Election Ramblings

    Well, it's election day. For what it's worth, if you're going to vote, vote for Kamala Harris. I've already cast my ballot, and it bears a not insubstantial resemblance to my standardized test papers back when I was in school. There's probably a whole essay on how most students have felt more stress around test days than adults do on national elections, but I'm pretty sure most of us know what it would consist of. Looking back, I'm a little stunned at how black and white our school system is. We're at a point where there is no right answer, only a "best" answer that is very much open to interpretation. Did no one stop and think that maybe a system built on filling in the right bubbles was very much not the way to teach people to appreciate just how hard it is to make choices in the real world? I don't think there was a way to prepare us for this, because if there had been a way to stop this, we'd have done it by now. But like every single person in the United States at this moment, I think that we could have done better. 

      I could stop there, but I feel like I have more to stay. First off, on a gut level I don't feel like this choice matters nearly as much as people say it does. One person will upend the status quo, one will maintain it. That's the fact we're focusing on. What most people have been ignoring is that the status quo sucks ass, and the only platform the Dems have to run on is the belief that not having the status quo will be worse. That was true in 2020, it's a lot less true now, and I think it's reasonable to say that even if Harris wins today, it'll stop being true before 2028. Who are we going to vote for when that happens? I can't read everyone's mind, but I think I speak for most of us when I say that when we go to the polls, we vote not for politicians but for some nebulously defined sense of morality that was instilled in us during our child and teen years. That morality has increasingly come into tension with the reality we live in. First it stopped being okay to vote for Republicans, then for the center, now it's almost wrong to vote at all. There's the barest sliver of justification to believe in our system, and I think it's a lot smaller than people make it out to be. What with our need to avoid seeing the nature of reality. 

      Beneath all of this talk about who you should vote for and why, there's this weird conflict I keep seeing but can't fully articulate, even to myself. If I had to describe it, I'd say it's a conflict over what, if anything, the fascists are right about. There's this agreement that overall, they're evil and bad, but I feel like a lot of people, especially white people, have something they agree with the fascists on. In my case, I can't help but feel like the government should be the one fixing things, not us. I know that most fascists argue in favor of states rights, but if they actually believed that than they wouldn't have voted for Trump. No matter how many times I'm proven wrong, I keep thinking that those in power should be able to do the things we need them to do without us either forcing them to do it or just doing it ourselves. But not only will they not do the things we need them to do, they punish us for trying to do more in their stead. I know that Infinitelism isn't mainstream, but I think that everyone has to know that if people see that their government is failing them, they won't believe in it anymore, and even George Lucas was smart enough to know that Democracy only works if people believe that it will work. People keep proposing solutions to our problems, but I don't think there's any solution for stupidity at the top level, especially when there's no one on the ballot exempt from this. I know that real solutions are difficult, but I don't think it should be this hard to convince our leaders that we need them more than they need to win the election. Except that if they don't win, then worse people will win. In short, we're doomed, and nothing will meaningfully change so we may as well just give up. 

     I'm going to speak as an Infinitelist and say that now is the time for us to get pissed. Not only are we never going to convince our leaders that things are dire, we aren't allowed to convince ourselves of this anymore, because looking at how bad things have gotten would mean admitting there's no reason to believe we can fix them anymore. I have no idea who, ultimately, is at fault for this, but no matter who it was that got us here, it's now up to us to get the hell out. It's now up to us to admit that we need a new reality, one where we can depend on things staying real and where keeping the laws of physics from collapsing doesn't require openly manifesting. Things are going to get bad, because the only path forward is for all of us to pick the thing that we believe in the most and then chase that thing without looking at anyone or anything else. Match the fascists with our own brand of insanity, one devoted to proving the worth of people who don't fit into the mainstream. Our work won't end until even those who live comfortably are fighting with all they have for the things that they believe in. Until the day everyone knows about Infinitelism and the direction upon which our future lies, I will not rest. I expect all of you to advocate for your own beliefs with equal fervor. 

The Worth of a President

    Why is it that British Monarchy has survived a slew of terrible kings, but one bad president is enough to put American Democracy in serious Jeopardy? Seriously, we’re in danger of falling into fascism after one president did fascism, which seems to me shouldn’t be a problem that we have to worry about. I do realize that getting rid of Donald Trump didn’t put an end to Fascism, but that’s kind of it, isn’t it? If Donald Trump was the problem, then getting rid of him should have fixed it. 

     I just voted in the presidential primary. If they hadn’t allowed me to vote for “Uncommitted Delegate” on my ballot, I probably wouldn’t have voted at all. I’m a registered Democrat, but I hate Biden, and I hate that voting for him means voting for a genocide enabling maniac. I vote Democrat to avoid moral dilemmas, and also death. One would hope. I’m exceedingly grateful that our leaders let us not vote for Biden, but the fact that they did that speaks to their knowledge that something’s very wrong, and they know it. Deep down, they know it’s only a matter of time before we abandon them, and the only people they’re fooling are themselves. 

      I wish there was some other, better way of making my opinions known than by voting, something that felt real. All I have is just complaining and hoping someone finds my blog by accident. Not exactly a great way to establish any political traction. Like a lot of people, I keep screaming at the sky hoping that the Universe will hear me and do something about this, because I keep forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we’re mostly too small to bother with. What I want, right now, is a ballot that lets me say, “I’m voting for Biden because he’s the only choice I have.” Because that’s what I want to tell the government right now. I’m not voting for Biden because I support his political policies, I’m voting for him because the other option is even more unthinkably awful. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, votes from people are weighted equally no matter their reason, so my vote will be treated as an enthusiastic embrace of a man I quite honestly loathe and a system I can’t wait to die off. 

      I don’t think Democracy is supposed to feel like this, where you go to the polls solely because you know the world expects you to and you vote only because the system will collapse if you don’t. I know that our laws of physics stay real because everything in the Universe makes a conscious effort to follow them, but I don’t think our system should fall apart just because the choices are really bad for an election. Just because there’s no one on the ballot that I want to vote for doesn’t mean I don’t want to not be allowed to vote at all. 

     As an Infinitelist, I think I’ve just realized that in order for democracy to work the way that it was meant to, it can’t truly feel real. A world that feels real feels like it’s going to be there no matter what you do, you’ve followed its laws for so long they’ve become grafted to your bones. Democracy isn’t like that, if you forget that it’s there, it often ceases to exist. It requires that people fight, in every way they can, for the world that they want to live in. If that’s the case, this era of people doing all they can to make their voices heard should feel like a win for democracy, as we’re getting a wake up call for just how fragile our world is. But it doesn’t. Because Democracy, real Democracy, means constantly facing your worst fear every day of your life. 

