Why, after 40-odd years of internet development, message boards, upload sites, editors and suchlike is uploading text still such a ballache? We've managed to get to the point where we have basically one ubiquitous editor the world over, and basically any word processor worth a look will have options for paragraph spacing, first line indents, book form styling...

...Yet as soon as you try to upload that to a platform somewhere it all breaks and takes forever to fix in editing. I guess this is more just a notification to say if you want to read my stories in their original formatting, you'll need to download them I guess. I've done what I can, but gods...

I had a dream this morning that I had died. I had gone to a place not unlike the real world, but everyone was a slave, but there was also nothing that needed to be done. There were no chains, just indentured servitude. The masters could control where people went, what they saw, what they were exposed to, and what they did, but only indirectly. I remember feeling an overwhelming feeling of peace flowing through me.
There were lots of things I didn't agree with going on in the dream. People occasionally forced to do the most menial things, often for the entertainment of their masters, and not for any real benefit. Whilst people like me had the will to refuse or fight back, we found ourselves wanting to commit, even if we resented the activity. After all, there was little else to do.

I remember losing awareness of my body. The dull aches fading into nothing, the tinnitus fading, the tightness in my chest releasing. My legs no longer clicked when I walked, and my stomach no longer ached after I'd eaten anything. I became convinced the people around me, including my masters cared about us, in a weird sort of way. They showed us attention when their other sources of entertainment failed them. They wanted us in a way.

When I woke I immediately wanted to go back there, and because I find it so hard to wake these days I did find myself drifting back into the dream. The scene changed from familiar to more abstracted, visiting an old western saloon, or a waterfall deep in the jungle, but that lingering element of being watched and commanded remained. Always something easy to obey. Never something that made our lives more difficult, and never were we alone.

I realised I didn't care about the how or the why so I stopped focusing, stopped trying to fight and just relaxed into the peace. I didn't need to decode everyone's motivations around me like it was a grand puppet show. I didn't need to be analytical and responsible anymore. I just needed to be, in those moments.

Then I had a dream of my ex-boyfriend. It's been almost 10 years since I last saw him. We were in an unfamiliar house together, and we were just chilling. He would make a sarcastic joke and I would laugh. I'd comment how I'd almost forgotten his voice. He'd just smile, as if he knew I hadn't. I wanted to ask him why he didn't talk to me anymore. Was it too painful? Was it just that love wasn't important to him? Had he found someone else at last? Was he even still alive? He was just as I'd remembered him. The dream turned flirty, and I laughed at the idea, having had no impetus for sex since the doctors had ordered me to double my Anti-Depressants. But I could use my body to make him happy, and that was enough for me.

I spent twenty minutes this morning staring at my ceiling, and now it feels like the waking world is a horrible place. The dream lingers in the edges of my mind, and I realise I have no one to tell. I have feelings I can't express, and let's be honest - no one likes to read about dreams. So, I think to myself, I'll write my dreams up into a little story. Embellish it a little. Turn things around a little too - maybe change the order slightly. I'll post it somewhere on the internet.

There to be ignored, like a whisper in a cacophony of sound. Another lost voice. In it all I realise the worst dreams are the ones you never want to wake up from. This is not a happy story. This is someone dying.

Woke up from a dream about someone I haven't seen in 11 years. God my heart hurts. I'm such an idiot.

Happy Halloween. Thanks to my brain for this trick.

Hey everyone! Murry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Hey everyone,

Wow, it's been a loooong time since I did any sort of update. Being an adult with responsibilities SUCKS.

That said I'd love to get more stuff going in the fandom, so I'm opening up for some short writing requests (1000 words or less). I'm not working to any timescales and can't guarantee I'll ever finish something but if you're looking for something for your character and don't care if it's ever done or not then give me a shout.

This birb reserves the right to yada yada yada disclaimer blah blah blah. Come say hi.

Hey Furs! Murry Christmas and a yiffy new year!

