#oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 415: Last time happy

Something got me thinking earlier: when was the last time I felt really, actually, genuinely happy? I feel like living through the 2020s (so far) in particular has given me such a sense of malaise and misanthropy that it's honestly quite difficult to remember what it felt like to just… exist in a sense of contentment and satisfaction.

A lot of blame can probably be laid at the feet of what I saw someone the other day describe as "breathing Internet fumes all day" — and I love that, apologies to whoever I stole it from — but it's also clear that even if I wasn't plugged in to online culture, it would still be readily apparent that these are not happy times we live in.

I often consider closing down every last bit of my social media and going completely off-grid. I don't have much of it left any more — the only standalone social media I still have is Bluesky, and some people also count Discord and YouTube as social media, though to me those are both a little bit different — so it's not like it would be a big effort to do so. But is that what I really want? Even with those few remaining connections to the "outside" world, I still feel isolated, disconnected and incredibly lonely on a daily basis. Surely it makes no sense to cut off what, from some respects, can be looked on as a lifeline?

I dunno. There are people I like talking to on Bluesky and Discord, and YouTube is a valuable creative outlet for me, just as this blog and MoeGamer are. The thing I find myself asking, though, is if anyone would actually notice if I were just to disappear from one or all of those services one day. I suspect that they would not, at least not immediately. Someone might, a few months down the line, think "oh, I haven't heard from that Pete guy for a while" and discover a closed profile page, but would they, then, feel inclined to reach out to me via other means? Again, I suspect that they would not, given that these days, if you are not on social media or in a WhatsApp group chat, you seemingly do not exist. The only person who emails me on a semi-regular basis is my mother; the rest of my daily emails are promotional offers, order confirmations or blogs/newsletters I've subscribed to.

Email used to be exciting. While my short-lived penpal relationship with a girl named Julia in my teens pretty much fizzled out when we finally met — at least partly my fault for being completely socially inept in person, for reasons I did not understand then but very much do now — I still have fond memories of the excitement I felt every time I received an email from her.

Going even further back, I actually still have a couple of hand-written penpal letters from a primary school friend that I was very close with, who subsequently moved away. I don't really know why I've kept those — I am unlikely to ever see or hear from her ever again, given the many years since we last had any contact whatsoever — but, I don't know. Something about the enthusiasm with which she asked me if I was still playing football (multiple times in one letter) and how I was getting on at Cub Scouts (which should give you an idea of how old I was when writing and receiving these letters) was… thoroughly pleasant. I felt like I mattered, like I had a place in someone's life, even if it was just as the recipient of an occasional letter.

The advice people normally give to this sort of situation is "get out there and meet people". And it's probably sound advice. Trouble is, with my general physical and mental state, I'm kind of… I guess "afraid" is the right way to put it. Honestly, at this point I don't really have anything to lose by trying it, but I'm still… afraid to lose whatever it is. Maybe if I'm able to work on some of my own problems first — and I am doing so — I might be able to tackle some of these broader issues. And, with any luck, I might actually feel happiness again by the time I'm 60.

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#oneaday Day 389: Belonging

One of the things I've struggled immensely with in more recent years — particularly during and after the COVID years — is a sense of belonging. I don't feel like I fit in anywhere. I don't feel like I have any friends. I feel like in the spaces where I have attempted to fit in, my presence is more just sort of tolerated at best, rather than particularly appreciated. And I'm really tired of having to pretend like everything's okay.

My particular snapping point this evening came in a small online community that I'm a member of. I'm not going to go into the details of the situation or the venue — and perhaps the fact that I don't feel able to, for fear of causing upset or drama, is part of the problem here — but suffice to say that a comment was made which made me feel rather unwelcome. It wasn't aimed directly at me, but it still had the net effect that I felt 1) unwelcome and 2) unable to talk about it, because honestly, it's not the first time it's happened, and on a previous occasion where I did speak up about it, there was a lot of unnecessary stress that I'm not especially keen to repeat.

The details don't matter. The important part is that I now feel less inclined to attempt to engage with that community on the things that are important to me because of this incident. Despite having been a member of that community for a while, and theoretically having a fair bit in common with a lot of them, I have, in various ways, been made to feel like I don't matter, like my opinion isn't important, like I'm somehow wrong to feel upset when something like this happens.

I don't say anything because I know what the response will likely be. "Stop being defensive." "It's just a bit of fun." "It's a bit of banter, isn't it?" All with an implied "you're in the minority here, so everyone is going to laugh at you for getting upset".

