Aside from how I have work tomorrow and need to get up at 6 am (so there's pragmatic reasons for it as well), I simply am feeling really really tired. I can't drink coffee, I can't nap without screwing up my sleep, and words are having that blend-together effect, soooooooo.

I'll need to hold on for an hour yet.

Wait, me making an entry before midnight?

Why yes. Yes, I am indeed making an entry before midnight, to help facilitate the process of going to bed at midnight. Usually when I say "bed at midnight", by the time I run all my errands (blogging, pills, and petting the kitteh), it's usually 10-30 minutes past midnight.

Soyeah, earlier blog today.

Today was obviously mother's day and doubled as our birthday celebration for my younger sister. There were plenty of good times to be had (ha I typo'd that as 'bed' nice subconscious telling me what I already know I want), and we watched Spaceballs.

I always wish that I had a way of sharing the events of a typical family night with those that I'd want to share them with, especially on days where the family doesn't end up discussing stuff like politics. (Which is usually done really late at night when my older sister and I are both out of the conversation and usually when my younger sister isn't in attendance, i.e., mostly done between my brother and my dad.) Especially the full family nights with all six members rather than partial ones with four or five of them.

They are just...special family moments, hilarious, fun, unique, irreplaceable. It's something that if you have it in your life, you just know it, you just get what I am referring to, but if it's something you haven't had, it's literally impossible to get, to experience, to understand it even if given vivid descriptions.

Families have in-jokes and those in-jokes aren't understood by outsiders, but even without in-jokes involved, even on a night to night basis, you just have to be there to appreciate it all, and even when I sleep, even when I park myself on the computer (a place where I am usually seen--not entirely unjustifiably so--as "out of it"), I legitimately do.

Also it helps that tonight during family night I felt particularly sexy. In a feminine way. I don't know why, I'm pretty sure I looked anything but, but I felt that way and feeling that way while with family is a rarity to be treasured, given how it normally doesn't--can't--exist.

Speaking of femininity, I felt fairly feminine today at work, too. It's kinda weird. When I first started wearing my underarmor shirt and pants, I felt incredibly feminine when doing so. However, today was the first time I was without, and I felt more feminine without than I was with, in spite of me being quite positive that I got a boost to my femininity when I initially started wearing the look.

Similarly, I am quite positive that when I initially started wearing my V-neck + sweatshirt combo at work for warmth, I felt more feminine...but when I stopped using that look, when I went back to the t-shirt, there was that very same boost in femininity.

It's weird. Rationally, logically, it's probably that the change from the norm feels different and that difference feels empowering, feels feminine to me. But I personally like to hold the theory--however implausible it may be--that each and every time is a permanent increase in femininity. That I was feminine when I began, and slightly more feminine when I wore the sweatshirt, then became more feminine when I removed the sweatshirt, and became more feminine when I started wearing the underarmor, and became even more feminine today when removing it and going back to just the t-shirt as I was before.

It's a nice thought to be having, anyway.

Apparently, when I'm tired like this, my mind wanders more easily. While that isn't very productive for making a coherent blog and leaves each subject in less detail than I intended, I believe a fortunate side-effect of it is an overall longer blog from multiple thoughts I'd otherwise have not blogged about; I thought this blog would be a paragraph or two and just look at what it is now.

Butyeah. That's my blog for today. Will probably also have my pills a bit early, so I can instantly plop down to sleep the second midnight rolls around.

It's a really lousy workaround, and doesn't do the original image justice, but it's better than nothing.
I used my phone to snap a picture of it, which I then through a convoluted process managed to transfer to my desktop (a process involving sending it to my girlfriend even though my girlfriend is literally my only years-long consistent blog reader in that every other blog reader I know of comes and goes with the times, making it kinda pointless long-term but OH WELL).

You can tell what I mean by the camera pic not being the best, but it's at least adequate at showing the basics behind the picture and what I mean.

As a refresher, take a look at yesterday's blog both for a reference point of the prior versions of the panel and for my description of this one. You can instantly see what I mean with the face, right? Something just feels...wrong about it.

Yesterday I thought it was the mouth. Maybe the mouth is slightly too large, but otherwise I took a quick look at the art trying a tactic: look at the image with the head obscured above the mouth (so that the mouth is the only part of the face visible); look at the image with everything below the mouth obscured (so that the mouth is the only part of the face not visible); look at the image with everything.

With the first, the image didn't quite look wrong--it looked okay, it looked passable.
With the second, instantly? "OH GOD THE EYES".
For the life of me, I could not get the eyes to match.
I tried.
I really, really, really tried to get the eyes to match.
But I botched it every single time no matter what I did. I think it's her left eye (appearing on the right) being slightly out of proportion, with the edge near the outside being larger than it should?

Butyeah--you can tell that I got really lazy from pretty much just below the shoulders. Still, the head tilt--while subtle--is hopefully there, visibly. And that was one of my main goals with this.

Overall, quite pleased with this.
​So let's show them all off, side-by-side-by-side, once more for a final comparison.

Aside from how the first is colored, the second is scanned, and the third is a junk photo.
In actual terms of quality of the art itself.

I feel like this is just a logical progression--a well and true, proper, art evolution.

It's on that note that I'd like to continue on a ramble that I originally was going to start in December, near the anniversary of The Descended, back when I first found and started archive binging Grrr Power. (Which I now read as it comes out.)

A ramble which earlier this week I began to revisit, but cowarded out of following through on it--I told myself I would write the ramble while I was at work. Even figured out how to preface it. Even told myself not to get distracted. Even told myself that I'd be a coward to not do the ramble. Even told myself I'd do it if I didn't feel like doing it.

And then at home...I didn't feel like doing it, called myself a coward for not feeling like it, told myself I would do it...and in spite of all of that. In spite of saying that, in spite of knowing I wanted to blog about it, that I should blog about it, I didn't actually blog about it.

Something I kinda sorta hinted at a little bit yesterday, but didn't get into as much as I'd like.

I'm not going to start the ramble the same way I planned in December (and heck, won't even cover a fraction of the material planned then, I'm only going to cover some of it).
I'm not going to start the ramble the same way I planned it earlier this week.

I'm going to preface it by saying that the art-me was for a longest time, "missing, presumed dead".
I thought my inner artist was just...gone.
Not gone in theory. I still thought of artistic things. I still thought of artistic stuff. I visualized artistic stuff. I was an artist in mind, still--but my drive to actually draw stuff in practice? My drive to draw things out in the real world rather than my head? It was gone.

Completely gone, for the longest time, as far as I knew.
Lingering there in the back was a desire to make my ideas real...but no drive to do it--until yesterday.

So what I say might be subject to change.
The artist within me was rekindled, so it's possible other stuff will be, too.
Also this was a ramble typed before I got passing interest in League of Legends, too, so that's another aspect of me which may come back as well.

But to go into things a little bit...

​...Well. Basically...I don't know what to do.

Or more accurately...I do, I compiled a list even, I just don't know what I want to focus on doing.
The full list also included don't-wants, too.

-I want to continue with my life on the mafia site I frequent.
-I want to finish my civ 3 mod, Across the Ages - Mediterranean.
-I want to continue The Descended with all of my accrued skills/knowledge/talent/ideas since my last work on it.
-I want to continue Red Hood Rider with all my accrued skills/knowledge/talent/ideas since my last work on it.
-I want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality...I really want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality.
-I want to be a teacher.
-I want to be a housewife, raise a family. (Of course, this is optional, but it is still a want all the same since there's multiple ways it could be done.)
-I want to live with my girlfriend.
-I want to fully transition.
-I want to live a happy, rich, fulfilling life.

-I don't want a job, beyond the one I've already got.
-I don't want to live independently.
-I don't want to write (yes, surprisingly enough, I don't want to, but like I said, the artist within me was revived so you never know) pure writing. Obviously, I'd write webcomics for The Descended and/or Red Hood Rider. Obviously, I'd write for Phyrra and Cyrus. Obviously, I'd still write down ideas whenever I had them. Obviously, I'd continue writing blog entries. But I don't want to write literature. 
-I don't want to read. (Well, I've done reading recently, but reached the end of everything I was reading.)
-I don't want to game, not much anyway.
-I don't want to watch things, not really, anyway.

Mind you,
-I do want to do those things if they involve someone else (namely/chiefly my girlfriend; absolutely I want to watch things with my girlfriend and watching, sayyyyy, One Piece episodes is the highlight of my week but what I mean by "I don't want to watch things" is that without watching them with someone else e.g. my girlfriend...I don't want to spend alone-time, me-time, time with just myself and nobody else, watching them--and this also applies to games; absolutely I'll play any game for/with my girlfriend but on my own my desire is rapidly fading).

But on my own.
Just by me, with nobody else.
No encouragement, no help, just as my own thing?
I just...don't want them.

A job is a means to an end--it provides income. To achieve most of the things on the list, I recognize that pragmatically-speaking, I need a job. Transitioning is expensive. Living with my girlfriend won't be possible most likely unless I can pull my weight and not be deadweight monetarily speaking. Phyrra and Cyrus is a project I don't want to make money yet which will be absurdly expensive to make. Red Hood Rider and The Descended both won't make money (they could off of ads, but I am against making money off of them in the same way I am against making money off of Phyrra and Cyrus).

I simply need money. Our world runs on money. And while I get a fair amount from my job--it's not nearly enough. It's minimum wage. Minimum wage in a state with one of the highest minimum wages in the US, but minimum wage all the same. It's also part-time, too, making things even worse. The only reason I have more money flowing in than flowing out is because I'm not pulling my weight in terms of paying for expenses. Food, gas, house mortgage (or whatever), car maintenance, etc.; I do none of that aside from the rare instances I put a quarter of a tank in out of emergency, or stop by a fast food place because I desperately need a fix.

I know I need the money--but I don't want a job, because simply put...well, there's more than just one reason.
One, I just don't want it. Not wanting it is itself a reason, it doesn't need a justification in of itself. I am happy with my current job (well, mostly happy, anyway, about as happy as any job would be because there ain't a job in existence which I wouldn't have troubles at least equaling my own if not exceeding the ones I deal with so I know my issues are comparatively minor). I simply don't want another.

Least of all as a replacement, but even if it weren't a replacement. Even if I worked two jobs instead of one. I just...don't want to.

Two, even if I did want another job.
I don't think I can handle it.

One day of 8 hours is literally murder on me.
How on earth people manage to do 8 hours a day, five days in a row, every single week almost without fail barring extenuating circumstances and recognized-by-the-company holidays, heck if I know. But I know that I am basically catatonic doing it once a week, where even doing it once a week is too much and I am barely functioning from it, where I would be better off not working in the final home stretch of the shift.

Even if the shift is limited to 5 hours a day.
Even if between both jobs my shift is limited to 5 hours a day.

I can't handle more than 20 hours a week. Heck, even 20 is breaking me. My hard limit, by my calculations, is 18--any more than that, and I am suffering badly. I am badly, badly suffering when I work more than that amount. I simply cannot function.

Working two jobs a week, there's simply no way I'd be able to keep it under 20 hours a week.
Heck.
Even if I quit lifeguarding (and again, to reiterate, I don't want to quit my current job), at the new job there's no guarantee I'd have the job security I do here while staying under 20 hours a week.

Say what you will about my work as a lifeguard having a job where what I'm asked to do is borderline-illegal and typically unethical and often counterintuitive and even contradictory, but the simple fact is...I've worked there for five and a half years and never once been at risk of being fired, in spite of me being able to ask for work of maximum-15 and receiving it. (Mind you, I do have to specify FIFTEEN in order to get 15; specify 18 and I end up with 25, but when I specify 15 I do in fact receive fifteen-or-less, as I requested.)

I've no such guarantee at any other job--in fact, quite likely my refusal to break myself by working more than the limit of my body can handle would end up with me fired, with me having no job. I physically. cannot. work. the amounts. that most jobs ask me to. It is literally impossible.

And yet legally speaking, we talked this over with my counselor, getting disability benefits for me would also be impossible because I can't legally prove that it's impossible for me to work that much. More complicated than that, I know that's something which people will try to pick apart, can't really explain it properly but trust me when I say that there's nuances involved where basically, if I was incredibly lucky and waited literally years I might be able to possibly receive help in some areas (e.g. housing I think?), but that what I actually need, extra money more than what I get now...

...I can't get from the government.
And yet I can't get it from a job.

A job is a means to an end, an end I desperately need, yes, but I just...can't do it physically, and don't want to do it either.
Plus.
Even if I did want it and even if I physically could do it.
There's a total paralysis in what jobs to actually do; I wouldn't know what to pick and choose even knowing these criteria. And even if someone literally spoonfed me a job--it'd require me to follow through on it and that's something I just...am not really...well. Invested in doing.

This is one of the things holding me back from pursuing an actually potentially viable teaching job in spite of wanting to teach (but more on that below)--I just know that in spite of having a passion to teach and wanting to teach, that there's just an utter freeze, an utter lack of will, to push forward and take the plunge in because for some reason that idea of having a job I just don't want.

And I can't make myself want it.

Especially since that job?
That job, which is a means to an end?

As far as my family is concerned, that job is so that I can take the steps to live independently.

...But what they fail to consider is...
...Me living independently? It's what they want. It's what they are pushing for. When they frame the question the wrong way, they get the illusion that it is something I want. Because living independently is a means to an end, it is more or less something I'd need to do to not be deadweight if I got to live with my girlfriend, to not kill my girlfriend from stress overload, to not have my girlfriend have a panic attack when I'm out of site, and so on and so forth.
It is also a safeguard in case I am suddenly kicked out of the house by my dad; if I know how to live independently, then I can survive on my own with difficulty.

But while it is a nice safeguard. And while it is something that would teach me how to be able to support in my own way my girlfriend rather than just be deadweight. I don't want it.
It's not something I desire.
Nothing in my life is inherently better with me independent.
Me being independent enables me to transition, sure--by proxy of not being dependent on my dad.
But that's not something which is a given.

It's not "independence = can transition, dependence = can't transition".
I can be independent and lack the means to transition, and I can be dependent on someone other than my dad and still have the means to transition.
The two aren't linked in that way.

So I just...I don't see the point?
Why am I supposed to be independent?
Because it's something that people "should" do?
Because it's something normal people do, especially by the age of 25?
Because it's something that would convenience others?

It's just...none of that is about me, now, is it?
Like I said--the only reason I see to be independent is to teach me the skills so that I'm not deadweight to my girlfriend, so that I can actually help out and manage some things on my own...but those skills don't require me to be independent, do they? Independence is the quickest, easiest way to teach them, sure, I guess...but it isn't the only way to teach them.

So if I can get those skills in other ways more suited to me...and I lack reasons of my own to seek independence...
...Why would I want it?

I just don't.

There's then my lack of desire to write.
You may recall that my flashdrive containing my writing broke years ago.
It's still broken, still hasn't been fixed, frankly I think my brother forgot it even existed, wrote it off as a lost project then didn't return it or something like that.

That's no excuse to not write.

I can, and have, remade stories from scratch.
Heck, because I am overly fond of rewrites, it's actually a specialty of sorts.
I can, and have, come up with dozens of story ideas. (Most compelling of all, the Worm-inspired Quadraverse story I owe you rambles--plural--about due to having expanded it multiple times since you last heard about it. And it'd be in exactly that format, a book, not a webcomic, not a game, not a show, a book.)

I can't stop my brain from coming up with dozens, hundreds, of ideas, nor would I ever want to. I enjoy those story ideas, I love fleshing them out, I enjoy talking about them, I enjoy making their plot twists, enjoy creating chronology, characters, and so on and so forth...

...But I just...
...Have an utter lack of desire to actually write.

I once came close.
I came close to creating a forum thread, recently, where I would tell people, basically, "I am looking to write, and want some writing prompts to give me a direction to write. I write as much as I can, before then requesting another prompt, and will keep going on this for as long as I can", more or less.
Figured out the rules and everything.
What my starting point would be.
What sorts of things I was looking for.
And so on and so forth.

Almost did it.

...But didn't.

Not because I forgot.

Because I lost interest.

I just lost interest in doing it.
And I have no interest in writing any new stories.
And for that matter, no existing stories.
The loss of my flashdrive, then, I realized was nothing but an excuse.
I was pissed at the time. Royally ticked off. Bummed out, in despair, at the loss.
But I could have recovered from it.

It was a choice not to.

Because right now?

The writer within me is dead.

Like I said, that's the status my artist within me was until just yesterday, so that could change.

But as of right now.

I don't want to write.

Because the writing me is dead right now.
At least the novelwriting, story-writing me.

Similarly--I don't really want to read things on my own.
I read, browse, TVTropes.
I keep up to date on webcomics--more out of obligation than anything.
Yes, I've binge-read a few webcomics recently.

But all of that? It's mostly enrichment. Mostly inspiration. It's mostly things which give me ideas, which make me feel better, which are part of another aspect: they are part of me living a full, happy, enriched life because they give me a degree of cheap pleasure, but it's not something I have any particular investment in. They're just time-wasters. Wasting time, rather than something I truly did because of a deep desire to delve into the world I was presented with.

The magic exists--and then it doesn't.
Worm is a great example of this.
I mentioned in my blog recently, either yesterday or on Friday, that I finished reading Worm.
And more significantly.
I did something like 28 chapters in only a couple months or so...
...And then stopped.
I just...didn't read.
I had plenty of times I could have read.
But for months. (Well, slight exaggeration.)
It just sat there, unfinished.

And then the magic was briefly back, just long enough for me to finish it in less than 48 hours. (Maybe less than 24, I forget if it was Wednesday or Thursday that I started but I'm pretty sure I finished before Friday?)
But it's gone again.

It comes and it goes, but it's not consistently here.
It was here consistently long enough to drive me forward to read something like 28 chapters in a remarkably short time. (I got some internet-stares when I said how much I had read in the short duration I had, akin to "...HOW", with them flabbergasted that I could read so much in so little time especially given that I read many comments too.)

But then it wasn't.
And it isn't, again.

So overall, reading's just not something I strongly have right now.

It is useful for enrichment, for entertainment, for boredom-suppressing, for lack-of-better-ideas activities.
But that's about it.

Ditto, gaming. It is equally a time waster, and due to a small selection pool of games...far less enriching of my life, other than providing entertainment and relaxation and a distraction from doing things that are more important to do.
I still game.
But when I game, it's not so much that I want to do it, as much as I defaulted to doing it.
I ran out of ideas, so I did it because I couldn't think of anything better to do and it was the thing that was most appealing or rather more accurately, least-unappealing.

Again, I'd like to reiterate.

These change when it comes to having a partner, having it not be just me.

I would read just about anything if I had someone to trade comments with about it, facepalming, screaming, making snarky commentary, the like, about it. And I don't mean in the sense of a forum where you just look at comments, place your own, respond to existing comments, e.g. on a webcomic with whatever posting method the webcomic uses (for instance disqus). I mean more in real time, where we can have a real conversation and bring attention to things the other might have missed.

That is fun. That is something that I would always be down for, that I would always enjoy. That I'd always find immense pleasure in.

I would play just about anything if I had companionship in it. Someone watching the stream of a game I play, preferably in real time, again to make comments about how much of an idiot I am being, how stupid that move I made was, how much I deserved what was coming to me, etc.

Someone to play an online game with me, where we could both fail together, repeatedly, because of my incompetence getting us massacred over and over again. Or, alternatively, if we stack things in our favor to make it nigh-impossible to lose...managing to win a victory albeit one where I didn't pull my weight. Or, alternatively, where we play against each other and I totally let them win, honestly, couldn't just be because I am absolutely utterly incompetent and they are just better than me, nope, not my inexperience, totally me letting them win.

Any of that? Yeah, that's fun. Never tire of that. Never gets old. Never would stop with it.

But on my own. With no feedback. With no network...I'm getting tired of it. I'm not creative, I'm not inventive, I fall back to the same habits and do not explore much. I play the same things I have played...and I basically just. Don't really have much motivation to play them anymore.

And similarly, watching falls under that same umbrella. Sure, watching things with others is amazing, is great, is something I want to do always and enjoy doing. A real highlight of my week, uplifting, amazing, basically something that gives me great, immense, immeasurable, pure, sheer, joy at having done, leaving me happy and fulfilled.

But on its own...well. Watching some things can be useful to gain inspiration. It can motivate me to do my own things, to make my own work, to get ideas from what I watched on things that I can improve on in my life and in my creativity...but that's about it.

I don't really want those to be central parts of my own, personal, me by myself, life.
They can exist in the peripherals, sure, I guess.
But they shouldn't be what my life revolves around.

What should my life revolve around?
Well, probably not half the things I want, but whatever it should revolve around should be something I want.

And again.
I want to continue being a part of the mafia forum I play on--because it is, like it or not, a fundamental part of my identity. It is a piece of me, a rather large part. When I gave up, progressively more and more, on every other site...at the end. Even after having given up on ComicFury...I stayed there. I stayed there when I stayed nowhere else.

It keeps me grounded, it keeps me sane, it gives me my one iota of social interaction and is the only source of resources/support network I have readily, easily, available access to. Pathetic, sure, sad, yeah, but that's simply the truth. They are all I have built up.

Doesn't help that they serve as a very nice source of enlightenment, so to speak--they have a far, far, far, far, FAR more open-minded view of the world than I'd otherwise get. I mean, liberal as liberal gets is a fairly dominant majority there, sure, yeah...but I need that to help counterbalance the fact that my family is as conservative as conservative gets.

I need reminders that my family is racist, that my family is bigoted, that my family's religious intolerance is not okay, that my family's politics are not to be blindly sheeped, that I should take their words with heavy grains of salt. And the site's one of the better places to give it to me.

Not the best, admittedly, because they have a bit of a problem with the "if you don't agree with this, you're part of the problem" mentality, and they're not aiming to educate people nor am I directly looking for them to educate me and other issues and the like, but it's still exposure to an opposite view to what my family (and by 'my family', I mostly mean "my dad's toxic, backwards views"), but I fully credit the site for being one of the largest influences in me not being an echo of my father.

Without them, I'd be the worst trash of the worst trash, most likely. A despicable human being that honestly the world would be better off without having around as a whole, one spouting hatred at all times at everything not appearing to be part of it. I was headed down that road, and while I'm not fully on the road opposite of it (to the point where some probably would still argue I am those things, a despicable human being that would be better off not around, an opinion I can't entirely dispute because yeah, I am kinda trash), that I am at least trying to stay further and further off of it is something I credit to the site.

Sure, yes. The internet is a toxic cesspool of vitriol, and this site is no different. That exists, in abundance, and perhaps moreso than on most sites. Certainly seems it is filled to the brim with those hostile, divisive emotions. And yet...in spite of that. It is not all negative. It is not all bad. I know that my place on there is largely a negative one where I cause more problems than I help...

...But in spite of that...I still want to be a part of it, because it is part of my identity.

It was one of the two places I came out on as being a girl. (The other being ComicFury.)
It is one of the main places that helped me build my confidence in my femininity, that helped me build my identity as a woman. That helped me find who I am as a person.

And it's something that I crave.
Even if I wasn't part of that site.
I don't think I'd be able to give up mafia altogether.
It's just ingrained in me. Second nature to me. As both a player and as a game host/moderator/insertterminologyhere.
If I was on any site that had mafia, I would play it--I wouldn't go out of my way to sign up for a site with it just to play it, but if I were already a member of a site I visited that had it, heck yes I would. (Which would be a liiiiiittle bit problematic since I know sites that I frequent such as Kongregate have sections for it.)

Heck.
If I was on any site that had a section dedicated to playing games...and they didn't already have mafia?
...I would start it for them.
I would figure out what I'd need to adjust, what I'd need to make it work, and then I'd make it work.

Only way it'd be possible for a complete detox from mafia would be to cut me off from any site that has any source of games on it. And I mean, any source. Doesn't need to be forum-based; if they have a chat client that has chat game support? I'd find a way to make a chat-based mafia game.

Because I think in mafia games.

I have it that ingrained in me, that I convert experiences into mafia games and mechanics. I turn ideas I see into mafia-centered things. Many of my ideas which started as a mafia game can be converted to something not a mafia game...but it also works vice-versa just as frequently, where something I thought of as a different idea becomes a mafia game because the mafia game suits the idea more naturally.

I've been doing mafia for over ten years--not half my life, but 40% of it. 2/5ths of my life, spent on the forum game. That experience sticks with you your whole life. It's ingrained in my brain. It doesn't go away. It's instinctive on every level. The good (what little there is), the bad, the ugly, it's all there, as part of me.

And because in spite of its flaws, in spite of all the things there which are sour, which there is bitterness about, I genuinely believe in the community, I genuinely feel like it is a special place, I genuinely feel like it is a place which is more good than it is bad. It's got lots of bad. Lots and lots and LOTS of bad. But the good is just...stronger, more empowering, more rewarding.

I want to make more of that good, there. I want to do what I can to make there a better place, one piece at a time. The site is, in many ways, a bit of a reflection on humanity. It is deeply flawed, it is deeply troubled, there is lots of hatred, there is lots of divides, but there is also lots of...everything positive about humanity. Bonding, creativity, socializing, humor, love, friendship, unity, you name it. 

I could drop it. (There are two situations which would cause me to; if my girlfriend asked me to, in spite of my attachment to it, I'd leave in a heartbeat, wrap everything up as hastily as is possible and then simply depart and never return again, OR, if I on a fundamental level felt the site itself had betrayed my trust. I've felt betrayed before, but that's not something that I consider the site betraying me so much as something else having done so.)

But given the choice, I don't want to. It's helped build me as a person. You can leave sites like that behind you...but it's not something you ever want to do, and this is no different. My investment, my attachment, is such that barring either condition coming true...I just...want to keep it as a part of my life.

I don't want it to consume my life.
I don't want it to be all of my life.
I don't want it to be the most important aspect of my life.
Heck, when I wrote these down, it was almost practically in the order of least important to most important. (Almost. Not quite. Not really, but you can kinda see how the later ones are more important to me than the earlier ones. It's not an exact list, being a teacher is a lower priority than my creative projects, but the reason it's lower on the list is that it has a direct lead-in to talking about the others, which you'll see if you keep reading, BUT I DIGRESS.)

So it's not an important aspect of my life.
But I want to continue keeping it AS an aspect of my life.

On that note--I want to finish my Civ 3 Mod, Across the Ages - Mediterranean.
This one's not really that important...but it's a bit of a pet project. There'd be a sense of accomplishment, of, "I did it!", and it's a bit of an education, a personal pursuit of mine, a bit of a healthy hobby of building something tangible, that you can look at as concrete, and which could lead somewhere.

Would be unlikely to lead anywhere, but could lead somewhere, in that even though it doesn't teach me coding or anything it still teaches me basic structure of how to make a game idea more or less real. It gives me the layout of the sorts of things, the details, I'd need to work out. Structure of the game, of map layout/creation, of units, of balance, of tech trees, of resources, the like.