      The fear I’m facing right now is this deep sense that no matter what I do, I’m making the wrong choice. The right choice feels like buying a ticket to outer space on one of those rockets heading into the sun. Reality has become so hard to maintain that it just feels impossible. Nothing I can do will let me create a world that feels real. Everything I can think of just winds up turning into a world meant for someone else. I guess that means I just have to keep fighting, in whatever way I can, for a world where, in the future, our country isn’t destroyed because of one bad president. No president of the United states should have the ability to destroy Democracy. 

The Last Post of February

     Throughout most of 2023. I decided to publish as much of my backlog of poems as I could. I tried to overwrite from month to month, as a way of making sure I always had a backup, but I eventually had so many poems it was hard for me to tell what I had published and what I hadn’t. So I decided that if I thought it was at all publishable, I would publish it, and I wouldn’t write anything else until I’d started running low. Well, I’m running low, or at least I’m at the point where I can scroll down to the bottom of the One Note Notebook I use for my unpublished poems and see the most recent unpublished poem up top. I have about two-months worth of poems (for Monday, not for Wednesday and Friday) left to get up, so I’m trying to come up with more things to write poems about. 

     For this reason, I’m trying to think of what I think our future should be like. Most of what I wrote about in 2022 was just complaining about how sucky our present was (I figured that since no one was reading what I had to say anyway, I might as well). I sort of took a break last year, mostly because I wanted to up the quality of my writing so I started practicing daily. I’m trying to get to the point where I can hold a train of thought long enough to, theoretically, write a novel. I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered that, but I decided to try and get back into writing posts because I was getting tired of writing for no one, especially when I’m proud of at least some of what I’m writing. 

    I don’t want our future to look anything like our present. That sounds, and feels, so wrong but it’s very much true. On some level, I don’t expect our world to change much at all. I keep expecting that the things that made up my past will persist, in some way, into our future, only to find that suddenly they can’t for some reason. Though I don’t think that I keep imagining a world that, from our vantage point, looks crazy and immoral just because it’s easier. To me, the biggest problem is that we’ve been unsatisfied with our world for a long time. We’ve done things the easy way for a long time, and we’ve just kind of accepted that they have to be what they are. I think that we’ve reached the point where, at the very least, we want to be unsatisfied in a different way.

      This has led me to a future where everything is simultaneously more subdued than our current world, and much more out there and crazy. It is a world where people insist the world belongs to them, and their rebellion takes the form of finding the mindset that best suits them and their views. There’s superficiality, but there’s a depth to it that our current world lacks, one not brought by people doing as they say, but by people using both their worlds and actions to create a stronger, more cohesive narrative about their lives. People know about the Infinite in this world, and almost everyone knows how to manipulate their Dreamworlds to some degree. There are still those who become Nazis, but they do so willingly and not just because propaganda was shoved down their throat. When people want to leave the Dreamworld they were born in, they can do so easily and safely, without accidently becoming in ensnared in something dangerous either built by someone else or that they accidently created themselves. 

      Someday someone will look at Infinitelism with a critical eye and tell me all of the ways in which it does not make sense. I know this, and I’ve accepted this. Whether I’m right or not, I’d be a little disappointed in the world if this didn’t happen. What good is the Dreamworld I’ve built for myself if I can’t defend it, after all? As time goes on, and I look at a world of people convinced that they have to live in a Dreamworld tied to reality in order to survive, I’ve found myself wondering if my ability to live in a world cut off from reality might be more vital than I thought. Unlike most Conspiracy theorists, I can live in reality and even accept that I might be wrong sometimes. I don’t know if that’s because I’m right or because I believe in what I’ve created enough that being wrong doesn’t hurt me. What I do know is that I see a lot of people who seem to be lost, trapped in a world they can’t make sense of. They’re stuck in a world that they can’t believe in anymore, and they aren’t able to create one they can believe in by themselves. What help they can get doesn’t seem up to the task, at least to me. Mostly because I think sometimes the best thing for your own sanity is rejecting reality, at least the parts of it that weren’t built with you in mind. After all, once upon a time racial discrimination was common. If the right people hadn’t said that this wasn’t a reality they would accept, the world wouldn’t have changed. 

My Truth

    I'm trying to write more posts, but it's not going well. Mostly because our decaying world has once again forced me on the search for a meaning to life. I don't care if such a thing doesn't exist, I want to have one, if only to say that I found something. I have to say, I get why religion is so important to people but I kind of wish that it wasn't. I have a lot of thoughts about why our world is the way that it is, but they're just things that I think about based on what I've read and seen, not any sort of grand revelation. I think that any future religion is going to be about the weird thoughts people have in the quiet moments when no one is looking, not some grand discovery by some great theologian. 

     I see a future where religion is a lot more spiritual and a lot less holy, with people worshiping in their living rooms and assembly halls instead of in grand cathedrals. To be fair, while I've believed in something for most of my life, I've only been in a church a handful of times (my mother's always been an atheist) so I don't know what effect a church or the presence of a belief system has on its members from firsthand experience. I just firmly believe that being religious doesn't mean being part of a church or an organized movement, the movements are just a way of letting likeminded people find one another. My problem with organized religion is that there isn’t any one I think is flawless, nor is there one that seems to have made peace with the existence of the scientific method. 

      My reasoning for creating Infinitelism, which is what I call my religion of choice, stems from me not finding a religion made for someone who wants to believe in something that will stay real regardless of what space she finds herself in. In this day and age, we’ve all been in spaces where one thing is true and other things are not, and we’ve all felt the exhaustion that comes from hearing someone in a space we frequent say something we vehemently don’t agree with but are not in a position to argue with. I hate being in spaces where I can’t make myself heard. It’s why I run a blog with no followers; you never get any love but no one complains either. I’ve always felt the need to believe in something, but nothing I found made sense, and critically believing in anything seemed to require you either believe science meant absolutely nothing or that everything in our universe happened for no reason at all. Neither felt particularly satisfying for me, so I decided to just make something up based on what I felt made sense. If you’re going to be crazy enough to believe in something in this day and age, I figure you might as well just make it up as you go along, so that’s what I’ve been doing. 

