#blog blogpost

[dailynaeleon]

sorry again. was also busy af today. take my special move MAKOTO TEXTPOST DUMP PART 1

[four-alligators-in-a-trenchcoat]

This joy is not your own, quit living the borrowed life!!!

Social media and the algorithm is like sugar water for your soul instead of milk, you will not sustain on it, and you can not continue to neglect growing your own roots. You reap what you sow! Love is for those who love the work! Let others inspire you, let your community motivate you, but please God learn to love the work. Have days where you create without looking at Pinterest when you get lost, let it take hours, let it take days! What are you trying to be free of? The LIVING? The miraculous task of it? - feeling very fired up by the poem "For the Student who used AI to write a Paper" by Joseph Fasano and a small line from Blue Period where Yatora says 'this joy is not my own' while watching TV. Its so easy to not do things when you can get the dopamine by watching other people do those things, but gosh does is slowly poison you and your soul. If you feel like you are not living your life, consider your choices, one of the being a flip-phone, please life can be so much better :3 Ask yourself what I did and still do:

When is the last time I felt joy of my own creation and accomplishment?

How much do I spend in the fields of boredom, the birthplace of imagination?

Where does my artistic soul flow from when its not curated by other people’s work?

[whokilledjared]

the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself. (& takes on social media)

Hi.

I'm lonely.

The moment I got "two weeks off school" in sophomore year, life went to 4x speed & I can't turn it off no matter how hard I try.

Maybe COVID-19 adolescence did numbers on me. Somewhere between the iPhone 5c and ChatGPT, 14-hour screen times have live-streamed to me a steady, homogenous death of culture.

Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is sacred. Every movement is a trend, and every cult classic a sequel.

The value we place on things being beautiful, on being "cool," and our gatekept appreciation of how hard these things were to find: it's been co-opted, or perhaps stolen. It's been stolen by the new merchant class. "Disruptors" and "innovators" turning our lives into a burgeoning black mirror prequel. Soon, we'll graduate too, and we'll wring every morsel of value in each others' lives dry for cash.

Plain and simple, I think we're being manipulated.

Your dates are an algorithm. Your music is a social signal. And Zuck knows when you sleep.*

God. What the fuck are we doing???

“Individuation is becoming the thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.” — Carl Jung

Recently, I deleted Instagram. My first impulse was to post a story or something, announcing my departure. But then, I thought that would be lame.

I got rid of my account, too. Kinda. Over 1 year, over 800 followers removed, and what remains of me is a little grey icon, and "JM_0000000010" where my name and face used to be.

yay.

There were many people I wish I could have been friends with, but I wonder, too, why I find myself so drawn to the validation of others. Does social media affect me worse, or do we all just choose to ignore it, languishing in private?

At any rate, this last year has almost felt like re-learning how to be a human being.

Personally, I think one of the biggest markers for maturity is when you become willing to disappoint the people you know in favor of what feels right to you, when you start to unravel the stories you’ve told yourself (or been told) about who you are and what you should be. In short, the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself.

And sometimes, I think about every college student that has ever lived. My grandmother, my dad, and so on. Just consider for a moment all kids who graduated before 2010:

What was it like for the ones in 1940? To walk around, before a campus had computers? In 2006: To meet someone pretty, but forget their number? In 1999: To cram into dorms, and watch Seinfeld live on-air?

Would I, like my dad in 1988, have braved cold night, brisk wind, & landline phone-call just to knock and see if my friends were too busy to hang?

What stories could I tell if there was even the slightest chance of getting lost on the way home from a party?

Humans are social creatures. We crave our friends like water. To me, the clearest difference between Dasani and Instagram is that one of them comes in a bottle.

Yet despite these distractions and comforts we have in 2024, somehow, we still have engineering students. People who carve out time in their day to sit down, look at paper, and solve differential equations. But then, that's not so hard, is it? It just takes time. Precious, fucking, time.

At Meta, leagues and leagues of these engineers power behavioral scientists, who are competing for the highest salary. Their benchmarks? Your FOMO. Guilt. Anxiety. Obsession. The worse you feel, the more you engage with their content. The more you engage with their content, well, you're starting to get the point.

Try something for me: Open up Instagram, but don't tap anything. What happens? How many little animations? How many tiny nudges prompting you to get lost? Our home-pages are billion-dollar diving boards, hoisting us over engineered catacombs of subconscious quicksand.

My homepage is my FOMO, my envy, and my crushes. The pain and struggle of trying to be someone who I am not. My little existential crises, bundled-up, packaged, and shipped with a like button.

To abandon your social networks entirely, however, requires a safety net of close friends. After all, your friends are online, and you'd be miserable without them.

