leader of the starry skies

Still trying to figure out how to present myself online. Be yourself... But what does that really mean? What does it mean for me, and what are the consequences of it, given that I have always felt like such an outsider?

I'm always seeing those heartwarming stories of people who say they felt like weird outcasts learning to "be themselves" and finding community and feeling more comfortable with being how they are. Yet such things have never happened to me, and at some point I gave up trying. Social isolation then leads to a lack of practice of social skills, which worsens the feeling.

I think it took about 18 months to feel somewhat normal again after my dad died, at which point I was so utterly sick of things being terrible that I started trying a lot harder with everything, even though it was painful and difficult. I guess I didn't really stop being depressed so much as I just became so bored and tired of it that I was willing to try anything else rather than continue that way... It's not even that it was a matter of willpower or motivation or anything though. And none of the clinical treatments for my mental health have ever truly had more than a slight impact. I'm not sure why I suddenly hit that point of finding it so irritating that I got up and started acting, but it makes sense in a way, since when faced with nothing but the exact same repetition of bullshit for years, most humans will reach a breaking point at some point.

I'm not cured or anything and will probably never be, but it's better to be here than elsewhere.

Anyway, the reason I mention that is that I am now faced with trying to present myself to the world again, as a person, and as a professional, and I have to ask myself what kind of image I want to present, what really is me, what is natural for me... Trying to unmask autism is definitely a part of this and I've been reading about a lot of other people's experiences there trying to make sense of it. I do remember the time in my life when I simply acted with no self-consciousness. But I was a child then.

I don't think most people have to do this sort of thing, they just are who they are, and beyond managing general social rules and expectations they don't really think about themselves very hard. It's strange to be in a place where I sometimes don't even know how to respond to very simple scenarios. A big thing is that I'm trying to learn to slow down more and if I don't know how to answer something, don't panic and rush into it. It's okay to not know things. Or not want to answer certain things. This is a difficult thing not just because of being autistic but also because of having experienced emotionally abusive relationships. I don't think it's uncommon for people who have been through that to find it difficult to adjust to situations where they don't actually have to micromanage every single word they say to make sure everything is completely correct and safe and inoffensive, lest it set off a violent reaction.

It's important to remember that I have met thousands of people in my life and the vast majority of them simply don't care much about how I say things. And a large amount of them liked me, in whatever form I was in at the time. I hope that if I can manage to put myself out there more, that will continue, and I will learn how to care less about the minutiae of how I appear and just be comfortable existing.

Well, I forgot I had this thing for the last 4 and a half years or so.

There are a myriad things to be frustrated with on the modern internet, but the one that was really getting to me this morning: the use of AI for writing has resulted not just in a proliferation of completely fake people masquerading as human, but also in humans presenting themselves with a writing style that is entirely homogenised. I don't know what it's called but I've long found the kind of typical "marketing speak" to be really irritating, the way that people write their emails when they're trying to sell you something. I didn't encounter this much at all until I started to take my career as an artist more seriously, meaning I had to start learning more about everything that goes into that or simple shrivel away and die. There are some very genuine teachers out there who will help you learn how to run a small business without losing your humanity, but there are also a lot of people who all write in exactly the same format that I guess is intended to engage readers.

They tend to put every single sentence on a different paragraph so you can read it all easily.

And then? They start asking themselves questions.

And then answering them.

Repeatedly, throughout the entire thing.

And every fucking email is structured like that.

There's more to it than that, but that's one of the most obvious and annoying parts to me. Anyway, this is also how AI tools have learned to write engaging text, except they don't just do it for marketing emails, they do it for everything. So now even fewer people are writing in their own voice, instead everything is structured in exactly the same manner. I regret that now I recognise it I see it everywhere and I become suspicious of people whose writing is structured this way. The last straw for me this morning was seeing a painter on Instagram with a shop selling their art and every one of the product descriptions was this lengthy AI-generated drivel.

However... I do have some sympathy for those people. I struggle with expressing myself in writing, and when it comes to my aforementioned creative career, it's probably one of the biggest roadblocks for me. I have to write about myself and about my work, I have to do more than just show people the pictures I have made because that is not enough any more. I have to be professional, but I also have to be a human. I want to maintain my privacy, but also tell people enough that they will actually care about what I'm doing. And not only that, but I do genuinely want to connect to people, to make friends. Social media is more of a struggle than ever, because any time I DO end up with a thought I want to express, it has to be chopped up and conformed into a sequence of 300-character snippets, or it has to be posted somewhere where no one will even see it. And all after all the effort I put in, I don't know whether it will even reach anyone or have any effect.

Obviously genAI is not a solution for this and is in fact both a result and a contributing factor to the modern internet being a harsh environment if you're trying to be a unique human being and connect with others. But I can still see why people might turn to it given what a struggle it can be. It preys upon people in that way. You can have the simple solution to all of these problems in your life in an instant, and those who aren't getting the support they need from society are particularly vulnerable to it.

Anyway, wrestling with how to present myself online is an on-going struggle, but I think if I were to write long-form things like this more often, in a place where I am not under pressure to appear any particular way, it would help. I hope so, anyway. It's certainly more natural and helpful than trying to express a thought on a microblogging site. Whether or not I will keep up with it, who knows, but I feel better for getting this out there.

ETA: I just looked at the old entries in this journal and my last one before I abandoned it was also about having a hard time existing online. Hah.

The first time I tried to play an MMO was when I was about 11 years old and I persuaded my parents to buy Final Fantasy XI for me. I'm not sure I actually knew what an MMO was at the time, just that I loved Final Fantasy, and this was a Final Fantasy game for PC. I played CD-ROM games on our computer so I assumed it would be fine! When we arrived home with it, we discovered two things - firstly, that it required a subscription to play, which my parents weren't happy about on top of the initial cost of the game. The other problem was that our family computer didn't actually meet the recommended specs to run the game. I remember some difficult negotiation with my parents about paying for a subscription, but the state of our PC was a bit more of a pressing issue. My dad said he would look into upgrading it, but ultimately it never happened, and eventually I traded in that copy of XI a couple of years later after realising I wasn't going to get to play it.

The next time I encountered the concept of MMOs under that name was, of course, World of Warcraft, but the press wasn't great. I didn't personally know anyone who played it, and all I heard about it was that it was a dangerously addictive game that, again, required a monthly subscription to play. I heard about people's lives being destroyed by it. It didn't appeal to me either - the artwork was in that style of fantasy painting with grotesque features and colour schemes that I never really cared for. I didn't look into it any further, and regarded most other major MMOs with a similar suspicion.

I dabbled in online games of various kinds, of course, mostly browser-based but occasionally otherwise, if they were free, but nothing serious. The idea of paying money for something virtual was frowned upon by my parents, so even aside from subscription games I wasn't allowed to spend money on things like Gaia Online either. That attitude instilled the same belief in me - that it was a rip-off or even dangerous to pay a recurring subscription for something on a site or online game, or even to buy one-off items, despite the fact that I really wanted them. I was appeased by the fact that my parents would grant me special permission to stay up til 2am to attend an event on Gaia, and by the offline games I had.

The first time I actually played an MMO and stuck with it was Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine. I played it because I was at the height of my obsession with the SMT series and playing every single game related to it that I could get my hands on - and, well, the game was free, so why not?

Unfortunately, while technically free, Imagine was very much in the realm of pay-to-win. It was painfully difficult to progress if you weren't spending money on virtual currency, and then gambling with that on top of it to win gear and items, a model which is now extremely widespread, especially in mobile games. I really did love the game in spite of its flaws, though, and at the time of playing I had just left school to become an art student, so I was living independently and was free to spend as much of my time and money on it as I wanted.

I won't say exactly how much I spent on it, but it was a lot, though I don't exactly regret it - my time playing the game before it shut down was highly influential on me in a positive way, I genuinely enjoyed my time and found it inspiring, not to mention that it provided me with important social connections when I would otherwise have been lonely. But the business practices were still not acceptable. I spent far more money on it that I would have done if I'd be paying a monthly subscription for it, because it was much easier to do so - every time, it could be viewed as a small one-off payment, not being locked into anything, you could quit at any time - theoretically, anyway. I'm sure everyone is familiar enough with gambling to understand why that isn't really the case.

Then, I signed up for the beta of Final Fantasy XIV. I'd heard all about the original version of the game and steered well clear of it, but now that I had some experience with MMOs, and the beta for the new, revamped version was free, I thought I'd give it a try. The rest is history, of course.

So, at that point I had definitely shaken myself free of my prejudices about the idea of subscriptions and MMOs in general, knew exactly how much difference there was between a "free" game that was built to sap as much money out of its players as it possibly could with no ceiling, and a subscription model which was by comparison reliable, predictable and attached to a game that was created with love and care. I haven't missed a month of subscription since A Realm Reborn came out, and while that absolutely does add up a lot over time, I consider it to be worth it. I love the game, I highly respect how it is run by its developers, and the positive impact it's had on my life is absolutely vast, like, I cannot possibly overstate this. I'm not sure I would even be here without it, let alone flourishing in the best development I've had an artist so far in my whole life.

But then, there is still the matter of World of Warcraft. After my opinions on these things became more balanced and I was less afraid of the idea, I did try WoW a couple of times, especially after meeting a lot of people in XIV who had played it a lot. It still didn't grab me, though. I found the character designs really unappealing and I struggled to feel invested in any of the places I was set free in during the early stages of the game. I also had pretty high standards for these things and for story coming from XIV, which captured my heart right from the beginning in all the right ways.

