#closed loop

You know how you type something like "I want" into your phone and then tap the middle autocomplete option over and over and over again, and it says some wild shit? This is just the LLM version of that. It looks ominous, but it doesn't mean anything.

Hello hello,

Been a bit busy round the homestead with the weather change, but being busy seems more common than not being busy lol

The month olds hot moved outside, to make way for the new chicks inside

Given everywheres been sold out consistently and that nature will do as nature does, we'll likely continue hatching out through the summer.

Onwards to the garden,

I uppoted these melons and some zuchinnis so they can get just a lil bit bigger before full transplant. Any extras I'm gonna try to sell this year for garden funds.

Very little growth on the tomato and pepper seeds, I had hoped I'd be lucky with the weather but I guess I'll have to wait on having either and hope the one si left to overwinter start producing soon.

Not much in the new strawberry bed. The peas are producing a decent snack amount now, so I'll need to figure a way to double the size of pea/bean areas.

Did some dye work on some pants. They went from olive green, blue and khaki to as black as I could. Also hemmed them for summer wear.

I used rit dye and idye poly. Currently I would recommend both. Idye poly took a looong time to run clear before I could give them a run in the washer, they 100% covered the thread and buttons the rit dye did not.

Their not dark enough for the wearer yet, so I'm on the hunt for another dye to try. If anyone has suggestion the fabric is cotton and I believe a polyblend of some sort for the thread.

Also we got a composter, as we are pretty certain the city's recycling/green program hasn't been back to normal since the virus closures reopened, and ive seen both barrels picked up by the same truck more than once since. While we can't do much on that (except call up, complain/explain and take action), we decided it was time to learn composting to close and lesson our waste stream more if we can.

On the bonus side, when its done we'll have fresh dirt for our garden which is always a win 🏆. The worst so far has been figuring out a good collection and take out system for the daily bits 😂.

In the kitchen,

Ive been saving every citrus peel i can (using a veggie peeler to make strips) and drying them out. Some ive used for tea, some for dry seasoning flavor (super excellent btw, I cannot believe i ever enjoyed the dusty stuff in the cheapo bottle.) And fresh in sauces. I'm also saving seeds to give a try at sprouting them. Figure why not, it's good practice 🌱

Alright, ive got to get my day started so I'm heading off.

In a future where technology can simulate emotion and fabricate the past, one man falls into a memory he didn’t live, but can’t live without. Closed Loop explores synthetic intimacy, identity, and the blurred line between real and remembered.

Closed Loop

1

The rain didn’t stop. It just changed density, like a bad signal trying to come through. Fat drops, mist, needle-fine spray, all the same. It clung to the cracked pavement and the cracked people walking in it, washing nothing clean.

The streets pulsed under a dozen stories of electric billboards, flashing fake smiles and forbidden luxuries. Perfume. Cruises. Fresh fruit. Things nobody in this part of town could afford. Nobody even looked up anymore.

I ran my small store out of an alley that stank of fried grease and regret, tucked between a synthmeat vendor and a pawn shop that would buy your teeth if you ran out of cash. Which you would. Sooner or later.

You didn't smell rain here. You smelled old oil, rust, hot garbage. Even the neon had a scent, if you stayed too long: a sharp metallic tang, like blood left to rot in a forgotten room. Trees were something you saw in old movies. Birds were a myth they still taught in school, maybe to keep kids from climbing out onto the fire escapes. Life wasn't lived here. It was survived.

Business was good, if you didn't think about it too hard. Memories, bottled, stitched, pawned, sold better than food, better than sex, better than air. I sold glimpses of a world that used to exist. Or maybe it never had. Didn't matter. People paid to believe.

Cheap memories went to the factory rats and bus station junkies: the taste of real beef, the scratch of a dog’s fur under your hand, a summer afternoon where the sky stretched blue and wide. You could get a five-minute slice of happiness for less than a rice bowl.

The rich ones wanted more. Romance. Nostalgia. Love, if you could call it that. The kinds of memories you didn't have to squint to pretend were yours. I’d built up a special collection for them. Premium stock. Real heart-stoppers.

