Mark’s Newsletter: February 2026
Story Time, Mental Health & Side Quest Recap!
February was an uneventful month. Like the month itself, this will likely be the shortest newsletter of the year.
Story Time
Here is an excerpt of the prelude, from an early draft (I can’t find the final deliverable), of story I wrote for a university class back in 2022. It was part of my final creative writing project. I wrote it thinking the world would learn from its mistakes.
Yet, here we are:
04.28.2033 @ 22:38:46 – Merritt Island, Florida – Captain Roger Fitzpatrick
Twelve years ago, a little man with a bad spray tan, too much power and not enough common sense got impeached and divorced on the same day. That night he went home and drank himself stupid as he went through his social media feeds to complain about his woes. He took advice from people online who insisted he was wronged by women, democrats and anyone else that was old enough to vote.
Fueled by vodka, handfuls of horse tranquilizers and Viagra, he went to work the next day in a blue suit, a red tie and carried a bucket of lard under his arm.
A normal person may have stopped to think that being fired would mean you don’t show up at the office anymore, but not this guy. No, this guy wouldn’t let a little detail like that stop him from doing the good lord’s work. Possibly the dark lord’s work. Who knows?
Anyway, he thought it would be a good idea to go to one of those undisclosed locations no one is supposed to know about. His online posts indicate he was going to go there because no one would let him go there unsupervised, even though he was “the man” in charge. He said he was going to livestream it to show the world all the “cool shit” they were hiding and the “EEE-TEES” they had locked up. I want to say it was the horse tranquilizers, maybe it was the vodka, but after reading his autobiography, I think he was just out of his fucking mind. As soon as he walked through the front door he began to strip. Once that blue suit hit the floor, he began rubbing lard all over his body. The security tapes are quite a sight to see, and that image will forever be burned into my mind.
Security must have been used to this behaviour, because it wasn’t until he passed through the third security checkpoint that someone noticed the access card he clamped on to his left nipple and asked, “Weren’t you fired yesterday?” I have never seen someone attempt to capture a greased-up pig before, but I imagine this was close. For a heavy guy in his early 80s he could move.
Eventually he got into the room that he was never allowed in.
Did it have a console under a big map of the world? Yes!
Did it have a big red button under glass that this big orange idiot needed to press? Yes!
Did he hit random switches targeting our enemies and allies? Yes!
Did he take a fire extinguisher off the wall and break the glass? You bet he did!
Did he press the button and start an all-out war? Almost.
Someone had the foresight to take the nukes offline when the impeachment hearings began, but the countries he targeted were fully aware of what happened because this dumb shit live-streamed himself doing it in all his greasy naked glory. So he personally moved the doomsday clock up from one hundred seconds to midnight to ten seconds to midnight and promptly dropped dead from a Viagra/horse tranquilizer induced heart attack.
Side Quests
In February I decided I wanted to try livestreaming. After doing a lot of troubleshooting, I was able to successfully do a few livestreams. I’m not a fan.
Trying to manage Twitch from my phone was an inconvenience, YouTube had its own hoops to jump through and TikTok was impossible since I don’t have enough followers there to qualify for livestreaming.
I ended up streaming gameplay from my Xbox directly to Twitch. No Man’s Sky was a fun game to play, but after an update made it unplayable and I haven’t returned to it since.
Don’t get me wrong, I had fun, but I’m not going to go out of my way to do it again unless I have a really good reason to.
I’m March, I think I’m going to try painting. I haven’t tried since high school, and that was longer ago than I’d care to admit.
Self-Care
I spent the last two months doing mental health assessments and online courses to manage stress.
The assessments showed that I have severe anxiety and depression. I feel like I already knew that, but now that there is proof, I can start treating it. This Thursday I start therapy over the phone.
There is a part of me that feels like this is something I should keep to myself, but I believe there are others out there who might be going through something similar, who need to know there is no shame in asking for help.
Elsewhere
My personal links of note: