F
FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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- #201
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 13: New Year? Noose Me!"
TL;DR: After celebrating the death of Satoru Iwata, I realize that something must be wrong with me mentally, so I go see a psychiatrist. She encourages me to achieve my dreams and scratch out a life for myself, I take up cinema as an interest and try out the Hash House Harriers. I stop seeing her some time in 2017, taking her coaching to heart. Then I join r/ForeverAlone, then Minassian drives his van, then I join Incels/Looksmax, then at the start of 2019 I write this journal.
TL;DR: After celebrating the death of Satoru Iwata, I realize that something must be wrong with me mentally, so I go see a psychiatrist. She encourages me to achieve my dreams and scratch out a life for myself, I take up cinema as an interest and try out the Hash House Harriers. I stop seeing her some time in 2017, taking her coaching to heart. Then I join r/ForeverAlone, then Minassian drives his van, then I join Incels/Looksmax, then at the start of 2019 I write this journal.
This journal draws to a close. Because the Year draws to a close. It's 
New Year's Eve.
I had to stop by Wal-Mart yesterday to pick up some stuff to drink. Non-alcoholic because I'm a pussy baby. At my local Wal-Mart they mix the wines with the non-alcoholic sparkling ciders and grape juices. But you know what else they put over there? Condoms. Because Wal-Mart knows that wine and sex mix.
The end of the year. But also? The end of the decade. The 2010s, man. I saw this video a while back that said the 2010s have no feel. That nothing defines them.
And for a while I used to agree with that. But doing this reflecting/past-authoring has made me realize, that's WAY off. The 2010s definitely have a definition. If a "definition" is whatever nostalgia people will try to capitalize on. If 80s nostalgia = Stranger Things, 2010s nostalgia will be dabbing and hoverboards and Fortnite and Pewdiepie and reaction memes and Stan Twitter and Blue Checkmarks of Social Justice. Zoomer stuff.
The upside to this is, each decade has its own feel. 10 years is the cap, after 10 years of things being one way, they usually change somehow. So I'll be glad to see the 2010s go. Arguably the low period of my life so far. So low, I actually went to therapy in the 2010s. Picture this...
2015. You're shitposting on Town of Salem and you've got 5.349 trillion Cookie Clicker cookies in another tab.
It's the best you can find in your long, wandering quest for something to distract you from the exasperation you feel for the world. You don't have much else. When you see it, in the Last Will of one of the Townies: RIP Satoru Iwata December 6th 1959 – July 11th 2015. You look into it. Indeed he is dead. Bile duct cancer. The industry and community turn out in droves to pay their respects. Your first thought? Good. You're glad he's dead. You'll take his death, somehow, as payment for the localization practices he signed off on as Nintendo CEO. A lot of lewd games not only made it onto Nintendo hardware on his watch, but made it overseas. He refused to accept that these games were lewd, and that lewds are not for the mainstream market. They're for importing from Japan because God help you if you see lewds at Best Buy, where an actual person in America has to process your purchase for you. You choose to see this as him being punished for his refusal to understand this.
But then you think, that's kinda fucked up, isn't it? That you're reveling in someone's death like this? And on top of that inferring some imaginary retribution out of it? Iwata wasn't "killed" for any rule he broke. The cancer gods don't care about your hangups. Something's wrong with you. It's time you got yourself looked at. It's time you saw a psychiatrist.
Speaking of going crazy, if you need more evidence that the 2010s sucked, look at Shia LaBeouf. This was the decade he went crazy. In the 2000s he was funny and exciting. Even when he got out of kiddy show business at Disney he was a joy to behold in the Transformers films. And Surf's Up. And Indiana Jones. And Disturbia. One of the risingest stars of the decade, Hollywood's go-to man when they needed someone boyish and plucky and kinda awkward. Then come the 2010s he decided he was gonna be a serious actor and also a director. I guess to make up for how bad the Transformers movies were. When Nymphomaniac came around, LaBeouf was all too proud to announce how far he was willing to commit to the role. "I'll get naked for real! I have a small dick but I want people to see it! I want people to see a REAL man's dick!!! I'll have real sex! This is gonna be a SERIOUS movie with REAL sex in it! I don't care if I'm dating Karolyn Pho right now, I'll have ACTUAL sex with my co-stars so they can put it IN THE MOVIE!" He cut himself and pulled his tooth in Fury, he stole the idea for Howard Cantour.com from Dan Clowes, and of course there was "I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE." Arrogantly I kinda compare myself to LaBeouf. Because we both have small dicks. But also, how he just kinda had this breakdown and threw his old life, around the same time I had a breakdown and threw my old life away. For a while he was seen as a pretentious weirdo. But by 2015, LaBeouf was kinda lovable again thanks to #INTRODUCTIONS and the "Just Do It" meme. And if he can tackle life changes like that and come out on top, why not me?
So I went to therapy. But first lemme talk about what I did before I went to therapy. When I was dealing with post-gamerism on my own. To have all that taken away from you is like getting your arm ripped off. It doesn't just take something from you. It doesn't just leave you with nothing. In taking from you, it gives you something. It gives you pain. And that's what I had after I "gave up" the video game thing. I didn't sit around with nothing to do because I didn't like video games anymore, I acted on the hate I now had for the video game industry and community. I went around e-mailing video game reviewers. Specifically, reviewers that had reviewed both Bayonetta and other less fun games like Dead or Alive. So I could dig up their rants about how Dead or Alive is creepy and voyeuristic, and ask them why they didn't say as much about Bayonetta. Why they weren't honest and brave like Arthur Gies. And I knew the odds of me getting a response were low, I was sending these by e-mail where they would almost certainly sit at the bottom of a stack of more important e-mails. So I went for quantity and contacted as many as I could. Every day I looked for new publications, checked what they had to say about the games of interest, and layed on 'em a wall of text that makes Year of the Pig look like steel slats. Of the many e-mails I sent out, I only got one response back. I forget the name of the publication and I can't be bothered to sign into my old inbox, but the gist of their response was "Yeah you're right, porn + quality writing/gameplay doesn't make it not porn. But porn doesn't usually have quality writing or gameplay. So when it does, we can't help but ignore the lewd aspects." Which is what I thought. People give Bayonetta a pass because her games are good. I guess deep down I wanted to know that I wasn't crazy. So hearing this from this one publication confirmed my bias enough that my rage died down just a little bit. I started to not care about the issue as much. But certain neuroses stayed with me. As a result of me desperately trying to put my triggers out of my mind. To this day I still don't eat strawberries, or anything strawberry flavored. Why? Because I don't like the yuri anime Strawberry Panic. It's not for me, it's for lesbians. So if Strawberry Panic isn't for me, I'm not for Strawberry Panic. I'm moving away from all things strawberry. It's not even an act of deliberate spite anymore. Nowadays I just automatically reject strawberry flavored food products. As a subsconscious reflex. Maybe I should've asked my psychiatrist to fix that.
