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Already planning a hunger strike against the inhumane draconian right winger/neoliberal gun bans. Gun control is also one of the worst forms of torture. Without guns/weapons its like merely existing and not living.

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On Who I Am & What The Hell I'm Doing On Your Lawn!

Started by The Wizard Joseph, October 04, 2014, 08:35:27 PM

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The Wizard Joseph

After some considerable time thinking on the reason why I'm sort of slow and not easily motivated to write I've hit on at least a major contributing factor.

I remember that the Christian school particularly liked to use the act as a punishment. Early punitive writing spoiled my perception and desire.

I'm not talking about something reasonable like a few verses from the Bible, say, 12 times each. Or a rational sentence explaining your wrongdoing in the first person maybe 50 times. Those to me seem harsh but not unreasonable as a reinforcement of concept.

These fuckers would assign hundreds of reps, on occasion paragraph length 'sentences'. One of my boyhood heroes was a guy about 5 years older than I that also went to my childhood church whom I shall call Gipster.  Gipster once was assigned about a 3/4 page sentence by our bus driver/'pastor'/administrative fucker. ANY teacher or administrative person person could assign such and failure to complete them in the time allowed would result in a conference with the family about continuing on with the school.

Gipster accomplished the task and was assigned some hundreds more IIRC for not handing it to the bastard with a humble enough demeanor or some shit.
My memory is hazy here and I have no recollection of what had set the driver off.

I will if not balance at least give ballast to the above with the simple fact that the finest English teacher of my life helped me to gain skill with the grammar and spelling aspects of the language during the fifth grade that have held me in good fairly stead to this day.

I still love run-on sentences! She helped keep my love of reading alive as well. Her name was Ziebell. I owe her one, and you now know who to blame as I Englishize.

Englate? Anglicize? Try Englation?

There's more, but I'm going to work on better things for a bit.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

#61
I have an awful tendency to divert myself from expression to  introspection. There was a time in my life when I used to constantly berate myself for laziness. I've come to understand that it has more to do with fear and long established behavioral trends. When I agree to do something, like working or assisting somebody that asks me to, I put just about everything I can into it. This often results in notable success because I am actually very hard working and very far from untalented. The problem seems to lie in my unwillingness to commit myself to a course of action when I'm the only one I'd disappoint. It seems like maybe I distrust myself. My mood disorder plays a role there, but I also do not well trust my judgment.

There's a quote from Full Metal Jacket that comes to mind.
"SIR, I have realized that whatever decision I make will be the wrong one, and so I have decided to stick to my guns SIR!"
And then the character gets promoted, but that's just a movie. I'm not in training for anything.

I'm well able to conjure that mentality when the situation calls for it. In an emergency I am freakishly fast acting and even more swift of thought, but when I am in stillness and alone I seem to just barely be able to take care of myself and seek passive diversion or literally just sit and stare, for hours sometimes, at whatever is passing through my head and heart at the moment. The more extreme my mood (up or down) the more likely I am to do this until some duty or another calls or a person disrupts me. The only thing that seems to change is the nature of the crazy show in my head.

There's a part of me that even now wants to run screaming from PD, my friends, acquaintances, and groups on FB, and even Internet (or any) news outlets. It's a massive urge to stick my head in the ground and a long recognized and hard-fought enemy. I'm not sure I'm "winning", but I haven't given up. What makes this enemy powerful is that "I know" how shitty things are and that they WILL get much more shitty over time, not less, before there's even a hope of getting better.

The good news is that I also know that I don't really know that and recognize all too well the very real danger of choosing a comfortable denial over the "truth" I think I know. The latter is treatable.  I might learn something true that overthrows my ideas about reality or at least helps me fight better. The former is equivalent to choosing NOT to ever get better. In effect it puts me in hospice before I'm even really dying.

I may be
Many things,
But refuse
To pretend
That I'm done
Because I'm
Not Dead Yet.

So fuck it.
I'll go on.





Edit because capitalisation matters
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

Q. G. Pennyworth


The Wizard Joseph

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

LMNO


The Wizard Joseph

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

So the whole thing about me being a "wizard" goes way back to my childhood. I remember the first moment that the idea stuck. I was in the kid's fiction section of the local library around the time I was in 3rd grade I think. By this age I was reading extremely well indeed. I had a strong grasp, if somewhat outsized and childlike perspective, of various mythologies. My favorites were Bible, Greek, and what were then to me  various, undifferentiated "tribal" fables.

