How much? Six and a half inches, snow. Enough where we have maybe one car capable of getting out? Most of us were certainly staying home today, including me. Fortunately, I didn't need to tell my boss that I couldn't come due to inclement weather, because my boss told me that our facility was closed for today. (Did need to cancel my counseling appointment tho.)

It is cold and it is not gonna melt and even if it did melt it's gonna refreeze which is even worse than before the melt. (Funny thing, ice is ten times more dangerous than snow. Snow's not much worse than water; ice is...well, ice. And melted snow refrozen makes solid sheets of it.) Meaning I probably won't be going to tae kwon do tomorrow, either. (Which kinda sucks, as I said I would and it's the first day of a new session for the lil' kids class. But, safety first.)

Being trapped at home on a day I didn't intend to be left me realizing...it is immensely, tremendously, overwhelmingly, boring because I am still in that recovering position of not really knowing what to do because I still don't feel like :efforting:. Mostly, I messed around for a few hours in Majesty (someone figured out a quest turning Majesty into a tower defense game of sorts, and then released a mod based on that quest for guardhouses which upgrades them further than the mods existing, allowing for lots of fun).

I also have made significant progress on the story of Worms. I'm ending the night having just finished Interlude 14--by my understanding, not even remotely close to finished with the story and it certainly doesn't feel that way. There are events which I know happen (TVTropes spoilers, the very thing that got me into reading Worms in the first place). One or two, I can kinda sorta see as maybe being close, but the others are events that in order to transpire (which I know they do), require significant setup (which hasn't happened yet), setup that doesn't just magically appear out of thin air.

So, slow and steady progress to go. Reading a comment at circa 12 posted in like 2018, I seem to recall them stating, "not even a third of the way through", and that wouldn't surprise me in the least. It is a thoroughly entertaining read, and I'm actually a little miffed at one little thing; Shatterbird's control over glass (which extends to Silicone) is pretty much exactly the power one of my heroes (canonical to the Rubyverse) has; he even goes by the codename of Silicone.

Ah well. The OP nature of that power (in a bad future, said character is one of less than ten superheroes/supervillains left alive in the dieing Earth and could continue to exist even after literally every single other person died; through time travel where he basically inserts himself into the pass, said future is averted and thus his present-self is significantly weaker than that and rather deliberately keeps himself rather weak since he hates his future self's guts and both share the sentiment of him not wanting to walk that path a second time, but I digress) is bound to be something others would be aware of.

Anyway, at least I'm not sick like I thought, and didn't have stress of work to make it worse. Also, we haven't lost power. Obviously, saying that is tempting fate, but realistically speaking, if we were going to lose power, we probably would have already. The snow stopped falling; the melting and refreezing could knock out power, but is incredibly unlikely to, and even if it did. It remains true that so far, it hasn't, which remains a blessing in my books.

I think that's all I can think of to say, so probably gonna go to bed now.

WHY MUST I GO TO BED

I want to create.
Except.
My mind is racing.
All it is saying is.
I want to create I want to create I want to create I want to create IwanttocreateIwanttocreateIwanttocreate

And so on and so forth. On repeat. I know what I want to create. I have a very, very strong passion for Phyrra and Cyrus right now. I've thrown around ideas for other things, but they were thrown out because of the overwhelming urge of, "No. Phyrra and Cyrus. I want to create I want to create I want to create".

The problem is.

With my mind racing like that.

I can't focus in on what to do.
I can't hone in on what I would create.
I can't slow it down to think rationally.
I'm just being flooded with the same thoughts over and over again, and each time I have a spark of an idea on what to do, I think, "That might be good, but what do--" and then the flood gates overwhelm with I want to create I want to create I want to create.

I don't know what to do.
I want to create, but I am 100% manic right now.
No other word can describe this.

​I want to create.

So a prior obstacle I was facing was coming up for a name of the planet Phyrra and Cyrus is set on. Today, I did that.

