Something.

 Is being unhinged a job? Is being absolutely silly something that I could make into a career? 

Obviously, the answer is yes. There are plenty of people who start a youtube channel and then immediately get sponsored by nordvpn or raid shadow legends or audible-remember when audible was sponsoring people? Other people thought that was gross, right? Do audio books work for anybody? It feels like it's impossible to retain any meaningful information when I'm listening to the boom rather than absorbing it with my sight orbs.

I understand that for some people it's easier to listen to a book rather than reading it, but how? I get bored so fast that I start dissociating and the story gets turned on its head. I started listening to the first book in the Witcher saga and and it broke me. I'm pretty sure someone died. In the book. Not real life... Maybe in real life? I couldn't hear anything and Minot is a sketchy city.

That's just neurodivergent brain I guess. Apparently my brain does the same kind of thing that ADHD brains do where they have really strange thought processes with no direct pathway. The best example I can think of right now is bad, but bear with me. Someone may be talking about how they had oatmeal for breakfast and I'll be like, "My favorite color for socks is green," with no logical explanation. What's probably happening in my brain is something like this:

Me: "mmm. They had oatmeal for breakfast. I love oatmeal."

Brain: (That's what I thought you'd say you dumb fucking horse)

Me: "Hmm... horses live on farms. Farms are where oatmeal is grown."

Brain: (The farmers probably have to get up early to tend to the oat)

Me: "Explain"

Brain: (Oat farm takes lots of effort. Time is required)

Me: "That makes sense. I wonder what they do to get ready in the morning?"

Brain: (Boot are probably involved)

Me: "They probably need good socks to make sure they don't wear out super fast"

Brain: (What color are sock?)

Me: "I like green."

Or something like that. It's surprising that anything gets done around here. It's of note that my horrible monkey brain does this on top of everything else. I'm literally playing Animal Crossing right now as I'm typing this. I'm also texting five people. All of these things requires my full attention. I'm also listening to music, but that doesn't count because I wasn't following along with the lyrics in my mind. The excessive need for dopamine is strong with this one. That's why impulse purchases happen. Did I need two more decks of cards? No. Did they make me slightly happy for a brief period of time? Absolutely. Are they currently making me happy? Not unless I also get them out to use them, but that would take away from making wishes on stars in Animal Crossing and I have to text Chris, Lilly, and my sister back. I don't have the time.

Sometimes my brain goes in the opposite direction, though, and doesn't want to do anything. On these days I sit on my bed and do something I don't want to do because it's easier than doing something I don't want to do than doing the things I need to do and want to do even less than what I'm doing. It makes me wish I could just stop, but then I would be bored and brain doesn't like that so it makes me do pointless and numb activity. 

And that's my life. A constant tug of war between doing too much and doing too little. I rarely win. My brain wins pretty much every time. It's worse when I'm caffeinated. Then I do things I don't want to do faster with more dissociation. I can usually do stuff that I need to but don't want to if  I'm caffeinated, though. Don't even get me started on sugar. I don't want more sweets because they will make me sick, but thinky machine demands dopamine.  

Why does life gotta be rough?

I didn't edit this because I'm playing Animal Crossing. If you're mad, who cares? Sue me.

I Am So Angry and I Can't Come Up With a Real Title

 So uhhhhh.... College amiright?

No. I am very wrong. If you agreed, reevaluate where you are in life. Nobody needs that kind of energy in their life. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. If I'm not going to be able to make a living wage, I might as well fail right out of high school instead of going to school for four years and not getting paid enough. One route gets you a shit ton of debt and both lead to not being able to support yourself. But it's your decision. If you just work hard enough, maybe you'll be deemed worthy enough to be alive. I'm practically already dead and I'm in college right now. 

That being said, college is such a scam omfg. Let me explain a bit (although if you're also in college you probably don't need me to.)

I'm currently attending Minot State University. I thought this would be fine. It's pretty cheap and it has decent ranking for academic quality. When I filled out my FAFSA, I got a loan that covered all of my expenses.