I wanted to do more than talk about what I didn't like though. I needed to find some things I enjoyed. I mentioned in the last entry how I hoped to find porn made by people who weren't afraid to own up to the fact that what they were making was porn. Who wouldn't try to attract non-porn audiences or ask people to look past the porn to something else. I went looking around for that. My porn savior. By 2015 there was a lot of "amateur porn" out there. By which I mean, 2D porn drawn by amateurs. Stuff that I would've called "fanart" 10 years ago and not wasted my time on. But by 2015 people were making businesses out of this. Thanks to Patreon. I went looking around and found a guy named Fenoxo. He had these text based furry porn browser games that were being passed around in this new age of furrydom. I was all too eager to project a savior onto him. But a few conversations with him and the rest of his fanbase in IRC were enough to turn me off. 2D porn wasn't doing it for me much anymore. So I stuck to what 3D porn I could find. Sadly by 2015, it was drying up. The names I had grown accustomed to? By 2015 they were out of the business. And my sex drive was failing anyway so I kinda dialed it back with porn in general. Now was the time to watch other videos. Videos on YouTube. Which I hadn't really gotten much of a look at outside of the interests I had in the 2000s. Like I said about 2014, I really started to see the state of Let's Plays evolve. "Real games" weren't the focus anymore. It was about indie games and other weird little finds on the Internet. Especially after Five Nights at Freddy's debuted. Only the biggest and AAA-list games could ever hope to break our fascination from games like FNaF or Undertale in the mid-2010s. These indie games I considered a worthy replacement for the old video game interests I had. I didn't play these indie games or have dreams of making my own, I just wasn't as bothered watching FNaF Let's Plays as I would be watching a Fire Emblem Let's Play. Which were rare anyway because it was all about indie games now. I didn't listen to video game prank phone calls anymore, but the videos of ICEnJAM had opened my ears up to the larger world of soundboard pranking, and that became a regular cope of mine, following the pranking careers of "Prank Phone Call YouTube."
Also on YouTube there were a lot more late night TV clips. Uploaded officially, by the shows themselves. There was a changing of the late night guard in 2015. No more Leno, now it's Jimmy Fallon. No more Jon Stewart, now it's Trevor Noah. No more David Letterman, now it's Stephen Colbert. No more Brian Williams, now he's sharing the desk with the pot-smoking MOGAIs of MSNBC. John Oliver had a show. Seth Meyers had a show. And what a time for them to take the stage. Throughout all the Bush years and... most of the Obama years, I don't remember Leno or Conan being as political as things started to get in 2015. And maybe this was a product of the times. In 2005, the idea of a gay couple was controversial enough to get an episode of "Postcards from Buster" pulled from air. In 2015? Not only is there no more "Don't Ask Don't Tell," not only is gay marriage the law of the land, but society needs more. Now arrives Caitlyn Jenner and the topic of transgenderedness enters the discussion. I forget when I saw it, but I remember seeing a clip of Real Time with Bill Maher where Maher was talking to Lewis Black. And to paraphrase from Maher as he racked his head over the whole transgender bathroom thing, "The gay thing, looking back, it was so much simpler, wasn't it? All they wanted to do was get married. Now we have this." It kinda actually flew in the face of gay advocacy. There's an example I think about a lot, this Chemstry.com ad from 2007.
www.newnownext.com
Some dude flips through a porn magazine for a while, and after looking through it he's like "Nope, still gay." Surprise surprise, it was exclusive to NBC. At least for a while. But it echoed one of the central arguments to the whole gay thing: "I am born this way, you cannot change me or convince me otherwise." Because people were like "Okay so you're a gay man, but what if I presented you with a super manly woman?" This commercial was echoing the response that no, you can try what you want, I'll never stop being gay. And in comes the 2010s like "Well actually you're transphobic because I'm signaling as hard as I can for the gender I identify as and you STILL won't have sex with me?" I replaced one frustration with another. Instead of debating whether or not Bayonetta is lewd, I was arguing in the Last Week Tonight comments sections about how if you don't want men in the women's bathroom, you cannot sign off on some "Anyone Can Go Into Whatever Bathroom They Want Bill." Thing about slippery slopes though? All of this came with the formal announcement of the candidacy of Donald Trump. And if you loved open bathrooms, for some reason you also hated Donald Trump. Who uses his power to walk into women's changing rooms. And so I'm like "You hate Donald Trump so much for going in that changing room? If you have things your way, he and I and every other creep will have our desire to walk in on changing women as a protected right!" But unlike with Bayonetta, I wasn't as alone in my frustration with the radical left. Opposition was rising, and opposition was looking popular. I wasn't really paying attention, but there was controversy brewing on Reddit surrounding then-CEO Ellen Pao. Taking the throne in 2015, she made sweeping changes to the culture of Reddit by banning subreddits she deemed "abusive." People railed against this as an infringement on free speech and overreach of liberal SJW virtuemongering. This was 2015, by the way, and r/incels was yet untouched. The benefit of keeping a low profile. But perhaps in 2015 r/incels could've used the allies, because there was still a strong presence of "Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean you should take it down." Then she fired Victoria Taylor, a beloved Reddit staffer. Which seemed pretty ironic considering all the pussyaching Pao made about treating female executives nicely. The site ground to a halt and several subreddits sat out in protest. A cluster of troubles with names like "The Fattening" and "AMAgeddon." The kinds of events that take Reddit from niche website to social hub. Also going on, maybe less so on Reddit but throughout the Internet? Gamergate was still raging. Which would have chilling effects for many people and places, particularly 4chan and its founder Moot. These times we lived in had made 4chan too hostile a place for him. So he resigned as owner of 4chan. Specifically because of Gamergate. 4chan was bought out by Hiroyuki Nishimura, owner and creator of 4chan's inspiration, 2channel. And like with Reddit, there was opposition and critique. Today we talk a lot about how Reddit is cucked and 4chan is cucked, but I think in the mid-2010s things like Gamergate and AMAgeddion were still an even fight. 2015 saw the coining of terms like "nu-male" and "soyboy" when it was okay to call people that without being called some kind of white nationalist. Terms arising out of critique of the new radical left. Times were still hard because the radical left existed, but you weren't part of the radical right if you dared to critique them. Not in 2015.
But politics weren't working for me. Anything else I can occupy my time with? I started to check back on the old haunts. Endless Online. Amazingly enough, there was news in 2015.
It's not up on the Endless Online website anymore, but here's the story: Owner and... let's say "operator" of Endless Online, Vult-r, lost access to the main Endless Online server. Because someone faked his identity and the server host believed the identity thief. Giving said thief access to the server and locking the real Vult-r out. And that's why it hasn't been updated. And he cannot update it, nor is he interested in buying a new server and starting fresh. He and wife(?) Aengie have moved on to Flash game websites as a business. So from then on to this day, Endless Online exists only in fan server form. I gave a few servers a look. I still check in on them now and then. Around Christmas, to see if there's snow in Aeven. I checked on JJ.AM. It was gone. Only it's SFW GIFs section lives on. Gaia Online was still around, I checked in on that from time to time. Like an old keepsake. You want it around... for the sake of keeping it. Not to really use at all, just for the security of knowing it's there.
As you can see I didn't have much. I felt stagnant. And I was still frustrated about my beloved lewds. yadda yadda yadda, I go to therapy.
What becomes clear is, I need some kind of a life. I'm lacking fulfillment. I don't have a normal social life or any friends. Pretty obvious, I didn't need her to tell me that. But what kind of a life do I want? What don't I like about my current life? I don't like that I'm in my 40s and that I have nothing. I was gonna have the video games thing. I really believed in a life based on that. Now I feel like I don't have enough to show for being as old as I am. I'm in my 40s and I have no friends, I haven't had memorable experiences that bond me with friends for life, I haven't had sex... oh there's another thing I did a lot. Read greentexts. About the social successes and failures of people on 4chan. And it was always someone either having a good time at a party, or embarassing themselves at a party. I could've gone to parties in college, if I only knew how. And was liked by people. And got invited to parties. I wanna achieve that /r9k/ dream of going to a party and losing my virginity to a girl I have a crush on. My psychiatrist tells me that there's nothing wrong with that dream and that I should pursue it even now. As well as other things. I need interests to relate to people with. That's a big thing I lacked. I didn't have much that I did for fun. I decided movies could be an interest. I didn't like them enough to write essays or talk about them on YouTube, but cinema was entering a new age of Internet discussion about movies. Between Reddit and Twitter, there were large communities that had real power, where you could go and talk about movies and if you wanted to be part of the discussion, you saw the movies at premiere so you weren't spoiled. Like how Harry Potter books used to be. Except now it's the new Star Wars movies. Speaking of which, Star Wars was big news. Big enough news that it brought back what Twitter calls the "hashflag." You know how on Twitter some hashtags get a little image next to them for a limited time? That's because someone paid money to brand that hashtag. Originally it was a temporary thing for the World Cup, but it was brought back for Star Wars. And now it's a permanent thing. It all felt exciting, and I wanted to be part of it. So I gave movies a shot. Movies are now my thing.