It has more to it than that of course.
To understand this ALL, you'd need me to give you a ramble on the birth of the colliniverse, but I don't feel like doing all of that (it was intended to be a full ramble on its own) just as a prelude for my real ramble.

The cliffnotes that are pertinent are, the colliniverse (the name of the setting for Phyrra and Cyrus) is thusly named because of the collision (thus, colliniverse) between INFINITY and Nothingness (thus, why INFINIverse/INFIverse were working titles and preferred titles for the setting until unfortunately I learned they were taken, alas).

There are four realms making up the colliniverse: the spirit realm, demon realm, mortal realm, and afterlife.

The first entities began to form simultaneously in two of these realms: the demon realm and spirit realm. These proto-demons and proto-spirits began to take on some properties of their realm (demons got the short end of the stick, but due to this fact, were the innovators of several breakthroughs).

While it took a long time for them to gain both shape and form, once they had begun to do so, they began to interact with their environment. Spirits learned that unless suffering cessation of existence, they could never truly perish. This meant that while they could visit the afterlife, they could never permanently reside within.

Demons meanwhile learned that to go to the afterlife, they had to suffer irreparable damage to their form, usually the utter destruction of said form altogether--a one way trip. They could of course suffer cessation of existence like a spirit, but they also had a permanent destruction. Thus, demons basically invented the concept of death.

Spirits and demons alike found that they could procreate, creating more spirits and demons; spirits and demons found that on some occasions, new spirits/demons could form without procreation (more common for spirits than demons tho).

Later on, some demons found out that in spite of reaching adulthood and maturing, they would continue to go through the process of time development--and since at adulthood they were at a prime, they would go past their prime and wither, even die. Thus, demons invented the concept of aging as well, something foreign to spirits aside from in the context of birth-to-maturity (which spirits understood).

Spirits also found they could do something demons couldn't. In ONE specific area of the mortal realm, they found that they were able to influence it. They were vaguely aware of the vast expanse of the mortal realm beyond said area, but slowly shaped this world's properties, within the confines of what they were able to manipulate with their limited influence.

This world is the world on which Phyrra and Cyrus takes place. Spirits were struggling with creating anything with a soul in the mortal realm, in spite of now being able to (briefly) visit said realm. (Demons, too, learned that they could visit this realm.)

They had the right building blocks, but something was missing. The spark of life just wasn't there...
...Until a demon named Lilith deliberately, willingly, underwent cessation of existence to impart pieces of her soul to all of the potential proto-life.

This process was what the planet needed to jumpstart evolution. (Mind you, evolution of life was possible without her--it's just that she made it advance leaps and bounds. She also did this at least partially out of spite, to leave her mark on the world as a "screw you" to spirits.)

And thus, the world would forever bear her name: Lilim.

Incidentally, two more demons also contributed.

Once Lilith provided her mark, demons soon learned it was possible to imbue life with their soul, albeit suffering cessation of existence when doing so. Life, mind you. Didn't require demon souls in order to thrive. There's not a finite, limited, supply of souls. New souls for life are born all the time. It's just that it's possible for a demon to make one particular lifeform have their soul.

Incarnos figured out how to import himself to the mortal realm, permanently, WITHOUT suffering the cessation of existence demons previously had suffered. He even kept his identity and personality, albeit losing his original shape and all his prior experience. The trick was that it needed to be done from the afterlife, and to imbue the new life with its soul at the exact moment the life would gain a soul.

So Incarnos invented the process of...reincarnating.

And finally, perfecting both the work of Incarnos and Lilith, we have Huuma, who reincarnated himself into a proto-human, yet also managed to pass on a small piece of his soul (not enough to destroy him, but enough where all of his progeny would bear at least some of his gifts) to all of his offspring. The whole was retained, but still passed on.

And it was from him that humans eventually formed. (It was not instantaneous, mind you.)

Eventually, spirits and demons alike perfected their forms, their lives, their abilities, their aspects, and so on and so forth and how to enter into the mortal realm. But this is some of the backstory for the process, which I could elaborate on further if I gave you the original ramble on how this state came to be in the first place.

