Y'ever feel like people know what you're thinking, and all they do with this marvelous ability is devise new and confounding ways to annoy you? This is my daily experience. It seems wherever I go, whatever I do, there is somebody hovering about, prepared to make it several times more difficult than it ought to be. If ever I decide upon approaching somebody with an issue, their actions and responses suggest that my unspoken plan has been somehow already communicated, and a counter devised.

   Sometimes I wonder if I'm in some sort of Truman-Show-meets-The-Matrix-type scenario, where everybody else has the script, and the script is being continually generated by a computer program plugged into my head. It would explain a lot. It would certainly explain why everything seems situated and designed so as to make me feel as ineffective and meaningless as possible. This could also be because this is, as I've previously postulated, some kind of hell, but I figure demons would be more interesting than the people I find myself srrounded by, who tend to range between bad actors and chatbots. There are exceptions, but few and far-between.

   I wonder, then, how long might I have been stuck in here, were that to be the case. A year? A decade? My entire life, perhaps. There are plenty of points in my life where people and events have veered more uncanny than before, and I have mapped the origin of my circumstances onto a few of them, depending on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking about. But things have always felt pretty alien to me. People always distant, making responses that don't follow in ways that feel forced. Before, I'd chalk it up to luck, good or bad, that my life wandered in unexpected directions, but now?

   I'm sure somebody calling themself a doctor would call me insane, slap a big ol' diagnosis on me. But, I don't feel like I'm going insane. Correction: I don't feel like I'm losing my grip on reality. It's more like I'm gaining clarity, and recognising that reality is the one whose grip has always been tenuous. I do feel like the stress and anxiety and disassociation that comes with being surrounded by people who sound like machines or puppets is driving me insane. But, that can hardly said to be a problem with me. Considering how I haven't snapped completely after nearly a year of this kind of constant pressure, I'd say I'm doing remarkably well.

   But, pressure there is, and it very-nearly constant. So, hey, if this is the world's most hellish reality TV show, and there is an actual person somewhere reading this (assuming any production staff leave my missives unaltered): send help, I'm being held against my will in a world full of lies.


Today I read "Anya's Ghost" by Vera Brosgol, did some laundry, and played with the cat. I've been updating the site a bit, adding a "Links" page, a new rant, and now a new story and a page to showcase some badly-taken pictures of puzzles I've put together. And, of course, all the usual tinkering, with a major shift being that most header content is now script-generated. Hopefully that won't affect loading more than it simplifies pages. The "Links" and "Puzzles" pages are utterly ragged on mobile, but rotating your screen may help, since by "mobile", I really only mean "portrait displays", as that was the simplest and most privacy-respectful way I found to differentiate.