Author: Jon Ureña

Spanish writer, author of My Own Desert Places and We're Fucked. I have also written plenty of short stories and poetry, as well as two books in Spanish called Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho.

Life update (09/03/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I feel like I’m nearing a turning point in my life. My current contract as programmer in the public sector ends in ten days, and they can’t extend the contract for legal reasons. The moment this contract ends, they may call me to return to work as a technician, but working as a technician, the massive stress it causes me, which is unmanageable for me, has sent me to the ER three times (two with arrhythmia, another with a supposed hemiplegic migraine which I suspect may have been a minor stroke).

Honestly, I’m scared of returning to that routine, of not knowing what bullshit I’ll have to deal with every day, of having to pursue other coworkers or “users” to glean the necessary information to do my job, to deal with annoying nurses and arrogant doctors whom I’d rather ignore or punch in the face. I’ve become so adverse to that job, that these past few months I’ve grown incapable of looking at other coworkers in the eye. I don’t actually have to work with them, which is ideal, but they’re constantly around, and I’m an island of quiet among them, uncommunicative, isolated with his noise-canceling headphones on, wishing that nobody notices he’s there.

I’m getting increasingly anxious as the final day of my contract approaches. I imagine myself refusing the contract, then looking up jobs as a programmer. I don’t actually want to work as a programmer for other people, but that’s a skill I have and through which I could extract money. However, back in my twenties, I tried to work in the private sector as a programmer. About half of it, it feels, I worked as an unpaid intern, and all the jobs I had either ended because I couldn’t take it anymore (after my very first job, I almost killed myself, which years later spawned my novel My Own Desert Places), or because some woman in a non-technical position believed I wouldn’t fit in there. And yes, I specified the gender, because that was always the case: my male technical-minded coworkers didn’t have an issue with me nor the work that I did, but some female supervisor considered that all my technical contributions were irrelevant. What such people were doing leading teams of technicians is one of the disasters of the modern world.

I made the mistake of talking to my seventy-year-old mother about it. My father is technically around, but his brain is so fucked that for my entire life he may as well have not been. My mother said I need a therapist to control my stress. She barely remembers that I went to therapy from 16 to 30, with breaks in between, and it did fuck-all other than waste money and cause me permanent damage with wrong medications. I think the whole industry is a sham. The work as a technician causes me unmanageable stress because my brain configuration can’t manage that stress. No amount of “techniques” to manage stress that some therapist could teach me would help. I already control myself by swatting away intrusive thoughts every ten minutes. I’m simply not built for such a job. You don’t put a blind person directing traffic. An autistic fuck like me whose brain is incapable of handing social relationships shouldn’t be in a job that demands him to deal with so many people on the daily.

It’s more than the change of jobs, though. I simply want to escape. I’ve been looking up apartments in another province (Navarre). 120,000€ for a two bedroom apartment. Same kind of apartment would cost about 240,000€ up here. I’d love to live in such small towns. Vastly reduced criminality, lack of mass immigration, nature close by. It’s so fucking humiliating to leave my home at six in the morning and have to walk through an area colonized by arabs, then take the bus, half of whose commuters are foreigners, up to the other bus stop, and along the way see that the people exiting the downtown apartments, the priciest locations, are inexplicably Africans who look like they came here a year ago (I’m counting both North and Sub-Saharan). House prices go up about 9% every year. Who’s paying for it?

I have a nasty anecdote on the subject from back when I bothered to attend writing courses, about ten years ago: I was waiting in the streets for a class to start while a black guy, heavy African accent, was talking to some local about the apartment where the black guy was going to live. It seemed like the local had guided him to show it. The African pointed at the blinds in the window and said, “Of course, they give me the one with the worst blinds. That’s racism.” They gave this son of a bitch an apartment, which the locals need to pay in full, and this fucking parasite complains. One humiliation after another. Losing your spaces, your jobs, your homes, your schools… And I’m not even getting into crime. My own home was nearly broken into by a couple of arabs some years ago. And look at Great Britain with the mass rapes of minors, almost always ethnic European, by the usual suspects. But God forbid you tweet something unsavory about men in women’s clothing; the police will be on your ass the moment you land in the country. Funny thing is, I take the 7:10 bus straight to Donostia, and literally everyone is ethnic European. We’re office workers. Slaves to support the privileged classes. But I work in the hospital building that houses the maternity ward, and I get reminded of who is having the majority of children these days.