I stood at the end of a row and asked God what He thought I might like to read next. I don't know where I got the idea, but I just closed my eyes and set my finger on the shelf and started walking until my finger seemed to catch. I pulled the book and discovered that it's title was "So You Want To Be A Wizard", a fiction with a title that played off of a popular occupational series. I haven't read it in ages, and it's not like the story forever changed my world, but it WAS the first time I got the idea in my head. I had very little idea of what a wizard was, just Merlin from the Disney movie. I didn't get to read the Hobbit & LOTR until well into public middle school, after my eventual expulsion from the Jesusnazi school.

Part of understanding me is understanding that the environment I grew up in was thoroughly and well, but of course not perfectly or totally, controlled by my parents until early into my freshman year of high school. I wasn't allowed to watch He-Man or anything that was otherwise "satanic". I got to play video games, NES was my first, but the game choices were strictly subject to approval. I grew up on the choices of classical, Christian proto-pop, and Weird Al for musical exposure. I guess my parents figured that parody was ok, suckerz!! :)

Dungeons & Dragons was THE DEVIL. Anything magical or even just extremely weird or ugly was THE DEVIL. I remember once having an aunt tell me and my brothers that some "Alien" xenomorph toy figurines that we had purchased with money given to buy toys had to go back because "Demons hide in ugly things". For real.

Eventually my parents totally succumbed to the incessant push back from the 3 of us, but this was not until well after we had all grown up enough to realize that ignoring the rule and doing what we want anyway worked quite well as long as we kept it to ourselves as much as possible. We became a highly coordinated 3 little-wiseguy Mafia. I'm sure that this unification was part of my dad's intent in how he raised us, and it definitely worked, but I can't condone his methods.

As oldest I was both enforcer and usually face man in dealing with our parents. If someone wanted to sneak out to the living room early on a Sat morning to watch forbidden cartoons, we all usually did. Acting as a bloc didn't save our bacon very often, but punishing 3 kids at 5:30am over and over is MUCH more tiring than just 1 at a time, and we were persistent little shits to be sure. My parents finally stopped even pretending to be able to enforce their cultural bans right around when I hit 8th grade, but let us just say I missed out on most of MTv.

I really was fascinated by D&D, storytelling, and the concept of the RPG as soon as I was exposed to them. I got into "choose your own adventure" books after I discovered that my folks didn't care as long as it wasn't an obviously "magical" story. Eventually I discovered GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, by SJ Games. It was just normal seeming enough to get past my parents once I pointed out that the "magic" systems were totally optional and that it was designed to do a historical or sci fi story as well as any other. It was a great starting system to learn storytelling from as it turned out.

Just some random musings and recollections to get me back into the swing of updating this thread. Hope to get up the guts to talk about more meaningful stuff soon, but for now I'm just going with whatever works to get my ass in gear and STAY THERE.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

Fuck it's been a year since I last wrote for this. Life's changed unbelievably since then. Going back over this has been an interesting experience as I try to re-order my thoughts some. This last year has been truly unbelievable, but I remain here. It's strange to think of a thing like this Discordia we are all here for as a supportive constant in one's life. Stranger still to find one day that it's a sane island paradise by comparison to the events unfolding worldwide and ALSO all too personally. Something told me not too long ago "2016 is just the tip", both in the sense of getting fucked and as a tipping point, also the tip of a deadly iceberg. Seems about right.

As for "what I'm doing on your lawn" these days... I feel like I'm an accepted resident in this sort of digital House of Eris now, looking out at the world as the world does EXACTLY what the writing all over the walls here indicates. The Beth Discordia clinic for the incurably lucid, an asylum from a world madder than I by far, it would seem, and this is truly saying something. Sometimes I scratch at the walls with the others. I occasionally wander the grounds. Mostly, lately, I watch the sky turn orange as the dawn and dusk are one and the same here, never touching daylight. I sometimes think it's the world burning... I'm not sure if that makes me crazy for thinking so or for ever thinking otherwise. Nero sang about Troy, you know. Fiddles weren't actually a thing back then, when Discordia was still a... notedly public force you could say. I shudder sometimes, still, at the feeling of her rough-hewn hand on my back. I think she's been shoulder-surfing me more than I know sometimes. But THIS piece of scratch is about me, and I just have to swallow my pills and get this out. She's got plenty of room to wander... I just have to let the pills settle in.. it's ok. It's just my turn to stand and speak in group-hour now.
Find a spot in the circle and listen, if you like.


