Tag: writing

Life update (10/04/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

For no apparent reason, my brain regularly reminds me of events from my long-gone youth, such as my middle school and high school years. Mainly I remember people whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. There’s this girl who invited me to hang out in middle school; she was autistically awkward, and seemed interested in me for unknown reasons. Last I knew of her was her receiving, during an arts and crafts class, a nasty gash that bisected her forehead and left a terrible scar presumably for the rest of her life. I never saw her again after middle school, but I remember her sadly from time to time; after all, if I could have cared for her, maybe she would have become my friend. In 2021, I wrote a poem about her. I don’t remember her name, so I can’t google her. I assume she killed herself.

There’s also this guy I hung out with in high school. Name’s Urko, if I recall correctly. He invited me out a few times, but I only recall us sitting at a bench as he went on about PlayStation 2 games. I was a PC gamer through and through, and must have been heavily into Morrowind at the time. I doubt I ever said much to him. I didn’t really want to hang out with anyone, but I was in a period of my life, spurred on by my mother, in which I forced myself to behave like a “normal person,” and normal people were supposed to want to hang out with others, so that’s what I did. Also, life at home wasn’t good either, so I suppose I didn’t want to spent too much time there.

Last time I spoke to the guy, I was playing a basketball match in which that guy also participated. The guy ended up spraining his ankle, and was carried away. Later that week, he approached me and said something to the effect of, “I won’t hang out with you anymore. When I sprained my ankle, you didn’t even ask how I was doing. You don’t care at all, do you?” And he was right, I didn’t.

When I was a teenager, I had the terrible luck of meeting a malignant narcissist. I hung out with him and others for a year and a half or so, until I grew bored of the whole thing. Well, he didn’t accept the fact that life was pulling us in separate ways: from then on, until literally the year of his death in a car accident, the guy, for no apparent reason other than because “he doesn’t understand that friendship is the most important thing in the world,” he made it a life mission to poison every single social group I ended up in, which at that point was mainly the ones I was obligated to find myself in, as in school. He went out of his way (he didn’t attend classes in my city) to befriend people of my class, and even my brother. He approached my then girlfriend and started trying to get her to break up with me. He got really mad, to the extent that it disturbed a friend of his, when my girlfriend, bless her cheating heart, exposed him for having done stuff such as breaking into my email and hijacking my website. In his twenties, that bastard was rising in the ranks of the regional socialist party as a politician, and was the kind to exploit his power to hurt people as much as he could, while smiling to the face of those he was manipulating. When I saw his obituary in the paper, I burst out laughing. Served him right. Why not, here’s an article in Spanish about his death. David Martínez, who unfortunately shares a name with the protagonist of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners series, was truly my nemesis: nobody has bothered to hinder my existence remotely to that extent since.

It’s always been a struggle for me to care about human beings. Given that I didn’t have the instinct for it, for most of my youth I took it as an intellectual, deliberate pursuit. You cared about people when you made yourself care for them; that’s how I thought it worked for others. Whenever someone approached me, I felt anxious, guarded. As they spoke, in my mind I kept repeating, “Please, stop talking to me.” I couldn’t wait to return to solitude and to my turbulent relationship with my subconscious (who is a motocross legend, as well as the love of my life).

It’s not remotely your run-of-the-mill introversion, of course: I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism (so-called Asperger’s) in my mid-twenties. Due to the cause of autism, which seems to be a non-uniform pruning of neural connections during development, my neurological make-up is different to virtually everyone else, even other autistic people. I read somewhere that on those machines that test neural activity, autists are more different from each other than non-autistic people are from each other, let alone autistic people from non-autistic people. In practice, that means that the things that soothe non-autistic people very well may be terrifying for autistic people. The things that make most people feel good may be jarring or extremely annoying to autists. They are societies of one forced to coexist with foreigners.

I can’t even count how many times someone, I’m tempted to say “some moron,” has suggested to me to behave in this or that way, assuming that my brain worked like theirs and therefore I would experience the same results (that’s assuming that those people weren’t genuine morons and had a proper handle on the mechanisms of their brains). In truth, autists become acutely aware from early on that they’re different from everyone else, and a significant part of their lives consists on adapting to other people’s often bizarre behaviors and needs, that are only the norm because they’re the majority. Many people seem to believe that everyone feels as they feel, although I’m not shocked given how naive if not straight-up retarded most people are when it comes to organizing society.