This is the problem with our monkey brains. Millennia of sociological natural-selection have made us quite great at feeling terrible. We're damn good at making tribal status games to play with, too.

Seeking refuge in quirked up septum piercings and boygenius listeners, my time in counter-cultural, alternative "scenes" between St. Louis and Tampa has shown me that even the weirdest of folks and the most removed can accidentally find themselves reduced to nothing more than high-school popularity contests. Even if I love them. Even if they're amazing people. We're human.

We can't "quit social media" as much as we can't "quit bottled water" Sure, we can, but it's inconvenient. And even without a bottle, we're still drinking water.

So I lost touch with my friends. I got no new updates on their lives. I forced myself into the inconvenience of not having a phone to reach for in fleeting moments of boredom. Suddenly, I was out of the loop. Suddenly, I was bored. And suddenly, nobody missed me. My only friends were the ones I had the time to text. Everyone else ... does not exist.

Weekends have become more valuable than ever. Without the empty social calories of seeing my friends' pictures, I find myself planning hangouts as often as my schedule allows. I have more lunches, more study sessions, and more is done in the company of less.

And I have the time to breathe.

And in this calm, I think I found my answer: it's my misplaced ambition. These fears of anxiety and people I thought I would miss, they seem represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of. This is, I think, how everyone develops their own definition of beauty — and of coolness. It's largely the intersection of what we find most interesting, and what we want to see more of in the world. Because beauty and coolness, by definition, are rare and hard to find. If they were everywhere, nothing be beautiful, nor would anything be cool.

When we all turn into wrinkles and cataracts, bad backs and heart attacks, for a brief, glorious moment, our lives are going to flash before our eyes. In this moment, you'll see your story. The ultimate progression of you.

How much of that will be skibidi toilet and reaction clips? How much of that will be arguing on the internet? Can you tell me, just how much of your life will you have skipped over to pacify your intentionally-lowered attention span?

That girl whose number you couldn't find Those passing questions over coffee that you couldn't search on Google The boredom of a subway ride

Those are not inconveniences, they're what the older generations refer to as "life."

* (oh, but if you can't sleep, consider this aside: Google knows the angle you walk at, how fast you're walking, and they've got crowdsourced pictures of everywhere around you at all times of the day. fun bedtime thoughts <3)

[glistering-melon]

COLORED. Look at my guys.

[wordsbyher]

(via Review: ‘Descendants of the Sun’ K-drama (2016)

"Don't feel embarrassed just because I found out that you like me. Even so, it doesn't change the fact that I like you more..." - Yoo Shin-jin to Kang Mo-yeon. (Descendants of the Sun)

"Say it's just a strategic retreat. Tell me to wait for you, tell me you'll do whatever it takes to come back to me." - Yoon Myeong-Joo. (Descendants of the Sun)

Source: mblognation.wordpress.com

[sylvyspritii]

"Hey i have an idea Since people like my latest Touhou style album, what if i just remaster/arrange all of ZUN's PC-98 songs next?"

So i calculated how many songs that would be (the songs in ()'s are bonus songs) And uhhhh…

Oh. Oh 116 songs.

116 divided by 3 years (156 weeks) is around 0,74

That means that realistically speaking, if i would finish 1 song every week (break weeks included like christmas and birthday), it would take 3 years

That is not financially viable for me, i need commission money to pay for rent and food

While i love the idea, it's just not viable in practise unless it "blows up" and sells a lot

I need money to live, clients pay me around 200-300 euro upfront per song, that is more than my newest TH album made /in total/

This is why clients are my main source of income and not my personal albums

Has there ever been a case of a Touhou PC-98 remaster album "blowing up" or being a financially viable alternative to just doing commission work? (worldwide)

(Not talking about Touhou arrange albums like +TEK's for example, i'm talking about "remaster" arrange style albums)

And i know this "money talk" might seem horrific and grey to some of my fans But hey i need to eat and pay rent If i don't, i die I can't make music while i'm dead guys

I hate capitalism as much as the rest of you, but that doesn't mean we can magically stop living in it all of sudden

That said I would like to thank everyone who listened to my personal albums and soundtracks I appreciate all forms of support, both financially and morally Thank you for caring about my music

[leologs]

Which is that one book that you pick up when you want to ignore life?

[Blog, Quotes, Literature, Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet, Reading, Solitude]

[sky-and-amusement-park]

gm oomfies

im back

ill make the follow up on the lacan herrscher post soon tm

[springfaaerie]

Hi, I'm Spring

Welcome to my blog!

My name is Spring and I'm a 24 year old libra with a scorpio stellium that enjoys cultural and digital anthropology, film photography, archives, writing, and mountains. I'm currently getting my bachelors degree in anthropology and working on a curated website for black folklore along with a few original stories to be published after I graduate next spring.