The knowledge generated from this is poor due to me being lousy at it, sure, but it's still some sort of grasped knowledge, which I'd get better at with time and practice. And it is knowledge which does have a way of transferring over to other projects, especially if I begin messing around with things I thought I wouldn't be messing around with (such as pcx files).

The intricacies, the nuances, of making my scenario what I want it to be, would teach me how I could go about making ideas that are my own game proper, into reality, because honestly this mod basically is a game of its own at least in scope, in scale, in ambition, in ideas poured into it.

I wouldn't even probably play it, beyond playtesting it. See the game section above for why. If I wanted to make something of my life...I just wouldn't have the time to keep playing it over and over again, even though if I succeeded at making it the way I dreamed of it, I'd have the ability to.

The ability to play it over and over again and enjoy it, that? That if I could actually achieve it with the full scope and scale of my ideas, would make it all worth it in the end. So it's something I want to do, but it's not something that is at all critical. I still have desire to do it even though I work on it less often than I used to (used to be just about every day), but that's more from increased passions elsewhere I didn't know I still had.

I want to go back to The Descended, from my revival of interest there.
This is something I was going to touch on in my December blog, which was near the anniversary of The Descended. (Remember, The Descended was spawned as an idea around Christmas Break, on vacation; we were in Oregon when on my grandfather's antique computer I drew the first sprite iterations of The Outcasts, The Elementals, and The Latens. I forget the exact date, but it was somewhere in that range.)

The exact blog was spawned during the time I said I had an "epic year-end blog", promised it was coming soon, procrastinated, said I'd do it, but never actually did, with it never having materialized. There was so much more to it when I wrote it, but one of the core aspects of it was a scary thought to have.

The Descended, with my thematic nature of liking 12, had about 12 "Arcs" of content.
Each "Arc" is, by my approximation of modern standards (not original standards), ~30-40 pages long.
The Descended was, from the very beginning, at its original iteration and with each reboot, each revision, always at every single point, envisioned as releasing once a week.

One comic a week.

The Descended was the first webcomic I had which had clear start and end points and material strewn in-between.

I had other story-based webcomics--some I even knew the direction of!
But I didn't have clear ends to them. Only generic ideas of where I was heading with things.

The Descended was the first, and in some senses, still the best, at getting me a story-based webcomic that didn't just have a simple direction. It had a clear, definitive, unambiguous, ending planned to it. (Mind you, not at the get-go. Took time for that to materialize, until July if I recall correctly which is why I consider July 23rd to be an "anniversary" for The Descended, and consider the original December launch date an anniversary.)

My original plot, I lost on my old old laptop. You know, back when my old laptop was called my laptop, I referred to an old laptop? Well now it's not the old laptop because my previous laptop now is the old laptop, so it's the old old laptop. Or maybe it goes back even further? Actually, it does.
My original plot was on my old old old laptop, a laptop so old I pretty much forget it even existed in the first place. That, or it was on a desktop. It involved many more gags than the current plot, many more out-of-universe mentions, far more self-awareness, and even toyed with the idea of there being a on-the-other-side-of-screen (i.e. YOU the READER...except, GAMER) character, a gamer, controlling the actions and being dissatisfied with the outcome, "loading" to redo them...and at least at one point the characters in-universe refusing to revert.

I don't remember the details, never wrote it all and frankly I'm glad I didn't because while that was a valid direction I could have taken things in, The Descended would have been far, far, far worse off for it. I'm much, much happier with the direction I decided to take things in when I got my next plot.

Which I still didn't finish.
And which was on my old old laptop.
But which, critically?

I mostly have memorized.

The finer details, fine points, exact specifics, I don't remember--but I remember far more than I don't. It's ingrained in me as second nature. Mind you, there's not total recall. I have to focus on a moment to remember that moment, but I can generally remember more or less the structure of all the ideas I wove, the intricate narrative between the four protagonist groups of four and their pasts from before the start of the comic.

And I can tell you that works out to be about 12 arcs, with each arch being about 30-40 pages long.
The first arc to introduce you to three of the main groups and a little about them, the second arc to get more into the details, third arc to have the outcasts have their first encounter as a team while the background of the elementals and latens is explored, fourth arc the three groups meeting, and then further arcs for exploring the villains and such. Davos with an arc, Aria with an arc (so that's six), an arc detailing the rise of the fourth group (so that's seven), at least two arcs detailing miscellaneous plotlines where each character gets some growth, and then at least two arcs for the climax (that'd put it at eleven meaning I'm either merging two separate arcs or forgetting an arc, but I'm in the approximate right range, here).

What makes this all be scary?

Well do the math, here.

I took down the original page, but the original date has been preserved.
The Descended's first comic was released on December 28, 2009.
Over 9 years ago; near the end of this year, we'll be seeing The Descended's tenth birthday, and at the time I wrote the blog, I knew we were looking at its ninth.

There are 52 weeks in a year.
Do the math I've presented.
12 arcs, each ~30-40 pages long?
360-480 pages.

One page a week?
If I kept to one page a week, in nine years, I'd be able to do 468 pages.

Now assuming every arc together ended up being less than 480, then I'd be finished with The Descended.
The Descended would be done.
DONE.
Finished, completed, start to finish, a comic that was actually wrapped up and concluded, rather than on an indefinite, indeterminable hiatus.

Now, granted.
One page a week, the original schedule, is an unrealistically high goal given my innate abilities and how busy I was.
Also granted.
I improved the comic in 2012, 2013, and 2014; those dates represent more accurately the places you can call launches for the comic proper compared to the original.

Butstill.

The scary thought?

The Descended is an unfinished comic I put so much effort into, only to end up wasting it, because of stupid reasons.
Originally, writer's block, leading to a rewrite and generating a script.
Then writer's block in how to make the script real, culminating in the death of the computer.
Then in artist's indecisiveness.
Then for the stupidest of stupid reasons, because I didn't have the worldbuilding finished.
The World of Soano, The Descended's setting, is an RPG Mechanics 'Verse--one which using RPG Mechanics Terminology, but which is not self-aware of being in a comic and do not consider themselves in a game (because they aren't).

This is a rare combo, but it's exactly what I chose to use. To them, they use terms like mana, charisma, wisdom, dump stats, the same way we might talk about computers, food, health, cars, whatever. It's just part of their world, of Soano.

I didn't finish making the mechanics--I wanted it so that the World of Soano was one where anyone could run a functional whatever-they-want using it. A tabletop RPG, a video game, a webcomic, a story, I wanted the World of Soano to be accessible and usable by all, not just me. So I wanted to build the system for it...and I never finished it, and I put the comic on hold while I tried.

Stupid reasons.
Stupid, stupid reasons to stop the comic.
The hiatuses were never for that officially, because I was busy, because I couldn't keep up with my life, but it still contributed to killing the comic.

And yet.

I would be done with it if I hadn't quit.

Or if not done...close to.
I would be nearing the end of it.
I would be getting ready to wrap things up.

And yet.

Instead of that.

I get a comic that never started.

In spite of how there is now a revival of interest.
And new ideas.
Yes, those ideas are a bit "draw and discard".
Some knowledge of The Descended is irrepairably lost forever. I'll never get the finer details back, I'm sure some plot threads I devised are entirely Lost Forever, in spite of how good they were. The plot I had for The Descended was a magnificent one, one which was funny and yet told rich stories with great character depth and which went into the backgrounds of them and showed their personalities, all of them, on full, the entire way.

You got a bunch of compelling villains, too, who were largely sympathetic in spite of being antagonists to the four groups. I've forgotten all but a handful (literally, can count them on a single hand; the big bad, two who have personal ties to characters, a third who has a tie to another character, and a fourth whose final battle I remember vaguely but I remember literally nothing else).

But I've also gained things like the Aria chronicle. Her basic background was in the plot from the get-go. I knew that the revelation about her lineage would be there, but the story was all in the present/future; it didn't delve into the past at all. That whole story would've never existed, and yet now it does in full, because I toy with getting into Aria's mindset quite often (she's fun to think as and fun to interact with).

And frankly...losing ideas? The ultimate excuse I put forward for stopping The Descended?

Was just an excuse.
It wasn't a justified reason to halt things. I remembered it, how hard would it have been to just type it up again and make a better backup? I stopped because I wanted to stop...

...But I've regretted it ever since then.
Always wanting to unstop it. To revive it. To come back to it. To do it again.

Heck.

One of the things I gained was a basic map OF The World of Soano. Soano's shape was originally incredibly vague, but now I know what it looks like. (Well not by memory, but I have the paper in my room and can locate it fairly quickly to reference.)

And using that basic map.

I was able to map out the exact geography of where our protagonists begin their journey.
And even drew up a few pages for a hypothetical reboot of the update that vastly improved the reboot of the reboot of the original. (I think that's how many I did? Might be one more reboot in there?)

I could make it be amazing.

Absolutely stunning.

I know how to draw all the characters better than I ever did, in spite of having not drawn most of them in like five years minimum in some cases.

I could fix the gaps in the mechanics, patch them up.
I could make it coherent.
I could finish what I started.
I could do everything I failed to do then, now, with my current skill sets.
I know I could do it, because independently I've done those sorts of things on my own.

It'd take time, it'd take planning, but I know I could make it work, and dangit.

I want to.
Even though I know it'd take time.
Effort.
And ten years to see fruition.
I know that the longer I wait now.
The longer it'll be for those ten years to come to fruition.
So I want to do it sooner rather than later.

​And you know what else this applies to?

The thing inspiring me to make this ramble?

Thaaaaaat's right!

Red Hood Rider is all of the above, and more.

When we had easter, a result of that was me organizing a lot of stuff.
Part of that was recovering my old never-made December blog entry, but another part of it was uncovering the Episode 1 artwork (which was all drawn on paper) that I'd brought out ages ago to use as a reference and never returned to my room.

It had degraded to some extent and had been shuffled, but I did what I could during this time to preserve it and put things in the proper order.

And this is what got me set off towards the current path.
Because while there was plenty of things about the old art that I hated (the original "Hello" face panel among them), there were other things that to this day I think are drop dead gorgeous.

I managed to make amazing art back then. Circa September 2016--two and a half years ago, it'd appear.


I did intricate details that to this day I'm not sure I'd be able to do.

There are some things that are horrific and I'm honestly wondering if it's just that I rushed them because I struggle to understand how I could be so good in some areas and so bad in others. Or maybe I made them from memory without reference images and the amazing ones are ones where I cheated by using some, butstill. Doesn't matter. The point is. There's some gorgeous artwork in there.

So everything I just said about The Descended?

Applies to Red Hood Rider, even moreso in some instances.
My original plot is sort of lost. There might be a copy of it stored online (which I know where it is), but I'm not sure if that's a copy of the plot itself or if it's just most of the characters. (I know it's not fully up-to-date because the character of Brigand I'm pretty sure wasn't included among other stuff.)

The original plot I've mostly got memorized, but vast large swathes of it I have forgotten. Mostly stuff that gave characters other than Ruby...well, their characterization. Each of the ten fighting members of The Ruby Gang had immense characterization to them, and even the two non-fighting members of The Ruby Gang had plenty, and so too did support members like the Darkblood Coven's higher-up vampires, other Coven's vampire leaders, and such.

Every single Rogue got a lot of exposure, and even a wannabe Rogue got a repeat appearance. (That I remember, but stuff like that, I know I didn't.) Fighting styles, I had mapped out. Basic abilities, I knew. Details of the Rubyverse, largely mapped out and explored.

Lots of that stuff, I forgot.

The majority of it, I remember.

And just like The Descended?

Critically.

There's a "draw and discard"...
...Where I added key aspects I didn't have. Though to some extent I've re-forgotten them, when I was playing around with inventing my martial art, it was the vampiric martial art that I was inventing, for use in the Rubyverse for some of the choreographed fight scenes that were far lamer and more rigid prior to this invention.

And near the climax of the series, there was a whole Episode that I've invented...one which is one of the most important in the whole series, as it is the episode which explains why Ruby has been the protagonist the whole time, which explains Ruby's role in the Rubyverse, why she was selected to be The Chosen One. Before I had an episode covering a What If where she didn't exist, where Sally was The Chosen One, and it's still in the series at a much earlier point, but this new episode?

This new episode builds off of that rather than just leaving it, and ties things together that originally weren't.

Ruby is actually given a very strong reasoning for being the protagonist, and in it, the episode explores both why Ruby is me...and why Ruby isn't me. And how both halves of that are important to why she's the protagonist. And how everyone is a little bit me, and how they could get by without someone who is heavily me, but why in my story they had someone who is half me.

Because that's another thing which has changed about the story.

When I first envisioned Ruby.
She was born as a series of "what if"s rapidly chained together.
What If I were a magical girl.
What If I were a vampire.
What If I were both a magical girl and a vampire.

And from that, she became me in all but name, just with abilities I don't have. Me if I were a vampire magical girl.

...Except...

...She evolved.

She isn't me anymore.
She's still partially me. She's still got large aspects of me in her life, because she was based on me, she came from me.
But she became something else.

AND FURTHERMORE.

I became something else.
I diverged from Ruby, just as Ruby diverged from me.

Over the last couple of years, I have continued to have my world outlook expand and grow--and Ruby's outlook has also expanded and grown...but not identically to mine.

We've taken similar paths, but not identical ones...and this new episode just before the climax? It heavily explored this concept, this aspect, of her and why she earned her identity, her spot, as the protagonist, rather than having it just be given to her. A meta commentary on her role in the entire series, even.

So much about the series I've lost.

But in spite of her being largely out of focus.