Talking about movies was never as enriching as talking about video games though. My psychiatrist wanted me to make friends through this interest of movies. But all I wanted to do was talk about movies in online communities. I did at least try it her way, I struck up conversations about movies with my co-workers, but it was all so boring. Not as much fun as talking about it on the Internet. And never as much fun as talking about games in the Internet in the 2000s. But I continued to see my psychiatrist into the next year. Picture this...
2016. You're walking past the smartphone retailer in your local university district. Except it's not called a smartphone retailer, now it's called a "Pokémon Center" because Nintendo did the thing they fought tooth and nail and made New Leaf to never do: Nintendo went mobile. And we don't call it "Team Fortress 2" anymore, we call it "Overwatch." And we don't call it "IRC" anymore, we call it "Discord." And we don't call him "Donald Trump" anymore, we call him "President Trump." We listen to slowed down music from the 80s on top of grainy VHS footage and call it "Vaporwave" and we love it because of how aesthetic it is. Filthy Frank and iDubbbz are geniuses. Pewdiepie is a hero. This is entertainment.
Somehow it all snuck up on you.
The Let's Play industry as I remember it died in 2016. It became more of a Twitch thing, and Twitch became more of an Alinity thing. If you wanted to see video games on YouTube, you either waited for something truly AAA, or you waited for someone to clip a Twitch compilation. No, YouTube was now for "dank memes." Seeing how many ways you could remix "We Are Number One" or the Game of War commercial featuring TheLegend27. I learned to love it as I continued my search for stuff to occupy my time. This was just what was on YouTube. A good Top Ten list also got me through the workday too. YouTube is one of the few sites that still isn't blocked at my job. It was in 2016, thanks to the YouTube listicles of horror channels that delve into creepy Dark Webby Internet mysteries, that I learned about r/incels. I didn't join, but as we do with IncelTears today I looked at some of the screenshots people were making fun of and was like "But that one's not problematic."
I started 2016 by deciding to lift. At first I wasn't really consistent with it. And am I really consistent with it today? But I started lifting because I wanted to work on pursuing my dreams like my psychiatrist suggested. I had to look attractive. Or at least younger. If I was gonna have the kind of sex I hoped to have. I had heard a rumor about Rutgers University. That there was rampant degeneracy there, hence they called is "Slutgers." And I knew that was the kind of place I needed to be. If I could go to Degeneracy College and be accepted by the degenerates, and have them pop my cherry, from that I could build some kind of social life. The plan was to go to Rutgers and audit a class. Just to be enrolled and go to the school and interact with classmates. But I had been to college before and went the whole stretch without getting laid. Suppose I do this, and it turns out they're not fucking as hard as their "Slutgers" name alludes. I had to ask around to see if there was any truth to the rumor. And I couldn't just go to Rutgers and ask. Fortunately(?) there was Reddit, which was really exploding in 2016 thanks to it being on the front lines of Internet sociopolitical debate. In this era of Donald Trump running for President. Reddit was the closest thing to a source I could find, they had a subreddit for just about everything. Including Rutgers. I went there, I asked, and they said "No we are not Slutgers." Which sounds like something someone would say about their slutty college if they didn't want the word getting out that it was a degenerate college for sluts and you should definitely not hire students from here. Or something a virgin blissfully unaware of the party scene/Greek life would say. I started to wonder if maybe Reddit was the proper target audience, as it was earning a big reputation with me as a place for nerds. Just about everyone on that subreddit, and every other college subreddit I found, was some kind of Comp Sci major. And we can't all be Comp Sci majors... can we? I needed to know where the cool kids congregated. I didn't know if they even used the Internet, I was still not that educated about things like Instagram or Snapchat. But I had seen pictures of parties from college. So I knew they were happening. But where? And how do I get into them? The question I had been wondering at since my 20s.
My psychiatrist said that there are parties you don't have to go to college for. Just make friends with people in social situations and connect over shared interests. But in 2016 the closest thing to an interest I had was movies. And the Gamergate/Trump Meme Magic Age had left its mark. In 2005 if you questioned if a character was a Mary Sue, it was a fair and necessary discussion to have. In 2015 if you question if a character is a Mary Sue, it's because you don't like the idea of capable female characters. According to websites like... The Mary Sue. And the cinematic universe wars? Well, actually I did kinda like those. Because Marvel had done such good work with their Cinematic Universe, and then the trailer for Batman v Superman dropped, and the thinking was "Oh my God, they're gonna do for Darkseid was Marvel did for Thanos" and naysayers were like "No way, DC is jumping the gun, they haven't been in the game long enough to compete with Marvel" and the cope was on. As we fantasized about what Batman v Superman would be. Also? People were saying the same about Universal's Dark Universe. So I was there to defend that cinematic universe too. It did feel good to be getting in on the ground floor of a new cinematic universe fandom. But still, unlike video games in the 2000s, I didn't know a way to consummate that fandom. Other than watching the movies and talking about them on Reddit. What was I supposed to do? Draw fanart? People did draw fanart, but it was quickly forgotten. Maybe I should've been a YouTube critic. But... I just didn't love the movies enough to talk about them like that. What I also didn't love enough to critique, but would settle for online discussion? Netflix. In 2016 it had Stranger Things and Black Mirror. I had been wanting to watch Black Mirror ever since I heard about "White Christmas." And people were talking about Stranger Things like it was the second coming of Jesus so I had to see that. Was this enough to replace cord TV? I dunno. But then again, was I watching anything on cord TV? I wasn't.
I could've connected with someone over Stranger Things, maybe? But here's the thing: I don't wanna fuck anybody who likes Stranger Things. Or Black Mirror. Or Batman v Superman. I'll talk to you about it on Reddit, or Discord, but as a sexual partner you don't interest me. I explained to my psychiatrist that I need fun in my life. As in, sexually degenerate fun. The people I'm meeting nowadays, they're boring. I wanna party. So in the following year, she suggests I try Hash House Harriers. The worst possible year to try Hash House Harriers. Picture this...
2017. You're glued to this YouTube stream of a giraffe named April, waiting for her to give birth.
Day after day. Looks like nothing's happening today. Alright, what else is on YouTube? Compilations of funny Tweets and Tumblr posts? Bass boosted clips from video games? Bass boosted Vines? Maybe keep streaming while you go on r/DC_Cinematic and save some more face on behalf of all who were talking shit about how great Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad were gonna be. They better hurry up with this Darkseid movie or whatever the plan is.
You know a subreddit I would never post on today? r/AskWomen. Because my post would be immediately deleted. But prior to 2017, as late in the game as 2016, I did post on AskWomen. And I didn't get modded or anything. They were open and receptive of my manhood. That changed in 2017. I think 2017 was the end of the "even fight" and the beginning of the "cuckedness" that we know Reddit and a lot of other places on the Internet for. Why? Because Trump won. Back when he was a joke, if you were to be like "Something something free speech" you could still be respected for saying it. Because you sounded rational. And yeah your views are conservative but that doesn't make you a Trump voter! But then Trump won, and people were like "Oh my God, see what happens when we listen to people with different opinions than ours? No more of this." The cuckedness that Reddit is known for today, I don't think that's a product of the principles it was founded on. I think it came from witnessing the rise of Trump support and Reddit becoming a focal point for people who truly believed in him on r/The_Donald. People were realizing non-liberals exist and are on our forums and subreddits, so best to dig in now because look at what those non-liberals did! It's those non-liberals that create a haven for people like Harvey Weinstein! 2017 was the reaction to all the ills that progressives perceived in the world. White, male evils. I think it was all the political attention Reddit got in 2014-2016 that made it the popular place it is today. For instance, AskReddit vs. Yahoo! Answers. A rivalry that's been going on since the start of the decade with Yahoo! Answers being the old fool of the two. The place where "How is babby formed" comes from. Not a place for intellectuals like Reddit. But that was still very much up for debate. Only by the start of 2017 were we so unanimous that AskReddit had replaced Yahoo! Answers. Answers wasn't just dumber or less useful, it was irrelevant.
