ｅｄｉｔｏｒｓ

I spend a lot of my free time writing. Scripts, essays, fiction, non-fiction, a little bit of everything, to be honest. I really love it. The only thing I love more than writing my own work is editing and polishing the work of other writers; editing is so strangely intimate and cozy for me. There's a lot of trust that goes into the whole process, not just between writer and editor, but between editor and work. One of the most valuable pieces of advice I could give any writer out there who is seeking publication is to find an editor that you trust and one that believes in you and your work. A good editor will determine how readers navigate your writing, will help smooth out any jagged edges, and will over all do everything in their power to not just elevate your writing, but you as a writer. That is the role of the editor, not to destroy, not to criticize maliciously, but to assist. And they do so without any of the attention or credit. This is my personal belief, take it how you will. I'm not waxing poetic about editing because I do it and enjoy it, but because in my time of picking up side gigs editing the works of others--works they want to be published, I've found so many writers just... don't take any of the feedback or corrections well at all. I don't understand it.

Why hire someone if you're going to dismiss the work they do and the assistance they provide? That's not to say the editor is always right, because ultimately, the writer is the one who knows the vision of the work. But the editor knows the consumer, the readers, and how they will navigate the language. Writing stylistically is perfectly fine, breaking conventions is expected, but you have to understand those conventions in order to know how to break them meaningfully without harming the work. I'm not sure if it's my old age showing or what, but I feel a lot of younger writers these days have neglected the fundamentals and the basics, forsaking them for some notion of being unique. Preferring being unique over being comprehensible. It doesn't matter, ultimately, how fantastic your story or ideas are if no one can read them or will become so frustrated trying that they abandon the effort entirely.

An editor is not an obstacle to overcome, not someone that should inspire trepidation. You should want an editor, and if you manage to find a good editor, you should grab on with both hands and never let them go. That's my perspective, at least. Editors are hard to come by these days, you know. With all the AI bloat infesting every writing program, every proofreader, every email, most writers feel they can scrape by without one. But what an editor brings to the table that AI can simply never grasp is human experience. Good editors are readers. They're writers. They know what makes a piece "good" and what makes it "great" and will do everything in their power to elevate a good piece to a great one. That's the whole point. I would wager most editors don't get into editing for the money, (even professional editors barely make any), but because they love doing it. That passion is crucial to any art; written word is not an exception.

I suppose this post has been more of a rant than anything, perhaps. Something to get off my chest as I reflect on my experiences. Some of the most passionate and successful writers I've dealt with have been those that embrace the editor and work with them. That ask questions of their editors, not demanding they explain why they've made suggestions, but asked questions about ideas or structures they've in mind but are struggling with. It's hard to explain sometimes why swapping two words around can completely change the energy of a sentence, or why injecting a comma guides the eye more cohesively between statements; that's just language. Language is fluid. You should want someone who can help yours flow. If your language is tripping your story up and frustrates your reader, your reader will abandon you. I don't think anyone writes, with the intention of being published, hoping that readers leave their work behind.

ｃｙｃｌｅｓ

There's a time each cycle that I stumble into a bit of a depressive episode without fail, and my friend, we're in the midst of that time. Appropriately, it coincides with my birthday, which also happens to get frequently connected to Valentine's Day by Earthlings. I assure you, the depression surrounding my birthday has been a consistent thing, long before my learning about the Earth holiday focused on romance and partnership. I'm not a sad boy this time of year because I "yearn for a deeper connection with someone," but rather I think I become more reflective in the period leading up to my inevitable aging, as do most sentient lifeforms. The period of measuring myself this cycle against myself previous cycle inevitably leads to a reflection less focused on me and more on my surroundings and the people that have come and gone. Maybe I'm just sentimental.

Jules has been planning something, I'm not sure what, but I'm pretty sure it involves our online community, and truthfully I'd prefer it that way. My life is quiet isolated, as it demands, and being able to connect with others online has been a blessing. I can't maintain an in-person social life anymore, given my condition, so online spaces give me that freedom. I'm focusing on the gratitude and love I feel for my online people more than the grief I feel for those in my real-life that I've lost. But that's hard. I miss my family often. Grappling with the knowledge that you've outlived and will likely outlive everyone is hard. Cool, I live a long time, but I think mortality is a limiter for a reason, it's why I'll never suspend my disbelief for fictional characters driven endlessly by the conquest of mortality. Living forever sucks, well, I imagine it sucks. I'm already so much older than I ever thought I'd be, pushing forward knowing that is daunting.