Maybe because I’ve had my brain functions disrupted by a hemiplegic migraine and by severe stress lately, I’ve been thinking about that troublesome organ of ours. One of the writers I used to admire the most (even though I haven’t read anything of his since my early twenties), John Fowles, author of mainly The Collector and The Magus, suffered a stroke, and afterwards he never wrote fiction again. He said that the stroke had robbed him of his imagination, and he simply didn’t have the drive anymore. He had written because his brain was configured to work like that, for him to want to write in the first place.

Studies about people whose brain hemispheres were surgically separated to prevent severe epilepsy have pretty much proven that free will is an illusion (check, for example, this article on the subject). I’ve always suspected as much, so I don’t believe in my own delusions: I do things because I’m urged to do them. In my spare time, if I feel like writing, I do so. If I feel like producing music or programming, I do those instead. You could say that it’s a lack of discipline or something, because one may give up on a hard task and instead waste his time unproductively, but I’d say that the very “want” of doing something hard instead of wasting one’s time is the urge your brain forces you to follow. I’m just glad that I haven’t been pressured by my brain into killing people or doing similarly troublesome things that would land me in prison. On a regular basis, I do imagine many, many things that would land me in prison, though.

All these things also prove that you’re just your brain. If part of it dies, there’s no “soul” to correct the missing part. I’m fairly certain that ghosts exist, but I’m inclined to believe that they’re some sort of electromagnetic phenomena produced by the brain while it was alive (I’ve come across studies on the matter recently), phenomena that may be preserved in specific objects or locations because of subatomic entanglement. Why won’t those wave functions collapse, who knows. Anyway, there’s no “other place” after death, Abrahamic or not, that will justify all the pain and horribleness of life. And unless the universe itself is a simulation, that may very well be, we only consider reasons regarding its existence because its configuration has allowed us to exist, meaning that for all we know there are uncountable universes out there in which nobody can consider such matters.

Why did I write all this garbage? It’s 9:17 in the morning, I’m at work, and I have nothing else to do. Why did you bother reading it? That’s the real question, ain’t it.

EDIT: the AI-generated Google podcast Deep Dive has quickly become my favorite podcast (not that I listen to many podcasts these days). I’ve fed it this post, and it has come up with the following podcast:

Life update (09/30/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last night, I was looking for someone in an unspecified South American country. This took place in a dream, by the way. A guy, whom I somehow knew was the leader of some notorious gang or cartel, told me that he would lead me to the person I was looking for. Although I was aware that he would probably try to kill me, I hoped to get the upper hand on him. I spent what seemed to be hours navigating very detailed, bizarre locations in this dream South American country; one of those experiences that make you wonder if through dreaming one accesses some parallel realm. Anyway, the dream ended without a resolution, because my phone alarm sounded. Six in the morning, time to go to work.

It’s so disturbing to dream for hours, looking at strange locations through a good set of eyes, only to wake up and find my right eye screwed up. As I mentioned in previous posts, I few days ago I suffered a retinal tear that sent me to the ER, and that they got lasered shortly after. I’m now supposedly recovering from the surgery. My vision, however, is quite diminished: a frayed lock of fibers keeps dancing in front of my vision, and the rest is dotted with the vitreous gel equivalent of dust motes. Imagine having a lock of hair trapped inside your eyeball and you being unable to do anything about it but shift your gaze around to try to keep it at the edges of your vision. I have some level of OCD, so this garbage is driving me nuts. I’m tempted to just wear an eyepatch. I suspect that such floaters don’t casually go away even after weeks or months, and that now I’ll be forced to tolerate this disruption permanently.

On top of that, I spoke with my general practitioner on the phone to tell him that for what seems to be months, I haven’t felt right in the head: I’m confused often, I make bizarre errors at work, sometimes I confuse the order of letters as I’m writing (even though I’m not dyslexic), and from time to time I feel pressure in the area of my right eye and temple. My right eye, by the way, is the one that has suffered a torn retina, and I can’t tell if that was a coincidence. I was told that my confusion and such would pass after my regrettable episode of hemiplegic migraine, but it hasn’t been the case. To be honest, though, I can’t be sure for how long I’ve been suffering these symptoms: these last five or six months have been an utter nightmare at work, as I was tasked with coordinating the replacement of about 940 printers, which forced me to endure high levels of stress weekly. I haven’t been fully myself for a long time.

