The Second Dream Diary is currently available as an Amazon eBook! (news)

From April 7-9, Naja Tau's Dream Diary: Back to School, the second dream diary, will be available to download for FREE for Amazon's Kindle!

And it's available for purchase right now for $2.99!

This eBook is a collection of blog posts that came right after the first diary ended in about 2013. The posts go until mid to late 2016.

I did a marathon read through this collection of posts, and I think this dream diary is finally ready to go. I've been editing this thing off and on for 6 years. I don't know when I'll be ready to put this out on paperback, but I feel comfortable releasing it as an eBook that I can go in and change whenever I feel like.

If you decide to read it, just be forewarned: it's a strange eBook. It was a very interesting time in my life. I had a lot of wild takes. My psychosis had just started to come and go, and I wasn't diagnosed with anything yet let alone properly medicated back then. 

I feel some sadness and some grief when I go back over these written memories from my 20s. I wish that I had continued my journey with physics. 

I may have a master's degree now, but it's not in physics, and to say that I'm unhappy with my major and with the university I got it from is a gross understatement. 

I ask myself how I got where I am now. I think I got impatient. I was too scared to go back to California after my illness worsened then improved, and I felt insecure about my intelligence, so I went for the easier path. 

Now I'm looking for work in adjacent fields that don't require my master's degree, so it's probably not even that useful in my current job hunt. Certainly, no one is knocking on my door to see if I'm available because of it. 

I recently took a class for something to do between jobs at my local community college, which is an  amazing school, and one of the guys in the class said, "You shouldn't have a problem finding a job with a master's degree!" Unfortunately, I am having a problem. I am having quite a problem. But I've applied to less than 100 companies, and I see YouTube videos of people in this job market saying they've applied to 500, so there's that. 

In a way, I'm kind of glad my degree isn't helping me, because I'd kind of like to see specialized, expensive, time-consuming degrees like mine... die. And I'd like to see people without degrees get good jobs just because they're decent, hard-working people who can figure things out. I'm just as capable or incapable of learning and doing a job now as I was when I was eighteen and didn't have all this education.

I went down a stupid, stupid road--both me as an individual making personal choices and me as a member of my society having to go down certain paths. The system I was in was ridiculous. I wasted so much time and money trying to get an education. It was fun sometimes, and it was my life, so I treasure it and am thankful for it, but I don't recommend doing what I did to anyone else. 

What's going to happen to us as a nation if our young people can't afford to get an education while all the other nations offer it for free (and offer healthcare for free, so you don't have to marry a job, but can be free to innovate and get entrepreneurial)? We're going to fall behind everyone else if we don't educate our population--heck, not even just our young people. Our old people need to continually update their educations too. If there's anything I learned from this class, it's that ageism is really silly and I shouldn't indulge it in my mental life.

Then again, every time I go to the grocery store, there's this kid who can't be more than 20 who either shames me for the food I purchase or orders me around. 

I bought two cans of ravioli, and they went down the conveyor belt and this kid picked them up to bag them and was like, "Tsk... Chef Boyardee..." 

Hah! 

Chef Boyardee... how immature... only babies eat Chef Boyardee...

But anyway--I do hope you'll add this eBook to your Kindle collection. Some of the dreams are quite fun!

New cryptocurrency tip jar! (news)

Image by Midjourney

I finally managed to get a tip jar going on the blog! It was really hard to set up. I kept doing the wrong thing over and over again.

The tip jar is in the tabs at the top of the blog if you want to check it out. It's run by Coinbase, which seems like a reputable company to me. 

The reason why I'm going with cryptocurrency is because I'd still like to try to preserve what privacy I can. AI isn't so advanced yet that ChatGPT is just going to automatically give up my legal name. With traditional currency tips, I'd go with PayPal or Venmo, but from what I understand, the terms of service for those require you to give your legal name to donors. 

If you ever see a tip jar from buymeacoffee.com, it's a scam. Someone took my user name on that platform. Also, if you see copies of my eBooks anywhere other than Amazon, it's a scammer (or at least a thief). I can't guarantee the quality or accuracy of those books. If I prepare and polish something related to Naja Tau, I'll link to it from this location on Blogger.

I've taken down most of my Naja Tau accounts other than this one anyway. I've taken down my Weebly site, my Instagram, my Facebook, I don't use Twitter anymore, I'm not on YouTube, Zazzle started charging $5 a month for accounts under a certain monthly income so I got rid of that, and I don't have a Patreon at the moment.