;)

*goes back to the wine*

One of the hardest things to do quite often in life is simply to take a step back and look at yourself and where you are in life. This is especially hard if you don't know what you are or where you want to be in life.

Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be easier if we all just had a counter counting down to our respective ends, so we could see how far along we are and how long we have to achieve things. Would we only start worrying once we reached the half-way point, and have a multitude of mid-life crises? Would we simply shake our heads and try to make the most of whatever time we have left? Would we shrug it all off entirely and say there's always plenty of time until someday there isn't anymore?

As anyone who knows me knows, I'm absolutely awful at finishing projects - or even getting to the part of the project that's interesting. I hate myself for it quite a lot - my lack of discipline startles and upsets me. Not, apparently, enough to do anything about it, but enough to drag myself down when I really ought not to.

The question then, is what is enough? At what point will I be doing what I consider to be a true reflection of myself? At what point am I going to be happy that I'm being true to my potential?

There are those who would say that simply holding down a full time job, regardless of other occupation and especially due to my patchy history with life in general, would be enough to say I am successful. Writing, learning and other personal improvements go out the window when people expect you to probably be on benefits for most if not all of your life. Arguably simply having a university degree, a functional relationship and a personal development goal are plenty enough to keep your average human being happy. Sure, I'm not getting a masters degree, and I have no aspirations to become a Doctor of anything. Sure I've given up reading and writing is an oft-ignored hobby that I treat with equal amounts love and hate. Sure I don't have a "career plan" and I don't know where I see myself in five years... But what does that actually mean?

I'm obsessed with the idea of fitting in. Of finding some little niche in society I can etch out an existence within. I'm not looking for a dream job I'll love, but simply a decent enough job that likes me enough. I'm not looking to be the most intelligent or well-read person in the world, but instead just insightful enough to keep a conversation going. I'm not looking for the greatest lover in the world - just someone who can tolerate my eccentricities.

I am hardly the romantic I was six years ago. I don't dream of coastlines and starscapes. Instead I cling to old memories of aspiration, and trap myself by telling myself something has changed.

Maybe something has changed. At some point along the line I stopped reminding myself that I've always been this pessimistic - this filled with perceived injustice in the world, and this regretful of my own existence. When a person thinks of reflection in the now, they rarely think of reflection in the then. The adage of various gay-accepting campaigns rings false in the ears of one trapped in a hole for 26 years - that of "it gets better" barely seems to register when you're waiting for so long for things to get better.

When you remind yourself that feelings and thoughts are so familiar to you it becomes almost comforting in a way. I imagine it's the way confident people manage - they throw themselves into uncomfortable feelings so often that the feeling of discomfort becomes more comfortable than comfort itself - these are the people who simply can't sit still; who are always pushing boundaries. I am not, it is practically redundant to say, one of these people.

But depression works like that too. Like listening to a familiar old sad song, it's black wings wrap themselves around you, the ridges of it's wings like the harsh beat of an uncompromising lyric, and it's grip like thorns which slowly cut you. A depressed person hurts themselves with their comfortable sadness, returning to old music like a half-eaten corpse shambling towards a vulture, declaring "Eat me!" and demanding to be swallowed whole.

There's a reason black is a colour used for depression. It is the colour of the absence of everything, and the colour of the hole that's left when everything is gone. How many of my actions leave me staring into the abyss, I wonder? How many of my choices leave me comfortably melancholic?

So a step back is in order. I'm not going to apologise to myself tonight for failing to achieve what I might otherwise wish to. I'm not going to feel guilty for the things I've done instead. I'm not going to surrender myself to it.

Too often a writer puts down his pen out of frustration. He curses his muse, he swears at his inner critic and he stares hatefully at his work. Just once I would like to put down my pen because I want to; because I haven't failed. Just once I want to be able to take a step back and say I'm okay.

I have apparently won $106 of memory :O

So I've been looking to write something for a little while recently, but all my ideas feel too big to jump into - especially trying to return to my unfinished novel. Does anyone want a little story, or want to prompt me? Maybe making this a little more social would make it fun. Feel free to jump in with anything.

