i blog.

i lost my airpods

My astronomy project has taken a bit of a turn. It all started way back (a few days ago) when I began writing out my thoughts on Dune and came to the swift self-actualization of "holy shit, I'm yapping about nothing".

Apparently, knowing that Western society kinda sucks and has a really horrendous history isn't the same as knowing how it sucks and how it affected people and how we got here and blah blah blah blah. To make a long story short, I'm in the process of researching a lot more on American policies in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) in the mid-1900s, as well as just reading a lot more on the different themes and critiques of Dune.

And through this process, I've realized that one thing I really want to dedicate some blog space to is the absolute beauty that is Google Scholar. To my friends who are still in high school, Google Scholar is something your English teacher beats into your head as you go through your gen-eds, but over time I've found it really useful.

While a regular Google Search on how America influence the Middle East in the 20th century would give me anything a half-baked analysis on foreign policies during the time to some random ass website ranting about "what's wrong with Islam", searching for stuff on Google Scholar actually gives you so much content on a specific content. Granted, you'll still probably have to sift through a bunch of random papers, but there's a lot more information in each one, not to mention they often reference other papers you can explore too.

After receiving a call from Mateo, coincidentally him on the verge of tears begging me to download and send him a Google Scholar article, I feel obligated to mention that it's a great resource once you're already in college, as the university gives you access to most of the papers you find. Oops.

On a more personal note..

Firstly, I have some things to say about the aesthetic of this blog; sorry about all the words... I know some of you have the attention span of a dementia-riddled goldfish with ADHD, but there's not really many supplementary images and videos I can attach when I'm talking about my own thoughts. Also, about the frequency of my blog posts, I really only want to post something when I feel as though I have enough to talk about. I'd say this post is probably the last one I'm sort of forcing myself to make by a certain date, from here on out there'll be a much wider gap between posts.

And now for the personal shit.

In Loving Memory

I am not dying. Feel like the image can be misinterpreted that way, so I just wanna put that out there. Not dying. What is dying though is my hair follicles, God rest their souls. 

If you knew me in high school your first reaction to this information is probably "yeah, no shit", but post-graduation my hair actually grew back quite a bit. I feel like the biggest reason for this was that the nightmare-inducing stress that plagued the past four, or honestly the last thirteen, years of my life (the American public school system) was now gone. I've also been taking meds for years, so that probably played a part in it too.

But recently my horrendous genetics (literally every male in my bloodline is bald) have caught up to me yet again, and I'm at a point in my life where I can, albeit very reluctantly, accept that I will be and look fine without hair, despite what I may initially think or what other people might say.

It feels weird to get any kind of personal on a quasi-shitpost website called Brain Fog Central, so I'll try to be (relatively) quick. I've always had really bad self-image issues, stemming from being born with Poland Syndrome, but after a long time I eventually grew to accept that, though I still have some days where it does affect my mental health. 

When my hair started falling out early into high school, it had a pretty similar effect on me, except this time I couldn't just hide it from myself and the world by throwing on a shirt. I wouldn't say I was ever bullied in high school, but there were many people who would comment on it or use it as an insult towards me. Even if the person meant it in a joking manner, it would still really hurt and cause me to spiral into a series of self-deprecating horseshit that I won't get into. 

Hair is obviously a big part of both my and everyone's self-image; it's always there when you look in the mirror. But I think my biggest mistake was conflating my self-image with my self-worth. How I look will always change--not only my hair, but everything about my body. At this point though, it feels unfathomably moronic to think that because I'll look different I'll look less physically attractive, or even be any lesser of a person.

There will always be someone who thinks I look like I crawled out of a shit-throwing contest in the New York City sewer system, regardless of whether or not I grow my hair out. There will always be some acquaintance who teases me without realizing the weight of their words (shoutout Nova High School). But I only have who-knows-how-many years left to make as much content for Brain Fog Central as possible, so I just have to accept my losses and keep it moving.

