I've not been blogging about it, but I've had some pretty revolutionary insights into things lately, and I mean that in absolute sincerity; if I were actually able to properly unpack the thoughts I had, they would be pretty darn insightful and actually make you pause and think. And if nothing else, give good insight into my mind.

Now I ultimately decided. I didn't want to spend the time/effort making those blogs. I had other things I wanted to blog about which were unrelated, took less time to talk about, and so on and so forth. Things which I could unpack quickly, easily, flawlessly.

So on Wednesday, I didn't give an expansion on my reflections about fear.

Yesterday, I didn't give a narration about the nature of time (and by extent, reality--short version, time in the narration given both exists and doesn't exist, everywhere and nowhere, is an objective constant that can be measured yet subjective illusion subject to the whims of the subconscious, without this being paradoxical because there's a logic to how it works; there's more to it than that and that's a poor explanation of the thoughts but like I said I didn't want to bother with the full version and still don't).

But today, I had a thought about failure, and this one I did want to share.

Failure is fun.
Now, I realize the Dwarf Fortress meme of "Losing is Fun!" exists, along the lines of "There's no winning, only losing, so make the loss as spectacular as is possible", more or less.

That's not what I mean.

What I mean by that is.

Failure is seen as a bad thing, but in it, there comes a blessing.
When you succeed, it is seen as a good thing, but with success comes a curse.
Failure helps you learn, whereas success can cause bad habits to form, but even this is not what I am referring to.

I'm more referring to what the effects of failure and success are, long-term.

Continuously failing can be a test of character, causing someone to either break and give up or push themselves with a drive until they succeed, but this is not what I am talking about, either.

What I more mean. Is that with failure, comes an expectation--or rather. A lack thereof. With failure, there is freedom. Failure gives you the luxury of choice, at every step. Do I continue, do I give up, as a start, but. I'm more talking about. When you fail.

You are under no obligations.

The results are right there, failure, in front of you. So if you've failed at everything. Then there's no obligation to do anything. What you do with that failure is up to you, allowing you the opportunity to do what you want--even if what you want to do is continue to fail.

That might seem like something nobody would want. Who'd deliberately want to continue to fail at a task which it's possible to succeed in? But therein lies the realization. Sometimes, continuing the task and failing it is the fun part, because it is the task itself which is fun--and succeeding at the task would make it no longer be the same level of fun.

This is one reason why I think so many people are perfectionists. They find flaws in what was done, to give themselves an excuse to call it a failure--so that they can do it again, but better.

Because the flip side of failure is success.
With success comes obligations.

If you succeed once, you are continuously haunted by that success: "I did it before, so why can't I do it again?" plagues all too many people. More than that, by having succeeded, it is expected that you will succeed again. People hold you to the level of quality you have shown you can do. If you do good, then you are under pressure to always do that good.

Once you have succeeded.
Once you have made your name.
Suddenly, everything is viewed in the lens of that success, compared to it.
"This is better than that".
"This is worse than that".

But when you have nothing but failures, there's a level of equality to it. A failure is still a failure, and while some failures are more spectacular (and I mean that in both senses it can be used in, in that they are massive failures or look-better-but-still-are-failures) than others, they still have more or less the same treatment.

A failure is a failure.

But when you succeed.
Suddenly, everything must be a success, viewed in terms of "less successful than previous" or "more successful than previous". And while some of these metrics are objective, plenty are subjective. Artists, creators, writers, and so on and so forth in particular are what I am getting at here; when they have gained renown for their work, their future projects are compared to these past projects, and inevitably, some will shower praise while others, criticism.

And it was this that made me understand why.

Why I am okay with living my life as a failure--and even seek failure out.

​There's a trope for this: Victory Is Boring. But it's a trope for good reason; it's true to life. There is less excitement in success, because with success comes obligation, comes expectation, comes pressure, comes the chains of the weight of the world bearing down on you. When you succeed, you are burdened by it.

But with failure, when you fail. You can forever continue to fail. You never need to succeed as a failure, because you can continue to fail over and over again and nothing changes. Nobody expects differently. There's no pressure to succeed, because you have failed. There's only the minimal burdens of the world coming from the bare necessities of survival. (You need to eat, you need to hydrate, you need to have shelter, and these things in the modern world come from some form of success in some endeavor for the most part.)

And I realized that this is why I am acting the way I do.

I have, for the longest time, lacked the drive to succeed.
I have, for the longest time, been dreaming up ideas and then not following through with making them reality.
I've been figuring this as being my bipolar disorder for as long as I've had that diagnosis: manic episodes for creativity, depression for how the idea dies out.