Butyeah. The world has a name now: Lilim.

Now I just need to unbury my drawing of a rough map of Lilim, and figure out how to create more precise geography and from that geography map out intuitive kingdoms from which I can then create the nations that will be named and visited.

And from there, it's naming cities. If I can name all major cities, then I'll have basically done the last bit of worldbuilding I need, since I already did worldbuilding on things like magical leylines, miasmic veins, and the like, with the distinction between beasts, demons, monsters, and whatnot. (Just because I neglected to share them doesn't mean I didn't do them!)

​I'm getting to where scriptwriting will be ridiculously easy.
So.

​Progress!

But no less sick.

In fact I'm actually more sick than before.

I had pains all along my right side. Shoulder, arm, knee, and especially the hip. These have since faded, but were quite bad at work.

My "zoning out" problem is getting worse and worse. To describe what that is, I honestly think it's a self-defense mechanism of some kind. When my body's suffering, my eyes just kinda...vacate. Become vacant. Zoom out. Fade out. I still see things, and I see them with no blur, but in spite of my vision not being blurred, it's unfocused. I can't really process what I'm seeing, because it's just kinda "out there".

That's something I've had every single day, some days much worse than others, and usually it's when my sickness is making me absolutely miserable, not helped by rather human conditions, like needing to use the restroom, dehydration, hunger, being cold, being hot, being tired, though these latter three are mostly from sickness. (The former three are more from work conditions just being brutal.)

I kinda blank out when it happens, too. My mind sometimes has thoughts in it, but often it's just empty. I exist, but there's nothing in me in those moments.

To be honest, those moments are a little scary--because every time I have them, I'm worried that they could take a turn for the worse. With, I dunno. Maybe me blacking out altogether or something. (Buthey. Doctor in two days! Not tomorrow, but the day after, on Wednesday. With luck, something can be done.)

I've been exhausted, in spite of multiple naps, and also suffering from a minor depression symptom of demotivation, in that I really haven't felt like doing anything. I've had productive things I could have been doing. Or even unproductive things which would at least be progressing something. Something, anything, even if not much.

But I didn't really do any of those. (I did knock out some puzzle games from my 500-game-and-growing-due-to-my-procrastination-and-giving-up playlist on Kongregate, though, so at least I was exercising my brain? Doing puzzles is scientifically proven to be healthy, so. Not total waste?)

I've also eaten a fair amount, albeit not quite as much as I was hoping. I ate most of my lunch; all but the ham and cheese sandwiches, which I felt I wouldn't stomach. I ate soup. I ate some grapes. I had some orange juice. Also drank tea and plenty of coffee at work (with two artificial sweetener packets and two sugar packets for the tea). But I was fixed four hot dogs, and...I don't think I can eat them.

I didn't take a shower today even though I know I need one, in part due to my dad's eating at the time I wanted to but mostly due to fatigue and wanting sleep rather than a warm shower (which honestly would probably have helped more than the sleep but OH WELL).

I have a slight sore throat and have had a little coughing today, too. Didn't really check my temperature at any point but have had the normal sickness variances in extremes between burning up and freezing cold. Then there's the tiredness, if you hadn't gathered that already! Less than before, but still existing.

But I think that's about it.

So, worse than before overall, but not terribly so. This is still "about normal" for me...given that I'm sick.
​This is, absolutely, in no circumstances, normal. But it's normal for me in my current condition. I'm not where I want to be, but I'm glad I'm not worse off. Still bad, still sucks, but I know I could be faring much worse than today.

Today I thought about how I would die.
Now, obviously.
I hold no plans to die.

Quite the opposite.

I've stated on numerous occasions I plan to live forever.
Still do!

But of course, naturally, plans never live up to reality and realistically speaking even if it's literally a hundred years from now, even if in spite of my numerous bad health habits I somehow live to be a centennial, and an older one at that. Even if technological advancements help stave off the many deaths I am likely to face.

Something, at some point, will eventually do me in.