By the way, if any of what I’ve written bothered you (yes, you), you’re welcome to fuck off, because if at this point you still defend any of this, I don’t want anything to do with you.

I saw a video earlier today about the Japanese youth, how they are completely unmotivated, don’t want to buy homes, don’t want to start families, are completely risk adverse, and just get by trying to survive as unbothered as possible. We’re not, unfortunately, in Japan, but same thing could be said of the last couple of generations in the West. Why are you contributing to society, exactly? So it can shit on your face and tell you to enjoy it?

What else is there to say, really? I noticed that someone, earlier in the day, went through a couple dozen of the songs I produced with AI a year or so ago. Such fun activities I used to engage in, that I don’t imagine myself retaking anymore. Perhaps writing is one of them, but it’ll fully depend on whether my subconscious flips the switch again. Basically what I’m doing, when I’m not busy programming or reading manga, is daydreaming about a better life (being someone else), or noticing discreetly the attractive ladies on the bus or on my walk to and from the office. Bitter old Houellebecq said, “The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer.” While he likely meant that he wanted to fuck children, the point stands. I have a forty year old body, so what remains is to work and suffer. And masturbate. At least you can rely on those seconds of relief from time to time. If I was funkier, I’d get into proper drugs. I’d love to do Ayahuasca, which is illegal for reasons. Likely because such drugs would make people wake up and want to topple the government. And then, who’d issue digital IDs, CBDCs, and social credit scores?

Anyway, if you have boobs, give them a squeeze for me, will you? Man-boobs will do.

Life update (08/29/2025)

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It’s been a few months since a switch flipped in my head and I suddenly didn’t feel like writing fiction anymore. I only act to satisfy my subconscious, so if she wishes to focus on anything else, that’s what I do. To a certain extent, I’ve felt relieved. I was under the pressure to perform, even though virtually nobody read my stuff. I suppose it’s related to the ingrained need to provide a service, a product, regularly, or else you’re worthless.

We men are the slaves of society: invisible drones intended to serve tirelessly until we grow too old, resented the moment we show weakness, abandoned the moment we break down. Our value tied to the quality of the last thing we provided, a value that depreciates very fast. If you cease providing, you may as well be trash that someone should pick up and throw away. Remembering all those years of writing chapters, the feeling I got when I posted the next one was something like, “I finally deserve to relax for a while.” And I always give my 110% on the things I care about, so I put an insane amount of hours into writing my stories, the sort of effort that wouldn’t be feasible if I had anything resembling a social life. I recall plenty of cases in which I could only finish a single paragraph in a whole writing session that may have taken three hours.

Was it worth it? Well, I don’t feel much in terms of accomplishment. It certainly wasn’t monetarily rewarding. It was also humiliating to see authors, some local whom I knew personally, that objectively were far worse writers than I, promoted in newspapers, called into radio shows, and seemingly being able to make a living through writing, while my stories only caused me trouble. I do have the memories, many of them far stronger than the lingering remains of stuff that has actually happened to me. It took me about three months to write My Own Desert Places, my first novel in English. I have a vivid memory of seeing the female main character walking down a cobbled street in Hondarribia, seen from behind, her brown hair swaying as she clutched a binder, heading to a writing course. She never existed. I remember going to a patisserie in Donostia along with a French secretary and a Paleolithic child, where we stuffed ourselves with delicious pastries. That never happened. I have grafted into my heart griefs of things that happened in my stories, of people lost to accidents, of dreams ruined, that make my eyes water whenever I recall them, even though none of that ever happened.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m forty years old, I’m insufficient as a human being, my body is a disaster, my brain is an even worse disaster, and I’m beyond exhausted. I don’t want the life I’m living. I need a change of scenery. I want to be where nobody knows me, where I don’t feel responsible for any living soul, and I can simply sit alone in a room and be myself. But it seems all we’re meant to do in this shitty world is work and work for money that is worth less every passing month.

We used to enslave ourselves because at least you got something of value out of the pain: usually a family of your own. But I’ve never wanted to burden anyone with my genes. Even if I did, that would be a terrible idea, as I would be an incompetent father. But even if I could be a good father, nobody would want to have children with me. So I guess I’m just going through the motions until my body breaks down completely.

