Remember when I said my last poste would be my last poste for the time being? Delete that from your Mind's Eye. I wanted to note down a few minor things:

First of all, thank you to Space for the comment they left on the FC2 Clap page, it's appreciated. I can't respond to private comments there, so hopefully you will see this. It was a nice thing to read during this tumultous period, and I wish I would be able to articulate a positive sentiment more coherently than this.

Secondly, tothepointofinsanity (who you might recall as an ocassional guest artist) and I have formed a 'circle' of sorts called Daydream Attorney. A work-in-progress website for it can be found here. There isn't really anything on it for now, but hopefully I can work on it in the future (and continue to procastinate on what I should be doing).

Besides BreadAVOTA, under Daydream Attorney is ttpoi's own webcomic Faux Lucid, which I recently created a website for here at fauxluc.id. Really, the website only exists because I kept insisting on how clever the domain name would be. :P

I've been thinking of creating a webring of sorts, perhaps for multimedia projects, or for other schizotypes, but I haven't really thought it through yet. And it seems like a lot of socialisation to bother with. It would be nice to curate a 'selection' of sorts of Bread-ish projects, but I'll be honest with you, I don't know any, besides Faux Lucid above. For as much as we talk about Homestuck as the comic BreadAVOTA is derived from, I do think that similarity is loosely based on the format/narrative style, but 'thematically' BreadAVOTA is much more, uh, Schizotypy The Comic. I will mull on the 'criteria' for it more and likely use the Daydream Attorney website for it when it comes to.

Here are some collaborative illustrations by me and ttpoi for the website soft launch. I drew Clara and Sar while ttpoi drew Isaiah and Bien:

I got the idea for these collaborations after seeing a 'trend' for it using a base by spaniforce. SarBien is kind of becoming the new MeJa with the 'seven billion drawings rehashing the same concept' so I probably ought to draw someone else eventually.

This was a spur-of-the-moment decision so we'll probably do a 'real' launch in the future, or something, when the website is done.

All that said, I would like to extend a thank you for the support and patience people have shown throughout the years of BreadAVOTA existing. It's a thought I had today. I have (evidently) not been doing well as of late, if I have ever been, but every once in a while I try to remind myself it is pertinent to vocalise my appreciation in spite of my poor mood. BreadAVOTA may not be the best comic, and may not even be a good comic by many metrics, but it is mine, and dear to me, and it is meaningful for it to be dear to others as well.

This year did not start off so well, and without elaborating too much on it January was very upsetting, and further cemented my desire to avoid others and to stop expecting myself to assimilate with anyone or anything. Human relationships are troublesome, and whenever I try to get involved in any kind, it feels like all I do is upset other people by virtue of being what I am. It feels like a moral imperative to never try again. And to die and all that. But in the time between my death (I'm already dead) and the time it takes for Reality to catch up to the fact, I will try my 'best', whatever that may mean, even if it all means is that I sometimes amuse people with funny bird comics.

I am a man (not a man) of many words, but the majority of them historically have been apathetic at best and hateful at worst. I am out of practice when it comes to saying things that evoke positivity and touch the heart, but despite my overt tendency for despair I have always considered myself an optimist. I think it is best to continue cultivating the manner of seeing the world as something where the value of things we care for are self-evident, and need not be argued for.

Kind regards, and goodbye for now (for real this time), rolypolyphonic.

I have said before that one of the reasons I do not like Engaging With Media Works is that I find it intensely boring. The other reason is that I feel constantly conscious of how disliked I am by others, conceptually, that it permeates through my every day life. I will be reading a book and thinking, okay, but this is a book written by a person who would probably support me getting thrown into prison or murdered on the street for thoughtcrimes and stuff.

The Internet is quite a morose place. Fascism is on the rise and so is the idea of 'bad thoughts = bad actions'. People l*ve to dismiss this concern as 'fandom bullshit' or 'porn addiction' or whatever else to attempt to divorce it from 'serious' political concerns, but what could be more serious than to start with the matter of Autonomy? If the mere act of thinking about something is legitimised as having significant weight, then we concede to cultures that support subjugating people merely assumed to be evil (or really, subjugation at all), or the concept of 'alternative facts'. As with many things related to the matter, it's always very frustrating to have the same people who dismiss the concerns of paraphiliacs-et-al as 'petty issues by entitled freaks' while also simultaneously acting as if these are so serious that the people who have these 'petty issues' should be litigated or controlled. So, what is it? Is it a 'petty issue' not belonging in discussions of 'serious politics' or not?

This is just a random thought I have had today, even though it is the same as thoughts I have had all the other days. I am 'fine' insofar that I have grown accustomed to it, but I do feel an abstract dispiritment in knowing it is not dignified to be accustomed to being conscious of your own alienation. When I was younger I regarded almost everyone as stupid, but 'stupid' is a vague word. These days, I call them 'unimaginative'. Really, I was resentful that the more 'normal' people were, the more easily they could live not being 'conscious'. They did not think so much about much of anything, because there was never any danger to be aware of. There's a transitive process here were needing to be vigilant over the fact most people want you to die for a reason they themselves cannot rationally justify (normal people are stupid precisely because they do not need logic) makes you wont to 'thinking all the time' in general, and maybe that makes you observant and superficially 'smart' but really it just makes you tired.

I recently read somebody say that they were baffled that people go to therapy to get basic self-awareness, because they believed you went after already being 'aware'. When they went to therapy, they were shocked at how often the 'professionals' could not or would not help because it 'seems you've got it all figured out already'. Time to be mean-spirited about it. I think people are shockingly stupid. Not academically or professionally or trivially. People are just so not aware. It is one thing to not know about something but it is another to be even unable to conceptualise the concept of certain things existing simply because it has never 'affected' you.

Certainly, I believe normality does this. I think it is inevitable to being normal, as a mere matter of what it means to be normal. To be 'truly' normal a person has to know (not know for a fact, and know as a feeling, but the intuitive state of knowing as 'being', the way an eye has no choice but to see) what it is to be normal. The point of it is you never have to think about it, you just know. And the more normal you are, the less you ever have to think. And so you just never think about anything.

This mindset described here is 'cynical' and 'misanthropic'. I do not see myself as a legitimate 'misanthropist' (I also think misanthropy is a stupid idea held by stupid people). I do however think that the concern gestured here is real: when you point something and say 'This is something people should think more deeply about' and people say 'Um, no? Are you insane?' at the suggestion it's baffling. It's worse than baffling. It feels like being lied to and gaslit every single day for the mere sin of existing. It's like pointing at something behind a person and they keep insisting it isn't there, not because they looked and they didn't see it, but because they won't even turn their heads. If they do the former, they at the very least offer you the dignity they expect for themselves.

There have been annoying political developments here recently, tangentially related to this and possibly subsconsciously spurring my thoughts. But I do not feel like talking about that. I have been sick and unwell all day, and when I feel unwell physically it makes me sick mentally. There is nothing to do about it. Maybe last year or two years ago, what difference does it make, I tried to soothe myself by talking to people, but I do not want to do that anymore. There is nobody worth trusting, not as something stupid as arguing that everyone is too 'evil' to trust but because it is a waste of time. The satisfaction that comes with being understood and perhaps even 'cared for' is never worth the effort it takes to get there, and I do not like the person I feel I become, or am, when I am around people and become preoccupied with thinking about how stupid I think they are.

As with many things, it is a paradox that benefits nobody: other people will think of the assertion as arrogant and unsympathetic, but in reality to me it feels 'nicer' to think of people as 'stupid' because it implies that they merely are unaware about something, but could learn about it later. I know people are not really 'stupid'. What they are is dismissive at best and vindictive at worst. It is not a problem of the mere 'individual' because we exist in a culture where it is Normal to be retributive and ostracising, but the palliative 'reassurance' that the issue is with The Abstract System and not a personal hatred people have with you, specifically, is barely if at all helpful. Perhaps even detrimental. Nobody will love you because nobody can love you. Your existence is so trivial that even your misery is lowered to the level of mere hypothesis. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

I have no alcohol in the house, because I never remember to buy any. But I have a few bottles of old perfume, decades old. I do not use perfume, except as a substitute for alcohol; a remedy for injuries and itchiness. I associate physical pain with the smell of perfume for that reason. I often think Media would smell like perfume, or that Jacques would like it, and maybe it has something to do with that.

I had some 'good news' recently. It was the best conclusion to something that has made me despondent for a few years now. I did not react to it. Not with happiness, and not even with relief or surprise. A year ago (or two) I distinctly recall saying I did not feel 'happy' and instead I just felt 'relief'. Now I do not even feel relieved. I feel very conscious and aware of everything, bad things, and not-bad things but not good either. Troublesome and vague. In the best moments my thoughts are somewhat silent, but they are never-ever good. I pass out too much. Sometimes I imagine myself pushing myself down the stairs.

I always found it a little funny that in horror movies, ghosts are always at the stairs, so I had a joke with myself that bungalows would never get haunted. This 'joke' was the whole basis of that one entry in BienAVOTA where Bien starts talking about the stairs.

Some more 'good news': I recently found old snippets of a vignette I wrote a year (or two) ago. I had it on my old blog, and thought I saved it locally (I didn't) so I did not archive it when I deleted the blog. The snippet I found was something amusing, about potato fries. I had a second vignette around the same time that was better (about buying coffee and relating the flavours of coffee to the concepts of childhood and adulthood and all that) that is, unfortunately, completely lost. I think that sort was the best thing I have ever written, so I have no rewritten it because I doubt it would go well. I think my work not merely benefits but relies on 'spontaneity'. If I write a prose story for more than twenty minutes it decays and goes bad.

I am sick of everybody. I am sick of everything. I hate it when people disrupt me. It is important we never try again. Death is a moral imperative. Being subjected to other people's perception is a crime against the facts of dignity, but some people die in desecration, with no fanfare or injustice, but sheer mindless banality. The words run out eventually.

Today, and by 'today' I mean just now as I am writing this, I discovered that there is a genre called 'Dying Earth'. No way! Someone came up with my idea first! Should we start blowing the stars up? Anyway, that was an interesting discovery. Part of my repulsion to learning about new things is I feel a distaste to finding out the stuff I write have been written before. Not because I am 'insecure' about being original per se (BreadAVOTA is not at all original), but because it sort of dulls a personal satisfaction I have. Most creatives are recommended to study from the masters to have a reference pool to use as a basis and all that. I think the amateur and tedious nature of BreadAVOTA is a feature more than a bug because it feels more isolated and 'me'-ish. I don't know, I'll write something longer about this particular mindset a different time.

Recently, I was thinking about technology. You know, in general. I feel like, 'idealistically', I am generally a fan of technology and view it more positively than most people. But I am skeptical about it in terms of the feasibility of its environmental impact. Really, the environmental aspect is my main concern with technology. The whole thing where technology ruins the human soul and turns everyone into philosophical zombies and zaps creativity or whatever else feels kind of foo-foo-woo-ish to me, and if The Divine Human Soul is so creatively bankrupt that the abstract notion of its Soulness is threatened by machinery then maybe it deserves it, not that 'deservation' is a concept I agree with either.

The Marginals, if viewed as technological tools, sort of gloss over the issue. You get the benefits of technology without the practical costs. They essentially pump out everything out of nothing. This is because I am not interested in litigating the environmental aspect of technology within my story, and not really because it is not something I 'believe' in (to the contrary, it may be one of the few things I believe in). In fact, BreadAVOTA is not really 'about' technology at all. The technology exists as aesthetic. It's set dressing. It's a metaphor. What the story is 'really' about is dumbass problems by bratty people. But I think the amount of A.I. meandearing in the story may make this unclear, which is a little concerning. But it's whatever.

As usual, my wrist hurts a ton, and I have done nothing as of late. Today, I learned how to emulate PS2 games. I played an old game for about an hour then got bored. But it's an option, methinks.

