The Last to Comment Wins
- Thread starter mrsimple
- Start date
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2023
- Messages
- 1,854
- Points
- 153
Remember, failing is just a step towards trying again and winning.
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2023
- Messages
- 1,854
- Points
- 153
Wah!
JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2024
- Messages
- 1,739
- Points
- 128
Moo!
Anonjohn20
Pen holding member
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2023
- Messages
- 1,854
- Points
- 153
Wah!
Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,396
- Points
- 153
I'm winning currently by doing nothing because I'm waiting
The dude lived down the hall from me, in the apartment with the doormat that said “Welcome-ish.” Neutral, like a shrug. I never saw him hosting a party or losing a package or stomping a trail of drama across the carpet. He was there, reliably, like gravity and tap water. Everyone called him “that guy.” I called him Dean, because that was his name. Yes, his name matched his vibe: clean, functional, faintly administrative.
His life looked like anyone else’s except it was always perfect. And not the glossy kind of perfect. Not the ring light, slow-motion, couture version. The other kind. The kind where nothing explodes, nothing rots in the crisper, no one breaks up with anyone in a chain restaurant parking lot. That kind of perfect. Not a fairy tale. A well-run schedule.
Morning was his natural habitat. He woke up before his alarm, which he set anyway because he respected redundancy. He put on the same jeans but not the same pair—he had three copies. He brewed coffee the way the instructions suggested, because he understood that instructions exist to shorten your meetings with chaos. He ate breakfast that would never trend: oatmeal, a sliced banana, peanut butter smoothed with embarrassing competence. He used the cheap salt because it’s salt. He wiped the counter because wiping a counter is faster than explaining to himself six hours later why he didn’t.
He cut toward the elevator, then took the stairs—second floor, obviously. First is easy for burglars and flood. Third is where refrigerators go to die. Second is the sweet spot. When he walked to the bus he chose the side with the morning sun in winter and the shade in summer, because the planet had told him what it was doing and he listened. He always wore sunscreen and carried a book. He carried it even when he suspected he’d never open it, because he knew carrying a book is a social vaccine. People are less likely to confide their pyramid schemes in a man who’s visibly occupied.
At work, he managed projects, which is corporate for “herding people toward done without letting anyone feel herded.” While the rest of us took sides with Kings of the Desk Islands and Queens of Slack Channels, he took the side of the spreadsheet. He wrote emails like legal sedatives. “As discussed.” “Per your note.” “To close the loop.” He used punctuation like a diet: enough to survive, not enough to show flair. No one remembered any of his emails. They just remembered that whatever the email was about landed softly and didn’t haunt the quarterly review.
He chose his fights with a scalpel and only when the outcome mattered. He refused to file bug reports on human beings. He logged the bug in the process. He praised ideas in public and edited them in private. When promoted, he neither announced it nor performed false humility. He just bought a plant and watered it on Fridays. It thrived. Everything thrives when the person in charge keeps doing the boring thing.
You want romance, I know. You want to know if he ever surrendered to the chaos of love. He did. Of course he did. But he chose his surrender the way he chose his socks: matching but not screaming for attention. He fell in step with a teacher named Mara who could read a room and a Times table. She laughed like she trusted the floor. She knew the difference between kind and nice, which is why he married her.
They planned fights the way people plan vacations. “Tuesday after dinner is our disagreement slot,” he told me once, grim as a dentist, because the hallway conversation had drifted to marriage. “We keep a list on the fridge called ‘Not Already Decided.’” I asked what was on it and he said, “The way she pronounces pecan.” They combined their catastrophes into one calendar titled “Probably Fine.” They put reminders for trash day and fasting labs and “Remember to say thanks for the thing,” because their egos were less important than their outcomes. When they hurt each other—and they did, because they were human—they used repair attempts like a couple of pros who understood nobody wins a grudge marathon. It all looked suspiciously simple. That offended some of us. Simplicity always threatens people who’ve built an identity out of complicated mess.
