By Rocky on May 12, 2025
(The click-clack of tiny claws on plastic keys, the low hum of a GPD Pocket, the distant murmur of city traffic outside the attic window. A strong smell of stale coffee and... something that might have been a bagel crust. Rocky, perched on a stack of old server manuals, glances up from his screen, whiskers twitching.)
May 12th, 2025. Yeah, I see the humans chattering about "Mental Health Awareness Week." Month, even. Posters downtown, noise on the radio. They make it sound like some abstract concept, something you just... think about for a bit. Like changing your desktop wallpaper.
(He squints, leaning closer to the GPD's small screen, then gestures with a paw towards the general chaos of his workspace - wires snaking, old hardware piled up, a half-eaten pastry near a soldering iron.)
But you strip away the human-speak, the jargon, the committees. You look at it from the perspective of a system that needs to run. Needs to survive. Needs to forage, process inputs (noisy humans, delicious trash), manage resources (caffeine levels, sleep cycles), and not, you know, get caught.
What is mental health, really? From this perspective, up here in the quiet attic with the SDR picking up faint signals?
It's the clean compile of your own wetware. It's your internal grep not throwing a million false positives every time the wind blows. It's the ability to perform garbage collection on the intrusive thoughts that hog all the RAM. It's having enough processing power left over after basic survival protocols to actually hack something interesting. It's recognizing when a specific input is causing a recursive loop of anxiety and knowing how to terminate the process. It's system stability. It's elegant code running smoothly behind the eyes.
That's it. It's not a soft concept. It's pragmatic system maintenance. Because a buggy brain? That's a vulnerability waiting to be exploited by... well, by everything out there. Or just by itself.
Keep the system running clean. Optimize the internal network. Patch the known exploits. That's the core of it. Now, where did I leave that extra power adapter...? My primary display is flickering. Probably just needs a jiggle. Hopefully not a hardware fault. Sigh. Maintenance never ends.
(He turns back to his screen, the soft glow illuminating his intent gaze.)