        I don’t think that Infinitelism is the ultimate truth, and I keep waiting for the moment science figures out the ultimate proof that our Universe is objectively real. That won’t happen for a while, which I’m finding strange because at least a few science types think that consciousness is universal across our Universe, so the idea that our world is just a sort of fever dream has to have occurred to someone other than me. Or at least someone has to have asked the very obvious question of, “If our world is a simulation built on top of another simulation, what would the world underneath all of the simulations be like?” Asking that is what led me to believe that reality isn’t real unless we make it real, regardless of if the “we” is living or nonliving. 

      Regardless of if it’s the ultimate truth, it is my truth, and I refuse to live in a world where I can’t live by what I feel is its basic tenants. Namely, I want to live in a world that I know is real and will stay real. Not just because it’s bound by physics, but because we as humans work to make it real. It’s not just living in a world where the accepted truth changes from one minute to the next, it’s this irrational belief I have that physics, the thing that everything in our Universe believes in, will one day stop being real and it’ll be up to us to find a suitable replacement. Until I think we’re capable of doing that, I won’t be able to feel safe in any world we choose to make. 

A Response to a Post

   I should start by saying this is a response, of sorts, to this post on SubStack by Joshua P. Hill. I should also mention that this isn't really about that post. This is about me, the way I feel about the world, and what I feel we should do moving forward. 

      I’m going to assume that anyone reading this knows what a parasocial relationship is, because they’ve been talked about kind of a lot. I’m also going to assuming that you’re opinion of them ranges somewhere from neutral to negative. The overall view of the world is that if you have imaginary friends, your primary goal should be to get rid of them and make real ones instead. Upfront, I hate this attitude. A lot. I suck at interpersonal relationships, always have, and probably would struggle even if I didn’t live in a world where interpersonal relationships had grown more difficult even for allistic people (so I’m told, anyway). I can get along with other people, but I can’t form anything that feels real. I don’t know how, and nobody really wants to talk about the difference between relationships of circumstance and relationships that feel meaningful, all I hear people say, time and again is that real relationships feel more meaningful than parasocial ones. That’s never been true for me. 

     The problem, for me, is that no matter who I’m with I have to hide part of myself. The neurotypical world won’t come to terms with the existence of Autistic people who can live in society, sort of. I’m far from the only neurodivergent person who feels like unless I’m perfect people won’t accept me, and good luck being perfect when you have to have total focus or you’ll lose the plot of a conversation. There’s no one instance that made me reluctant, it was a lot of people consistently being weirded out by my behavior that made me stop wanting to connect with others. 

      What I hate about society’s reaction to parasocial relationships is that you can clearly tell that it’s the product of people who have never walked into a room full of strangers and been hit with an immediate sensation that they didn’t belong and needed to leave fast. Joshua talks about a future where parasocial relationships are unnecessary because we’ll have a community of people who love us, and I desperately wish that I could ask him what Universe he’s been living in. For some of us, parasocial relationships are the only option we have. The world we live in hates us too much to let us become part of a community.

     That’s my emotional reaction, but one thing I realized as I started writing my thoughts out is that, in a way, we all kind of live in a parasocial relationship. Who doesn’t feel like the community they’re a part of, be it their town, country, or fandom, knows who they are and cares about them? Who hasn’t referred to a group of people as though they were a consciousness independent of any member? Hell, we even have the phrase “Collective Conscious” implanted in our society. I’m not alone in growing up in a world that expected me to form a parasocial relationship with it. Most religions assume that you’ll spend a lot of time in prayer, singing hymns, celebrating holy days devoted to various gods, and forming a community based around the church, the people in it, and the gods that it’s meant to worship. I’d go so far as to say that true community is impossible without parasocial relationships. We need to believe in something in order for it to be real to us, so in order for a community to be meaningful, we need to believe that it’s a real thing that’s doing real good for us and for our world at large. 

     This is just my reaction, but reading this post feels like someone saying that just because something isn’t real, that means it can’t have meaning or purpose. As someone who doesn’t believe in external, objective reality and thinks that everything is meaningless until we give it meaning, I find this troubling. Not problematic, exactly, but it feels like the first step to saying that we don’t have to worry about our world falling apart because it doesn’t involve our input at all. I know that’s not what he wants to say, but that’s what I feel like he’s saying. Maybe I’ve just gotten too involved in a religion only I believe in, but I don’t think a world becomes real just because you get a lot of people together who want to make it real. You need to give them something to hold onto, something they can make their own. If you take away their ability to fantasize, than you’re left with nothing but the dust of hope and the remains of a belief system. 

The Cost of Dreaming

    Ever since October 7, we've been watching Israel push Gazans as far as they can, and now it looks as though their final plan is coming into fruition; bombing Gaza until not a single person is alive. A million people, dead, the image burned into our minds for all eternity. In my mind I remember a video I saw about a month ago on X, the corpse formerly known as Twitter, of a Democratic senator saying that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza didn't matter, that by the time of the next election, we would have all forgotten. A million people, killed, by the hands of the country that financed this "war". A war between those with guns and those who have done nothing but run for their lives. A war between the media and the journalists desperate to get the truth out. A war between those who want to live in a virtuous nation, and those who believe that as long as we don't televise the death, we don't have to face the consequence for murder. 

      What angers most people is that our country could be this openly cruel even the fascists aren't (technically) in power. What bothers me is that there's nothing we, the people, could have done to prevent it. It's openly known that we're funding Israel's genocide, and yet when we screamed at our politicians to do anything to stop this, all we could get them to do was to pause the fighting briefly. They had months in which to stop what's clearly going to happen, but they didn't. You can't tell me they didn't know this was coming. They had access to the top military data in the country. If an idiot like me could see that Israel wouldn't stop until every man, woman and child was dead, they could see that too. Yet we, the people, the one who elected our politicians to office, can do nothing but sit back and watch. Even if we were to seize the means of production now, it would be too late. 

   The reasonable voices in our world are telling us to keep things in perspective. Any price is adequate, if it means keeping us safe from the Infinite. Then you realize that the world is expecting you, an average citizen, to shoulder the burden of a million deaths in order to keep your world going. That’s when you look around and see that most of your friends and family are perfectly willing to accept this price, assuming they will still be alive when this is over. Everywhere you look, you see people not talking about this, assuming they can’t cover the nuanced issue of a world leader butchering a bunch of innocent people just to throw his weight around. At best you hear people mention that Israel has oppressed Palestine since its inception. Mostly you don’t even get that.

