Monthly Archives: September 2013

Up The Hill

Posted on by
Reply

I’m feeling better these days. I think finally getting actual therapy on Friday helped enormously. I wasn’t sure whether my recent blues were due to the lowered Paxil dose or whether it was lack of therapy, but therapy made me feel a million times better, so I am willing to say that was the dominant contributing factor.

I’m not sleeping so much either. I still have a bed addiction that needs to be dealt with, but the need for sleep is decreasing on its own and I am finding more pleasure in the little things, like making music, and that is all for the good in the end.

No more fast-forwarding through life!

You know what also makes me feel good? This video.

Yes! Yes yes yes, a million times, yes. THIS. I am so glad there is a backlash against this Princess-ification of little girls and against the strange way our society has of knocking the interest in science, math, and engineering out of girls starting in their tween years.

The statistics are as stark as they are damning. Up to the threshold of puberty, boys and girls rate their own interest in science and math at around the same rate.

But by the time they get to high school, the girls’ interest in science and math has dropped by more than half.

Clearly something is wrong. The world needs all the scientists it can get if it’s going to survive the century, and we can’t afford to be drawing from only half of the gene pool, not to mention only one gender’s perspective.

Another happy-making thing : This essay by Michael Enright of the CBC about whiny atheists.

It’s a great essay, but I have to deal with this first or I’ll burst : What the fuck is Enright wearing? Was he dressed by Munchkins? Has his neck joined the Red Hat Club? Is this part of some sort of Gay(er) Les Nesman subculture that I’m not aware of? Is his Halloween costume going to be Elton John’s accountant this year?

I guess when you work in radio, you can dress however the hell you want.

OK. Got that out of my system. Now about the article itself : I see Mr. Enright is on the same page as me, and so are others re : this whole angry atheist thing.

Atheists are hardly a persecuted minority. Sure, religious bigots hate us, but I take that less of an attack and more as an endorsement. It’s not like we are being rounded up and shot or denied food and lodging. We are not even attacked in the media very much.

And every time some bunch of self-righteous dickbags raise a stink about there being a cross on government property or getting their knickers in a twist about people saying “so help me God” when they are being sworn in, it makes us look just as nuts as any Reverend Phelps or David Koresh, and makes it look like we are a bunch of shrill, shrieking, humorless, heartless cunts with nothing better to do than pee in people’s Wheaties.

Plus it supports the religious right’s absurd sense of persecution. So not worth it!

So anyhow, feel like I am going up not down lately, and that is always good. I think I just needed to unburden myself with my therapist. I don’t feel entirely light yet, but next weekend is Vcon, so that should do a lot to boost my spirits.

I always absolutely adore being at a science fiction convention. A public function where I feel totally at ease! Imagine that. I can walks amongst my people, the nerds of the world, and stuff my brain at all kinds of cool and interesting panels, and then at night, party down in geek town!

Paying for it will be a bitch, and I get moments of clutching panic about that, but what the hell.

I will manage somehow.

Oh, and speaking of stuffing your brain with info, check out this Mental Floss vid.

Man that guy is good at giving you a feast of fascinating trivia at maximum speed. I wish I had the kind of mind that collected facts like his apparently does.

I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t have the ability to collate it into a list. If I did, I would be churning out list based comedy articles a la Cracked.com every day.

Anyone out there good at lists?

And finally, I did one of my slideshow thingies.

I was originally going to do a talker and I was all set to do it, but my camera is in one of its rare bad moods where it doesn’t want to show any picture and while I could always do a talker where the video is just a still picture of me looking mentally deranged (how unlike me), it just wouldn’t be the same.

Don’t worry about the camera, by the way. A reboot will fix it. I will be on your screen talking about odd things again soon enough. I just didn’t feel like waiting for a reboot before I got to work.

When the fit is upon me, I MUST DANCE!

So instead you get one of my silly ass slideshows. There are a number of stupid mistakes in there, including me repeating myself, but by the time I figured that out it would have been an enormous pain in the sphincter to fix it so I said fuggit.

I may go in there and fix it and re-upload sometime soon, but don’t hold your breath. My particular web of neuroses makes it hard for me to go backwards even when it is clearly justified and if I don’t do it, I will end up looking like a putz.

I fire and forget, which I am sure will bite me on the ass at some point but it’s just the way I’m made.

Well, it will be time for Denny’s and conversation soon. I will see you tomorrow folks!

And THAT you can count on!

Bunch o’ stuff

Posted on by
Reply

Maybe that’s what I should call my linkdumps from now on. Welcome to Bunch o’Stuff, episoder 813.

First, I got three words for you :

Vintage. Victorian. Vibrators.

Yup. This is that Hysteria stuff. Curing women’s “hysteria” by a “pelvic massage” that amounts to nothing less than finger-banging them. Littlejean Jail Museum in the UK currently has am exhibition of the “ingenious” devices used to save those poor doctors from getting carpal runnel from clitflicking.

The devices uniformly look horrific and in practice they were not much better. This was well before such quaint notions as “safety standards” and “patents” and such. It was purely caveat emptor, which is particularly dangerous when both a) the purchaser is not the one it will be used on and b) you live in an era where women were not even considered people.