On a lighter note, I’m working daily on my programming project! I originally envisioned it as a browser-based platform to play adventure games, immersive sims, etc., in a chat format. Given that I’m a hedonist, it has turned into a complex, very powerful platform to create erotica, relying on large language models to act as the other characters. Got to enjoy my fetishes through it. Constantly coming up with ideas for it, to the extent that it never feels like I could take a break and show the current state. I plan to make a video about its features, with the faint hope that someone else will want to add code and content to the repository, content that I will be able to enjoy myself.

Anyway, thanks for reading, I guess.

Ongoing manga: Spy x Family, by Tatsuya Endo

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I first found out about this series when barely five chapters had been released, and I’ve been a faithful follower ever since. We’re now about 120 chapters in, with no clue about when it may end, due to its mainly episodic nature. Amidst a fuckton of isekai stories (I’m not shitting on them; I love me some isekai) and stories similar to other existing ones in the Japanese market, Spy x Family is unique in setting, concept, and general tone. The story is set in a fictional continent similar to Europe in the fifties (or at least the Japanese’s idealized image of past Europe), that is experiencing a cold war between two countries named Westalis and Ostania (basically West Germany and East Germany while the Berlin wall was still up).

Our protagonist is a man whom we come to know as Loid Forger (fake name). He’s generally known as Twilight, a legendary spy feared by the rival country of Ostania. He’s been tasked with stopping the warmongering ways of a former prime minister of the enemy country. Given the former prime minister’s reclusive nature, Twilight’s handlers decide that their best chance of worming their way into the prime minister’s life is through his son Damian, who is going to attend an exclusive school. Twilight can’t attend it himself, so he needs to figure out how to get a child, and because the exclusive school looks down on single parents, he’ll need to get himself a wife as well.

Twilight, settled in the enemy country of Ostania, visits an orphanage. That’s how we’re introduced to the most popular character of the story, as well as one of the most popular of modern manga: Anya. The author could have reduced her to an adorable child, which she is, but instead she’s also smug, a bit of a dolt, barely interested in anything but food and her hobbies, and can also read minds.

The author masterfully makes Anya a constant source of joy thanks to her peculiar personality and how she approaches problems. A telepath, she’s aware that her new father is a spy for a foreign nation, which she finds exciting. One of the first things she does is use his spy devices and accidentally get herself kidnapped.

As mentioned, Twilight needs a wife for the mission. They meet Yor, an attractive yet socially and emotionally stunted woman who also requires a husband for the sake of appearances. In her case, she’s the most lethal assassin of Ostania. Through an extremely memorable proposal involving a grenade pin, Twilight ends up married to his number one enemy.

Anya becomes the only person aware of the thorny circumstances of her new family, yet remains unable to fully comprehend them, as her mind is addled by the spy shows she’s addicted to.

What follows are the struggles of Twilight as he tries to turn his new daughter into an elite student, even though she’s an unmotivated idiot. Meanwhile, the overworked guy deals with other spy missions, as both countries continue with their tug-of-war to get the upper hand on the other. We meet many more memorable characters: Yor’s younger brother, who works for the secret police, is in love with his sister, and would love to throw Yor’s new husband in jail on principle. Twilight’s fellow spy Nightfall, his protégé and competent spy on her own right, is madly in love with the guy, and eager to get Twilight’s new wife out of the picture. Damian, the target’s son, a haughty tsundere who can’t accept the fact that he has fallen for the adorable Anya, as getting involved with a commoner would be unfitting of his station. The kids’ headmaster, an earnest man who evaluates the world in terms of elegance. The target’s wife, a subdued mess of nerves, obsessed with the occult, who has a bizarre suspicion about her husband’s real nature. Bond, a precognitive dog that the Forgers adopt. Becky, Anya’s best friend, the heiress of an arms manufacturing company, who despite being a child is planning to replace Yor’s role as Anya’s stepmother.

The author perfectly mixes humor with poignancy. Plenty of characters are marked by the pointless wars that both countries have fought against each other. Twilight himself lost his family (I don’t recall if he lost them in the war or if he was an orphan for as long as he can remember), and also lost his childhood buddies. He works as spy to preserve world peace against forces from both countries that intend to inflame hostilities.