I used to overshare a lot online about my real life circumstances. These days, I just make vague statements, like 'I have done nothing as of late' and 'I feel tired' and 'I wish I was dead'. But I have lost the motivation to talk about what I am doing. I wonder if that is a bad sign, or a sign of something bad. It's also very difficult to care. It just seems very unimportant, to 'feel' like anything matters, to 'think' that there would be a meaningful distinction between choices like these. I could drop dead today and it would be not much more than another dull ingression into the system of things. These things happen. Things disappear and the world keeps revolving, and the world keeps revolving and then the world ends.

Waouh, a more-or-less finished illustration? After I just finished the Carriage Return illustration last month?! This is the level we are at, where doing one half-assed drawing a month counts as Progress.

I've experimented with the BreadAVOTA art style here and there over the years, to minimal success. I hate major departures from the pre-existing style, and while I have accepted I do not like drawing enough to expect I will ever make 'quality' work, there is a threshold of how ugly I can stand my drawings being.

At the very least, I've been trying a different way of rendering that still mimics my usual style, without taking as long. This drawing took around an hour (usually, for something of this rough quality, it takes me four to eight hours, I think). It's far less cleaner than my usual illustrations, but once the canvas is resized for online uploading it isn't immediately obvious anyway.

Mandatory pixel effect version:

What Sar was going to say, before Bien so rudely interrupted, was 'cry'.

Recently, I have been thinking about small-time artists I followed years ago that have vanished off of the face of the earth. There was an artist I liked around 2013 for whom I have no evidence of existing anymore. I actually found their new account in 2020, but forgot to note it down, and they were way too obscure to easily search up. I do recall their colouring style strongly influencing mine, though.

I often think about this concept: the idea that these small things that largely affect you can vanish over time without any proof of its existence, and there's a sombre feeling in knowing that they had such little influence in the grand scheme of things. Something changes your life forever, and the world keeps revolving. Something like that. I'm often quite self-effacing, despite being a borne geniuse incapable of being wrong about anything and all that (very humble and modest, I know), so I don't really 'feel' like anything I do is 'important'. With regards to BreadAVOTA and its three readers and eight unique visitors of February (hi guys), it does feel a little [emotion I can't articulate] to have invested five years into accomplishing nothing but a webcomic that takes forever to update, without anybody being particularly concerned about it anyway.

Of course, if I will ignore my Mortal Foibles of Insecurity for a bit, I recognise even if it is a small number of people, it's going to be people who are likely archiving the hell out of every single thing I say and make, finger over the trigger ready to repost everything and anything if I nuked everything. This brings me no comfort, personally, but conceptually I'm sympathetic to it. Don't do that, though.

I don't 'feel' regret, but I often make myself think it. I have been thinking things like 'I wish at that time, I had told that artist that they influenced me when I found their new account'. Maybe it's a nice gesture. I have said this before, but because of the way I am, I interpret things not through the axes of love and hate, praise and criticism. I've staked a lot into concepts of 'intentionality' and 'loudness'. The idea that people who never vocally engage with anything I say or do are also going to be the people who 'care' so much as to repost my entire existence if I tried to delete it upsets me, not because I want praise, but because I have this conceptual opposition to what I feel is a sort of hypocrisy. If you recognise something has 'meaning' to you in a way that the world's revolution will not allow you to let the thing be lost to time's ephemarility, I think trying to project that meaning outwards to the world without acknowledgement towards the thing itself is a little, uh, not-good. Not morally repulsive, I suppose. Just not-good.

Of course, like most things it's me projecting my standards for my own behaviour towards others. It's not a 'real' desire or expectation I have of others, in recognition of Our Differences And My Special-Snowflake Syndrome. I feel like I don't exist. I 'know' it, but I can't recall 'feeling' it; the feeling of being convinced, or more fundamental than being convinced, the inevitable sense of intuition that comes with recognising reality. A functioning eye cannot help but see, it has no actual choice; to 'choose' otherwise is to stop functioning. I get the sense I am dead, quite literally. Put aside this convoluted metaphor. I feel like when I express that sort of positive statement, something like 'You really influenced me positively', it's a detached and factual statement instead of a compliment. An observation, not praise. I do it to affirm an unfeeling 'rule' and not to connect with another person. One reason I have avoided it and continue to do so is that I know, in practice, people will see 'me' at the other end. 'Here is a Person who said something nice about me, thank you.'

Receiving gratitude has always made me uncomfortable. Or something. I don't know. It's difficult to explain. My grasp on the concept of 'identity' is so weak that I think facts and experiences exist (being influenced, being changed, being affected, recognising something a person makes as 'meaningful'), divorced from the people who experience these things, who manifest these experiences into reality. With that in mind, I can't 'receive' acknowledgement from others correctly. It always feels like they're doing it from an entirely different plane of reality, and in the process of translation it distorts into something else.

It's tłusty czwartek (Fat Thursday), the last day for Polish Catholics to gorge themselves on sweets before Lent fasting. Here's Tarnowska with the traditional pączki (a type of doughnut).

I completely forgot that was today, which is a shame. Polish Catholicism and bread? Truly a missed opportunity. Sorry, looks like we won't have a problematic Choose Not To Warn All Archive Warnings Apply BDSM noncon feederism kink SarBien story this year. How will Cringenowska survive without the opportunity to force-feed Bien. Don't make it sound so weird. :)

Here's a drawing I made in twenty minutes. Man, if it only took that little time to move the main bloody story.

My wrist hurts, every single day. It has been for two months now, but it's been getting worse. I'm getting concerned that someday I will fuck my wrist enough to be unable to draw. I mean, I could write, but it's just not the same. I don't want BreadAVOTA to be a completely verbal story.

That's all I wanted to say. Subtle foreshadowing of the terrors ahead. Things have been bad lately, for reasons unrelated to the wrist. It's just another thing on top of other things. To pad out this entry here is a tier list I made of the Breaddates so far, with each update in each tier also in the order of how much I like them:

• S - BienAVOTA | …Like a Duck… | Carriage Return | It Always Rains Where I Am, Too | Therefore, You and Me
• A - CH7-1 | I1-5-R&D | I1-4 | CH3 | An Archetype of a Person from Universes Before | Christmas Cookies
• B - CH6 | A1-3 | From Violence Comes the Birth of You | Stupid | I1-1 | The Gift Is… | CH1
• C - CH5 | Thoughtful Prose Analysis, Exhibit A | Be Good | A1-1 | CH7-2 | CH7-3 | Commander of the Crows | Waouh… | Waiting…
• D - I1-5 | CH2 | A1-2 | Fermata | CH4 | I1-3 | mfw when the birds | As Scary As It Gets
• E - I1-2 | Love Love Nightmare | al niente | Heyyyy Herald… | The Curator of the Missing | A1-5 | A1-4
• F - SIU | A Transmission from Our Local Interference Signals Bien and Ava | Fuck You

February 15:

I don't want to talk to anybody, and I wish I was dead. Waouh! I haven't been responding to any of my already-not-that-many-messages of the past month. I just don't want to. It feels pointless to speak. I 'could' but it feels like a waste of time because it isn't fun, speaking or being spoken to, and I find myself feeling a sort of detestation as well for other people, like I'm being disturbed. Stop talking to me!

Anyway, maybe this has happened before and I simply can no longer recall. But never before has my desire to keep to myself be so strong. My greatest weakness of the past was my lack of commitment. I couldn't die because I was concerned with it hurting other people. But now I truly do not give a fuck. In fact, I hope it hurts.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, 'not really' and all those sentiments and the same circular bullshit of the past seven billion years ad infinitum. I really like Jacques, shocker. It was his birthday yesterday but I didn't do anything but work. I'm not going to do anything today, either. I don't want to do anything, in the plain sense of the word. I hate my job because I don't like working. When I'm not working I'm not doing anything else. The closest thing I get to 'enjoyment' is writing these inane bloge postes. Not even Jacques being the subject makes drawing tolerable.

This was always inevitable and predictable, in particular, that is, I hate drawing et al, I never liked it. I like the product. Fuck all the Real Arteests with their soulful sentiments on the value of creation, 'it's the process, the journey invigorates me, I am by heart and by nature a creative!', there is nothing I hate more than the process of creation, I just want the thing to be over and done with, I want the thing to make itself! Not facetiously or superficially, I hate having to do things!!!!!

Anyway, here's a scenario I will not draw, and it also did not actually happen in the story but it is the sort of thing Anthony would think about (I'm currently in an Anthony phase):

For Valentine's day, since it is Jacques birthday, Anthony would sing a birthday song for Jacques, and by 'sing' I mean he would mumble it through gritted teeth with a dark shadow over his face, something in the centre of the pyramid of being flustered, humiliated and humiliated again (humiliation takes two corners of the triangle because it's that much humiliating). He'll go on a rant about how stupid the birthday song sounds and how 'Wszystkiego najlepszego z okazji urodzin' would be better to say. Najlepszego, mój hiacynt. A hundred years and a hundred years more. I hope you live forever so your suffering doesn't end. Instead of getting two separate gifts, he'll half-ass his pathetic courtship ritual and propose to combine them into one. As a gift to you, for both your birthday and Consumerist-love Day, I'll lower myself to the pathetic level of going out on a date with you.

Jacques would find Anthony's weird execution of 'flirting' trite. Jacques's a little dense, so he can't really tell Anthony has a thing for him, even it's a hate-thing. He'd think the proposal of spending time together was meant to be a joke. The fact that Jacques years later would keep giving Media dates as a 'gift' is only ironic and funny in the liminal limited space of this anecdote I am sharing to you, Hypothetical Audience, here on my bloge because this doesn't actually happen in the story, so canonically the 'self as a gift' thing was still all Jacques's idea. But the point is, Anthony would do the same thing.

Jacques might give him a gift, maybe. Something incredibly generic. Maybe the Marginals give Judges one (1) free chocolate coin for Valentine's (so generous) and Jacques gives his to Anthony. I like to think Anthony would get flustered and think, well, I guess the [pipebomb or some equivalent] I wanted to give you would be inappropriate now. But realistically, he would throw the coin to the ground and step on it and call Jacques an ableist slur and say he doesn't want his stupid rubbish.

Jacques is too cognitively vacant to take offence to this. The thing about him is that Anthony's cruelty doesn't faze him much because he doesn't even conceptualise Anthony as a guy that exists. This might be why Anthony hates him.

I forgot the initial scenario I was describing, it was supposed to be funnier.

This wouldn't happen but I think Anthony spends a lot of time daydreaming about bullshit scenarios like this. He's supposed to parallel how Jacques daydreams about Media. Like a not-love triangle. Many ironies in the fire. Anthony only knows Jacques's birthday through his visions, since it's a secret.

It feels like I am running out of time, probably because it is happening. It has been so long since I last did anything that it feels pointless to make things. I think I should just throw in the towel altogether; I don't think it would really change anything, it's not like anybody reads this thing, so even if it disappeared off the face of the earth nobody respectable would care. Only people not truly appreciative of the efforts of this product but people who have a fetish for thinking they curate rare things and would repeatedly stalk and harass me over and over again trying to 'archive' all my stuff for no reason other than to make it clear I am not welcome anywhere, not even the avenue of online anonymity. It has happened before and it will happen again. Unfrotunately, by my own poor decisions I have robbed myself of the possibility of a quiet death, because people want me to suffer even in the silence of myself. It's simplistic to say nothing will change when I kill myself, more like I will remain miserable even as a corpse and other people will be apathetic except for one or two people who will be happy about it. But there's no sense of loss, which is unfortunate except not really, since none of it matters. I just think I should kill myself instead of bothering with boring formal cancellations; if I killed myself the cancellation of the story would be a given, after all.

February 16:

I went out with Jacques. Yay! Jacques is so wonderful and precious. I'm really glad I invested in a carrying bag that lets me take Jacques anywhere. Normal people certainly think those fixated on fictional characters the way I am are insane losers, but Jacques is more important to me than anyone or anything, so I don't care.

