VirtuaLyric

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

*on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince — evergreen, no news peg*

The contract was with Warner Bros., signed in 1992, six albums, $100 million headline number that was actually back-loaded and largely contingent on sales thresholds nobody was hitting anymore — and the thing that drove Prince insane about it, the actually load-bearing thing nobody talks about because it's boring and it's contracts and contracts are boring, was the ownership question on the masters.

Warner owned them. Warner owned them in perpetuity. Warner owned them under the standard major-label terms that had been industry-standard since basically the 1950s, which Prince had signed onto in 1977 when he was nineteen and had a lawyer who was good for a nineteen-year-old getting a deal, short of the kind of "renegotiated the back end of the contract such that you'd own your work in twenty years" representation.

Nobody owned their work in twenty years. That was the deal. The deal had been the deal since Sam Phillips sold Elvis to RCA.

So the symbol thing — the unpronounceable glyph, the "Artist Formerly Known As" branding crisis that comedians and late-night hosts spent the entire mid-90s mining for jokes about how the weird little Minneapolis guy had finally lost it — was, mechanically, a contract maneuver. Warner owned the recordings of "Prince." Warner did not, could not, own the recordings of a symbol that did not have a name and could not be pronounced and could not be filed under anything in the legal language of the contract. It was the corporate-law equivalent of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody. Records released under the symbol were not Prince records and therefore did not count toward the contract obligation and therefore could not be controlled by Warner in the same way, and crucially, the touring revenue and the merchandise and everything that could be monetized live and in real time without a record label intermediating, that all flowed to whoever was using the symbol, which was him.

The "SLAVE" written on the cheek at public appearances functioned as literal description. It was a description of what he understood his contract to be — somebody else owns the product of your labor in perpetuity, you have no right to leave, the wages you receive are set by the people who own you — and you can argue about whether the analogy is in good taste (it isn't, particularly, although the Black artist exploited by the white-owned major is a structurally different version of a real and old story going back to like Bessie Smith) and the analogy holds up. He had read his contract. He had done the math. He had figured out that he was producing roughly an album a year, sometimes more, and that under the existing arrangement everything he made would be owned by a corporation that had paid him a fixed advance for it twenty years ago, and that the only way out was to either die or invent a way to record under a designation outside his name, outside his legal name, outside the category of names altogether.

Warner, to their credit (their credit being that they were doing what record labels do, which is enforce the contracts they paid to write), responded with the kind of slow grinding institutional resistance you'd expect — they shelved albums, they delayed releases, they put out greatest-hits compilations from the catalog they did own to compete with whatever the symbol was releasing through alternate distribution channels (NPG Records, mail-order, eventually the internet, which he was on extraordinarily early for a 1990s pop musician — the *Crystal Ball* set sold direct to fans in 1998, before Napster, before iTunes, before anyone in the music industry was taking the internet seriously as a distribution mechanism, and Prince was selling his back catalog out of his house in Chanhassen).

And here's the layer that lands hardest. The "Artist Formerly Known As Prince" was a joke for a decade. Then the entire music industry collapsed because the Warner Bros. business model — own the masters, own the publishing, control distribution, make the artist sign a contract at twenty that you can ride for forty years — turned out to rest on a physical-distribution monopoly that disappeared when Shawn Fanning was a sophomore. And when the dust settled around 2007 or so, every major artist with any leverage at all was negotiating exactly the kind of deal Prince had been screaming about in 1993: shorter terms, reversion of masters, ownership of their own catalogs, direct-to-fan distribution rights. Taylor Swift re-recording her catalog because the original masters had been sold to Scooter Braun is the same fight. Same fight, same mechanism, same grievance, twenty years later, with the entire industry having quietly reorganized to make Prince's position the default position of any artist with the bargaining power to insist on it.

He died in 2016, which is the part that I think people don't fully sit with, owning the symbol but no longer owning his life — fentanyl, prescribed for hip pain that was the result of decades of doing splits and James Brown spins in heels on hard stages, the kind of cumulative bodily injury that is invisible because the performances were so transcendent that you didn't think about the joints, and then the prescription opioid epidemic, which had been quietly killing Americans for fifteen years by the time it reached the kind of celebrity that registered nationally. And the Paisley Park vault — the famously enormous archive of unreleased recordings, several thousand songs by some estimates, recorded compulsively across forty years and stored in a literal vault on the property — that vault, which had been the central asset in the entire Warner dispute, the thing he had refused to release and refused to let them release, became after his death the thing his estate started releasing on roughly an annual basis to a market that absorbed it as legacy product.

Which is to say: Warner won, alongside the original-Warner outcome where the corporation had to settle and let him go in 1996. The structural Warner — the abstract Warner, the major-label apparatus that owns the means of distributing and packaging and monetizing recorded music — won the longer game. The vault is being mined. The estate is selling. The fight he picked at thirty-five over who would control his work after he was gone landed two ways at once: he beat the specific corporation he was fighting, and the structural fact won out at the next layer up — someone always controls the work after you are gone, and the controllers are always going to be people who think about your work as a quarterly revenue line.

He's definitely into Femdom. That's part of why his dumb ads keeps getting my attention - I recognize a dark mirror of myself when I look into it. Too many ads of sexy, confident women brutalizing and humiliating men to be coincidence.

He's also probably into giantesses/macrophilia - again, I see my twisted reflection here. Likewise, he's a monsterfucker.

There's a recurring motif of women with busty silhouettes, but a giant gaping hole where their boobs and hearts would be? And people get shoved into the titty hole? I think that fetish is probably too specific to have a name.

Definitely a cuckold, since a lot of the ads feature the dom women going of with another man after humiliating the "hero," and the other guy often looks nearly identical too. Might be into Domination Loss, since the ads always end with the furious hero charging forward to get revenge on the dom, with the expectation that we will be motivated to play the game to take her down a peg.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE PROOF

So I was going to append this link to my previous post, but I think this one deserves its own post.

[I]f you search Twitter/X, or Instagram, or social media platforms in general, you will come across "Pitt" fans undergoing what seems to be some sort of mass delusion. "The Pitt" season 2 has a running narrative about how Noah Wyle's Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch has become suicidal. This has led to many fan theories about whether or not Robby will die by the time the season ends.... I came across a video from a content creator I've never heard of claiming that they had actually solved a big "The Pitt" season 2 mystery. "The show has been faking us out!" this person said. "Robby isn't going to die in the season finale! Santos is!" To quote another Pitt — Brad Pitt in "Moneyball" — what the fuck are you talking about, man?

And this especially:

Noah Wyle and company also appear to be well-aware of certain fan backlash bubbling up around the edges of the show. In a recent junket interview, Wyle said, "I think audiences have become sophisticated in a whole new way when watching a show. They're watching the show that we're making, and they have another show that they're making. And when that show doesn't align with the show that you're making, they don't like it much."

I saw that interview and I wish I had the link to it, because Wyle's body language and tone were, uh, telling.

And let's not forget about

In the context of gay male culture, these terms are about anal sex. The top penetrates and the bottom is penetrated.

'Be careful, Doctor. Insulting the honor of a Klingon can be extremely dangerous.' - kurak [to crusher]