Max 🕳️

Plucking strings

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

It’s one of the worst feelings because your brain is built to want one villain, one answer, one clean line to stand on.

Two things being true at once ruins the fantasy of clarity.

You want to say they loved you. You want to say they hurt you. Life says yes. Both.

You want to say your parents did their best. You want to say their best still cut you open in places you’re finding years later. Life says yes. Both.

You want to say you’re grateful. You want to say you’re miserable. Life says yes. Both.

You want to say you’re healing. You want to say you’re still angry enough to burn the room down if someone says the wrong thing in the wrong tone. Life says yes. Both.

That’s what makes it unbearable.

One truth is easy to carry. One truth lets you build a personality. It gives you a script. It tells you whether to stay or leave, forgive or hate, relax or panic. Two truths make you stand there with your hands full and nowhere to put anything. Two truths make you feel split down the middle, like your own chest has become a courtroom and both lawyers are right.

You can feel it in tiny moments. 01:16, kitchen light on, fridge humming, one hand on the counter because you’re more tired than you want to admit. You’re replaying a conversation that should be over by now. You’re trying to decide how to feel, which is already a losing game. Your brain wants a verdict. Instead it gets complexity.

They were kind to me.

They also made me feel small.

I miss them.

I’m safer without them.

I want more from life.

I’m exhausted by the effort it takes to build it.

There’s no satisfying emotion for that. No neat reaction. No clean pose to strike.

People love simple feelings because simple feelings are social. Everyone knows what to do with “I’m heartbroken.” Everyone knows what to do with “I’m furious.” You can make a playlist for those. You can text your friend. You can post a little quote and get sympathy.

Try saying “I’m devastated and relieved.”

Try saying “I forgive them and I never want to see them again.”

Try saying “I know this is good for me and I still hate every second of it.”

That’s where language starts to fail. That’s where you start pacing instead of talking.

A lot of adult pain is just this. Not tragedy. Not catastrophe. Contradiction.

You get older and realize maturity is not becoming certain. Maturity is building enough internal space to hold two truths without forcing one of them to die just to calm yourself down.

That’s not noble. It’s brutal.

Because the body hates ambiguity. The body wants safety. Safety often arrives disguised as certainty. Pick a side. Name the villain. Lock the story. Call them evil. Call yourself innocent. Call it fate. Call it a lesson. Call it anything that turns the blur into a border.

Two things being true at once keeps the border smeared.

You loved them. They were wrong for you.

You had a good childhood. You were lonely in it.

You’re talented. You waste yourself.

You’re trying hard. You avoid the exact work that would change your life.

The double truth is where the shame lives too, because it makes you feel inconsistent. Weak. Messy. Indecisive. You start judging yourself for not being able to settle into one pure emotion. You think, why can’t I just hate them. Why can’t I just be grateful. Why can’t I just move on. Why can’t I just trust the choice I made.

Because your life is not a slogan. That’s why.

Most of the deepest pain doesn’t come from one truth crushing you. It comes from being stretched between truths that both have a pulse.

That’s why breakups hurt so long. The person was not all bad. That’s why family is complicated. They were not all cruel. That’s why work drains you. You can be lucky and still be dying inside. That’s why healing feels insulting sometimes. You can be getting better and still be grieving the version of you that got broken in the first place.

No clean ending. No pure emotion. No one sentence that puts the whole thing to bed.

[zaso ✟ 📹 @ev1lzaso]

100% agreed. life is so beautiful when you leave your house and do things in public. I feel like it’s so draining to have everything be digital. video stores, movie theaters, film festivals, screenings, all those things help build community and human connection. streaming doesn’t

[Max 🕳️ @softbrewed]

@scottdomes Excellent tweet. I couldn’t have put it better

[空 @soraoyogusakana]

ブレワイ9周年だって！おめでとう御座います！！
何もかもが美しくて素晴らしいゲームです

[jeliot @jeliot_]

im forgetting your face #nightinthewoods

[grayfruit @thegrayfruit]

outer wilds is such an annoying game to be a huge fan of because you can't talk to anyone who hasn't played it about why it's good and if you talk to anyone who HAS played it they just go "yeah I know dude"

[Joey Toro @JoeyToroArt]

Why I love Low Poly Art

[Max 🕳️ @softbrewed]

@Stefaaan06 @OzeanStones It’s a beautiful experience

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

Everything is hard and no one cares.