So I've been rather ill over the past 3 weeks or so, so I haven't been producing anything.


Work has also been hell. Sometimes I don't know whether I should consider myself lucky to have a job or not. It seems all it does is draw the fun out of everyday life, stifling it under a cloud of exhaustion.


Do you ever get to that point in life where you just want to curl up and regress - go back to that point in life where decisions were made, paths were chosen and things were done? It's not like I have regrets - It's just... I feel trapped and lost, and old music, old friends... old feelings are all that keep me anchored in the present. Am I really that bitter and jaded that all the fun in life I see lies with past 'me's?


I don't know when I'll get back to writing. I need a den to hide in for a while.


-Feathers.

Words! Words have been typed! Almost like I promised. That's like... a good thing, right?

I've been ill with the flu over the last week or so, and I had another project I wanted to work on, so Jasper's Odyssey will be updated, but... just not yet. I'll try to get two or three pages out tomorrow minimum.

One of the strangest things about growing up and being “technically adult” in the modern world is how differently I seem to have approached the ideas of things like careers and hobbies when compared to my parents. It's true that when fill my time with hobbies such as gaming the experience doesn't differ all that much from having a relaxing evening in front of the television – but the more prosaic or practical hobbies which older adults enjoy don't draw me in at all. [ 1551 more words. ]
https://gamepsychblog.wordpress.com.....e-to-be-bored/

Yay! I passed my driving test! That was way harder than a university degree.

Life is kinda weird. You spend most of it worrying about what you should be doing and where you should be going, but somehow you end up muddling through anyway. You might not get to where you want to go, but half of any travelling is the journey.

I got a job!... again!... and it's the same job!... just not for agency!

I have a job!

Stress comes from, and leads to a lot of problems in life. It is my firm belief that anyone capable of rational thought is also capable of understanding logical concepts, and thus are capable of coming to the same conclusion as any other human being given enough time, enough knowledge, sufficient motivation and a way to overcome distractors.

Despite this firm belief, most common signs of stress and depression involve in some way one of these four attributes; Deadlines are stressful because they limit your time, lacking knowledge is stressful because it makes you doubt whether such knowledge is attainable, lack of motivation is perhaps most damming of all as it makes you question the very right you have to exist and makes you fear anything which may disprove your legitimacy of a human being, and finally distractors convince you that your focus is miss-placed by forcing you to think about other things.

In absence of these limitations, the difficulty of any task is meaningless. The search for the last digit of Pi would be trivial if you have infinite time to work it out. If a person did not worry about knowledge they would be more prepared to except contradictory or incomplete information as the best available to make a decision. If a person is driven to strive towards something, as a plant's stems are chemically drawn to grow towards light or our muscles retract from intense sources of heat or pain, then progress will always come eventually. If one has no distractors one is never shaken from their thoughts; never drawn into repetitive cycles of sorrow, anger or doubt.

Of course, in practice this is impossible. You could spend your entire life working on a single story, a single poem, a single piece or art and never perfect it - your effort ultimately futile, falling as time strips the last of your strength. The tolling of a church-bell is a deadline, but perhaps not even the most definite one as a rumbling stomach or parched throat demand attention at regular intervals, or perhaps even the drive for sex or violence could be considered as deadlines - concepts which demand a person take action before the stress becomes too great.

It is an oft-noted truth of learning that the more you know, the more you know you don't know, and this appears universally true. What is, therefore the value of knowledge? There is a good argument to the effect that if knowledge is intrinsically valuable, then ignorance holds a value to. If someone is said to be ignorant in a subject, their knowledge could be said to be objectively less than someone more knowledgeable, but if asked each person were asked how much they did not know the knowledgeable man would live in greater poverty than the ignorant. The only way to sensibly quantify knowledge is to assign a value on what is needed to be known. It is also oft-noted that necessity is the mother of invention, and when so much of science was driven by the imminent threat of war or death it is hard to find argument to the contrary. Indeed, if one was to assume that knowledge should only be valued by it's usefulness it is a wonder that we choose to learn anything at all before having a justification to need to knowledge. To search for knowledge of unknown utility is to stress oneself, even if a true use for such knowledge does exist and is just obscured in the present.

