2026-02-22 22:45:00
For most of my life the door for people was always open.
I was patient, accommodating, understanding, and empathetic. Or at least that’s what I told myself anyway. In reality, I was mostly just the fucking doormat.
I gave people space to step over my boundaries and wipe their feet because I was always worried I might be overreacting. Maybe I was being a little too sensitive. Maybe I had misunderstood, I am human afterall. Or maybe I just needed to be more patient and understanding, to put myself in their muddy, shit-trodden shoes.
So the door stayed open, to my detriment.
Eventually, through hurtful experiences, I learned that: Some people benefit a lot from doors that never close.
After a certain point in my life, something shifted. I stopped negotiating with myself every time something felt wrong or just a little off, a gut feeling so small I could have swiped it away like an annoying gnat. But I didn’t, I started to trust that feeling and I stopped waiting for perfect certainty before deciding whether a line had been crossed.
Now the door closes much faster. And sometimes it slams, the glass rattling and all. That mostly happens when someone clearly crosses a boundary; disrespect, manipulation, behaviours you only need to see once to recognise.
But other times it closes more quietly. That’s the vibe check. There’s nothing obviously wrong, but something feels “not quite right”, the feeling you can’t put your finger on but you know that if you let it linger and get any closer, it’ll end up biting you on the arse.
Some people might call that being “too sensitive.” I don’t see it that way. I just have strong boundaries and I enforce them just as hard; for my own mental wellbeing and peace of mind. Not for anyone else’s.
2026-02-22 19:05:07
If more information was the answer, we all would be billionaires with perfect abs.
Like everyone, I wanted to be more productive and more motivated, so I thought, “Hey, why not read Atomic Habits and other books that people on social media recommend?” As I thought, I did.
I found and read two or three self-help books, and I came to the conclusion that they suck, and I’m not the only one. But before I go further, let me acknowledge that some people genuinely do find real value in these books. For many, self-help books offer fresh perspectives, practical tips, or even just a sense of encouragement. If they’ve helped you, and you took action in a better direction, that’s great.
But first, why do people continue to buy those books? They make you feel good because it feels productive. It gives you the illusion of progress, that something in your life is changing. It feels like you’re learning something.
However, that is the issue of “self-help” books.
Inside them lies the most obvious advice that you can ever find. However, they don’t feel like it, because they are covered in pretty buzzwords and tens of personal anecdotes, testimonials, and a few charts if you’re lucky. “Atomic habits” advice can be boiled down to: "design your environment so the right behaviour is easy and automatic”.
Well, if that’s the prodigy worth reading for over 300 pages for you, go for it. Have fun, because you will probably forget what was in the book in a month, or even while reading the next chapter. I can almost bet you won’t apply the advice, busy reading another "self-help” book, if you can even call that a book.
Stop being an incel wannabe-yuppie and read fiction, because unlike self-help, it actually changes how you see the world.
Fiction will provide you with immeasurably more value than any "self-help” literature ever will. Lessons from fiction don’t just inform you. They shape you, they leave you with an imprint far stronger than any bullet-point list or chart will. Read what you’re actually interested in, and wisdom will find you on its own.
When you read a novel, you don’t receive instructions. You live through consequences. You sit inside another mind long enough that it starts to rearrange your own. In "Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, you don’t get a lecture on morality. You feel the paranoia, the rationalisation, and guilt. You experience how a single idea can corrupt a person from the inside. That kind of understanding cannot be summarised into a productivity framework. It sticks because it was lived through, not listed.
Good prose will also change the texture of your thinking. Language shapes perception. After reading ”1984” by George Orwell, you start noticing euphemisms, propaganda, and empty political phrases. You become sensitive to manipulation not because someone told you “watch out”, but because you’ve seen what happens when language is engineered to blur reality. The lesson embeds itself in your perception. Think about social media enforcing the use of “unalived” instead of murdered. Once you become sensitive to how language softens reality, you start noticing it everywhere. Fiction develops that sensitivity without feeling like instruction. It doesn’t sit you through a presentation. It alters how you see.
Self-help books promise shortcuts to improvement, but lasting change comes from experiences that shape perception and judgment. Fiction gives you that in ways no checklist ever can.
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2026-02-22 13:30:00
Content warnings: Non-descriptive mentions of child abuse, exploitation, racism, homophobia, misogyny, and religious trauma.
Christmas has been tough for my wife and I the past few years. Our pay has steadily increased, but so has the cost of living. The past few years, rather than giving each other gifts, we have decided to share experiences. We get each other something small and we pick something to do. This past holiday, my wife and I stayed home and cooked an amazing full Christmas dinner together.
For Christmas of 2023, we decided to give each other a trip. We put together a rubric because we're both teachers and huge nerds. We needed to make a full itinerary with rough costs, plans for each day, and accommodation options, and then present it in an eye-catching way. We hooked up my wife's laptop to our TV and, in the gentle glow of our Christmas tree, showed what we made.
