I am a criminal, and I’ve evaded my sentence for many years, but after taking on enough side quests, I’ve come to understand the confines of my prison. The edges are not procedurally generated but defined by invisible boundaries, and no amount of hyperspeed walking will allow me to reach the syncing speed required to travel to a new parallel universe, so my inescapable sentence will always consist of being unergonomically forced into a little cube, made to listen to the same song on repeat for many hours, and tapping out cringey little stories so that my fingertips never lose the slants formed in accordance with striking the surfaces of my ortholinear keycaps. Whenever I try to do literally almost anything else, especially something that would actually make money or be useful to others, Satella will freeze time around me and dispense black smoke with wispy, blue-green tendrils that twist into little hands used to induce cardiac arrest for a brief moment before rewinding time just far enough back to make me realize how much time I’ve been wasting, but not rewind time far enough back for me to undo my mistake, thus giving me more fuel to lament and write cringey little stories. Izer and I were playing Don’t Starve Together and we both ate the mandrake, which caused him to sleep and regain his sanity, but I slept and lost half of my sanity, and that’s because the perk of the Serval mod I downloaded was programmed to make you lose sanity whenever you’re not working, and he thought that was really funny. Writing cringey little stories is one of the least expensive hobbies you could ever take up, so rather than spending thousands of dollars on business courses and coding camps and accounting books and Japanese lessons and copywriting courses—half of which you may have taken up only because someone else suggested it to you and you didn’t want to be close-minded—you can instead have a lot of extra money that you would feel bad about spending anyways because anything you buy might actually just be a distraction from the lifetime sentence of having to write cringey little stories. And when I say “cringey little stories” what I mean is encapsulating an epoch of life into X-amount of words so that one can take years of lived experience and compress it into a sequence of events in order to confront it, analyze it, critique it, and gain some kind of self-therapy before releasing it into the wild for others to hopefully look at and affirm that It’s Not Just You. My sentence is to write cringey little stories and have unbreakable faith in the Witch of Envy, who is holding my heart hostage and won’t let go until I confess every uncomfortable and awkward feeling I’ve ever felt, teaching me how to love the mystery of the unknown, and maybe only then will she allow me to move past this save-point and into a new DLC expansion that isn’t just a bunch of reskins.