The best I can hope for is that this is an event that is far-flung into the future, that the death is at some distant future time rather than suddenly in the immediate future.

Which is, of course.

Nothing special. It's the same everyone wishes for, pretty much. A long, fulfilling, happy life.

Yet inevitably at some point it will end, and I've come to the conclusion that there are only two possible methods for this to happen.

The first is something so sudden and abrupt that I'm dead before I know it, with no warning, whatsoever. We're talking, something that I literally don't see coming, that one minute I'm alive and literally a second later I am dead. Think, bullet through the brain, type here. Something which takes me out so fast I don't even know I'm being taken out.

These are few and far between, but you never know. Obviously if one of these happens to me, I can't exactly survive it.

The second is to die in my sleep, and this is by far the more likely.
Now, I would like to note, it is specifically sleep that would be the deadly cause. Not slipping into unconsciousness. (Though sudden unconsciousness without warning, you could I suppose classify as synonymous to the above sudden death without warning.)

When push comes to shove, I feel that if I were in a situation where I knew my life was slipping away, I'd have the willpower to stave off an eternal sleep. I could fight back against unconsciousness, keep myself from passing out regardless of injury, regardless of what affects me, because I know that if I didn't I'd die and I have an incredible willpower when I need to have one, to survive.

But the body does need sleep. I can avoid sleep when in an urgent situation where sleep equals death. I can avoid sleep when in that sort of emergency. But eventually the body does need sleep. All humans need sleep at some point. Yet a problem exists with sleep, which makes it truly the most terrifying of fates, and also the far, far, far more likely to cause my demise.

When I'm asleep, because I am asleep and have no active thought. Well. With no active thought, I have no defense mechanism. Willpower comes from the will to keep thinking; inherent in sleep, is the inability to think, at least not consciously.

And sure, my subconscious mind may be more amazing than my conscious mind when it comes to things like creativity and the like. It is responsible for keeping things functioning, too; the subconscious mind does things like breathing and blinking among the more mundane tasks unless we take it upon ourselves to do them consciously. Balance, mostly subconscious; we don't think how to walk, so much as we just do it instinctively.

The subconscious mind knows how to do a lot of things. And it has a tremendous ability to keep you alive even in situations where doctors would declare someone braindead; there are many stories of miraculous recoveries from being braindead, and it's largely the subconscious keeping things ticking to thank for that.

But the subconscious, while an amazing thing which is tremendously powerful at keeping things going. Has its limitations. It will act in ways we don't want it to sometimes, and can shut down things which need to not shut down in order to live. It tries, but it is still imperfect; like any human, like any computer, it can make errors.

Not to mention, even the subconscious mind can, when stressed passed its breaking point, shut down, and that's the terror of sleep. If the subconscious mind shuts off while the conscious mind is awake, the conscious mind can fight for life long enough for a 'reboot' of sorts to take place in the subconscious.

But if the subconscious mind shuts off while the conscious mind is asleep...that's death. When we release control of our bodies to the subconscious, when we sleep, we are trusting our subconscious to guide us through to the other side and awaken us up again, bring our conscious self back, once we have done what we need to do in sleep mode.

Yet the subconscious mind can't always do that. And the conscious mind in that regard beats the subconscious. With enough will to live, I fully believe that if I'm awake, I could, sayyyyyy...survive a plane crash from thousands of feet in the air. Fully alive through it, too. Fully conscious.

I'd be able to fight off the unconsciousness that would lead to certain death.

But after the fact.

At some point.

I would need to sleep.
Sleeping is necessary, especially to heal these life-threatening injuries. The subconscious mind does a better job than the conscious mind at mending injuries.

But it is still a period of vulnerability, due to the risk of total system failure.
The subconscious mind and conscious mind work as backups for one another; when one fails, the other can keep the body going. But when both are down...only death awaits.

So it's for this reason I'm convinced that whenever I do die, it'll be in my sleep.

It's kinda terrifying, when you think about it. Every day could be your last, but you assume it won't be, especially if you're like me and assume your will to live will overcome any otherwise-lethal obstacle.