In general, I feel like I’m falling apart. My general practitioner told me that he would put me in contact with some neurologist, and from there, perhaps I’ll get an MRI done to discard possible faulty blood vessels, or brain damage. Neither of them would surprise me.

Anyway, this afternoon I hope to start ordering my notes for the next chapter of my ongoing novel. Thankfully, my artistic endeavors make me feel like I’m progressing somewhere other than the grave.

Song “Schizosaurus Rex” (Paisley Underground version) from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

In case you don’t know, this year I’ve been exploiting the amazing AI service Udio to produce songs. I’ve already made and released two full albums based on a strange story I wrote back in 2021, named Odes to My Triceratops. It follows the adventures and misadventures of a trio of friends who live in a town lost in the map. The main dude is a songwriter named William Griffin, who’s passionate and sensitive, if a bit unhinged. Another character is William’s next-door neighbor Claire Javernick, a blind redhead. Then we have Lorenzo, who’s a sentient triceratops for no justifiable reason. You can download the first two albums of this story through this link.

So yeah, a fresh new song directly to your ears, this one in the style of the relatively obscure Paisley Underground movement, which is a sort of garage psychedelic rock with a Californian vibe. I’m very fond of how this tune turned out.

Lyrics below:

A beast from the deep,
The monster under your bed.
Eyes red like the setting sun,
Claws the size and weight
Of a heavy human soul.
It can’t die; it only transforms.
It can’t be stopped,
Unless it decides to stop.

I have a portal to hell inside my throat.
It hurts, but I’m getting used to the pain.
Still, I don’t know whom I hate more:
The world, or myself.

This isn’t the story of how I died.
This is the story of how I met a girl,
We fell in love, and she betrayed me.
She didn’t do it on purpose;
She was just a dumb kid.
Besides, the darkness drove her crazy,
Almost as crazy as me.

I ain’t a poet, couldn’t hope to be,
But I’m the only person left:
A castaway in a plastic kayak,
Drifting down the River Styx
Past skeletons clinging to rocks,
Reaching out for a bite to eat.

You and I, love, we shared our lives,
We did the best we could,
But the best we could
Was a steaming pile of dogshit.

Someday I’ll make it to that faraway shore
Where eagles soar on golden wings.
There, I’ll sit and rest in my blue suit.
I’ll watch as time goes by,
Not aging a day, not losing a thing.
The memories will blur and fade
Until all I have left is me.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material. Yes, I’m writing the lyrics, you guys (who are by the way unaware of the fact that they’re AIs themselves). Check it out.

Life update (09/28/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

This morning I woke up from a troubling dream to find that the vision of my right eye was compromised: a tangle of fibers shifted at the center of my vision, along with a myriad little dots that swam like particles in a fish tank. Then I remembered: yesterday I suffered a torn retina, as recounted in this post.

I try to be productive, according to my definitions of productivity, even in my off days and in the holidays, so I sat at my computer and continued working on a new song. I plan on alternating between producing scenes of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked (latest chapter being number 127) and songs of my ongoing musical saga Odes to My Triceratops. I’ve already written the lyrics for the new song, and I was going through my enormous list of instruments that could be used, when I realized I could no longer focus on the task. Instead I decided to remaster one of my earlier songs, but I discovered that I really, really wasn’t in the mood for that. So I climbed into bed, pulled the bedclothes over my head and let my mind drift into its fantasies while listening to mommy ASMR.

I almost wasted the afternoon in bed, but I decided to take a walk in the nearby woods as usual. Turns out that the damage to my vision is more notorious in the sun: the layer of fibers that float at the center messes with my depth perception. Given how my life has been so far, of course I had ended up with my vision damaged; one of the few things I was looking forward to was buying a new graphics card and a VR headset once the next generation rolls out, so I could lose myself in those experiences. But unless this shit in my vision clears out, I won’t be able to properly enjoy that.

The doctor who operated on my retina didn’t add a mention of my diagnosis nor that operation to my patient history, which I can access online. I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking, given that he’s obligated to do so. On Monday I will get a call from my general practitioner about how to move forward, and I’ll have to explain that I was diagnosed with a torn retina and I was operated for it on the spot, even though there’s no proof on the records. It’s just been issue after issue, both in my personal life, mainly with my health, and at work.