Not that I used the product myself. I knew better.

Until the night everything changed.

2

They always came to me wrapped in plastic raincoats, their collars turned up against the stink, trying not to look desperate. They shuffled in from the puddled streets, blinking against the neon glare like rats scurrying out of a sewer. Men in rumpled suits, women in threadbare dresses that still carried a whiff of old perfume, ghosts of a better life none of us believed in anymore.

Business was steady tonight. Steadier than usual. Maybe the rain drove them in. Maybe the city had just broken a few more souls than it fixed this week.

I ran a clean shop. No black-market cortex jacks, no memory dumps ripped from dying minds. All my product was curated: licensed uploads, private captures, some stitched and smoothed at the edges to make the dreams run sweeter. Didn't matter. Nobody asked for credentials. They just wanted to forget.

A kid with scabbed hands paid half a week's wages for fifteen minutes at a dinner table with people who loved him. A factory woman with joints gone stiff from the line bought the memory of a hike through an evergreen forest, the kind that hadn't existed within a thousand klicks in decades.

And the rich? They came later. Drenched in silk and chrome, they wanted curated love affairs and impossible summers. They paid triple for something tender. Something rare.

I dealt to them all, took their credits, watched their eyes go glassy with longing. I told myself it was just a business.

And maybe it was. Until she showed up.

3

He came in just before closing. Suede coat that hadn’t seen rain, shoes that cost more than my rent. The kind of man who worked for someone important, but not important enough to smile.

“She’s looking for something refined,” he said. “Said you deal in authenticity.”

Authenticity. As if pain had to come with a certificate.

“I deal in memories,” I said, dragging my hand across the cluttered console. “Authentic’s extra. You want real emotion? Real love? That’ll cost.”

He didn’t flinch. Just placed a cred-stick on the counter. “She wants it delivered tomorrow night.”

I nodded. “Then she’ll get what she paid for.”

The suite was thirty floors up, above the rot, the gutters, the boiling noise of the street. The kind of place where the windows showed filtered sky and soft rain sound was imported for ambiance.

She opened the door herself. No staff, no security. Just her, in silk the color of warm gold, whispering under the suite lights, leaning against the frame like we’d met before.

“Didn’t think you’d deliver personally,” she said.

“You live high up,” I said. “Figures.”

She smiled. “Up here, we like to forget how the city smells.”

I handed her the chip. “Maybe, but you’re no different than the rats who crawl into my shop. You just have more creds. Buys you the good dreams.”

Her smile widened. Not offended…amused. She stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell her perfume, spiced citrus and money.

“Then maybe you’ll understand why I like the ones that feel real.” She turned the chip in her fingers. “Want to try it?”

“Not my thing.”

“It could be,” she whispered. “This one’s... special. You should feel what she feels like. Just once.”

She slid the chip toward me like a bribe. Or a dare.

4

I stared at the chip for a long time. Long enough for the neon buzz outside to start drilling holes in my skull.

I didn’t use. That was the first rule. Dealers don't sample the product. Not if they want to stay in the game.

But tonight...

The rain had been mean, the customers meaner. Every face that stumbled into my shop had been chasing something they couldn’t name. I’d spent hours selling them ghosts. Smiles. First loves. Family dinners that probably never happened.

Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was spite.

Maybe I just wanted to know, for once, what the hell they were all running toward.

"One taste," I muttered. "One time."

I slotted the chip.

For a second, nothing. Just black. Then the world cracked open like an egg.

Sunlight.

Real sunlight, bleeding through a canopy of green leaves so bright it hurt. The air smelled... clean. Not filtered, not burned. Alive.

She was there, barefoot in the grass, laughing at something I hadn’t said yet. The sound hit me like a memory I didn’t know I was missing.

I stumbled forward, blinking against the golden sky, and the ground beneath me was soft. No cracked asphalt, no metal. Just earth. Real earth.

She turned, sunlight catching in her hair. She held out a hand.