Without knowing why an action is important, or with the threat of an impossible deadline it is hard to become motivated. To begin a project which one might never see the completion of, or to expend effort on something of no discernible function is illogical. Motivation is difficult to conquer because every instance of motivational analysis is subjective based on one's psychological reaction to a stimulus. Conforming, peer-pressure, inspiration, social pressure, financial pressure, time pressure, biological need and many more influencing factors are examples of motivators, but none of these are directly controlled by the person experiencing the motivation. Even internal factors such as desire or perception of difficulty are not under the full control of an individual, no matter how tasks are broken up or otherwise re-evaluated. When the desire to conform is love, or the threat of financial pressure drives no action then no action is taken, just as when our stomachs are full we feel little desire to eat.

Finally, the mind is prone to wander, reminding you of that film you wanted to watch, that book you wanted to read, that other thing you should prepare for, how tired you are, your first boyfriend or girlfriend, your friends and family. The mind of the human reads a hundred words further before it suddenly realizes it's daydreaming about the significance of the first word of that paragraph, and whether the author had considered that "finally" might cause his reader to suddenly decide to think about other uses of finally, or the way the word seems quite out of place considering how much of the post is still to come. A glance at a watch, or the time in the system tray of a computer shows how costly a daydream is, and suddenly a productive choice becomes stress.

So why talk and analyse about stress? Because stress leads very quickly to depression. I am depressed. Lonely, I miss my old life with old friends and my first love. I wonder if my life will ever go anywhere, and fear I'll run out of time before I make a choice. I refuse to research my options, afraid that knowing the choice will damage my motivation further as each unpalatable option is placed before me. I notice how distant I am from my friends, my colleagues, and how detached I am with my emotions, how cold... clinical my text. How all my interactions are white-gloved, sterilized. Even the poetry of my soul is cleansed of it's unnatural wildness, struck to form and rhyme, caught in my comfortable distance. I find no kinship to guide me, no future to strive for, just endless doubt. Worst of all, every second my mind calls me away from my task, convincing me that penning my thoughts is worth more than finishing any of my work - that just one funny image might cheer me more than an hour spent with imaginary love and chaos. That I should regret the things I did for those I loved, when it makes me hurt so bad.

And I indulge in my solitude, I swim in thoughts of black ink and crumbling text. Here there is no structure, there are no rules, there is no desire, there is just endless calm. Closed eyes in darkness as hands press against cold, transparent glass. The visceral sensation is more real in that moment than any of my learnt knowledge. It calls to my existence more than school-rooms and essays. In a simple touch there is more humanity than all I strive for in my waking life. I deny the world my work. I shun those I love, and who perhaps love me. I shoot myself in the foot to deny me a future as an athlete. I listen to old music from which I'll learn nothing. I feel, every inch of skin a unique sense, distinct from all others.

It lasts a moment before my brain reminds me of a future, with needs and desires. My libido reminds me to put "falling in love" on my to-do list. My stomach tells me that though it's fine for the moment I should probably go shopping soon. I feel guilt for ignoring my work, though I know I won't use that guilt to motivate me to do it.

I am human, after all.

I just figured I'd post somewhere a list of common misconceptions of my chosen area of study.

1. "Oh, so you're a Psychologist? Do me!"

Unfortunately this is not someone instantly falling in love with you just because you've studied behaviour and/or brain activity a little - instead it's people expecting you to Psychoanalyze them and tell them stuff about themselves they don't know. The boring reality is that Psychology very rarely tells you individually useful information, but instead applies broad findings to a particular subset of people. For example, a study on behaviour after playing violent video games can be used to accurately predict what the majority of people would behave like right after a computer game, but would tell you nothing about how those people played computer games or what they were thinking.