[LUCIL∀ @denpanopticon]

imagine. A zelda movie that looked like this

[vids that go hard @vidsthatgohard]

In conclusion to 2025, fuck AI and support real artists.

[Mike F @DeputyWarlock]

if i ever found out a mouse lived in my home, and he had a small archway in the wall, and he lived in there with small, real furniture, and he ventured out nightly to get one olive or a small wedge of cheese. i would stop at nothing to end his life. i would spare no expense

[Zaza Waybright @Le_Unorthodox]

Damn... Fionna and Cake Season 2 is actually over. I'm gonna have to make another one of these one day with Fionna and Cake bits added on fr.

[conduct|r @conductr_]

we are overstimulated and we don’t even notice. netflix while eating. reels in the bathroom. music while cooking. podcasts on walks. we consume by default, not by intention. you keep filling every gap, then wonder why you feel foggy and unmotivated. boredom and silence are the real growth drivers. they give you space to think and create. that’s when solutions show up for problems that have been stuck for months. leave some room

[AUTOMATON WEST @AUTOMATON_ENG]

Neon Genesis Evangelion director Hideaki Anno doesn’t believe creating for the global market is the way to go. “I’m sorry, but the audience will have to be the one to adapt”

https://t.co/D5LhMzRtc4

[Amanda Killian @eroscestlavie_x]

Will never judge a person for being way too online between Dec 22 & Jan 1. You might be in your childhood home on an air mattress right now these posts might be keeping you alive

[Max 🕳️ @softbrewed]

@deathbykismet @nise_yoshimi Absolutely love the texture and rendering

[Max 🕳️ @softbrewed]

@Mirage91570273 @IHateFallGuys Tell me your contempt for Outer Wilds Andy’s in this context

[Jeremy Giffon @jeremygiffon]

I don’t believe there is such a thing as laziness. Rather, I believe that most people spend their lives working on the wrong thing. No one is a lazy procrastinator in all areas of life. Everyone has something they can do effortlessly for hours. And they tend to do that effortless thing better than they do the thing they are lazy about.

Consider, Andre Agassi who wrote an entire biography about how much he hates tennis and how miserable his life was when he pursued it. It would be fair to call him a 99th percentile player. Then you can look at Novak Djokovic. A journalist asked him what keeps him motivated as the greatest of all time. He said “I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball…there are [other players on the tour] who don’t have the right motivation. You don’t need to talk to them. I can see it…”.

It boggles my mind how insane it is that the greatest of all time gets to simply enjoy hitting the ball while the merely very good player has to turn to smoking meth at the height of his career?

It shouldn’t be this way, that’s not how the world should work! It should reward the suffering, otherwise what is the point? And yet it does seem to be how it works.

For every Fields Medal winner who strolls around day-dreaming and writing poetry there are a hundred adderall addled grad students sacrificing body and mind to come up empty handed. Just as for every peanut brittle chomping, bridge playing centi-billionaire investor there are a hundred middling hedge fund managers who leap from their balconies at the sight of market turmoil. It ain’t fair and it may be grim, but it is ultimately good news.

Everyone thinks we are making some kind of conscious tradeoff between production and happiness on the production-possibility curve but in reality we are just below the frontier for no good reason. There are not a lot of opportunities out there with a return profile like this one.

At the end of my life I want to play a role in as many people as possible saying something like this: "yeah I was working in this field I didn’t really like and my life was kind of miserable and my output sucked and then I realized I should actually be doing this other thing in this weird niche that no one has ever quite done before but I find myself to be perfectly suited for. Now, I’m great at what I do and am very happy and the world gets to experience one more unique instantiation of greatness than it did yesterday.”

It is tragic that in the course of history so few people have been able to utter words like this. We don’t need to throw up our hands. I know there is a lot more that can be done here than we currently think possible.