Today, I bought two new things: Penny Blood: Hellbound (a roguelite game) and Penny Blood: Inheritors, an e-book. That's all I can buy for the month because now I'm broke. I had to spend a lot of money on some other sudden bills. You know, right now I'm not so 'broke' as to be in immediate danger but I don't have any savings which is concerning, but whatever.

These two are associated properties for the upcoming (hopefully) game Penny Blood. The main game ran into some troubles with their previous publisher not releasing their funds, so the entire project is at risk. Concerning! I would really like the game to be released, because it's a spiritual successor of the Shadow Hearts series. I'm adding that to my inspiration list, too.

I bought the two to support the main game, even if my single measly purchase may not mean much. It's a symbolic gesture. I played Shadow Hearts when I was relatively normal. I was never normal, but there was a point in time when I enjoyed things a relatively normal way. There was a time when things were not so boring, and life not so pointless.

Such a shame, this game series. Sometimes, something you value disappears and changes your world forever, but the world continues to revolve unconcerned. I would like to communicate my appreciation to the original creators somehow, if only by buying their new stuff. A tangible act of support. For my own ethical beliefs, I think liking and even 'loving' something is pointless to anybody but yourself it it never reaches the person for whom the 'love' is relevant: if anything, I think it's insulting and self-aggrandising to think your love is or ever has been worth anything to anybody else if it is ultimately an act of self-satisfaction. As with all things, things that are not materialised into reality are pointless, and nothing is wrong with pointlessness, but it is something between arrogant and immoral to want others to believe internal sentiments are equivalent to material actions, whether the sentiments are good or bad.

I'd write something more interesting or insightful, but I'm feeling incredibly unwell right now, physically and doubly-emotionally. This week I once again did nothing at all. I'm lagging behind my job, I can't do any chores, and I'm not working on any art/writing, I can't even read/play the stuff I just bought, like I can't engage with any of the stuff I have collected throughout the years, and I'm always consciously anxious, not a general 'this is a bad time' generic sort of generality, I mean, that sort of neurotic, painfully-aware sort of anxiety, the kind that you can't ignore, because you're aware of it, I'm emphasising the awareness here, I'm gesturing to an emotion that is being felt and not a state of being (passive and inertic), like if you fall down and hit your head it hurts, and this is not the discomfort of lingering or getting-used-tos, it's like that, it hurts and it does not stop hurting, this is something I am emphasising because I am used to being hurt and uncomfortable and despondent all the time but usually because it happens all the time it gets stale, it fades into the background. This is not the nervousness that fades and becomes indistinguishable. It is not the type that becomes normal. It's the pressing feeling of wrongness where every moment you are conscious and cognisant and aware that something's wrong, and there is no getting used to it. I don't want to do anything. It's not that I 'want' to die so much as I don't want to do anything, not 'not wanting to do something in particular' but 'actively opposed to doing any single action ever', to which the only equivalence is death, so I want to die.

Anyway, audios and some pictures/videos were broken because of file hosting issues, but they should be fixed now. Please report any issues if you can find them, thank you.

Ocassionally, I am torn between the feeling that it is a moral imperative to vocalise misery as a way of apologising to reality (Sorry for being a burden on the world, here I am suffering to compensate) and the opposite which is that you should never express too much pain, lest somebody try to save you and you end up owing them, forever.

I am/was/am/was Catholic, although I do not precisely know what that was all about. Maybe cultural inertia, but I was way too moved by the matter to claim the First Law. Really, maybe I liked the idea of unconditional 'salvation', the kind where you didn't have to deserve it. It's a recurring theme in my stories, I think, to the point that it may come off as somewhat naive, obtuse and even apologistic of bad people getting away with doing bad things.

One issue I have always had with relationships is that I have nothing to do in them. For how much I can write in isolation, like in postes like these, I rarely have anything to say to others directly, and ocassionally people who assume a level of 'eloquence' from me based on my public verboseity take my private silence to heart. I sometimes imagine it would be easier if somebody interesting and clever talked to me, and I generally have a 'thing' for people I perceive as 'intelligent', not that intelligence is real or whatever. We gotta keep up the lore here.

I may have a better conversation with a good interlocutor for the course of it (the conversation), but experience reveals that I cannot foster an interest in relationships with them, either. The problem is if they tell me something I don't know, I'm not confident enough to make a statement about it, and if they tell me something I do know, it feels tedious to talk about. I largely navigate communication as a means for information, and information is something one can get this day and age without the need to interact with a living human being. All things I consider meaningful enough to know, I can discover either through engagement with media (not that I even do that either, but the point is it's an option) or through mere observation and mind-rotation.

I'm not really saying much here. I've just been ruminating on my disinterest in people lately. I've always been disinterested in people, but I usually retained a sort of 'instinct' to want to interact, even if only to fulfill an imaginary quota. Maybe it is because of recent events and distresses and the feeling that I have been burned one time too many, but now it's really hard to care. I like talking, but anything I want to say I can say right here to nobody, instead of 'needing' a real person on the other side to listen. What difference does that make? If anything, there's some solace in knowing that if you die nobody's close enough to you to care. The worse I feel about the world, the more resentful I am of other people, not for trying to save me and not for refusing it either, but merely for being in my vicinity during the humiliating vulnerability of it all. When I am in a bad mood, nothing anybody else does is ever correct, and I get angry at the idea of people trying, as if All Of This was about their attempt to be different and not about the way I feel.

Maybe part of my affinity towards God in the past was that God, in its perfection, had no need for your reciprocation or deservation: it takes nothing out of it for it to 'save' you. The Living do not have this benefit. If their benevolence is 'unconditional' then you live with the knowledge that they had to sacrifice something for your sake, even if it was 'mere' time, and if they demand for your gratitude or affection then it only leads to suffocation, a claustrophic room where no love-et-al can breathe. The only alternative, morally and practically, was to learn to live on your own terms, or die.

I would like to talk about two things soon: BreadAVOTA's concept as a 'utopia' and how it intersects with the mundaneity of the problems the characters have, and about translyrics I recently wrote for another MARETU song while I was on the bus going home from getting a few documents updated. The Art of Poste and the Art of Convo are such different landscapes that to think communication through one translate to the other feels quite simplistic.

When I think about it too hard, I feel like I was never legitimately religious or spiritual, I just really liked the aesthetic.

I've mentioned before that BreadAVOTA's ideal form would be through a video game which I have zero plans of creating, but for the sake of blogeposteing I'm going to elaborate on what this game would have been like. The game's concept came a little after the initial premise of the plot (before I decided what format the plot would be executed through), so it does have some complexity compared to the 'beta version' that was essentially the bare-bones of 'a sentient Doll tries to change its name'. As a result the game concept resembles the current comic more than the original 'beta' comic concept resembles the current comic.

Also, while the comic is going to diverge from this concept due to format restrictions, a lot of these is still going to be relevant. It might come off as 'spoiler-y' so keep that in mind.

The Plot

The premise is largely the same as the current comic: Bread goes through the requirements one by one, accidentally gets involved with government shenanigans and the Annotations, Bien does some metatextual Lord English bullshit in the background.

The game would mostly be split into two 'modes', one for Bread and one for Bien. Depending on the player's choices, either the protagonists/Bread's side would win, the antagonists/Bien's side, or the 'true' ending where everyone lives happily ever afterHowever, I never decided what this would actually entail..

Oh, and you have to play the game seven billion times to get the full story like Undertale or whatever.

The Graphics

For Bread's mode, the overworld/exploration would be in a painted, 'traditional'-esque format, as if illustrated on paper, close in style to my illustration for Carriage Return. It would be in a point-and-click format. Instead of having a sprite that walks around, you instead had a map of different regions, and within a region you'd have different 'pages' of the rooms/locations there that you could flip to.

The game, like the current comic would be monochromatic, with the colours shifting in rainbow order based on your story progression.

Here are some incredibly terrible visualisations that I did during my lunch break. Ignore the bad drawings, I'm doing this with my trackpad.

For Bien's half, the game would be a fake desktop UI and one I imagine to be quite simple; primitive, even. Heavier on the high contrast. The entire background would be pure black and windows are just divided by simple blue lines, kind of like if your entire desktop was just the command line terminal. If anything, it would be something very reminescent of the UI of the early Ultima games. The minigames would have similarly shitty stickman graphics.

This is it, baby... peak UI.

You can see Sar if you video call (why would you want to see Sar though lol) Hej ): and the art style for Sar's sprites would be similar to the vaguely pixellated, dark-but-saturated style I have for the illustrations that feature Sar. Everything else gets little detail and is just very blocky in appearance.

Like a traditional desktop, you can open multiple windows at once, so you can refer to your old lessons/notes/material/etc. while writing your bullshit reality augmentation program. Besides your program icons, the taskbar has a clock[citation needed] for your daily schedule.

The Music

Music truly is what makes or breaks a game. BreadAVOTA, as a game that actually totally exists, is thus affected by this gamer expectation.

I think Bread's mode just has the usual cutesy RPG music. Honestly, I don't think about it much. Each Annotation would be associated with a song, and the 'words' you collect are sections of the song, so if you string them perfectly you can unlock the entire thing. I imagine you could play them back in Bread's room as unlockable content.

I imagine each Annotation would have a unique musical style associated with the Marginal as well.

Bien's mode would be silent by default but you could open up a music player and play a few 'generic' ambient tracks, Bon's songs, some random Polish Anselirian songs that I totally would have cleared the copyright for, and Bien's own music (bad and terrible).

Here are some samples:

Bread Mode

Bien Mode

Bien's music would be my own (bad and terrible). You can hear one example in I1, but Bien's would be worse.

The Gameplay

The Initial Playthrough

The style of gameplay would have depended on which 'mode' you were in and how deep you were into the game.

Bread's half had a more open-world RPG (?) style of gameplay. You would visit different places and go around doing a variety of tasks. I imagine there would be a progress bar for the three components (Soul, Mind, Body) and that they would increase (or decrease) based on which tasks you perform and how you do them. This would mostly be non-linear exploration, greatly inspired by the concepts of how one raises virtues and becomes the Avatar in Ultima IV (great game, by the wayGuy who only knows Ultima IV: This game should be more like Ultima IV).

You would also have your own room to customise your Bread, by changing your outfits and also swapping around the Breadlings. In this game, the Breadlings would be like status effects/skills/etc. and that you could only use a limited few at a time. Some tasks would be well-suited or even require certain skills that a specific Breadling had, so you'd have to swap them around every once in a while to do certain quests. It would also be neat to have a friendship mechanic between the Breadlings, but this is overcomplicating an already convoluted concept, so if this would have been implemented I think it's for bonus story content instead of anything essential to progress the story. I think it would be similar to the chats you have in Twisted Wonderland when you take enough lessons with a character.

You could up your Soul and Body stats through the open world, but to Open Your Mind you would have to do an Annotation, which had its own gameplay.

The Annotations, like in the comic, happened within a Marginal's Internal Universe, and I think this would be the only part of the game that would have any actual combat. There were different concepts of how the battle system would work, but one idea involved building up a 'case' to be able to pronounce the offending Object in the World as 'guilty' (basically, rationalising an excuse to punish or kill them), and this would get harder over time from how irrational/miniscule the 'crime' being litigated was and the more alien cultural context. At the 'Trials' that culminate at the end of the Annotation, eventually the Objects wouldn't even actually fight and just beg you not to kill them. lol.

An idea related to this was that you would travel the Marginal's World to look for 'words' which served as evidence in your case, and that the words would be laid across a web/network of sorts based on their relation to each other. A full 'attack' would essentially be a 'sentence' haha yeah because you're Judging them so you serve a sentence #factsandlogic, and you had to be strategic in which specific words you'd string together. Some words would be usable in multiple sentences, but once you used a word you couldn't use it again, which could affect the strenghth/integrity of future sentences as you'd only be able to use what you had left, among the pool of what you collected.

Since the Marginals have their own unique languages, in more advanced Annotations the words may not even be in English anymore, or be represented through symbols, so you'd have to use context and observation of the world to find out which ones could be strung together/their efficacy.