And somewhere, tucked behind her voice and the hum of unseen bees, a word slipped loose in my mind.

Jasmine.

I breathed it in. God, I breathed it in like it was the last clean thing in a dirty world.

The scent wrapped around me, sweet and sharp, a kind of gold in the air. I didn’t know how I knew the word. Nobody sold anything that smelled so sweet  in this part of the city. Nobody sold anything that wasn’t fried, frozen, or rotting on the vine.

But the memory whispered it anyway, soft and certain: jasmine.

She smiled like she’d been waiting forever, like there was no one else in the whole damned world but us. And for a second, for a breath it didn’t matter that I wasn’t him. It didn’t matter that I was borrowing this life like a suit two sizes too small.

I could feel the weight of her hand when she caught mine. Warm. Real.

"Stay," she said, voice threading into the wind, into the leaves, into the memory itself.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The memory ended before I could speak, snapping back like a broken rubber band, dumping me onto the floor of my shop with the static buzz of dead neon burning the inside of my skull.

I lay there for a long time, staring up at the cracked ceiling, the scent of jasmine still clinging to the back of my throat.

Reality came back slow and ugly. The hum of the city, the stink of rust and old oil rising through the floorboards.

I wiped at my eyes before I even realized they were wet.

I told myself it was the static burn. I told myself it didn’t mean anything.

I told myself a lot of things that night.

And every one of them was a lie.

5

I told myself I wouldn’t slot it again.

One taste. One time. That’s all it was supposed to be.

But the chip sat there on the counter, humming against my brain like a live wire. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see her laughing in that field that couldn't possibly exist.

It wasn’t just the sight of her. It was the air. The light. The way the world felt in that memory, like it had a heartbeat bigger than mine. Like breathing didn’t have to hurt.

After a while, the customers’ faces started to blur. Their hunger, their whining, their creds, all background noise to the throb in my hands, the itch in my spine.

Three nights after the first time, I closed up early. Pulled the shutters, killed the lights.

Slotted the chip.

And fell back into her arms.

It got easier after that. Easier to slip away from the stink and the noise. Easier to forget the rules.

I'd tweak the feeds, stitch together glimpses of her smile from one memory, her voice from another, the way her hand brushed mine in the fading sun.

Piece by piece, I built her.

Not the memories themselves. Her.

I stopped selling for a while. Let the shop run dry. Didn’t care. The clients would wait. Or they wouldn’t.

What did it matter?

Out there was rust and rain and broken neon.

In here, there was jasmine.

I told myself I was just riding it out. A bad spell. A little escape before I got back to work.

But somewhere inside, a part of me knew better.

I wasn’t visiting anymore.

I was moving in.

6

I found the truth in a pawnshop wired to collapse.

The owner was half-machine, half-rumor, a whisper stitched together by back alley deals. He didn’t deal in memories, he dealt in origins. Where the clips came from. Who built them. Why they were made.

I didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to know.

But by then, the ache was too deep. I had to find more of her. I had to find all of her.

"Pretty piece of work," the owner said, tapping the chip I'd slid across the counter. His fingers left greasy prints on the casing. "Real high-end emotional mapping. Best I've seen. Synthetic, but... damn good."

My throat dried up.

"Synthetic," I said.

He grinned, showing a mess of teeth that had seen better years. "Memory Farms, Inc. Model 7-A DreamWeave. Romantic bundles. Limited edition."

He tossed the chip back to me.

"That field? That laugh? That scent?" He shook his head, chuckling. "She ain't real, pal. Never was. Custom work for the luxury market. Whole worlds stitched together for folks who like their fantasies rich and easy to swallow."

I didn't remember leaving the shop. Didn't remember walking back through the rain.

Only the way the world looked different. Grayer. Smaller.

Empty in a way that even the city couldn't explain.

She wasn’t someone I’d lost.

She was something they built.

And I still loved her like she was breathing somewhere under that fake blue sky, waiting for me to come home.

7

I stopped chasing scraps after that.

No more street brokers. No more backroom hacks. No more pawing through dead men’s memories hoping to find her smile tucked between someone else’s regrets.