Crucial details like that?

I didn't originally have...yet I have since been given.

A draw and discard.

Mostly memorized, some lost, but lots gained.

I wouldn't have it finished.
72 episodes were planned--each episode a little bit shorter, in the 20-40 page range rather than 30-40 page range, but with far more episodes you more than make up for that. Divided up into 12-episode seasons. Conservatively, that'd be 1440 pages; liberally, that'd be 2880 pages.

Red Hood Rider also updated at a rate of one page a week.
And was much, much newer.
When was the launch date, again? 
October 1st, 2016 it looks like.
Two and a half years ago.
At 52 pages per year, that's ballpark figure of ~130 pages.

Less than a tenth done with the series.
Heck.
Less than half way to conservatively being at the end of the first season.

But the other part I said about The Descended?
That part still applies.
I would have ~130 pages done for Red Hood Rider.
Instead of four.
FOUR.

Because I quit.
Because of real life stresses.
Because of stupidity.
Because of excuse after excuse.
Because I gave up.
Because I just...didn't do it.

And yet.
Now.

I want to.

I know how to do it, and do it better than I was doing it. I wouldn't need to redraw anything, all I'd do is suddenly have a years-long sudden improvement in the art. (Might come at the cost of it being in a different font tho as I don't remember what fonts I originally was using.)

I can make it amazing, make it stunning, I can fix my mistakes (for instance, fixing the godawful aesthetic of the ComicFury site), finish what I started, do everything I failed to do then and do it now. With my current skills, it's viable, it's doable, and it wasn't back then. It'd take time, it'd take planning, but I could make it work.

And I want to do it.

Even though I know it'll take time...and would take an amazing 28-56 years for me to finish if doing only one page a week. (Which is an outright impossible thing so I'd need to somehow manage to do more than one page a week. Like, two or three pages a week.)

Yet if I don't start it now.

It'll take that same amount of time whenever I do start it--and I'll be just as behind then, in the future, as I am now, because I didn't do it now, because I didn't close the gap any when I had the time, the chance, the method, the opportunity, to do so.

But in spite of that.

It's not the only thing I want to work on.
It plus The Descended are not the only thing I want to work on.

I really want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality.
I think of them almost every single day.
Again, there's a draw and discard effect going on.
Some worldbuilding details get lost; exact details of how episodes are meant to go get lost.
But the overarching chronology, what things happen when? I know by heart, and I keep on repeating them over and over again.

I really, really want to make them come to life.
They are my passion. There is an ambition there. It is a love project. A project of pure love, a creation filled to the brim with all my heart and soul, that I want to pour my everything into. I know it won't be easy. I've had a bit of an insider look into what constitutes a sound editor's job, and contrary to my original hopelessly naive belief that I might be able to do that myself realistically speaking having seen exactly what that entails I know that in theory I might be able to technically speaking do it...

...But that when doing so it's a butchered job that is a hot mess. In order for Phyrra and Cyrus to come to life as I envision it, I'd need someone else to do the sound editing for it. Because if it were me, I'd never be able to do it justice. I could do justice to The Descended. I could do justice to Red Hood Rider. (Although to get multiple pages out per week I may need to bite the bullet and get help because frankly I don't know how I'd manage so much as one a week yet alone multiple a week with no aid.)

I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus. I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus as a voice actor and even if I could do one voice I certainly couldn't do them all. I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus as an animator least of all because I'd have to teach myself how to do it and then do the hot mess of a job at it which is shared for being what a sound editor would be.

I'd have to go back to my blog where I detailed everything about what I need for Phyrra and Cyrus to confirm this is everything, but off the top of my head, what I need?
-Animator for the four openings
-Animator for the four closings
-Animator for the show itself (the three need not be the same, though they can be)
-1-4 composers for the openings' music (one composer could do all four, four composers could do one, or anywhere in-between those extremes)
-1-4 composers for the closings' music (ditto)
-I'll handle the songwriting for the openings and closings
-1-4+ singers for the openings (probably at least one will use multiple voices and thus need multiple people)
-1-4+ singers for the closings (ditto)
-A sound editor
-Voice actors for each member of the Thaukama, each villain, recurring characters (rare as they may be), and one-off characters (this probably is 2-4 dozen people altogether depending on how much overlap there is)
-I'll handle the scriptwriting

I can do justice to the things I say I'll handle.
I can, and plan to, give direction to the animators for openings, for closings, for the show itself. (The latter is an extension of the script; of course the script, or what I call the script, covers the basic plan of what's to be animated.) But I can't do animation and have it do Phyrra and Cyrus justice.
I can songwrite and do Phyrra and Cyrus justice.
I can't sing and have it do Phyrra and Cyrus due justice.
I can give direction to the composers for what I'm looking for from them, but my skills in musical composition are lackluster enough that I wouldn't be able to properly do Phyrra and Cyrus justice if I handled this.
Having seen what sound editing entails, how involved the process is, how so much of a single second of video animation can have like thirty individual sounds (not an exaggeration, if anything that's understating it rather than overstating it) attached to it? I can't do that and do Phyrra and Cyrus justice. I'd miss too much, I'd leave too much out, it'd be too basic, too sloppy, to chaotic, to filled with things it shouldn't be and missing things it should have.
I can't voice act and even if I could I can't voice act for the number of people I need.

I can't get these things for free, I know this, too. Even an animator working cheaply for the exposure it'd give, even an animator who I could get on board for recognizing it as a love project, even an animator who could get as passionate about it as I am...well...even if I could get someone with one, two, or even all three of those traits?

It still wouldn't be free to do. Because anyone who learns animation to the level of skill I would be looking for is doing this sort of thing professionally--as in. They need to pay their bills. And animation takes time. Ain't an animator in the world who'd be able to provide that animesque high quality animation I am looking for, who'd do it in what amounts to their spare free time, because that's what them doing it for free would be.

If they do it for a cost, then because it's a job they are going to be making it a project they put some fairly decent investment into. Maybe it's not their top priority project, but they're not going to put it on the backburner, they're not going to put it off. They're getting paid, so they are going to make it and make it well because they want to live off of their animations.

If they did it for free, then they'd still need to pay their bills. They need money for food, for gas, for electricity, for supplies, for internet, for all the stuff professional artists and animators need. They need money to survive--so they need to get it from somewhere.

If I wasn't that somewhere, then they'd need to be doing something else to get the money...meaning that Phyrra and Cyrus? Not their focus. Honestly...if Phyrra and Cyrus took longer to make because the animator was working cheaply and had it as a lower-tier project while working on a higher-tier project that was more expensive and can sustain them, that'd be fine.

My concern though is with the quality; when I do finally find an animator...if it doesn't live up to my vision...if it isn't what I envisioned or even better (because the thing about good artists to a writer is that sometimes, they exceed the writer's expectations and throw in details that are even better than what the writer told them to do, and I imagine animation is similar in that it can be better than what the script called for), if it looks like junk because as far as the animator was concerned something not helping them pay the bills was junk to make at a lower quality...what was the point in making it at all?

I imagine that with the proper research, I could probably find someone who would work for free. Would be incredibly hard to find, but I could find it out there somewhere. But would they make it quality? That's what I'm looking for. And 48 episodes of quality? That's not cheap. That's not free. That's expensive.

It takes money that I don't have.

But I want to make it.
I know I can do it.
Realistically speaking I'd be funding it by season, I'd be needing to do a fundraiser, I'd need to find a way to make ad revenue to go towards the future seasons and maybe fundraise them if the ad revenue isn't enough, and even after doing that I'm going to have to find people who have a combination of those traits.

Who are willing to do it cheaper than the usual rate for the sake of exposure.
And/or who are willing to do it cheaper than the usual rate because they recognize that it is a labor of love, a project with heart and soul behind it that they genuinely believe in.
And/or who are passionate about the vision that they are able to see I have for it.

Because that's the only way I'll be able to get the money raised and have the money raised cover everything.
I know a lot of research needs to be done on my end.
I know that a lot of work needs to be done on my end.
Finishing the scripts.
Doing the storyboarding of sorts.
Filling in filler details.
That sort of stuff.
I know that all.

But I want​ to do it.

And I also want to be a teacher. Not as much as I want to make Phyrra and Cyrus, and, heck, not as much as I want to create my webcomics. But.
I love teaching. I love imparting my insights, my wisdom, my thoughts, my teachings, onto others. I like to be able to say that a person was left in a better position, because of a contribution I gave to their growth.

I just have a love of teaching.
I don't even care if my lessons are listened to, if the people I am teaching to actually learn, though obviously I take pride and joy when they do, especially if they are able to take my teaching and improve on it to make it better than what I was teaching them to do.

I just...really like passing my knowledge and skills on to a "younger" generation. 

This need not be a teaching job proper, though.
I don't need to be a Teacher to be a teacher.

For instance, I am prominently known for being an expert/"expert" at the theory behind mafia. (Depends on who you ask. Bit of both camps are accurate; I have been playing for ten years so it figures that yes there are somethings I really can teach people about and being autistic with my brain wired in nonstandard ways gives me unique insights others over those ten years have missed...but because I am autistic I am prone to poor explanations of concepts, and just because I've done it for so long doesn't mean I'm perfect or know everything or am right all the time because I'm human prone to error and also poor judgments. Could ramble on this subject all day, but here's not the place for it.)

Nothing gives me greater joy than just getting a chance to tell people about my philosophies and have my ideas be passed on to them--not necessary verbatim. Taking elements of my ideas is actually a way to turn a basic idea which was on the right track but never nailed it (which is what I often am) to be refined to the point of actually getting it.

I encourage healthy skepticism in my teachings, will tell things as I see them and have a bit of a "that's the way it is" attitude towards some stuff, but I like just...seeing people actually read what I say, and taking even some of it to heart. Like, pondering what I said, considering it, and even just going, "ehh I disagree, for these reasons".

Someone who reads my ideas, and develops their own, someone who listens to my teachings, but develops their own. Someone who paid attention and took the best of what I had to say and eliminated the worst of what I had to offer. I love having stuff like that happen.

And another form teaching can take?

The main form which I dream about it taking, in fact?
The ultimate form--parenting.
Now, granted.
I know that I'll probably be a lousy mom.
Doesn't change that I want to BE a mom.

Doesn't have to be biological children, though it could be. I'm not picky. Doesn't have to be from birth babies, though it could be; again I'm not picky. I'd consider myself no less the mother of a 4 year old than I would an infant, no less the mother of a child with my blood in them and/or my girlfriend's blood in them than I would someone who has none.

Aside from being a housewife being my dream job (again, even though I know I'd be terrible at it and it is pragmatically speaking, economically nonviable in this day and age), frankly, the main reason I think I've always dreamed of raising children?

Was so that I could teach those children.

Every time I think about it.
Every time I think about all the times I've pondered wanting kids.
Every time I think about having envisioned raised kids.
Every time I think about all the different ways it could have happened.

Ultimately.

The thing that I remember most from all of those times.

Was that I was teaching them the lessons that a mother teaches their children, more or less the type of lessons my mom taught me only being my own unique take on them, stuff like actions versus consequences, the price of pursuing what you want, the like. Giving them a drive, giving them an encouragement (because encouragement is one of the most important aspects of teaching).

Supporting them, loving them.

It's mostly that I wanted to teach them to be the human beings they end up being--and with luck, to have some pride in knowing that their lives turned out the way they did in part because of what I helped them with. (We'd certainly hope so, because the alternative to that is despair/shame/horror that their lives turned out the way they did and the constant doubt of where I went wrong. Stuff like, 'they became a serial killer', noooooooot something I'd exactly be able to find pride/joy in, is what I mean.)

Ultimately, though...everything I just said?

Literally everything--mafia, the civ 3 mod, the descended, red hood rider, being a teacher, raising a family? I'd give it all up for my girlfriend. I'd give it all up to just live my life with my girlfriend. It is perhaps one of my greatest wants. It is one of the holy trifecta, the other two being the other two I listed.

I want to transition.

I want to have a full, happy, rich life.

I happen to also legitimately think that these three things are the only three on the entire list which augment each other rather than get in the way of each other. I have a finite amount of time in a day.
I can't, fundamentally can't, every day.
Do mafia.
Do the civ 3 mod.
Do The Descended.
Do Red Hood Rider.
Do Phyrra and Cyrus.
Teach.
And everything else.

I can't do them all at once.
I have to pick and choose. (More on that in a bit.)

But I legitimately, genuinely, think that the holy trifecta are together things that not only I can do all at once, but which are borderline impossible to do without having done all at once.

​I am a girl.
Without having fully transitioned, I will never truly be able to be at peace--which will diminish my happiness.

I derive the greatest happiness and joy out of the love I have for my girlfriend. They are the most important thing in the world to me--more important than anything else and I would do anything for them.

Transitioning is something that I legitimately don't think I can build a support network for on my own--it's a little bit of a self-feeding loop. To build a support network, I need a support network. And to get a support network, I need a support network. I honestly don't think that I'll be able to manage it on my own. And while I can theoretically have access to a support network here...realistically speaking, I don't see how it ever works smoothly.

It'd be bumpy, shaky, at best. It's something that I'd barely manage to do, if I managed to do it at all. There's a very real chance that left to my own devices, I never transition in spite of always wanting to, for like...ten, twenty years. However long it takes my dad to die. And even then, only transitioning if I am not then reliant on my brother, and can find a way to manage it in the hectic situation.

It's something that in theory I can do, but pragmatically speaking, transitioning is something that I'd likely have the easiest time with if it was with my girlfriend. 