That's really it for this post. Again, I can't really say when the next one will be; since this is a full-ass blog, I'm really asking for a lot out of you guys to read through everything, so I want to make sure that everything I post is something I feel is worth me writing and you reading. In what might be my first and last genuine moment on this shithole of a website, I am extremely grateful to all of you who take the time to read this, it means so much to me.

I'm back in town on Thursday. Prepare.

"Cogito ergo sum" - Jesus, maybe

I'm tired of philosophy

One of the most beautiful things about my local film school is that any students of said school, in the process of filming a project, are bound to one of humanity's most extraordinary concoctions: union regulations.

Through a (about half-year) period of my life, I had spent weekend after weekend working from the asscrack of dawn in some teenager I barely knew's house (through the gracious benevolence of their parents) making a 3-5 minute short film in 8 hours; and while I think that it's genuinely incredulous that I managed to walk away from that experience with the thought, "hey I want to do more of this (acting)", some part of me should have really taken that thought, and followed it up with "am I a masochist".

With the beauty of union regulations, however, I can give that answer a definitive "hopefully not"! You see, there's this concept humanity came up with millennia ago, nomenclated in English as the word "food", and after about six hours, all members of a film crew operating under union regulations are required to be given it.

I found that out yesterday. Mind. Blowing.

Me after two slices of free pizza

I don't really want to make my day on set the fulcrum of this post, a big reason being that I'm not sure how much I'm even allowed to say, but also because there's not much to say. I only acted, so I don't really have some deep connection and analysis to the project to explore on here, thus I won't.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WORK ETHIC????

Trying to motivate myself to start doing substantial work on Home has been iffy. Generally, my writing process is very slow, as I'll take a lot of time finding the right words to describe simple scene action. My style of writing (professionally, obviously not bloggingally) is rather abstract, so I also need to take the time to tone it down to a language that makes sense to anyone reading it. That's not to say that I just write on a "deeper level" or some shit like that, rather that the DSM-6 will have a substantial section filed under the name Armesto.

        NOTE: If you've got some shit to say about the image quality on this blog, I accept critiques in the             form of Photoshop subscription donations.

So needless to say I'm a bit miffed with my progress on that project. I do have a general outline for about half of the plot, but fleshing it out has been more tedious than I expected. Also, just for future reference, the novel idea I mentioned in my last post will probably not even begin conception until summertime, as the basis of the plot requires me to have a fundamental understanding of atomic physics, which I have neither the time nor effort nor patience for studying at this present moment.

You may ask, why would you ("you" being from your perspective, ergo meaning me ("me" being from my perspective)) need a fundamental understanding of atomic physics? To which I would respond, mind your ("your" being from my perspective, ergo meaning you(r)) fucking business.

I love thought experiments.

On a more serious note, though, the deadline for my astronomy video, whilst rapidly approaching, teeth rabidly heat-seeking my asscheeks, is still a few weeks out, so I do have some liberties with my approach to the project, but it's still really dependent on my ability to, como se dice, lock the fuck in. 

Just as a fun little aside between you and me, this website is unfathomably shit, and trying to put an accent mark over that first "o" made have to retype this section twice. Thanks Blogger!

One of the main limitations (following a perpetual state of lethargy) is that I don't have anywhere to film. I share a room with someone, and while I could ask for the room, I don't want him to start thinking this is a give-and-take relationship, 'cause then he'll start asking me for the room and that's just not acceptable. To anyone in high school reading this, you'll understand when you're older.

Aside from that, there's also the fat, steamy pile of a question that is equipment. I don't go to the film school, so I can't exactly borrow equipment from there, and believe it or not, I'm fucking broke, so I don't want to try and rent out video equipment from a place in the city. My friend offered to let me borrow his camera, but I'd still need to figure out audio.

My solution to both of these issues is the same: I'm going home for Thanksgiving.

My Master Plan (trademarked)

Basically, I don't have to worry about finding a place to record, because I have my own room back home (despite my sister taking it over). Also, I have two great avenues for getting equipment: the first, and honestly more fun, way is begging my friends back home who own camera equipment to lend me their shit. I don't know who has what though, so that might be a hassle.