She wasn’t real.

But I could make her real.

I locked myself in the shop, killed the feeds, rerouted the power. Set up a closed loop system, full immersion, one-way ticket. An endless dream that wouldn’t crack or fade or dump me back into the cold stink of the streets.

I wasn’t building a memory anymore.

I was building a world.

It took days, maybe weeks. The clocks stopped meaning anything after a while. I stacked the fragments like bones, wove the scenes together with precision and wire and blind, stubborn need.

In this place, she would be waiting.

In this place, the sunlight would always find us.

I didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t leave a note. Didn’t lock the door behind me.

There was no one left to miss me.

Not really.

The last thing I heard before I slipped under was the rain, hammering the city into mud.

Then even that was gone.

8

I woke to sunlight.

Not the cracked white glare of neon. Not the sickly blue wash of billboard screens.

Real sunlight, slow and golden, pooling across the grass.

The air was thick with it, the scent of jasmine, heavy and sweet, wrapping around me like a blanket pulled from some forgotten childhood dream.

She was there, sitting under a tree with blossoms dusting her hair, smiling like she’d been waiting for me forever.

When she stood and crossed the field, her feet made no sound against the earth. Her hand found mine, warm, familiar, certain.

"I’m happy you’re here," she said.

I tried to answer, but the words caught somewhere between memory and dream.

Maybe I didn't need words anymore.

I followed her toward the water’s edge, where the river caught the sky and the sky caught the river, and the whole world blurred into something soft and endless.

No rain.

No rust.

No city.

Just jasmine on the wind and a hand that would never let go.

It wasn’t real.

Some random fan: "something something, dave filoni is going to use the world between worlds to erase all the things I don't like!"

Me:

I could never read a story without an ending.

It's too much of a wasteful indulgence

When you never know where the plot is leading.

To give away so much of one's time

Reading about a world without a horizon in sight.

This leads me to believe that I might never write another story

Because the ones which would flow from my pen

Would be the stories which never end.

.

The years that I spent looking for closed plots in every story

Have been full of characters trapped in unbound misery.

The pages that I filled while defying the linearity of life

Trying to resolve the plot devices, trying to end the strife.

But all I had at the end were unresolved character arcs

And half-hearted redemptions which always missed the mark.

I have deliberately tried to ignore

Every bitter truth life has in store.

.

Would my stories end after I stop writing them

Would every word wither along with the pages

Or would they continue living somewhere

Deep within someone's heart for a few eternal ages?

.

I would like to end right where I started

Just so I don't have to look back

Into every word that I've written.

But I could never watch them fade

In front of my very own eyes

When the stories I wrote

Were meant to immortalize.

.

What would I do to get my stories to live a life apart?

Maybe I could keep writing, or maybe I'd just never start.

.

Best of 2021 TV Shows #25: Infinity Train (HBO Max)

Our first entry for tv revisits one of the best pieces of original animation in the past 10 years and while not an overall conclusion, brings a final loop around for one more ride on the infinity train.

2 decades before Tulip, Lake and the Apex we see Canadian teens Ryan Akagi and Min-Gi Park linked since youth having a dream to make it big as rock stars. On the verge of their 20s Ryan remains committed while Min wants to be more realistic and attempts to move on without him. As Ryan isn’t willing to lose his best friend, the duo through circumstances both intentional and intervening find themselves aboard the looped train linked by only numbers with both not being able to leave until the wall between them crumbles.

The bonds of friendship (and maybe more according to the fandom) show through here as you see what built them up and what causes them to crumble. It’s honestly relatable to see this as despite goals you set long ago, not everything can be attainable and it’s sometimes good for growth to let people go live their own lives.

Plus Ryan and Mins duo Chicken Choice Judy brings the curtain down on the series really nicely in the final moments.

But there’s always hope for bringing the other 4 books down the line.

Those green numbers aren’t yet zero in some fans minds.

SUM 22: A final ride on the endless locomotive has two besties on the brink. Ryan and Min are worthwhile parts of this crescendo.

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