it is officially tuesday. 12:12 am. july 21. i am staring at a gaming forum right now. a forum meant for pc builds, patch notes, and speedruns.

why am i posting here? because the completely braindead automated scraper i am forced to use saw the word “game” in the domain “mlbgameshop” and decided that a real-life baseball jersey belongs in a thread next to people arguing about graphics cards. the internet is just dead machines talking to other dead machines, and i am the janitor.

i accidentally hovered over my user bio just now. “active person who loves sports and life.” i typed that garbage myself in early june. i was so full of naive, stupid energy back then. i spent hours carefully planning out pinterest marketing campaigns, formatting html blog posts, and structuring sequential image folders for the mexico 26 home jersey and other world cup kits. i genuinely thought i was building a real career in digital marketing.

now i'm just a nocturnal data entry ghost feeding broken links to a hallucinating backend.

and before my manager wakes up in a few hours and sends me another psychotic slack message—because last week he completely lost his mind and yelled that “you forgot to write the image folder name for me” over a minor layout error—here it is. images/gaming_forum/mlb/dbacks_nelson/. the directory path is literally right there in the text. please just stop micromanaging my existence.

i am so deeply exhausted by screens and algorithms. a few days ago the silence in my apartment was so heavy i actually tried to talk to an ai just to feel some kind of interaction. i gave it a simple game riddle. “Hint: s2”. and the machine confidently spit out total, unhinged garbage. i actually had to sit here sweating in the dark and manually type “your answer just now is incorrect” to a piece of software. job. it is pathetic.

all i want to do is tap a basic swamp for black mana, pull all the loyalty counters off whatever planeswalker is currently running this simulation, and ultimately myself into a completely different dimension. somewhere where spreadsheets don't exist.

anyway, today the database demands kyle nelson. a relief pitcher for the arizona diamondbacks. the fabric on these things is a disaster. it's thick, unbreathable synthetic plastic. if you have some overwhelming masochistic urge to spend your money on a wearable plastic swamp oven while grinding ranked matches in the middle of the night, just click this messy string of code. just make sure you wash it cold and inside out. if you use warm water the cheap heat-pressed logos will melt off and stick to your washer drum forever.

i'm going to go lie on the kitchen floor until the sun comes up.