Masterlist <-

I write for Twilight and ACOTAR (and also marvel at some point but, we don't talk about that) but am open to new thingsas I find new characters to enjoy. You can find me on wattpad, where most of my works are already uploaded. Working on getting an AO3 account as well. Currently reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black, A Court of Frost & Starlight by SJM, and a plethora of assigned reading + reading for my bachelor's degree and curation project (updated as of 3/5/25).

[9divine9]

I wish I was loved

I wish I was loved, unconditionally. through days when my energy sucks up a room with my blank eyes. through moments when I’m too scared to speak up for myself. through times when I want to speak my mind and instead keep quiet because I’m scared of being alone. through thoughts of wanting to run falling off a cliff when I can’t take it anymore. through my soft voice screaming to be heard when the winds push me off my feet.

I want to— love myself unconditionally. through days where i want to give up and yell at myself to do better, be better. I wish, I loved, unconditionally.

[four-alligators-in-a-trenchcoat]

What do I do without a smartphone?

When I got a dumbphone/flipphone, I immediately started living a super cool super fulfilling life! I travelled a ton, ran a marathon, immediately got good at art, read 4 books in a day, and now have 22 close friends! Thats exactly how it works, i'm not lying AT ALL, trust me ;)

...ahhh okay you got me, thats not actually what happened.

Yes my life did change, and all for the better! I do have a cooler and more fulfilling life now, but not like that, I just started living a regular life? This little post is about what that looks like these days (for me)

First, a little bit of math. My screen time with a smartphone was 5.5 hours on a good day and almost 9 on a bad: about an average of 7.25 hours a day. Ive been smartphone-less for a little over about 5 months; just about 170 days.

Average 7.25/hrs a day x 170 days = 1232.5 hours total/24hrs

51 full 24-hour days I got back.

ALMOST TWO MONTHS OUT OF THE FIVE

- Alright, i've never done that math before, holy shiitake mushrooms thats insane. Back on topic, oh my god I would have spent 2 months out of the past 5 entirely on my phone

What do I do instead? What consumes the hours? Or the in-passing minutes?

I live normally, just without a phone honestly, it didn't make me suddenly want to run a marathon or just turn into Picasso day one. It just gave me back the opportunity to live.

I turned to my hobbies, like ceramics, reading, journalling to bring the simple joys back into my everyday!

I stopped being able to distract myself from how icky I felt when I didn't move my body, so I slowly started swimming again!

I started to blog a little! Thanks for reading :D

I got bored at home, so I started seeking out social spaces and hanging out in person with friends and prioritizing making them!

Those are huge things, really big, hour by hour things that take up my life now. I am still a student, in a demanding major, who tries to study 5 hours a day, and I work part-time. Is that the most prominent change? Absolutely, but in the minutes passing between tasks, before I leave somewhere, waiting for something there is also a little mojo added back into my day. I would have been spending those little snippets of time pacifying myself on a quick scroll, 20-30 reels on IG that I would never remember. Instead those morsels are spent...

Doing nothing! Sitting around is a forgotten joy, don't be afraid to be alone with yourself, its the only way you will get to know you.

Sudoku! If i've got 5-10 mins waiting somewhere and feel up for the task, a quick sudoku from the little book I carry around is great.

Tidying up/cleaning! I mentioned this in a past blog post, but it's easier to keep the space around you tidy when you reclaim those little minuets while your breakfast is cooking or your waiting for the water to boil. Bagel still in the toaster? Why not give the kitchen a quick sweep! Coffee is steeping? Wouldn't you know it, thats how long it takes for me to unload the dishwasher! (still a student living at home, that dishwasher is a FULL 4-person dishwasher man)

People watching, takin' a quick ol' gander at your surroundings. Make sure you haven't forgotten what life looks like, or what the general population is up to.

I still spend some time on Tumblr, Reddit, and Pinterest, its not like I went cold turkey or that I'll never see social media again. Its easier to live your life when you have the time, and its easier to have the time when you don't have a monster algorithm in your pocket built to addict you. You can do it! Do it at the pace that is good for you, but get those two months back!

☆ a photo of my cat for good luck ☆

[waanderlussttt]

going to get breakfast & go to the bookstore w my gf in the morning!!!

[ultimate-healing-blog]

Vegetarian dish..... Check it out and don't forget to follow, like, and share post.

[chronicallysimming]

"Making friends with Sickle Cell is a complex task; socialising with a chronic illness is challenging, and very quickly, loneliness becomes a new symptom that I need to manage. It is a symptom that seems to weigh down heavier than fatigue and stabs harder, further than the daily pain."-Chronic Creativity.