And from then on, when anyone ever talked about Yahoo! Answers, it was in the context of it being some ancient forgotten concept that walked to AskReddit could run. 2017 was the year ResetEra spun off from NeoGAF. ResetEra wasn't just a spinoff founded on a principle of "No sexual harassment." It didn't just stand against things. It stood FOR things. And that's the difference. It stood and continues to stand for what it feels the world was lacking, that should've stopped Trump from being elected. When I look at ResetEra, I reflect on the NeoGAF I used to know. The one that I arguably joined late, but was much different than whatever ResetEra is. In 2014 there was no room in the hearts of gamers for Anita Sarkeesian. But one Gamergate later and ResetEra is born. Where I believe Sarkeesian would be welcome. Where her ideas of female developers and a lack of accomodation for women would be considered.
Which brings me to what made 2017 such a bad time to be a Hash House Harrier. The reputation at least, for Hash House Harriers, is that everyone loves drunken sex and impropriety. Which is all bravado anyway and you'd know that if you ever went to a gathering. But as much of a joke for pretend this was, the time for even joking about this had passed in 2017. Female Hash House Harriers, I forget what the name is and fuck them I'm not wasting the effort looking it up, were now voicing complaints about being approached by male Hash House Harriers, whatever those are called, fuck them. And so across the Hash Houses people were told to basically just kinda cool it down. Which is the worst kind of advice to give. Vague advice. Just fuckin' tell me what to not do and say. But then that's the biggest flaw of this #MeToo Era. There is no rubric for what does and doesn't count as harassment because the rights of the accused don't matter. What matters is that people feel comfortable. So if someone is made uncomfortable by you, whatever you did, you're at fault even though you had no way of knowing what that random person's boundaries were. But even if we hadn't been given that instruction, it wasn't as ribald a scene as I was led to believe it was. You meet at a bar, you fill the place up, and you just sit around talking and drinking and sometimes playing games. You could have just as much fun on a random Eventbrite bar crawl. But for this shit I had to ride out of the city to sign up.
It became clear that what I was mostly doing was self-improvement and being social. I didn't need a psychiatrist to help me do those things. So eventually, I cut her off. It was understood, I just didn't have anything more to talk to her about. But I was still lonely. Not sad lonely, but determined to come up with a plan to not be lonely. And I needed a place to talk to people about that. Not a psychiatrist, or at least not that psychiatrist. I could brainstorm ideas about where to meet people with anyone. And so I did. Picture this...
2018. Among the lost souls of r/ForeverAlone is where you call home now. You don't hang out on the DC Cinematic subreddit, you got tired of the bullshit. And you don't hang out on r/DarkUniverse either, it's too sad. To see what few people so dedicated as to still hang around be dealt the harsh truth that all of their own big talk about the future of their new fandom turned out to be empty also. You don't spend much time talking about your own problems, just sympathizing with others in need. Until one day a man name of Alek Minassian commits the unthinkable. And because Reddit currently lives in a "Dont' listen to the people who wanna keep their subreddits they're just extremists who voted for Trump"-ocracy, Forever Alone does damage control and disavows Minassian and those they deem "incels." You've been thinking about this on and off ever since you learned what an incel was. And now you've got the opportunity to voice your thoughts on this.
People didn't really see it my way though. Don't let le Reddit Gold fool you, it's just that people on Forever Alone are really nonconfrontational. You have to wait for them to voice their opinions unprompted, and when they do it's usually "Fuck them incels. It's okay for me to be suicidal because I'm messed up in the head, but it's not okay to write angry things on the Internet no matter how messed up in the head you are." This was too hypocritical for me to ignore. I had to... not just leave, but go where I was needed. If this was the hypocrisy that was prevailing, I needed to fight that hypocrisy and I couldn't fight it on Forever Alone. I had to go to where incels themselves were being confronted: On the incel refuge. Incels.me/is/co. The big goal was to, as an incel, be contacted by the opinion-shaping press and late night talk show pundits, so that I can be one of the voices for incels where a voice is lacking.
I was surprised to see that there was an Off Topic section because I assumed most incels were too mired in the misery of their situation to enjoy hobbies. Then I wasn't surprised to learn it isn't really filled with discussion of hobbies. Because most incels are too mired in the misery of their situation to enjoy hobbies. And that's the way it was for me. Except unlike most incels, I had the agepill to chase my sorrows as well. It wasn't just that I was too incel for today's copes, I was too old. Smash Bros, something I used to love. 2018 saw the news of a new Smash Bros. game. Now, here's a comparison of memes from the Smash 4 Wii U days vs. a comparison of memes from the Smash Ultimate.
By 2018 I've lost all grasp. That bizarre, ironic(?) "dankness" has set in entirely and it's too far along for me to understand at this point. The community, I wouldn't belong. So now I can't go back to Smash. Not like I had been during Smash 4 Wii U (which wasn't much) and definitely not like I had in the Brawl Era. In 2008 it was SigurdHosenfeld being reposted on GameFAQs. Now? It's Diives and his Inkling animations behind a Patreon pay wall. I didn't miss Smash. Not the games, not the community. Especially not with this Bowsette meme taking off. I'd rather stay on Incels.forum. All of my old world has outgrown me now. It's time for new things.
And so I continued to search for them. Until the current year. Picture this...
2019. Since joining the incel community you've seen about half the people you've ever talked to get banned. Not just on Incels.whatever, but on its sister forum, Looksmax. You hope you last at least one more year, as you begin chronicling...
And the rest is in this thread.
So, what did my dad want me to figure out from all this past-authoring? I guess... for as long as I can remember I've been trying to live in a fantasy world. The world of my toys, the world of my waifus, the world of the video games me and my friends were gonna make, anime world, furry world, Smash world, etc. And there was so much that I hoped to do that I just never did. I'd like to say it's because I stopped liking it like with video games, but why didn't I achieve those things before the 2010s, when I started having all the debates about video games and whether or not something is a parody and it doesn't count? I realize now: I am the Knight of Pentacles that my Mother's Day spread revealed so long ago. I'm slow to act. Maybe because I'm lazy. Maybe because I'm soooooo careful I don't wanna make a move until I'm sure. Maybe I lack the resources. Whatever it is, my problem is that I don't "do" things. Not fast enough, and often not at all. This journal was supposed to be full of some kind of journey. I didn't go on a journey this year. I went to South Padre, but I didn't achieve anything. I didn't grow or learn. Well, I learned how to waste a trip to South Padre. My stove! My stove is still broken! I meant to replace it in time for "oven weather" but I was like "Nah, I don't feel like it. It's not 'oven weather' right now, so I won't. Probably not even smart to do it, probably smarter to save my money." I'm full of excuses like that.
But in my defense, I do try things. And it's that experience that informs my choices in the future. I tried things at my psychiatrist's behest. And none of them took. So I think those experiences tell me a little about what I do and don't like, right? So what do I like? I was supposed to uncover what would fulfill me. But see, that's the thing. I didn't lose sight of my dreams, they just became unappealing to me. Maybe if I had achieved them on time I'd be happy with what I had achieved today. But what good does this foray do me now?
I don't have... anything I really enjoy. There's a thing I've learned. I'd like to find a thing to enjoy that leads me to people having fun. That's what I'll try to do tonight. The streets should still be flooded with drunken revelers right now. Everyone should be good and loose. I'll go out tonight, and I'll ask everyone there where they met their friends and what they do with their friends. That way I'll learn how to meet the kinds of people who go to New Year's Eve parties and stuff. The kind that have reason to buy liquor and condoms together. I'll report back with my findings, if I can stay awake when I get back.
New Year's Eve. I had to stop by Wal-Mart yesterday to pick up some stuff to drink. Non-alcoholic because I'm a pussy baby. At my local Wal-Mart they mix the wines with the non-alcoholic sparkling ciders and grape juices. But you know what else they put over there? Condoms. Because Wal-Mart knows that wine and sex mix.https://incels.is/threads/went-to-get-some-new-years-eve-stuff-from-wal-mart.167766/
The end of the year. But also? The end of the decade. The 2010s, man. I saw this video a while back that said the 2010s have no feel. That nothing defines them.
And for a while I used to agree with that. But doing this reflecting/past-authoring has made me realize, that's WAY off. The 2010s definitely have a definition. If a "definition" is whatever nostalgia people will try to capitalize on. If 80s nostalgia = Stranger Things, 2010s nostalgia will be dabbing and hoverboards and Fortnite and Pewdiepie and reaction memes and Stan Twitter and Blue Checkmarks of Social Justice. Zoomer stuff.
The upside to this is, each decade has its own feel. 10 years is the cap, after 10 years of things being one way, they usually change somehow. So I'll be glad to see the 2010s go. Arguably the low period of my life so far. So low, I actually went to therapy in the 2010s. Picture this...
2015. You're shitposting on Town of Salem and you've got 5.349 trillion Cookie Clicker cookies in another tab.
It's the best you can find in your long, wandering quest for something to distract you from the exasperation you feel for the world. You don't have much else. When you see it, in the Last Will of one of the Townies: RIP Satoru Iwata December 6th 1959 – July 11th 2015. You look into it. Indeed he is dead. Bile duct cancer. The industry and community turn out in droves to pay their respects. Your first thought? Good. You're glad he's dead. You'll take his death, somehow, as payment for the localization practices he signed off on as Nintendo CEO. A lot of lewd games not only made it onto Nintendo hardware on his watch, but made it overseas. He refused to accept that these games were lewd, and that lewds are not for the mainstream market. They're for importing from Japan because God help you if you see lewds at Best Buy, where an actual person in America has to process your purchase for you. You choose to see this as him being punished for his refusal to understand this.
But then you think, that's kinda fucked up, isn't it? That you're reveling in someone's death like this? And on top of that inferring some imaginary retribution out of it? Iwata wasn't "killed" for any rule he broke. The cancer gods don't care about your hangups. Something's wrong with you. It's time you got yourself looked at. It's time you saw a psychiatrist.
Speaking of going crazy, if you need more evidence that the 2010s sucked, look at Shia LaBeouf. This was the decade he went crazy. In the 2000s he was funny and exciting. Even when he got out of kiddy show business at Disney he was a joy to behold in the Transformers films. And Surf's Up. And Indiana Jones. And Disturbia. One of the risingest stars of the decade, Hollywood's go-to man when they needed someone boyish and plucky and kinda awkward. Then come the 2010s he decided he was gonna be a serious actor and also a director. I guess to make up for how bad the Transformers movies were. When Nymphomaniac came around, LaBeouf was all too proud to announce how far he was willing to commit to the role. "I'll get naked for real! I have a small dick but I want people to see it! I want people to see a REAL man's dick!!! I'll have real sex! This is gonna be a SERIOUS movie with REAL sex in it! I don't care if I'm dating Karolyn Pho right now, I'll have ACTUAL sex with my co-stars so they can put it IN THE MOVIE!" He cut himself and pulled his tooth in Fury, he stole the idea for Howard Cantour.com from Dan Clowes, and of course there was "I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE." Arrogantly I kinda compare myself to LaBeouf. Because we both have small dicks. But also, how he just kinda had this breakdown and threw his old life, around the same time I had a breakdown and threw my old life away. For a while he was seen as a pretentious weirdo. But by 2015, LaBeouf was kinda lovable again thanks to #INTRODUCTIONS and the "Just Do It" meme. And if he can tackle life changes like that and come out on top, why not me?
So I went to therapy. But first lemme talk about what I did before I went to therapy. When I was dealing with post-gamerism on my own. To have all that taken away from you is like getting your arm ripped off. It doesn't just take something from you. It doesn't just leave you with nothing. In taking from you, it gives you something. It gives you pain. And that's what I had after I "gave up" the video game thing. I didn't sit around with nothing to do because I didn't like video games anymore, I acted on the hate I now had for the video game industry and community. I went around e-mailing video game reviewers. Specifically, reviewers that had reviewed both Bayonetta and other less fun games like Dead or Alive. So I could dig up their rants about how Dead or Alive is creepy and voyeuristic, and ask them why they didn't say as much about Bayonetta. Why they weren't honest and brave like Arthur Gies. And I knew the odds of me getting a response were low, I was sending these by e-mail where they would almost certainly sit at the bottom of a stack of more important e-mails. So I went for quantity and contacted as many as I could. Every day I looked for new publications, checked what they had to say about the games of interest, and layed on 'em a wall of text that makes Year of the Pig look like steel slats. Of the many e-mails I sent out, I only got one response back. I forget the name of the publication and I can't be bothered to sign into my old inbox, but the gist of their response was "Yeah you're right, porn + quality writing/gameplay doesn't make it not porn. But porn doesn't usually have quality writing or gameplay. So when it does, we can't help but ignore the lewd aspects." Which is what I thought. People give Bayonetta a pass because her games are good. I guess deep down I wanted to know that I wasn't crazy. So hearing this from this one publication confirmed my bias enough that my rage died down just a little bit. I started to not care about the issue as much. But certain neuroses stayed with me. As a result of me desperately trying to put my triggers out of my mind. To this day I still don't eat strawberries, or anything strawberry flavored. Why? Because I don't like the yuri anime Strawberry Panic. It's not for me, it's for lesbians. So if Strawberry Panic isn't for me, I'm not for Strawberry Panic. I'm moving away from all things strawberry. It's not even an act of deliberate spite anymore. Nowadays I just automatically reject strawberry flavored food products. As a subsconscious reflex. Maybe I should've asked my psychiatrist to fix that.
I wanted to do more than talk about what I didn't like though. I needed to find some things I enjoyed. I mentioned in the last entry how I hoped to find porn made by people who weren't afraid to own up to the fact that what they were making was porn. Who wouldn't try to attract non-porn audiences or ask people to look past the porn to something else. I went looking around for that. My porn savior. By 2015 there was a lot of "amateur porn" out there. By which I mean, 2D porn drawn by amateurs. Stuff that I would've called "fanart" 10 years ago and not wasted my time on. But by 2015 people were making businesses out of this. Thanks to Patreon. I went looking around and found a guy named Fenoxo. He had these text based furry porn browser games that were being passed around in this new age of furrydom. I was all too eager to project a savior onto him. But a few conversations with him and the rest of his fanbase in IRC were enough to turn me off. 2D porn wasn't doing it for me much anymore. So I stuck to what 3D porn I could find. Sadly by 2015, it was drying up. The names I had grown accustomed to? By 2015 they were out of the business. And my sex drive was failing anyway so I kinda dialed it back with porn in general. Now was the time to watch other videos. Videos on YouTube. Which I hadn't really gotten much of a look at outside of the interests I had in the 2000s. Like I said about 2014, I really started to see the state of Let's Plays evolve. "Real games" weren't the focus anymore. It was about indie games and other weird little finds on the Internet. Especially after Five Nights at Freddy's debuted. Only the biggest and AAA-list games could ever hope to break our fascination from games like FNaF or Undertale in the mid-2010s. These indie games I considered a worthy replacement for the old video game interests I had. I didn't play these indie games or have dreams of making my own, I just wasn't as bothered watching FNaF Let's Plays as I would be watching a Fire Emblem Let's Play. Which were rare anyway because it was all about indie games now. I didn't listen to video game prank phone calls anymore, but the videos of ICEnJAM had opened my ears up to the larger world of soundboard pranking, and that became a regular cope of mine, following the pranking careers of "Prank Phone Call YouTube."