My father is a strict disciplinarian raised by an even more strict pair of disciplinarian parents. My mother a narcissistic psycho that was most fond of using my father as her violence-proxy against us when we weren't up to her impossible, profoundly hypocritical, standards. This is my perspective now as an adult after much healing and better knowledge as such. To say this was all that they were would be very wrong. To say my father doesn't love me and my brothers would be wrong. Mom, so much as she's able to actually love, also did, but her delusional image of herself as "a good mother", among others, was the only thing that was really important to her, not anything else. She'd play shocked and wounded PERFECTLY were she to be so accused in public, but in private she was a very different person, even more so in private with my pop, as it turned out. We don't talk anymore by my choice for both our sakes. After my parents went through a messy divorce I don't intend to detail here anytime soon her true colors were on display for everyone who knew her to see. She lives far from where I grew up now, and dad remains in the house he built with one of my brothers and my brother's fiancé. That house has many, many patched walls and other signs of 30 odd years of violent intra-family strife, and a love I only still hold for my father. He did the best he could for us, being who he is and just a man after all. I'll get to the part where I realized this eventually.

Dad taught us boys a simple philosophy about violence growing up. It might be summed up as, "Always be the one who walks away, no matter what that may take." By this he meant that needing to attack people was a sort of weakness, but if you had to fight commit totally to being the only one still walking if that's what's necessary. He was not a man given to violence, and certainly not criminality, and it wasn't a glorious thing to him. He raised us in this perspective from a very young age indeed while in many ways preparing us to be very able as needed, and most importantly to have each other's backs as brothers, as family.
So much for that shit, but I'll get to that later.

By many folk's standards my dad would be called abusive because of his use of corporal punishment in discipline of his children. This is a matter of philosophy and perspective.  I would call him abusive for other reasons. When as little kids my brothers and or I did something against the rules set by my dad it COULD mean a very sound spanking after he sat you down and explained why, asked you if you understood, made sure, then informed you that it hurt him more than you and meant it by his eyes, and proceeded with a moderate hand to ass cheeks only. I have met many who were raised by sadists and criminals and true madmen. My father was not like them, but a man doing what he knew, the ONLY thing he knew from his own upbringing. That doesn't mean it was ok, just that I was fortunate to also be loved by at least one my abusers.

You see as we grew a bit older and found more and more ways to buck the system the punishments became harsher and fighting, verbally at great volume and physically at even greater volume, became standard by the time I was in junior high. As a child I had no idea how much influence my mom had in this, but I still blame dad for letting her push him for her insane sense of control and then play the "good cop" so she could continue seeing herself as a good mother. Violence and anger became steadily more and more central to my life as a little fucking kid in gradeschool AND at home. Being bigger and smarter gets you picked on. Being known as the strongest scrapper in school, like it or not, makes you target number 1.

I was both, and it got really bad. I learned to make kids fear me even more, thinking this would get me peace, but it did exactly the opposite. I remember particularly well an incident not very long, I think, before I tried to hang myself with a jump rope in the detention corner stairs of the playground at school. I was quite literally mobbed by probably about a dozen kids throwing rocks and spitting on me as they cheered on some popular shit who's name I don't remember, and whose face I'll probably never forget ruining after I realized my younger brother was in the crowd throwing stones too. I wanted them all to see what a real monster was, since that's what I was to them, clearly. It was the first time I think I ever experienced berserk, psychotic rage, and would prove to be very far from the last time. Fuck, it was my very best friend for... too many years.