And of course--my girlfriend probably wouldn't have become my girlfriend if I hadn't known I was a transwoman, and presumably is happier when knowing that I am happy (especially if they are the cause of said happiness).

When I wrote this blog, originally on the 23rd, I titled it "I don't know what I want to do".
But it's more like...
...I don't know what to focus on doing.
I know what I want to do.

I just spend five and a half hours typing it out. (Okay that's a slight exaggeration. Started at just past 12:45, and it's 6:03 now, so it's more like 5.75 hours.)

Everything I wrote? That's what I want to do. (Mind you I didn't cover large swathes of some subjects, e.g. the massive chunks of the December blog I left out.)
It's just that they are all so...so...conflicting, and I just.
Have a paralysis on what to focus on, more or less.

And while I know there is quite a bit of risk in me extrapolating on my thoughts down this avenue (seriously you have no idea how worried I am that this blog post could get me banned from sites or like have a cop knock on my door), I feel like the reward is worth it.

Basically. My detractors may have the impression I think I'm the greatest, but. I really don't. Sure, I have delusions of grandeur, I put up a facade of confidence all the time, and even get genuinely arrogant. So I'll be the first to confess there are times when I, genuinely, fool myself into thinking I'm a good person.

But whenever I'm actually honest with myself and reflect...I know I'm not. I'll talk about things I've done, thoughts I've had, perspectives I hold, but even when I try to explain why I'm a monster, I avoid actually revealing the things which make me one, because I don't want them to be known. (And frankly I could potentially even ruin my life by revealing some of them.)

Even in this blog post, right here and now, I am doing precisely that. I'm not going into what makes me a monster. I'm barely even teasing it. My statement that I am one sounds like it's empty, because I don't back it up. And people may think I exaggerate, as is my wont. People may think that what I think is monstrous of me is something completely normal. They would be wrong, because if they actually knew, they'd agree, yeah, it's monstrous.

But because I don't tell them, they assume the like of that. Thinking I'm not possibly that bad even though if anything I'm worse than I indicate. To give the tip of the iceberg, and I hesitate to even describe it that way because this makes people severely underestimate the extent of how disturbed I am, I wanted to talk about something.

What I'm about to describe, I feel would not so much as even scratch the surface of my inner monstrosity. (I've made it quite clear in the past that all of my mes, all of the me that makes me me, is afraid of that inner monstrosity, and for good reason given what it can do and my fear knowing it can and would do that.)

The evil within me can be, on occasions, channeled into good, but the evils were evils I immersed myself in willingly, with no such altruistic goal; I had no expectation of turning the evil into good, and doing so can be thought of as simply not letting lemons go to waste and making lemonade from them. It's still evil regardless, unambiguously so.

How bad am I talking?

To reiterate: everything I am about to describe. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I am about to tell you. I don't consider monstrous. So after reading the entirety of this blog post and seeing every single thing I describe and knowing not a single one I consider to be monstrous, you should be left with a question:
"If she didn't consider any of THIS monstrous, what does she consider monstrous?"
(The answer is not some philosophical trivial BS nonsense which is completely fine with everyone else, by the way, nor is it some quirk that literally everyone has. It is actual real monstrous things, but the darkest parts of my mind I keep private from others and won't ever explain on a blog.)

Before we begin, though. This is a necessity:
TRIGGER WARNING: THE ENTIRE REST OF THIS BLOG DEALS WITH TORTURE AND MAY TOUCH ON GORE AND RAPE, AMONG OTHERS. Viewer beware!

You've been warned, so you know what you're in for here; it's...not gonna be pleasant.

​Torture is something I think about alarmingly often, and not in the more lighthearted ways. What I mean by that is, I'm not talking about BDSM here because that is in no way shape or form torture; I am also not thinking about torture in the clinical, scientific, detached, theoretical sense of it.

You know. Think about how someone can be a buff for a subject. Science buff. History buff. Gun buff. Knife nut. You get the idea. They can hold fascination over the history of the subject throughout the ages, and know details about it from various regions and points in time, and go on long, passionate rants about, saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy, the gory details of how the Aztecs would sacrifice a human being.

But they do that in a way which is self-evidently healthy and light; they're not into those things because they derive some form of recreating these things. Their interest can be thought of as trivial. They dig into the facts about those things as a side-project, as a hobby, as a passion, as a passing interest which they can be enthusiastic about, but they don't really go beyond that.

My interest in torture is not of that kind.
My torture is of the more thorough, deeper kind. I absolutely was the kind of kid that tortured all forms of life as a child. I probably left lifelong psychological damage on one of our first pets from what I did to her; I would squish ants, tried burning them with the magnifying glass trick, and would relentlessly brutalize plants in just about every way possible.

And while I eventually did swear off those ways and promised to be pacifistic, in spite of that, on some level I did shift gears from plants and animals onto humans. Where the unhealthy, darker sides of torture would be. The type of thought where it'd be, "This is how to go about it, and this is what to do to not get caught", kind of thinking.

(Disclaimer: Due to just how vividly and detailed I am in these descriptions, I feel the need to state beforehand: in case you are wondering. No. I haven't actually tortured anyone. Nor have I looked up/researched torture. But these are a collection on my thoughts on the hypotheticals behind if I did do it. I state these with a viewpoint which sounds confident and assured, that what I say is fact. That viewpoint comes from a lifetime of demented thoughts, thoughts not acted upon but which were thought up all the same. This is the darker side of having an overreactive imagination; by having the ability to envision even the most twisted of things, I am able to do...well. Just keep reading. THAT.)

People can and have called me psychopathic and/or sociopathic for my more sadistic tendencies, and frankly I don't really blame them for doing so, given my selfishness and detachment from reality and utter disregard for the rules of society and so on and so forth.

Yet to go into torture, really go into it, you have to start with a few baselines for what I actually mean by torture, here.

You can think of torture in terms of attempting to obtain pieces of information. Not only is torture proven ineffective in this regard, but also there are more reliable ways of obtaining such information. I don't really see torture as viable to this means, and this type of torture is not what I mean.

You can think of torture in terms of deriving pleasure from the inflicted suffering of others. This is closer to what I mean, where the torturer is enjoying the act of the torture more than anything else, but this isn't quite what I mean, either. There's plenty of ways to derive pleasure from the suffering of others that don't involve torture.

​What I more mean about torture is, what you can think of in terms as being "torture for the sake of torture". Torture for the sake of tormentation. Not expecting to get pleasure, not expecting to get anything out of it. The torture here is zero gain. There is nothing to be had from it. Only pain of the victim.

In other words: inflicting suffering, just to inflict the suffering. To drag others down, not to raise yourself up, but simply just to drag them down. Something transcending a sense of sadism, as it were. This is where I approach torture from, so that should give you a good idea of where I'm coming from, if you can comprehend this concept as an actual real thing. (And I'm telling you it very much is one...at least for me.)

​I've even thought about what would ultimately be one of the most excruciatingly slow, painful methods, which I call the "Hundred Permanent Paths of Pain". (Name is a bit of a misnomer, because there's not literally 100 pains involved. There's more.)

The first step in it would be to break every bone you can safely break without killing the victim. Hands, arms, legs, feet, ribs, the like; we have hundreds of bones in our body. Not all can safely be broken without risking, say, internal bleeding, but a fair number are safe to break. Keep in mind that bones can also be broken in multiple locations if big enough, and that inflicts even more suffering.

That's just the start though. From there, pull out all 20 fingernails and toenails. Rip them out of their sockets. And then, cut off the top third of each finger and toe. Then the middle third. Then the bottom third. (Each finger and each toe--even our thumbs, even our pinkies, even our big toes--has three distinct sections. These sections are harder to see in some of those extremities than others, but exist all the same.)

For all of these cut off parts, cauterization (which is extra pain) can be applied as is necessary to stop the victim from bleeding out. We're at 81 (if you count bones collectively as 1) paths of pain thusfar; the next logical step is to cut off the hands at the wrists, then the feet at the ankles. Then, cut off the arms at the elbows, and legs at the knees. And then, the arms at the shoulders, and legs at the hips. Which bumps it up to 93.

At which point, there's a bunch on the face.
Ears, 95.
Eyes, 97.
Tongue, 98.
And then you can pull out each and every single tooth they have.

The tongue and teeth come last for the purposes of hearing unmuffled screaming.

This level of agony would of course be instantly lethal if given all at once, so would be delivered over the course of days, if not weeks. And if their forcefully-blind/deaf/mute-paraplegic state isn't enough, there's always whipping their torso and hanging their neck but not enough to kill them for bonus extras (that can technically be done again and again at any time).

Step by step, the permanent paths of pain would be...well. Permanent damage. Starting out with things that can heal even if unlikely to heal correctly, and then moving on to things that won't heal but can be adapted to, and progressively on to more and more debilitating injuries, worse and worse as it goes along with the exception of the facial ones that are technically less severe, but are more psychologically scarring.

Which is a nice segue into the next section of defining torture to me.

All of the above? Absolutely nothing to me. Because while the above does hold some psychological aspects to it, it is almost entirely physically-based induced suffering. And for me, psychological pain is the true heart of where torture lies. You can inflict endless amounts of pain, but if it's physical, it's temporary. Psychological pain, on the other hand, isn't.

​This is one of the reasons, say, rape is such a special kind of evil. (I'll try to keep my talk here light and respectful, but I do consider it to be a form of torture of sorts, so I feel I need to at least mention it. And, yes, it is in fact monstrous, so ignore my "everything I say below I don't consider monstrous" line above when it comes to this section.) There is the obvious immediate physiological damage, but the psychological scarring from rape lasts a lifetime. 

Especially if after it, the victim suffers further from others: not being believed, being called names like whore, slut, and the like, victim blaming, and in a disturbingly large number of cases absolute lack of closure as the rapist walks away without any lasting consequences for whatever reason.

Even if the victim does receive a form of vindication/justice and has some amount of closure, there will always be some reminders of the incident that they can never fully remove from their minds; it will last a lifetime and never go away. They can find ways to cope, they can find ways to recover, but they'll never fully heal, because the psychological damage lasts well after the physical damage has passed.

It is perhaps one of the more extreme examples and in our every day life/the absolutely craptastic world we live in one of the most common examples of torture (sad as that may be, it's simply the facts; it happens, and pretending it doesn't won't change that it does, and is there a LOT), but I could name any number of other tortures akin to this.

For me, torture can be thought of as a performance art, subject to the whims of the audience (in this case, the audience is the victim): the key to making it be successful is to find the audience's trigger points, and figure out what works to psyche them, what gets them to react in the ways you are hoping to make them react.

Because, the real key to torture, is to never let the victim go numb. When a person is past their breaking point, they'll numb the pain. Pain will be meaningless to them. And when pain is meaningless to them, it ceases to be torturous, because it no longer has any affect on the victim.

So you rotate the torture. You give variety, introduce new hells one after another. And you give things which, preferably, can never be adapted to. Many psychological sufferings can eventually be coped with; a skilled torturer who really knows how to torment their victim will inflict psychological scarring that no matter how long it goes on for, will never be something they can adjust to.

The majority of my most disturbing imagery will end here, but I still wouldn't say the rest of this blog is safe to read, because I'm starting out with describing the ultimate torture someone could inflict on me. (One of the few redeeming aspects of these thoughts? I had them with me as the guinea pig in them. I didn't envision me inflicting the hundred permanent paths of pain on another; I envisioned them being done to me. But that still doesn't change how disturbing they are.)

The ultimate torture that someone could inflict on me is what I call "The Metal Box".
It is exactly that, a metal box, about three times the height (and thus, width and length, as this is a perfect cube) of the prisoner contained within. The walls absorb sound, so no sound from outside enters; no sound from inside echos. As the name indicates, the walls are also a cold metal.

You might think that the metal box would have no lighting, or dim lighting. Quite the opposite, the lighting within is equivalent to that of the sun (give or take), with light shining from all six directions. Not from a single location, either; the light is spread out across the entirety of the walls, floor, and ceiling, as if the very metal itself were the light itself.

There would be a small hole in one wall for a toilet, but not a hole large enough to climb through. So small a hole, in fact, that it can barely fit the contents you are dumping into it. It's just big enough that you won't die of disease as a result of poor sanitation, but offers no escape, no entertainment (it's not like a flushable toilet with a toilet seat that you can lift and lower for entertainment or a handle to flush for entertainment or tools you can use to escape). Pure baseline functionality.

There would be a water dispenser, designed similarly to that of those used for rodent pets like a hamster, such that you only receive the amount of water you need to survive, no more; it's impossible to drown yourself when you become more suicidal. It's also impossible to break it down into tools to orchestrate an escape.

Meals are delivered at random varying intervals, anywhere from as little as one hour apart to as much as two weeks apart. There is no pattern to these meals; there is no rhyme, no reason, to them. They come when they come, and don't come when they don't come.

Said meals are delivered with no tray, no plate, no silverware, nothing but the food itself, and are dumped in such a way that it's impossible to see anyone delivering the food. It just goes in, and that's it.

The metal box is, other than these features and the presence of the prisoner within...completely and entirely empty. Nothing inside it. Whatsoever. Except the prisoner, and the necessary means to keep the prisoner alive and functioning. With no way for the prisoner to derive entertainment from those necessities, and no escape route. Trapped in a metal box of a room, utterly empty.

The end result of this would be losing all sense of time, trapped with the worst enemy of all: my own mind. My own mind is my absolute worst enemy. I function because I have an outlet for it. I wrote down this blog at work; that's an outlet. When I post it as a blog, that's an outlet.

