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If pre-college me saw what I am now it would scare the shit out of them so bad that they would end up in Harvard just to make sure they are as far away from this version of me as possible. I literally broke myself, I literally broke myself for no reason.

I think we should codify a new type of Sci-Fi classification. Of course, we have the classic Space Opera/Soft and Hard, based on the role of technology. There are theme- and setting-based ones like military, dystopian, cyberpunk, horror etc. But I think a good meta-classification is on the alien-humanity dichotomy in the universe, for example:
          
          Soft-Homocentrism - there is an underlying theme of humanity being at the centre of this universe; human characters decide outcomes and influence the fate of the narrative, while other species are secondary or restricted to the position of animal: E.g War of the Worlds, Dune, Subnautica
          
          Hard Homocentrism - Explicit themes of human supremacism and dominance and the portrayal of other species as below or evil, can be satirical or critical of humanity: E.g WH40K, Starship Troopers, Hell Divers, Avatar(?)
          
          Pluralistic – The species are more or less equal, and/or their shortcomings and diversity is not portrayed as an essential component of interspecies relationships: E.g Halo, Star Wars, Marvel, Endless Space/Stellaris 
          
          Cosmic Horror – The human-alien relationship represents a struggle between the frail self-defeating human condition and the overpowering force of nature. Moby-Dick ish.: E.g Lovecraft, Dead Space, Aliens
          
          Human absence – Humanity is either non-existent, extinct, implied but fully absent or has evolved into something else: e.g Spore, Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death, The Books of the Raksura ( I had to google these admittedly. )
          
          Alien Absence – No aliens, generally implying humanity as a single species and aliens as not yet discovered or aliens as extinct.  E.g. Asimov, Solaris, Ad Astra 2001(?)
          
          I'm also thinking that there's a lot of overlap, like Half-Life, where the Combine are kind of a cosmic horror, but it also kind of has pluralism with the Vortigaunt, but it is also mostly homocentric. Or Mass Effect, which is pluralistic, but the reapers are cosmic horror.

The normal logic is that when you live your whole life afraid that you are inherently feminine, that you look feminine, that people will find out your feminine secret and that no matter how much you overcorrect, you will never feel manly enough and there's something wrong with you for not liking and not wanting to fit in with masculinity, the moment when you accept yourself and you pursue "your femininity", you will be happier and things will go naturally your way.
          
          But since this is real life, I now just feel gross at both my masculine features, which I can't get rid of, and at the same time feel like I can only look normal and attractive by presenting as masculine, and looking in the mirror at my attempts to be feminine is fucking gag-worthy. 
          
          FUCK. MY. LIFE

There is a uniqueness in the persistent stale quality of Romanian culture and society. A form of absurdism that left-critique of traditionalism can't really cover. I'm reminded of a story I read of a family that didn't call the ambulance for one of their grandmas having a stroke because they "didn't want to bother the neighbours", I think it's a good equivalent to how our cultural "ecosystem" works, it slowly decays by its own negligence at helping itself, with a blunt , genuine stupidity that consumerism and intense ideology could never possibly hope to replicate. There's a reason the saying "In Romania everything's 100 years in the past, so it's never going to be in the war" exists. There are three types of people here, those who live with the blunt stupidity, those unfortunate enough to be old in some remote village somewhere, condemned to be stale forgotten lakes, and those who are offered a way out, who in their fervorous crawl into the breathing world lose their Romanianness. We're not going to have a noteworthy death as a people, be it in 50 years or a hundred, we're going to slowly sweep ourselves under our own rug.

I feel like I just wasted the first 4 years of my adult life in so many ways, from holding onto beliefs antithetical to my person to my repressed sexuality and identity to how I choose to spend my time, wasting it by bar hopping and using all of my free time as an excuse to get drunk and ignoring college.

The first quarter of this century is almost done, and I am thinking of how strange the inequality of knowledge and belief is right now. We have people on the frontier of science and progress, studying the cosmos, discovering cure after cure for various illnesses, fighting for humanitarian causes, trying to get humanity into space, expanding psychology and sociology to help marginalised peoples and working on preserving the environment. On the other hand we have an equal amount, if not more, of rapists, abusers, bigots and warmongerers, of people who believe the world was given to us 6,000 years ago by a god and of people who refuse to get past tribalistic cognitive biases.
          
          How do you reconcile these two groups when it feels like the latter can't be convinced with reason, empathy or even be bought by the benefits given by the former? Yet for the last 10,000 years it seems like it has always been convinced.

Have you ever noticed how a 3D model of an object changes your knowledge of that certain object? Take, for example, an apple. See, if you only knew it from a plain 2D side angle, there would be a plentiful lot of knowledge about said apple that you normally comprehend that would be difficult or impossible to comprehend holistically. 
          
          See, you may categorise the apple in hundreds, thousands or even millions of images of its top side, bottom side, cut in half, cut in three pieces or halfway peeled off, rotten, full of seeds, bitten or eaten to the stub. There are so many particular images you would need to really grasp this apple, as compared to having an apple in your hands, which you can "model" whichever way you want and, moreover, see transition organically from one state to another. 
          
          This is how we view phenomena which we study in subjects like economics, psychology and history quite often, as an assemblage of images which is at best turned into stop-motion animation. What if we had a fully mapped-out 3D model of the world from 1939 to 1945? 
          