I don't like this. I don't like that I feel this almost anywhere I go online these days. I don't like that I find it near-impossible to make new friends, I don't like that I can't be honest about things I'm thinking or feeling, and I don't like that the only places I have where I feel like I can really express myself are those that I have complete control over — like this blog and MoeGamer — and which getting people to pay attention to is difficult. I even feel anxiety posting things on YouTube and Bluesky for fear of someone (often wilfully) getting the wrong end of the stick and yelling at me.

But more often than not, I'm just ignored. Tuned out. I'm unimportant. Unremarkable. Worthless. No-one cares. If I cried out for help, like if I was going to do something really stupid, I feel like no-one would come. Thankfully I do at least have my wife, who loves and supports me, and my cats, who unconditionally adore me, as I do them. So that is something, at least.

It's just sometimes it would be nice to remember what it's like to have friends. People I can share just small but special moments with. People I can be unabashedly nerdy and dumb with. People I can get drunk and play retro games with. People I can get a pizza and watch anime with.

I used to have all of those things. There are, mercifully, still a few small elements in my life that mean I haven't given up hope on all of the above completely. But every day it feels like it gets a little bit harder, and the world feels a little bit less like I really belong in it.

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#oneaday Day 325: It's technically my birthday

It is, as the headline says, technically my birthday, but only because it has passed midnight due to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33-related reasons. I will celebrate my "official" birthday with tomorrow's post.

I spent most of today making some videos. I haven't made any for a few weeks, and I wanted to get back into things, so I picked out a few favourites from the Atari ST back catalogue to cover. Expect videos on Star Fleet I: The War Begins!, Continental Circus and Total Eclipse very soon — all three are games that are quite dear to me for one reason or another, so I'm happy I've finally made some time to play through them and provide some commentary.

This was the first recording session in the "new" study, too, and things went well. Not that there was any reason they shouldn't, mind, since the actual layout of the study hasn't really changed, just the decor. I also have a lot more stuff "put away" when I'm not using it now, too, so it's not quite as chaotic. The tidiness is rather nice; I should try my best to keep it that way. I have succeeded thus far.

The trouble with mess is once you create a little bit of it, it then inevitably spreads to cover all available surfaces. Leave a coffee cup on the side for a day or two and more will join it. Leave wires dangling everywhere and you'll eventually reach the conclusion that "ah, it's fine" and add more wires. Leave books and magazines out rather than on the shelf, and more will gradually pile up atop them "just so you know where they are". Chaos, inevitably, ensues when all of these things happen at the same time.

I do wonder sometimes why it's so hard to keep things tidy. I remember often being told as a young'un that I should tidy my room, and I often found it a bit challenging to keep my student houses under control. I suspect at least some of it is down to autism/ADHD-adjacent considerations, as I know that some other folks who deal with these mental health issues also have similar tidiness problems.

The one thing I console myself with, even when the house is an absolute pigsty, though, is that I've never got into the "hoarder" state one person I used to know had their house in. One time we went to visit them, and I'd never been in there before. I was genuinely shocked to find a house like something off a reality TV programme: literally no floor visible underneath all the crap that was everywhere. And the whole house was like it. I didn't say anything, because it's impolite to and there are almost certainly private, personal extenuating circumstances for when a living situation gets to that state.

But I've always used that as a sort of benchmark. As long as things don't get that bad, a bit of tidying up — with a bit of moaning and complaining along the way as required — it's fine. And nowhere I've lived has ended up in that state just yet, thankfully.

Anyway, that was a stream-of-consciousness ramble of the kind you only get at 1am. Time for bed. Then I can wake up and officially be a year older. G'night!

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#oneaday Day 305: In the Attic

I am doing my monthly(ish) visit to the office, so you join me once again from a hotel room. This time around I have had mostly good luck: while I am technically stuffed into the "attic" on the third floor, my room is next to the lift and stairs and it has a bath.

So I had a bath. It's always nice to have a bath in a hotel, because their baths tend to be much bigger than ours. And as a large gentleman, it is nice to have a large bath to match. Even if I miscalculated, as I always do, the amount of water displacement my fat arse causes, leading to me semi-flooding the bathroom. I managed to mop most of it up with one of the towels, but the annoyance of that threatened to put something of a dampener (pun intended and not apologised for) on my evening.

I wasn't feeling great anyway. The drive down here was stressful. Occasionally I find myself… I don't know if "dissociating" is the right word, but I'm going to use it anyway. I feel sort of "detached" from myself, like I'm watching things going on but as if I'm sort of a step "back" from them. Then, inevitably, I become conscious of my dissociation, which inevitably occurs at an inconvenient time, such as when driving, and that freaks me out and makes me stressed. So I end up in a bit of a cycle.