Money? He let it sit. He sent it straight to index funds and an emergency account labeled “Not Today, Chaos.” He owned no coins with dogs on them. He didn’t do options unless you count “Option A: living indoors.” He learned the phrase “no cap gains on a Roth, my friend” and kept it in his pocket like a rosary. He bought two of anything that tended to break—the second phone charger, the second umbrella, the second pair of shoes—because redundancy is the cheapest luxury. He replaced appliances before they turned into crime scenes. He tipped well and precisely. He bought the second-cheapest bottle of wine like it was a constitutional right.
His grocery store strategy was offensive in its sanity. He picked the longer line with the efficient cashier instead of the shorter line with the teenage chaos tornado. He didn’t speed to red lights. He read toner labels. He packed a tote in his backpack because he understood supermarkets had created a culture of bag-shaming to camouflage the price of avocados. He kept a chocolate bar in the glove compartment named “Truce.”
You want a flaw. I could tell. You want a crack in the statue. Fine. He was allergic to drama and occasionally to cilantro. He preferred the library to parties, unless the party was a meticulously time-boxed event with clear exit signals. He did not collect people who required rescue. He said no like a lullaby: soft, certain, sleep-inducing. “No, but I hope you find what you need.” It enraged our inner martyrs. There’s a specific fury that lives in people who want to be begged; he never fed it.
Most of the time, the world ignored him, which was his plan. Now and then, it tried to recruit him. The startup bros invited him to “advise.” He asked what problem they solved and what they would stop breaking in the process. They put him on mute. A TEDx organizer cornered him with the offer to “platform his philosophy.” He said he didn’t have one. He had a set of defaults, and none of them involved owning a lavalier mic.
He was unbothered by novelty for novelty’s sake. He learned just enough carpentry to prevent weekends from being a Home Depot pilgrimage, just enough cooking to be inedible only on purpose, just enough car maintenance to keep mechanics honest. When TikTok told us to dump ice on our laundry or drink buttered mushroom cortisol smoothies, he smiled quietly and went for a walk. Ten thousand steps, not as belief, but as math. He slept eight hours like it was his job. He flossed in the shower and wore boring shoes that never injured him.
Then his father got sick. The scene you’re craving: this is where you think perfection shatters and reveals its cost. You want the messy phone calls, the unplanned flights, the frantic sorting of paperwork at midnight. He had the paperwork ready because his father had also been quietly competent, and they had spoken like adults during a summer that looked unremarkable from the outside. When hospice came, he called in from work with a sentence that required no performance. He sat in the room, held a hand, and cried without apology. He chose the playlist of his father’s favorite silence. He knew grief is not a story arc but a weather system. He let it rain. He did not hustle his mourning. He let it live at the bottom of the drawer with the passports and the spare batteries and the letters that say “Do not read when happy.”
He returned to work and said nothing that wasn’t true. He did not post a carousel of candles. He brought muffins to the nurses’ station a week late, because people are drowning the first week and then forgotten. He had calendar entries that read, “Call Mom about nothing in particular.” The calls lasted seven minutes. Seven minutes is a perfect length for loving.
I tried to trip him once. Not literally. I invited him to Vegas under the guise of spontaneity. He came. He walked the strip like a field biologist sent to study neon. He played blackjack with a limit that would not punish his future self. When I asked him if he wanted to “make a memory,” he said, “I’d rather make an early bedtime.” I mocked him, naturally. He nodded, went to bed, woke up for sunrise in the desert. Later, he showed me a photo of the sky that looked like a screensaver and a schedule that didn’t include a hangover. I don’t like being taught without consent, but he taught me anyway.
People suspected secrets. They wanted a trick. They kept asking for the hack that made him water the plant and remember trash day and stick to one credit card. He had no hack. He had a habit of not making every choice an identity referendum. He did the next thing, and the next thing was dull. Most bliss hides behind dull doors. Who knew. Well—he did.
I never saw his house explode. I never saw him sprint for a closing gate or spill soup on an important shirt. He never missed a flight because he left for the airport at a time that mocked spontaneity and believed in TSA. He never forgot a birthday he cared about because he did not pretend memory was a friend. He never unsubscribed from an entire life in the name of reinvention. He edited. He was his own copy desk.