My wife used Canva (if I remember correctly) to create an amazing 10 day trip to New England. I put together a google site about a trip to Colorado. I had been before, but my wife had never really been in the mountains before. We decided to take the trip to Colorado for our fifth wedding anniversary, and save the more expensive New England trip for another year.
We spent a week in the Mile High City aka Denver, Colorado.
One of the Denver days had us in the nearby community of Boulder, Colorado, to go shopping in the Pearl Street markets. I had left this day intentionally vague, intending for us to wander into one of the eateries that sounded good when it struck us. Sandwiches sounded tasty, so we walked to the nearby Yellow Deli.
We're both fantasy nerds and the place looked like it was straight out of The Hobbit. Our waitress was a warm, cheerful woman who talked up the food options, and touted their yerba mate. I ordered my go-to sandwich: a Reuben. This sandwich did not disappoint. The bread was fresh and delicious, the sandwich perfectly constructed. My wife and I got two different flavors of yerba mate so we could share. In a trip full of delicious food, this cozy little hideaway fit in perfectly.
I sat down to write post cards from the trip a few weeks later. One of my friends is in love with Boulder, so I wanted to recommend him the restaurant, but I had trouble remembering the name. I searched for Boulder, Delis, and Pearl Street before I eventually found it. However, the context I found it in was surprising: an article from the Denver Post titled Twelves Tribes' businesses like Yellow Deli exploit cult followers for free labor, ex-members say.
According to the Twelve Tribes' home page, they are a network of tribal communities who live communally on farms, where all incomes are absorbed by the community. They are a Christian cult, explicitly claiming to attempt to live like the disciples of Yahshua (a potential translation of the original name of Jesus, according to wikipedia). They are open about the fact that, if you join them, your possessions become the community's.
The cult has communes globally, and operate many different business outlets including the Yellow Deli. According to the same Denver Post article, cult members work at these locations unpaid as, by the group's own admission, all business incomes belong to the community. Everyone is, on paper, a co-owner of the restaurant. None of them receive a pay check.
There is an appeal to living communally. But anything that sounds too good to be true, sadly, often is.
I am going to be taking the information from this section directly from their website, mostly from the Beliefs section.
In their cosmology, man is the highest life. Their website's belief page has enough purple prose to rival my nature writing:
"The vast universe, with countless trillions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, orbited by countless planets, and for what? As beautiful and glorious as they are against the velvety darkness of night, the stars were not only meant to gaze upon in wonder, but to colonize, forever and ever..." - The Twelve Tribes
They believe Yahshua intended man to abandon everything for the mission of spreading 'the Fruit of the Spirit'. They view their church as a nation of farm and communities. In order to welcome the return of the Messiah, they must create a "set-apart nation" that lives among civil governments that protect human rights. However, society is violating the natural law "to the point of calling evil good and good evil". Thus the need to be separate. While people in secular society can be righteous, they can't be holy. The Twelve Tribes are striving to be holy, and you can join them.
This site's rhetoric already sounds like cult language to me. I would love to genuinely live in a communal society free from wealth and money, but I don't. I can't. And any community that purports to live this way by requiring your possessions and incomes should instantly invite skepticism. It could be real, but overwhelming experience says no.
According to the Pacific Standard, the group champions the virtues behind corporal punishment. Children within the cult are to be punished with whips from canes or sticks, depending on their age. Children are expected to work, inviting allegations of child labor. This is justified by cited biblical text.
The same Pacific Standard article also claims that the cult's dismissal of modern medicine meant that children have died within their community. Allegedly, girls are expected to marry early and have children.
From the Denver Post article I referenced earlier, while the cult does take in people who need help and nourish them, they also exert substantial psychological pressure. Members are allowed to leave, but heavily dissuaded from it. Like many cults, when a member exerts too much individuality or asks too many questions, all that kindness allegedly goes to the wayside.
A report by NBC claims that some leaders have engaged in sexual assault against children. It's difficult to say how widespread these actions are as the cult is insular and distrusts the outside world - a view built right into their belief system. This isolation can create an environment of grooming and exploitation.
Finally, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, this southern born cult has a troubled relationship with race and sexuality. While they do try to recruit people of color, the SPLC alleges that the group's inner teachings describe race based chattel slavery in the United States as a positive thing, and preach that homosexuality is a sin punishable by death.
While I initially had a moment of amusement when I learned of the Yellow Deli's cult ownership, those feelings quickly yielded to disgust as I read deeper. I can deeply understand the appeal of communal living, and it's something I would want in a better world. I can even comprehend the desire for authoritarian structure in a chaotic and often confusing world. Yet when children are exposed to structures and systems that are inherently abusive, any sense of sympathy goes out the window.
Parasitic groups that remove member agency should be aggressively challenged as predatory.