I think the concept is interesting, but how this would be executed sounds very complicated. The 'gimmick' also sounds tedious over time, but I imagine something like this could fly if the entire game had like, only seven Annotations or something like that.

All that aside, there was a friendsim mechanic where you could befriend either Jacques or Media (or both), for additional story content and potential ramifications in the ending.

Now, for Bien's mode, there were two main aspects: relationship-building with Sar and Ava, and the actual coding. The layout of the game would be a sort of desktop UI: it would have a 'chat' feature to talk to Sar and Ava, a file explorer to read through various documents/etc., a mini DAW to make shitty synth music with, a program for you to code in, Bien's blog (this gets relevant later) and some 'extras' like minigames (mandatory fishing minigame).

Sar and Ava have different approaches to their 'attack', with Ava's being more streamlined and 'foolproof' and Sar's being more chaotic and overwhelming. You would have a daily schedule where you'd have one lesson a day with each, and the rest of the day was for UI exploration. You would build your relationship with either character based on different things: how well you do in their respective lessons, whether you choose to interact with them in your free time, and how you use the information you learn from UI exploration to improve the type of interactions you have with them.

Now for the coding: at a set schedule (like, maybe once a week) you would have to 'code' a program. This program later turns out to be relevant to the cases in the Annotations. I never fully hashed out what this would look like because 1) I code just as well as Bien, which is none as fuck at all; 2) I wouldn't actually want the player to write 'real' code, because that sounds tedious for no reason. I imagine you'd just write in a fake in-universe programming language that is significantly simpler than real code. Your shitty synth music will also play here.

The idea I had was that what you were coding was the Annotations themselves, although chronologically you would already have finished the Annotations. Basically although in the context of the story, that's what you're doing, metatextually you would just be reconstructing the Annotations and the original decisions you made in Bread's mode. That means that if you did well in Bread mode, you'd struggle more in Bien mode and vice versa, and this affects who wins in the ending.

The 'language' Bien needs to use to 'code' would depend on who you had a higher affinity with that week. If you were closer to Ava, it would be more tedious, time-consuming and repetitive but ultimately easier to understand, whereas if you scored higher with Sar you kinda do just fucking whatever. I also think that which of these two approaches is more 'ideal' would also be contingent on the Annotation it corresponds to, and that this would be somewhat similar to the word-stringing in format just so the player wouldn't have to learn seven billion new mechanics.

At set intervals of Bien's schedule, he 'logs out' to do 'real life' things like have his meals or do chores. As the player, you don't see or participate in these activities, but you get a rundown of how they went from reading Bien's blog.

Nearer the end of the game when you realise Bien is fyucking up the nyarrative, your new role as Bread is to discover the 'glitches' in his terrible code, and whether Bien's code is more Ava- or Sar-flavoured is going to affect the type of Final Boss Battle you have at the end.

Regardless, to get the Everyone Is Happy Ending, you'd have to meet certain conditions, like having both their stats maxxed out and having a good relationship with all your companions. Otherwise, the ending depends on which stats you completed.

Playthrough 2: Eclectic Boogaloo

Congratulations, you have unlocked the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom and completed BreadAVOTA: The Game That Totally Exists! You can stop there if have decided that was the most gimmick-y bullshit ever, or you can keep giving yourself psychic damage by playing through the game again.

If you have finished the game once, for the sake of quality of life you now have a select menu that lets you skip to specific chapters of the game using the same results you got from last time. Here is where Bien's blog gets relevant: his blog is where you write about your 500k slowburn normal life AU of the Alternate Timeline. To eventually complete the Altline's 'story' you would need information garnered from subsequent playthroughs, so how quickly you can finish the Altline is contingent on how much exploration/relationship-building/etc. you did in your initial playthrough. It's possible to finish it as soon as the second playthrough if you really maxxed the hell out of the first one, but I imagine a 'typical' player might need to go around three or four times? I don't know.

Either way, the Super Secret Everyone Is Even More Happy Ending is unlocked if you finish the Altline. Whatever that entails is up for conjecture.

Waouh! That sure sounds like a concept that would be very cool as a game and not as a webcomic. Alas, some ambitions are not to be.

A few minor updates:

• PR6 now has proper cover art. We have a new illustration by me and even a guest illustration from ttpoi, who some may recall as the guest artist for BC7/Schizoid Union of Two Eccentrics as well. Since I made an illustration, that means I have met my quota and am now going to hibernate for ten years again.
• I have revived my old art tumblr (@rolypolyphonic) for the sake of posting my original illustrations. I have no plans on using it to socialise or to blogposte, because first of all I bloody hate that webbed site, and secondly because I feel much more settled and comfortable here in my own café.
• February has begun. I highly dislike this month, due to certain things happening on February. I won't explain further. That reminds me that Valentine's Day is coming up and I have zero plans for a Valentine's Day bread crumb. Ha-ha! But really, PR6 is the final update I will post until A1-6, so we'll be dormant for the time being.

That's it. Ciao.

Compared to, say, 2023 or 2024 I do feel more 'stable' but as I have said before I owe my stability much to solitude. If I do not surround myself with people who want to kill me, I am less preoccupied about thoughts of having to die. Well, today I was thinking about such things again, and it's bothersome. I have that anxious feeling where you cannot breathe and feel dread in your chest and might go catatonic and want to die. Anyway, I think existing in this world is troublesome.

This is not 'news' to anybody even vaguely familiar with my online presence, but I have always been vocal about the support for paraphiliacs. While writing Carriage Return, I was thinking about how I am 'politically' aligned with paraphiliacs, in terms of defending them, but I myself lack sexual/romantic/sensual/whatever interest in much matters. I adore Jacques, as my one-note fixation, but at this point, are you really a socially inept loser if you don't latch on to a fictional character? Either way, there's this feeling of disbelonging, a sort of cultural gap of being not-at-home even among the paraphiliacs, while also needing to manage the paranoia that comes anyway from being in the Everyone Wants You To Die And Assumes You're A Predator demographic.

Tangentially related: local elections are soon, and I have seen people arguing how the loss of the better candidate was because the supporters were 'annoying'. Well, there is 'practicality' in conceding to the petty triviousities of using polite and eloquent verbage to promote a particular candicacy, but there is no doubt a shot at pride to do so. That is, to have to 'cooperate' with people who give up their morals over something as ridiculous as being annoyed.

breadavota.cafe is quite niche, but assuming there may be one or two people 'out of the loop' I figured what we mean by 'paraphiliac politics' here may go over people's heads. Of course, if you are here, I assume you are more sympathetic to the 'cause' than not, and that my paranoia may come as baseless. Where oh where, rolypolyphonic, do we keep getting this idea that people 'want to kill you?'

Much to be said about the irritation of emotionally charged language. Much of the 'controversy' surrounding the 'support' for 'paraphiliacs' is that when we're talking about 'paraphilias' people think about the most controversial ones, the so-called 'Big Three'. To align yourself as an ally (and/or member) of the demographic leads to bad faith accusations disguised as inquiries, so, that means you support pedos? 'Pedo' here, like many of these euphemistic words, P. Diddy's, Epsteins, kiddy-diddlers (because certainly, people who take child abuse seriously are all so excited to use very serious terms like kiddy-diddlers, which most definitely lend respect to the gravity of the situation) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, because it's essentially saying two things, the first is you fuck children and the second is that this is not, in fact, normal, and you are bad for abnormality and abnormality alone.

I will elaborate on these two points: 'the first is you fuck children'. Thoughts and feelings are not actions, and frankly if a person thinks about doing something (and I am, indeed, including thoughts of abusing others, children or otherwise), but they do not actually do it, they should not be held accountable for it.

The second: 'this is not, in fact, normal, and you are bad for abnormality and abnormality alone'. Child abuse is 'normal'. Gasp, you might react, this is a tacit admission of your support for child abuse! This is the knee-jerk reaction of a person who equates 'normality' with proper ethics. If child abuse was not normalised in society, then why does it happen so frequently? The treatment of children as the property of parents, the way they are forced to kiss and hug their relatives on reunions for the sake of courtesy, the fact that it's acceptable to stop a child from basic functions like eating or going out to piss because it'll 'disrupt the class', the frequency in which people say they want to beat up snot-nosed whingey loud as fuck brats clogging up the grocery store aisles. The obsessive signalling of a desire to 'protect children' from the 'pedos' is rarely a reflection of a thought-out ethics wanting to support the vulnerable, but more often a desire to protect a comfortable lie.

It is laughably sad that communities and subcultures so obsessed with healing the inner child or protecting victims or recognising trauma or stopping the cycle or whatever other buzzword is popular these days cannot make the connection between 'everyone is mentally ill because of bad childhoods' and the frequency of bad childhoods. We are so used to aspects of 'childhood' being bad that we do not want to call it for what it is, and ingress it into 'childhood' itself, as if it is the nature of youth to learn how to be abused, so you can spend your adulthood soul-searching and taking care of your inner baby tulpas.

Society has little issue with children being abused, as long as the manifestation of abuse isn't tinged with icky 'abnormality': indeed, it's quite apparent that the opposition to paraphiliacs under the notion of their 'predation' is not from a belief that abuse is a violation of rights and dignity, but from a shallow distaste for things that are not normal. Abuse is bad because it hurts people, and not because it's 'gross', and this 1st year Philosophy class sort of logic is somehow remiss to many the moment controversy flickers by.

The constant derailing of slippery slopes and the spectre of the boogeymen omnipresent in the discourse aside, there is one thing I can say about feeling the need to 'argue' against this: there is something very alienating and insulting in needing to 'defend' yourself from the assumption of child abuse, of all things. Engaging with a person who has already decided that you 'fuck children' is dispiriting not merely from the derision of your character, but something more fundamental in its hypocrisy. To many, the abuse of children is so non-trivial and normal that it does not exist as an issue to discuss but merely as an insult to use against people deemed abnormal. It has the intellectual rigour of advocating for veganism by saying, oh, so you're fine if I picked up your dog and gutted him with a knife in front of you? It's an 'argument' that is about establishing your own moral superiority more than anything that involves a sense of 'ethics'.

Going back to the local election issue, I do understand that resentful feeling, the idea that you have to be 'polite' in the face of utter bullshit. People who cannot say pedophilia without censoring every vowel with an asterisk have neither the guts nor the logic to 'debate' about it seriously, and a lack of seriousness is the last thing we need in the discussion of abuse.

Anyway, that isn't what this poste was meant to be about. I was more here to lament, but I'm gradually losing the eloquence for lamentations. I used to write thousands of words describing my loneliness and alienation and now all that is left is to say I am lonely and alienated. Short and sweet? Perhaps so. Perhaps the nature of the truth is straightforward. Lefteris is evil, but at the same time, is the type of person who has given everything up in the name of 'ethics'. When I reflect on my life, I can only think of my social difficulties as the result of that stubborness, the inability to concede to things he considers petty, which is most things. Having nothing but one's pride and the insistence that everyone is beneath me makes me feel, in some respects, like a dog in a manger, whatever that entails.

Does it 'matter' what I think? I mean, I think the thoughts matter. Because they are correct (mind you, I am never wrong about anything). But does it matter that I think them? Certainly not. I don't usually care for attention, and am in fact usually opposed to it, but I do get thoughts like, man, does it even motherfucking matter for me to poste a webcomic that nobody reads? There will be no difference between the moment before my death and the moment after, in any fundamental sense. That is the type of thing I think, I think.

Observing Lefteris and his Divine Antisociality would be interesting if it was someone else, where I can be a morbid observer unaffected and unmoved. Unfortunately we are the same person (we're not) so it's just hell for me. Lefteris's entire thing is that he needs to be correct and superior and competent at everything all the time, and superficially he can say it is a matter of pride, almost because there is something a little humanising in arrogance. But it is barely pride, when there is no satisfaction. There is no gloating or smirking or evil moustache-twirling in being acknowledged as 'important'. Instead, it just feels like an obligation. There was no choice but to Develop Ethics. I used to 'achieve' things, but I was never happy about them, because I did not feel like I was moving towards an 'achievement'. I felt like I was doing what I had to do. Experiencing 'life' as What I Had To Do has all the drudgery and lack of agency it implies.