But what if I were, permanently rather than temporarily, deprived of all outlets...yet not having my ability to think dimmed, dulled, or numbed in any way, shape, or form? What if my overreactive imagination and relatively speaking fairly sharp senses were left to run amok, unchecked, ungated?

I fidget with objects to distract myself. I do things all the time to distract myself. But I always need something, anything, to focus on, because if I have nothing to focus on my brain explodes in activity, and when it has that type of outburst, nothing can stop me from just being in agony.

I need to move. But in such an environment, I would be unable to move. I could pace back and forth, but eventually my body would tire and I'd be forced to stay in one spot. As pacing helps me channel my energy, once I was no longer able to do so out of sheer exhaustion, I'd be at my wit's ends. Because I'd have all this energy, all this mental energy, accumulating, as if a bomb ready to explode...yet it couldn't be released.

That would be the truest, greatest of hells someone could inflict on me. Highly immoral, sure, but that's a given for torture since, y'know. Torture isn't exactly ethical, now, is it? Also highly illegal, mind you. But scarily enough, not all too far off of real world jails in some parts (for instance, isolation), which mind you is a contributing factor to why I want to always be a law-abiding citizen and never need to go to jail.

I simply couldn't survive in there, because the things I would need to survive are the very same things they would absolutely forbid me from having. Pencil and paper to write down thoughts? Way, way, way, WAY too dangerous. Laptop to type up thoughts? Probably even more dangerous! I'd no joke if a thought hit me that was that important, would write it down in blood, which I'm quite sure would make my living situation even worse.

What I'm getting at there is that I need an outlet. I absolutely need a way to vent, a way to express myself, a way to give my thoughts, to give my mind away in an external factor, even if it is something stupidly simple. And not doing so would be torture. Psychologically scarring, driving me insane.

So that's what I mean when I say I can think of no greater torture someone could inflict on me than that. But...I have a small confession to make:
In spite of what I just said. It's not quite fully accurate. While it's true that The Metal Box is the worst torture which someone could inflict on me, an aspect of it would actually give me respite from the TRUE ultimate torture...one which nobody can inflict on me.

That of the hell of my life, due to what can never change in it.

There are many, many, many things that people can change in their lives. It's not exactly true, but in general it can probably be said that the more things someone can change, the more privileged they are. An old story my dad used to tell me comes to mind.

There were two men.

One man kept making wrong choice after wrong choice.
The other, right choice after right choice.

As the man who kept making right choices went on in life, more and more choices opened up to him.
As the man who made wrong choices went on in life, fewer and fewer choices were available, until only two were available: death by (one method I don't remember), or death by (a different method I don't remember).

I'm horribly, horrendously butchering that story since it's been like 15, 18 years since I last heard it, but it's related to what I'm talking about here.

If you are in a position where you have the luxury of choice, you can change many, many things. The better off you are, the more you can change; the worse off you are, the less you can change. Now, even if you are worse off, you can still make changes, but your chance to make change and your opportunities to make the change are going to be more limited than if you were better off; that's just self-evident, that a poor situation/circumstances leads to less available chances to create good ones, whereas good situations/circumstances lead to more available chances.

Anyone can climb the latter in theory, but those who are already higher up on the latter have better shots at climbing the latter further than those who start from the bottom. That's just the world we live in. I don't feel I'm being cynical in stating that, either. It's real. Should it be that way, no. (I could probably go on endlessly on a tangent about equality, equity, and so on and so forth but I won't.) But it is that way.

And why I'm saying that is...

...I hold an incredible privilege, because I am already quite high up on the ladder. Not incredibly high, but middle class. (Not sure where on middle, if it's upper, lower, or right in the middle, but it's middle class undeniably.) We have debts; we have the need to monitor money; we have a bunch of things we have to watch out for that upper class people take for granted, but we also have things like 1.5 cars per person in a six-person family, about that same number of computers, a TV in both bedrooms as well as the living room, at least two PS1s, at least three PS2s, at least two PS3s, at least one PS4, an XBox 360, a Wii, numerous DVD/Bluray players, half a dozen gameboys and gameboy advances, plus the things which make use of these (movies, shows, games) in the hundreds.

If my parents had had only one or two kids with no pets (we've had two dogs, four cats, countless fish, two mice, and a hamster as pets off the top of my head and pets are ludicrously expensive to raise and keep in good health; saving our 14-year-old cat when he was a kitten cost at least $3,000 when he swallowed too much strong), then they would undeniably be upper class. (Especially since my brother is the only sibling of us three to really make any actual money.)

We're poorer than that because of said pets and extra kids (mind you, neither myself nor my younger sister were planned; we're both accidents so the aforementioned two-children scenario almost did happen), but what I am getting at here is...that's still incredibly well-off, all things considered.

I have a lot of things that are good in my life. I have warm shelter every day, due to having a house to live in. I have safe, reliable, consistent, quick, reasonably cheap transportation. I have a steady job (albeit minimum wage). I have a neverending supply of food, and more than that, the luxury of choice in what to eat. (I can't even begin to fathom how much of a privilege that is, in spite of knowing just full good and well exactly how much it is indeed a luxury!)

I have a constant supply of water, albeit due to no city water access not quite unlimited. (We have a well. And live in Western Washington. I need say no more than 'western Washington' for 'endless water' to come across.) As indicated above, I have multiple sources of entertainment available to me at any time.

I even have a girlfriend!

​I am in a position which, objectively speaking, is awesome to be in. People would quite literally KILL to have what I have.

Yet this creates torture.

Because while there are so many things I can change.
Because while due to having all of that, I have so many opportunities, so many chances to change.
What eats me up inside is that the things I most want to change.
Are the things which can't change.

There are plenty of things which can change, and my position affords me almost unlimited access to pretty much all of those; I have at my disposal endless numbers of decisions which can lead to countless numbers of possible paths, good or bad. I can change my life in those ways, with the potential to make it better!

But the ways I can change my life, be it for the better or for the worse, are the ways I don't care about changing.
The ways I can't change are the ones that I want to change.

And therein lies the suffering, the torturous part of it.

Because what I can change isn't what I want to change. I am shown, every day, with my privileges. "All of this is things you can do." Yet I am shown, by that, "You can make change"...except in the areas I want to make change.

There's hell to be had in my every day life because of that duality.

​No matter what I do, I can't change some things, even if I really want to. I have a female mind, born into a body that is biologically male. That can't change, no matter what. I could suffer a form of death. Pretend I'm just a guy for the rest of my life and hope, PRAY, that if I tell that lie to myself for long enough, that if I consistently sell the same story, that eventually it'll be real.

That's not changing it though. That's denying it. That's a refusal of reality. That's rejecting reality, and going down a road that nobody should go down, least of all someone like me since going down that road leads only to misery and suffering not just for me but potentially for others as well.

Technological advancements are an amazing thing; there's HRT and GRS or whatever name it goes by. But while those are good, they aren't perfect. The technology to make a body born biologically male 100% absolutely indistinguishable from a body born biologically female doesn't exist yet.

We're getting closer every day to it existing, but it doesn't exist now. That's no excuse of course not to use the existing technology, which I fully do intend to use...but even our existing technology is ludicrously expensive; to fully transition will cost me $100,000 or so, give or take.

In other words. No matter what I do. Regardless of the situation. I can't change who or what I am. I can't change that circumstance. I can get good at masking it; fully transitioning will help me cope with it. But nothing can change it, well and truly change it. At least not with our current technology. (Who knows what the future holds, in ten, twenty, fifty years it very well just might, but right now, no such luck.)

I am also autistic. This is not as obvious a tormentation as being a transwoman can be, but it is not without woes. This is also a mixed blessing/curse, in that there is some genuine good to come from my autism, from my ability to pick up on nuances, increased pattern recognition, and vastly boosted creativity, among other gifts.

But there are also some tremendous downsides to autism.

I will never be able to communicate as I want to.

I can try.

And I do try!

Every day, I try to get better at communicating.

But no matter how hard I try, I am hardwired to the very core to think in a way which is just different from other people, and that difference is difficult to live with. I can never convey my intended meaning as effectively as I want to. Even in words, it's difficult. I ramble. I make gigantic wallposts that nobody reads. In person, it's outright impossible.

​I can't change that. So it's torture. I can cope with it; I live with it every day, so I've adjusted to it. But I still don't like it. I don't like not being able to tell people what I mean and have them understand. I don't like my increased vulnerability to not understanding what others mean. I don't like people altogether skipping what I say.

I don't like those things, but no matter how much I try to change them. The best I can do is develop workarounds. I can turn weaknesses into aspects of strength, to exploit the most out of things. But I can never cure it altogether. I can never change it. I can try to make it work, but it'll always be a part of me that I wish was better than it is, because it is something I simply can't overcome because it's impossible to truly grasp.

I am bipolar. This is more obvious a tormentation in some ways, because the torture is something which people can generally at least grasp the concept of, but they might not understand just how bad it can be. Impulses are very, very, very nasty things. Most people have good control over their impulses. As I'm bipolar, I am forever vulnerable to succumbing to them.

Now this is all fine and dandy if the impulses are innocent enough, and good can come from being impulsive. I took track on an impulse. I took cross country on an impulse. I decided on swimming over wrestling (which my mom actually favored) on an impulse. I went to the same lifeguard training my sister did, on an impulse. And from those series of impulses which are a direct line (swimming came from needing a bridge between cross country and track, meaning without crosscountry, there wouldn't be swimming; with no swimming, there's no lifeguarding), you get me eventually getting a job.

But most impulses aren't innocent. Impulse buying is a go-to example, but I always live in constant fear that the darker half of my brain I suppress holds the full potential to, via impulses, enact those darker thoughts. I told you in the earlier disclaimer that I'd never tortured a person before, but no matter how unlikely it may seem to you--and believe me, it's quite unlikely because I've forced myself to set up dozens of safeguards--I am always living in fear of myself succumbing to an impulse which could lead to an event like torturing someone.

Do you know how scary it is to always be afraid of what you fear you're capable of doing? Impulses can lead to me hurting someone. In fact, they have. Not deliberately, of course. But they have hurt people before, and quite severely hurt them at that. Mostly online, mind you. And years ago when I was a kid fairly new all things considered to the internet. In the dark times, of the 2010 range for me (give or take a year).

The hurt I inflicted on them will never go away. It was accidental, yes, but it still happened, and it was because of poor impulse control more than anything else. (Autism may have played a part in me not realizing what had happened until it was too late, but that's ultimately not important what caused the hurt; what's important is that the hurt happened.)

Impulses aren't even the torturous part, though. I live in fear of impulses letting loose the monster within me, but I fear that knowing it to be an incredibly unlikely scenario. (I doubt that, short of some extreme trauma severely negatively impacting my psyche, it will ever come to reality. Still doesn't stop the fear though.)

The real bitch about the manic half of my depression is that when combined with my autism allowing me to sense things and connect random things. My brain is in constant overdrive, the overreactive imagination I mentioned earlier. How's it feel to have something within you, which makes you feel like your chest/brain is going to explode? It's maddening.

It's useful! It is incredibly useful for my creative efforts. But it is so overpowering that when I wave of mania hits me, I can do nothing but succumb to it. I can't do anything other than try to release the energy pent up within me, and this can and does lead to the aforementioned poor impulse control, too.

There's more to bipolar disorder than the manic half, though. The depression half of it, the low of it, is crippling. It can kill my drive altogether. It is, singlehandedly, the reason I haven't made anything of my life. At this point, probably having had high hundreds of thousands if not even millions of story/game/etc. ideas.

Not one has made it to reality.

Not. a. single. one.

To some extent, yes, the mania half is to blame because I can't focus on one if my mind is entirely on a new, different one.

But even if I am entirely focused on an idea.

If depression is running its course.

I can't do a thing.

I just shut down.

I do nothing.

I waste time, and make no effort.

And the worst part is, this can not only happen randomly, but also be induced by the slightest of causes. If I have reason to feel down, then I can enter depression no matter how minor the reason (it can be as little as a bad work day), and once in, I'm not leaving in a timely fashion (say a bad work day happened and I get depressed; it's not magically healed the next day).

The depression has its uses, yes, in that the time down is time which I've managed to turn into an artform, sometimes quite literally.

But I still don't take it well.

​Not even going into, counterintuitive as it may seem, how depression and mania can coexist simultaneously. Specifically, the danger there is combining depression bad enough to get suicidal with mania's poor impulse control; you can understand, then, exactly why that is an ugly, dangerous, combination to exist but it is perfectly plausible.

Again, I've put in safeguards to prevent it. Numerous ones. Failsafes for the failsafe's failsafe, levels of safeguarding. But all of this. Every single bit of the bipolar disorder countermeasures. Is just coping with it. It never changes that I have it.

I can make use of it; there is good to be had from it, as I have outlined.
But there is also a great many downsides to it, and no matter how much I want to change it so that I don't have those downsides.
I have those downsides.
They won't go away, no matter what. There is no magic pill to make my mind all better; it is permanently messed up, because I was born with these neurological conditions.

And the downsides of them stack.

Because the downsides of them stack.

Every day.

In spite of having the power to change.
I know that they won't change, because the ability to change doesn't mean that anything can change.
I can only change the things it is possible to change; the way my brain has been wired since birth is not a thing that can change.

You can slightly alter it. Coping mechanisms. Workarounds. But the fundamental nature of it remains the same.

So while I can get closer to being allowed to be the me I want to be. I'll never have everything I actually want.

And because of that.
That creates my torture.

I shouldn't be in a position to complain about a hellish life, because I have things which SHOULD lead to a happy, fulfilling life. And I do in fact, genuinely, feel happiness, each and every single day!