But there's a constant throughout this, and it's not just in my creative works. In mafia games, in all aspects of my life.

I have proven, time and time again, that when I put my mind to it and really try, there is almost no challenge I can't overcome. (I am human so I have limitations, but these are much fewer than most, especially myself, would assume.)

I have proven, time and time again, that I can do this, I can do that.

I have proven it as a proof of concept. Yes, it's viable. Yes, I can do it.

So why don't I do it more often?

Why do I lack the investment to try?

Why do I not make the effort?

Because if I made the effort, I might actually succeed--and that's something I don't actually want.

Well. Obviously. There are some things that I'd rather succeed on. (Namely, transitioning; living with my girlfriend.) But by and large. "It's the journey which matters, not the destination" is a saying for good reason, and it is specifically this that I am getting at.

The destination of success isn't actually worth anything to me (except on the few things it is; see above).
The journey is what I have fun with.
But the only way to ensure I keep on the journey.
Is if I don't reach success--and thus, fail.

So as I said.

Failure is fun.

And that's why I will forever be one.
I'll probably, realistically speaking, never succeed. Not even on the projects I most want to, like Phyrra and Cyrus. And because I'll keep inventing new ideas and never put in the time/effort to find out solutions for the technical difficulties in my modding, I'll never succeed in perfecting my mod.

But I'm at peace with that, because I am okay with living my life that way.
It comes with its own hardships. It comes with its own trials. It comes with the difficulties, the pains of knowing that my vision will never reach others. It comes with financial difficulty and making the few things I still want to actively pursue succeeding at, harder to get. (It's easier to succeed in transitioning and living with your girlfriend if you have succeeded at getting a steady, well-paying income, for instance, so it's harder on me that I can't get that easily.)

But it is not without its perks.

And honestly I actually think this is a contributing factor to why most people don't "succeed" in life.
Not everyone is famous.
Nobody achieves most of their dreams.
Everyone has a little creativity in them, and the vast majority of the human population has an overabundance of it; almost every single person in existence has some sort of creative thing they'd love to make. Music. Songs. Poems. Stories. Games. And so on and so forth. Yet only some of them so much as start, and of those that start, only the smallest of fractions of them succeed.

Most people are unknowns.
Most people are failures.
Most people never make it.

But I think the reason why.
Is because even if they never consciously make this connection.
On some subconscious level.
They know it, and are happy with who they end up being, even if it's a nobody.

For most of my life I've always struggled with the dilemma of feeling like I am half-nobody, half-extraordinary. That I am stuck in the middle of being ordinary and being special, that I am not normal enough to really fit in with more normal individuals and yet not special enough to make it big as a star, not talented enough to become the famous person I've always dreamed about being.

Yet I think that with this realization, I can be more at peace with myself.

I still won't ever fully "normalize", because with my brain wiring that's not possible.
I still won't ever succeed.

But now I feel a sense of serenity about it, that this is not a bad thing. That this is an alright place to be in.

You might think that this would mean, thanks to this realization, I'd give up on some things.
Oh no.
Furthest thing from it.
I'm doubling down on doing them.
Even knowing that I'm going to fail, I'm going to do them--specifically because I know I'm going to fail!
(The mythbusters quote about "Failure is always an option"? More like 'failure is always the ultimate option'.)

Honestly if I actually succeeded at this point I wouldn't know what to do with it.
But I'll still try. Over and over and over again.
My lot in life likely won't ever change, especially given my lack of drive to do so since I'm mostly content (aside from hating my dad) to live as I am.
But I'll still try.
Because the failure from trying is the most fun I can have.

Today, I felt like I was actually recovering! I didn't feel fully recovered, but I felt like I was at least beginning to recover! I wasn't tired, had no fever, no cough, not so much as a sore throat. Everything was fine.

...Until about an hour before tae kwon do.

At which point.
I started coughing.
I suddenly developed a sore throat.
All my energy vanished.
And I began to feel like I was burning up, feverish.

With a vengeance, the sickness was back and plagued me for the rest of the day pretty much.

I'm not getting better.

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.

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

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

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

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

This is not always a good thing.

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

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

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

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

So in the driver seat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Makes a good story to tell at the least.

Sure enough, not enough time for me to do what I want to do!
I had a double ramble planned with two topics, one revolving around Bard in Phyrra and Cyrus and the other covering a dream I had last night which I extrapolated into a fairly interesting anime story idea. (The dream was that I was watching said anime show with my siblings, and then later watching it by myself on my TV...in spite of not having had cable TV for at least a year or two if not more.)