This is mainly an episodic series. We’ve gone through elaborate arcs, such as one in which Twilight and Nightfall have to win a preposterous tennis tournament to get their hands on a piece of intel, one in which the Forgers fight off assassins in a cruise ship, or one in which Anya’s school bus gets hijacked by terrorists. We regularly get chapters focused on secondary characters or on minor aspects of the main characters’ lives, which don’t contribute much to the plot but are always well done. This is one series you always want to return to because you want to see more of the characters and the circumstances they find themselves in.

They’ve adapted this series, to my knowledge, into two seasons of anime and a movie. I only watched most of the first season, but it’s great.

Spy x Family is already a classic of modern manga, which you must read if you’re into the medium.

VR game review: Ghost Town

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I’ve been playing a lot of VR recently, so I may as well review the only long-form game that I’ve finished in this couple of weeks. Ghost Town is a puzzle-based adventure game set in Great Britain back in the eighties. You’re a spirit medium (a witch) named Edith, whose shitty younger brother disappeared under shady circumstances, and your goal is to find him. Trailer is below:

There are many more pros than cons as far as I’m concerned. The setting, mainly London in the 80s, is quite unique, and provides a gritty touch that I appreciated. The character animations and models are generally exceptional for the Meta Quest 3, maybe the best I’ve seen so far. I don’t like puzzle games, yet this one made me appreciate the puzzles. I was never entirely stuck, as the progressive hint system helped me eventually realize at least where I should focus on. I loved the tactile feel of exorcising ghosts, although it’s a minor part of the experience. Plenty of great moments come to mind: interacting with ghosts behind glass (great-looking in VR), using eighties ghost-bustery technology to investigate artifacts, a very creative museum of haunted artifacts, sleepwalking through your eerie apartment tower in 80s London, a great sequence in which you wander through a maze-like version of your apartment while malevolent presences whisper from the shadows (very P.T. like), clever use of light in puzzles, etc.

Horror stories are never more terrifying than in VR. Play Phasmophobia if you dare, for example. I try to avoid horror games because of my damaged heart. However, the ghosts in this one are more spooky than scary.

Now, the cons: personally, I wish the game were more like a regular adventure game instead of a puzzle game with a narrative thread woven throughout it. That’s just a personal preference, though; I wish we got the equivalents of the Monkey Island series in VR. Anyway, the least interesting sequence of puzzles for me was the lighthouse, which comes right after the introductory flashback. I actually dropped the game for like a couple of months after I first played it, because I didn’t feel like returning, but I’m glad I picked it back up and continued.

However, my biggest gripe with the story is that you’re supposed to search for your brother, whom you meet in the first scene, when you’re investigating a haunting in an abandoned theatre, but in every damn scene he’s in, the brother comes off as envious, narcissistic, entitled, and overall a complete dickhead. I didn’t want to interact with him. Did the creators believe we would be invested in finding this guy just because he was related to the protagonist? I think it’s a given that they should have made the brother sympathetic, but he annoyed me in every scene he appeared.

All in all, fantastic experience. Perhaps a bit short, but I felt like I got my money’s worth. If you have a Quest 3 and you enjoy these sorts of games, check it out.

Life update (08/14/2025)

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Three days ago, the youngest of my two cats, who is fourteen years old or so, started breathing weirdly, in a phlegm-y way. When I put my hand on his chest, it vibrated as he breathed. I hoped that it would pass on its own, but it was clearly getting worse.

I’m on vacation for a few more days (although I’ve done fuck-all of consequence, other than programming, playing the guitar, playing VR games, and masturbating), so I took the little guy to the vet. The X-rays didn’t show anything. They injected him with a corticosteroid, and told me that I’ll have to somehow make him swallow the same thing in pill form for the upcoming seven days. The vet, a nice-seeming younger woman, told me that the corticosteroid is mainly for relief, because the real cause is likely a polyp or a mass, and at his age, it will likely not be operable. If things don’t improve in the next few days, I’ll have to bring him to a proper clinic in Donostia, thirty kilometers away, so they can perform a CT scan and similar stuff.

He’s dying. I’ve already lost three cats and it haunts me weekly. I’m way too sensitive to handle the deaths of these little creatures that I’ve loved for years. To begin with, people having pets is insane; just a replacement for the biological urge of having children. It’s clear to me that nobody should raise any living being that’s unlikely to outlast them. I’ve loved my cats, but when I look back, I don’t store any memory of my dead pets that isn’t tainted by the fact that they died. In the case of two of them, also of how they died.