I've come this far, though, so I might as well see it through. Whatever 'it' is.

ｈｕｒｒｙ ｕｐ ａｎｄ ｗａｉｔ

When I tell you that I've spent roughly the last 400 years of my life perfecting the art of sitting in a room and waiting, I'm not exaggerating. From my time in military service to now, I swear there's nobody out there sitting idly in a room and patiently waiting better than me. The armed services really ingrain a patience in you unlike anything else. Everywhere you go, you rush to get there, and once you arrive timely, you just sit and you wait. From medical appointments to operations briefings to training assignments, to outright missions, you are waiting with the expectation that arriving early (which you must do) only means you have to sit idle for longer. Since they fished me outta the wreckage of the Hoplite, that skill hasn't really gone away. If anything, working for JVO has really honed it in. After all, the military in most places is just a megacorporation of a sort, so they all really run the same way.

As some may know, I was called to juror service today for our good ol' justice system. It was just an exercise in the art of waiting in a room without going insane. The tick of the clock resonating through the windowless room, the rows of odorous patchwork seats, the presence of strangers whose existence I only just became aware of, it's a lot to soak in, even for an avid people watcher. I had partially expected to be exempt from the summons, given my special circumstances--there's enough radiation in my body to cook a small country--but no, not even I with my kooky, zany medical circumstances get a pass. So I sat in that room, in my full radiation suit, and did what the military taught me how to do best: I waited.

After perhaps the most corporate video I've been subjected to in a long while, the clerks gave us a briefing about what was going to happen, how we should behave, etc. The emphasis on remaining put and paying attention was not lost to me, and such emphasis ultimately just translates to: "We know you're going to be so bored, but please you have to sit in here anyway in case we call your name." Given I had gone in with the expectation of being excused almost immediately, I brought absolutely nothing stimulating to keep my mind occupied while I was waiting for my turn to be empaneled. I let the wonder of what possible trial I could be hearing take me, and I found myself entertained by the memory of court-room dramas from other planets that I watched growing up as a kit. I suppose I have a way of romanticizing everything, especially new experiences, even if those experiences are objectively mild at best.

I fantasized about the drama of a murder trial, about an expert witness explaining an autopsy report. About the twists and turns of the case, I theorycrafted extensive familial connections, envisioned a motive--and then stopped myself when I realized how fucked up that kind of was, actually. First of all, I can't even recall the last time there was anything but an accidental death on the station, and second, y'know it's pretty fucked up to yearn to spectate the worst moments of other lifeforms' lives. I think the saturation of true crime content has somewhat numbed a lot of us to that reality. Sure, it's interesting to listen to a video about a double homicide, but at the end of the day, that's two lives that were extinguished. Now, I'm not here to soap box or preach atop my high horse about enjoying true crime media, I certainly am not that hypocritical, but I was drawn to consider why it was that I was hoping for a unique tragedy to somehow make my time spent sitting and waiting worthwhile. Needless to say, when I did finally get called back to empaneling, I was not selected for duty for the particular case that was presented, and subsequently, I was sent back to the bland waiting room.

I spent the next two hours there, passing the time playing chess on my mobile device, reading some writing stored on it, and generally just watching the other poor souls trapped in that state of limbo with me. I think we can learn the most about other people by watching them when they're left to idle, left to their own devices. Many people just leaned on their arms and slept. Others spent the time reading novels. A few brought their work with them and were attending emails, code, and other occupational duties while waiting to fulfill a civic one. Had I known I was going to be held for so long, I think I would have brought the book I'm reading to finish it. But, if I'm being honest, I'm numb enough to idly waiting in a room that I find it somewhat meditative. Though some may consider a day spent doing nothing but sitting in a room to be a waste, taking the time to organize and process my thoughts about things was much needed. I was able to find new inspiration for ideas that have been threatening to fizzle out, I was able to draw observations about a system I was previously unaware of for my own works, and the state of screen-free stillness was a nice break for my overstimulated brain.

Maybe not being excused was the best outcome, in the end.

After being dismissed the first time, I was never called back to be questioned for another potential trial. There were a few other souls who shared that fate, it seemed. But our "suffering" (all the clerks and attorneys kept insisting we were suffering) wasn't prolonged. We were dismissed as a group and given our proof of service, which grants us a period of immunity for the next few cycles in case we're drawn up in the lottery again. Having only gotten about two hours of sleep last night, I was thrilled to be able to head back to the hab earlier than planned. I got back here and settled in for a nap.

After, I had dinner and chatted with Jules for a couple of hours, and now here we are spending the night doing what we do; working on our own things. Body doubling virtually instead of in-person; his room is on the opposite end of the hab from mine. There are a few community members in the Gogh room with us. If you aren't familiar with Gogh, you should definitely check it out if productivity games and body-doubling help you work.

Not sure what's on the agenda for tomorrow, probably some work on Kilonova; my break is coming to a close. I need to prog before it does.

ｍｏｄｅｌ ｗｏｒｋ

Dude I've been heads down in the trenches working on customizing this new prebuilts Male VTuber Model that recently came out, and Helios's mercy you guys, it's nutty. I've played with a lot of prebuilts, made a lot of assets myself, commissioned others, and this is legitimately the first "traditional" style VTuber model I've had that I feel actually represents me in a way that is accurate. And it's not just accurate, it's insanely close to the REAL DEAL, to me. In total, so far, I've spent roughly 14 to 16 hours tweaking parameters, editing meshes, adding textures, dialing in the tracking, etc. to get it to the point it's at now. And after all of that, I feel like I finally have something that's actually really good. The excitement to use the model has been through the roof; any excuse to stream, I'm live. I'll definitely shove a picture of it here at to show you. It's been fun playing with a new model and taking the tools from another artist and making something really cool with them. The artist team behind the model is linked in my credits; def go check them out!

Our trackers came in, also. For awhile there, I was starting to think we had gotten scammed because the website the manufacturer uses to track packages was very sketchy and mostly inaccurate. It's hard for us to get shipments out here (OBVIOUSLY), but I really didn't think it was going to be that bad. I got the new Rebocap trackers, as mentioned in previous posts, mostly for Jules since the SlimeVR trackers wouldn't work for him. We got them set up and he streamed with them last night for the first time. Full-body tracking is a lot of fun; even if it reveals some more technical issues with your model that are going to need more fine-tuning and adjustment. It's good to see Jules getting excited about things--always makes me happy. Though I've been obsessed with this VTS model I've customized and edited together, I'm excited for my custom 3D model that's coming later next month. I'm hopeful that the SlimeVR trackers will work for me so that I can also have full-body tracking on that model. It's going to be a lot of fun.

My break from work is ending soon and in a way, I guess I'm kind of glad. Not doing anything was really fun for the first month or so, but at this point I feel pretty listless and bored. Don't get me wrong, not running long missions or staring at schematics for 8+ hours a day has been fantastic, but it will be nice to have a bit more going on than just whatever work I can make for myself. That's "work", by the way, not actual paid labor, but tasks that I can set out to finish. Speaking of, I'm 80 pages deep in the manuscript. I haven't worked on that this last week, but I plan to do more writing this weekend and into next week. My break ends in 10 days; how much of the book can I finish before then?

Jules is planning on making a Neocities soon. I'm excited to see what he cooks up. I've also been thinking about ways to flesh my page out without cluttering it or making it so egregious and absurd to look at. I know a lot of these pages are built from nostalgia, but I have to wonder what the purpose of making a page is if people are going to struggle to interact with it at all. Anyway, that's all for this projectile vomit of a post, as usual. I'll check in sooner rather than later! Nana cunts, love you. ♡

ｆｒｉｄａｙ

I finally managed to sleep in for a little bit later today, though it came in a very weird form. I originally went to bed just after 0000 and ended up waking up at around 0400. I'm stuck in 4-hour cycles again, when I do manage to sleep, which sucks but I can't be too choosy about my sleep. After failing to fall back asleep, I got out of my pod at 0530 and made some light breakfast. Settled down after I ate, did a little bit of work, and then went back to bed at 0800. Four hour cycles of work and sleep. Woke up again at 1300, so that was five more hours, at least. Unfortunately for me, I woke up feeling a bit ill. Hoping I can burn whatever this is off before it turns into more than just a sore throat. Cherrichus sent me the finished commission I ordered from her this morning, and that's what I spent time setting up; very excited to debut that on stream tonight. As usual, I'm not planning some big fanfare or reveal for it, I think it's a lot more funny to just show up with new things and get the genuine reaction to them, rather than hyping them up. There is one exception to this that's coming soon, though. More on that to come in the future.

Jules had a really nice stream last night discussing goals for the new cycle with our community from Earth; many of them have very simple goals, very realistic, and I hope to see them fulfilled this year before the cycle turns over again. I've got mine up on my homepage here, if you're curious. Speaking of my goals, I'm just about finished with digitizing Kilonova, I've got about 3.5 pages of the drafted manuscript left to convert, and right now I'm sitting at 18786 words, across 75 A5-formatted pages. Curiosity bade me style the manuscript in that way and it's been expectedly motivating to see my work in what will hopefully be its mostly final form. I need to send out some more correspondence with agents to shop it around.I anticipate being finished with it before the summer season hits North America (Earth), which means there's a good chance it could be on shelves as early as this time next cycle. There's a secret time limit I'm working against. Time is always running.

It's been so long since I've had an extended break that I think I'm starting to get a bit restless, now. Making work for myself each day, finding a routine. Routine is good, I like having an itinerary. Going to spend the afternoon organizing my OBS and re-balancing my audio once I get my manuscript digitized fully. Making more "work", but really just doing things that need to get done. My work days this week have revolved around babysitting Poppy Bot. She's finally getting over the bug that had left her ears a mess. I don't think we could have picked a more needy K9 unit, to be honest, I feel like I'm raising a toddler. The only way I've actually been able to get anything done without her just standing in my doorway to whine and stare at me is by dragging her bed from the living room into my room--which HARDLY fits it, mind--and tucking her into bed behind my chair. Needy. Needy. I go back to work later this month and I have mixed feelings about it.

A new set of full-body trackers should be here either today or tomorrow, it depends on when the mages get to porting them on Station and clearing them.

ｎｅｗｓｌｅｔｔｅｒ

There are a lot of 'zines' out there, digital magazines specifically curated around an IP or subject, united by that, and packed to the brim with original artwork from a variety of contributing artists. The last two that I've been aware of more intimately have left me somewhat disappointed, not because of the quality of the projects or art, or even the subject matter, but because writers haven't been included. "Back in my day," he cried, his hair greying, his life force fading, "magazines were packed with articles, too!" At least the ones I used to read. I consumed a lot of articles from magazines, all across a variety of subjects from advances in nanotechnology to new discoveries related to the stars in our local cluster. I digress. There are a lot of writers in the community that Jules and I have built online, and I want them to have greater representation. I thought that zine projects could offer that, but I suppose from a logistical standpoint, it may be much harder to organize and print/publish pages that have both graphics and extensive blocks of text.

I've been looking for alternatives. Even without researching, I know there are millions of newsletters out there, filling internet niches and circulating original written works in largescale email blasts that are organized with ruthless efficiency. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Though I'm not particularly tech literate enough to compete with operations on that scale, I do want to try my hand at organizing a bi-weekly newsletter that features written works from the artists in our community. That being said, I've been digging around for resources that I can take advantage of to accomplish this, and it seems like Substack is the most reliable and affordable option.

As far as the design goes, I do live with a designer who has the aesthetic eye and skills to do just about anything I could ever conjure, but part of me kind of wants to try my hand at arranging it in Figma myself. I've played with the program a little bit here and there, testing different things and figuring out what each tool/option does, etc. but I've never tried to make something that would be used. My best bet, likely, would be to ask my bestie [Jules, ICYMI] to cook something for me. Or at the very least, to take my amateur concept and iterate it into something that looks more professional. I'm a bit of a stickler about appearances, especially when it comes to design (fuck you for doing that to me, btw, Jules) and I'd rather my own project not look decidedly amateurish. If there's anything that will turn supporters and contributors away from a project in today's world, it's definitely the appearance of something. One glance over a hastily cobbled carrd or a peek at a preview cover will form first impressions that you cannot, objectively, afford to squander. I won't really know the extent of my options on Substack until I really dig into it, as well, but I'm hoping it'll give me the option to organize something more structured than just BLOCK OF TEXT™ in columns or paragraph format.

I also don't particularly like the idea of pushing the newsletter via email, mostly because everyone receives hundreds of emails across dozens of inboxes these days. Contributing to that problem isn't the most appealing to me and I worry that doing so may result in the effort of both contributors and myself going completely ignored. Again, more research required. But that's the plan for right now; launch a newsletter every two weeks. Each period, I'll put out prompts and open submissions with a word count, and then comb through them to curate those that best fit the prompt and page limit for the newsletter.