Also on YouTube there were a lot more late night TV clips. Uploaded officially, by the shows themselves. There was a changing of the late night guard in 2015. No more Leno, now it's Jimmy Fallon. No more Jon Stewart, now it's Trevor Noah. No more David Letterman, now it's Stephen Colbert. No more Brian Williams, now he's sharing the desk with the pot-smoking MOGAIs of MSNBC. John Oliver had a show. Seth Meyers had a show. And what a time for them to take the stage. Throughout all the Bush years and... most of the Obama years, I don't remember Leno or Conan being as political as things started to get in 2015. And maybe this was a product of the times. In 2005, the idea of a gay couple was controversial enough to get an episode of "Postcards from Buster" pulled from air. In 2015? Not only is there no more "Don't Ask Don't Tell," not only is gay marriage the law of the land, but society needs more. Now arrives Caitlyn Jenner and the topic of transgenderedness enters the discussion. I forget when I saw it, but I remember seeing a clip of Real Time with Bill Maher where Maher was talking to Lewis Black. And to paraphrase from Maher as he racked his head over the whole transgender bathroom thing, "The gay thing, looking back, it was so much simpler, wasn't it? All they wanted to do was get married. Now we have this." It kinda actually flew in the face of gay advocacy. There's an example I think about a lot, this Chemstry.com ad from 2007.
Logo
Logo is a leading entertainment brand inspired by and for the LGBTQ+ community and reflects the creative class across television, digital and social platform...
Some dude flips through a porn magazine for a while, and after looking through it he's like "Nope, still gay." Surprise surprise, it was exclusive to NBC. At least for a while. But it echoed one of the central arguments to the whole gay thing: "I am born this way, you cannot change me or convince me otherwise." Because people were like "Okay so you're a gay man, but what if I presented you with a super manly woman?" This commercial was echoing the response that no, you can try what you want, I'll never stop being gay. And in comes the 2010s like "Well actually you're transphobic because I'm signaling as hard as I can for the gender I identify as and you STILL won't have sex with me?" I replaced one frustration with another. Instead of debating whether or not Bayonetta is lewd, I was arguing in the Last Week Tonight comments sections about how if you don't want men in the women's bathroom, you cannot sign off on some "Anyone Can Go Into Whatever Bathroom They Want Bill." Thing about slippery slopes though? All of this came with the formal announcement of the candidacy of Donald Trump. And if you loved open bathrooms, for some reason you also hated Donald Trump. Who uses his power to walk into women's changing rooms. And so I'm like "You hate Donald Trump so much for going in that changing room? If you have things your way, he and I and every other creep will have our desire to walk in on changing women as a protected right!" But unlike with Bayonetta, I wasn't as alone in my frustration with the radical left. Opposition was rising, and opposition was looking popular. I wasn't really paying attention, but there was controversy brewing on Reddit surrounding then-CEO Ellen Pao. Taking the throne in 2015, she made sweeping changes to the culture of Reddit by banning subreddits she deemed "abusive." People railed against this as an infringement on free speech and overreach of liberal SJW virtuemongering. This was 2015, by the way, and r/incels was yet untouched. The benefit of keeping a low profile. But perhaps in 2015 r/incels could've used the allies, because there was still a strong presence of "Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean you should take it down." Then she fired Victoria Taylor, a beloved Reddit staffer. Which seemed pretty ironic considering all the pussyaching Pao made about treating female executives nicely. The site ground to a halt and several subreddits sat out in protest. A cluster of troubles with names like "The Fattening" and "AMAgeddon." The kinds of events that take Reddit from niche website to social hub. Also going on, maybe less so on Reddit but throughout the Internet? Gamergate was still raging. Which would have chilling effects for many people and places, particularly 4chan and its founder Moot. These times we lived in had made 4chan too hostile a place for him. So he resigned as owner of 4chan. Specifically because of Gamergate. 4chan was bought out by Hiroyuki Nishimura, owner and creator of 4chan's inspiration, 2channel. And like with Reddit, there was opposition and critique. Today we talk a lot about how Reddit is cucked and 4chan is cucked, but I think in the mid-2010s things like Gamergate and AMAgeddion were still an even fight. 2015 saw the coining of terms like "nu-male" and "soyboy" when it was okay to call people that without being called some kind of white nationalist. Terms arising out of critique of the new radical left. Times were still hard because the radical left existed, but you weren't part of the radical right if you dared to critique them. Not in 2015.
But politics weren't working for me. Anything else I can occupy my time with? I started to check back on the old haunts. Endless Online. Amazingly enough, there was news in 2015.
It's not up on the Endless Online website anymore, but here's the story: Owner and... let's say "operator" of Endless Online, Vult-r, lost access to the main Endless Online server. Because someone faked his identity and the server host believed the identity thief. Giving said thief access to the server and locking the real Vult-r out. And that's why it hasn't been updated. And he cannot update it, nor is he interested in buying a new server and starting fresh. He and wife(?) Aengie have moved on to Flash game websites as a business. So from then on to this day, Endless Online exists only in fan server form. I gave a few servers a look. I still check in on them now and then. Around Christmas, to see if there's snow in Aeven. I checked on JJ.AM. It was gone. Only it's SFW GIFs section lives on. Gaia Online was still around, I checked in on that from time to time. Like an old keepsake. You want it around... for the sake of keeping it. Not to really use at all, just for the security of knowing it's there.
As you can see I didn't have much. I felt stagnant. And I was still frustrated about my beloved lewds. yadda yadda yadda, I go to therapy.
What becomes clear is, I need some kind of a life. I'm lacking fulfillment. I don't have a normal social life or any friends. Pretty obvious, I didn't need her to tell me that. But what kind of a life do I want? What don't I like about my current life? I don't like that I'm in my 40s and that I have nothing. I was gonna have the video games thing. I really believed in a life based on that. Now I feel like I don't have enough to show for being as old as I am. I'm in my 40s and I have no friends, I haven't had memorable experiences that bond me with friends for life, I haven't had sex... oh there's another thing I did a lot. Read greentexts. About the social successes and failures of people on 4chan. And it was always someone either having a good time at a party, or embarassing themselves at a party. I could've gone to parties in college, if I only knew how. And was liked by people. And got invited to parties. I wanna achieve that /r9k/ dream of going to a party and losing my virginity to a girl I have a crush on. My psychiatrist tells me that there's nothing wrong with that dream and that I should pursue it even now. As well as other things. I need interests to relate to people with. That's a big thing I lacked. I didn't have much that I did for fun. I decided movies could be an interest. I didn't like them enough to write essays or talk about them on YouTube, but cinema was entering a new age of Internet discussion about movies. Between Reddit and Twitter, there were large communities that had real power, where you could go and talk about movies and if you wanted to be part of the discussion, you saw the movies at premiere so you weren't spoiled. Like how Harry Potter books used to be. Except now it's the new Star Wars movies. Speaking of which, Star Wars was big news. Big enough news that it brought back what Twitter calls the "hashflag." You know how on Twitter some hashtags get a little image next to them for a limited time? That's because someone paid money to brand that hashtag. Originally it was a temporary thing for the World Cup, but it was brought back for Star Wars. And now it's a permanent thing. It all felt exciting, and I wanted to be part of it. So I gave movies a shot. Movies are now my thing.