If you ask a Psychologist to analyze you, either you're asking a Psychotherapist which is not a legally protected term, at least in the UK (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho.....nited_Kingdom) or you're looking at seeing a clinical Psychologist or Counselor. A Psychologist is more like a Scientist, and a clinical Psychologist more like a Doctor (though even then there are clinical Psychologists heavily involved in scientific research, not just treatment).

2. "Yeah, but it's not a real Science, right?"

When people say this they're generally picturing someone in a lab coat or a hazmat suit dealing with experimental things in jars. Psychologists are just like that, but the research materials are people instead of test-tubes, neural scanners like MRI machines instead of electron microscopes and often tasks instead of reactions. Ethics committees unfortunately get very upset when Psychologists talk about putting people in jars, which is why Psychologists don't contain their participants in that way, but that's an element of control we'll just have to abide by.

Science in general works on principles of theory which are empirically supported. Whilst often mathematical and physical laws align consistently enough to form grand statements like E=MC^2, or something as objectively true as Newton's laws of motion, Psychology instead deals with complex superstructures with many different unobservable parts - currently unobservable, that is. In Physics there were theories on what things were made of long before atoms were discovered. In Biology, there were theories about the osmotic transfer of gases into and out of the body before such ideas were ever empirically proven. In any Science there can be theory or observation first.

Just looking around you at the people you know, and even your own behaviour you can detect patterns and systems at work. We know we must perceive these systems to be a part of them, so there must be a system involved in controlling our relation to that system - and on and on. We are surrounded by observable behaviour at every turn, some of which we can predict, much of which we can explain, but none of which we truly understand - that is, unless we turn to Psychological theory.

For example, there is a theory that much of what occurs in the brain in a reaction-time task is moderated by attention processes and decision making processes. A collection of studies found that most people perform faster in an experiment where they are required to make a quick reaction to a single stimuli than an accurate decision between stimuli. They found that it was also possible to express this difference mathematically, with a good degree of accuracy, based on how many possibilities of choice the decision condition gave. This is now informed by a theory which uses a subtraction method to subtract the time it takes for a person to respond to a single stimuli from the time it takes for multiple stimuli to get an estimate of the extra "decision making" time needed, thereby mapping a process in the mind, Scientifically.

3. "Whoa, okay... but I didn't understand a word of that."

Psychology is not an easy subject to understand, for the simple reason that people are not easy to understand. Find a room of 10 people, and Sociology tells us 0.2 will be autistic (1:50), 0.1 will be homosexual (1:100), about 5.5 will be male (55:100) and a whole host of other information, however it tells us nothing about how they are likely to interact, what social roles they are likely to adopt, and more importantly - why? The key to understanding Psychology is to understand why the question was asked - what makes people's minds different? Is it gender? Disability? Nurture? Nature? Situation? Motivation? Pressure? Violence? Exposure? Knowledge? Demographic? Cultural origins? Drugs? Preference? ... or is it none of those things? Is it simply chemical and hormonal reactions in the brain?



That's all for now, maybe will write some more some other time.

Peace
-Syndel

Merry Christmas everyone!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ6kJ7GWtv0

Tonight I will be mainly curling up around my laptop in bed, cradling it softly and basking in the cool, blue glow. My wolf form's tail curves around in a crescent beneath me and I hum a soft lullaby to myself.

I am surrounded by nocturnal life - a thousand tiny winged creatures expressing their innocent curiosity at the strange bright light in darkness, and unafraid to explore...

...The image is spoiled slightly as they begin to try to eat me alive, flying all over my skin in a seemingly suicidal attempt to feed off any exposed body they can find, including but not limited to my eyeballs.

So it's that time of the night again, where a burd is all tucked up warm in bed but his brain won't stop humming that endless tune of thought.

It would be productive, I suppose, to use this time to try and write something, but I'm kinda low on interesting ideas, and there's not much I want to read myself. If you're reading this why not comment with an idea of what you'd like to read, or something to that effect.

I guess this is me openly declaring I'm open to requests.