Not. We thought it would, but it didn't and it's not my fault. (By we, I mean me and my aunt who works at the college)

Minot State has a policy about freshmen: Unless you sign a waiver that says that you will live with family who are within 50 miles of the campus, you are required to live on campus and enroll in a meal plan. On some level, that makes sense. Requiring that you live on campus and have a meal plan means they can make sure that you have a place to stay and food to eat. The issue is, they aren't upfront about the charges.

Now obviously, they state how much everything costs. Here's the problem: I accepted my student aid in July. My loan from my FAFSA plus a scholarship was enough to cover all of my costs. But they didn't add the housing and meal plan charge until the middle of August. 

If you're not sure why that's a problem, let me explain. I received $8000 for tuition and fees and accepted it. It covered all of my tuition and class fees. I found out the day that tuition was due that I did not have enough to cover housing and meals and had to come up with $3000. If they require freshmen to live on campus, why in the hell did they not add the $3000 all the way back in July when they told me what everything would cost. What the fuck.

After talking to my aunt to figure out how the hell I was going to come up with $3000 in 10 hours, we talked about the situation a bit. She told me that a coworker said, "Freshmen get fucked."

No fucking kidding. When I talked to my sister about how it felt scummy to wait so long to add the charge to my account, she made me realize why it felt so scummy.Your FAFSA is supposed to cover as much of your schooling costs as possible. If they don't add the $3000 dollars right away, the government doesn't have that $3000 recorded as needed from the FAFSA. That pretty much forces you to either get a private loan, or deal with the cost out of pocket.

Even though the university says that they don't receive compensation of any kind from private loans, I honestly can't think of any other reason that they would deal with the costs like that. If I had known about this, I probably wouldn't have even enrolled. I got completely fucked over, and now I have an extra loan that I didn't want.

I'm beyond frustrated with this whole situation. I love learning and I like all of the people that I have met and worked with on campus, but don't go here, especially if you're a freshman. I doubt that anyone who reads this will have been considering going here, but seriously. 

If you have anything to say about this situation or about college in general, feel free to reach out to me. I certainly will not side with any college if you need to rant or whatever. 

Have a day. You can decide if it will be good or bad.

A Horrible and Cursed Idea

 I have a few important things to say before we get started.

Firstly, I'm very, very sorry for this particular blog post. I don't know about you, but this is not the content that I had in mind when I decided I wanted to hold onto this blog.

Secondly, here's a disclaimer. This post is going to discuss furries and the economy. I know that the economy is horrible and terrifying, but you'll survive. Also I'm not a furry and I know I like to tease people about being furries, but I don't actually have any more of an issue with furries than I do with people who engage in literally any other hobby. You wouldn't point at people who are into anime and tell your friends that they're gross for liking Naruto (Unless you're the worst kind of person). Nobody goes around and makes fun gaming communities for cosplay. It's not a big deal. Shut up.

You have no obligation to share this particular post with anybody and I won't ask you to share this post, but if you enjoy my blog posts, please share them with people you care about. If you have any friends who are furries, feel free to share this with them as a way to say, "I now know why you are the way you are!" Everybody is looking for reasons why they are the way they are. This may help.

And so it begins.

I was in the car with my older siblings when I noticed a building that was used as an office for a law firm. The sign on the building had the name of the firm and the mascot; an anthropomorphic squirrel wearing a kilt. When I saw this, a thought occurred to me that probably nobody was expecting: What if furries are an inevitability of capitalist society? 

I will be the first to admit that this is a weird thing to think after seeing a sign for a law firm. We aren't even going to get into the strange ADHD-esque logic pathways that connected these particular dots, but the point is, this particular sign led to thinking about whether there are patterns in the way anthropomorphisation is used in the world of business and whether these patterns have a noticeable impact on people who see them.

Quick detour. If you're not aware of what a furry is, welcome to the internet! I'm going to be taking this particular innocence away from you. Furries are people who have a particular interest in anthropomorphic animals. Furries generally seem to regard their community as a fandom the way that any other group centered around a particular medium does. Furries have animal personas, conventions, costumes of their persona, and any other fandom accoutrements that you can imagine. It is a little weird, but no judgement here.