Talking about movies was never as enriching as talking about video games though. My psychiatrist wanted me to make friends through this interest of movies. But all I wanted to do was talk about movies in online communities. I did at least try it her way, I struck up conversations about movies with my co-workers, but it was all so boring. Not as much fun as talking about it on the Internet. And never as much fun as talking about games in the Internet in the 2000s. But I continued to see my psychiatrist into the next year. Picture this...
2016. You're walking past the smartphone retailer in your local university district. Except it's not called a smartphone retailer, now it's called a "Pokémon Center" because Nintendo did the thing they fought tooth and nail and made New Leaf to never do: Nintendo went mobile. And we don't call it "Team Fortress 2" anymore, we call it "Overwatch." And we don't call it "IRC" anymore, we call it "Discord." And we don't call him "Donald Trump" anymore, we call him "President Trump." We listen to slowed down music from the 80s on top of grainy VHS footage and call it "Vaporwave" and we love it because of how aesthetic it is. Filthy Frank and iDubbbz are geniuses. Pewdiepie is a hero. This is entertainment.
Somehow it all snuck up on you.
The Let's Play industry as I remember it died in 2016. It became more of a Twitch thing, and Twitch became more of an Alinity thing. If you wanted to see video games on YouTube, you either waited for something truly AAA, or you waited for someone to clip a Twitch compilation. No, YouTube was now for "dank memes." Seeing how many ways you could remix "We Are Number One" or the Game of War commercial featuring TheLegend27. I learned to love it as I continued my search for stuff to occupy my time. This was just what was on YouTube. A good Top Ten list also got me through the workday too. YouTube is one of the few sites that still isn't blocked at my job. It was in 2016, thanks to the YouTube listicles of horror channels that delve into creepy Dark Webby Internet mysteries, that I learned about r/incels. I didn't join, but as we do with IncelTears today I looked at some of the screenshots people were making fun of and was like "But that one's not problematic."
I started 2016 by deciding to lift. At first I wasn't really consistent with it. And am I really consistent with it today? But I started lifting because I wanted to work on pursuing my dreams like my psychiatrist suggested. I had to look attractive. Or at least younger. If I was gonna have the kind of sex I hoped to have. I had heard a rumor about Rutgers University. That there was rampant degeneracy there, hence they called is "Slutgers." And I knew that was the kind of place I needed to be. If I could go to Degeneracy College and be accepted by the degenerates, and have them pop my cherry, from that I could build some kind of social life. The plan was to go to Rutgers and audit a class. Just to be enrolled and go to the school and interact with classmates. But I had been to college before and went the whole stretch without getting laid. Suppose I do this, and it turns out they're not fucking as hard as their "Slutgers" name alludes. I had to ask around to see if there was any truth to the rumor. And I couldn't just go to Rutgers and ask. Fortunately(?) there was Reddit, which was really exploding in 2016 thanks to it being on the front lines of Internet sociopolitical debate. In this era of Donald Trump running for President. Reddit was the closest thing to a source I could find, they had a subreddit for just about everything. Including Rutgers. I went there, I asked, and they said "No we are not Slutgers." Which sounds like something someone would say about their slutty college if they didn't want the word getting out that it was a degenerate college for sluts and you should definitely not hire students from here. Or something a virgin blissfully unaware of the party scene/Greek life would say. I started to wonder if maybe Reddit was the proper target audience, as it was earning a big reputation with me as a place for nerds. Just about everyone on that subreddit, and every other college subreddit I found, was some kind of Comp Sci major. And we can't all be Comp Sci majors... can we? I needed to know where the cool kids congregated. I didn't know if they even used the Internet, I was still not that educated about things like Instagram or Snapchat. But I had seen pictures of parties from college. So I knew they were happening. But where? And how do I get into them? The question I had been wondering at since my 20s.
My psychiatrist said that there are parties you don't have to go to college for. Just make friends with people in social situations and connect over shared interests. But in 2016 the closest thing to an interest I had was movies. And the Gamergate/Trump Meme Magic Age had left its mark. In 2005 if you questioned if a character was a Mary Sue, it was a fair and necessary discussion to have. In 2015 if you question if a character is a Mary Sue, it's because you don't like the idea of capable female characters. According to websites like... The Mary Sue. And the cinematic universe wars? Well, actually I did kinda like those. Because Marvel had done such good work with their Cinematic Universe, and then the trailer for Batman v Superman dropped, and the thinking was "Oh my God, they're gonna do for Darkseid was Marvel did for Thanos" and naysayers were like "No way, DC is jumping the gun, they haven't been in the game long enough to compete with Marvel" and the cope was on. As we fantasized about what Batman v Superman would be. Also? People were saying the same about Universal's Dark Universe. So I was there to defend that cinematic universe too. It did feel good to be getting in on the ground floor of a new cinematic universe fandom. But still, unlike video games in the 2000s, I didn't know a way to consummate that fandom. Other than watching the movies and talking about them on Reddit. What was I supposed to do? Draw fanart? People did draw fanart, but it was quickly forgotten. Maybe I should've been a YouTube critic. But... I just didn't love the movies enough to talk about them like that. What I also didn't love enough to critique, but would settle for online discussion? Netflix. In 2016 it had Stranger Things and Black Mirror. I had been wanting to watch Black Mirror ever since I heard about "White Christmas." And people were talking about Stranger Things like it was the second coming of Jesus so I had to see that. Was this enough to replace cord TV? I dunno. But then again, was I watching anything on cord TV? I wasn't.
I could've connected with someone over Stranger Things, maybe? But here's the thing: I don't wanna fuck anybody who likes Stranger Things. Or Black Mirror. Or Batman v Superman. I'll talk to you about it on Reddit, or Discord, but as a sexual partner you don't interest me. I explained to my psychiatrist that I need fun in my life. As in, sexually degenerate fun. The people I'm meeting nowadays, they're boring. I wanna party. So in the following year, she suggests I try Hash House Harriers. The worst possible year to try Hash House Harriers. Picture this...
2017. You're glued to this YouTube stream of a giraffe named April, waiting for her to give birth.
Day after day. Looks like nothing's happening today. Alright, what else is on YouTube? Compilations of funny Tweets and Tumblr posts? Bass boosted clips from video games? Bass boosted Vines? Maybe keep streaming while you go on r/DC_Cinematic and save some more face on behalf of all who were talking shit about how great Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad were gonna be. They better hurry up with this Darkseid movie or whatever the plan is.
You know a subreddit I would never post on today? r/AskWomen. Because my post would be immediately deleted. But prior to 2017, as late in the game as 2016, I did post on AskWomen. And I didn't get modded or anything. They were open and receptive of my manhood. That changed in 2017. I think 2017 was the end of the "even fight" and the beginning of the "cuckedness" that we know Reddit and a lot of other places on the Internet for. Why? Because Trump won. Back when he was a joke, if you were to be like "Something something free speech" you could still be respected for saying it. Because you sounded rational. And yeah your views are conservative but that doesn't make you a Trump voter! But then Trump won, and people were like "Oh my God, see what happens when we listen to people with different opinions than ours? No more of this." The cuckedness that Reddit is known for today, I don't think that's a product of the principles it was founded on. I think it came from witnessing the rise of Trump support and Reddit becoming a focal point for people who truly believed in him on r/The_Donald. People were realizing non-liberals exist and are on our forums and subreddits, so best to dig in now because look at what those non-liberals did! It's those non-liberals that create a haven for people like Harvey Weinstein! 2017 was the reaction to all the ills that progressives perceived in the world. White, male evils. I think it was all the political attention Reddit got in 2014-2016 that made it the popular place it is today. For instance, AskReddit vs. Yahoo! Answers. A rivalry that's been going on since the start of the decade with Yahoo! Answers being the old fool of the two. The place where "How is babby formed" comes from. Not a place for intellectuals like Reddit. But that was still very much up for debate. Only by the start of 2017 were we so unanimous that AskReddit had replaced Yahoo! Answers. Answers wasn't just dumber or less useful, it was irrelevant.