So these things were designed with all the warmth and care of a cattle prod.

Still, I love thinking about a time when the anti-sex people took their campaign of fear, shame, and ignorance to such a degree that people start having sex without knowing it because they have no idea what sex really is.

And at least some of the ladies got orgasms from doctors from it.

Next, a Good News/Bad News story.

The good news is, there’s a haunted house out there cool enough to let people run through it nekkid.

The bad news is, sadly, they caved to public ridicule and are not gonna go through it it.

Pennsylvania’s Shocktoberfest haunted house had already sold the tickets ($20, which is not half bad for a unique experience like that) when the word came down that the gubmint was taking out their public humiliation at the hands of the press out on these fixed attraction pioneers.

That’s too bad. Running naked through a haunted house sounds like good clean fun to me. Damn people and their weird hangups about genitals.

We all have them, dammit! Give them air!

Next we have your Holy Fuck video of the day : watch a jaguar take out a caiman.

Holy fuck…. there wasn’t even a fight! The jaguar just went CHOMP and got himself a very big meal.

A caiman is basically just a slimmer, sleeker version of a crocodile. So that is a video of a big cat versus crocodile kumite, and it wasn’t much of a match because it was over in two seconds.

I guess I always assume apex predators like jaguars and caiman avoided one another as more trouble than they are worth. So to see one take out the other with very little effort boggles my brain cells.

Guess we know who is top of the food chain there!

Next, we have an amateurish but still excellent bit of social satire from Gen Y.

Hey look, an embed!

I have a big space in my heart for these poor millennial kids, raised in prosperity, spoiled by their families, then suddenly thrust out into a world that is just plain broken.

Same thing happened with us Gen X types when we graduated college in the middle of the previous big recession in the Nineties. Guess what? Your degree is useless, your parents kicked out out of the house because there is only so long a Baby Boomer can go without reverting to primal selfishness, and the world’s attitude toward you seems to be “What, are you still here? Why?”.

But that is nothing compared to what kids today are going through. The recession is deeper, madmen and crooks run the economy, tuitions are way higher, and their helicopter parents have left them entirely unprepared to fend for themselves in a world far harsher than the one they were born in.

So sure, the acting in the above video is a tad weak and the phrasings need a bit of work, but it’s still the sort of thing that everyone needs to see.

This kids have it rough. They can have all the earnestness and pretension they wants.

Now, I am ashamed to say, we get serious.

This lady is so absolutely on the mark that I kind of want to marry her. She is the gettingest of it-getters. She knows her stuff.

I have to say, though, that I have never heard a teacher say horrible abusive things like that in my life. I am pretty sure that, at least back home on Prince Edward Island, that would get you fired real fast.

Maybe it’s a Canadian thing. Calling a student stupid in class would just be so rude.

So it saddens me greatly to see all the people in the comments saying that exact kind of thing happened to them. Before that, I held the possibility in my mind that it might not be as widespread as Doctor Brown said.

Nope. This really happens. And there can be no crime worse than a teacher bullying a child.

Don’t claim it’s for their own good. Tell me, is it working? Is the student improving? Have you even noticed? Do you even care?

Or would you prefer they didn’t, because then you’d just have to find something else to humiliate them about?

It’s bullying, and it’s made infinitely worse by the fact that it is coming from a person with great power over you against whom you can do nothing.

If I had a kid and I found out that was happening to them, it would take a lot to keep me from finding that teacher and beating the fuck out of them.

I mean, that’s the kind of thing that makes that boxing match bell go off in my head.

Finally, we have this moderately neato bit of music I did today.

Not entirely happy with it, but it’s still pretty good. Has an intro and a finale and all the instruments work well together, which is pretty amazing considering I got them all (well, all four of them) from instrument packs that were definitely NOT labeled “for making pseudo-Orientalish music”.

It’s a pleasant little ditty.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

Friday Science Bamboozle, September 27, 2013

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome back, my nerdlings. Come, bask in science awesomeness!

Can you say “Oops”?

First up, errata. Seems that story I did last week about them finding alien stuff in the upper upper atmosphere was just a bunch of hot air.

Charitably, we will just say that the lead scientist got a little too excited far too early, and not only went off half-cocked but without doing even half of the work you are supposed to do before you go claiming that what you have discovered is actual, legit science.

I would be more bummed out about it, but as far as I know, the far more credible story of finding extraterrestrial life inside a meteor is still viable, so fuck it.

We Are Not Alone

But maybe the aliens… are US! (cue Twilight Zone sting)

According to this fascinating (and kinda gross… definitely germphobe trigger warning) article, only ten percent of the cells in your body are genetically human.

The rest are various forms of microorganisms that have a symbiotic relationship with the human cells and which have, in a sense, co-evolved with us, but are not actually human.

Do you realize what this means? Holy batshit, Fatman…. we’re not workers, we’re management! What we think of as our human selves is just the overseers to a bunch of tame germs and such.

Or, less colorfully, we are all shepherds over a flock of beneficial microbes who give us their wool and we give them a place to live.

Philosophically and poetically, my mind is blown.