All of this because of my father's intention to raise us as he had been, and his inability, and later I think conscious refusal, to see past his love for my mother and see her for what she is, and what it was doing to us. At some point I think the cognitive dissonance caught up to him and he began to vent his anger on us as often as giving out structued "punishment", perhaps rightly deserved on occasion. She'd piss him off and turn him loose on us whenever she felt her "authority" was threatened, which was in fact quite frequent by the time I was getting into high school. But by then I was quite a bit bigger physically than dear old dad and mom and the game had changed entirely. My father was never, never had to be, a fighter in the way that I had learned to be and I think he sensed this in my eyes more than once going into high school. He began to lay off me as I got steadily meaner and developed a taste for the politics of violence widely available in high school.

I was never a part of any serious gang, but I was at least as feared as any pack of thugs from freshman year onwards. This is not me bragging, just the facts. I had learned that the threat of force is more effective than it's actual demonstration and that even those in "authority", like gangbangers and poorly paid hall monitors, not cops, feared the unknown of what someone MAY do more than any actual deed itself. Once the shit actually hits the fan everyone commits to their rolls, but if you can instill uncertainty in someone and leave them afraid of an unknown badness then they leave you fucking alone like "the crazy-whiteboy" should be. I had learned the value of coercion over force and took to it like a fish to water. I mostly used it to fuckoff in the computer lab and otherwise do as I pleased. The small hallway outside the lab was MY turf. The labrats and nerds were MY nerds. The lab teacher was quietly complicit in this so long as I kept the real wolves off "her kids" and maintained her deniability.

This I did very well. It was the state of things until my truancy record and GPA under 0.5 caught up with me about halfway through junior year and I was given the option by THE SYSTEM to fuckoff at a tech school instead, so I did. I didn't need to be terrible to do as I pleased there and it was rather refreshing, but I still gave no shits for my classwork and graduated with a full diploma a semester late by testing out entirety in December of 2K. By then I was quite a different person on several levels and not long after had a sort of final encounter with my dad that sealed my new perspective permanently. I'll tell that part then get this posted and some badly needed shut-eye, but there's a sort of spiritual turning point/mental breakdown in my life that preceeds this story that I'll dig into another time. For now it'll suffice to say I no longer blamed God as I previously had by the time this happened.

I was 18, and I had changed greatly, but my family life was as loud and violent as ever. One evening I heard the usual shouting, but this time it was unusually sharp. I instinctively knew dad was beyond reason by his voice, and heard the youngest, then about 15ish bolting down the hallway to his room at the end of the hall near mine. There was no way I was going to let this happen. I took up all of the doorway to his room before dad got to the hallway, my brother's terror was real and I expected dad to be furious, but he was out of his mind angry as he walked up and tried to push me aside, and failed. He shouted at me to move. I looked him dead in the eye and calmly said no. That did it.

For the first and last time in my life dad truly assaulted me in full rage and fury, beating on my chest as I soaked and dodged blows that could very easily have broken a less experienced combatant's ribs, face, and things, shouting for me to move over and over. Dad was a machine repairman and STRONG beyond what might seem likely in his arms and chest, but old and fat and NOT fighting so much as beating on an intractable obstacle. Time gets hazy when adrenaline gets involved, but I'd guess about a minute or so of this went by, an eternity in combat time. Not once did I strike back, just "chose full defense" as my maneuver round after round. Dad devolved into a blubbering wreck, still landing blows but faltering and shouting at ME to stop. I realized that he wasn't shouting at me at all. He didn't even know I was there anymore in a very real sense.  All in a horrible second I SAW the violence handed to him in his childhood, and generations before, pouring out of him AT me, but not finding anywhere to go but back into him.

Now, sweet Discordia, here's a secret I need out for myself. For a moment I was beyond tempted to kill him as a weak thing, unworthy. For a moment that without God, as I had come to understand God, would have gone uncontested. Had that moment come even a few months earlier I just might have. He finally wore down entirely and was forced to lean forward, rope-a-doped and off balance. I could have done it "accidentally" in self defense, easy as pie. Instead I turned on that part of myself that still hated him and killed that. It was the hardest thing I ever did do, but I had to choose or die. My choice from then on was to leave all violence and coercive behavior behind me as well as I could. The course that choice ultimately set me on brought me here one day.

There's more, shit about my brothers mostly, but I can only bleed just so much in one go.