What kind of fucking name is Lefteris? Full offence to anybody out there named Lefteris. It's just so funny a name, for no real reason. I've already acknowledged the Hypothetical Audience of people who may just be BreadAVOTA readers and not schizoposteing migrants, so I might as well write a real introduction. Lefteris is Lefteris, and he's an evil administrative computer who lives inside my head, and tells me to do stuff.

My fucking God, this is humiliating. Logically, he is a 'personification' of an abstract concept, and while he's really there, because it's difficult to deny something constantly niggling at you, don't take this as some spiritual belief or whatever. Shit, rolypolyphonic believes in multiple people inside your head. Okay, well I do but not for me. Only for everyone else. We're all about schizorationalism here. We all know he's not a real person, and baby, neither am I!

This is exactly what he sounds like:

A very suave voice, innit? Maybe you'd be fine with having an insane rogue AI living in your brain too if it sounded like Simon Prebble. He's like an imaginary (not-)friend, except different in the sense that he's actually The Actual Person With Me-ness and Mine-ness here and I am the one artificially 'constructured' to be a fictional pseudo-person. The difference is that after 'I' was imagined into existence, Lefteris went, 'Okie-dokie, now you go live in the Outside World and I'll be inside here, in the Mind.' The great thing about living in an imagination is that you don't have to be a human. You can be an alien computer ghost with a British voice. God, life is so unfair.

This wasn't what I was going to talk about either, but maybe I'm talking about all these things to distract from the miseries. I have this contradictory feeling going 'you should probably talk to somebody or whatever, you are feeling like this because you are not doing anything, so instead you are ruminating, and ruminating is bad for you' but also that I do not want to talk to anybody, ever. I want to disappear, and I want to run out of words.

Another week… of nothing! I was 'supposed' to draw this weekend, but got preoccupied with so many real life matters that I did nothing. Yikes! Sorry to the one person I have not drawn my owed art for, if you somehow stumble upon this. I'm so busy on the weekdays that I only have time for anything on the weekends, but because I was so busy on the weekdays I spend my weekends doing the things I neglected to do on the weekdays. So I barely have time for anything at all. How sad…

Some slight good news is that I was able to work a bit on the story for A1-6. That is not much, because I have not worked on the actual art, but it is… something. Meh. Really, it is nothing. I can't believe January is almost over. We're entering February, which is a month I hate. I've been saying that since November, but that's because I hate these months. March is a month I do not hate, and feel neutral about, so hopefully by March my head will be clearer. In the meantime, to lull my suicidal ideation, I've just been rotating my characters in my mind. I don't want to think about anything else and I don't even have the time to bother with anything else to begin with. I don't want to talk to people, which is easy enough online where I can simply just not talk to anybody ever, but in real life it's something I cannot avoid. How cumbersome and overwhelming existing is. Is any of this even 'worth' it?

Well, here is a different poste I have been writing on and off since last week, and I decided to quickly wrap it up just now. I might as well poste on the bloge while doing nothing else BreadAVOTA-related…

I'm not one to put content warnings on my bloge, but that's more a lack of vigilance than a serious repulsion. I'll say it now that this one's cruder, more vulgar and more irony-poisoned than usualChoose Not To Use Archive Warnings.

It may be made of ink

Now for some media bonanza

Recently, I've been hungry all the time. In my last medical exam I also gained a few kilogrammes: not so much to be noticeable, visually, but it's the first time I've gained weight in several years. I'm a little anxious over it, not so much just 'gaining weight' but the thought of not being able to wear some of the clothes I have had for decades. Either way, the weight gain isn't the problem, it's the hunger. I don't know why I'm hungry almost all the time, even though I eat more now, and the only time I'm not hungry is when I'm too sick to even move, like what happened today.

I was so sick that I did nothing again all day. I need to finish some drawings, like for a Ko-fi donation (thank you), and the illustration for Carriage Return. I'll try again tomorrow. I'm not making any progress at all with the story. It feels like I just don't want to move. I can't stand doing things that don't come easily to me, so when my physicalities started failing me I realised any 'competence' I thought I had was a farce to begin with. It's a revelation I put a lot of significance towards: people who are always right have no experience being anything else, and people who know everything have nothing else to learn. I just want to stop moving.

Lefteris seems to be antsy about something, but without the connotations of snivelling, tail-between-legs fear. Whatever the word is for antsiness without the fear. Concerned deliberation? This is the sort of thing that precipitates my many deaths and replacements. Recently I had this sudden thought that it is I that is fake, because 'I' am actually Lefteris. I mean, Lefteris is the Person That Possesses Any Me-ness, and I am just a construct fabricated to carry out his will in the real world: to watch over, and to experiment with. Once that gets dull, I get replaced with a new experiment. This isn't a new thought, exactly: I've had many in the same ballpark. But the other day there was a new 'form' in which the thought took, like seeing a familiar sentiment articulated in a brand new way. Recently, we had a conversation where Lefteris said he made a mistake(s) in the past few years, recklessly dooming 'us' (me) for their inability to be more vigilant. I was stunned by the experience of seeing Lefteris ever admit to being wrong about anything.

It doesn't mean much to say I'm not feeling well, because I 'never' feel well. I'm in this state where I recognise my circumstances now are better than they were years prior so I'm 'happy' (or maybe not happy, just... relieved? Stable?) as a general sense, but my affective in-person 'mood' is bad. To motivate myself I think about my handful of relationships, even though I don't 'do' much with them, maybe in the sense that staying alive because someone else 'wants' me to is a little more convincing than staying alive because I want to, because I don't. But throughout the month I have been getting a sense of disconnect from the handful of people I know. It feels 'pointless' not in a bored or misanthropic sense. Just something vaguely existential. I feel like a troublesome person, and while I 'value' certain people I recognise I never value anybody enough where 'changing' to be better for someone else's sake is ever a more viable or even attractive option than staying the same. Being alone continues to be a sort of moral mandate. Either way, I haven't had the energy to introspect much on it.

I feel like things are always 'moving' and what I want is for it to stop. Things are overwhelming and boring all at the same time. I think about what I 'want' for the future and I feel like I want things to be motionless but 'meaningful', or at least some approximate of it. Other times when I think about what I want I want to be dead. It's neither here nor there. I've been thinking a lot about being more 'quiet'. You know, even more isolation. I think I need to get off the Internet for good. I already quit social media, and then I think I need to quit not-quite-social-media too. I wouldn't delete this website only because I'm paranoid of losing control of it and having random people try to #lostmedia me about it. I care about my story, which is something I write to 'solidify' thoughts more than anything, but it makes it a pretty bad story. There is no art or insight or meaning to it. It's just an overglorified and overextended bloge poste. I've never been particularly 'insecure' about my inability to write, but only because I've never felt like I was trying to convince anybody I was capable of it anyway. The act of recreation and entertainment was not merely 'writing' as a hobby but the very notion of language itself for me.

I got algorithmically recommended this post in a writing advice forum where somebody shared a snippet of their writing, discussing prophecies. They gave examples in the prose, structured a bit like this (paraphrased for anonymity, of course): 'Children born during the full moon, killed. The evil artifact of doom, destroyed. The hero from another world, transported'. Somebody wrote some response criticising the structure for improper English and said it should be like 'Children born during the full moon were killed', and that the placement of the commas did not make sense. All Reddit advice including mine is bad by default, of course, but this was dumbfounding, and it does make me feel like much of writing to people is about content and not style.

BreadAVOTA is a story practically devoid of content, so of course I would think that. It's purely a stylistic story, and everything exists for Style. Sometimes there is a 'point' but the 'point' isn't about anything to do with the overarching plot, and is more just the 'thesis' of a particular story. I suppose I should have written an anthology comic instead, but at the time I didn't even know those existed, which is stupid in retrospect, and reflects not much more than my inability to read more things.

I don't have a point here, either. I used to write a lot when I was depressed, not anything meaningful or inspiring, just loads and loads of diary entries about how I'm depressed. I tie a lot of value into 'language' as a concept (clearly), there used to be a time where I didn't 'think' in words but thought in abstractions, and then I forced myself to think exclusively in words. I cared about it that much. I had this idea that if I stopped talking I would die. My life was intrinsically bound to the words I was saying, or maybe not the words at all, but just the saying of them. It made me desperate to constantly talk to other people, even if in disconnected, impersonal ways (The Art of Making Poste). I've been gradually losing the drive for that too, and I wonder if it's the first sign of ensuing suicidality (Active Version). I don't feel like writing to anybody these days, regardless of whether I have anybody to write to or not, because I don't feel like I have anything to say. I feel like I only say things because I believe it keeps me alive, the iron lung and pacemaker of my vanishing spirit. But it doesn't actually mean anything.

I have a massive headache as I write this, which seems to be a recurring pattern with these blog entries, but then again, if I always have a headache, there's not much room for anything else.

We have now entered 2025 and my only resolution is to finish Cycle 1 before the year ends. The gap between two parts of I1, I believe, took sixteen months, so unfortunately the idea of not updating for more than a whole year is not new to me. I suppose the issue is that I really don't feel like drawing. It's difficult to draw without 'feeling' like it, nothing comes out right. I was never all that good at drawing anyway: not to devalue my own work too much, but I can somewhat render my work to a decent quality. But drafting/sketching my work is the problem: in the majority of my illustrations, the sketches are incomprehensible and I 'sculpt' them into decency with the colours.

This makes it so that starting a drawing is always exceptionally hard, not merely in terms of executive function, but in, like, actually having the sketches look like what they're supposed to look like. I suppose this is evident with how simple the drawings are in BreadAVOTA, populated by repetitive headshots and standing 3/4 poses without any real dynamic action or perspective. I admit it, we're style over substance. BreadAVOTA uses the ocassional painted page and cute background to hide the fact that I cannot draw characters worth shite.

Anyway, I'll try thinking over how to better use the multimedia format to make what I want to portray more effective. I'm limited by my (lack of) coding ability when it comes to more 'flashy' effects or presentation, and that aside I like the relatively simple layout of the website. I've seen a lot of beautiful and interesting static websites, but I'm not sure if they fit the aesthetic I want. And despite BreadAVOTA being intended for PC use, I do make an effort to make it mobile-compatible, which poses quite a few difficulties. An initial plan I had for the Annotation was to use a different web layout for it, in mimicry of a desktop, with different windows and all, but the problem was I couldn't make it work on mobile (drag and drop doesn't work on mobile devices, apparently).

Well, besides 'get the bleeding story moving' another thing to do this year is to repurpose the old FC2 for a static version of the website where you don't have to interact or dig through the website to find everything. Of course, the digging around is 'the point', but there's nothing to lose in having the alternative option.

The feedback form will be taken down later, but I received around eight responses, which is honestly more than I was expecting. Thank you for the articulate feedback, all you three readers who are also eight people but still three people for the gag.

Well, anyway, here's some thoughts for the day.

I do not really like video games, because I do not like the vast majority of media. I've said this a lot of times so it's no news. It's the effect of my anhedonia. Everything is boring.

Despite this, I used to play video games, around a decade or so ago, on the NES and the PS2. I think using a controller to play games makes them more enjoyable, so maybe the real reason I stopped enjoying games is that I no longer own a console. I also used to play old as shit PC games. And by 'old as shit' I mean those hideous 8-bit DOS games from when 'gaming' was not established enough a landscape for any conventions to be widespread, so we were in this liminal phase where programmers, who without the Internet and the community feedback it provided, were throwing shite at the wall and seeing what sticks. Some game mechanics were revolutionary, others lost to time (sometimes because they sucked, sometimes because the game just faded into obscurity), but either way they all were interesting, at least, in giving you a glimpse into the creatives' minds.