I’m in a bad mood. Not proper depression, because that’s mainly biological and can hit whenever it pleases, but I’ve certainly been pushed a step further down the path of “I don’t give a fuck about anything,” and this last decade or so I’ve ventured very far down that path. Life has been consistent in proving to me that everything will go wrong, and that no matter how hard I try, not only it won’t amount to anything, but I will also get a “nope, and furthermore…” kind of resolution. I’m nearing forty. My mother, last month, mentioned in one of her careless, near senile comments that I’m in the best part of my life (to be fair, she has said that for the three decades of my life so far). I thought, “Shit, if this is the best that life has to offer, I don’t want to see what’s ahead.”

I was moderately entertained this afternoon by progressing a bit on the mangas I’m reading through, and now I’ll continue working on a new song. A pleasant enough Saturday, I suppose, much more pleasant than next Saturday, half of which I’ll spend at work. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was compelled to write this entry, so that’s what I’ve done. See ya, turds.

EDIT: as I’ve been doing recently, I’ve fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material. Check it out.

Ended up in the hospital (as a patient), Pt. 5

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of life1 Comment

It feels like I’ve just posted an entry of this series, but here comes the next one! The previous entry recounted how I had ended up in the ER with a diagnosis of hemiplegic migraine. As they performed tests on these poor eyes of mine, to discard possible damage, they did in fact find damage in my right eyeball: my vitreous gel had detached. The doctor wasn’t sure whether that had happened years, months, or weeks earlier. Anyway, she told me that I should be careful, because it could develop into retinal tears or retinal detachment.

Yesterday I started feeling that another migraine was coming. Given that I no longer experience regular migraines since I started taking beta-blockers for my poor heart, this was probably yet another episode of the dreaded hemiplegic migraine. I experienced a weird pressure behind my right eyeball as well as in that temple, and I felt some nausea. I also made bizarre errors at work that I can’t explain; in the worst case, I accidentally mixed the data of a user I was creating with my own data, which left me unable to access the intranet. I still don’t know how that happened, because as far as I know, it should have been impossible.

This morning, as I finished writing the latest entry of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, a conspicious black filament suddenly appeared in my right eye’s vision. When I shifted my gaze, it moved like thin kelp in the sea. I’m familiar with floaters from my previous detached vitreous gel, but this was a new artifact in my deteriorating vision. And, as I came to learn, just the beginning. The vision of my right eye worsened: the couple of blurry dots turned into a myriad, the thin kelp-like fibers became a tangled mass right in the center of my vision. Soon enough, it felt like I was looking through the water of a fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This wasn’t a migraine, but a physical defect in my eye, one that was worsening by the minute.

I hurried to the ER. A couple of tests later, they confirmed that I’ve developed a tear in my right retina, and it was necessary to patch it up with laser to block further deterioration. The doctor was young, in his early twenties. He didn’t explain basically anything about the procedure or what steps I should take to recover from it. He didn’t even give me a report, which I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to do. Anyway, he sat me in front of some contraption with a built-in laser, he numbed my right eyeball with some drops, and pressed some crystal thing to my cornea. Shortly after, I learned how it feels to have a laser stitch the inside of your eyeball. Every flash of red light was accompanied with a gnawing sensation in the middle of a very delicate organ. Manly tears of pain streamed down my face. If I had retained a sense of humor at that moment, I might have imagined myself receiving a demon eye from Kishirika Kishirisu. Alas, I wasn’t in the mood, because my body has been breaking down steadily, in strange ways, these last three or so years. I’m exhausted and pissed off.

Worse yet, although the laser, with its biting, burning ways, has likely prevented further deterioration, what I can see from my right eyeball at the moment (my pupil is still dilated, and I’m not wearing that contact lens) suggests that the floaters that had seeped in from my retina or whatever have found a permanent residence there, and the vision of that eyeball is permanently fucked.

After that young doctor finished messing with my eyeball, he left me seated at the waiting room, right after telling me that I should have no problem going to work (I’m working the afternoon shift). The guy disappeared. After I regained some sense of self, I looked for him again, but couldn’t find him. I wanted to know if I could put on the contact lens, and if I needed to do something specific to recover from the ordeal. A nurse informed me that my right eyeball should be able to tolerate a contact lens. She also pulled me aside and cleaned the residue from the sticky numbing drops, which apparently looked like white splotches. So on top of the humiliation that my right eyeball subjected me to, I must have looked as if someone came in my face. I’m living my best possible life.