     There will be those in the months ahead, as we are treated to picture after picture of people dying preventable deaths, who will claim the fault lies with Egypt for not opening its borders. As if the fault would lie with anyone who doesn’t lie down to authoritarianism. Even if Egypt were to open its borders now, that would solve nothing. The problem isn’t that we as a society killed millions of people, the problem is that we decided that the death of millions was a reasonable price to pay in order to protect ourselves from seeing the Infinite. If that’s true, than I must ask; what will it take for our world to change? Is the death of our country enough to scare you? Is the death of our planet enough to scare you? Is the potential death of our Universe from breaks in reality, preventable only through understanding of how our physics were created, enough to scare you? All of these and more will happen if we don’t agree that seeing the Infinite is a small price to pay for keeping our world alive.

     Ever since October 7, I’ve been watching people fight with all that’s in them to keep this from happening. Now, upon seeing they can do nothing but watch as a million people die, many are breaking. This is not awakening them to the Infinite. This is the moment they realize that as long as our world is alive, they will never be safe from the Infinite. Our leaders, safe on their mountains, refuse to believe that we’re in trouble. I’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough. All we want is to live in a world where we never need to see the Infinite, and no matter how hard I look I can’t find one anywhere. Should we be surprised, then, that a new world is being born?

A Distant Dream

        When I first started this blog back in 2017, I mostly wanted to live out my fantasy of being a professional writer. Not that I wrote professionally (I’m still a long way from that, actually), but it was nice to dream of one day being known as a writer, rather than as a college student preparing for a career that I had no interest in but, I was told, would pay the bills. Maybe it would have, I don’t know. I flunked out of college before I could get my degree. Now I live out my dream of writing “Professionally” and I have to say, it’s not as fulfilling as I hoped it would me. I’m not actively miserable like I was in college, so I’ll gladly take that. It’s just that as a writer, I kind of thought I’d have some sort of reach, some sort of audience to win over. I never dreamed that not only would I not have an audience, but I’d have no way of getting one, as far as I know anyways. Keep in mind that when I first started thinking of becoming a blogger, it was 2014. Anyone could have an audience in those days. Now I’d be stunned if even a celebrity could find an audience. 

     It’s really tempting to throw in the towel. I don’t mean abandon the blog. The only thing anyone has left these days are dreams of relevancy, and I’m not giving up mine. What I mean is giving up on the idea of an audience finding me and just writing my thoughts out as a kind of diary. No fear of judgement, no worries about what would happen if someone saw me for who I am, just me writing for the blog the way I write for my “practice sessions”. That was something of an original goal, write down my first drafts for stories in a place where there was just a bit of pressure, than edit for publication. That hasn’t happened, and at this point I have no idea if there will be any place that I could publish my stories in a year. The problem is that I still want to write stories. 

     There are writers out there who only write as a means of paying the bills, but I’m not one of them. I don’t write for the craft, though I greatly admire those who do. I write because I spend more time in my stories than I do in reality. My stories are my world. They’re the core of my identity, and I want a place to share them. I also have a bit of ambition, telling me that stories are only worth sharing if they’re good and if they improve the lives of those reading them. I don’t think my stories do that. I never set out to do that. I set out to tell stories that make me feel better and give my life meaning. I also set out to at least try and give a little bit more meaning to other people’s lives. We sorely need it right now. 

     I think I need to face the fact that my dream of going professional probably won’t come to pass. I’m not entirely sure I want it to, either. I love writing, but I hate the idea of only being allowed to write what my audience wants to read. I’m not scared of not making money doing this. What I am scared of is a future where I have to give this up in order to survive. Our world hates people who create for the sake of it. If you’re a creator, your supposed to create for the sake of someone else, or something else. Everything’s a side hustle, every craft a chance at success. I’m sick of it. Doubly so because it means that every artist’s dream is to make it big, even when it’s not what they want. I wish that we lived in a world where all of us could just do what we wanted to do, without needing to worry about pleasing someone else. Most of us want that, or at least to please someone whose demands are reasonable. I’m an exception. I don’t want to work for anyone and don’t want to depend on pleasing others to stay alive. I don’t think any of us should have to. I think that living in society means sacrificing some of our personalities, but that just means we should work hard to make sure no one has to make that call. 

A Hot Take on Elon Musk

    I don't have a life. Not just because I have very niche interests, but because I use any excuse I can find to not leave the house. The reason for this is that I hate social interaction, to the point where I hate all of my neighbors for the crime of living close enough for me to run the risk of running into them when I have to leave the house to run errands. I figure it's better both for me and the unfortunate souls who might meet me to just avoid people altogether. 

     I mention all of this because of something that happened the day before this post goes up. I'm talking about the time Elon Musk tried to eliminate Twitter's block feature. I've heard people say that the tweet has been deleted and many have pointed out that if he tries he'll be delisted from the various app stores in existence. I don't know if that matters, because we know that Elon Musk has learned firsthand that he can't get away with doing whatever he wants. Multiple times. So why doesn't he learn his lesson?

     The short answer is that I don't think he wants to learn that lesson. The slightly longer answer is that I think he wants Twitter to be a place he can do whatever he wants without consequence, and he's been trained to believe at this point in his life that if he demands the world take the shape that he wants it to take, it'll eventually give in. He's a billionaire, after all, and has grown up surrounded by wealth and people who got where they are in life by never taking no for an answer. He's not used to being in a situation where if people don't like what you're doing, they can just leave, and from what I've heard he's not used to having to build his own brand or manage a space of people with different needs, wants, and expectations for what a social media platform ought to be. 

     A lot of people call him out for doing this, but as someone who runs her own website I have a slightly different take on this. My problem isn't that Elon Musk decided that he wanted a website made of only him and his most desperate fans, my problem is that he decided that he needed to buy Twitter in order to do that. With all of his money, he could have just built his own platform from the ground up, a la Donald Trump post Twitter ban, and then he wouldn't have to worry about fighting to change course on a pre-established website. He could still be a megalomaniacal asshole, but now he wouldn't have to worry about anyone getting hurt as a result of his actions. The damage would be contained, so to speak. Not only would it have been better for those of us driven off of Twitter without any other place to go, it would have been better for him, because he wouldn't have to worry about people who don't like him being likely to stumble on his tweets by accident. 