I recently finished Ultima IV, a game I have been playing for a million years. This was the first time I ever finished the game, which I ran through with a walkthrough for the dungeons. Sorry but I am no longer the type of completionist who would walk through all those confusing and scary 3D rotating walls. I do quite well on aptitude tests, especially all those tests where you rotate shapes and symbols to figure out the next one in the pattern. I wonder if Ultima IV's peculiar dungeons helped me in that. Anyway, back when I was more of a Gamer with a capital G, I was the type to enjoy just running around and interacting with everything. Completing the game wasn't the point, and in those times it was more commonplace to play a game for the sake of playing it without the expectation of actually finishing it. I mean, you try completing the Ultima games without the walkthrough or the manuals that came with the original games. The thing with these older games is that because technology was so limited, it was not feasible to have the game itself tell you what was going on at all times, and there was also somewhat of a necessity to put bland, grind-y gameplay to pad the game out, because there wasn't much else you could program into it. It means that a lot of the puzzles in older games made no real sense either: the questions and answers weren't logically connected. You 'solved' the puzzles by interacting with everything and seeing if that did anything.

The initial idea for BreadAVOTA was a video game. Not a game I would ever actually make, because I cannot develop games (no amount of positive thinking can bully circumstance into submission: I am such a person who can never be a game developer, and I have accepted this). But the plot of BreadAVOTA was first conceptualised as a hypothetical game. You played as Bread who had slice-of-life-y moments in the overworld, and then you progress the story by going through the Annotations like the different levels of a game. And then when you moved on to Bien's side of the plot, the idea was that you used Bien's side to pseudo-code the puzzles or whatever the hell it is Bread is going to do, and then you used Bread's side of the narrative at first to just 'solve' the puzzles but as the story went on it was not about solving the puzzles but finding the logical flaws and shitty code that Bien wrote as a way of finding Bien himself and putting an end to his manipulation of Reality. And Bien had his own story where you as the player had the choice to either make Bien grow closer to Ava or to Sar, with your choice affecting the type/style of 'game' he would make for Bread to play. Yadda yadda. We would also have reverse-Undertale where the game would appeal to your guilt by having killing Objects in Annotations progressively more unpleasant, because instead of fighting back they would all just beg for their lives or whatever.

BreadAVOTA is obviously not an actual game, but if you can see what it was 'supposed' to be, I hope it makes people a little more understanding towards my poor meow meow flaws. It feels like I'm adapting a story in a format it was never really 'meant' for. I can make the website vaguely game-y, but it's really just not the same.

Well, all that aside, since I don't really play 'modern' games, I'm unsure what modern gaming 'looks' like. I played Undertale, which sort of gives me an idea? But I mean, Undertale is to me for games what Homestuck is to me for webcomics. As in, it's my only point of reference. Smarter writers will tell you you need to read a lot to learn how to write effectively, but my golly, I really REALLY do not want to read. Or watch-play-listen-etc.

BreadAVOTA's story is 'derivative' by nature, because first of all it's literally Homestuck if it was worse, and secondly because the plot sort of rests on the idea. Universes are just rip-offs of each other, Marginals are edgy DeviantArt OC's! Etcetera etcetera. This is such a silly problem that feels exclusive to me because of the type of person I am, but a major failure in BreadAVOTA is that it's a story that would benefit from making a lot of allusions and references to pre-existing work, but I don't like enough things to do this regularly. Music is the easiest to consume, so I end up shoving in a lot of songs into the story to sort of do this 'concept', kind of, but it doesn't really 'fly' that well. It just feels different to have random background music or transcriptions of lyrics as opposed to, say, quoting popular literature or making pop culture references, the latter actually reading as intentional allusions as opposed to, well, 'music for scenery!'. If BreadAVOTA was an actual game, where integrating sounds is far more effective, this would be less of a problem.

I sort of went on a tangent there. What I really wanted to say was that eventually there should be more game-y aspects of the story, if not necessarily with how the readers interact with it (the current level of interactivity is likely the limit we're going to stay at), at least in terms of the plot/narrative (awww shit this is literally Homestuck!!!!!). We kind of already saw it with BienAVOTA: there's a bunch of references to games there. The Wars are structured like games, Bien is more-or-less being told to make games (well, write stories, technically, but presented vaguely like a game), the Demons are associated with 'playing games' (in I1-5RD). But I don't play games, and the games I did play are a very limited pool. So whatever attempt I make at 'doing a game-y atmosphere, but not as an actual game, just as a comic' is probably not going to read... like... a... game... the way all the music in the story doesn't read like a Poetic Allusion. Or whatever.

I have failed to articulate my point clearly. Woe is me. I'm trying to allude to something about conventions here. Games look like how they look today because of adapting the mechanics that worked from older games. Sometimes when you play an older game you might find an idea that was quite interesting and effective but never caught on, and it's like... I don't know, looking at what could have been, like being in an alternate universe. It's interesting to see how creative works and the tropes and conventions that define them progress and relate to older works. You know how in novels, some will begin a chapter by putting in a random quote from a different book, not as an actual part of the story but sort of to set the 'tone' of the theme? This happens in enough books that we intuitively understand what the 'point' is in doing it. When a book makes references or parallels to literary classics like Dante's Inferno or Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or the Catholic Church's The Bible, we just know what is meant by this (as in, not the specific references themselves but the act of making a reference to begin with), because we see it happen in creative works all the time.

Doing this with music, on the other hand, isn't one of those heavily established conventions, at least, not the way BreadAVOTA is doing it. There's a different 'atmosphere' somehow in having Bien transcribe the lyrics of a song, as opposed to if I had him read some famous piece of literature, even though arguably there isn't an 'actual' difference: I'm still making a reference to a pre-existing work. Maybe the different, often stricter copyright issues surrounding music limited the type of derivative works that use them and in turn the emergence of conventions on how these works would look like, but still, it's not precisely a 'thing' to do. The only thing I can think of that is comparable are those 'songfics' that used to be popular in the 2010s, and they were regarded as odd, stilted and 'cringe-y' in a way that, all things considered, was not precisely because of the act of putting song lyrics in a written work and writing a story alongside it, but because of the lack of convention in doing this. Nobody bats an eye if you start the prologue of your novel with You will die like a dog for no good reason. Ernest Hemingway. A rose by any other name is just as sweet. Knowledge is power. France is bacon.

Forgive my ineloquence. But it's the New Year so I wanted to write an entry. Today is actually a very difficult day for me. For reasons I won't explain. And my head hurts and all. But eh, whatever. Happy New Year! Let's hope Something Happens this year!

IN A GOOD WAY

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.

I didn't do anything for this year. The holiday season is always tough on me, emotionally. And it's around this time where somebody I know just vanished off of the face of the earth. It happens, but you know how it is. I can only hope the people I once knew are doing well, wherever they are.

I had wanted to draw something for this year, but I didn't get to doing it.

I don't have much to say, it's not easy to think. The past few days I have been sleeping too much; I'm sleepy for no reason. I also have this vague sense of (???), like nothing really matters, and I have these thoughts of, 'I don't want to do [anything] because it's pointless.' I try to tell myself it's temporary, and I only feel that way because of the season, and that eventually my motivation will come back. I 'want' to keep writing my story, despite feeling like I don't have the motivation or energy or incentive to do so. Or I can want to want it, there's no functional difference.

I go to bed early these days, around 7 PM or earlier, and right now it's such a time, and I think I'd rather go to sleep than think too much.

I have been feeling unwell lately, but that's par for the course for December. I've been preoccupied with some matters, which I won't bother getting into.

I'll share some minor updates here: I recently added a new illustration to An Archetype of a Person from Universes Before that was requested through a Ko-fi donation (thank you!). It also seems like the comment box is broken, which is an issue with the comment box host (HTML Comment Box). I sent an e-mail and hopefully it's a temporary issue, but if not I'll have to look for a different comment box widget again. Ach ):

Anyway, I recently received a question about Jacques and his relationship to his family. This is important enough to his character that I think I will write something about it in the story eventually, but the question reminded me of Albert Camus's The Stranger, a book in which the main character's relationship to his mother is similar to Jacques's relationship to his own, or at least, my interpretation of the book.

Recently, since it's been suggested (and for my own purposes), I've also been trying to archive my old blogs, or at least, the last two I had (I didn't export any back-ups of the first ones). I'll deal with that another time, but in the meanwhile I found my old postes talking about my interpretation of The Stranger from earlier this year. It's written somewhat haphazardly, but I figure I might as well share it here as well (and it might give insight to how I write Jacques):

[ There was meant to be a first part to this, but I didn't archive it, so the beginning is a bit abrupt ]

Half-formed thoughts that I'm too sick to think about too deeply but re: 'The reason Meursault shot that man was because he actually did care for his mother' in disconnected paragraphs:

It's notable that he refers to her as 'Maman': the English version (that I am familiar with at least) translates this as 'Mother', which is technically indeed what it means, but any English speaker can attest to refer to your mother as 'Mother' sounds clinical and detached. 'Maman' does not quite have the child-like quality English speakers associate with, say, 'Mommy' but it's definitely a warmer title than 'Mother' that already paints a particular image about the relationship they have. This may be the most important point, but besides that…

Meursault does have emotions and he expresses as such in the story, it's just that the subtext/follow-up to his expressions is that it makes no difference either way. An 'obvious' thing that may be silly to point, probably, but I'm surprised at the number of times I have seen it simply be said that the 'crux' of his character is he feels nothing.

Since I like to think of him as a quintessential schizoid (who doesn't), my interpretation of him is that he experiences the same dilemma many schizoids do: he is superficially apathetic but is in reality incredibly sensitive, even if he himself may not be 'aware' of it. It's a case of using the maximum of your energy to suppress the maximum of your ego: nothing feels meaningful or important because the overwhelming nature of emotion is eschewed from the selfhood.

Despite this, Meursault would be a person who is sensitive to change. He gets irritated when others push him to do things, even if he responds with passivity (avoidance, 'I'll just go along with it and be done with it') to hide it. This in part can be interpreted as perhaps apathy, perhaps the whole 'don't like people intruding upon me' feeling, but I also feel it's something like… 'I don't see the point of doing that because it makes no difference even if I did.'

The story textually demonstrates his apathy (for example, when he's asked about moving for a job and he doesn't really care because life's the same everywhere) but I think his apathy is deeper than just… well, apathy. When he says none of it makes a difference, it's not that he doesn't actually believe anything will change in a literal sense but that he doesn't feel like any of it will be meaningful to him. His default response is to try to be immovable whether he does it through action or inaction: that is, he'll resist minor irritation but also go along with what would be considered major decisions (marriage, moving for the job).

And that seems contradictory at first (wouldn't that be a big change?) but Meursault's avoidance and sensitivity has come to a point where he evaluates reality not through its material state but through personal abstract connections. If he goes through a big change like marriage or moving or even going to prison, to deal with the disruption in his material reality he tries to tell himself that it is not different in an abstract sense: how he is within. It's like a classic schizoid schism where things that happen to the external self/the 'body' are considered irrelevant to the internal self/the 'mind'.

It's notable that when he's in prison that one thing he thinks about is something he learned from his mother: the idea that there is nothing in the world that one cannot learn to stand. It may just be a generic shibboleth but I always found this noteworthy because it's the principle from which I myself deal with my own issues: of course material reality has a tangible effect on you, and it can change in major, unpredictable ways. And you can't control it! And to deal with that lack of control instead of thinking about things externally (what can be done with the circumstances?) you think you can learn to live through it by controlling it internally, that is, making 'life' be nothing more than a test of endurance, a series of learning how to make yourself tolerate.

I think the fact that in prison, his thoughts surround his mother quite a bit is also evidence enough that, while he may not love her in a 'traditional' way, still had a relationship with her distinct from everyone else.

All that aside what actually stood out to me is when questioned for his motive for the murder, what he points out is his irritation with the sun. On a surface level, his apathy is brought up again: his irritation with the sun in his eyes and the heat of the day is tantamount to a man's life. He lacks the emotional capacity to internalise murder the way a 'normal' man would.

This stood out to me in particular because he brought up the sun before: during his mother's funeral.