The second path is hitting up my dear old pal Jimmy G. from BECON-TV for some equipment. I think he'd let me, as McFatter college students will occasionally borrow stuff from him, but I don't really know if I'd be able or willing to drive all the way over there after 3 months without a car. My life is so hard.

I'm holding in a massive shart as I write this

I'm not real. There is no Brain Fog Central. There is no "Armesto". There is no Queen of England. You have to let me go--it's been 14 years. I just want you to move on.

I always come back.

Merry Christmas

So it's been a hot minute since I've used this blog. To speedrun every life update since my last post, I moved off to college, got bootleg bronchitis, and am now 6'12". I think that about sums it up.

I think there's really two main reasons for my using this blog again; first and foremost, I find it entertaining, and over the course of my senior year I became trauma-bonded to this website in a way that Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us could spend eons fathoming and still never quite reach. They and the Maitreya Buddha will be the last left to ponder such a dynamic bond, and maybe only at the end of the road to Nirvana will that triad find their eyes finally opened.

Anyways the second reason is that I have problems writing consistently, so blogging might help a little. Y'know, simple shit.

TO HYPERBOREA WE MARCH!!!!!

I have a few writing-based projects I'm working on right now. For context I'm a Creative Writing and Linguistics major; debating switching from Linguistics to something else. But anyways, the first one I want to talk about is this script for a video about the relationship between science fiction and real-world science. Basically, my Astronomy professor assigned us a research article on any science-related topic we want, through virtually any medium we want. 

So. . . video.

Getting my suffering's worth

When I say "real-world science", I don't exclusively mean natural science. Yes, there's a lot of sci-fi material that either inspires the work on or develops natural science; the first thing that comes to mind is the book The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne (which my professor actually recommended to me (the book is obviously based on the movie)), through which I am currently in the process of reading.

It's incredible to think that the most scientifically-accurate model of a black hole in history was created for a few scenes of a science fiction film. At the (admittedly willing) expense of sounding like a Christopher Nolan meat-riding goon, I think the film itself is a feat, not only of theoretical physics, but of imagination and creativity.

But there are also many cases where sci-fi ends up influencing the "soft sciences", namely social sciences. For example, Dune, a franchise I have yapped far too much about on this blog, is a story rooted in the ramifications of white saviorism, though the book does a much better job of developing this plot point than the movies.

 Although I am a massive fan of the films, there is a quote in the original book that I believe Denis Villeneuve made a very poor choice of leaving out; "The worst thing that could happen to your people would be to fall in the hands of a Hero." I might talk about it more on a later post, but I believe there's a lot of comparisons that can be drawn between Paul Atreides and America's constant meddling in the Middle East, both in past decades and now.

Another book I'd really like to talk about in this video is 1984 by George Orwell--admittedly, I haven't yet read it, but it's such a famous and impactful book that you'll hear the term "Orwellian" thrown around all the time, generally in relation to authoritarianism or late-stage capitalism. Again, I've yet to read it, but I get the sense that it's an important, especially going into the next four years under President Annoying Orange.

Missileanus (or miscellaneous however the fuck you spell it) thoughts 

In my spare time I have a screenplay I've been working on called Home. It's vaguely inspired by a short film script a friend of mine wrote and showed me; it's mainly about trying to overcome nihilism and finding the strength to keeping going through community and passion, and I have it set in a very bleak, post-climate change world to challenge the hope I want characters to build up through the progression of the story. I don't want to talk about it all that much, A) because I only have about 4 pages right now and B) I have to worry about intellectual property now.

The last project I'm working on hasn't actually been started in any capacity, it's moreso just an idea for a novel that I want to develop. It's very much a hodgepodge of almost everything I've experienced in university so far, the tone and writing style of which being astronomically inspired by Good Omens, which has swiftly become one of my favorite books. I love it for the same reason I tolerate The Secret History, that being the amazing writing. However, where the two diverge in my mind is that The Secret History has a very drawn-out plot that just becomes boring after a while, and Good Omens has one of the most creative and hilarious premises you'll ever see. 