He grew older on schedule. When the doctor told him to do resistance training, he joined a gym with fluorescent lights and a trainer named Kyle who treated him like a project. He learned to deadlift enough to haul bags of mulch without drama. He bought ergonomic things and stood up between meetings and ignored 90% of “biohacking” because he had already hacked the bios: water, vegetables, sleep, walking, yes, sunscreen, again, obviously.
He did not become a sage. He did not start a podcast called “Perfectly Ordinary.” He volunteered with the same after-school program for eight years because it fit into his Tuesdays and didn’t require him to pretend he was saving anyone. He made eye contact with teenagers at exactly the level teenagers can stand: briefly, then away. He helped them quietly solve for x, which is the least glamorous superpower.
When it was his turn to go, there was no news alert. No tragic twist. No lesson delivered with the grace of catastrophe. He was gardening. Yes, he gardened. Obviously he gardened. The man was a love letter to compost. He started to feel wrong, sat down, and did the annoying and correct thing of calling someone before the romantic timing of “too late.” It didn’t matter. Bodies end. He had a mild heart that chose not to listen forever. He had his affairs in order, not because he wanted to die but because he respected the inboxes of the living.
Mara found the folder where it’s supposed to be. There were passwords and the confession that the streaming service she liked was actually his, and she could keep it. The will said nothing surprising except a footnote about the coat he hated and why it had stayed anyway. He had written a list of “unnecessary apologies” and left it where anyone could find it. “Sorry to the plant I overwatered. Sorry to the neighbor I avoided in the elevator while learning how to cry quietly. Sorry to the clothes I explained myself with for years. Sorry to the better punchline I thought of on the stairs.”
His funeral was short on adjectives and long on faces. People who don’t attend funerals showed up because he had written them emails at critical junctions that didn’t demand anything back. The after-school kids were older now and acted like it was an optional class, which is a kind of respect. No one attempted a grand thesis about a man whose thesis was that you can side-step most preventable nonsense and accept the rest.
After, his apartment looked like a demonstration model for adulthood. Nothing in the sink. Two of the good pens. Energy-efficient bulbs. A jar of euros and a jar of paperclips, both labeled. A fridge door with a magnetic clip holding his list of defaults. It said things like:
Say no in a complete sentence.
Arrive five minutes earlier than the person you’re meeting respects.
Pick the longer line with the better cashier.
Use the good olive oil. Use the cheap dish soap. Don’t confuse categories.
Go for a walk. Eat a sensible thing. Text someone a specific nice sentence.
Don’t share your worst day with strangers. Do share your best day with the person who can handle it.
Do not escalate what you can untangle.
He never called it wisdom, because people think wisdom is a circuit breaker that makes the house glow. He just used it the way you use indoor plumbing. Quietly, daily, with gratitude when you think about it and no fantasies of sainthood. He was not a monk or a guru. He had no charisma cult. He was a man who knew that perfection, the livable kind, is less about control and more about refusing to audition for chaos.
And yes, his life looked like anyone else’s, assuming anyone else makes a habit of not turning themselves into a bonfire and then acting shocked by the heat. That was his trick, if you insist on the word. He declined the contract with spectacle. He refused the ancient urge to confuse drama with meaning. He paid attention where it counted. He ignored the rest. He left a world unenchanted and more merciful for it. I can still hear him, or maybe it’s just my better self, telling me to pick the longer line with the better cashier. It’s the most boring advice I ever needed. It is, of course, perfect.
His life looked like anyone else’s except it was always perfect. And not the glossy kind of perfect. Not the ring light, slow-motion, couture version. The other kind. The kind where nothing explodes, nothing rots in the crisper, no one breaks up with anyone in a chain restaurant parking lot. That kind of perfect. Not a fairy tale. A well-run schedule.
Morning was his natural habitat. He woke up before his alarm, which he set anyway because he respected redundancy. He put on the same jeans but not the same pair—he had three copies. He brewed coffee the way the instructions suggested, because he understood that instructions exist to shorten your meetings with chaos. He ate breakfast that would never trend: oatmeal, a sliced banana, peanut butter smoothed with embarrassing competence. He used the cheap salt because it’s salt. He wiped the counter because wiping a counter is faster than explaining to himself six hours later why he didn’t.