So maybe you can then understand the torture of HAVING THESE THINGS, KNOWING THEY ARE AWESOME, YET FEELING TORTURED IN SPITE OF POSSESSING THEM. Having them makes the torture in many ways worse, especially when I am told, "You have those things, why are you saying your life is hell?"

​When I have things others want above all else, how can I tell them I don't want those things? That what they consider a cherished gift is worthless to me? That what I have is their dream, yet I'm deliberately wasting it? That I don't care about the things I take for granted they want.

When I have no RIGHT to complain...what's it mean when I DO? Knowing I got good, yet I don't appreciate it. So luxurious, so nothing to complain about...yet I do ANYWAY. I know that my feelings on the subject hurt them...but I can't stop myself from having those feelings.

I can pretend I don't feel that way, that I appreciate the things I ought to appreciate, but it's still a lie. The simple truth of the matter is that I don't care about anything I have other than my girlfriend. (Incidentally. Caring about nothing in my life except my girlfriend is, in fact. Reason I would leave everything for them. Because I don't care about those things; I care about them, my girlfriend. Because I care for my girlfriend but not any part of my life, I would thus sacrifice any and every part of my life for the sake of my girlfriend. But I digress.)

​In other words. I know I am privileged, yet with the sole exception of my girlfriend nothing I have I really feel helps, making the torture worse. The torture is mental, psychological, in nature, continuously ongoing. It never ends. There's never a break in it. Never a chance for me to get a rest from my weaknesses.

They are always there, always a fundamental part of me, constantly reminding me of what I'll never have, what I'll never obtain, no matter how much I dream of having those things. All of that? Things which, by having, I "SHOULDN'T" be tortured, so because I know I shouldn't feel tortured, make the torture I feel all the more worse because in spite of having those things I still am tortured?

It's the worst pain I can possibly have. I don't feel I have the right to complain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm in pain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm struggling every day. I don't feel like I have the right to say my life is hell, my life is pain, my life is suffering.

I don't feel like I have the right to say those things. Yet I say them anyway. And I live this pain, every single day of my life. Because every single day, no matter how subtle, I suffer from gender dysphoria of my body not matching my mind. Every single day, no matter how little problem it presents, I struggle with my autistic idiosyncrasies clashing with society.

Every single day, I live in fear of succumbing to any number of problems originating from my bipolar disorder, and even when I don't, I am constantly bombarded by my own mind's hyperdrive. Processing a million different things and inputting them all at once, with poorly-assembled filters that could fail at any time.

Hells made worse by living them every day.
So isolation cures most of them, except the explosion of bipolar's mania, which is made oh so very much worse. 

Of course, all things considered. Miraculous as it may be, I am reasonably speaking well-adjusted. People who interact with me might just think I'm quiet, or a bit odd; they wouldn't really think of autism. (The last time I was asked, it was by a police officer, who wanted to make sure my stuttering wasn't because of either brain damage ensued from my car crash or from consuming alcohol, both things he would have obvious reason to take action on.)

That's because I have coping mechanisms in place.

I genuinely am able to live a happy, peaceful life. (Especially considering, and I can't emphasize this enough, I have a girlfriend that I love, who loves me, and that by being with I feel alive; they really are a motivator for me and an anchor point, as it were, a "rock" to rest upon.)

But said happy life is largely the result of wastefully squandering what I have, akin to a drug addict. An easy example to utilize here is the game of mafia, which I have so heavily integrated into the core of my life. A running joke is that mafia is the ultimate drug addiction.

The real piece of wisdom comes in when you realize it's not actually a joke. Mafia serves as an escape from the world. My problems still exist outside of it, and manifest even within it, but while I am playing it I don't have to consciously think about those problems. They don't go away. In fact, they only get larger. But while there, I can bury myself away, happily doing nothing.

I derive a sense of self-worth from it. It is self-destructive, it is incredibly harmful, but it makes me feel happy. It is a way to deal with the torture, but it does not cure the torture. It is a way of temporarily forgetting about my problems, my suffering, but it can't cure them no matter how hard I try and by immersing myself too heavily in it as I've done on occasions my life has taken nosedives, plummeting in a downward spiral.

Sounds like a drug to me.

I do have non-mafia coping mechanisms.
Even productive ones! That being, non-gaming coping mechanisms, since I play more games than just mafia to escape the misfortunes of the world.

But while those coping mechanisms exist. They can't cure the problem. Just mitigate the damage of it. 

I am always struggling between my self, and my sense of others. The desire to do good is there, but so too is the struggle to overcome my limitations, to bypass my roadblocks, my shortcomings. And I fail, time and time again. And each failure is more painful than the last, because each time I tell myself I learned, I'll do better, and that I won't make the same mistake again...so when I make it anyway, there's a sense of dread and despair, of a broken record.

And, yes, hopelessness. Always, wasting. Never who I want to be, never doing what I want to do, and when faced with this truth, using excuse after excuse. (Heck, you can find them here in this very blog!) But never changing. Half because I don't want to change things I can, half because I can't change the things I want to. So always on repeat.

Some things I most want to can't change. Yet I have the power to change plenty. An ability I knowingly and deliberately squander. Itself a form of cruelty, self-defeating, even destructive, yet I learned to revel in this debauchery as a coping mechanism.

There are good coping mechanisms, but most of mine aren't. I can change coping mechanisms, but I struggle to do so, because what I want to do isn't to change the coping mechanism, but to change myself so that there's no need to cope in the first place.

Something which I know is impossible to obtain. And the circle continues anew. A self-feeding loop.

I do, however, have a saving grace. It's a form of acceptance. Knowing that I can't ever get what I want has allowed me to come to peace to it to some extent, and I can live my every day life at least in part due to that, and I don't think that's an inherently bad thing; it's actually a quite rare gift.

I have some level of peace about who and what I am, something most people in similar situations never obtain and their response to never obtaining it is quite often disproportionately suicide; my risk of that is quite low because I know I can live this way even if I hate it.

It is also a curse though because that same tendency has a downside of feeding the negativity. It can help me, in the sense that it prevents the negativity from taking control altogether. But it can also hurt me further, because it allows the negativity to foster, to thrive.

It's actually quite possible, in fact, that this sense of acceptance is in some ways...my numbness from succumbing to the torture. It does fit a number of the symptoms; I am continuously in pain, and certainly have been pushed to breaking before. It'd make sense that if I did in fact develop acceptance as an adjustment to the pain, it'd make me more numb to it.

Granted, this being psychological pain. This being psychological torture. Acceptance as a numbing agent to the pain doesn't stop it altogether. The pain still destroys my life. It just doesn't do as much damage as it would without the acceptance.

​I don't really have a direction to take this morbid blog after this. I certainly don't have a positive spin to put on it; with more clever writing I may have managed one, but honestly I'm not sure this is a subject which would deserve a positive spin. This is a debilitating thing.

Every day, I have that torture, and every day, I know it could be oh so much worse.

I'm not even scratching the surface of my mind here.

​But I thought I'd at least give you a piece of it.

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!

You may remember that my working title for Phyrra and Cyrus was INFIverse. (Or INFINIverse, I forget which.)
You may also remember that is an existing name of a 'verse. I didn't bother to do research on it, just enough to know both names were taken so couldn't be used as an original name.

Today I came up with that.

It kinda sucks. So if I can find a better original name, you bet I'm gonna use it.

But it returned an absolute zero on google results, which means it's unique to me: the colliniverse.

The meaning is not nearly as special or accurate.
The INFINIverse is accurate because of the concept of INFINITY. (I still need to give you that creation myth.)
The colliniverse takes a concept from there, the collision of INFINITY and Nothingness, but it's not quite the same especially since technically speaking it wasn't quite what you'd call a collision. (Again I'd need to give you that creation myth for you to understand.)

So for me I still consider this a working title. A NEW working title. A working title UNIQUE TO ME. But still, something which with luck I can think of something better down the road.

OH WELL.

For now, it'll do.

I am also beginning to lay the groundwork for further Phyrra and Cyrus work.

This will take me quite a while to finish, but I got about a third of what I wanted to do today, done. And that's progress!

Soyeah.

We're getting there.

​Slowly but surely.

More specifically, what I mean by that is...I feel like I can actually do the things that I want to do.
I have the sense, not immediately.
I have the sense, I'll have to fight for them.
I have the sense, that I'll need to make sacrifices for them.
I have the sense, that my motivation will come and go and that they'll never come to be unless I have the drive to keep going even when motivation wanes.

But I have the sense.
I can do it.

Right now, basically.

I just...believe in myself.
I don't often give myself that luxury, especially as time has shown I often can't.
But.

I feel like I can actually do it.

I can make something of my life.

I feel it.
I know it.
It is a strange sensation to have.
That feeling, which I know is nearly impossible.
Yet to know that somehow I can do it.

It defies words, but I have it now.
And due to how rare it is.
Due to how much of a commodity it is.
I felt the need to blog about it.

I am going to do this.
It will take a hell of a long time to get right, get good.
​But I can do this and I will do this.

So have one now!
Today, I developed another take on God and Angels which would be for a story.
What story, heck if I know. Not the Rubyverse, not Phyrra and Cyrus, not Soano, so that disqualifies the usual candidates. Could be new, could be an existing story (but probably not), got no clue even what form the story would be; all I know is that the story would feature what I developed today.

And what I developed today was basically an origin story of roles and relationships which persist to the modern day.

God, in this setting, as per my usual, is agendered, having no actual gender. God is an entity, existing in a way transcending our understanding, neither male nor female. However, God likes to present itself in the form we are most comfortable with.

As most humans identify God as being 'He', that is the form He usually takes, and will be how I refer to Him for the rest of the ramble for the sake of simplicity. All of His creations are also agendered at their base levels. The souls of humans have no gender (even though spirits have gender), and so too are all angels agendered, able to appear as male, female, both, or neither, at will.

God has more to him than that. He is not the all-powerful God that we know.
​In this setting, God both did, and did not, create the universe. God gained awareness, but was blind to everything. He saw absolutely nothing. He could do absolutely nothing. But then, He noticed something--the event that we would come to define as being the big bang, as a possibility. Not a reality, but a possibility. And He could make that possibility become a reality, so He willed it to be, setting off a chain reaction.

In the resulting universe...God can't break the rules of reality, but He can bend them a bit, where He influences events. So, He is bound by the rules of the universe, thus, is not what we'd call all-powerful...even though He is able to do just about anything.

God can see everything in our universe...but in order to see a specific thing, He has to actually focus on that thing. This can be thought of as seeing the forest instead of a specific tree within--He sees the whole forest and thus has an idea for what happens within, but the only way for Him to know what happens to one specific tree within the forest is for Him to focus His attention on that tree.

Since the universe is a very, very big place, that's a very, very big forest for Him to be monitoring the trees within.

God can see into the future...but He only sees the probable futures that are most likely to happen. He is thus able to be surprised both by natural freak occurrences and of course by any creature with free will, including humans. We usually act in the way He sees us acting, but we can still surprise Him at certain times.

God both knows everything about the universe, and yet doesn't know everything about the universe. This can be thought of as an instinctive knowledge. He, by what we'd know as intuition, more or less knows what everything does...but He doesn't know precisely why they work that way, only that they do.

So when you combine all of this, He's not all-knowing or all-seeing, but He's still fairly close, in that He knows the general workings of the forest, the general happenings of the forest, and the most likely occurrences to happen in the near-future of the forest, and He is able to directly influence the forest.

...Just, not turn the forest into a fire, as it were. (Though He's quite capable of setting the forest on fire, should He so will it. He just...isn't.)

God has, throughout the history of the universe, been trying to influence it as positively as He can, but while He has capabilities beyond what any human has and his existence is far above our own, He is not perfect; He can both make mistakes, and have oversights which lead to bad things having happened.

To this end, He actually uses His direct creations as tools.
Angels, with a single set of wings and the ability to take on any form they please, serve as monitors of sorts. They observe areas of reality, interact with it on a more direct basis, influence it subtly rather than overtly, but also constantly and consistently rather than sporadically.

Cherubim, with two sets of wings, serve as more or less the 'workforce of the heavens' (if angels can be thought of as the 'workforce of the non-celestial'). They sometimes interact with the less-astral planes, but more or less do most of the "behind-the-scenes" work of running/influencing the universe for God.

Seraphim, with three sets of wings, serve as overseers. They are, more or less, the bosses of angels, but also are conduits. They serve as a direct line of communication. They occasionally communicate directly with God, and are more or less His direct assistants and underlings. They very rarely, but on occasion, interact with more mortal realms.

Arcangels, with four sets of wings, serve as almost-equals to God. Direct underlings, direct 'generals', direct advisors, who are full-time entities serving more or less as His direct "balance-checkers" as it were. It is literally their job to question God's decisions, more or less. Well, two of them at least. (Gabby, the third, more or less has the job of being the direct enforcer of God to keep unruly children in line, and serves as a balance and tipping point, keeping disarrest from happening.)

​Arcangel Lucifer, The Lightbringer, Satan of Hell, is "a bit" of a rebel, using his male name and pronouns but taking on a permanently-female form. (Why? Because.) He is not actually evil. Just...argumentative, and strongly opinionated. (He's the oldest of the three arcangels.) This puts him frequently in disagreement with God, but he's not always antagonistic with Him. Just usually antagonistic.

​And, interestingly, he is not always wrong. God is, as mentioned, not perfect. He can make mistakes. Usually, a fair indicator of this is when Michael/Michelle agrees with Lucifer, but even when not, sometimes, God admits that even if Lucifer's exact argument may not be right, he still raised valid points to take into consideration.