Alas.

I need to go to bed, because I've got work tomorrow.

​Tomorrow will also be a "so many things, so little time" day for the record. I'm anticipating about half a dozen obligations by my estimate. I'll count it as a win if I get half of those done; I'll double my win points if one of said things is girlfriend time. <3

Well one of the two days of it anyway, but seeing as how I have work tomorrow the birthday present gift was for the one-day pass only so I won't be going; I'll be working.

It was quite fun and pretty much what I expected it to be.

I did notice something about myself, though.

I'm having an increasingly large urge to use more and more of my left hand/arm. I don't know why, but for everything except for a few things (especially fine motor control), my left hand seems to be the one I'm finding more appealing. 

I actually have a bit of a theory. My right arm functions faster and with more dexterity, but I feel it might be less powerful. This would be backed by my preferred practice stance, and also the stance I seem to favor in sparring a good amount of the time: my right leg is forward.

As any fighter can tell you, front-side attacks are faster, with more precision, but far less speed than back-side attacks. But it's also a position which can be thought of as fighting southpaw, because when you fight, your primary hand isn't usually the blocking/jabbing hand; your primary hand is usually the one you throw crosses with, and I favor my left hand.

​It may be something to explore in the future, but we'll have to see.

I actually do have a headache, but that's most likely because my mom drank the cup of coffee which was meant to be mine so I'm going through withdrawal. (At least I think? I mean, I had coke last night, but no coffee today and I am a person who can drink potentially up to six cups of coffee in a day, and I believe headaches are a symptom of withdrawal, so. It's my working hypothesis.)

But even if it has more mundane explanations, my explanation for it is that I partied hard last night with my girlfriend. I basically stayed up all night, but this is not without consequences. I woke up at 2:30 pm. I left for dance at 6:15 pm, getting home at around 10:20 pm. It's 12:10 am now and I'm going straight to bed because I have an absolute HELL shift (it's a SEVEN HOUR SHIFT, of TWO EXTREMELY BUSY EVENTS), so when you factor in prep time and eating time, that's about a five-hour day total of free time, broken up into three before, two after.

And that makes a difference, because when you have an imminent deadline, which you know is there, that limits what you can do. The things I need to get done, I knew I couldn't get done in those times, so I didn't do them today. So today in terms of most stuff is a washout.

But, tomorrow will be better. I'll see if I can get my online life together.

...Was totally worth it though.

So yesterday, I ended up vastly expanding on what happened on Tuesday, meaning this ramble might be a little chaotic and disjointed, but I'll try to keep it as coherent as possible.

Basically.

On Tuesday, I had a series of multiple dreams. I've since forgotten them--all except for one. I had a dream about a more modern-aesthetic Power Rangers team. One Ranger (maybe blue?) was a morbidly obese (incredibly, INCREDIBLY fat) 10-14 year-old dark-skinned (I forget if he was Black or Hispanic, but it was one of the two) boy, and he was the ace of the team; strong, skilled, and smart, but NOT the leader, either in or out of combat.

There were two or so other initial Rangers, with a fourth and fifth antagonistic-to-the-first-group-at-first duo of Rangers. (Like I said. More modern, rather than classical, Rangers.) They were led, OUT of combat, by an elderly gentleman who was obscenely rich.

That's about all I remembered from the dream once waking up...but it was enough to send off a chain reaction in my mind, where I reminisced about a really, REALLY old idea of mine.

We're talking, I know for a fact I was younger than 15 when I had this idea, young. Since I turn 25 in 2 days, that means this idea is in the 11-15-year range, of OLD ideas. I believe the tenth season of Power Rangers was recently ended when I had this, old. (You know. The season which had the Red Ranger special, which had a Tommy Oliver clone in the form of a sixth Ranger that was highly antagonistic at first that disabled/stole animal zords from the Rangers until the Red Ranger managed to undo the brainwashing and turn him good again, with him being a wolf-themed Ranger. That season. It was the last season I watched as a child, so it left its mark on me.)

Let me look that up, in fact, since I have a computer.

...Yep. February 9, 2002 to November 16, 2002. Wild Force.

I distinctly recall, also, that I actually never got to see the conclusion of the series. I got CLOSE to the conclusion, including seeing numerous villains die/do heelfaceturns/fight with other villains/work with the Rangers either temporarily or permanently, but RIGHT near the very end of the series...
...I didn't get to see the end of the series, leaving me immensely disappointed, and as a child who was creative.

My answer to being disappointed was to write my own story using the material.