Cults prey not on the ignorant, but on the hopeless. Many of the followers still in the cult claim they are happy and fulfilled with their lives. Yet you also have to consider the intense behavioral policing, social isolation, and indoctrination that are inherent in destructive cults. If everything outside of your bubble is considered to be wicked, why would you risk losing everyone and everything you know by questioning your belief system?
Some people do - and they manage to break out. Many more do not.
Hopefully this writing will help you avoid eating at the Yellow Deli, should you find yourself in the position to do so. If you have any experiences or opinions you'd like to share with me, I would love to hear from you: [email protected]
Thanks for reading, if you made it this far~
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2026-02-22 04:06:00
I recently published a series of posts about my history with music, but last night I decided to unpublish them. I felt they were a little too personal, they didn't really cover everything I wanted to, and they weren't very well-written. It's hard to fully encompass my entire history with music, all the bands I've loved and genre obsessions and concerts I've been to and struggles with expressing myself through music, in just a few short blog posts.
It feels kind of strange to unpublish a post, like I'm burying a part of myself that I wanted to shine a light on. I have mixed feelings about it. Should I have left those posts up in all their flawed glory, even if I wasn't completely happy with them? Should I go back and edit them, try to make them longer, more substantial? Should I turn it into a writing project spanning weeks or months?
What am I so self-conscious about? This is my personal blog, after all, isn't it? Of course I want to connect with others, but I also want to freely write for myself, and I don't want a large audience or algorithmic pull.
Maybe I'll return to those posts at some point in the future, but for now they remain buried underneath everything that I've deemed "good enough."
2026-02-22 03:28:56
I have a penchant to place my role models on unreachable pedestals. I study their work and conclude there’s something fundamentally different about them: inherently gifted, built with materials I was simply not given. Often, I visualize an invisible barrier that separates “people like them” from “people like me.” (I later learned this was a thought process I’ve been unconsciously fostering).
Such narrative is comforting in a way. If they’re special, then my hesitation to act upon my goals becomes justified, right? Anyway, via enough self-help rabbit holes and an epiphany so stupidly obvious it should’ve come sooner, I realize the most discernible difference between me and the people I admire is that they are going for it. Literally that’s it.
It’s not even confidence or some hidden, godly advantage. Authors I admire, creatives I envy, artists I secretly measure myself against – they simply start. They fumble, iterate, and show up again regardless of their output. Your role models aren’t operating on a higher plane of human capability. They’ve just trained themselves to relentlessly do the work, to embrace the messiness that I, however, tend to overthink to death.
Of course, such epiphany will not wholly obliterate my fear of inadequacy, but it reframes it instead. I’m an avid believer admiring someone can be an effective roadmap; and every awkward attempt and failed experiment is a small bridge over the chasm you once believed separated you from the “naturally gifted.” After all, the pedestal exists only in your mind.
2026-02-20 11:09:00
AI can't write like me. It can't write like you. It can't write like any human, really. The only thing it is good as is bullshit PR speak, which is meant for companies that are not human. This is it's purpose.
AI can write legibly. But it won't go off on a random tangent halfway through a blog post (certainly not with parenthesis around it) and then reel itself back in.
AI isn't funny. It has all the charisma of a caricature of a Millennial written by an aging hollywood executive who's best stand up is a series of shitty knock-knock jokes.
AI can't showcase your passions like you can. It can't connect with your passion that has been formed since childhood.
AI can't be real with you. It'll shove out the most palatable thing out because it is programmed to statistically write what YOU think you'll like. It doesn't consciously wonder about how its words will be perceived.
I think there are a lot of people who are worried AI will copy their style. Which leads me to believe that these people sanitize themselves.
Writing is art, in order for something to be art it has to tap into the human experience. That's why conservative art is so dogshit, it's reactive rather than contemplative.
AI won't be able to capture your essence. Something will always be off about it. Even if it comes close, there's something in the way that will stop it from actually sounding human. It can only copy and paste short snippets at best, but it can't write something original from it's own mind.
AI can't write like me, and it sure as hell can't write like you.
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Just got done playing Halo CE with my father in law. We're doing a run of all the Halo campaigns (going from Reach, CE, 2, 3, ODST). We beat Reach not too long ago, and I had the idea of us doing CE couch coop. Then for Halo 2 we do it through MCC so he can see the updated graphics (since he's never played MCC).
Also put an order for a 7th gen iPod, got a good deal on it. About $20 below normal pricing. Looked like it was in good condition, all I needed was the motherboard anyway. Also got a new stylus for my turntable. Hopefully it'll be a nice upgrade. It hasn't came in yet, but I'll probably post something about it on my microblog when it gets here.
Did lots of drumming today. Had fun jamming to various songs and trying to improvise drum beats to songs I haven't fully studied. "Ain't It Fun?" by Paramore, "Armatage Shanks" and "The American Dream is Killing Me" by Green Day, and "Up From the Bottom" by Linkin Park were what I played.