To any fans of Donna Tartt who feel passionately wronged by my thoughts on The Secret History, all I have to say to you is womp-womp. I read three hundred sixteen pages of that shit (written out for dramatic effect) before my brain started unplugging itself from my eyeballs and putting up a mental gameplay of Subway Surfers. Let's find a more entertaining hill to die on.

Oh, I also got casted in a student film here. Hopefully the first of many.

The Finale (for realsies)

Goodbye everyone.

This project is the last thing I will have done before becoming an adult (legally, not mentally). It's a really weird feeling. I don't want to say I'm very attached to it, but I've been working on it for over a month, and working on this blog for even longer. I love this shithole of a website.

My CCR itself is pretty crap; I really only cared about the opening (sorry). I only used two sources (again, oopsie).

“What Is Science Fiction Writing? Definition and Characteristics of Science Fiction Literature - 2024.” MasterClass, 1 Sept. 2021, www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-science-fiction-writing-definition-and-characteristics-of-science-fiction-literature.

Menadue, Christopher Benjamin, and Susan Jacups. Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy, and How Do They ..., James Cook University, 2018, researchonline.jcu.edu.au/54351/1/WhoReadsSFnF.pdf.

Regardless of how bad the CCR is, I'm so proud of how much I tried on the opening, even if I did procrastinate editing it and started like two days ago...

And finally, I made a promise in a blog post about a month or so ago regarding what I'd say for my final post. 

I have no fuckin' idea

The Finale (film finale not post finale)

INCANDESCENCE

Reflection (not creative nor critical (nor creative and critical))

Well. Shit.

There's so much I can say about this project, but there's even more I already have said. It's been such a deranged journey for me. When I started, I decided I only had two goals: to try my absolute best, and to actually enjoy the process of making it.

There's been times where I struggled to fulfill either, but now that I'm almost at the end, I can finally say, without a shadow of a doubt: I am not cut out for this shit.

I don't know if I enjoyed it. I think just having a due date is enough to stress me the hell out, even if it is over a month's worth of time. Also, I lost a week of being able to work on this due to STN, but even then I'm not sure if I would've made adequate use of that extra time.

I absolutely did try, though. Even if I procrastinated at some points, I worked my ass off when it counted, and I hope anyone who sees the opening, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed it, can tell that I put all my effort in.

To wrap it all up like a chicken wrap

My next two blogs will be the Opening and CCR, so in a sense this is my last "real" blog post. And there's only one person whose image I can put on here that will truly do the honors of closing this year out.

Love ya, cousin

:)

I'm going insane again

As I write this I'm fixing some last-minute shit with the spaceship. My computer is currently crashing while trying to combine about 36,000 vertices into one object because I messed up the materials at some point. I don't even know anymore I'm just tired.

This all happened because I wanted to add a little thruster trail behind the thingamabob and realized the solar panels were transparent. I don't know what happened or why but I solved it to the best of my ability, which is saying very little.

If this fixes it I'm going to re-add the trail; if that ruins it again then I will say [F-WORD] the trail and leave it out. And then I will begin to sob profusely. I hate this project.

I want to graduate. Now.

I fixed it. The solar panel texture is stretched out for some reason but I don't give a shit about that. I have many, many words that describe how I feel about Blender, but I will keep them to myself. On the bright side it only takes four seconds to render a frame for the spaceship, meaning I won't have to pay some render farm for that. Hooray.

I'm gonna get all the rendering done tonight so that I can just finish editing tomorrow; hopefully before I film my CCR tomorrow night.

It's possible that I don't blog about any of the editing process. If I do, hooray! If not, I probably took a well-deserved nap.

uhhhhh what else

I don't [F-WORD]ing know. I'm sick of school. I'm sick of this project. I'm sick of sick.