the outside of us, which is our environment. Why do most of us not know this? Maybe it's because we've been taught all our lives that what we do in private is private, that we are separated from each other as physical beings, that our thoughts are autonomous and our own. What we really are from the very beginning of these lives is products of other people, our environments, our food supply, the treatment we receive, the expectations we are subjected to, the many many words of others all around us all the time, the many activity cycles of work and school and sports and holidays and shopping and entertainment....

We are products of this world.

What we do with ourselves as products is the challenge. Do we do as we are told and live up to expectations for emotional support and validation? Or do we take a look around and wonder why we don't go against the grain and stand up for something important once in awhile?

How do we decide what is important?

Our niches are prepurposed. Our activity logs are preset. Very few of us wander off the preconstructed path. Many of us stop at drop down menus. We don't invent ourselves, our lives, our activities. We think we make choices, but we don't choose what isn't on the menu.

Who do you want to be? What do you want to do or to happen in your life? What is important to you? 

I really do hope you have a great 2023. Some things will suck, some things will drag you back and progress will feel lost, some things will feel so fail that depression threatens to swallow you whole. BUT. As I learned through many many years of blogging, the inch forward sometimes means way more than the 10 feet you slide back. Every inch forward is real conquer, real work you put into what you want. Over time, every inch of discipline you train yourself into becomes marathon material.

I am an addict. I spent many years in health fail on handfuls of meds. There is nothing in this world that fixes anything quick. You can be wealthy and still feel completely bereft. You can be physically fit and still feel emotionally overwhelmed and drained. You can't fix anything with pills or drinks or money.

Do you love who you are? Do you want to? How do you find a way to love yourself? What do you change so that you can love yourself? 

That is the start. That is the path. And that is the goal. Everything else will get fixed along the way if you honestly ask yourself those questions and then honestly look at what sorts of answers you can say to yourself. 

Choose off the menu. Find your true niche, even if you think you are the only one. Make what you feel and want important enough to change what you need to love yourself.

You are important, and it's not just ok but vital that you learn to love yourself. Become the person you would love to be for those around you.

You can do this. Work on the inches. Forgive the fails. Keep your focus.

Invent your own menu.

C+

 I wrote this on 7/15/22 and walked off before I was finished.

In the last week I've gotten calls from 5 different states that didn't leave voice mails and an unidentified text from another state that only said hello. I guess I must be getting on more nerves than usual. Over the last 3 years nearly all of the numbers that left voice mail or I stupidly answered claimed to be publishers who shouldn't have been able to access me at all, but none of these lately left voice mails. Funny, after the hello text I began wondering if it might match a number I deleted off my phone after many years of letting it sit, but ironically cannot find it online any more even though that person openly put their number out everywhere on the net. I would have to pay just to access it now. So now I'm wondering what happened for THAT to happen.

The only negative response I've gotten to something I tweeted today didn't tag me but liked what they were responding to so it was easy to find the timestamp response.

Gonna say this.

With all the twisted babylonian mush going on in the media and especially on twitter, with all my years of millions of transparency words out in the open all over the internet, after all the friends who'd left me by the wayside for sticking to truth-seeking and logic and simply being my fully diagnosed self for public when I feel like it, with so many accounts hiding behind avatars full of mockery and judgment, I'm finding it a bit hilariously Freudian that I wasn't even tagged.

I'm not afraid of words. Anyone can say anything to me at any time about how utterly stupid and ugly and fail I am and I will never quail. Anyone can point at me, blame me, throw me into whatever pile of crap they feel like, and I will not even blink. Feel free to tag me. Just say it. Or am I that scary that you're afraid I'll make you famous? 

I'm not out here in public for accolades. I'm not trying to make money or be someone. I'm certainly not the sort to take myself very seriously.

I am here to show others that's it's ok to come out of hiding. I have survived crushing depression, several addictions, a lifetime of diagnosed cognitive challenges, and thoughts of suicide.

I'm out there because God wants me out here. Point blank. I do what I do because that is what I was born for.

If the publishers are real, then a whole list of them want me as a client and have been bugging me for years. Almost nobody else ever gets my number. If they are fake, then whatever reason they are bugging me every time I say something in particular must mean what I'm saying is a big deal. I've had 3 rigorous stats classes in 3 different fields of study, and the odds of so many people trying to get hold of me by name isn't an accident or coincidence. So whatever I say, it's enough for people to offer me money, even if they are fake. By all means, call me something lame and blow me off. The fact that you're actually seeing my twitter feed means you want to see it because I'm so rarely retweeted or even talked to on twitter any more plus all the silly shadowbanning,

I don't remember if I was going to write anything else. 

There are people (and bots and surveillance) who have responded instantly anywhere I throw a link out even though they don't follow me, and I know this because several times across the years I have trimmed my medias way down vetting every single follower, or put the links in really out of the way places where almost no one cruises through, or cross linked in ways that I could see the double drive and watch that come in on triangulated trackers that show IPs and was able to verify very specifically the locations, and then once even nailed one person down to showing up as a stalker in my source code on FB, hitting my entire family even though he followed none of us. I told an acquaintance of ours and it stopped.

Anyway, I'm too lazy to watch trackers anymore, too miserly to waste the money paying for services anymore, too bored to care. 

But yeah, when I do perk up and pay attention, I see stuff. 

I don't know why this happens and I'm not going to guess. 

Not my first rodeo. 

gaming

Super, super busy already this month.

I want to lead off with this quote from a player in one of the city builder worlds I play in.