      This bothers me in particular because I'm one of those writers who likes to write from the perspective of powerful characters. If you want your story to have conflict, you need to write around their abilities. What this means to me is writing in a way that these character's worlds have built in failsafe's to keep them from destroying the world entirely while still allowing them to change the world to their will. In summary, I know that it's possible to create a world where a character is powerful but not so powerful as to be the major threat to everyone else. 

     In my eyes Elon Musk isn't a major threat because of his excessive wealth, he's a threat because he chooses to be. He could still be selfish, thoughtless, and stupid in such a way that his actions wouldn't hurt anyone. Hell, he could even accept a world of delusions, he's powerful enough that I doubt that anyone would care and with all of his money it would be an accurate reflection of reality. All he had to do was accept that with his power came the greater risk of causing suffering either directly or indirectly and planning his actions accordingly. But he's not doing that. If anything, he's doing the opposite, and I can't think of any reason for doing that other than that he's been trained to believe that power's only good if it makes the people below you miserable. Knowing that, why the hell do so many people look up to him? As a loser myself, we deserve better than Elon Musk.  

    I feel like our world is full of people desperate to believe in something, something they know isn't real and that can't be made a part of reality, but our society isn't built to facilitate that. Our society is built on the foundation that if you can imagine it, then it should be possible, and if it isn't possible than you should stop imagining it. I'll be the first to admit that the line between fantasy and reality can be thin. I'm also one of those people who believes firmly in the power of stories as a means of helping people cope with a world too messy and complicated to understand. But what happens to a world of people without the tools to write their own stories? And what happens when people insist that every story worth telling has already been written? 

Ramblings of a Madwoman

     I keep trying to come up with something to write in Thursday slot, but I can't figure out how to make what I want to say suitable for any audience larger than my eyes alone. I can't explain any of what I've been thinking about for months without appearing to be massively delusional, and I can't explain why it matters to me without looking like I've gone off the deep end. I know that at this point it's safe to say that we're all just coping with reality, but let's not pretend that we aren't all judging each other's coping strategies. 

     Somewhere after I started writing for this blog daily, I started believing that this philosophy I believe in, which I call Infinitelism because I can't think of a better name for it, might be important. Not in the, "I could use this to start a cult," sense, but in the, "This could be the foundation of our future," sense. It feels like a stupid thing to admit, I can't prove that it's true, and I'm petrified of the thought that I'm just putting up mental layers to avoid admitting that I'm starting a cult. Not that anyone would notice me on this blog, but just because you can't do something doesn't mean you aren't still evil for trying. 

    It doesn't help that I keep being bothered by thoughts claiming that the world is relying on me to build it a future. "Relying" isn't even the right word, but I can't think of a better way to explain it. It's like we're in the middle of a funnel, where anything outside of a very small tube of possibilities will end us completely, and I'm in the middle of that funnel. Maybe it's just ego telling me that my actions are especially important, but that isn't what my heart is saying. 

     I'm torn, honestly, because everyone wishes that they could see themselves in a movie, tailored to their taste in genre and setting. Everyone wants to believe that they're important, and the future depends on their actions. But we all know that the future also depends on everyone else, and that if they don't want the future we dream of then there's not much they can do. In some ways, I think that we're happier knowing that the future doesn't depend on us. It means that when we screw up, it doesn't have to matter to anyone who isn't us. We may want power, but I think the number of people who dream of being as powerful as Elon Musk number about the same as those who want to be a struggling single mom with three kids. 

     I think the only difference between me and everybody is that I came up with the philosophy of Infiniteslism, and I came up with it because it increasingly became the only way that everything I was seeing made sense. So much of my life made sense when viewed one way but not the other, and nobody seemed interested in coming up with a system where fantasy and science were equally valid and important, which is something that I've always believed was true. The problem I have with society as a concept is that it's always given a lot of attention to things that most people don't care about while ignoring the things they care the most about. It's why I built a system where reality was so flexible even physics could be altered, I wanted a system where everyone had to be accounted for. I don't think that codifying it into law is enough. We need to convince everyone that until the day we're all certain that the fates hear our pleas, our world will never really be real. 

What I Want

    I love blogging, but I've more or less given up on anybody discovering me. In some ways that's a good thing, I can write whatever I want and not worry about criticism. In other ways it's a bad thing, like I don't know if anything that I'm writing is good. I keep wondering if I should move on to another platform, but despite having blogged for about two years total, six years if you want to include all of the years I couldn't get a daily blog going, I know nothing about anything other than the writing side. I suspect that if I could get my head wrapped around the SEO side of things, I'd be doing a lot better, but every time I do I get horribly confused and I can't find any really good sources. I get the feeling that doing more would mean doing things that go against my rather specific moral code.

     I think that the problem with blogging is that these days the internet is designed for instant fame, to create overnight sensations that everyone gossips about for months on end before completely forgetting about them. From the perspective of those at the top, this makes sense, since it means that you get a constant stream of eyeballs on your platform and thus the advertisers see a constant stream of people buying their products. From the perspective of those who are trying to make it on the modern internet, that means that unless you're amazing at getting people to notice you, you're doomed to complete obscurity. I don't think this is bad just as a creator, I say this as someone who used to love finding weird, obscure things online, but who can't find them anymore. If you casually browse, you'll only find the things that a lot of other people found interesting or insightful. I suppose it does increase the quality of the things that you do find, but it means that you'll never find the one time someone with generally banal opinions came up with something genuinely insightful and interesting, something that makes you sit up and go, "Huh, I hadn't thought about that." 

     I know that it's also an issue that so many people are trying to make it as bloggers, influencers, content creators, what have you. I know that even if I could work out how to convince google to list my blog, my chances of anyone finding me are incredibly remote. Success, even if I understood the system inside and out, is incredibly remote. That's a lot of the reason I'm not trying that hard, and if all I wanted was fame than I'd be okay with being the losing piece, as much as one could be when one is denied what one is supposedly owed. But I don't want fame. Not exactly.

     I keep imagining myself in a community of losers. I imagine myself among people who, like me, talk like their the greatest creators to have ever come around but, like me, know that isn't true. We all love what we do, and you can hear our passion when we speak, and all of the things we produce just suck. We aren't deep, interesting, or insightful, we just pretend that we are, and we pretend that the world hates us for being honest. It's a myth, this place, a paradise meant for those who create but will never create anything extraordinary, and I've dreamed of finding it since before I started blogging, but all I seem to find are places where you have to be amazing. I don't want to be amazing. I love the art that's poorly made, that comes from an artist who wants to bend the rules without knowing what the rules are in the first place. Sometimes you get an artist who wants to prove that people will be wowed by anything, sometimes you get an artist that makes something stupid, and sometimes you get an artist who makes something that's just for their friends and family, and is incredibly wholesome as a result. You can find all sorts of things in bad art, including copies of anything famous as desperate artists rush for attention, and I wish that our world was built to appreciate that. I think that, deep down, most of us wish our world was made for the love of bad art. 

Society's Playground

     Do you remember when you were little, and you used to play with other kids? Do you remember what it felt like to be with a group of near total strangers, bound only by a desire for playmates? Do you remember meeting with them, day after day, in a place without rules and restrictions, until, as if by magic, you fit into each other’s lives? 

     I’m sure I’m not the only person who misses her childhood, who misses the days before I knew just how difficult and lonely life could be. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m a writer, so I have more protection from the pain of reality than simply pretending that my past was perfect. That doesn’t mean that I don’t reflect on those times, on the moments when friendship felt so easy and the only people who wanted to see you suffer were monsters, unless you were a monster yourself of course. I was thinking about this, and suddenly I wondered; why is it so hard to find a space to do that as an adult? 

    Adulthood means work. Work means that you do what someone else wants you to do. Work means that you sacrifice time for yourself for the betterment of humanity, or so I was told at least. Work means that you don’t think about what you want, don’t ask for what you need, don’t press for things that would make your life better. Work means you stop being yourself, and instead become something else, devoured by a world that doesn’t notice you. To transition to adulthood, you must stop asking for help, for love, for anything that would make you happy. To have someone look after you would imply that you’re still a child, and all children must face the fact that one day they’ll grow up. That, or be cast out. 

     That’s what our world is, at least, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. They say it’s been that way since the beginning of time. Look far enough in our history, though, and you can see something different. A time when adults had time for themselves, a time when growing up didn’t mean giving up community or your caregivers, a time when you didn’t have to be self-sufficient in a world that was supposed to bring us closer together. I won’t pretend the past was perfect, I’m the first who will say that we left it for a reason, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from it. We can see what our ancestors did right while acknowledging where they screwed up. 

     I say it’s time to build a playground for adults. A place where you can go to be with near strangers, bound only by a desire for friendship and fun. A place to meet others, day after day, with only a few rules and restrictions until we, once again, learn how we can fit into each other’s lives. 

Something's Wrong

    I knew we needed something to believe in, but I didn't think we needed it this badly.

    I should state right now that I don't believe in psychic powers or auras or whatever the magic believers believe in. Not just because it can't be proven, but because I don't think there's any justification for people who don't really want magic powers to believe in them. I say this because, as an Infinitelist, I think that unless a lot of people believe in something, then it can't be real. But last night, something strange happened. It could have been sleep paralysis, but I swear to god it felt like one of those visions the psychics always talk about. I don't even really remember it, all I know is that it felt like I was in somebody else's mind, and that someone else felt really angry. Then when I woke up, I noticed that my blog had views. 

    For the record, this doesn't normally happen. I'm fully willing to admit that it was probably just a coincidence, but since this is the Infinite we're talking about, I'm not willing to take chances. I'm also dead certain that I shouldn't have felt anything at all. Most of the reason I think the Infinite exists have nothing to do with magic or auras, in fact they have a lot more to do with the fact that nobody likes talking about them. I'm convinced that if things were alright, I wouldn't have felt anything at all. That I did leads me to think that reality isn't in very good shape, and that things might be even worse than I thought they were. 

    All I can say is that to whoever saw my post from Monday, I implore you to find something that you can believe in, something that you know is real. Even if it's just the laws of physics, find it. And if you're as worried about your world falling apart as I am, then try and remember this poem of mine. I wrote it specifically for moments like this. 

A Bad Writer

    Being a bad writer means loving your work. Maybe not everything you've ever written, but most of it. More than you probably should. You would be the last to defend your work to the public, but that doesn't mean that you don't care about it. 

    But even at your proudest, there's a voice in the back of your mind that says you're only a bad writer because you don't want to work hard enough to become a good writer. When you dream of writing the novel that will shape the world, or come up with a concept you don't see anyone else talking about, it's exciting but also depressing. You know that you could be so much better, but you're not sure how to get from mere goodness to greatness. 

A World that Will Last

     It's strange to think that less than a decade ago, social media felt like it was here to stay. I think the concept is here to stay, but I don't think that Twitter is going to be the only social media platform we lose. I was considering moving the blog to another platform, or at least finding somewhere to self promote, and I realized that I couldn't think of anywhere I wanted to move to. There are a million better options than blogger, but the problem is that I'm still not comfortable with the idea that people might read what I write. I realize that's stupid, but I can't help but worry about people not liking my poems and stories, or getting upset at my opinions. 

      I was writing the post for Tuesday, and I found myself reflecting on the huge amount of progress we made in the '00s, bringing about gay marriage, talking about how far we had to go on fighting systemic racism, and different forms of sexuality becoming more noticed. I realized that the reason that all happened wasn't that we were an enlightened species, it was that people felt safe enough to talk about it. I don't mean they felt the world was safe for them, I mean they thought that the world that didn't want them would last long enough, and be malleable enough, to change into a world that did want them. What we're seeing is the world that didn't want minorities collapsing, not because the minorities were vocal, but because of mismanagement and corruption at the top. When the new world is born, the minorities will once again have to go into hiding, once again have to wait until the world that wants them comes along. But it never will. Not because we're cruel, but because we're apathetic. We don't want to do the work it takes to build a world that lasts long enough for those at the fringes to feel that it's safe to try and change it into a world that will accept them. As a result, every time a world starts to feel safe and familiar, it will collapsed, and be replaced by a world that looks almost like the one we lost, but not be quite the same thing. So the people will have to wait to figure it out, and by the time they do it will crumble once more. 

     It took billions of years for the galaxy in a small part of an endless Universe to create us. Why do we keep building worlds that can't even last a century? Is it too much to ask of ourselves that we admit that our world wasn't, isn't, and never will be real? Is it so hard to ask our leaders to let us do the work it would take to make the world real, instead of sabotaging us every step of the way? Is it too much to hope that maybe, soon, things will calm down enough for us to build a world that will last? 