But every night you have no guarantee you'll wake to see tomorrow, even if you're like me, because you have no choice but to release control at some point.

I wouldn't be afraid to go to bed tonight, though.
Why?

Because.

I intend to live forever.

And statistically speaking.
The odds are on my side that I'll wake to see tomorrow.
For over 9,125 days, I have gone to sleep and woken up. That's 9,125+ proofs of no incoming mortality.
Furthermore.
151,600 people may die every day.
But there are approximately 7,442,000,000 people alive in the world.
Do the math; that's a 0.0020370868046224% chance of my death happening.
The math OVERWHELMINGLY supports that, yes, tomorrow will come for me; I will in fact live.

​When you combine the promising math with my intention to live forever, I can go to bed each night in peace, knowing I am going to wake again tomorrow.

By which, I mean, it loves to invent new anime. Phyrra and Cyrus, as you may recall, was birthed by this method. I had a story I meant to blog about but didn't get around to which was another one, and today I had yet another one, albeit this one kinda self-plagiarizing from the previous one.

I don't have the time to explain it today, but it was a really interesting one, to say the least.

Speaking of Phyrra and Cyrus. I didn't do anything productive aside from making content which may actually appear as like five minutes of filler in an episode. Basically, you'd know this if I uploaded my ramble on metals, but adamantium is a metal in the colliniverse. (Specifically, it is akin to steel, in that it is not in of itself, per se, so much a single metal, as much as it is a refined version of a different metal, of which there are dozens. As steel is refined iron into dozens of different alloys, so too is adamantium a refined version of a different mythic metal with dozens of different alloys.)

So today I was wondering if it was in fact possible to have Wolverine expies, that have adamantium melded to their bones--the answer is yes...but that it is not only incredibly expensive, but also incredibly stupid. It can be directly compared to, beit our world or Phyrra and Cyrus's, making a full-body plate male armor...out of gold. Yeah, it's something you could do. It's not going to kill you to do it, either.

It's just a waste of money because in real life it is utterly worthless. The properties of the metal mean that whatever benefit it could offer in theory, when molded into that form, don't work in reality. Still, some people do it anyway. It does offer more mass behind, say, a punch; it does make bones unbreakable, which can be convenient for someone who would break bones a lot.

But the tradeoff is that even the most dense of bones is lighter than the lightest of metals to plate the bones in, so you'd become much, much heavier, not to mention, less flexible. Bones are designed to be a bit flexible; adamantium...isn't. So you become stiff, almost robotic, and need to be much stronger, and are still weighed down.

But seeing as this is a setting which has plenty of golorgs (I need to do the ramble on them as well; short version, that's short for golem organism which is the magical-based equivalent of a cybernetic organism, aka, a cyborg), and there are some situations where it could come in handy (say someone was born with the condition of brittle bones, which is a thing in our world so why not in Phyrra and Cyrus), plus, there's no rule which says that you need to have every bone be adamantium.

It's still incredibly expensive to do, but on a small scale for those who have an actual use for it, it can be done. Not something you'd want to do if you can go without, though, thus, why it'd be stupid for people to just randomly do it. This would come into canon as maybe being a five minute segment if that of a throwaway quick fight for fun, where a contestant would have it and Phyrra would topple them.

​Something I could easily do away with, or expand further, as the need arose, basically.

Just not what I need to be doing!
At work, I sketched out in some quick doodles a few traditional Paladin weaponry.
Now, mind you, what I mean by traditional, is exactly that; they are things which are common due to tradition, but are not in any way shape or form mandatory in that Paladins use the weaponry they forge, and the weaponry they forge is weaponry suited to their style of combat/lifestyle choices.

I didn't get all of it done, but I still knocked a few basic doodles out for a few of them. Felt good to ~art~, even if only briefly so.

What I more came to talk about is a personal blog from my childhood, to tell a completely true story of one of my earliest memories, because it's an entertaining (if a bit mortifying) story. I had to have been either three or four years old for this incident, early. (So in the 1996-1997 range.)

