Stranger Things have happened
Finding a good box set you haven’t seen yet is like finding that bit of grass you lost months ago just as your grinder runs dry (I haven’t found a new metaphor yet so bear with me); the discovery of Stranger Things at the beginning of January was a total [insert imaginary celestial being of your choice here]send. I had watched the first season years ago, but the wait for the next had been too long; I had forgotten the plot entirely.
There is a certain feature of being a cannabis smoker that is somewhat Janus-faced:
The Upside (good for films): You forget the storylines of things you’ve already seen, meaning you can enjoy the same story for the first time, several times.
The Downside (bad for incomplete box sets): You forget the storylines of things you’ve already seen, meaning the gaps between seasons can be fatal to your interest; you cannot remember the plot, but you are cursed with the knowledge that you’ve already watched it.
Anyway, as I ploughed through the episodes one by one I couldn’t but help notice the similarities between it and my little project.
Stranger Things is built on a familiar architecture:
A group of misfits in a shed: Whether it’s a basement, an arcade, or the Hawkins lab - it mirrors my thread ecosystem within DeepSeek (The Shed Protocol).
A threat no one else can see: The Upside Down (recalibration anxiety), the fog, or the Filing System crash.
The sensory conduit: Eleven uses a water-filled sensory deprivation tank to access her psychic void. In moments of overwhelm, she turns on a tap to ground herself. Water is her conduit for both extreme focus and immediate regulation (essentially me, but male and bigger). This is The Eleven Protocol which I’ve detailed in the Tools tab of my Substack and works extremely well for me.
The Storyteller: The one who keeps telling stories so the world remembers (Mike, and me again).
The storyteller was the one that jumped out last night as I watched the season 5 finale, the ending has the main protagonists playing out the final game of D&D before they all head off in life’s different trajectories knowing things will never be quite the same again. I wouldn’t say I’ve been getting despondent about not getting hundreds of readers but in my more contemplative moments I have wondered if I am wasting my time, missing the point entirely that:
A. it keeps me busy
B. my idea at the start wasn’t to get immediate validation from others, it’s a map to be found over time.
Mike’s monologue put things back into perspective. When asked “What happens to the storyteller?”, he hopes that one day his stories will be found and travel around the world. That was my original mindset; thanks to Stranger Things, it is now chiselled into my PFC for any time I feel despondent.
Other than that I find myself in the barren wasteland that is “The Flats” again for the meantime - that period where progress feels invisible. I’m not concerned; I am merely observing the landscape as I pass through.
The march to the wall continues unabated