I'll carry On,
as I can
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

P3nT4gR4m

That moment in a young boys life where it's made clear the balance of force has changed and a new father-son paradigm is in play. I remember it like it was yesterday. Often wonder what the fuck it must be like for kids who never got to experience it. Strength is not nurtured - it's forged. Every slap, every punch, every kick in the ribs. "You made a monster, daddy and from now on you watch your step or the fucker is going to eat you." :evil:

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Vanadium Gryllz

QuoteThe Beth Discordia clinic for the incurably lucid, an asylum from a world madder than I by far,

Cool sentence.

Interesting read, Joe. I feel like your writing skills have improved a lot in terms of sentence/paragraph structure recently. Keep it coming!  :)
"I was fine until my skin came off.  I'm never going to South Attelboro again."

Junkenstein

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on September 30, 2016, 11:36:09 AM
That moment in a young boys life where it's made clear the balance of force has changed and a new father-son paradigm is in play. I remember it like it was yesterday. Often wonder what the fuck it must be like for kids who never got to experience it. Strength is not nurtured - it's forged. Every slap, every punch, every kick in the ribs. "You made a monster, daddy and from now on you watch your step or the fucker is going to eat you." :evil:

I've been looking at a few of my scars lately and I've been pleasantly surprised about how I feel about most of them now. There's a few lessons in every one and said teachings have been pretty useful.

Joe, that was quite a read. Glad to see you picked the right path.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

The Wizard Joseph

Quote from: Xaz on September 30, 2016, 12:06:54 PM
QuoteThe Beth Discordia clinic for the incurably lucid, an asylum from a world madder than I by far,

Cool sentence.

Interesting read, Joe. I feel like your writing skills have improved a lot in terms of sentence/paragraph structure recently. Keep it coming!  :)

Thanks! I'll do my best. I'm still slow, but I'm steadily getting more comfortable with writing. Believe it or not that took more than 4 solid hours including several editorial passes to write.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on September 30, 2016, 11:36:09 AM
That moment in a young boys life where it's made clear the balance of force has changed and a new father-son paradigm is in play. I remember it like it was yesterday. Often wonder what the fuck it must be like for kids who never got to experience it. Strength is not nurtured - it's forged. Every slap, every punch, every kick in the ribs. "You made a monster, daddy and from now on you watch your step or the fucker is going to eat you." :evil:

I've been confided in by LOTS of monsters raised by monsters. This reversal of power is never a truly strengthening moment, but exhilarating to be sure. The truth is that the ability to overpower violently is absolutely nothing compared to the ability to endure and understand, in life and actual combat. Many who cling to their rage never gain mastery of themselves and are weaker for it in every way, but they almost never see it that way. They can't! They fought SO HARD for that reversal. IT HAS TO have been worth it right? RIGHT!? But it wasn't. One day they always see this different, scarless strength in someone else. Sometimes the underlying damage never heals and everything "wholesome" is rejected because this subconscious reminder HURTS LIKE HELL for the rest of your life.

How'd it go for you P3nt?
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

Quote from: Junkenstein on September 30, 2016, 06:54:51 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on September 30, 2016, 11:36:09 AM
That moment in a young boys life where it's made clear the balance of force has changed and a new father-son paradigm is in play. I remember it like it was yesterday. Often wonder what the fuck it must be like for kids who never got to experience it. Strength is not nurtured - it's forged. Every slap, every punch, every kick in the ribs. "You made a monster, daddy and from now on you watch your step or the fucker is going to eat you." :evil:

I've been looking at a few of my scars lately and I've been pleasantly surprised about how I feel about most of them now. There's a few lessons in every one and said teachings have been pretty useful.

Joe, that was quite a read. Glad to see you picked the right path.

I'm glad too. I'm convinced that the choice made for me a path few get to walk out of that situation. I had also renounced all ties of authority from my parents on a spiritual level by that point. This a more meaningful act than most folks would likely believe on the face of it.

I'm really glad you found the read enjoyable! I'm working really hard on stretching my own scars and regaining my former potential.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: The Wizard Joseph on October 01, 2016, 01:13:24 AM
How'd it go for you P3nt?

It's been interesting. Gave me a good solid place to start from. An attitude that can laugh off most hurdles and a desire to push this monkey as far as it'll go. That might have come later, tho, after the depression and anxiety and bipolar and all that shit that had to be purged and stripped out. That shit was an adventure in itself. No regrets.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark