Am I only dreaming?

hell yeah

This is GREAT, they're having so much fun!

There's no charity
Some don't deserve to make it
You'll blame and fight each other
For just a slice of plunder
Too down and tired to wonder
Whose foot you're crawling under

Hayao Miyazaki in "Nostalgia for a Lost World," from Starting Point: 1979–1996 (translated by Beth Cary and Frederik L. Schodt):

One of the things about drawing is that, if you put in serious effort, you will become good at it, at least to a certain extent. But that's all the more reason to study a variety of things that interest you while you still have time, before you enter the professional world, in order to develop and solidify such fundamentals as your own viewpoint and way of thinking.

If you don't do this, your life will be treated as just another disposable product. In the animation business, most people spend a long time working at the bottom of the organizational ladder. You usually have to endure a lengthy apprenticeship period, waiting patiently for the chance to someday demonstrate what you can do. But the opportunity to demonstrate what you can do only comes along once in a while, so unless you are extraordinarily lucky, you'll probably never make it.

To endure something is obviously exhausting and agonizing. But at the same time, you must also continue to hold what you regard as important close to your heart and to nurture it. Should you ever relinquish what you truly hold dear, the only path left to you will be that of a pencil-pusher — the type of animator whose sense of self-worth is determined by the numerical amount of their earnings, or who cycles between joy and despair over the high or low rating his work receives.

That last paragraph pierces directly through all of my paragraphs. I have been through periods of relinquishing what I truly hold dear. I push back against the phrasing that this is an either/or proposition; it is possible to return to what you truly hold dear. Maybe the hardest part is reassessing whether what you hold dear has shifted while you were wandering cold-eyed in the wilderness.

But no matter what others may say, if it isn't something I really want to work on, it isn't animation to me. I'm talking about a very personal view of animation here, of course, and when it comes to my work there are also obviously times when I have to compromise. In fact, there are times when I really have to struggle, and I suffer quite a bit in the process.

Me too, Hayao! But we can't let that suffering strip us of the future intent to live truthfully.

Man, I used to be able to play the hell out of the guitar!!!! This song is just one guitar track, recorded in one take while singing into a single stereo microphone, with just a few overdubbed vocals and whistling. 2007.....................!!!!

I sure wish I'd gotten my depression treated a decade earlier so I wouldn't have grown so disgusted with myself that I couldn't bear to play the guitar without feeling despair at my prospects!

]

"Covered my eyes with your hands. Walked me through all of your plans. I told you I could see it all, but all I saw was you."

From Salon.com, There is hard data that shows "Bernie Bros" are a myth:

People responding to hundreds of millions of people online tend to dehumanize others.

They remember that someone is female/male or follows some candidate or is of some race, but they frequently don't pay attention to differentiate actions of one member of that group versus another. So rather than consider how frequently an individual of some group acts, they think of how frequently the group acts as a whole. If they interact with many more members of one group than another, that perception of the group is magnified by the number of members they see.

"Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower," Winchell says of his results. "There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don't seem to be aware of.... Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat's campaigns," he added, noting that this may be partly what helps perpetuate the myth.

I downloaded all the followers of the Twitter accounts of the nine most popular Democratic presidential candidates and the president ([around] 100 million Twitter accounts). I then randomly chose followers from them and downloaded all their tweets from 2015 to the present. I have run two different sentiment analysis algorithms on these tweets. So far, nearly 6.8 million tweets from 280,000 Twitter accounts have been analyzed out of the 100 million-plus tweets I currently have downloaded (I continue downloading more).

The chance that some tweet is negative when it comes from a follower of candidate X is pretty much the same as if it came from a follower of candidate Y. [...] Bernie followers act pretty much the same on Twitter as any other follower. There is one key difference that Twitter users and media don't seem to be aware of. Bernie has a lot more Twitter followers than Twitter followers of other Democrat's campaigns.

To summarize my conclusions: First, there is a general tendency for online behavior to be negative, known as the online disinhibition effect — but it affects all people equally, not merely Sanders' supporters. Second, pundits systematically ignore when other candidates' supporters are mean online, perhaps because of the aforementioned established stereotype; in this sense, the Bernie Bro is not dissimilar from other political canards like the "welfare queen." Third, Twitter is not a representative sample size of the population, and is so prone to harboring propaganda outfits and bots such that it is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion.

"The idea that Sanders' supporters are somehow uniquely cruel, despite Sanders' platform and policy proposal being the most humane of all the candidates"

...is a pretty important phrase to reflect on!

Foxy Shazam was one of the best live bands I've ever seen. They broke up in 2014, but have scheduled a show for next month. Jeezus CHRIST could I use some more of their chaotic power