in may 2011, electro house group swedish house mafia dropped their single 'save the world' to *checks wikipedia* rather good reception in europe and north america, considering that the album it was to feature in, until now, would be their last (of two) before their breakup a couple years later.

on that digital single download, as well as on the deluxe editions of until now was a remix by electronic power duo knife party, the surviving fraction of dnb trendsetter pendulum. their sound was a lot more aggressive and buzzing than SHM's pining and hopeful house, and maybe it's just my pendulum bias talking here, but it slaps cheeks.

in march of 2012, video artist and brony shitposter dabuxian uploaded his first full pmv (pony amv (anime mv (look we'll be here all day if i keep etymologizing))) since his previous channel's ban in january. it was called she reads all day, and it featured the bookworm main character in a number of animated and captioned vignettes about how much she loves books. a silly affair, but it was during a major explosion in the mlp fanbase, so it both drove an exponentially increasing wave of content and was an early product of it. it stuck, for at least a few people and for at least a time, having seen over a million views to date.

in november 2012, i had the poor judgment to desire the status of IRON NODER on this very website, so as part of my scramble to come up with nodes, i placed a number of things in drafts, including a list of books i had planned to acquire and read. i was proud of it then, so i made it a public draft and i called it she reads all day.

you shouldn't look, it is a terribly embarrassing list. for one thing, the book selection is dreadful. i probably thought i was so affectedly eccentric. i mean, really, i wanted to read ayn fucking rand? absolutely ghastly, how clueless i was back then.

for another thing, i felt the need to disambiguate the title. perhaps someone asked me, who the she was; perhaps i asked myself. in either case, i felt the pluck you'd need to feel to think that "[my] grand list of books / the title is an obscure reference to a thing, i am actually a guy" was aloof and not heavy-handed.

absolutely ghastly.


fast-forwarding now, past many years of my life and much evolution of culture, to february 2020.

twitter user @IrisHeartfang posted a meme that would be just true and popular enough to resurface periodically throughout 2020 and silently embed itself into people's memories. "tfw you are a broney in 2012," reads the caption above an image of a boy standing at a crossroads. to the left, the sun rises behind a sterling white castle, labelled "become trans girl;" to the right, a haunted mansion on the edge of a cliff sits dark against an even darker landscape of dark clouds and thunder, "become white supremacist."

ha ha, ha ha ha, so true. man, on a related note, it sure is a good thing i hadn't become a white supremacist since 2012. having been an early brony, you can infer i spent enough of my time on 4chan and derivatives, that it would not have been inconceivable for me to have my brain infected and consumed by whatever mindvirus they incubate there. luckily i grew out of that, and was eventually radicalized to the left instead,

i thought to myself, unreflectingly.


and then there was a worldwide pandemic.

well, strictly speaking, it started in maybe september 2019, because that's when it was first known, but you know, late capitalist dystopia gotta sacrifice untold hundreds of thousands of lives to pad some wallets and stick it to xinnie the pooh or whatever. so the lockdowns didn't really hit until march 2020.

it's 2021 now, and i gotta say, i've been having trouble sleeping lately.

well, i've been having trouble sleeping for a long time, really. longer than covid. i'd much rather be doing something. it's not even a matter of keeping busy, i am as likely to be reading some prattle on the internet or chatting to my nocturnal friends as writing, if not more. and even when i stop, there's always that unbearably long time where it's you and your thoughts and god you just cannot find something that is comfy for more than a moment.

that's normal, right? staying up way past your "bedtime" because you want to be doing something, instead of being alone in the dark and staring down your thoughts until you mercifully lose consciousness. of course, once you succeed, you get to wake up the next day and rub the rheum gunk from your eyes, which puts off the issue for another 16 hours.

they call it "sleep crust", did you know? the eye-gunk, i mean. yeah, check it out, google says: “Sleep crust is a mix of mucus, exfoliated skin cells, oils, and tears produced or shed by the eye during sleep,” said Pettey. “It’s a natural part of healthy eye function. [...]”

see, it's totally normal.


with the (a) hindsight of 20(/)20, we can see that SHM's breakup was only an extended hiatus, and as of 2019, they're back. pendulum is finally making good on the reunion promises it made in 2017, too. and a couple of weeks ago dabu reposted one of his old pmv's to youtube, one of the ones that had been lost to his channel ban.

and so it is that i find myself here, my worldline cycling back once more. noding about an obscure reference to a public draft that nobody read. but actually? i don't think i'm so concerned with being aloof and not heavy-handed, anymore.