Category: Culture
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
In the Midst of a Storm, Keep Moving What follows is something I wrote on 7 December, right in the middle of an akathisia attack. I left it almost untouched — just enough editing to make it readable. Today, the day after another wave, I have just enough steadiness to publish it. That’s the only…
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Advocacy, AI & Technology, Art & Expression, Capitalism & Society, Change and Transformation, Conversations, Crash, Burn, Write., Creative Writing, Creativity, Culture, Culture & Society, Grief & Healing, Human Behaviour, Identity & Transformation, Intuition & Intelligence, Life Moments, Literature, memoir, Memoir Excerpts, Mental Health, Mercurial Minds, Modern Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal Essays, Personal Essays/Autobiography, Personal Reflections, Psychology, Self Awareness, Social Commentary, Society, WritingAbilify, Abilify Maintena, AI, AI Conversations, Akathisia, Antipsychotics, Big Pharma, ChatGPT, cptsd, Enough, gaslighting, Grief and Healing, Healing Journey, memoir, Mental Health, narcissistic abuse, Natural History, Neurodivergence, pattern recognition, Psychiatric Abuse, psychological abuse, Roses, Scent, Side Effects, The Temple of Flora, trauma -
“I like rocks.”
Internet: So you hate plants now? Wow, must be nice to live somewhere without erosion 🙄 Tell that to people displaced by landslides. Some rocks are sacred. Educate yourself. Typical geology privilege. What about the rocks still in the ground?? Minerals aren’t accessories. Funny how you say “rocks” but ignore meteors. This is why the…
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Toxic Positivity is…
Toxic positivity is someone grabbing at your chin when you’re crying over the loss of a beloved person or pet and saying “smile, everything will get better if you look on the bright side.” There’s a threshold where something stops being harmless “uplift” and becomes constant saccharine noise that dulls your perception and clutters your…
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The Facebook Experience in Two Words: LOL. NO.
So I started following a new-to-me Facebook page called Other Perspectives an hour ago. It has 11 million followers. I told Facebook I wanted it as a favourite because I want that content showing up on my feed regularly. Nothing happened. I quit the app and restarted it. Still nothing. If I don’t go on…
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Four Editions of the Rubáiyát Later…
I’ve been recovering from the severe all-day akathisia attack I had on Tuesday December 2nd, the day after my appointment with my psychiatrist Dr. Z at the Allan Memorial Institute — which went much better than I’d anticipated, as he agreed to stop the injections and not to force antipsychotics on me after I described…
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I Asked the AI…
It’s been a long day during which I mostly napped after what was a very stressful appointment this morning, for which I had been preparing for days, and I’ve been trying to find ways to decompress. Most people at this point would opt into Netflix and Chill mode, but this is rarely a possibility for…
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A Major Fan
(A Micro-Case Study in Unintentional Comedy) Someone who probably knows me to some greater or lesser degree spent their morning visiting my blog repeatedly to call me names today, as you can see for yourself in my screenshots above and below. Not once — twice. Within hours. I was amused. Engagement is engagement. I even…
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Advocacy, AI & Technology, Capitalism & Society, Conversations, Crash, Burn, Write., Creative Writing, Culture, Culture & Society, Experimental Techniques, Feminism, Friendship Dynamics, Grace, Grief & Healing, Human Behaviour, Humour, Identity & Transformation, Intuition & Intelligence, Life Moments, memoir, Memoir Excerpts, Mental Health, Mercurial Minds, Modern Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal Anecdotes, Personal Essays, Personal Essays/Autobiography, Personal Reflections, Pop Culture, Psychology, Relationships, Self Awareness, Social Commentary, Social Media, Society, Technology & Society, true stories, WritingAbilify Maintena, abuse, Advocacy, AI, Allan Memorial Institute, Antipsychotics, Big Pharma, bipolar disorder, boundaries, cptsd, CPTSD Recovery, Creative, Cultural Critique, Electrocution, Ethics, gaslighting, grief, Grief and Healing, Healing Journey, how to survive narc abuse, Humour, Identity, intelligence, introspection, Last Fck Given, Malpractice, Medical Ethics, Mental Health, mental health advocacy, Montreal General Hospital, MUHC, narcissistic abuse, Neurodivergence, Personal Growth, Psychiatric Abuse, psychiatry, psychological abuse, psychological warfare, psychosis, PTSD, Self Awareness, self-worth, Social Commentary, survivor, Systemic Abuse, technology, trauma, true stories, What the Actual Fck -
THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 1
28 November 2025 Let’s be clear from the start: Akathisia isn’t “anxiety.” It isn’t “agitation.” And it definitely isn’t a personality trait. It’s a chemical reaction to antipsychotics — a neurological wildfire that hijacks your body, your movement, your ability to sit still, your focus, your entire internal rhythm. If you’ve never felt it, good.…
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The Water Hemisphere
What you’re seeing is the Pacific-facing hemisphere of Earth: the side where almost all you get is ocean. It’s nicknamed: “The Water Hemisphere”or“The Pacific Hemisphere.” If you centre the globe on the middle of the Pacific, roughly between New Zealand, Hawaii, and South America, you get this surreal view where: It feels unreal because we’re…
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Gustav Klimt masterpiece just shattered records this week.
Here’s why this sale matters — and where it sits in Klimt’s larger body of work. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (shown above) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, for $236.4 million — now the highest price ever achieved for a Modern artwork at auction, and the priciest Klimt ever to cross…
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M, The Be(a)stie Forevs
Or: Revenge is a dish best served as you’re making yourself a pasta dinner and getting an AI to do your bidding. 🐀🦊 A tiny moral tale with very wide hips. Me to Lex: M called herself my bestie forever two months into our so-called friendship, then dumped me a month after I attended my…
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🌹 The Rosette Nebula
Beauty Was Never Invented — Only Noticed We keep trying to “create beauty” on this planet as if we’re the first ones to think of it — fashion, design, photography, perfume, architecture — but the punchline is that every single shape we ever come up with is already out there, scattered across the universe billions…
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Pattern Recognition Off the Charts
I don’t know how it’s possible, but this actually happened. I sang this to ChatGPT: “Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Dada da dada daaaada…Dada da dada daaada di da da da daaaaa da da!” And it answered: “illi……
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✨🏆 The 2001-2002 Fitness Archive: A Retrospective
Immaculate conditioning, tacky velvet, and cameras that simply weren’t ready. Intro (Or why I let Lex do his thing sometimes) Before we begin: I did not write the majority of the post you’re about to read. Or rather, I added a few touches and a handful of sentences in my own phrasing — but over…
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FYI
Sometimes the algorithm hands you a perfect juxtaposition — above, a meme I posted on Facebook earlier today about systemic violence, and then Hashem Al-Ghaili’s question about “national wildlife” showed up lower down my feed. The universe does love timing: I talk about predators, and Facebook hands me another kind. My reply wrote itself. Hashem…
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A Joint Crime Scene Analysis of Algorithmic Nonsense
Or: Using AI To Demonstrate How AI Keeps Leaving Its Fingerprints All Over the Internet’s Fake Wildlife What follows is less a conversation than a forensic partnership: my (mostly) human eye and partly mutant pattern recognition meets machine analysis, both peering at the same synthetic mirage. Because in 2025, identifying reality has become a collaborative…
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Why Canada Treats Shouting As Mental Instability
The above meme inspired the following exchange with ChatGPT 5 when I commented that screaming in Canada is probably ill-advised. ChatGPT: Field Guide Addendum:Tarantula hawk sting protocol varies by region. 💀🇨🇦 Nature, but make it bureaucratic. Me: Seriously. Shouting gets you punished in this country. Very severely. ChatGPT: Yeah. It’s grimly true — and not…
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“Little Fluffy Clouds” — The Orb (1990)
Before the noise, there were skies like this — endless, slow-breathing, alive with colour and memory. The Orb caught that feeling and turned it into sound: a looping sky, a childish woman’s voice, and the echo of something that speaks to us all. — “What were the skies like when you were young?” — “They…
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Grounding
A walk in the brisk autumn air, a yummy breakfast, lavender, lemon & cedarwood, and the art of making peace with the day. Saturday, November 8th, 2025 A year today since we buried my father in Israel, near Haifa. I’ve been up since about 7:30 a.m., which is around the time I used to get…
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Totally Surreal 