I am considering trying out Patreon for my readers, but I don't know if anyone would be interested or could afford it, and I don't know how much time I will have to devote to that after I find a job. And what would I offer? Monthly horoscopes? Articles about dreams? Music? Pictures of my cat's feet?

Please, just play it safe if you're interested in supporting me and go through the links here on Blogger. It's a horrible thing when people doing evil get away with deceiving those with positive intentions. 

Murder of podcaster and her husband by her stalker. (rants)

I just saw a news story about a podcaster who was murdered by her stalker, and the comments really irritate me, so I'm trying to pick this apart. There's a large group of people who seem to think that this lady either attracted the inevitable or (worse) got what she deserved because she had a podcast. 

Personal feelings aside, there's a logic/false dichotomy problem with this, and it's very annoying. 

These people are basically arguing that we should create a society in which good people sharing their knowledge, expertise, and experiences should be afraid to show themselves in public and should voluntarily limit their own career and networking opportunities so that the minority of abusive people like stalkers can be free to live their lives and continually put abuse them or someone else. I don't know if people who argue this are just forgetting that we create the laws we live with and that we have the resources to enforce the rules we create, but because we do make up our own rules as a society, they're basically arguing that having good people live in fear of being in public is a more sensible way to run a society than simply removing the people engaging in anti-social behavior. They are arguing that society should suppress its best assets--it's decent, responsible, well-behaved, cooperative people--from fully coming into bloom and reaching the peak of their usefulness in terms of adding to the culture.

This attitude seems like it comes from people stuck in 1990, not people in the 21st century who are expected to have LinkedIn profiles, who are supposed to try to be seen as industry experts to get a job, who connect with their friends and relatives on social media, who engage in hobbies and learn on social media, and often want to make a living off of the information industry. 

Sure, when the internet was brand new in 1995, and we naively believed that we had the option of staying anonymous, it felt smart to try to obscure your identity. But privacy is in the past. Google and a hundred other sites have your information all the way up to your social security number. So much is on the dark web, and it multiplies every day. All these people with fake names on YouTube seem to think they're anonymous. They're not. Google has all your info. It knows your phone number and probably knows everything else about you too. It takes one data breech and anything and everything Google knows about you could be on the dark web. And the government gets data breeched all the time, and they know your info too. It only takes one tiny misstep to become traceable to even a script kiddie. We just haven't invested resources in tracing people who do horrible things on the internet yet unless they're trying to mess with really serious government affairs for a long period of time. But AI is really, really freeing up a lot of workers' time these days, so... I don't know what's going to change. All I know is that karma is real, and that we as a society really need to get more security-minded. And I think we are. Cybersecurity is a blossoming career field right now. 

Right now, we as a society seem to have decided that psychopaths are pretty rare, so we should just let them do whatever. And that that's just how it is, and should be, and it will never change. Well, yeah, but the only reason it won't change because we choose not to do anything about it. And I mean there is a whole range of anti-social behavior that we tolerate. 

I think all one can do these days is to adopt a philosophy of living without fear. Internet use is not optional in 2023. We all benefit from it, and so I think we should work together to optimize its benefits to society. That's going to mean different things for different individuals, but in any case, that 1990s argument that "celebrities" are asking to be stalked and should therefore not receive much assistance in countering it, doesn't make sense anymore. We are no longer talking about wealthy King Richard III needing to hire bodyguards to rule a kingdom because he's so famous. Now, this is a lot more likely to be your next door neighbor just trying to get by. 

In my opinion, things like this stalking crime and other violent crimes suggest that we as a society need to get really serious about improving the root causes of these kind of events: a lack of emotional intelligence and wellness. We've already failed as a society to protect our citizens from mass shootings. The next thing is going to be AI-driven/robotic mass shootings, and that's going to be a lot harder to shut down if we keep our current approaches to security. We (as a society, not necessarily as individuals) shouldn't ignore it when people exhibit severe pain like this guy did. There's a good chance that if there was some kind of mental health intervention combined with locking this stalker up for a while, no one would have died. But we weren't prepared.

"Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio" is currently downloadable for free!