He cut toward the elevator, then took the stairs—second floor, obviously. First is easy for burglars and flood. Third is where refrigerators go to die. Second is the sweet spot. When he walked to the bus he chose the side with the morning sun in winter and the shade in summer, because the planet had told him what it was doing and he listened. He always wore sunscreen and carried a book. He carried it even when he suspected he’d never open it, because he knew carrying a book is a social vaccine. People are less likely to confide their pyramid schemes in a man who’s visibly occupied.
At work, he managed projects, which is corporate for “herding people toward done without letting anyone feel herded.” While the rest of us took sides with Kings of the Desk Islands and Queens of Slack Channels, he took the side of the spreadsheet. He wrote emails like legal sedatives. “As discussed.” “Per your note.” “To close the loop.” He used punctuation like a diet: enough to survive, not enough to show flair. No one remembered any of his emails. They just remembered that whatever the email was about landed softly and didn’t haunt the quarterly review.
He chose his fights with a scalpel and only when the outcome mattered. He refused to file bug reports on human beings. He logged the bug in the process. He praised ideas in public and edited them in private. When promoted, he neither announced it nor performed false humility. He just bought a plant and watered it on Fridays. It thrived. Everything thrives when the person in charge keeps doing the boring thing.
You want romance, I know. You want to know if he ever surrendered to the chaos of love. He did. Of course he did. But he chose his surrender the way he chose his socks: matching but not screaming for attention. He fell in step with a teacher named Mara who could read a room and a Times table. She laughed like she trusted the floor. She knew the difference between kind and nice, which is why he married her.
They planned fights the way people plan vacations. “Tuesday after dinner is our disagreement slot,” he told me once, grim as a dentist, because the hallway conversation had drifted to marriage. “We keep a list on the fridge called ‘Not Already Decided.’” I asked what was on it and he said, “The way she pronounces pecan.” They combined their catastrophes into one calendar titled “Probably Fine.” They put reminders for trash day and fasting labs and “Remember to say thanks for the thing,” because their egos were less important than their outcomes. When they hurt each other—and they did, because they were human—they used repair attempts like a couple of pros who understood nobody wins a grudge marathon. It all looked suspiciously simple. That offended some of us. Simplicity always threatens people who’ve built an identity out of complicated mess.
Money? He let it sit. He sent it straight to index funds and an emergency account labeled “Not Today, Chaos.” He owned no coins with dogs on them. He didn’t do options unless you count “Option A: living indoors.” He learned the phrase “no cap gains on a Roth, my friend” and kept it in his pocket like a rosary. He bought two of anything that tended to break—the second phone charger, the second umbrella, the second pair of shoes—because redundancy is the cheapest luxury. He replaced appliances before they turned into crime scenes. He tipped well and precisely. He bought the second-cheapest bottle of wine like it was a constitutional right.
His grocery store strategy was offensive in its sanity. He picked the longer line with the efficient cashier instead of the shorter line with the teenage chaos tornado. He didn’t speed to red lights. He read toner labels. He packed a tote in his backpack because he understood supermarkets had created a culture of bag-shaming to camouflage the price of avocados. He kept a chocolate bar in the glove compartment named “Truce.”
You want a flaw. I could tell. You want a crack in the statue. Fine. He was allergic to drama and occasionally to cilantro. He preferred the library to parties, unless the party was a meticulously time-boxed event with clear exit signals. He did not collect people who required rescue. He said no like a lullaby: soft, certain, sleep-inducing. “No, but I hope you find what you need.” It enraged our inner martyrs. There’s a specific fury that lives in people who want to be begged; he never fed it.
Most of the time, the world ignored him, which was his plan. Now and then, it tried to recruit him. The startup bros invited him to “advise.” He asked what problem they solved and what they would stop breaking in the process. They put him on mute. A TEDx organizer cornered him with the offer to “platform his philosophy.” He said he didn’t have one. He had a set of defaults, and none of them involved owning a lavalier mic.
He was unbothered by novelty for novelty’s sake. He learned just enough carpentry to prevent weekends from being a Home Depot pilgrimage, just enough cooking to be inedible only on purpose, just enough car maintenance to keep mechanics honest. When TikTok told us to dump ice on our laundry or drink buttered mushroom cortisol smoothies, he smiled quietly and went for a walk. Ten thousand steps, not as belief, but as math. He slept eight hours like it was his job. He flossed in the shower and wore boring shoes that never injured him.
Then his father got sick. The scene you’re craving: this is where you think perfection shatters and reveals its cost. You want the messy phone calls, the unplanned flights, the frantic sorting of paperwork at midnight. He had the paperwork ready because his father had also been quietly competent, and they had spoken like adults during a summer that looked unremarkable from the outside. When hospice came, he called in from work with a sentence that required no performance. He sat in the room, held a hand, and cried without apology. He chose the playlist of his father’s favorite silence. He knew grief is not a story arc but a weather system. He let it rain. He did not hustle his mourning. He let it live at the bottom of the drawer with the passports and the spare batteries and the letters that say “Do not read when happy.”
He returned to work and said nothing that wasn’t true. He did not post a carousel of candles. He brought muffins to the nurses’ station a week late, because people are drowning the first week and then forgotten. He had calendar entries that read, “Call Mom about nothing in particular.” The calls lasted seven minutes. Seven minutes is a perfect length for loving.
I tried to trip him once. Not literally. I invited him to Vegas under the guise of spontaneity. He came. He walked the strip like a field biologist sent to study neon. He played blackjack with a limit that would not punish his future self. When I asked him if he wanted to “make a memory,” he said, “I’d rather make an early bedtime.” I mocked him, naturally. He nodded, went to bed, woke up for sunrise in the desert. Later, he showed me a photo of the sky that looked like a screensaver and a schedule that didn’t include a hangover. I don’t like being taught without consent, but he taught me anyway.
People suspected secrets. They wanted a trick. They kept asking for the hack that made him water the plant and remember trash day and stick to one credit card. He had no hack. He had a habit of not making every choice an identity referendum. He did the next thing, and the next thing was dull. Most bliss hides behind dull doors. Who knew. Well—he did.
I never saw his house explode. I never saw him sprint for a closing gate or spill soup on an important shirt. He never missed a flight because he left for the airport at a time that mocked spontaneity and believed in TSA. He never forgot a birthday he cared about because he did not pretend memory was a friend. He never unsubscribed from an entire life in the name of reinvention. He edited. He was his own copy desk.
He grew older on schedule. When the doctor told him to do resistance training, he joined a gym with fluorescent lights and a trainer named Kyle who treated him like a project. He learned to deadlift enough to haul bags of mulch without drama. He bought ergonomic things and stood up between meetings and ignored 90% of “biohacking” because he had already hacked the bios: water, vegetables, sleep, walking, yes, sunscreen, again, obviously.
He did not become a sage. He did not start a podcast called “Perfectly Ordinary.” He volunteered with the same after-school program for eight years because it fit into his Tuesdays and didn’t require him to pretend he was saving anyone. He made eye contact with teenagers at exactly the level teenagers can stand: briefly, then away. He helped them quietly solve for x, which is the least glamorous superpower.
When it was his turn to go, there was no news alert. No tragic twist. No lesson delivered with the grace of catastrophe. He was gardening. Yes, he gardened. Obviously he gardened. The man was a love letter to compost. He started to feel wrong, sat down, and did the annoying and correct thing of calling someone before the romantic timing of “too late.” It didn’t matter. Bodies end. He had a mild heart that chose not to listen forever. He had his affairs in order, not because he wanted to die but because he respected the inboxes of the living.
Mara found the folder where it’s supposed to be. There were passwords and the confession that the streaming service she liked was actually his, and she could keep it. The will said nothing surprising except a footnote about the coat he hated and why it had stayed anyway. He had written a list of “unnecessary apologies” and left it where anyone could find it. “Sorry to the plant I overwatered. Sorry to the neighbor I avoided in the elevator while learning how to cry quietly. Sorry to the clothes I explained myself with for years. Sorry to the better punchline I thought of on the stairs.”