I guess I'll wrap this up by expressing my desire for information regarding the publication and dispersal of newsletters. If you've got any experience doing as much, hit me up on Discord, you can find my links to get in touch on our Linktree.

ａｎｘｉｅｔｙ

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about my time in the services and how it has left a mark on me, for better and for worse. This surfaced a couple of days ago because I overslept and missed my own stream, hilariously enough. Streaming isn't something I've been contractually obligated to do, it's something I do for fun--there are no consequences for missing/canceling a stream. AND YET, I found myself pacing around stressed and anxious that there would be some punishment for something as simple as oversleeping. I spoke to Jules about it briefly. I stated the obvious, what I've just written, about there being no consequences, etc. for missing stream, but that I felt so anxious I couldn't sit still over it. On paper, maybe it does seem like I'm an anxious person after all. But then I get to thinking about why I feel that way; the only attribution is military service.

I think it's universal that the military instills you with this sense of urgency that really is complicated to try and describe. If you're a veteran, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Not the "hurry up and wait" shit but the threat of devastating consequences for trivial shit. If you oversleep and miss a doctor's appointment there are consequences, sometimes even group punishment. If you aren't where you're supposed to be 15 minutes before your scheduled time, there will be consequences. And when you're in training, the theatrics are cranked up to 11. Your drill instructors scream that your 4 minute tardiness would have "gotten all your friends killed" or that your absence somewhere due to miscommunication would have "killed someone." That's bizarre. It's abnormal. And it's unhealthy, long-term.

The armed services pipeline is a fascinating case study in behavioral psychology. I'm not a psychologist, so I cannot state with any educated certainty what the actual psychological results of conditioning a mind within that context are; I only speak from personal experience. There's rhetoric about shaping and molding people into warfighters, like a potter with a wheel. But, I think the process is more like chemistry than pottery. It's a delicate balance that, when skewed too far in one direction, explodes. The worst that can happen on a potter's wheel is structural failure, in which case, you just mash it all back down into a lump and throw it again. You have the option to try again, the ability to try again, but with the mind, I think you only have one chance.

People are gathered up from all walks of life, some volunteered, some are here out of avoidance, others traded a military contract for time incarcerated, and smushed together in a controlled environment all under the same conditions. You eat when you're told to, exercise when you're told to, speak when you're told to, etc. To quote one of my favorite games, the military is "your daddy, and you're its how high." And it's relentless, I think that may be the thing that is often misunderstood about the training environment. There are no breaks. That constant pressure is always on. And the cost of failure, failure that isn't even yours, is often group punishment as a twisted way of building teamwork and cooperation. But really, what it does it foster a sense of resentment and an unspoken acknowledgment about who the weak links are. You live in a perpetual state of "go" during training and that, now coded into you, persists through your time in service. It sticks with you when that time comes to an end, too.

There's a pipeline to turn delivery boy into a warfighter, but not a pipeline to deprogram him when he can't fight anymore.

That's the real issue. The military hollows you out and pours all this shit into you, it desensitizes you, dehumanizes you, and the supposed opposition you'll face so that you don't hesitate when the 'time' comes. But what it really does is imbue you with anxiety flavored as urgency and professionalism. It makes you more judgmental, more controlling, it gives you an addiction to overworking to avoid consequences. I can't work on a team because in the back of my mind, if something isn't done to 'standard' the first time, I'm going to be outside at sunrise doing burpees until I puke. If I'm late, I'm going to jail, or my best friend is going to explode into a million gory pieces somehow, and it'll be my fault.

I've been back in the civilian sector for a long while now, but that conditioning is still there. I've talked to doctors about it, both "military" doctors and civilian doctors. There aren't enough resources for veterans, full stop. I think most societies pedestal their soldiers--how universal are soldiers?-- but provide them no recourse or care when their use has run out. I want you to stop for a moment and think about all the propaganda you've seen for your local military. All the digital ads. All the posters, the billboards. The documentaries, the television programs, the podcasts. Your impression of what any of that actually means is incorrect, unless you've served, in which case I'm preaching to the choir. Now, I want you to think about the resources you know of, off the top of your head, that are meant to support veterans. I'm sure the list is much smaller. And I'm sure that even if you are a veteran, that list is minuscule. It's not enough. The most notable resources are those meant to aid during a crisis, and while comendable and appreciated, most of us aren't living in perpetual crisis, we're stuck drifting somewhere between listlessness and crisis.