Anyway, I’m at work right now. I have informed my boss that I’m not supposed to lift weights nor do any strange movements for about two weeks, which could be a problem; we are sometimes told to move computers and printers around, or at least crawl under tables to push the ends of cables into wall sockets. Now I can only anticipate in what bizarre way my health will deteriorate in the upcoming years, until get tired of this shitty life and jump off a bridge. By the way, my health issues, from my heart to my eyeballs to my other balls (found a lump in there), apart from a markedly subdued mood and occasional disorientation, started when I got pricked in the shoulder with an experimental treatment for some world-wide disaster that shan’t be named. My heart started acting up that same day. It’s a good thing I won’t have children, because I probably lack swimmers at this point.

Anyway, fuck off and all that jazz.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your material, and they came up with a particularly compelling Deep Dive. Thanks for cheering me up, guys.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 127 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.

In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.

A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.

“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.

At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.

A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.

The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.

“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”

I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.

The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.

I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.

“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”

My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.

“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”

“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”

I sigh.

“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”

Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.

“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”

“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”

“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”

“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”

My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.

“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”

“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”

“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”

“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”

Ramsés’ frown deepens.

“I told you I did.”

“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”

“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”

“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”

My boss throws his hands up.

“Oh, who knows!”

“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”

Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.

“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.

I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.

By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.

Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:

I’ve fed this chapter to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of any material. Check out the result:

Life update (09/24/2024)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Today I’ve gotten yet another proof of the fact that I’m one of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Allow me to explain the situation so you can point at my retarded self and laugh.

I’ve been working IT at a hospital complex since 2018. I will never be on a permanent contract for this organization, because I can’t speak Basque. But I replace workers when they go on medical leaves, on vacation, or when the bosses call in reinforcements for some project or general disaster (my longest uninterrupted period of work in my life happened during the covid heights). I’ve never taken vacation days, in this job or any other. I was under the impression that I got paid for those days, because it said so on my paysheets. And I’m not one to go on trips like your average Instagram girl, or do anything in particular during the holidays. After all, my sole purpose with working is to earn as much money as possible, so I gladly sacrificed vacation days to add more money to my bank account. There’s also something in my personality that highly dislikes inconveniencing people and making things difficult for others, which would happen by throwing my vacation days into the mix. That, admittedly, is a bizarre thing for my brain to feel when I spend part of my weeks daydreaming about murdering people.

As you may see coming, my coworkers started mentioning to me recently that if I didn’t spend my vacation days, I wouldn’t get reimbursed for them. I don’t know why this year, after six years working here, is the first time I’m hearing about this. Before I started this whole months-long project of replacing nearly a thousand printers in the whole hospital complex, my boss mentioned that he wasn’t sure if I would get paid for the unspent vacation days, but that he would consult with HR. He never returned to me on that subject. And I suspect now that he was always aware that I couldn’t reimburse my vacation days, and the fact that I never take vacation days was part of the fact why he assigned the printer project to me, because the bulk of it would get done during the summer. I stupidly, stupidly didn’t insist on him telling me whether or not my vacation days would get reimbursed.

Today I visited the appropriate departments, and I got the appropriate bewildered looks that anyone would offer to someone who says that he hasn’t taken vacation days in six years even though he doesn’t know if he has gotten reimbursed for them. You see, I am a dumb motherfucker, after all. I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, given that I’m autistic and such dysfunction isn’t precisely uncommon, but every time something like this happens, it makes me wonder if I really should try to pretend that I can live like a normal person, at least when it comes to working.

Anyway, I learned that I have the right to take five days off for personal reasons, four days off because they didn’t count properly last year’s vacations, three days off because of the Saturdays I’ve worked this year, and 21 days of regular vacations. So I suppose that I will spend most of the two following months writing, programming, molesting myself, and possibly traveling a bit.

That’s all I wanted to say. Bye, bitches.

EDIT: I fed this post to the Google thing that generates AI podcasts, to see what the two entertaining hosts had to say about it. Thank you for finding my plight “pretty hilarious,” you guys. Additional “thank yous” for pretending that my blog receives comments.

AI podcast about Alma: a Successful Case Study

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial, ReseñasLeave a comment

Back in 2021 I wrote this short story about a therapist and his troubled patient named Alma. Man, 2021 was one prolific year. Anyway, I’ve presented this tale to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of your source material so the pair of hosts would do a review. Check it out.