          Where instead of seeing it all happen like an overlap on a timeline, or laid out on a 2D projection, or a dozen images trapped in stasis, or, of course, a book, which is inherently unable to give you information in any other way than chronologically and abstractly. A simulation of this whole period would allow you to turn the Second World War from an assemblage of a million images into one apple-like phenomenon, thus giving us the ability to understand it much more holistically and organically.
          
          Which is why I think we should, on one hand, create 3D maps and projections and, on the other hand, adopt concepts and terminology from geometry. Creating new languages and terminology that are suited to our "3D understanding" as opposed to the self-limiting information gathering of 2D language.
          It may almost remove our need for certain narratives, created only to establish perspective. Leaving room for new forms of interpretation

There is no greater tragedy of the 21st century than the death of thought leader and person/human/husband Charlie Kirk. While some may look at famines, terrorist attacks and natural disasters as greater, their victims were many, but Charlike Kirk was only one. There is no 100 ft gold-encrusted marble statue dedicated to him (which he should get) that can cover this now great void left in all of our lives.
          
          We will never recover all of the lost knowledge in that big-ass forehead of his, the kindness, the understanding, the empathy, their lack in this world seems to resemble his great shadow, his voice protrudes through my exhales as I pray in his name and as I kneel with my congregation in front of The Lord... I can feel my forehead growing, all of our foreheads growing...we are Charlie Kirk.
          
          God, I wonder, when that .30-06 was making its deathly journey through the chamber and out of the barrel...what were you thinking? Smiling? Knowing that this pure freedom-loving soul would soon make his way to your pearly gates? Or crying because you had to pick this beautiful flower out of our garden so much sooner than we ever hoped? 
          
          I think of his last words: "Counting or not counting gang violence?" And I think that perhaps they were the reason? I have dwelled so much on this verse, and your (and his) wisdom keeps me guessing but always makes me smile. 
          
          Oh' Charlie! You have left America (and by consequence the whole world) with a great conundrum: Is gang violence, this reaper of lives, truly gun violence? Or was it a premonition? Did you know that this thug, this demon, was part of a gang? Of Antifa?
          
          And to you, assassin! You Judas, you Demon, you Antifa, my final words! How many million-billion-trillion-gojillion dollars did you receive from Soros? Tell me, for I will not be jealous, I will not be mad, for no commie wealth in your pockets can ever compete with the wealth we receive from just one "Liberals OWNED" video. Do you truly think you can compete?
          
          Bless Trump

A figure that always seems to conveniently be cropped out of "Napalm Girl" is the soldier on the far right corner of the image, who is casually smoking a cigarette, looking cool, even. It seems almost symbolic, the pop-culture perception of the Vietnamese soldier as almost "neo-western", in a wild land far from home where morality is grey and only the tough survive, where the environment is as unrelenting as the native savages, cigars, guns, poker cards, counting the dead, country rock, slow-motion action scenes, etc. This is the sanitised vision, what you imagine when you see the "G.I." smoking a cigarette with fire in the background.
          
          Then there's, of course, the reality of the situation: that there was no black and white, there are no grey characters in this image, this cool-looking G.I is the banality of evil incarnate, a monster watching as little girls run in horror from him and his comrades. 
          
          There are no wild landscapes and wild foreigners. The lands of the people living there are mercilessly destroyed by napalm and Agent Orange in the background; the kids, screaming in horror, are, of course, the only human beings in the picture. 
          
          The soldiers are not "neo-western cowboys"; they are not tough, they are not facing death in the face, and all they are confronted with is suffering in the form of children, and they all choose to ignore it.
          
          P.S: Yeah, I know he was actually rewinding a camera to take a picture, but why didn't he just help the girl?
          
          An article on Napalm Girl and how it was cropped by A.P: https://aboutphotography.blog/blog/the-terror-of-war-nick-uts-napalm-girl-1972

Tragedies like the Holocaust, the Gulag system or American slavery all have their own mythos. When we think of the Holocaust, we even have a specific colour: grey. We think of ash, gas chambers, the furnaces, barbed wire, the trains, the locations: Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, the butchers: The guards, the SS, Hitler, Eichmann; the specific dehumanization of Jews, we have narratives, from the Weimar republic to the Ghettos to the Camps and to the liberation; we know the clothes, we know how the jews looked, we know how the guards looked,  so on and so forth. 
          
          Gulags are similar; we think of the freezing taiga, of cannibalism, of Stalin, of political repression, suffocating isolation, forced labour, etc. 
          
          When we think of the 10-15 million killed in the Congo by King Leopold...we have no mythos, cut hands for sure, a number, a location...and that's it for those who even know it happened. We read Heart of Darkness by Conrad and don't even associate it with this event. Could you read Uncle Tom's Cabin without the whole mythos of American slavery falling on your head? Or read The Pianist without thinking of the extermination camps? No, you can't.
          
          Events like the Congo Genocide need a mythos, especially this event. We need to give it a reality far above the existing one: A number, a name and a location. 
          
          We should know what the Belgians looked like, their uniforms, their posture, and their guns.
          
          We should have the image of children's hands being chopped entrenched in our heads. 
          
          We should think of the chains and the locations; the Abir Congo Company should be as horrifying of a name as hearing "Schutzstaffel". 
          
          To point on the map to where the atrocities happened, like we can point to Poland or to Siberia. to point at the destruction of villages and their transformation into plantation as we can point to the secret arrests of dissidents in the USSR.
          
          Have the dates entrenched in our heads. Holocaust: 1939-1945, Gulags: 1930's-1950's, Congo: ?