And from then on, when anyone ever talked about Yahoo! Answers, it was in the context of it being some ancient forgotten concept that walked to AskReddit could run. 2017 was the year ResetEra spun off from NeoGAF. ResetEra wasn't just a spinoff founded on a principle of "No sexual harassment." It didn't just stand against things. It stood FOR things. And that's the difference. It stood and continues to stand for what it feels the world was lacking, that should've stopped Trump from being elected. When I look at ResetEra, I reflect on the NeoGAF I used to know. The one that I arguably joined late, but was much different than whatever ResetEra is. In 2014 there was no room in the hearts of gamers for Anita Sarkeesian. But one Gamergate later and ResetEra is born. Where I believe Sarkeesian would be welcome. Where her ideas of female developers and a lack of accomodation for women would be considered.
Which brings me to what made 2017 such a bad time to be a Hash House Harrier. The reputation at least, for Hash House Harriers, is that everyone loves drunken sex and impropriety. Which is all bravado anyway and you'd know that if you ever went to a gathering. But as much of a joke for pretend this was, the time for even joking about this had passed in 2017. Female Hash House Harriers, I forget what the name is and fuck them I'm not wasting the effort looking it up, were now voicing complaints about being approached by male Hash House Harriers, whatever those are called, fuck them. And so across the Hash Houses people were told to basically just kinda cool it down. Which is the worst kind of advice to give. Vague advice. Just fuckin' tell me what to not do and say. But then that's the biggest flaw of this #MeToo Era. There is no rubric for what does and doesn't count as harassment because the rights of the accused don't matter. What matters is that people feel comfortable. So if someone is made uncomfortable by you, whatever you did, you're at fault even though you had no way of knowing what that random person's boundaries were. But even if we hadn't been given that instruction, it wasn't as ribald a scene as I was led to believe it was. You meet at a bar, you fill the place up, and you just sit around talking and drinking and sometimes playing games. You could have just as much fun on a random Eventbrite bar crawl. But for this shit I had to ride out of the city to sign up.
It became clear that what I was mostly doing was self-improvement and being social. I didn't need a psychiatrist to help me do those things. So eventually, I cut her off. It was understood, I just didn't have anything more to talk to her about. But I was still lonely. Not sad lonely, but determined to come up with a plan to not be lonely. And I needed a place to talk to people about that. Not a psychiatrist, or at least not that psychiatrist. I could brainstorm ideas about where to meet people with anyone. And so I did. Picture this...
2018. Among the lost souls of r/ForeverAlone is where you call home now. You don't hang out on the DC Cinematic subreddit, you got tired of the bullshit. And you don't hang out on r/DarkUniverse either, it's too sad. To see what few people so dedicated as to still hang around be dealt the harsh truth that all of their own big talk about the future of their new fandom turned out to be empty also. You don't spend much time talking about your own problems, just sympathizing with others in need. Until one day a man name of Alek Minassian commits the unthinkable. And because Reddit currently lives in a "Dont' listen to the people who wanna keep their subreddits they're just extremists who voted for Trump"-ocracy, Forever Alone does damage control and disavows Minassian and those they deem "incels." You've been thinking about this on and off ever since you learned what an incel was. And now you've got the opportunity to voice your thoughts on this.
People didn't really see it my way though. Don't let le Reddit Gold fool you, it's just that people on Forever Alone are really nonconfrontational. You have to wait for them to voice their opinions unprompted, and when they do it's usually "Fuck them incels. It's okay for me to be suicidal because I'm messed up in the head, but it's not okay to write angry things on the Internet no matter how messed up in the head you are." This was too hypocritical for me to ignore. I had to... not just leave, but go where I was needed. If this was the hypocrisy that was prevailing, I needed to fight that hypocrisy and I couldn't fight it on Forever Alone. I had to go to where incels themselves were being confronted: On the incel refuge. Incels.me/is/co. The big goal was to, as an incel, be contacted by the opinion-shaping press and late night talk show pundits, so that I can be one of the voices for incels where a voice is lacking.
I was surprised to see that there was an Off Topic section because I assumed most incels were too mired in the misery of their situation to enjoy hobbies. Then I wasn't surprised to learn it isn't really filled with discussion of hobbies. Because most incels are too mired in the misery of their situation to enjoy hobbies. And that's the way it was for me. Except unlike most incels, I had the agepill to chase my sorrows as well. It wasn't just that I was too incel for today's copes, I was too old. Smash Bros, something I used to love. 2018 saw the news of a new Smash Bros. game. Now, here's a comparison of memes from the Smash 4 Wii U days vs. a comparison of memes from the Smash Ultimate.
By 2018 I've lost all grasp. That bizarre, ironic(?) "dankness" has set in entirely and it's too far along for me to understand at this point. The community, I wouldn't belong. So now I can't go back to Smash. Not like I had been during Smash 4 Wii U (which wasn't much) and definitely not like I had in the Brawl Era. In 2008 it was SigurdHosenfeld being reposted on GameFAQs. Now? It's Diives and his Inkling animations behind a Patreon pay wall. I didn't miss Smash. Not the games, not the community. Especially not with this Bowsette meme taking off. I'd rather stay on Incels.forum. All of my old world has outgrown me now. It's time for new things.
And so I continued to search for them. Until the current year. Picture this...
2019. Since joining the incel community you've seen about half the people you've ever talked to get banned. Not just on Incels.whatever, but on its sister forum, Looksmax. You hope you last at least one more year, as you begin chronicling...
And the rest is in this thread.
So, what did my dad want me to figure out from all this past-authoring? I guess... for as long as I can remember I've been trying to live in a fantasy world. The world of my toys, the world of my waifus, the world of the video games me and my friends were gonna make, anime world, furry world, Smash world, etc. And there was so much that I hoped to do that I just never did. I'd like to say it's because I stopped liking it like with video games, but why didn't I achieve those things before the 2010s, when I started having all the debates about video games and whether or not something is a parody and it doesn't count? I realize now: I am the Knight of Pentacles that my Mother's Day spread revealed so long ago. I'm slow to act. Maybe because I'm lazy. Maybe because I'm soooooo careful I don't wanna make a move until I'm sure. Maybe I lack the resources. Whatever it is, my problem is that I don't "do" things. Not fast enough, and often not at all. This journal was supposed to be full of some kind of journey. I didn't go on a journey this year. I went to South Padre, but I didn't achieve anything. I didn't grow or learn. Well, I learned how to waste a trip to South Padre. My stove! My stove is still broken! I meant to replace it in time for "oven weather" but I was like "Nah, I don't feel like it. It's not 'oven weather' right now, so I won't. Probably not even smart to do it, probably smarter to save my money." I'm full of excuses like that.
But in my defense, I do try things. And it's that experience that informs my choices in the future. I tried things at my psychiatrist's behest. And none of them took. So I think those experiences tell me a little about what I do and don't like, right? So what do I like? I was supposed to uncover what would fulfill me. But see, that's the thing. I didn't lose sight of my dreams, they just became unappealing to me. Maybe if I had achieved them on time I'd be happy with what I had achieved today. But what good does this foray do me now?
I don't have... anything I really enjoy. There's a thing I've learned. I'd like to find a thing to enjoy that leads me to people having fun. That's what I'll try to do tonight. The streets should still be flooded with drunken revelers right now. Everyone should be good and loose. I'll go out tonight, and I'll ask everyone there where they met their friends and what they do with their friends. That way I'll learn how to meet the kinds of people who go to New Year's Eve parties and stuff. The kind that have reason to buy liquor and condoms together. I'll report back with my findings, if I can stay awake when I get back.