A World Like Any Other

    When I was younger, I used to pretend that I had the ability to enter an alternate universe that was just like our universe, but didn't have any other people in it. How it worked and what you could do depended on what I felt that day, but one thing that stayed constant was that time didn't move while I was there. When I got bored, and wanted to see my friends and family again, I could go back home, and they wouldn't even notice that I'd been gone. 

     There are days when I wish that I could go back to The Past. Not because it was better, but because it felt like home. Life now and life prior to 2020 took place in completely different worlds, worlds that look almost identical, but have none of the same people. I can't tell if I'm a different person or not, I just know I'm the only person I know who's happier in our post 2020 world than the world we had before. But that doesn't mean this place feels safe, or welcoming. In some ways, being better off just makes me feel guilty. It doesn't help that I feel as though I could have had all that I have now without the world falling apart in the process. Whatever the case, I now have the world I dreamed of as a child, a world where I can do whatever I want without fear of consequence. But I always knew the only way this world would stay perfect would be if I could go back to the old world whenever I wanted to, without that, it's just a world like any other.  

The Fate of America

        I’ve been thinking a lot about the Infinite lately. We all know about it, know that we were born from it, and that we’re doomed to someday return to it, yet we cannot talk about it. Only in the most religious or philosophical settings can we admit that none of what we see and here is real, and most of what we know about reality is conjecture. I’m not alone in thinking, “If what I see in my mind is indistinguishable from what I see in my mind, how do I know that what I’m seeing is real?” But we don’t talk about it nearly enough. We talk about conspiracy theorists or evangelical Christians as though they were freaks, oddities, outside of the norm, and not merely a slightly more extreme version of humanities need to avoid seeing the Infinite. 

      It bothers me because our world fell apart in 2020, yet those in charge insist on pretending that nothing happened. I’ll be the first to admit, finding meaning when the world ends yet everything looks the same afterwards is hard. The world that ended wasn’t a world that was bound by physics. But it did end, and our leaders won’t even talk about it. Worse than that, they’re doubling down on the behaviors that made 2020 so awful. 

      It wasn’t just the pandemic that destroyed us, of course. It was the Trump presidency, and the decline of the Republican party into a plague of madness. But is unity truly the best we can do? No human has ever joined a group just because they said they were a group, they joined a group that was based around something. What, exactly, is America based around? Freedom? The police keep killing people of color and the Republicans insist on banning any book that has even slight hints of “wokeness”. Equality? Why was one man able to buy, and subsequently ruin, Twitter then? Religious tolerance? Then why are the only people elected to politics the same brand of Christian nutcase? The problem isn’t that we’re disunified, it’s that nobody believes in America anymore, and certainly not in the American Dream. Yet when people complain that they can’t believe in the world they grew up in, the only response those in charge seem to have is, “Well participate in it anyways.” 

      I don’t know what sort of message will be sufficient enough to bring us back together, but I don’t think I should be the one deciding that in the first place. I don’t believe in society as a concept anymore, let alone in the country I used to sing songs about. The world I imagine when I think of a Utopian future is so far removed from this one that it’s not even on the same planet. I just know that it wasn’t that long ago that people genuinely loved America and wanted to see it changed for the better. It could be that all we need to do to fix things is to simply start enforcing the messaging that brought people to America in the first place. 

      Frankly, I don’t think it’s that simple. As much as I, and many others, loathed Donald Trump, people still elected him. It may have been a fluke that got him into office, but he’s still popular among a lot of deeply broken/evil people. Even after destroying Twitter, Elon Musk is still beloved by a group of people who still, somehow, believe that he was sent to save us. I know Fascism is unpopular, but it’s also loud, mean, and has a bad habit of getting its own way. I’ve seen plenty of people on the left say, “You know, maybe we’d actually make progress if we stopped trying to be nice all the time.” And that’s just it. The messaging that brought people to America in the first place is a great foundation to build a community, but there still needs to be a direction for that community to go in, and all we have now is capitalism. 

      Whether capitalism was a good idea in the first place, I honestly don’t know. I just know that it keeps breaking on us, and the flaws that keep it from working as we want it to seem to be built into the system. To me, the biggest issue that it’s focused on increasing the amount of stuff we have, and that’s all it really tells us to do. It doesn’t tell us anything about how to make friends, what kind of things we should enjoy, it just tells us to keep buying stuff and making stuff and making more room for stuff. I get that it’s not the economy’s job to tell us about religion, but in America our economy has become our religion. 

      There are a lot of reasons we aren’t as religious anymore that I don’t have time to get into, but the core issue is that our economy became our religion, then Covid caused the economy to collapse, after we saw clear evidence that America wasn’t what we were told it was with a president who wasn’t committed to any of the stated ideals who stayed in office despite being loathed by all not inside his inner circle and being impeached twice. We don’t have a world to believe in and our leaders don’t have a reasonable response to this. I would think the bare minimum would be for someone at the top to acknowledge that Donald Trump represented none of America’s values, and that we the people need to work on fixing the problems. There’s your message, right there. “We know things are bad, we know we haven’t done enough to fix them, we promise we will hold all the corporations accountable and make them work with us to bring the country you knew back, only better, brighter, and more focused on happiness rather than just making things.” 

     But that won’t happen, because our leaders aren’t equipped to admit that, deep down, they know the world they built isn’t real. Like money, Santa Claus, and God, it has to be believed in, or it ceases to exist. But they’re at the center of society, the least equipped to admit that the ground they walk on isn’t holy. Fixing America would be a major blow to their worldview, and to the worldview of those who keep them in power. The fact of the matter is, in order to be saved, America has to die. It’s just a matter of who’s the first to kill it.  

Theory of Belief

     I’ve written about my Infinite Hypothesis before. What I should make clear is that there’s a very good reason no one talks about it; we aren’t supposed to know it’s there. The Infinite is inherently meaningless, so reality is an attempt by those who live in the Infinite to give themselves and their choices meaning. You know how if you play a game with a bunch of cheats it stops being fun after a while because nothing is challenging? That’s what living in the Infinite is like, nothing is challenging, nothing has consequences so nothing is meaningful. 

     One consequence of the Infinite, therefore, is that we’re all built to believe in things. Be it Aliens, God, or Santa Claus, all of us believe in something, often to the point where we ignore all evidence to the contrary. Belief looks different from person to person, but it generally comes in two contradictory flavors. 