I know you guys don't know me, and I'm not looking for pity, but make sure to let people close to you know that you care. I've lost 2 family members and 5 friends in the last 2 months. It's really why my attendance has been a little spotty lately. i apologise, and I'll be back 100% when things cool down. Thanks.

First of all, NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR REAL LIFE.

Omg, apologizing because people died? Wow.

The kind of gaming I'm into this last couple years tends to attract older people. I play with terminal cancer patients gaming right up to their deaths at home, among many other aging medical conditions. It has never been more obvious to me than in gaming that people are dying off, bigly, everywhere. Covid and lockdowns and now failing health are wiping fellowships out so badly that the game creators have stepped up reorganizing dead spots on the city maps and offering extra special purchase deals. It's not at all uncommon for half a fellowship to just stop playing and for arch mages to suddenly go MIA. I'm a regular mage in several groups, and one of the arch mages will be going into triple bypass surgery quite soon. Half his fellowship is already MIA and I'm basically holding the line for him till he comes out the other side. If he goes MIA longer than a month or two, I might just take the few left and start another group. Without any contact we'll have no idea if he didn't survive the surgery or was away from game long enough to just let it go.

Interestingly, I happened to join one fellowship recently (I play in several worlds) where an arch mage stomped off. Here's the basic takeaway.

Archmage abandons Fellowship for more aggressively playing group. 

Fellowship pouts while one asks in chat who will step up.

No one answers for two days. One asks again, begs. No one answers. I go *ahem*...

No one objects. I, the lowest ranked least senior member, slide into arch mage.

Fellowship blows up. 3 leave, loyal to the arch mage who abandoned them. No one else says anything.

We blow a tournament they are easily capable of owning.

Someone insinuates it was my fault...

I go Arch Mage MOM all over their butts and start posting the ultimate tournament strategy guide.

They are stunned to realize they're playing with a f*kng hot damn professional gamer.

We'll see what happens.

Wow, this font is horrible for italics. I have to keep bolding it.

So that and the holiday slide is upon us, which means town festivals and punkin patches and school activities. I've been to one of the bigger local HS football games, helped with a school function, showed up to birthday (more coming!), started prepping my house for holidays. We got that front deck done last time I was blogging, now we've got new blinds up on the main floor windows and I'll be getting a Christmas tree up early this year because that's what you do when medical stuff pops up with others and the winter already looks dismal. I personally know a person who just found out defcon cancer, might be her last Christmas if she makes it that long, another is going into major surgery before holidays hit and recovery will hamper festivities, stuff like that. 

I know I left you guys hanging on my own stuff. I'm actually in good health, but we're keeping an eye on my liver again. I have a long history of autoimmune flare ups that finally stopped in 2014 but not before handfuls of medications damaged my liver. I was dx'd with a liver condition in my 30s because of that, and now I'm 60. Well, after that norovirus in August, guess what got triggered. Yep, there's more puffiness, so now, even though I'm feeling ok, it's time to get a baseline on stuff like schlerosing mesenteritis and liver fibrosis. If they decide I need treatment I'll likely wind up on long term prednisone, which I find unpleasant, to put it nicely.

If you've not spent your entire adult life on medications, I hope you really appreciate that. For the most part I've been able to live a pretty normal life, minus the energy for actual fun and stuff, but I still got a college degree and raised kids and held jobs through it all, sure can't complain because I could have (probably should have) died when I was 19 but God kept me here, so here I still am. I don't have cancer and I'm not in any immediate danger with my health, not actually suffering illness right now, and I'm able to eat and sleep enough to do pretty well, like run my house and enjoy gaming and a few other hobbies like my chickens. But yeah, if you haven't had to deal with years of medications destroying your body to 'keep you healthy' or something, please consider yourself lucky enough to have more power in your life to change your circumstances if you don't like how it's going. It's one thing feeling stuck with no money or from depression or a really stressful job or a very stupid situation with family, but it's a whole different story when you're medically unable for years to actually do things like drive away and go shopping or something. I mean, I can do that a bit now, but there was a long time I couldn't. Just don't take it for granted if you can.

Anyway, yeah, I'm going to get my tree up before Halloween and seriously have more fun with holidays this year because I don't know how next year will be and I don't wanna be all mopey about it. I'm presetting the mood and enjoying my family.

As noted on twitter and in many other blog posts through the years, this is my birthday month, as well. I may not be able to eat more than a couple forks of fluff when I make my birthday cake, but I'm totally making one. I don't care if the world blows up and the money fails and all of Elon's satellites go crashing, I'm enjoying my birthday month, every single day. I made it this long against quite a lot of odds and I'm celebrating. The best present I've gotten so far is ARCH MAGE MOM. 😂😂😂 omg, that is too funny. I'm so boss it's pathetic. I was born for that. I can't help taking over everywhere I go, even if it's subtle and from behind a curtain.

In the meantime, got another gallon of cherry tomatoes and some homegrown peppers from one of the kids, so I made another batch of salssssa and am using that in my continuing calorie restriction (super yummy and super low-cal)  coupled with fasting one meal a day, no junk. I made a crustless ham and cheese quiche over the weekend to use up some of the eggs, and one day I made a really pretty filet mignon, so my birthday month is starting off really yummy.

Welp, I've spent long enough here, wanna keep moving. Lotta stuff to do. Hope you guys are having a nice October, or at least staying focused on something nice in your lives. I love you and you're going to be ok if that is what you decide what you want. You can decide that, you know. 💗

In case you were needing this. Sometimes someone does.