It's a very loose association that only exists in abstraction and not in reality, but Meursault is exactly the kind of person who lives in abstraction and not reality: the sun is something he associates with his mother's funeral, ergo, it symbolises a period of major 'change' that he has yet to learn how to process and bury, even if he appears to be apathetic to it all.

When he confronts the man he shot, it is indeed not about the man at all, but a looser connection that only exists in his mind: that man, the sun, his mother's death.

I don't really think he 'loved' his mother the way one usually expects love to be, even if only because I'm projecting my schizoidism of being unable to 'love' from being unable to feel like one is actually 'in' material reality. But what mattered is that his relationship with his mother was distinct—he knew and remembered her in a way he did for nobody else. So when she died, perhaps her being lost as an individual may have been received with 'apathy' but it still had a more abstract meaning of marking an irreversible change.

When all other events, people and places are indistinct Meursault can convince himself that swapping them around will make no difference: material reality is a meaningless blur, so in his own abstractions objects are interchangeable with one another. Thus when things change, he can mentally operate as if the new is indistinguishable from the old. But Maman was someone he 'recognised' so with her loss there was no internal object to immediately replace it with: it presented a challenge of being a change he could recognise and thus could not deny nor ignore.

Shooting the man was something he himself could not explain in logical, material terms because it really did mean nothing in material reality, and he was aware of it. He knows he has no 'real' motive and that he didn't even know the guy. But in the abstract reality from which he operates from, the man's presence was associated with the sun and thus occupied the same metaphorical space of his mother's death. Shooting him was, in an irrational way, a way of seizing control against the feeling that there was a change in his life that he could neither move back from nor pretend made no real difference.

I missed it the first time around but besides the choice of him saying 'Maman' the very first sentence ('Aujourd'hui, maman est morte') using 'aujourd'hui' (on this day today) emphasises a particular trait of Meursault's, which is how much he lives in the present.

It's shown throughout the story how he lives moment to moment with no heed for either past or future, and this has always been a very schizoid experience. It gestures to both the dissociative nature of the condition that causes discrepancies in time perception and a difficult in evaluating or even experiencing temporality as one 'normally' should, and to the detachment of the condition, the feeling of life passing by without you as you exist 'outside' of material reality, like watching the world behind plexiglass.

The way he describes his mother's death with such an odd sentence, one that is difficult to translate the ambiguity of in English. 'Today, Maman died' is a literal translation but merely saying 'today' for 'aujourd'hui' for me doesn't fully carry over the idea of temporal disruption. When Meursault talks about today and follows it up with his mother's death, it's gesturing to a more existential notion of time as something disrupted by his mother's death, that there's a point between 'today' when he learns of the death and the time that existed before.

As I said in my last post, Meursault can convince himself that changes in material reality make 'no difference' in his personal abstract reality by considering objects (people, places, events) indistinct and thus interchangeable. His mother was different, in that she was distinct, so unlike with those other changes in his life, her death is a change that is a genuine disruption. There becomes a distinction between the Before and After of the death.

For Meursault who exists in the moment and doesn't properly conceptualise this understanding of time, as sequences of events that constitute the Past and Future, he operates as if everything is only the 'present'. He understands this death as marking an important before and after, a point where everything changes, but this isn't something he is accustomed to, so instead of thinking of the death as a fixed point in the past [ Maman died that day and I am now living in the part that comes after the death ], the death becomes a constant. When he says 'Today, Maman died' that today carries over. That particular today never actually becomes yesterday or the day before or any amount of days before that to him. It's always just today. Maman died today.

And again this is what makes it so important as well for him to point to the sun. The sun in the novel is presented as a constant: not merely as background dressing but a noticeable stimulus that bears down upon Meursault. The sun that shone upon him when he shot the man being 'the same sun when I buried my mother' is important not merely as a loose association of the sun and his mother's funeral, but it's symbolising his difficulty adapting to change and his coping mechanism of existing moment-to-moment.

The experience that there's this thing that splits reality in half, an irreversible event that marks a point that is no longer the same as before, but lacking the ability to properly comprehend and internalise it, like the sun that you can feel and see with your peripheral vision but cannot actually look at head-on without blinding yourself.

Do you ever hate an incident so much you cannot talk about it? I cannot talk about a lot of things to even my associates, but I used to complain about certain things in public, and in reality I have no idea what of the things about me my associates are aware of, because I never bring it up to them and they never bring it up to me (either they don't know or they feel it's not polite to discuss). I never intend to talk to them about it, but I do regret having ever talked about it in public at all, because the possibility that they know those things weighs down on me quite heavily. I do not regret much, but I sometimes do regret how much I've shared about my life: I endeavour to be honest about beliefs and feelings, but I would like to keep facts about my existence undercover. I'd appreciate it if everyone forgot about it, and never brought it up again.

I am aware of my permanent delusions, but my goal is not to 'cure' them. I want to learn to live with them, I want people to play along. The conventional manner of treatment is to 'understand' that perpetuating delusions is bad, but if the badness is that everybody regards you as crazy it makes me bitter that the solution is to comply with reality against my will instead of having people concede to my thoughts. I would understand it if I was making demands of others, but nobody is meaningfully affected except for me in Playing Along. I am incapable of true honesty, because honesty would have to be acknowledging that certain things are mere fabrications, and every day I am weighed down by the feeling that I have to choose between the person that I feel I am and should be and being dishonest to the world. I can't complain about it correctly because by necessity I have to be vague about what 'it' is.

I watched The Good Place recently. It was alright. I'm not a fan of much fiction (despite writing my own), so it's not like I was 'obsessed' with it. But there is this one scene where they ask Michael to take off his human disguise so they can ascertain he is not an impostor, and he doesn't want to do it because he doesn't want to be seen as he truly is, and they don't force him. I really liked that scene, because it aligns with certain feelings I have regarding self-determination. I recognise the value of 'self-love and self-acceptance', as The Advocates will call it, but to be honest I was skeptical of the 'inherent worth' of 'needing' to 'accept' the things you cannot control.

What I mean is, I think one needs to learn to live with things that cannot be changed not out of some inspirational shibboleth of moral value but because it's practical: you have no choice. I would not associate it with pride or love. I think choosing things, even things you 'cannot' choose, is something to fight for. I suppose I am sensitive to the feeling of being helpless and controlled, to the point that what matters to me is not 'how things are' but the ability to choose it: how I would prefer a bad decision if the decision was called mine.

Well, I can't say much more about it, since I need to be vague. One of the things that tides me over is knowing that I am certainly not alone in this feeling, and although I cannot be part of the world in a meaningful enough sense to 'belong' with such people, just the presence alone is enough to be meaningful.

I may not run out of time any time soon, but I know how the story goes. There is nothing in the darkness that will not one day be forced into the light.

I have several memories of dying. Lefteris thinks it's funny, I suppose as a hypothetical mind construct given a name for the sake of amusement than any real belief in identity it doesn't matter much to him. I was cleaning files recently; I found how a few years ago I would draw simple diary doodles, except whoever 'I' was is irrecognisable. I think of how some of my associations weren't 'made' by 'me' but instead were made by 'others' in the past, and I wonder what that is like. I feel like I am stealing relationships even though logically they are mine. I suppose it is that I do not feel like a 'real' person in any meaningful sense, so I feel like I am robbing the life of somebody in the real world who is real, but for whom my presence has removed them of the reality.

The Marginals are a little bit of a lolrandomxD hodgepodge of different things. It works, thematically, since the initial idea was that Universes are stories and Marginals are all the random riffraff that get cut out or otherwise don't coherently belong. Either way, I still feel like I don't have the eloquence to express the proper feeling I want with them.

A Marginal is a Universe of Objects (the Objects are not really not real people). If you live in the Living World, perceiving 'a Marginal' seems to be perceiving a singular being. 'Media', some inky man obsessed with Jacques, seems like a 'person'. It is not intuitive to determine he is a Universe or he has Objects from perception alone. Media certainly has a 'backstory' but in the context of their current Reality it's not actually 'real', it's just vague Memories that 'inform' his existence, the way a fictional character has a backstory for themselves. But they certainly feel real to him. Who exactly is Media? I mean, in the broader context of his relation to the Universe: is he one of the Objects? A different kind of it? Is he the 'coagulation' of the Universe as a whole? Etcetera, etcetera. It bothers him, too. I am mostly just projecting feelings.

I try not to think too much about the future, because it makes me suicidal. I am worried about practical things, but most of all I am worried about the possibility that there will come a day in the future where I will have no choice but to abandon the 'reality' I live in, because it is not actually real, and I would rather die. It is not because I am afraid of the Real World, but simply because it is not a world that I feel Real in. It's complicated.

I never like this time of year, and in the past month or so I've been unwell every day. I get headaches and nausea and I have this constant feeling where I'm sleep deprived, even though I'm not. And I'm filled with a sense of dread. I want a distraction but have no idea what that could even be. I often wonder what's the point. I try to tell myself I have to keep existing for the future 'me' who won't feel the same way. I started to call myself only by the generic name, 'rolypolyphonic', because at some point I realised names wouldn't work for me anymore, and I like the anonymity I share of knowing it's also the online name my associate uses, even though frankly since they don't post online it's still technically me. Since I want to hide from the real world I want someone else to do real world stuff on my behalf. Oh well. My head hurts again, and when I am overwhelmed during the evenings I end up crying, but sometimes I feel it is just because it is the night. I'm not sure why, but evenings often make me cry. It's inconvenient because then my eyes hurt in the morning. It isn't that late at night, but I think I'll go to bed.

This started as a response to an ask, but it's long and significant enough for me to want to write a simple blog entry about.

Pan asked: Do you have a fave chapter? Least fave chapter? How do you feel about BreadAVOTA after writing it for so long and the way it changed over the years?

'If It Looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck, It May Be Made of Ink' is, I feel, the strongest example of my writing style, because it perfectly exemplifies my personal tastes: trivial situation, no action scenes or larger-than-life scenarios, extreme reliance on narration, minimal description of appearances and settings, introspection on the thoughts of a singular character, periodic breakdown of reality from being plunged into a mundane task, etc etc.

Of the major chapters, I'd say the entirety of Intermission 1, except maybe not for MV6, which I loathe with a passion.

Least favourite: Chapter 4. I could have split that up or something.

Honourable mentions for A1-4 and A1-5, which aren't precisely bad but are so nothing that there's nothing they evoke, but I'll give myself leniency for that one. I (rolypolyphonic) was dead when A1-4 was written, and I (rolypolyphonic, too) was working without an idea of what to do, on account of I (rolypolyphonic) being dead. And I wanted to get A1-5 out of the bloody fuckin' way because we've been stalling for so long.

I am content with how BreadAVOTA's story has gone so far even though I am aware that my own personal issues and circumstances have really killed a lot of the 'potential' that I had wanted for it.

Despite that, I feel that as the story has progressed it has started to 'take form' as the type of story I have always wanted to read, which is a feeling I didn't get in the beginning. I feel that people may disagree with this, but while I don't hate the first half of the narrative it feels very different from what I would have wanted it to be. It's structured like an isekai action-adventure where a quirky protagonist meets strange otherworldly beings and is going to be roped into monster-of-the-week type adventures a la the Annotations. This would not have been a bad type of story, and I would willingly argue it would have been a better type of story (clearer plot structure and progression), but it is ultimately not a story that I actually care about.

I'm not 'opposed' to the traditional hero's journey and other conventional storytelling formats (they're popular for a reason: they work!) but there's a reason I don't engage with the works other artists create and that's because while I find them technically proficient, they don't engage with my emotions. I've gotten used to this fact having been Big Fuck-Up Schizo my entire life, but I never realised how much I could appreciate a piece of fiction that 'speaks' to me until I decided to just make it myself.

I have always professed that BreadAVOTA is a worldbuilding/setting-based story, and I think that was sort of misleading because I hadn't realised when people talk about worldbuilding, they consider a sort of broad 'tapestry' of culture: names, flags, food, dances, arts, history, wars, political negotiations, religious practices, cosmic mythologies. From my oh-so-schizoid vantage, it's difficult for me to care about such aspects of the world when I've never been inclined to 'beauty'. There is no awe-inspiring feeling in me in seeing a wonderful painting or a large mountain or the colours of the sky changing, and throughout the years many people have noticed BreadAVOTA's odd lack of a 'world' outside vague philosophies.