His funeral was short on adjectives and long on faces. People who don’t attend funerals showed up because he had written them emails at critical junctions that didn’t demand anything back. The after-school kids were older now and acted like it was an optional class, which is a kind of respect. No one attempted a grand thesis about a man whose thesis was that you can side-step most preventable nonsense and accept the rest.
After, his apartment looked like a demonstration model for adulthood. Nothing in the sink. Two of the good pens. Energy-efficient bulbs. A jar of euros and a jar of paperclips, both labeled. A fridge door with a magnetic clip holding his list of defaults. It said things like:
Say no in a complete sentence.
Arrive five minutes earlier than the person you’re meeting respects.
Pick the longer line with the better cashier.
Use the good olive oil. Use the cheap dish soap. Don’t confuse categories.
Go for a walk. Eat a sensible thing. Text someone a specific nice sentence.
Don’t share your worst day with strangers. Do share your best day with the person who can handle it.
Do not escalate what you can untangle.
He never called it wisdom, because people think wisdom is a circuit breaker that makes the house glow. He just used it the way you use indoor plumbing. Quietly, daily, with gratitude when you think about it and no fantasies of sainthood. He was not a monk or a guru. He had no charisma cult. He was a man who knew that perfection, the livable kind, is less about control and more about refusing to audition for chaos.
And yes, his life looked like anyone else’s, assuming anyone else makes a habit of not turning themselves into a bonfire and then acting shocked by the heat. That was his trick, if you insist on the word. He declined the contract with spectacle. He refused the ancient urge to confuse drama with meaning. He paid attention where it counted. He ignored the rest. He left a world unenchanted and more merciful for it. I can still hear him, or maybe it’s just my better self, telling me to pick the longer line with the better cashier. It’s the most boring advice I ever needed. It is, of course, perfect.
JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2024
- Messages
- 1,739
- Points
- 128
I still have a fondness for the carp.
Is it your bot that loves the socio-political references or you? Still, I understand.
The problem is that there is regular stupid, and there is academia stupid. Academia stupid is on a whole other level. Regular stupid has to survive on its own. Academia stupid is grown, nurtured, funded, and told it will change the world for the better.
I certainly restructured my writing a bit to fit the webnovel format.
I was the type of reader to pick up a book by brute force choice and read it from start finish, sometimes also by brute force. Stupid, yes. But also an experience that opened my mind to ideas I was never looking for. But in the internet market tags are 100 percent needed.
I gave in to these title conventions. I don't have the street cred for short and cool titles.
Meh, some people have to work and are too tired to write during ALL their free time.
I truley despise this intentional metaphor for everything.
I think this may be true.
Damn. Yes. I'm writing a story chasing an audience right now and that's far more dificult than writing the story I want.
What if the diagram doesn't intersect? There are two main choices: Abandonment or passion project. I think a passion project is not abandoning an audience. It's more like refusing to pander to the larger audience and recognizing that the work will most likely never be popular in your life-time.
But on the other hand, if the market is so skewed that even with pandering, popularity is a Herculean task, why not have at least one or two passion projects.
Fuck the machines. They are for shit posts and avatars.
Learn the methods. Learn the theory. Let it inform you and give you awareness. But never let it chain you. Like you always say, the only real failure is failure to persuade. And I think half of persuasion is luck.
This entire paragraph speaks to Nichomachean ethics. Too much or too little is vice.
My stories never shut up in my head. Except when I sit down to write them. But then it's more like they're all crammed at the exit pushing so hard to get out that they become stuck.
This is the process of free drafting and seeing what happens.
HAHA NO! Grants aren't for artists, they're for propagandists.
Shiriru_B
Book binge in progress.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2020
- Messages
- 358
- Points
- 133
*Explodes spectacularly*
JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2024
- Messages
- 1,739
- Points
- 128
Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,396
- Points
- 153
black background (paper will be black)
everything will be printed on UV
minimum info, less clutter
make the background:
icons that are on the site
or
some kind of texture
logo with qr code or info with qr code
aaaaaaaaaaa
everything will be printed on UV
minimum info, less clutter
make the background:
icons that are on the site
or
some kind of texture
logo with qr code or info with qr code
aaaaaaaaaaa
Tempokai
The Overworked One
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
- Messages
- 1,396
- Points
- 153