Just a quick reminder: Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio is free to download on Kindle right now and will be until Thursday!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072WGTC7F

Ready to start a new chapter in my life. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

My friend in Seattle bought a house in a surrounding suburb, and he wants me to live with him and his husband for very cheap rent. I like where I live now--the only problem is that jobs aren't as varied or plentiful here, and they don't pay what they should considering the cost of housing here. 

I don’t want to trade down, so I did a little digging into the demographics of this suburban town in Seattle. I found out that the median income is over $100,000. 

This might be an interesting experiment for me! I’d get to see what living with rich people is like!

Now, low rent isn’t no rent. I still need to pay my friend his rent when I move. So while I’m still in Arizona, I am applying to remote jobs. But hundreds of other people apply to these jobs, and I never get picked. 

Laying awake one night, because I always seem to contemplate my career choices at 3 a.m., I thought that maybe I could find a suitable job locally in this small suburb in Seattle. 

So I went on Indeed.com and to my surprise, the most in-demand job in the neighborhood is “Cheese Specialist.” 

That didn’t pay enough, so I thought, do I need to make my own job? Do I need to go into business for myself to make a living? 

I did some more digging into this town and I found out that there are some services the town wants that they aren’t getting. They want a florist. The nearest one is an entire town away. 

But the number one thing this town wants is: pole dancing lessons. It’s the number one SEO’d search term on the town’s Yelp. This is not a joke. 

The most interesting part about my market research is that they don’t want to hire pole dancers. They want to BE pole dancers. 

I’m starting to get an interesting picture of this town that demands that its grocery stores hire cheese specialists. These people emerge from the offices of their six-figure corporate jobs, and they’re sitting in commuter traffic for at least an hour. The whole time, they can't wait to take off all their clothes and swing around on a pole. That’s what the whole town is secretly searching for en masse.

And although I have never thought of them in quite this way, I know that this describes my friends perfectly.

But I'm actually a little concerned about how many Karen videos this town posts on YouTube. It suggests to me that there might be an entitlement problem in this town--both entitlement to act up and entitlement to film someone without their permission. I worked in customer service for a decade, but I still generally don't approve of Karen videos. As I've mentioned before on here, I have bipolar schizoaffective disorder. What if something happened to the mental health funding in the area and I couldn't get my medicine? People generally don't think of the immense privilege of not having psychosis. You might be harming someone with a severe disability if you're filming them acting strangely in a store or something. 

But despite the weirdly high number of Karen videos, I think I'm going to take the plunge. I think I'm going to take my chances living a totally new lifestyle in the upcoming months. 

Blogging has so often helped me to feel alright with the world, but I've been frightened of the knowledge that I am not perfectly anonymous on this blog at all. But what's that all about? I'm afraid that other people will know what I think and that they won't want to play with me? I don't think I should live my life in fear of not being liked. That's really getting in my way now that I want to come into my power and explore all the different things I can do. I hope you enjoy reading what I write, but I need to be okay when people don't like it too. And that's not even to mention the opportunity costs of people not knowing you at all. 

Anyway! Be brave and be beautiful, dear reader. It takes action to get cheese specialists and pole dancing lessons established in your town. You've got to know what you want and aim for it. 

"Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio" Kindle eBook giveaway!

Download Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio on Kindle by Amazon

FREE from this Sunday, March 19th until Thursday, March 23, 2023!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072WGTC7F

I made a new cover for my screenplay-turned-novel, Megachurch Versus Tattoo Studio. With the advancement of several new AI tools, it was really simple! I bought a subscription to Midjourney, which, the company says, entitles me to the copyright of the images I make with it. 

I plan to try using AI-generated images to illustrate my dreams, if I ever get back to posting about them. Illustrating my dreams is something I always wanted to do, but was too lazy to. 

I also re-read the novel and polished it a little. It was rough in some spots, but I think the overall story is entertaining. 

I think it may come across as either a Christian or an anti-Christian novel, but I would say that it's neither. Christianity is mainly just the setting and a plot device in the novel. I tried to remain pretty neutral about Christianity's overall goodness or badness. 

I spent a lot of years in the Christian Church, so I did express some of my criticisms and observations of one of the Pentecostal churches I grew up in in this book. But it's not intended to discourage people from believing what they want to. I understand that one's choice of faith is related to culture, social circles, personal experiences, and all kinds of other intimate things. I wouldn't want someone to stop doing something that actually makes them happy. I would argue that religion makes a lot of people unhappy--but I know the reverse can be true too. 

Hopefully, this book can entertain people of any spiritual background!