I can’t take this shit. The only relief that I get from my brain bombarding me with intrusive pains is when I’m playing the guitar, when I’m lost in a very engaging experience like a VR game, or jerking off. When any of those distractions ends, the flood returns, and I have to wade through everything painful that my brain refuses to let go of. The number of those private pains only grows as I get older. I suspect that due to the peculiar configuration that my neurons settled on shortly after birth thanks to the autism-related atypical pruning, memory-wise, my brain is a machine made to discard every good experience and etch in stone every bad one. Over the years, I’ve grown wary of attempting things, talking to people, etc., because I know I’ll just be adding more shit to the pile. A classical sign, I suppose, of Pure Obsessional OCD. I don’t know for how long I’ll be able to stand this.

For the last few months or so, I’ve avoided going outside other than to work, to buy whatever needed buying, and to play the guitar, and I play the guitar in the woods, so the population and general demographics are unlike what can be found in the rest of society. But today I had to bring my cat in a carrying case to a nearby clinic, where they refused to take him in due to overwork, so I had to take a bus downtown. Society has turned into such a horrid zoo. I don’t understand how people can look around and think that everything is fine, unless you’re one of the people who are benefiting from it. And us Europeans are the ones losing everything.

I remember my maternal grandfather, who fought on Franco’s side. In the decades after, particularly during the last twenty or so years of his life, he went out as little a possible, because “out there, there’s only weird people.” If he had lived through the current ethnic cleansing, he would have killed himself. I’m no christian (the Roman Empire adopting Christianity was the biggest humiliation ritual imaginable, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. See recent examples of Trump, Mr. “America First”, groveling up to the “chosen people”), so I can’t support Franco such religious grounds, but those fucking communists had it coming. Regarding the christian thing, read Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. In summary, how could I look forward to anything in society when everything is deliberately going the wrong way, and it’s only going to get worse? I’m just glad that I won’t bring children to this disaster.

My cat is walking around, climbing furniture, and eating a bit, but he’s still breathing weird. Almost guaranteed, this is the decline that will end in his death. I suppose he has lived long enough. I doubt that his life has been particularly happy, given neuroses like overeating whenever he has the chance even though he pukes afterwards. But what can you do. I can’t even give myself a happy life.

Minoru Furuya: my favorite manga author

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

I have barely been able to connect with novels these past ten or so years, and the last living writer I respected, Cormac McCarthy, has been not alive for a while. Most of this half of the world seems to have lost their collective (and collectivist) minds, so when I want to experience a good story, I have to look to the Orient, past the reds. I’ve enjoyed plenty of South Korean stuff, but I’m mostly into Japanese. I’m always on the lookout for the next mind-blowing, perhaps even life-changing manga, but I seem to have run through the vast majority of the quality ones.

A couple of days ago, I thought again about Minoru Furuya, who earned the rare merit of being my favorite manga author. From time to time I look him up hoping that he has finally begun working on a new series, but unfortunately, the guy seems to have retired; his last work was the bizarre Gereksiz, from back in 2015-2016.

I suspect that most manga fans don’t know about Furuya. I’ve yet to talk to anyone who has read any of his works. But I get Furuya’s mind, to the extent that I’m fairly certain he also has OCD: his characters regularly fall into patterns of obsessiveness, and deal with intrusive thoughts and images that they sometimes act upon. The protagonist of his Ciguatera comes to mind, with his spirals of preoccupations in his bedroom, trying to bury his face in a pillow to keep himself from falling further. The protagonist of Himizu, perhaps his overall darkest story, feared being assailed by demons lurking at the corners of his mind, eager to break in. Both very common experiences for OCD sufferers.

Sadly, I’ve read virtually everything of value that Furuya put out. He started with an extremely amateurish series about a high-school ping-pong club (or something like that), a comedy that reminded me of the kind of material I created in middle school. I’ll probably revisit it at some point, but it’s early-nineties carefreeness. He followed up with Boku to Issho (link for my review), another comedy about a bunch of fellows living in poverty who hope to survive while keeping their sanity and dignity intact.

In the 2000s, he went straight from a slapstick comedy to his darkest tale: Himizu. With this one, he introduced the pattern for all the protagonists to come: outcasts with very little going for them, usually burdened by mental issues, who seem mostly pushed around by life. Good stuff sometimes happens to them (regularly, this involves dating someone above their league), but they usually pay for it with chaos and occasional brutality. His are the kinds of stories that go from mundane relationship issues to someone having his ears cut off while tied up in a shack. There’s the sense that life is extremely perilous, and that at any point it will force you to struggle through horror whether or not you’re ready for it, and if you survive it, you may not get any lessons out of it other than “life goes on.”

After Himizu came Ciguatera, generally considered his best. I came across that one plenty of times over the years in lists of best manga ever, but I ignored it because I thought it was a sports manga of sorts, centered on biking. But the bikes ended up being a symbol of a better, brighter future that could carry the protagonists away from their shitty circumstances. Ciguatera is a sort of a Bildunsroman in which the protagonist, a below-average dude with no talents to speak of, intends to figure out how to measure up to the girl he loves, hoping to become a dude worthy of respect. This one had likely the most realistic of Furuya’s endings, to which I have returned repeatedly in my mind.

Then came Wanitokagegisu and Himeanole. Both feature working-class protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, who feel that life is passing them by, who can’t figure out how to improve their circumstances or even become interested by anything, and who are sure they’ll die alone. From that perspective, these last four series are very masculine stories. In both tales, the protagonists get involved in other people’s troubles, which lead them further and further into chaos and brutality. Both also feature the protagonists getting girlfriends way out of their league, which brings joy but also the sense of constantly having to measure up lest they look elsewhere. Both series feature horrific violence. Himeanole wasn’t even licensed in English, and fans have only translated up to chapter eight of about sixty-five. I only know of the full contents of that series, to the extent that an adaptation allows, because they made a movie out of it, which I watched last night.

His last serious story, and my favorite of his, was Saltiness (first review, second review), about a clearly autistic dude who realizes that his beloved sister will remain unmarried because she has to take care of his crazy ass, so he leaves for Tokyo to become independent, even though he’s thoroughly incapable of dealing with life. Saltiness is very hard for me to explain, but it feels like Furuya managed to create a parable with it for dealing with the nonsense of life, and finding one’s place in it despite being ill-suited.

Sadly, Saltiness seemed to have been his main send-off. His final work was the extremely bizarre Gereksiz, which starts with the bizarre premise of a solitary middle-aged man dragging his female coworker to show her the woman that he’s infatuated with, only for them to realize that he’s the only one who can see the woman. The story gets far stranger from there. It’s a great read, although it felt anticlimactic compared with Furuya’s previous works.

Given that these days I consider Furuya to be my favorite manga author, one would suppose that my favorite manga would be one of his, but that’s not the case. My favorite manga, which is among my five favorite fictional experiences in no particular order, is Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun. That one has never stopped haunting me. It feels like Asano was trying to exorcise something out of himself through making that story. Unfortunately, after it ended in 2013 or so, Asano never even came close to achieving those heights again. An idealist, as evidenced by his earlier works, he seems to have expected it to change the world as well as himself, only for Asano to wake up ten years older having resolved fuck all. He wrote a semi-autobiographical series afterwards, titled Downfall, that showed how despondent and bitter he ended up after finishing his masterpiece.

Anyway, I suppose that’s all I wanted to say. Not sure why I even wrote this, but I did, so there.

Guitar practice in the woods (2025-08-11)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, MúsicaLeave a comment

If you enjoy a deranged Spaniard playing guitar in the woods, I’ve got premium content for you.

That spot in the woods is quite isolated and rather unknown even for people who live around, so at the most I get three or four people a session passing by. They’re usually in a hurry. This time only a single person passed by: a woman wearing a pink sports bra, who grinned at me as I played. She was hot, too. The previous day, when I set up shop next to the spot where in a certain novella of mine I installed the memorial stone for the love of my life, I lifted my gaze and briefly connected with a woman who was passing by on a bicycle. She was also grinning at the fact that I was playing the guitar. It’s strange: people, particularly women, are usually wary of me, but put a guitar in my hands, and suddenly they look glad that I’m there. If only they knew.

Also, I recently went to my favorite guitar shop to ask why the thinnest nylon string always broke whenever I tried to tune it on my Alhambra dreadnought, only for the shop guy to tell me that I absolutely shouldn’t use nylon strings on my dreadnought. Apparently I should only use bronze strings, which is what you can hear in the video.

Anyway, that’s an hour of me playing other people’s songs. Enjoy, if you enjoy these sorts of things.