Not immediately after. I don't think I was that young, and that it was written that close. So not when I was nine years old. But close sounds about right; the 10-12 range is exactly the zone where I would have written this story idea down.

And I call it a story, but what it really was...was fanfiction.

I don't use that term lightly.

You know how I have dozens of stories which are knockoffs of things? I still call those stories, and use the term knockoff, because I developed original aspects to the stories--some of them even being prophetic! For instance, my Bleach-knockoff story was written before the Hueco Mundo arc, yet contained details about my Hollow-equivalent and Shinigami-equivalent's relationship to one another that was only revealed during/AFTER that arc (including having my story feature Hollow-equivalent characters as heroes!); my Bleach-knockoff story was written to contain a canonically-optional sequel that contains children of the main characters...

...Which had them meet in a VERY SIMILAR situation to the actual end of the Bleach manga. I wrote that ending when Aizen was still a main villain. Like. I didn't even know that there was anything after Aizen, because at the time I was writing it, there wasn't. So now if I ever were to publish the story, it would look like I DID blatantly steal ideas...

...Even though those ideas were my original creations. In other words, it'll look MORE like a knockoff than it actually was, because I developed a deep setting and lore on my own, without utilizing the details of the setting.

...BUT I DIGRESS.

MY POINT BEING.

I usually will call things knockoffs when they are knockoffs.

This wasn't me writing a knockoff, "basically Power Rangers with the serial numbers filed off".

This was me writing Power Rangers. Fanfiction, of me writing a series paying respect to the entirety of the series as I had known it to be. To my childhood of the first ten seasons, of which I'd seen a large portion of but never the entirety of. (For some strange reason, that "seen 90% of the series, but not the season finale" thing that happened for season ten for me? Also happened for many prior seasons. I got to the part where series-long villains were defeated, and said series-long villains went down destroying zords, but didn't actually reach the conclusion of the series.)

​The basic premise of this was that--due to an inherent clause of the background material--this would be an alternate universe, but would be almost identical to the known Ranger works. The story involved how an ancient, powerful civilization (implied to be Atlantis...in Mesoamerica, with strong ties to the Mayans) deciding to materialize all the evils across the universe, be them past, present, or future evils, into a single entity.

They hoped that by doing so, they could create a utopia for generations to come, as a world free of Evil would prosper--but they underestimated the strength of Evil, and in order to save the world, they had to seal the Evil entity up using the ten elements. Though they ultimately succeeded, it was not without cost; by the time Evil was sealed, their civilization laid in ruins.

Come modern day, an expedition uncovered this Evil, and accidentally broke the seal, setting it loose on the world once more to wreck havoc...but all was not lost, as the ten elements each chose a champion, from across the world (that "across the world" aspect was important; I wanted a diverse, multiracial cast, spanning the entire globe), to carry on the fight.

That's the basic backstory I came up with.

Now for what that means.

I envisioned an ambitious project, with either ten short seasons or five longer ones featuring a mid-season finale. An actual multi-year storyline, continued start to finish with the same cast and setting. As the backstory implied, there were TEN initial Rangers, rather than just five; double the number.

The ten Rangers were:
Fire
Ice
Water
Energy
Light
Darkness
Air
Earth
Metal
Rock
(Nature, you may note, is missing; he's the eleventh Ranger, joining at a later date. This cast being incredibly genre-savvy, a humorous moment arises when one of the two lead-Rangers comments, "Okay, if anyone has a recent new friend, long-lost relative, or notices a change in behavior from existing friends or family, speak up. Especially if they're wearing green."
"What's suspicious about wearing green?"
*camera pans to show off the Rangers in their civilian attire wearing colors matching their Ranger color; the lead Ranger says nothing but communicates the message nonverbally*)

Evil would have nine generals, each representing a sin. Yes, nine sins. I originally planned out all nine of them, but I forgot what the original 9th was. I developed a new 9th on Tuesday to replace the forgotten one. All the generals would have different personalities and approximate power levels, with the 9th and final being the hardest. One of said sins was incredibly sympathetic, defeated/destroyed at about the midway point in the series.

I don't remember my original sin ranking, other than the 9th was the most powerful, and 8th was the second-most powerful; of the seven sins WE know, I don't remember how I ranked them most to least. But the idea was in a ten-season series one would be defeated at each finale; in a five-season series, same idea, just also utilizing mid-season finales.

But I did work on said sins on Tuesday; it was my main project I worked on. Absolutely new, I came up with an idea that each of the sins would not, in of itself, inherently be evil, that they represent things that are not bad, but in extremes, can be bad--and thus, that their opposites (which would be themes of the season) wouldn't be direct opposites, but rather, the thing necessary in order to provide balance to the sin.