Fast forward to now, however... I picked up WoW yet again on the free trial in order to play with my partner, and this time things have been different. I still have criticisms of it, but I've now been shown all the things about it that are genuinely really fun and exciting and beautiful, which I hadn't seen before. The way the game is promoted is always with artwork and screenshots that came across to me as drab and unappealing. I had no idea that the game actually contained environments in it as impressive as those in BfA and Shadowlands are, that its artistic style came together so beautifully there, that the quests in this new expansion would start out so fun and engaging. WoW's success and history means it doesn't really need to try too hard draw in new types of players, I guess, but I can't help but wonder how many more people would try it if it was marketed more to their tastes. If I had been shown Bastion and Zuldazar and all of Kul Tiras before I would have considered playing the game sooner, I think. It's still early days for me but I'm enjoying my time in it at the moment.

WoW, and many other MMOs, are absolutely addictive, though. I may not consider them monetary rip-offs but that factor was definitely true, haha... This entry also doesn't touch on my feelings about subscriptions in a broader sense which are complicated and not entirely positive, but I'll save that for another time. The point here was really just to document how my perspective has changed over time from considering such an idea to be exclusively avoided due to the influence in my childhood, to now considering that it is, in some cases, a very reasonable model.

There are lots of fireworks tonight. It's normal for this time of year, with tomorrow being the 5th of November, but I feel certain a lot of them are being set off today because it's the eve of the new national lockdown.

There's a lot that maybe I should have been writing about here. Time feels like nothing lately as we all know. But I'm updating right now because I need to say this somewhere but I don't know if many people would understand. That sometimes it really weighs on me how much I am relied upon by someone important to me, that it makes my heart heavy to maintain every day, but that I won't give up on it. I feel other people's pain as mine, and especially when we have a close bond. But it's something I weather out of choice, because of our bond, and what I have received in the past and what I have hope for in the future. This is not like those times when I gave too much of myself because I was desperate for approval and when my good nature was abused. It is just a difficult place to be in. I want my efforts to be recognised and sympathy for how I feel without someone judging the situation from the outside and telling me I don't have to bear it. I don't, but I choose to because I believe that sometimes we need to support each other even when it's hard. Time continues on. There are always cycles. We will come through to the other side.

Here I am again. Today is a strange day. I was working, and telling myself that I really must take the afternoon off because I have a tendency to go way too hard lately and the break is needed for both my brain and my hands. There was a FFXIV Live Letter due that I was really looking forward to, to unwind, and I recently bought the big updated biography/collected works of Grayson Perry that I was very much looking forward to reading.

Then, the news broke of Tim Smith's death.

It's funny how we deal with death.

I'm still not sure how I can eloquently summarise all of my feelings, but I will write something.

Whenever someone important to me - and also a public figure - dies, I don't really enjoy the outpourings on social media. Even when they are sincere from others, I can't bring myself to make yet another post just like everyone else, trying to cram down all my feelings into 280 characters.

I don't think I can do it in more, either, not yet. But I can explain part of it. When you have gone your whole life feeling different in a strange, complicated and near unexplainable way, with only parts of you ever being fully understood, and then, at a pivotal point in your development as a person you discover there is someone else who has experienced those things that were too odd, too obscure, too difficult, and has captured them in the form of art, music, writing, whatever - it is absolutely monumental. That person, for me, was Tim Smith. The landscapes of my mind I suddenly found reflected in him and his work. A point of resonance that nothing else has ever quite managed to reach.

I did end up reading some of the Grayson Perry book. All of it reminds me to keep making art, real, genuine works of art from my heart and soul, because it's a human need to express oneself and be seen and understood by others. "Understood" is not something I feel all that often, but I need to get it out there. The effect that Tim and Cardiacs had on me is evidence of that. It's important for me to continue the threads that he gave me, weave them with all the other experiences and influences that make up me, as a person.

Some of my recent work feels a little stiff to me, though it's been well-received by those who have seen it. Part of that is the need to earn a living by honing skills that have more mass appeal and usage, and part of it is the current lack of space I have while I'm still in the process of figuring out a better workspace situation. I want to strike a very fine balance between raw, genuine honesty, soul, beauty and technical ability. I believe it will happen if I keep working hard. I want to share the view from my "whole world window".

I am still finding my way. I am learning how to keep time for myself. How to say no. How to keep my energy mine. How to use it efficiently. How to manage and balance everything.

I'm a little annoyed that I bought a headset second-hand that was not, as the seller described, like new. Trying to save money like that didn't turn out to be such a great idea, but it was a risk I knew about when I took it. The amount of time and energy required to actually send it back or a request a refund is just too much right now. I will make do with it and its semi-functionality until I identify a suitable replacement.

I want to cut my hair.