Still, I made it here safely, accompanied by the second episode of the Fun Factor Podcast, which I can highly recommend if you're as interested in classic video game magazines as I am. This time around they take a look at a magazine I'm not familiar with, not being from North America, but a lot of the stuff discussed was familiar — including the full postal addresses of actual children being published in a continent-wide magazine and no-one seeming to think that might be a bit of a dodgy idea.

Anyway, I'm here now, I've eaten Hotel Snacks and now I'm ready to just sit and vegetate a bit before going to sleep. The usual Police Interceptors garbage is on TV and I have some video games and ebooks with me, so I think I can safely stave off any further stress or dissociation with either or both of those.

Oh, I did finish a book last night, but I want to talk about it a fair bit and there ain't no way I'm going to battle my phone's keyboard to do that right now. So perhaps tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow)…

#oneaday Day 295: The sky isn't falling

I've had a pretty stressful week, the reasons for which I won't get into for now, but suffice it to say they were work-related issues. (Nothing anyone who cares should be worried about, I hasten to add; part of the problem is my own disproportionate sense of panic-stress to even slight mishaps. And that is, essentially, what happened this week.)

I don't like getting stressed out or annoyed at my current job because, for the most part, I actually like it and want to stay there. At this point I think it's the job I've held on to for the longest without going insane, but I do find myself worrying that The Way My Brain Is is just sort of fundamentally incompatible with… work.

I don't mean that I don't want to do anything, or that I just want to sit around all day doing nothing. I've been there, I've done that, and it's nowhere near as much fun as you might think. I am grateful for my current position, and I believe that if I were to leave (I'm not planning on doing so!) I would be missed, which is more than can be said for some positions I've held in the past.

But still, there's the stress. I'm beginning to feel like work-related stress may simply be an unavoidable part of literally every position out there, and that kind of sucks. Because if I can still be feeling the kind of stress that makes me not want to get out of bed in the morning at a job I actually like and want to keep, it really doesn't feel like there's a way to escape it at all, short of winning the lottery, jacking it all in and living purely for whatever you, specifically, want to do.

Even then, though, the modern world manages to bring in stress. If I were to win millions and be able to quit my job comfortably, I would almost certainly want to continue writing and making videos. And I would not be doing those in an attempt to make money; I would be doing it purely because I want to. But I just know from bitter experience even if you're doing something you absolutely love doing and expressing pure, unbridled enthusiasm for it, there's always someone lurking around a corner waiting to make your day miserable with an unpleasant comment or a wilful misinterpretation of something you say.

The only escape, really, is to completely cut yourself off from everything and live off the grid from a social perspective, only making use of the Internet for essential things. Because at this point, I feel like completely living without the Internet at all is probably impossible.

But anyway. The stress this week was not pleasant, but I survived it, and I need to tell myself every time something like this happens that the world is not, in fact, ending, regardless of anything that has happened. Instead, it seems that Shit does indeed Happen, whether or not you think it "deserves" to, and the only real way to stay standing is just to weather the storms that come your way every so often, learn any lessons that can be learned from the situation, and hopefully come out of the other end stronger.

That's what I should tell myself when this happens. But we all know that's probably not going to happen. The next time Stress Happens, it will have the exact same effect on me, and I will come to this same vaguely philosophical conclusion after the fact once again. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

Oh well. Something about recognising a problem is the first step and all that.

Time for bed, I think!

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#oneaday Day 254: Nothing Much

I've had a nice quiet weekend that has been almost entirely occupied with Xenoblade Chronicles. I thought about making some videos, but decided that I didn't really have the mental fortitude to sort that out, so I have just had a completely relaxing weekend where I thought about nothing of any importance whatsoever, and just enjoyed myself.

This is a valuable thing to do now and again, particularly if you are feeling any sort of burnout or stress, which I most certainly have been of late. Honestly, I feel like I am starting to come out of the other side of the funk I've been in for the last while. I'm not completely out of it by any means just yet — and I'm sure the first time I look at social media for work on Monday I will suffer a mental health setback — but I am feeling a bit better, partly for having spent some time just relaxing, partly for having got some things off my chest with the post the other day, and partly… well, these things just pass eventually, usually.

That, honestly, is one of the things that's kept me holding on through difficult times — the knowledge that "this, too, shall pass". It always has done. Sometimes there have had to be difficult decisions made in order to encourage this, too, to indeed pass, but for the most part, just gritting your teeth and hanging on in there generally allows one to pass any number of this, toos, that might find themselves coming your way. And thankfully this most recent bout of the blues appears to have fallen into that category.

One thing I try to do when I'm feeling low is to ponder the things I do have that I should be — and am — grateful for. I'm not saying that just because you have things to be grateful for that you shouldn't be sad, of course — processing one's emotions is important and healthy — but rather, I think I'm saying that when things get hopeless I find it helpful to remember that I do not, in fact, have nothing, and that as difficult as it can be to appreciate that when you're down the bottom of a depression hole, those things you do have are a welcome sight when you eventually clamber back out.

That was a tortured metaphor, I know, but I'm just bashing things out on fumes here. Early night tonight and an attempt to get back into a routine of feeling like a vaguely normal human being. I don't know if I'm quite ready to return to the super-early mornings and going for a walk down to the shop, but I can at least look to tomorrow with good intentions if nothing else.

I hope you've had a pleasant and appropriately relaxing weekend, and that your week ahead isn't looking too stressful or chaotic. I am very much ready for a break, but I have a couple of weeks to get through before I can enjoy that break. That's feeling eminently doable at this point, though, so here's to Getting Back Into Things.

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#oneaday Day 250: A whimper

It's day 250 of this bullshit, which feels like a significant milestone, and I feel like I don't really have anything to write about. Inevitably, I will almost certainly now proceed to churn out at least 500 words on nothing in particular as I always do when I claim to have "nothing to write about", but I at least wanted to set expectations up front.

I am feeling exceedingly burnt-out right now, and I use that phrase deliberately. After my reading up on autistic shutdowns the other day, I also ended up reading a bit about autistic burnout, which is not a "medical" term, but it is one that has come to be commonly used among autistic people and those who care for them. And it's definitely something I feel like I am contending with right now. Persistent tiredness? Check. Random irritability? Check. Inability to concentrate? Hell to the yes. Desire to just shut down completely? Absolutely.

I should probably talk to someone about this, but I don't really know where to begin, and don't want to come across like I'm making excuses or anything. It's a busy and stressful time for everyone at work right now, and I don't want to leave anyone else in the lurch by just noping out of life for a few days, but at the same time I feel like if I don't put my hands up and say "I need a fucking break" I will almost certainly involuntarily end up noping out of life for a few days. And I don't really want that.

As I've alluded to on previous days, the current happenings around the world aren't helping, and I'm also becoming frustrated with the few online communities that I have remained a part of in a vain attempt to feel any sort of social connection with anyone. There's one in particular that I'm very close to just ditching completely because I'm tired of the moaning negativity that goes on in there, but I like the people who run it so I don't want to upset them by appearing to go off in a huff or anything like that. (Who am I kidding, I suspect no-one will actually notice if I leave.)

I am finding distraction from my own negative thoughts through a combination of Friends, Angel, Xenoblade Chronicles and, yes, I bought the RPG Maker DLC the other night and have made a start on making a stupid self-indulgent project. So that is something. At least I am not sitting staring at a wall or anything like that. But I would like to feel, y'know, better about things generally. And I'm not entirely sure where to start with that.

Oh well. The week is half over. I can, at least, look forward to the weekend. We have nothing in particular planned, but that is nice. I fully intend to sleep in, play some video games, perhaps record some videos and just forget about all this for a couple of days. And once my commitments for this month are over, perhaps I will finally take that time off I clearly owe myself.

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#oneaday Day 246: They don't tell you anything

One thing I have been gradually coming to realise — or perhaps more accurately, accept — since I was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder in (checks) 2017 is that… you seemingly don't get any help. At least not by default. I probably could get some help if I went and asked for it, but I sort of feel like being diagnosed with a condition should probably be some sort of automatic trigger for someone to get help, or at the very least, advice.

But no. While I am glad I got my diagnosis as it helps me understand a bunch of things about myself that I had always been a tad frustrated by in the past, there is still a whole lot that I don't know — and if I hadn't specifically gone looking for the information myself, I probably wouldn't have found out.

Now, I'm kind of hesitant to do this, because I simply don't trust the Internet at large to provide reliable medical advice these days, but there are sources that, one would hope, set themselves up to be reputable and authoritative, so if I do go looking for information, I seek out those sources wherever possible.

One thing I learned about today is known as a "shutdown" or, to some, an "autistic implosion". This is where an autistic person, when confronted with an uncomfortable situation, a high level or stress or overstimulation in general, closes themselves off, puts their shields up and seemingly becomes quite non-responsive in terms of interpersonal interactions, emotions and suchlike.

I've been aware that I do this for a long time — up to and including very recently — but it had never really occurred to me that it, too, is a symptom of being on the spectrum. But sure enough, as I read this piece from an Australian autism charity earlier — one of those sources that I judged to (hopefully) be reputable — I found myself recognising more and more things, including behaviours that I had engaged in long before I knew that I was autistic.

Experiencing a shutdown is very strange, because you're often conscious that you're doing it. You're aware that everything is becoming too much, but rather than wanting to lash out at it (which leads to the opposite, but equally possible, reaction known as a meltdown) you just want to… retreat. Hide. Get out of there as soon as possible.

And this reaction, this desire to flee the situation I was in… that is all too familiar. I'm pretty sure this also ties in with the bouts of depression I have where I just feel like I'm suspended in a bubble, barely aware of anything that is going on around me, only half-conscious of the fact that I'm just staring into space, my mind constantly going around and around and around the same thing over and over, even though doing so is what is driving me deeper into that shutdown.

I kind of wish that, having been diagnosed, I could have had some proper time with a therapist who knows and understands autism, who could explain the various situations and behaviours that I'm likely to encounter and be more conscious of, now I better know who I am — and perhaps how to cope with them. Because there's no "curing" these situations; it's just part of the person I am. But there are ways to manage my environment and the situation I'm in to make them less likely to happen — and to cope with them more effectively when they do arise.

Perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and seek out some sort of private therapy. Two things have, up until now, discouraged me from doing that, though: the cost, and the choice paralysis that comes with deciding exactly who would be an appropriate therapist for me. Because it turns out there are a lot of them. I've also not really been sure what I'm looking for when seeking a therapist — but I think today's revelations are telling me that what I should really be seeking out is exactly what I describe above: someone who knows about and understands autism, and who can help me understand the behaviours and feelings I'm likely to experience, and suggest some ways to manage and cope with them.

Food for thought. I will mull it over.

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#oneaday Day 243: I think I'm stressed

I think I am, as the title says, stressed. I yelled at the robot vacuum cleaner earlier because it was being a dimwit and chewing up loose threads rather than going back to its charging base. I get infuriated by stupid little acts of clumsiness that really shouldn't be as annoying as I am feeling they are right now. And at work today I felt more overwhelmed than I've felt for a long time, for a variety of reasons.

I probably just need a good break to get away from… everything, so I'm going to see about getting a bit of time off in the not-too-distant future. Everything just feels like… a lot to deal with right now, and I'm not coping with it very well. It's the combination of a particularly busy patch at work, coupled with a few annoying specific stressors related to that (which I won't go into now), with The Situation in the world (particularly America) piled on top of that, and a general sense of helpless frustration at how, with every passing day, I feel less and less like I really "belong" in the world we're apparently building.

Take the AI thing. As time goes on, more and more people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the lake-boiling plagiarism machines don't appear to be going away, so we "might as well" embrace them because you shouldn't get "left behind". As far as I'm concerned, the ones being "left behind" are the ones wilfully giving up their own skills — and the opportunity to learn new ones — in favour of typing a fucking prompt into a dumbshit autocorrect that hallucinates complete bullshit a statistically significant proportion of the time.

Earlier on, someone posted (mockingly, thankfully) a "tool" that allowed people to generate Bluesky posts using AI. If you're too much of a lazy cunt to think of 280 characters you want to share on a social network, you shouldn't be using that social network. Now, granted, I absolutely fucking hate the vast majority of the time I have to spend doing social media posts for work, but I'm still not going to use AI to generate them, because I know it'll be just as much work checking through all the dross it produces to ensure it's not saying anything fucking stupid or completely fabricated.

I checked in on LinkedIn for the first time in like 15 years the other day, and was horrified to see how much generative AI is all over the place on that platform. LinkedIn is already a place that joy goes to die, so it doesn't surprise me to see tools for generating vapid slop placed front and centre there. I can't think of anywhere I want to hang out less. It was already insufferable before people could just get a machine to generate their "inspirational" posts about what the coffee they had that morning taught them about B2B sales, and now… God.

I'm wound up, I'm irritable, and I just want to… escape for a bit. So once I've dealt with my most pressing commitments, I'll be doing everything I can to ensure that I can take a bit of time to get my shit together and calm down a bit. Because feeling like this probably isn't good for me. I've seen the endpoint of feeling like this, and it's not pretty. I don't want to end up there again.

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