With that in mind:
The ninth sin, Knowledge, I took a little bit of an obvious biblical cue as to the source. However, Knowledge being a sin, by my definition of the sins, makes sense when you think about it. Your first inclination might be, "how can the pursuit of knowledge be evil?", but what makes it a sin is reckless and unchecked pursuit of knowledge. Pursuit of knowledge, above any and all ethical concerns.

You can think of this in some fairly obvious terms. Human experimentation is a bad thing, we can generally agree to that, yes? And yet, the results of human experimentation have yielded great advances in understanding of the human body. The problem is, that knowledge came at the price of literally being genocide. (Think, as a go-to example, the holocaust.)

Knowledge is undeniably a good thing. But pure knowledge, with nothing to put it in check, leads to a level of amorality that is, undeniably, something we'd define as evil, because there is nothing inherent in pursuing knowledge that gives us ethics; quite the opposite, ethics impair the pursuit of knowledge, thus why they're often portrayed as discarded and we have the common mad scientist trope.

So the opposite of knowledge isn't ignorance as you may expect or something to that effect; the opposite of knowledge, I defined as Wisdom. Wisdom, here, would essentially be having the sense to 'know' things that knowledge doesn't give you, in that it's having the capacity to have good judgement, to know "that's wrong" in ways knowledge doesn't allow. To take experience, and put it not so much in cold data points, but warm feelings, as it were.

​In terms of the story, Knowledge is the strongest general--and is, in fact, the first of the generals to destroy a zord beyond capacity for it to be repaired. He thus, goes down VERY late in the series. Near the end. He hurts the Rangers. He damages them, and wages psychological warfare on them by bringing up truths they don't want to hear, and the Rangers struggle to overcome this and are left rattled even after having done so.

The eighth sin, Despair, is not from Danganronpa, thankyouverymuch. Danganronpa was not even a game in JAPAN when I came up with this idea, yet alone with an American release. It's actually taking more of a cue from Fullmetal Alchemist in that I always thought Father, as a homunculus, should have an eighth sin to be named for, just like the other seven homunculi had sins they were named for.

In hindsight, Knowledge would actually be a better fit for a sin for Father, but at the time, my younger brain came up with the idea that Despair was an eighth sin, because it made sense. Despair seems to be a common, strong negative force of humanity, similar to the other seven sins, so to me it was just a logical extension, especially since it does have a direct opposite: Hope. 

Despair, in terms of the story, takes the story in a bit of a darker turn, the catalyst on which results in the exploits of Knowledge. Despair, himself, does not inflict personal damage. He doesn't destroy a zord, but what he does do, is leave the Rangers struggling in ways they have never struggled before, and even after he is defeated, the Rangers consider it a phyrric victory thanks to what they were unable to recover.

​From there, we get into the familiar seven sins. The below isn't a power ranking, as a reminder, and is just the order I happened to remember the sins in.

Pride I defined as not being evil, because sometimes, it is good to be proud. Proud of what you are, of what you have done, of your heritage, of your progeny, these things may be prideful but they are all admirable. It then should be no surprise, then, that the opposite of pride I don't consider humility, here. Because pride also leads to aspects such as honor and nobility.

The thing making pride a sin is when pride is given in excess as to blind someone to others, potentially harming them. Thus, the opposite of pride, I defined as Compassion. In that by being compassionate at all times for others, you would keep the pride in check, and be unafraid to take a blow to the pride in order to help those in need.

Wrath was a difficult one for me to justify as not being evil because it's the sin I have the hardest time understanding. Ironically, of the seven sins it is probably the one I feel third-strongest (second only to sloth, with pride as my main sin), in that I have lashed out blindly against the world, but I never really understood why. I knew the feelings of wrath, but not the underlying reasoning of wrath.

Still, I did what I could, and came up with the idea that wrath is a source of strength for humanity when humanity has been in pain. You can think of it as a strong survivalism instinct of sort, to lash out blindly, without purpose, to cope with hardship and hope that by the time the wrath has subsided, the damage dealt has left us in a position where we can continue to survive, hopefully in better positions than we were at the time we became wrathful.

The check for this blind lashing out, then, would be Understanding. Understanding the source of our suffering would allow us to root out the real problem. Attacking aggressively (a trait of wrath) is not necessarily a bad thing! But to do so without aim is reckless-at-best, destructive at worst. By understanding what's wrong and being able to deal with it at the root of the problem allows the emotions to be channeled productively, rather than destructively.

Greed is, as defined by me, more or less a focus on materialism. Materialism is not, in of itself, evil. A want for the material can be quite innocent, with beneficial traits of it including sentimentality. Attachment to objects can lead to feelings of warmth, as well as preservation of history and the creation of stories. In every day-to-day life, materialism also manifests as a want to provide not only for oneself, but also for those that one cares about.

In our world, you can't get by without materials. Most commonly, we think of wealth, of money, but even in a land without it, you need materials in order to survive. Food, shelter, water; all of these are or require materials. And craving these, especially when you are lacking in them, is not something which can ever be evil to me; that's just simple survivalism.

What makes greed be a sin is an excess of this focus on materialism. Where gathering the materials is in excess, and you gather more than you have a need for and make no productive use of the extra. Depriving others of what you didn't need in the first place, simply because you gathered it for whatever reason and don't give it back.

For me, I then defined the opposite of this materialism as Spiritualism. This is not, inherently, religious. And frankly, the dictionary definition for spiritualism sucks. (Good god, is that what people think I meant when I have used the term previously? I've used the term spiritualism a LOT because I am spiritualistic but not religious, and yet...what I mean by that is most decisively NOT what google is telling me when I search for that term.)

Okay so apparently I'm gonna need to go off on a tangent because I'm not sure how to explain this because I can't do it with google. Spiritualism as I see it is a companion opposite to materialism. By that, I mean, they are opposites, but you can and SHOULD have BOTH. Which is why it is what keeps greed in check.

So if materialism can be thought of as a focus on the material world, on the physical reality, then spiritualism is a focus on the immaterial, on the belief that there's more than the sum of the parts. You don't have to believe in an afterlife in order to be spiritual. 

Actually, that's the word I was looking for in order to get google to tell you the meaning I'm going for: 
spir·it·u·al
ˈspiriCH(o͞o)əl/
adjective
adjective: spiritual

1. 1.
   relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.
   "I'm responsible for his spiritual welfare"
   synonyms:nonmaterial, incorporeal, intangible; 
   inner, mental, psychological; 
   transcendent, ethereal, otherworldly, mystic, mystical, metaphysical; 
   rareextramundane
   "your spiritual self"
   antonyms:physical
   • (of a person) not concerned with material values or pursuits.

(Huh, didn't know weebly could do that kind of formatting.)

THAT is what I mean.

So a sense of spiritualism to me is that. To have a sense of more to life than just the material. And having this, I consider an essential counter to greed, because with a sense of spiritualism, you then have purpose for your materials. And when you have no need for the materials, you are more willing to give these materials to those who are in need of them rather than hording them for yourself. Giving to others, because of a sense that spirituality allows for a type of peace.

Lust is a sin which I also don't really understand that well, but for me, the idea of its opposite being chastity was absolutely absurd. Instead, I simply developed the idea that its opposite would be, quite simply, Love. In this case, because Lust as I understand it is a sin because it is lusting after something, namely, pleasures of the flesh.

For me, abstinence would then not be an opposite; it'd just be stupid. The opposite over a crave for something would be a genuine appreciation of that something. Love can then take any form. Of objects, of family, of a platonic friend, of a romantic partner, and even of strangers.

In this case, then, you could say it is absolutely okay to crave after things. Having cravings is not a bad thing; it is entirely human to want, and there is nothing wrong with wanting things, as this want can lead to a great many things, including motivation to drive your life in a positive direction. It is only when this craving becomes harmful that it becomes a problem, and by having genuine love for the thing you are craving, you wouldn't be able to cause that harm because if you did then that wouldn't be genuine love. (More or less, anyway. Probably not the best wording, but I feel like the basic idea comes across.)

Gluttony I more or less define as eating in excess. Obviously, eating is not a sin. We need to eat to survive. Eating a lot is not inherently bad, either. Some of us really need to load on the food. And it is perfectly healthy to eat as much as you want; it is probably unhealthy if you're not, if you're starving yourself.

So what makes eating in excess a sin, then? By letting it accumulate. Eating, but not making anything out of the consumption. So what I defined as the opposite of gluttony, is Drive. A drive to do something, strong, powerful, motivating, allows that consumption to have purpose.

Sloth, then, follows a similar purpose, but here, I define sloth as being inaction. Here, it becomes a sin when it is deliberate inaction, especially deliberate harmful inaction. Where taking action will prevent harm, and by choosing not to, harm is produced.

However, inaction is not itself a bad thing. Inaction leads to gathering of more information, to create a more reasoned opinion, allowing action when taken to be better, be more precise, be more on target. To accomplish the goal, to accomplish what you set out to do, with a greater ease, speed, and success rate.

What works as an opposite to Slothfulness then, is Decisiveness. That being, decisively deciding, "Now is the time to act". Having the ability to know when you need to act...but also when you need to not act. Someone lacking decisiveness, someone indecisive, is likely going to lead to harm by having hesitated, or alternatively, someone lacking decisiveness, someone impulsive, is likely to charge into a problem without a thought, recklessly causing havoc. (You can understand, now, why I consider this my second-greatest sin!)

Last but not least (presumably, anyway; one of the seven sins is 'least' for the purposes of the story, but heck if I know what the order was), we have Envy. Envy is honestly the sin I might have the hardest time defining. For me, I can think of it in the terms of,
"Seeing that someone else has this thing, or has done something, and a drive arising to action from this", more or less. What makes that a sin is when the action taken is destructive, is harmful, is damaging to others. But Envy is not, in of itself, evil, because seeing someone having done great and wishing to act after having done so is not evil.

After all...humans idolize other humans. What do you do when you idolize someone? You generally take direct action motivated by that someone. That's not an inherently bad thing at all! It can be a bad thing, but it can be an immense force for good, driving you to do a many great things.

So what I define as envy's opposite, is Acceptance. Acceptance works as a companion to envy on all levels. It is acknowledgement of what you can, and cannot, achieve, so you don't harm yourself trying to do the impossible. It is acknowledgement of what the differences between you and your object of envy are. It is acknowledgement of what your object of envy wants, it is acknowledgement of...

...Well, all the various circumstances. If you harm someone else out of envy, you're not accepting the circumstances; you're trying to reject them. And that's what makes the difference. Accepting, rather than rejecting, reality...but still using those feelings for productive ends. "I can't do this, I can never be that...but this is what I CAN do, that is what I CAN be", is where I am going with what I mean.

So those are the sins I developed for the story, and their accompanying themes. Each time the Rangers would clash with the generals, one of these themes would come up, in either subtle or overt ways. And over time, the narrative would be woven.

One sin, I don't remember which, was far more sympathetic; this sin ends up destroyed at the half-way point in the series.

For the curious, eventually, there would be two other Rangers joining, for 13 total.
The 12th Ranger is Heart; the 13th Ranger is Void.

​However, yesterday, I did something I was never able to do as a child:
I knew the elements of the 13 Rangers as a kid.
​But I never knew what their zords were, what their teams were (that being, the distribution of the initial ten Rangers), or even what their colors were.

I did all three yesterday.

ONE OF THE TEAMS:
Fire, the Red Ranger, would have a Dragon as his zord, and would be the leader of one team.
Earth, the Orange Ranger, I wasn't quite sure what the zord would be but I came up with Badger.
Metal, the Silver Ranger, would have a Dog zord.
Darkness, the Purple Ranger, is another one I wasn't certain of but I came up with Rat for the zord.
Water, the Blue Ranger, was an easy choice for zords, with a Shark. (Yes, I know, it's been done before, but so have most animals in terms of zords. Admit it, you know it's true.)

In the megazord, the dragon would be the body; shark, one arm; rat, one or both of the legs; wasn't sure beyond that.

THE OTHER TEAM:
Ice, the White Ranger, would have a Bear as his zord, and would be the leader of the other team.
Air, I had trouble coming up with a color but decided Pale Ranger would work. As far as zords, didn't get a specific animal but it'd be some form of Bird. (All three megazords I envisioned as having wings on their backs. Membranes for the dragon, feathers for the bird, and then a third type of wing below.)
Rock, the Brown Ranger, would have a Snake as a zord. (Yes, this is basically Onyx.)
Light, the Yellow Ranger, I had trouble with but settled on Elephant. (Mostly for the purposes of shaping the megazord.)
Energy, the Cyan Ranger, I came up with a Jellyfish zord. (I know, a creature of the sea. But literally all the animals I can think of as having a 'sting' that aren't fang/tail-based are aquatic animals. What would you use if not a stingray, electric eel, or jellyfish? Spiders/scorpions/snakes weren't viable because that's an entirely different type of sting, and NOT the type I was going for. Also see below.)

​In the megazord, the bear would be the body; the bird would be the wings; the snake would be one arm; the jellyfish, the other arm; the elephant, the legs and maybe also a shield/weapon.

Nature, the Green Ranger, would be the 11th Ranger, joining some time in the earlier half of the series relatively early-on. His zord would be a Dragonfly.

Heart, the Pink Ranger, would be either the 12th or 13th Ranger, depending on whether she joins before or after the mid-way point in the series. (I don't remember.) Regardless, her zord is a Cat.