You can read the entirety of this story on here:

Alma: a Successful Case Study, Pt. 1
Alma: a Successful Case Study, Pt. 2

Ongoing manga: Rebuild World, by Nahuse

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four-and-a-half stars.

For once, this isn’t an isekai: the story is set long in the future, after some apocalypse about which the survivors are still trying to figure out the specifics. Apparently their predecessors had become so advanced that they were mixing biological engineering with super-AI or some shit, until their industries went haywire and started mass-producing mutated monsters that overwhelmed the world. Those facilities seem to be still active somewhere, pumping out enhanced monstrosities. Seemingly the sole remains of humanity live in a megacity. More accurately, the wealthy live in the megacity. The rest of humanity (or just Japan?) endure in the surrounding slums. Among the unwashed masses, the local badasses are known as hunters, the only ones daring to venture into the wasteland to make their living. Killing monsters is profitable if they’re threatening the city or other hunters, but their main source of income are the relics of the old world: any random underground mall from the pre-apocalyptic world suddenly found attracts most hunters around, that won’t hesitate to murder each other for the loot if necessary.

Meet Akira. It’s a post-apocalyptic Japanese story set in the future, so someone named Akira had to be involved. We are introduced to him as a traumatized teenager who constantly gets robbed and generally bullied by local shitheads. During a monster attack, the guy has enough, and decides to defend himself with a gun against a group who are bound to kill him. Suddenly, a naked female spirit appears, and hovers casually toward him. Akira freaks out until she, who calls herself Alpha, explains that she’s an AI remnant of the pre-apocalypse, and that he’s the only one who can see her because his brain is attuned to the old-world networks still in place, so she can show herself to him as augmented reality. She’s not just a curiosity, though: she can offer Akira superhuman support, analyzing his environment, pointing out enemies, guiding his shots. After she manages to save him from explosions and monsters by telling him to stay put or move at times, he realizes that she’s trustworthy, and that this sexy ghost of the past is his ticket to a better life.

Alpha, as we piece together early on, isn’t that trustworthy. Apparently, for many cycles, she has been finding humans to support. All of those cycles have ended with the subject dying. In the latest one, the subject came close to succeeding in beating some final dungeon that Alpha wants her subjects to clear out, only for some information to have been revealed that made the subject turn against Alpha, who promptly took the subject out. What’s Alpha after, then? Is she on the side of the pre-apocalyptic humanity, who may only want to resurrect the old world no matter how many modern eggs need to be cracked? Is Alpha part of the same AI that mass-produces monstrosities? We still don’t know. Throughout the story, the friendship between Akira and Alpha is heartwarming, but as Akira becomes more and more dependent on her, in the back of your mind you know that she’s going to screw him over in the end. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not Akira would go along with whatever Alpha’s true objective is.

Akira is emotionally stunted. He was orphaned so young that he has no memory of his parents, and all he has known of people growing up is the need to protect himself from sentient wild beasts. As the story advances, he meets people who like him, and would even want to tear his clothes apart and mount him, but the part of his brain that ought to connect to people doesn’t work to any significant extent. Plenty of other compentent hunters see him as an uncaring loner who, despite his competence, is someone to be wary of. The exceptions are a few women in his life to whom he proved himself, and who are eager to take him under their wing and show him their delectable parts to get a rise out of him.

The gals in this story are delicious. Props to the author and the visual artist. From the teenage gang leader Sheryl to the redheaded murderess whose name I don’t remember but who was a super cyborg or something, you want to stare in awe and horniness. Thank you Japan for being you.

This is yet another one of those Japanese stories in which you follow the lives of the characters as they change and grow. Although some personalities clash, they have reasons for doing so. Some chapters are just about having a good time and hanging out with interesting characters that get along, and that’s something I think has been lost in Western stories, that are full of forced conflict and people acting like bastards to each other. As far as I’m concerned, you can rely entirely on the tension born from the story world and concept, as well as from some characters that are genuine bastards, and just have the rest of the crew navigating that while relying on each other.

I’m loving this story. I wish I could keep experiencing it, but I’ve run out of chapters. If you’re into Japanese stories with great action, careful worldbuilding, human stakes, and total babes, this is one of the greats as far as I’m concerned.

Also, why not, here’s an AI-generated short podcast about this review: