stewing, rumination, complex traumatic stress disorder, and seething. it feels now like what i've spent my entire life maladaptively escaping through this medium of the internet is now what everyone you know uses it for.
a small foreword: this is a test of a "type" of post that's meant to be more off the cuff than others may seem to be. i still discourage myself from "spewing" but i know better than to assume i'm being kind and fair to me in what i do and do not consider worthless drivel.
i had a hard day today. i'm fast approaching a major life shift, not quite a crisis but it's the calm that comes before it. the "bad calm" as i tend to call it. it will be the first time in my life where i am not settling for complete physical and emotional isolation; i will be among people in my peer group, and it will be my duty to participate in my community as somebody who wishes to "spread humanity". that is, despite all my problems, i still love and care deeply about people. it's my feeling of feeling obligated to care about others, and never quite being shown what being cared for looks like, that makes this love dangerous and hard to stop. i don't understand the feeling of loving someone else that doesn't come with debilitating anxiety and pain that i am under strict obligation to prepetuate. i mean this loving in the shared, communal sense. soon, i will have to navigate learning how to seek solitude instead of reinforcing loneliness, because my loneliness has made love impossible. it is for this reason that i feel deep sorrow for the state of our world. this is what my love for humanity currently feels like.
parrots
i follow a lot of different parrot video makers online, and i've grown a fondness for a lot of them. i've got a galah1 that i keep in my mind that i make sure to keep as loud as the real ones. maybe it's to keep my expectations realistic for if i ever decide to keep one. it and a small flock of lovebirds with a parrotlet here and there.
parrots have been the focus of interspecies communication for a long time; they share this trait with monkeys. Apollo the African Grey parrot is maybe the most famous contemporary example of a live-in animal communication project. from what my discerning eye can tell, no LSD or nipple tweaking is taking place here this time. Apollo genuinely seems like a happy, healthy bird, warranted criticism of aviculture notwithstanding. i unfortunately tend to take such a heavy interest in parrots because the concept of keeping one is so fraught. it's an interesting socio-cultural conundrum, being legally allowed to own something nearly sapient and capable of forming sentences that have traceable associations and semantic meaning, often used in proper context.
to dedicate your life to becoming a 24/7 Talking Parrot Scientist already requires that you make strange choices. it requires that to own a parrot and teach it to learn colours and shapes --- for, again, assumingly, the rest of your natural life --- you must already see the prospect of an animal being able to talk to you as nearly divine. it is easy to understate how much of a commitment a parrot is to begin with, and it's this constant cultural misunderstating that condemns parrots as a kept-animal into an adopt-rehome purgatory fueled by our own sick interests.
i'm not going to claim that i know much about Dalton here, only that i preface what i'm about to say and talk about with this: i think "checking yourself for parasociality" is overblown and it's usefulness begins and ends at whether you are in direct contact with someone or desire to make inappropriate advances. one of the big worries about "the situation" we are currently in is how hard-wired our desire for connection is; if not connection, our desire to be intrigued by things. which is connection. social media is designed to make all attention extractive and inappropriate. individual onus doesn't work as a whole, for nearly anything.
he likes to talk about sentience and AI on twitter, apparently. at least, that's what i was told when i decided to comment positively on a very odd and cryptic post he made on his main Apollo channel, which i was informed by a friend who's been following him much longer than i have is a thing that he likes doing occasionally. whether these are intentional "rent-lowering gunshots" is anyone's guess.
it took some consulting my friends to feel comfortable reading any of it. i'd experienced that kneejerk urge to look away when someone does something strange and makes themselves a target. for all intents and purposes, Dalton does not seem bothered at all by the confused and scared reactions these posts tend to receive, and it's likely that he does this on purpose. he's not in the comments arguing for the sanctity of his work.
a brief aside that i had learned just how aggrevating the process of archiving a youtube post is. the website's architecture seems actively hostile to it. which is likely saying too much: google could probably not give less of a rat's ass about media preservation anyways.
i stop here to think about religion, and it's Western association with zealotry and psychosis. i don't need to scroll down at the comments to know that this is the kind of post that raises heartrates in those who "know a guy" or who otherwise struggle to appreciate the flavour of ernestness evocations of God and the firmament gives off to a more agnostic audience. most of the rest of it gets away from me for similar reasons.
I witness Man chained by powers beyond himself, Unworthy of the forces now bridled, Grasping reins he cannot comprehend, Nor even hope to perceive.
cute parrot funny video
now, i've been trying out "commenting on videos" lately as i've found "cute parrots" to be a very easy thing to make commentary on. you get there early enough, you praise their baby, you get an easy shot at a top comment and a little "liked by the creator" badge. it overall feels nice to do this. this was something a little different, and i had already been slightly in the know about Dalton's general strangeness, so i got that little dopamine rush opening my youtube homepage and seeing one of these. i chose to highlight in my comment my appreciation of his willingness to be "openly strange" knowing that he'd be the type of guy to take this as a compliment, or an ego boost. to hell with it, we're already all evil for being alive, i'll blow smoke up his ass. i suggested he make a blog instead. hopefully one that looks like this. if he uses base44 and Next.js i will be mad.
people generally did not seem to take kindly to this, and i don't know what i expected. i knew that AI Schizoposting was a contentious subject that people are very prickly about. the thing is, when i ask myself, "did he use AI to make this?", i feel nothing. nothing about how the post made me feel had changed. but i had become anxious in that same rejection-sensitive way. my obligation to care had to be placed somewhere, and this somewhere is more existential and not bound to language2. how does meaning-making work anymore?
meaning machines3
the cPTSD panic response more often than not is completely empty of anything to figure out or understand. it is a relentless self-prepetuating barrage of anguish and despair. a more therapeutized individual may disagree but i'm not speaking to objective fact here. when i think of chronic rumination, i think of Hell. with each breach of my chalk circle, i touch Hell and go back in.
i risk burning myself out on posts like these. so a gentle reminder to myself that i could call it here if i like. do you need a conclusion? or would you rather make some connections for yourself?
it's this adorable thing.
there's a list of words that i forbid myself from using. "wrongthink" is one of them.
my first mention of something that i think about over, and over, and over again.