His eight wings are all white feathered wings, representing his element being pure light.

Arcangel Michael/Michelle changes every human life cycle between which form (s/)he takes, and is currently in a male form. Lucifer tends to be a champion of the greater existence thinking on levels of souls; Michael tends to be a champion for existence on a smaller scale--most notably to humans at least, that of our own, dealing with us both spiritually and physically.

This still puts him/her at odds with God on occasion, and at odds with Lucifer on occasion, but the two are actually fairly similar to one another, having a lot in common and getting along fairly well. Michael/Michelle is the middle-aged of the three, and has his/her wings be of different elements:

Two fire-wings, two ice-wings (all four feathered), one water wing which more or less looks like a liquid octopus tentacle with dangling squid-like-tentacle protrusions and a jellyfish-like membrane (all made from different types of water, but giving it an aesthetic loosely like that of a bat wing, only with anatomical parts matched to sea life), a matching wing made of energy, with what looks like lightning for the bones and the membrane more or less being visible static electricity (so, another bat wing).

His final two wings, both feathered, are one white and one dark wing, representing light and darkness.

Arcangel Gabriel/Gabrielle, Gabby for short, usually takes on the gender opposite of what gender God would be represented as when appearing spiritually, and takes on the same gender as what God would be represented as when appearing physically. 

This is more or less because Gabby tends to take on the role of both arbiter and enforcer: as a representative of God, s/he will want to appear as if an incarnation of God when walking among mortals. However, on a more spiritual level when individuals have a stronger direct connection to God, Gabby then represents the opposite side of what God is seen as, as to provide a sense of balance.

Since, as mentioned, most people see God as male, Gabby is seen as male when in physical form and as a female in a spiritual form. And since arcangels tend not to spend much time in the physical realm, it's usually safe to assume Gabby is a she.

Gabby's got four wings like the other arcangels, but one pair (representative of air) is invisible, and thus, can't be seen. She has two metal (feathered) wings, two rock (also feathered) wings, and two vine-like spines of wings with hordes of bugs swarming from them to form a vaguely insectoid-like wing. Think like a butterfly wing, except instead of millions of scales, it's millions of bugs. These represent various aspects of life:
Rock, as the raw building blocks; insects/vines, as the creatures created from it; metal, as the refined products made from the life.

...That's as far as I got on that.

Like I said.

I don't really have a story.

Well, I do.

I think me describing the above?

That counts as a story.

In that I have four named characters with numerous implied lesser characters.
I have these characters' backstories defined, as well as more or less what their abilities are, albeit deliberately vague on the exact nature and scope of them.

So there's the makings of a story.

But I didn't really take it anywhere.
Haven't built it further and I probably won't.
Haven't placed it anywhere and I probably won't.
So what you see here is probably what you're gonna get.

The next time I talk about God, Angels, or anything like that, it'll be yet another story. Maybe already existing, maybe another new one, but I can guarantee you it won't be this one because I really don't know where to go from here. This was all I had.

That is, when I call myself trash. Often, I am. Often, I can be excused temporarily from a task, so long as I actually follow through on it. Have that happen, no harm done. Not trashy of me, just real life ensuing.

What makes me trash is when I am excused temporarily from a task, promise to do it, and then break that promise, making another promise which could just as easily end up breaking. And doing this with multiple promises at once, such that when I choose to fulfill one, I am breaking another because I only had the time to fulfill one.

That is pretty much an accurate summation of what's happening right now, and if not trash, what would you call a person who did that? To some extent, it can be justified. Yesterday, work left me physically, mentally, and emotionally drained--and then after that, on top of it all, I had other things to do once home. (Among them, desperately-needed girlfriend time, which while eating up time, is one of the only ways to recharge me emotionally because sometimes I just need to have that interaction in order to not feel dead inside.)

It turned out to be worse than I thought; I was actually coughing (albeit very subtly) by the time I would be going to bed. Because I was pushed past my physical breaking point. Meaning, while I wanted to fulfill some unfulfilled obligations which I had promised to do...

...I couldn't. I just couldn't. Not with how I was. It'd have been utterly impossible for me to do.

...So I was planning to do it today.

Except most of today was spent sleeping (see also, needing to recover), and once I was awake, I was informed of something that was 50% me not remembering, 50% me having no way of knowing in advance. Those two might seem like they contradict, but they don't. What happened is, we knew our parents might be gone overnight. (And when our parents are gone overnight, on Saturdays, my brother comes over for an anime night.)

Until today, I had no way of knowing that in advance. I could have still planned for it in advance, though, simply by remembering it; I was in fact the one to bring up the subject on Thursday before even my sister did so I was literally the one who basically was indirectly planning for it, and yet I didn't remember this a day later on Friday.

And now it's basically midnight, with me working my same Sunday shift early Sunday morning. With a chance of family night tomorrow (though I don't think so).

At least one promise I made for Friday was a result of an earlier broken promise, too, so I am breaking a promise that was breaking a promise.

I am pretty much. Becoming the worst of the worst kind of failures. The one who has so much potential to succeed and you can see it and you see the promise of success, only to see it dashed, but you maintain hope...only for it to be dashed, but you keep on waiting, because you have belief in them...which keeps getting shattered, over and over again, until eventually you give up on them and accept that they failed to deliver.

There's no more painful way to fail than that.
Yet that's what I'm doing.
​Which is, pretty much. Trash.

Basically, I developed a handy metric to use as a reference point for approximations on what characters have.

The basic of the scale is a 1-10 scale:
3 is "this is the average capacity of a human". 5 is "this is the typical peak level of a human". 10 is "this is the typical peak superhuman level". * is "this is the peak level a spirit can reach". (Spirits, notably, are at their strongest, above superhuman which makes sense considering they're not human at all. Though, that being said. Not all spirits are above superhuman in all areas. In fact, none are. And many aren't even above superhuman in any. Still, they have the capacity to be higher than superhuman, thus the ranking.)
** is "god-tiered", as in, if a god were to manifest, this is the expected power level they would have.
*** is "godslayer", as in, if a god were to manifest, this is the level of power necessary to kill said god.

This metric is meant as a guideline. Not an absolute rule. It is not explicit word of god, so much as it would be to give a fair idea for what sorts of things are, and are not, possible. A reference point, but not an absolute reference point; a loose reference point for generalities, a way of being able to give some sort of comparison between things which you would normally never be able to compare otherwise.

There are sixteen categories which you can apply this scale on.

Strength: Self-explanatory. How strong someone is. Physical power. Might. Oomph to their punch. How much they can lift. How hard they hit. You get the idea.

Speed: Self-explanatory. How fast someone is. Note that this is unspecific as to the type of speed. So this is a bit of a broad category, but loosely, it can be thought of as "how rapidly you can act/react".

Agility: This is also fairly self-explanatory. This is how nimble someone is. Their maneuverability in combat. Able to jump over someone, spin, run circles around them, bend limbs in unusual ways. Their flexibility. Their ability to move around in a controlled fashion and know precisely where they are going and what they are doing. How precise they are in their movements.

Stamina: This is how long someone can go. Their physical energy reserves; how long they can continue to fight. This covers both the physical and mental aspects of it. It is how long it takes you to become exhausted.

Endurance: This is how much punishment you can take. This is not toughness; this is not stamina. This is the opposite of both, in that this is how much damage you can receive, and yet not collapse. It is, essentially, how unfazed you are by the damage you take. If you have high endurance, then sure the blows you take can break bones and cause internal bleeding, but you can keep going.

It is your ability to resist pain. It is your ability to push through the hardships of battle. It is not based on how much energy you have; it is not based on how resistant you are. It is based on fortitude, on willpower, on how well you can sustain yourself in battle when you are being continuously beaten down. (It is thus, notably, a common heroic trait.)

Toughness: This is your ability to tank damage. Or rather. This is, specifically, how hard it is to damage you. Someone whose skin is like armor? That's superhuman toughness. Someone who you can cut through as if with a butterknife? That's low toughness. Easily damaged, fragile, low toughness. Hard to inflict any harm at all, hard to damage, high toughness.

Basically, toughness is how hard it is to damage you, whereas endurance is how much damage you can take before you collapse. That should give you the difference between the two. Stamina is how much you can put out before collapsing.

Regeneration: How rapidly you recover from damage inflicted. 10 would be something like regenerating lost limbs to give a general frame of reference. This is a fairly self-explanatory concept. Humans have wounds which heal fairly slowly comparatively speaking compared to the supernatural entities in existence.

Recovery: How rapidly your energy reserves are replenished. High recovery can lead to someone who ran out of stamina ending up still being fresh in the middle of a battle, for instance; low recovery means that what you put out in the battle is it, and maybe then some with it taking a long time after the battle to recover what was lost in it.

Intellect: Basically how smart you are. This covers all aspects of smartness, from improvisation to planning, from intuitively picking things up to meticulous analysis, from understanding how things work to applying the optimal usage of what you have. This is usually a constant, based widely on the individual rather than the species, but there are some exceptions where beings have the ability to temporarily up their intellect (or in some even rarer cases, where entities sacrifice intellect for greater gains elsewhere), thus its inclusion.

Then come the magical equivalents to these stats.

Magical Power: How strong your magic is. For reference, Phyrra and Cyrus went from 0 (had none) to 10 overnight. 3 is the level of an established fullblown mage. Accomplished spellbladers are 2s; amateur spellbladers--even prodigies--are 1; this is the level that both Clara and Cedrick are at.

Yes, 1. Spellbladery is, as I have previously established, akin to using a single finger from a single hand instead of a full arm yet alone the full body. And Paladins are spellbladers; Cedrick's telekinetic control over his platinum spheres is a type of spellbladery.

Magic Casting Time: How rapidly you can cast/control your spells. Phyrra and Cyrus also went from 0 to 10 on this overnight. In contrast to Magical Power, this is actually an area where spellbladers tend to actually exceed the levels of mages.

After all, mages use a wide variety of magic; spellbladers specialize in a specific type of magic, so it makes sense that, naturally, spellbladers are going to be very good at their specific magic. Cedrick is a 5; Clara is a 4.

Magic Versatility: This is a combination of how diverse your magic is and how skilled you are at applying your magic to different types of situations. The former would lock spellbladers at 1 (because, obviously, they can only do one thing), but the latter--how creatively you use your magic--allows spellbladers to, potentially, reach slightly higher levels. (Because if you're gonna only do one thing, you get very good at learning how to use that one thing in creative ways.)

Phyrra and Cyrus went from 0 to 10 in this as well. (Note that, for all three of these, their 10 is 'potentially at this level', not necessarily 'is guaranteed to be at this level'. Phyrra and Cyrus have the potential to cast the most powerful spells in the least amount of time which can be literally any type of spell...but they have to train themselves to do that, first.)

Cedrick is actually fairly low on this, as a 2; Clara is a bit higher, as a 3, because Paladins are one of the most advanced form of spellbladery.

Magical Reservoir: This is basically the amount of magic you can cast before collapsing from exhaustion/potentially killing yourself. Phyrra and Cyrus went from 0 to a potential 10, but their bodies are unaccustomed to this level of power so their bodies have been slowly adjusting their way up. Pragmatically they start at around 3: average human capabilities. As the story progresses, they can tap into more and more magic, allowing them to use more and more and make bigger and bigger things. (Because the more powerful the magic, the more it taps into the magical reservoir, obviously.)

​Cedrick is around a 2; Clara is around 4.

This is thus the magical equivalent of stamina.

Magical Resilience:​ How much magical punishment you can take. Humans are notoriously low on this compared to spirits. This is the equivalent of endurance for magic.

Magical Resistance: How much magical damage is reduced. Very few beings, even spirits, have higher ratings on this, except for beings which have resonance with anti-magic (which is a thing, kind-of; it'd be more accurate to say magical reduction because you can't get rid of magic altogether).

It is thus the magical equivalent of toughness.

And last but not least:
Magical Replenishment:​ ​How rapidly you recover your magical reservoir to cast spells. Phyrra and Cyrus go from 0 to theoretically 10. Like with the reservoir, they start unaccustomed to their full potential, with their bodies slowly adjusting their way up. Pragmatically, they start at around 5: exceptionally fast for humans to recover, but still at notably human​ levels of recovering, so no unlimited casting of spells continuously.

Cedrick is around a 4; Clara is around a 2, maybe 3.

​Soyeah, that's the system I devised. From the descriptions I've given, you can probably already get a good sense of why I emphasized this is not an exact science. It's just a loose reference point for about what level characters can and can't do.

​And that's about all I can say because I'm pretty sure my computer's gonna try and restart again literally any second now. Every second is pushing it, but one last thing before I go.
​I'd like to say today is my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend, and I wanted to share that with the world. <3

For a start, I created a new minor villain, yet unnamed, who would be one of the lieutenants (but a human one) of the second big bad (that being, Gunther). I know what he's like, but I haven't given him anything other than his function as an opponent to challenge Phyrra briefly during the struggle.

The main thing I did today for the setting, though, was work on a song, which I believe I will make the opener of the first season: "Reach to the Sky". I only got half a chorus there, but it got me thinking. A previous opener I was working on can be made to fit the theme of rock (and I had it as second opener); this opener is obviously air and is the first, so.

Four seasons. Two existing (albeit both half-finished) openers being elemental.

So I figured, I might as well continue it and have the third be fire and the fourth be water.

Don't exactly have them written out tho.

Still!

It's progressing.

Closers will be more reflective of content for the show, I feel. At least the third certainly is, so if it's more reflective of the content why not the others.

I just need to finish them now.