So many factors.

Education, Culture, Internet, Parenthood, Trauma, Joy, Zeitgeist, Race, and endlessly more and all of it evolving and dying faster than any time in human history.

I have zero fucking clue where we're going to be in the next 10 years, in the next 20.

Sometimes I can't tell what's right and wrong anymore.

Others. Just "Others". Same heads all sharing different bodies. The details change but they're all just walking vessels of the zeitgeist. You try to talk to them and you know what they're going to say before they say it.

And I can see it on their faces, the older, pink-skinned Others outside in the real world, I mean. It's the glare, the wrinkles, the expression that looks like it's never smiled. I can tell how much "they" hate me, like they can see in my head and know what kind of ideologies are in it, or maybe the presence of a Hispanic is of inconvenience to them, I have no idea. I don't even wear anything that should set them off for fucks sake.

I think it would hurt a lot less to internalize that "they" simply aren't of comparable makeup to me.

Need to write this while my head still works.

Been happening for a while now, got worse after getting COVID a month ago. My head keeps going back and forth between unbreakable will and complete despair. On a good day I can feel something, on a bad day I'm happy just to be able to leave bed without feeling dizzy and detached from everything entering my eyes and ears. On a good day I have unyielding absurdist ideals in the face of the god-forsaken timeline, and maybe even a bit of hope if I really forget how awful it's gotten. I remember how much progress we as a race have made and have yet to invent and how a good life for me isn't impossible, still that's on a good day. Some days I'll tell you to keep going as there's so much wonderful feeling in the world left and the next I state I wouldn't blame you at all if you wanted to give up and die today. Some days I'll tell you

what to believe in and contradict myself in the same paragraph. I don't know what I believe in anymore sometimes. Some days my boyfriend tells me he loves me or the music that can take me on the rides of my life in a dark bedroom, it's like it isn't parsed by the synapses. I'm tired, I'm scared and I'm weak.

This world isn't real to me anymore.

The entire internet had become so seemingly hive-minded and centralized that it's not fun anymore. One day, I saw a shitpost in my timeline and figured nothing of it, later that same day my sister tells me to look at a funny gif, it's the same post. Later that day my friend from across the planet sends me the same image, then again I see it in a discord server. It begins to sink in how much of our internet intake is nearing total similarity, designed by a series of numbers so well understood yet so poorly fought against. In 2040, our children will not ask us where "The Algorithm" came from, it will have always been and seemingly always will be to them, and I'm scared. Good people, awful people, left, right, it's the same jokes, same rhetoric by everyone. We have devolved to the point that the things we enjoy are used by the other to create a visage of us before we even learn their names, and more often than not it's fucking true. I know what it's like to hear voices all your life, to have debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder that makes you second guess every action until you can't take it anymore, and I fear the modern internets' constant propagation of this "ideal content creator" this fucking impossible to fulfill notion that the artist has an obligation to exist for their audience, to exist for their wish fulfillment and to exist as someone who can do and say no wrong is akin to the voices, I fear for my own sister sometimes and the bullshit she has to even consider as an artist in 2023 who aspires to do more with themselves than fanart and cred-seeking low effort twitter bait. I write this knowing my words will change nothing, I write this not to hope but to have this in a place where there is a possibility someone gives a shit. I want artists to fuck up, I want them to say questionable things, I want them to make things that only make sense to them and watch as their nonsense project ends up being adored. I can't stand seeing all of our collective aspiration be limited by those who perceive us. Even the horror genre as we once knew it is another thing to be added to the list of casualties by the consumerist ideal, nobody wants to be scared, to be challenged culturally or morally, it's just something to react to, to make into a fucking product, and if you think it's bad with horror games, give horror films a run for your money, it's JUST THE SAME SHIT.

I'm so tired, and if you've ever wondered why I put everything on my Newgrounds page, important game dev or fetish fuel, this is partially why. I want more to learn more than the names of those who make the things they play, and learn what happens when an artist doesn't exist solely as a name with no known history, someone with flaws, desires, hates and loves, a human fucking being.

The audience is a byproduct of work, not the other way around.

https://ben-crooked.itch.io/peter-the-trip