Oof, that's rough

But there are a lot of times I prioritized new experiences, personal safety/growth, adventures, and opportunities over roots, and *sometimes* that feels super lonely.

Wouldn't trade the adventures for the world, but wish I knew how to balance it better.

I'm a bit of a reclusive drifter by nature, and I have severe social anxiety and RSD, so I also haven't built up a lot of deep social networks, and have a tendency to end up mostly looking back and going "huh, guess I drifted away from that group."

It's not *bad*.

So I'm going 'home' for a week and spending maybe 6 hours with people I knew before I turned 25.

No family or school reunions. The two friends I am still connected to are busy moms. I love them, but our lives are pretty far separated.

More chillingly, literally half of my church friends from my teens are dead. Anti-vaxxing parents got 2 of them. The rest are in traditional conservative lifestyles, mostly. Some briefly escaped and then were dragged back in.

Coming from a small hyper conservative Christian family, I have very few connections to relatives, mostly by choice, but also just bc most of one side is gone.

And I don't have school connections really bc I was homeschooled and isolated in my teens.

But this trip is making me hyper aware of how little connection I really have to... Anywhere. Aside from lunch w/my childhood best friend and checking on my grandparents to make sure they're literally alive, all the friends I'll be seeing were made when I lived elsewhere.

Something I think we don't talk about enough is how isolating it can be to 'forge your own path'. It's kind of on the top of my mind bc I'm going 'home' next week.

I walked out on the people who raised me the day I turned 18. A year later, I moved across the country. It was the right thing to do.

Someone with the handle @velocity69.bsky.social is sharing a video with the caption:

"The highest quality video of the moon was just released…
so beautiful

* Artemis II"

It's gone viral, but it's not from Artemis II. If you've shared it, you might want to un-share.

Later:
The Kids Are Alright
The Kids Aren't Alright
Kids These Days

Unintentional poetry in song library:
Feelin
Feelin Good
Feeling Exceptional
Feeling Good
Feels like (it feels alright)
Feels like the First Time

oh my scattered smothered and covered god

I love love love that we have humans heading farther into space than ever before. It's amazing.

I also am firmly not thinking about the reality of that, as someone who had severe anxiety about the land to sea ratio in Hawaii last time we went.

But god, it's good to have something beautiful rn.

I wish I could say that I've learned the value of taking time off to just let my brain reboot, but I know myself better.

Oh, and I went from on-fire burnout to singing and dancing while I worked. So, you know, MAYBE I SHOULD LEARN SOMETHING.

My brain was so busy lobbing ideas at me that I was still emailing them to myself as I was getting ready for bed and basically figured out the outline of a whole setting/series. The best part is, I got the idea from that jacket panel, the idea for which came from road trip planning.

Hit bad burnout/anxiety/depression today, so took the afternoon and shoved myself into the studio to craft.

Made an evening bag, started painting a jacket panel, designed a couple of other small projects, cleaned the office, organized my desk, reviewed perfumes, and wrote a BUNCH.

Blocked attie ai. Highly recommend you also do so.

OpenAI funding fears hit memory chip prices Spending cuts at OpenAI have hit memory chip prices as fears grow about the tech company’s ability to fund its expansion.

Good news! OpenAI is canceling so many large purchase orders and datacenter expansions that the global price of RAM is dropping.

Lol attie now more blocked than the white house. Loving the energy

Unmedicated ADHD: my plans for today are none of my business

If you're furloughed from DHS or still working without pay, I would like to speak with you. Anonymous is fine. Find me at dave.jamieson@huffpost.com or Signal: davejamieson.99

(The whole 'forgot a whole-ass novel thing isn't surprising to anyone who has asked me what part of a game book I wrote. For some reason, as soon as words go on a page, they are just GONE.)

I also realized tonight that trying to write a specific number of words per day or whatever just does not work for me and probably is part of why I stopped writing. I also can't do brain-dump drafts, I generally write nearly final text on the first pass. So I have to really be in the story.

(I've been writing professionally for games for almost a decade since that one. I still can't plot my way out of a wet paper bag, but my prose is damn solid.)

First novel was... Very much a first novel. Second novel was pretty much all religious trauma catharsis (I also do not know where that draft ended up). This one is... Not terrible, but also is very, very 'young' in skill.

Just found a whole novel I'd forgotten about. Yes, one I wrote. I remembered writing two, but discovered this one when I was looking for notes for a long-running old project.

I still only have the VAGUEST memory of writing it and could not tell you anything about it.

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

It is, and it is HUGE.

A picture of the massive Alphonse Mucha's Le Pater coffee table book, with gilt lettering and ornamentation.

In "well, didn't expect that to make me tear up"... I've been a fan of Mucha's work for years (and was fortunate enough to see his Slavic history series in person in Prague), and some of the quotes in here hit right where they needed to. This book is huge, beautiful, and a love letter to the artist.

A bay horse and a black horse nuzzling over a fence.

Two beloved, cantankerous, intense warhorses who have earned all the love and cookies in the world.