   The first kind is what most people associate with religious worship. It’s the kind where what you believe in is completely fake, and deep down every believer knows that, but you keep it real because you want it to be real. Most modern religions cultivate this kind of belief, because it’s the kind of belief you don’t need to justify. The second kind is the version of belief society is, at large, much more tolerant of. It’s the kind where you question your world. Why is the sky blue? Why do Hydrogen and Oxygen make water? Why is our society set up the way that it is? This is the kind of belief where you seek to learn about your world and try to make it make sense to you. 

     These two belief systems are always at odds with one another. The first kind views the second as immoral, because how will the world stay real if you question it all the time. The second kind views the first as poisonous, because what happens to those who are suffering unjustly in a poorly built system that can’t be changed? 

     Personally, I think our world needs both forms of belief to survive. 

     To believe that our world isn’t objectively real is to believe that even the laws of physics are only held together by the belief of what, to us, is an Infinite Universe. The reason we, as humans, can’t push past physics (in my eyes, at least) is that we have an enormous system of belief holding everything together. But our world can’t survive just because we believe that it’s there. In order to have meaning, things have to change, or at least they need to be able to change. In order for that to happen, you need people who know that the system is false and arbitrary, and to push for something that they think would work better. 

     I don’t know for certain whether or not we as a whole value one belief system over the other, but I do know that in our current world they are very much at odds, and I really wish that they weren’t. I don’t like living in a world where the choice is either “Don’t ask questions” or “never take anything at face value”. It means that one group builds Dreamworlds that are real but very temporary (what you might call fascists or religious nuts), while the other group builds worlds that are built on values but are so close to reality that no one really believes in them. They don’t have to, because everyone knows these values exists and they don’t question them.

     That’s what most people get wrong about belief, they think of it as something you take to be wholly true no matter what, when in fact it’s something you know can’t possibly be true, but you believe in it anyway because it makes sense to you. It’s one of the ways you build the world you live in, and a way you find where you belong. Some beliefs are so common that we treat them like reality, but when you look at how our worlds are actually built it becomes clear that it’s nothing more than an elaborate lie. Most of us don’t want to be “Successful”, we just want enough to be happy. Most billionaires aren’t smart, they’re just propped up by a system that claims they are. Religion isn’t just about worshiping god, but about building the world that God lives in. We take our world for granted, because we have no choice. Until the day we realize that our world must be believed in, even if we don’t want to. 

Thoughts on AI Art

     There’s a lot of discussion about AI art lately. There’s a lot to discuss; can Artificial Intelligence make real art; is the way AI gathers data stealing (it is); is it immoral to use it for fun, for profit, or as a replacement for traditional art; etc.? I’m neither a programmer nor an artist, but I am a blogger and I have seen some ads for programs that offer to write up blog posts for you (my posts are so low effort anyways that I don’t see the point), so I say I have some skin in the game even if I don’t see it impacting my life that much. 

     I have no issues with AI in theory, in fact I actually think it’s kind of interesting. It’s not trying to make masterpieces, it’s just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what will stick. This leads to a lot of bad art, but it also leads to a lot of art that’s interesting because no human would want to try it. Although, I do think that it won’t be long before the people making AI art programs try and focus on programs designed to see what types of art humans prefer and push their focus on to making “better” art, rather than art that’s interesting. If that happens, then AI will promptly stop being a threat to artists, because art isn’t supposed to be “good”, it’s supposed to resonate with people on some level. It’s why I don’t use it personally, because I don’t think it’s possible for AI to make something deliberately meaningful, just something that resonates with us entirely by accident. 

     Let’s say that the programmers are smart/stupid enough to never try to refine the AI, and it remains in it’s current form, where anyone can use it and it learns art by looking at elements of free online art. I’m not going to try to answer any legal questions, because I’m not a lawyer and I expect that lawyers will answer those questions soon enough anyway. My issue is a bit more philosophical. 

    Art, of all sorts, is deeply important to us, but nobody gives much of a thought to the artists who make it. It’s not just an art problem either, it’s a problem with work of all sorts. We live in a world where getting the best stuff for the lowest prices is a sign that you’re smart and determined, always scouting for great deals, and pushing for better value, a sound philosophy on an individual level, deadly when it’s applied to a societal level. This is the environment AI art, and AI in general, was created in, and it’s why people are so scared of AI taking over the world. The tools themselves are stupid, but the people using them know that as long as the price is low enough most people don’t care where it comes from. It’s why we still buy clothes from overseas despite having seen the conditions the workers are trapped in. In this world, advocating for the advancement of AI could be seen as good and moral because this way no humans have to suffer. But that’s not really the point, isn’t it? The point is that lots of people are going to lose not just their jobs but their entire career, and have no reliable way to make a living. It’s not just artists either, a lot of jobs are at risk of being turned obsolete because of AI. 

    Like I said before, I don’t think AI is the problem, and I don’t think using it makes you evil, exactly. I think it’s the system that surrounds AI that’s the problem. It’s not just capitalism, because if capitalism were the issue the solution would be to make it so that businesses couldn’t pool capital, but when we tried to get rid of them, we found that didn’t always work well either. 

    I think the problem is that we, as people, want society to be simple. We want to know who’s in charge, who takes out our trash and cleans the public parks, and what our role is, and we want those to have the shortest descriptions possible. So the fact that power pools in the hands of a few, all maintenance jobs are nameless, and all of us aim for the same jobs isn’t just the effect of capitalism, it’s the effect society being very hard to understand. This is compounded by the problem that we try not to think about society at all if we can help it, because society isn’t real. We have to pretend that it’s real, or else it all falls apart. 

     But I think it’s now time we stop pretending the system is at all sustainable. I think that, with the advancement of tools that are taking away all our old jobs and an environment that allows us to thrive using social and well as physical capital, it’s time we talk about moving to a new system, one where our primary job is keeping our world together. 

    I don't want to say that Twitter is doomed, but I will say that I'm giving up on it. I don't know how to put it, I'm sure plenty of smarter people could explain it, but I feel like the overall vibe is declining. It's like everyone knows the site's dying, but some are trying really hard to hide it. 

     I suppose if we're using the old dumpster fire metaphor, I'd say we've reached the point where it's still burning, but it's not nearly as warm and flashy as it used to be.