BreadAVOTA, to me, is 'simulating' or 'reconstructing' a certain framework of 'reality', which is to say mine. I don't mean that I 'see' or 'believe' alien computer ghosts or that objects are sentient or that the abstractions of human beings are bodies of matter. Rather, it's trying to touch at the feeling of being a 'schizotypal' person, not as a list of symptoms but as a qualitative subjective experience. Whenever a person looks at my characters and asks, 'God, why the hell should anybody care?' what I'm 'trying' to do is getting people to ask the sort of question that I am forced to ask every single day, just by virtue of existing.

Since I've only ever lived as myself, it's been tremendously difficult to do this. I have no frame of reference but my own, and I don't know how to 'translate' that into the 'language' other people speak.

There is, of course, the other more immediate factor: BreadAVOTA has been going on for four years and it is very difficult to maintain the same style, tone and interests for four years. My new experiences and interests shifted my writing style.

Everything before and including I1-2/MV6 feels 'different' to me than I1-3 onwards, the latter being a story that 'touches' at my sensibilities more. In context, there was a gap of sixteen months between I1-2/MV6 and I1-3. Even MV6 took half a year to do because of my circumstances at the time, and I1-5-RD and BienAVOTA were the 'turning points' of me and are also where a noticeable 'shift' in tone and perhaps quality of the story happens.

If you've read BreadAVOTA since the beginning, the gap in time might 'soften' the changes that happened over the years, especially for my past followers/associates who were more prescient of my Gradual Descent Into Psychotic Madness, but if you're a new reader grinding through the story in an afternoon or two, I imagine the shift is much jarring. I1-5-RD and BienAVOTA don't even look like they belong in the same story anymore, but they are exactly what I want them to be, which is something I can't say for the earlier chapters. For me, that is more than enough.

BreadAVOTA need not be a good story; for my purposes, what matters is that it feels like something definitively 'mine', and it's difficult to let go of the feeling of sticking by the flaws of something if it's the only thing you have.

The entirety of the existing BreadAVOTA canon has been reuploaded. Rejoice! Looking for a Polish ''''Anselirian'''' translator for the 'Further Reading' snippet in I1-5-RD was a bit troublesome, but fortunately with the power of The Interwebs we have made it a Reality. This does mean, however, that I will eventually have to *shudder* make my own social media account to find my own translators, because I can only ask my associates to intercede for me so much.

I have to go back here and there to make bug fixes and proofreed (you're encouraged to send me a message if you encounter any mistakes), but for the most part I'll try focusing on Brand New Updates now.

With that said and done:

True rolypolyphonic aficianados which is like two people (I imagine the third breadposter is more casual about things) know I am so easily shame-ridden over the thought of taking people's money that the last time I used Ko-fi two years ago I ended up returning the donations and spending more on the fees it takes to return the donations than I got from the bloody donations themselves. Huzzah.

But a café isn't a café without any coffee so we now have a Ko-fi. Any money sent to the Ko-fi will be used for the website's upkeep, and since nobody reads this comicExcept for the three breadposters who I ♡ very much I expect I might get $1 every six months so I'm not going to be too fussed about using the money for anything else.

There are two membership tiers: a $1 monthly donation tier where you receive early access to whatever I'm doing, and a $3 monthly donation tier where you receive the same and also receive an art commission. You guys ought to be aware of my slow output by now so do expect that that montly update might range from Real Actual Content to something as trivial as three paragraphs of prose.

If you only seek to make a one-off donation instead of subscribing, you will also receive a one-time commission. Please note that in sending a donation to the Ko-fi, you must put an art request in the message: I will not 'accept' money for 'free' for moral reasons.

If you cannot support breadavota.cafe with cash money, remember that you can always continue to support us by engaging with the story, and maybe sharing it with a reasonable group of people (not a bajillion people on your TikTok influencer account or whatever, if I have to pay $20 in bandwidth I'm going to blow this whole website up).

This may be a miniscule amount of money to you, especially if you are a Westerner, but my monthly salary is a hundred dollars and my monthly medicine is seventy dollars so I'm already kind of killing myself slowly just by letting this bloody comic exist. Alas, it's part of the art. Never let it be said that I do not truly care for BreadAVOTA. My desire to complete the story is why I continue to fight against Ye Perpetual Suicidality! Ahahahah!

In other news, it's the anniversary of my last suicide attempt. I feel better now than I did back then, despite it all.

And then the evil children grow to become evil adults

breadavota.cafe now exists. Isn't that nice? I ought to use this Initiliasation Entry as a retrospective but I don't have a lot to say that I didn't say in the previous entry, and besides, who's reading? Besides all the BreadAVOTA readers, which is a sizable sum of three people.

When the site goes live, I'll upload up to the 'On Hiatus' update. Past BreadAVOTA readers, which I assume is all of you because I have zero desire to bother promoting that this story still-exists/that this website now-exists, are well-aware that that's around the half-way point of the previously finished updates, but the rest will follow… when they do. I am not one for efficient planning.

I'm considering uploading the backlog to completion once the next major update (A1-6) is finished, but in reality I've been saying that since June of this year. Since 2022 I've faced major art [block or burnout, whichever it is] and I have yet to recover. I've crunched the numbers [looked at my files]. I did three illustrations for 2022, one for 2023 and—don't be too shocked now—a whopping zero for 2024. In 2020-2021 I was drawing ten comic pages a day. Needless to say, but I'm one to say the needless, things are not profitez-en-bien, and they likely won't be for a long, long time.

I can write with marginally more success than I can draw, but I really, really do not want BreadAVOTA to become primarily a webnovel. For one, I'd have to edit every HTML page meta-tag to say 'webnovel' instead of 'webcomic', which is tedious and unbecoming. For another, BreadAVOTA's magic system hinging so much on convoluted, contrived linguistic middlingotology is already cumbersome enough to slog through the way it is without having it be the entirety of the story. Besides, if not to look at Jacques, the cutest and most important character not merely of BreadAVOTA but the entire Living Universe, what even is the point of BreadAVOTA? The world's first schizotypy allegory in a YA format? A demonstration of unique worldbuilding through an ipseity disturbance of a magic system? Don't make me laugh. BreadAVOTA is a furry fetish webcomic first and whatever the hell it is besides that second.

I spent a lot of money to get this domain. It's a lot of money because I'm broke. Maybe I should make a Patreon, which I probably will bar the fact that I probably won't. In lieu of monetary support, maybe you should e-mail me a very nice and/or very scathing review, as long as it's honest, and displays your rigorous integrity. All three of you.

Having abandoned my schizoid blogging days, because anybody on the Internet who makes mental health advocacy their main shindig is awful and annoying, I have since become better, and by better it means I have become full-blown schizophrenic. HAHAHAHA. Oh lo and beholden is the disorganisashen of speeeechhhhh. Every once in a while you (I) get people on reddit messaging me for surveys and interviews, because they write dissertations about schizophrenics. For one, as a hebephrenic (read: my speech and thinking erode into dust, but hallucinations/delusions are minimal), getting a lot of surveys about my experience with psychosis is taxing. If you're going to write a dissertation the fact you couldn't bother to do a rudimentary G**gle search of the differences between hebeprenia and psychosis reveals not only your lack of academic integrity but the sorry, sorry sad state of affairs of schizophrenia research as a whole. A message I got, which I ignored for my own pretentious sake, came from a person asking to interview me for a dissertation while having their profile full of 'narcissistic abuse' posts. Truly, the mark of a true dedicated psychologist is throwing people with personality disorders under the bus.

I try not to ask for things from people. You (I) cannot particularly decide when or where symptoms flare up. I won't go into detail, because I'm trying to gesture to a phenomenon more than individual people by saying this, but if you act and sound hebephrenic (or psychotic) around people, even if you aren't asking them for help and hoping they 'save' you from your insanity, they will often treat you as if you are taking resources for them. It's not necessarily malicious, but the whole 'I care about you and that's why it's best we never talk again because I can't help you and have my own mental illnesses to deal with and you being visibly mentally ill is clearly imposing an expectation-slash-obligation on me to do something about it, and not at all you just being visibly mentally ill, which I support by the way because I'm an activist' spiel that you hear not from asking for help, but merely existing as a schizo makes it quite evident that much of the sentiment behind Mental Health Advocacy online is an intellectual exercise-slash-self-soothing balm, a way to make yourself feel good without doing the uncomfortable work that it takes to put your money where your mouth is. In the name of self-care, we must remind the schizotypes of the Internet that mental illness is a conscious choice and a moral failure. Never let the gold-star Aspies try to convince you otherwise.

Also, these people never say thank you. They never say thanks! I don't need a thank you, precisely, as an individual. I think it's more that the fact that these people who pride themselves on their supposed 'awareness and education' for the mentally ill can't practice basic etiquette after asking people to write elaborate responses to their questions is ironic and dispiriting. If you can't show common courtesy, what makes you capable of actual 'advocacy'? Online Activists get a lot of value from forming networks, and without the cushioning of befriending other Online Activists to push you forward the niggling feeling that people talk to you like you're the schizoid ChatGPT becomes far more apparent, and even then the other Online Activists who try to 'befriend' you aren't immune to treating you the same. The value of any niche microcelebrity is first and foremost charisma and secondly eloquence, integrity be damned. I'm no better than anyone, except the Genshin Impact players, but I don't make my entire online presence being about how goody-goody I am. Or maybe I am better than a bunch of people. For one, I know how to thank people I have the gall to ask for favours from.

What is up and coming on breadavota.cafe? Not A1-6, that's for sure. I'd force my way through it but I can't even do that, and I know if I did I'd dig myself into a hole I can't crawl out of in terms of reconciling it with the rest of the story. Here's a list of other things I ought to handle at some point:

• Minor grammar/spelling corrections and standardisations. In particularly, the wiki (which was originally written by Breadposter Guillaume) needs to have the spelling standardised. Gui would spell that 'standardized'. The z's and s' are one such swap, but there are a few here and there that ought to be dealt with.
• The 'Home' tab on the homepage will eventually be replaced with simple browser game/s. At the moment, I'm thinking of replacing it with a dress-up game of the character of your chosen theme. I've considered making it a different game as well for each character, but frankly I don't know how to code anything except the dress-up game.
• An art/gallery page for illustrations and possibly photographs of my art dolls and plushies.
• Maybe some kind of Ko-fi/Patreon or whatever. I usually dislike receiving money from others, to the point that Rememberers of my days as a schizoid blogger may recall I spent twice as much on fees/conversions costs returning donations than I ever earned on the donations themselves, but I think having an extra fund for the domain name/hosting would be really helpful, and if I release some early previews or other ancillary works in return it's not really a 'donation' and I'll feel like I'll have earned it. Of course, there's like three people who read this, so the likelihood anybody would give me any amount of money is statistically improbable.
• I am also considering making some kind of SNS account again, if only to poste updates on, because who uses RSS anymore? I'm not sure which website to use thouugh, and I also have the whole 'social media drives me crazy and insane' problem to deal with. I feel a little better now than I did last year, but I figure the fact I stopped talking/stopped letting people talk to me is the main factor behind my relatively calmer state, and I think being anywhere online but my own website is going to compromise that. I already have to deal with strangers I don't recognise apparently archiving every single bloody metaphorical breath I take on the Interwebs.
• I plan on using this blog page not just for direct BreadAVOTA postes but for tangentially related stuff (real life meandering and postes about schizotypy, paraphilias, lovelessness and other themes directly tackled in the comic to explain the way I present them in the story), so I may have to update this blog page to something easier to link individual posts to.

Eh, we'll see how it goes.

Kind regards and well wishes to my fellow schizospectrals (and I guess the rest of you guys assuming you exist),
rolypolyphonic