Life update (07/28/2025)

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I’ve settled into a routine that fits me: wake up at six in the morning (even in the weekends, I wake up around seven), prepare for work, put on my earplugs, take the E29 bus that carries me to Donostia, read some manga on the way, walk through the hospital complex while avoiding looking at people’s faces, sit at my desk, put on my headphones, do my programming of the day, take the E29 that carries me back to Irún, do some more programming, go to bed. From time to time I lift weights, and on the weekends, when I have the energy, I walk to the nearby woods and play the guitar for a couple of hours.

Perhaps this is what being middle-aged is, after all: you realize your shortcomings and what you weren’t meant to do. I’ve thought back on my life and the relationships I’ve had. All of them were a mistake. I’ve hurt so many people without meaning to just because of how broken I am. I keep getting reminded, by my own brain, of this girl I knew when I was in middle school. She was likely autistic as well. Awkward as hell. Very lanky, generally plain looking. She used to write me elaborate letters. I doubt I ever read any of them. I don’t have them anymore. About a year or so after she last spoke to me, some stoner dickhead slung one of those big choppers of arts-and-crafts, and bisected the girl’s forehead, leaving a massive scar. I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen. I wish I knew if she killed herself, but I don’t remember her name. People only become somewhat real to me when they turn into myths in my mind. She’s now a girl I could have helped but failed to do so because I never had the means to. Stay away from people. There’s only hurt to come, both ways.

Due to my peculiar brain configuration, my memory is abysmal: I barely remember anything. I have stronger memories of the stories I’ve written than of stuff that has actually happened to me. And what I remember is almost invariably negative. Due to my daily intrusive thoughts, I’m usually reminded of, when not directly bombarded by, stuff I wouldn’t want to remember. Not worth the effort, the pain, the bother. It’s really simple: I wasn’t born equipped to live like a regular human being. Ultimately you just end up becoming yourself and discarding the useless alternatives you tried.

I recognize beauty, though, and I’m attracted to some of the young women I see on a regular basis. I don’t know if I wish I weren’t. On the bus, at the hospital. Nurses most likely. Most of my daydreams end up involving sex in one way or another. But in these daydreams I’m not myself. Perhaps my biggest regret is that I can’t redo it with fair odds. I would have settled for a body I wouldn’t have to be ashamed of. I think I have more things to say about that whole business, but I can’t figure out what that would be at the moment.

Soon enough it’ll be September 14th, when my current contract as a programmer will end, and I’ll have to either return to work as a technician, which terrifies me (the stress of that job landed me three times in the ER, two with arrhythmias and the other with a supposed hemiplegic migraine that I suspect was worse than that), or find myself a job as a programmer at forty years old, when programmers are on their way out due to AI (not complaining, I use it all the time).

It’s all a big whatever. I just want to be left alone. That’s what I think about most of the stuff I have to deal with on a regular basis: just let me sit in peace. Just let me program in peace. Just let me play the guitar in peace. I think my biggest aspiration in life has been to sit alone in a room without being bothered. I don’t think I ever truly believed I could aspire to anything more. I’m trying to get as much of that as possible.

Speaking of manga, the hentai-with-a-plot Parallel Paradise was surprisingly great. It’s about a high-schooler who ends up isekai-d into a world where he’s the only male, and every girl (they all die at twenty) gushes out food-scented slime from their nether regions after the littlest touch of his male fingers. One of the girls is a martial artist whose martial art consists on throwing grenades. Great sense of humor, compelling plot, and surprisingly touching at times. I’ve reread One Punch Man and found it more interesting the second time around. I’ve just barely started Atelier of Witch Hat, which I didn’t want to get into because it seemed girly and I don’t like Harry-Potter-like stuff, but it’s good.

I think I need more grenade-throwing in my life.

Anime/Manga #1

On By Jon UreñaIn ArteLeave a comment

Whenever I feel like it, I’ll bring attention to videos or other media about two of my lifelong loves: manga and anime. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is one of the main legends of anime, perhaps the number one. What many don’t know is that the original manga is also a must-read, and in many ways improves and deviates from the movie (more accurately, Otomo himself changed many aspects of the plot to fit the movie).

The following video is a great overview on how special the process of getting Akira made was.

Random shit #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Slice of lifeLeave a comment

In the 2000s, some American studio bought the rights to dub an anime, and decided to turn it into outrageous nonsense. An obscure moment in history that will never be repeated. Now, it endures in the internet as a legend. The following video recounts this strange tale.