Basically, the short version of it is...I was a genius child. Absolutely smart as could be, in many aspects; incredibly sharp. Fairly common descriptor of autistic children in fact; we pick up on things which most people don't, but we just have an incredibly poor understanding of other things as a tradeoff, more or less.

This is not always a good thing.

When my family was out car shopping, it happened that I was left alone in a dealership car. I don't know why I was left alone, but I was left alone in the back seat of the car. Presumably, my parents were testing the car out, and got out to talk to the dealer about details of the car, inspecting it from the front, or something like that. (They may have had the hood up, even; that'd certainly explain how they didn't notice this!)

If I was in any way restrained by a buckle (I'm presuming I was, but I have no memory of it, so if so it presented me with no challenge to my goal), I managed to undo it; I know this, because I remember crawling from the back seat...into the driver's seat.

(This is a story that, for full effect, you'd need to listen to multiple family members' perspectives.)

What I remember of this is I had a single thought:
"I wanna drive like mommy and daddy do!"
I knew the steering wheel made you go left or right; I knew the brake pedal slowed you down; I knew the acceleration pedal sped you up; I also knew that in order to start the car...mommy and daddy always pushed the brake pedal down, and ended up pulling that lever on their right sides back in order to make the car go forward.

So in the driver seat.

I did exactly that.
I think I was completely down in the pedal area where the feet were, pressing down on the brake pedal...and shifting the car into gear. (Or at the very least, neutral.)

My parents were, prior to this, completely unaware anything was happening...but started panicking when the car I was in started moving forward. (Thank heavens there was no key in the car because even at that age I coulda turned the car on. Though, granted, had I managed it, I probably woulda been stopped before shifting the gears, butstill.)

The main reason for the panic, however, was not because of the implication...

...But because my brother was right in front of the car as I pulled this stunt.

So they made a mad dash to the driver side door, figuring out what had happened, in order to stop me.

In other words.
As a child.
I almost ran over my brother, by "driving" a car.

To this day, how I pulled off what I did baffles my parents, and even I'm not really sure what happened. All I remember from the incident, really, IS that thought of "I wanna drive like my mommy and daddy do!" and the car lurching forward after I fiddled around.

​Makes a good story to tell at the least.

Not as much progress being made as I would prefer, but enough to be good!

I figured I'd knock something off the quickie list.

​I wanted to cover this when talking about characters' parents, but the short version of it is, literally over half the cast is orphans. The few who aren't, have both parents alive, with one exception. Ace's mother died reasonably recently in his life (without her, he had no ties to his home and thus her death spurned his adventuring life)...but his father is very much still alive.

Unlike most parents still living in the story, we actually get to meet him and learn a fair bit about him. His name is Jake Samson, AKA, "The Four-Armed Swordsman". This is a moniker he earned via using two two-handed weapons...one per hand. He doesn't literally have four arms, but the implication of the statement is, his skill and mastery of using two two-handed weapons at once is such that it seems like he'd need four arms to accomplish the feat.

His weapons of choice are a longsword (maybe even claymore) in his right hand, supported by a nodachi in his left hand. He's considered the best swordsman of the old continent, one of the top ten adventurers in the old continent, and one of the top ten swordsmen in the whole world.

In this sense, he is a bit of a rockstar, and suffice to say, Phyrra is in particular flabbergasted to learn that Ace's father is someone so famous. It should be noted though that due to how the world of Phyrra and Cyrus is, he's only a mild celebrity. He has some world-wide renown, but only in his area is he considered particularly strong. So he IS famous, but only slightly so.

So I still need to find a spot to unload all the stuff in my notepad file as to not risk having that info lost forever; I need to share a fair amount on blogs, too. I have my blogs loosely ordered such that they are grouped by subject, making it easier for me to ramble, too. All the big ones are organized so that I can unleash them all at once and all the small ones are in the notepad, waiting to be launched.

​Progress!