Void, the Black Ranger, would be either the 13th or 12th Ranger, depending on when Heart joins. However, his join point is fixed; he joins immediately after the half-way point in the series. (It's not really much of a leap of logic to conclude this; yes, the sympathetic sin destroyed plays a part in the creation of the Void Ranger. But it's not in the way you would expect...)

I should mention:
A key individual, not a Ranger, but a vital cast member, is their out-of-battle leader. This guy, a young billionaire at the head of a massive corporation, was the sole survivor of the group that unearthed the Evil; he was responsible for accidentally breaking the seal. This is also a fundamental part of the backstory from the very beginning; he was always designed to function as a bit of a Big Good.

He is the one who brings the Rangers from their positions across the globe and gets them to work together as a team; he is the one who bankrolls the entire operation, and more or less is responsible for founding an entire corporation dedicated purely to the purpose of defeating the Evil he unleashed. It was remembering him that made me do all of this work, because of the similarities between him and the elderly gentleman I dreamed of.

But today, I gave him a first name which I hadn't done before. None of my characters had any names. But I gave him the first name of Adam.

Other stuff I did yesterday:
Adam's organization would equip all the Rangers with stun pistols--incapable of destroying Evil, but capable of momentarily stopping it. Similarly, each Ranger would have special daggers, which can wound beings of Evil, but not destroy them.

Each Ranger would have their own unique weapon, though. I did in fact come up with 13.
Sword
Axe
Mace
Staff
Spear
Bow
Crossbow
Rifle
Scythe
Claws
Disc
Whip
Armor (think, big boxing gloves, and an equivalent for the foot to allow for Kamen Rideresque kicks)

Obviously, Power Rangers being merchandise-driven, each Ranger would develop 2-3 additional weapons or so, and all Rangers may receive the Armor (with the original holder of the Armor simply getting superior armor, upgrading the existing armor to be MUCH better) because that's an excuse to make at least 13 new toys, but AT LEAST TO START WITH, each Ranger would have one of these weapons.

No, I didn't assign specific Rangers specific weapons; I can kinda sorta give some decent ideas for which Rangers would be candidates for which weapons based both on their element and animal (as both can contribute), but I don't see any weapons which scream one particular Ranger. (Other than Fire having the Sword, out of tradition because obviously a/the leader has the sword.)

One final thing I did yesterday: develop a Quirky Miniboss Squad.
Specifically, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. These four would be subordinates to the generals, always helping out but being comically inept. You know the type. Every Power Rangers squad had these villains, the villains who don't often fight the heroes if they fight the heroes at all, mostly work in the background, have scenes with the major villains, might have some character development, but are ultimately mostly harmless and sidekicks to the REAL threats.

That's all I made.

There's more to the story, more details I created originally that I'm not going into now (I only really described the details necessary for you to know what's new), but you get the idea of what I worked on.

And why it was way too ambitious for a ten-year-old.

So I stayed up late last night--nothing wrong with that.
I didn't set an alarm--nothing wrong with that.
I actually woke up at a reasonable hour, too--about 1ish. Now, mind you, that meant I only got about five or so hours of sleep, but I more or less went, "Uhg, it's not as much sleep as I want, but I'll just gather my thoughts for five or so minutes, get up, and prepare for the day, including the staff meeting."

...I woke up at 4:30.

You know.

Typically the time I'm already 15 minutes into having prepared to leave for said staff meeting.
And I needed to eat breakfast, and I'm typing this up, and I needed to search for confirmation of the staff meeting (found none, texted boss, and to my dismay, they told me the posted schedule was accurate; in spite of not having sent out any form of notification like they normally do, the schedule said we'd meet tonight so we're meeting tonight), and now I need to actually rush through the preparation for said staff meeting (I had planned to properly shave all my body hair and thoroughly comb my hair including removing a persistent knot in my hair which has been there for weeks and not even my special brush can remove; NOPE NOT HAPPENING) and leave.

Oh, and things other than a staff meeting?

For TODAY?

Pfft.
Yeah those aren't gonna happen.

GOODBYE LIFE.
​IT WAS NICE KNOWING YOU.

So I looked at the guard schedule, and I saw four guards scheduled.
I thought at first I had read it wrong.

I didn't.

Then I thought, "alright, maybe it's a scheduling error?"

But as I examined it, it looked deliberate.

So if it was deliberate, the obvious conclusion:
They did schedule 4, but one or two of the guards would get to go home earlier than the listed time.

Since, after all.

Four guards would be complete, total, absolute overkill, right?

...WRONG​.