I've written and rewritten this journal several times over the last ten days. Let's see if this one sticks. Several peeps and creatures have asked if I'm okay, and I figured I'd make something of an explanation for what's going on in my brainpan.

So, mixed in with all the stress I dealt with over the last year or so (the house situation and my uncle's death being the big ones) I didn't mention one thing all that much. I apparently got bit by a lone star tick at some point, and developed mammalian meat allergy, also known as Alpha-gal Syndrome. If I eat any mammalian meat (pork, beef, rabbit, etc...) or dairy, my body will punish me, and while it's currently not to the point of lethality, it's not fun. I end up so sick that I'm out for an entire day, if not more. Poultry and fish are fine (though I already had an allergy to shellfish that's much more dangerous), but it's a severe limitation to my diet that I'm still having to figure out how to work around. Especially with a mate who loves eating out.

Well, on top of all that stress, I'd gotten burnt out from all the frantic writing that I'd been doing, and just being unable to escape the "everything sucks and you need to know about it" crowds online. Still couldn't even escape politics offline, so my mental health hasn't exactly been all that great.

Enter the AI witch hunts, and the Mia Ballard situation. I won't go into detail here, and there's been so much misinformation and pseudo-journalism going on that even I can't follow it anymore, but seeing an indie author go from getting a book deal with a traditional publisher, to allegations of using AI from randos on YouTube an TikTok, to the New York Times being manipulated into writing what amounted to a hit piece on her, to her publisher dropping her way too quickly to actually do an investigation... It kinda brought back that fear of actually being remotely successful and drawing attention to myself again, and I just mentally broke. Social media traumatized me (it's why I left), and social media influencers having that much power only makes it worse.

I don't like LLMs. I'll never use them. Hell, I use Windows XP/Vista, old Mac OS X, and other workarounds just to escape the "joys" of the modern web and all the embedded LLM crap. Yet, even I have a deep fear of these AI witch hunts since they don't care about proof. They don't even actually care that their "AI tells" are just examples of things amateur and fandom writers do, since that's where a lot of the training data came from. If they target someone, they won't stop until they "win", and that terrifies me.

So because of being unable to really escape from everything, I've been forcing myself to mostly stay offline in hopes to actually recover some of my own mental energy to just deal with everything. Reading physical books, working on my website (yes, I can do that offline), doing housework and yardwork, learning kandi beadwork, moving my notes into physical notebooks, learning how to make pixel art, the occasional drawing practice in my sketchbooks... That's all actually helped some, at least between the political news jumpscares I end up getting IRL.

I don't blame the internet. I blame the general public on social media, influencer culture, call-out and cringe cultures, mob mentality, and the drive toward moral panic for all of this. Can't do much about it, but at least I can survive it.

But yeah. That's what's been going on with my mental health.