hikari 🌟 (lives for another day)

It feels like a film that "romantic comedy" as a genre exists to enable. Which is to say, what it really wants to do is make you feel great joy and great sadness and say something about life itself, and the "comedy" framing merely lets it get away with its premise.

The thing about the Germanic languages is every single one sounds like a parody of all the other ones.

We will freely admit that the fact it is *in Dutch* (primarily; some dialogue is also in English) is a source of great pleasure to us (but we do watch with English subtitles of course, we don't speak Dutch even if it feels like we almost do, knowing English, Swedish and German).

Good gods this is such a well-written movie. Please learn as little as possible about it before watching it, it's more fun that way.

„De Surprise” (2015) is a really wonderful film, only 30 minutes into rewatching it but there's lots of little moments in it that make you, you know, glad to be alive? Very strong recommendation.

Right, we need to add this little warning: „De Surprise” is a great movie, but the second thing that happens in it is the main character repeatedly tries to kill himself; obviously he finds joy in life by the end of it, but uh, yeah. Just bear that in mind if you're interested!

Live happily, and never do anything that takes your life for granted; existing on this earth even for a moment is a miracle, but it is a miracle that will end the moment you get lost in hubris, and when that happens, you won't be able to tell the tale.

✌️

I think that's all. Pray we never need to talk about it again. Sheesh.

We're going to rewatch a movie called „De Surprise”, it's a Dutch romantic comedy with a very funny premise, and it has something to do with living happily, and that's what we want you to do: live happily.

And there was no magic trick where suddenly getting a fuckton of sleep dep and thinking too much made us have this particular “interesting time”. It is one we only could have because of a *decade* of trying to be better. If you think you can do that, you'll just die, sorry.

And everything — literally everything — that we might have achieved from this, and we still have to carefully wait and see until we know it's not just pure hubris, all the joy and wonder and whatever, is stuff you *absolutely* do not need to go through this horror to achieve.

I could talk about this, we could talk about this, for a very long time. We are, like, it must be emphasised, *extraordinarily* lucky. We are perhaps in the 0.1% of good outcomes of a psychotic break. We know that almost everyone we know, regardless of background, would do worse.

Do you *want* to know that, for the rest of your life, the actual history of your life is now something that makes anyone around you consider you *literally insane* if truthfully recounted; that you will have to constantly mask and hide it, even if you might be happier overall?

Do you *want* to live through feeling your body is being severed from your mind, like the horrors you are experiencing are so total you consider abandoning your supposed commitment to not killing yourself? I don't think you do. I don't think you do. You do not. You really, do not

do you really want to be mentally ill, like us? Do you *want* the grief that comes from nearly alienating everyone you've ever been friends with, nearly losing your partner, your career prospects, your home, your ability to think, your ability to live life remotely normally?

you have to remember we are *mentally ill*; for all our cool insights and interesting posts, at some level you must be mentally ill if the fact your university's anime society decided to show you Bakemonogatari one semester eventually gives you a psychotic break 9.5 years later

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes, I wish someone out there will find me
'Til then, I walk alone

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me, and I walk alone

I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
And I'm the only one, and I walk alone

Please for the love of God do not copy us. We know that everything we say, that the fact we're obviously healing in some way will make some people desperately want to, but like: geez, a decade studying schools of Buddhism and eventually taking LSD would probably be safer, y'know.

I really want to say the thing again about how you can only walk the path to enlightenment if you are already basically enlightened (and even then, walking the path only makes you “1% more enlightened”), but it feels so horribly hubristic, even though it isn't, it has to be said.

“but surely you learned some things”
“Yes, I learned a million things of course.”
“then why—”
“But the other million things were things I already knew. I just didn't Know them.”
“what do you mean”
“If you don't Know what I mean, I can't begin to tell you. I'm very sorry.”

“so what did you learn from the psychotic break hikari”
“More or less absolutely nothing.”
“wow seems like you were lying about the million knocks to your hubris”
“No, I wasn't, and that's the entire thing, the delusion is equally if not more painful if you turn out to be right.”

the harrowing experience of learning the difference between knowing and Knowing

We're not sure if that's true, I think you probably have to alternate between trying and not trying to get places, but it's definitely true that the periods of “not trying” are very, very important, easily as important as the periods where you do “try”.

“Live happily!” means you shouldn't be trying to worry about using the best audio interface you have and especially not webcam pose and body pose positioning when you just want to noodle, y'know.

We'll shut it and get back to playing, that was the whole point after all.

We must sound quite full of ourselves, we are a little bit, but what just happened is we combined a bunch of very easy familiar things together in a way that will make guitar practice less stressful in future; we have done the minimal amount of thinking needed to Not Think :)

Yep, new “lazy no-stakes guitar practice while still recording and being able to share the results easily” strat unlocked, total Minakami Yuki victory etc

Right, right, right, “record your practice sessions”. We happen to have a Rocksmith Real Tone Cable on hand (We've never played the game — long story), if we quickly grab that and set it going, we should be able to record without having to Think too much.

One demonstration of this is that I'm currently sitting at our desk, in our desk chair, wearing a skirt; normally these are the Worst Possible Circumstances for playing guitar, but I'm apparently entirely unbothered by it, I'm playing things I can play comfortably like this…

we're not saying we're good at it, we're just not (currently) bad at in the ways that come from *trying to be* good at it

holy shit Circumstances have suddenly made us massively better at guitar, and it's not because of any magic happening in our brain, not at all, it's that we're tired of thinking and are not trying to think about what we're doing, and so we just Play, we have Flow, y'know?