My first question when exploring this was, "How does the world of marketing influence the public, and on a smaller scale, individuals?" We are constantly bombarded by marketing tactics and varying advertisements for everything from the new brand of bread to gadgets that you've never seen before and never needed. The obvious goal behind them is to convince you to buy something.The relevant strategy that comes for this topic is anthropomorphisation. There are a ton of studies about this particular topic. One study by Dwinita Laksmidewi et al says that, "researchers found that presenting products with human-like physical features led to consumers' positive response."1.   This is because assigning human traits to non-human things, like animals or inanimate objects, allows us to relate to things that we normally wouldn't assign human traits to.2.

 You have definitely seen these anthropomorphic mascots before. They're on cereal boxes, in sports teams, they're part of things you haven't even heard of. Some very popular media makes use of non-human characters. Children's literature has given any kind of animal you can feasibly think of human characteristics. It makes sense that there are people internalize this and make their own characters. If all of the examples before weren't enough, this random and kind of strange website makes the point that some of the most popular cartoon characters are furries. This is enough of a phenomenon that there is an entire website dedicated to research on furries that has resources for anybody who wants to learn the who, what, and why on furries. 

I know a lot of people don't see Tony the Tiger and think, "I wanna be that," but those who get involved with the furry community may have faced external factors that influenced them. New research has shown that advertisements can change the way that people feel and think about themselves. More specifically, the study states, "behaviorally targeted ads lead consumers to make adjustments to their self-perceptions to match the implied label.3.  Based on that, people most likely don't see mascots like the fucking cheeto's cheetah and think, "I want to be that," the unconscious process is probably closer to, "I want to be like that." 

So we have come full circle. A big combination of marketing strategies has likely led individuals to being a furry. I don't have the schooling or credibility to make a conclusion about whether or not furries are inevitable, but based on all of that, it certainly seems like it could be the case. I don't have the time or the patience (or the willpower for that matter) to continue researching for this, but feel free to do your own research on it. If the history of marketing tactics was different than it is, maybe there would be fewer furries, but furry mascots have been a thing since the industrial revolution. As long as there is a company trying to sell something, there will most likely be some genius on a marketing team somewhere who says, "Look at this! Empathy is triggered by this talking lion! Let's exploit that!"

 

This post took way too long. Anyway, I hope that you don't want to yeet yourself into the void too violently.

Thank you for reading. Love you.

Welcome Back!

 I know that this blog has been silent for a few months now. Boy is that about to change.

Thank you for clicking the link on twitter and reading my weird ravings on whatever happens to be trapped in my mind on any particular day. I appreciate you very much for continuing to read whatever these posts are supposed to be. If you are not here from twitter, I'm sorry. There's no way out. I now occupy a specific amount of space in your mind that is dependent upon how much you enjoyed reading my words. You will never get this space back. Know that I am there partying and generally making a fool of myself within your brain cells.

I just wanted to post an update about things. I am working on posts except when I am not working on posts. Specifically, I was not working on posts throughout June and July, but have been working on them since the middle of August. In particular, one post I'm working on is taking a long time to put together and it's quite a ride. Thank you for your patience. I hope that when my new post occupies your brain space you feel enriched and slightly further away from the ever-encroaching presence of the void. If you feel the need to hurl yourself into the gaping maw of the abyss upon seeing it, that's your prerogative. Just know that it will be here soon, so ready yourself.

Some quick updates about the things I have been interested in or activities I have partaken of while not in my daily resting coma:

1. Started college. Don't recommend.

2. Played 40 something hours of the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles remake. Sweet nostalgia. I can't believe Square Enix butchered multiplayer :/ Fix my childhood Square Enix.

3. Read the first book in "The Witcher" series. I do not have an opinion yet. I'm still not 100% sure what is going on in this strange world, but I'm ready to find out.

4. Mother Mother? You've heard of them right? It's the band that's ruining my life at the moment. Here's a song I'm stuck on. Feel free to commiserate. 

5. Hozier. Always. Forever. What does that man know that we do not?