Black Holes Of The Deep

The ocean has black holes.

Not of the space kind, thank goodness, but something equivalent. They are whirlpools that have, purely by chance, developed a stable pattern that means that nothing can escape their circular current.

It’s one thing to learn that all vortices follow the same rules, but to see it demonstrated with something as freaky cool as a black hole of the ocean is something else.

Everything that enters these stable vortices circulates endlessly, meaning they can accumulate a lot of stuff like sea life, plastic waste, and oil.

I wonder if we could harness one of these black holes of the deep (tell me that’s not fun to say) in order to generate clean electricity.

And speaking of generating electricity… from this point on it is all about the energy!

Sing it, Old Man Earth!

It’s weird that he has clouds for hair.

Here’s four stories about three ways to get clean energy.

Method One : Microbes

Yup. We are talking Microbes that generate electricity.

A team at Stanford has cultivated a rather strange form of bacteria that actually generates electrical current as a byproduct of its digestion of organic waste.

You know what that means? POO BATTERIES!

Seriously though, while it is not known if this will ever produce enough electricity to power your iPod charger, it could very well be the sort of thing that provides the energy input for a slow but efficient detoxification project, especially if supplemented by solar.

Imagine dozens of little microbe-munching machines working patiently and tirelessly to detoxify a “dead zone” like the article says, or even just cut down the costs at your local sewage treatment facility.

I just love the idea of microbes that actually make things cleaner.

Method Two : Caged Atoms

Stepping a little into the Phantom Zone on this one, but not overmuch.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have found a way to make a thermoelectric material that is far more efficient than any other before it.

Thermoelectricity is relatively easy to understand. A thermoelectric material is one that generates an electrical current when used to bridge two material of different temperatures. The bigger the temperature different, the bigger the current.

This has enormous possibilities. Imagine a thermoelectric plant in one of Iceland’s volcanoes. Arctic cold up top (most of the year), fiery hot down below. Zap.

I don’t quite grasp how this trapped cerium thing makes for a more efficient thermoelectric effect, although I like the image of them all rattling the bars screaming “ATTICA!”.

But anything that leads to more efficiency in harvesting the gigawatts of energy that flow around us every day is great news to me.

Method 3 : Good Ol Solar, Part I

It doesn’t make the news as much any more, but solar power is still in the race and kicking some ass, at least in terms of the here and now.

Want proof? California just opened the world’s largest solar energy farm in the blistering sun of the Mojave.

See, this is what I love about California. They might not get the smartest government, but they at least have governments that think big and follow dreams.

This solar farm is not a photovoltaic solar farm. Instead, it’s of the type that uses rings of mirrors that all reflect sunlight toward a central tower that contains water. The sunlight boils the water, the water turns to steam, the steam runs a turbine, and just like that you got electricity.

I love this form of solar mostly because it’s the more practical system for turning sunlight into megawatts that we have in the world today.

But that might not be true in the future….

Method 3 : Good Ol Solar, Part I

A group of teams of scientists from around the world have announced that they have developed a solar cell with a whopping 47 percent efficiency.

That makes it the Guiness Record holder for most efficient photovoltaic cell and, more importantly, means that we are closing in on fifty percent efficiency mark that solar enthusiasts have sought for decades.

The idea is that at fifty percent, solar could compete with the current filthy energy from coal and oil on an even footing because it would cost exactly the same. No subsidies required.

And if we ever reached that state of magical equilibrium, it would take only the gentlest of regulatory pushes, say a five percent tax on dirty energy, to make solar come out on top.

And hey, who says we will stop at fifty percent?

It’s been behind in the race for a long time, but solar is definitely moving ahead right now.

It’s an exciting time to be alive and interested in science!

Seeya next week, folks!

Atheism and gratitude

Posted on by
Reply

First off, here’s today’s vid.

It’s about atheism and tolerance.

I won’t dwell on it because I more or less said all I wanted to say on the subject there. In my dream world, that video would draw down gales of angry comments from angry atheist angry about how I pointed out how angry they are.

But this is the real world, which means all my words and images disappear into the background noise of the zeitgeist without causes so much a ripple in its field.

It’s not that I am looking to make people angry per se, but I do want to challenge their beliefs and make them think, and in practice that is nearly always the same thing.

I just can’t stand bigotry and hate, and I will reject it and fight it wherever I find it, without prejudice, without exceptions, and without hesitation.

From a certain point of view, that makes me untrustworthy and unpredictable. I can’t argue with that. My primary loyalty is to my own sense of right and wrong. Against that, interpersonal loyalty and other similar issues tend to run a distant second.

I suppose I just hope that those close to me understand this about me and never ask me to do something I will consider wrong, or at least, will forgive me if my burning need to do what I think is right causes me to make choices that do not favour them.

I try to make sure it never comes to that, and so far, I have been quite successful at that.

But I fear the day I have to choose between those I love and what I consider right.

Speaking of which, I have started watching Dexter via Netflix, and I am really enjoying it because by having the main character be a psychopathic killer, it really highlights the whole hot circuit/cold circuit dichotomy that has obsessed me ever since I learned the terms.

Dexter is all cold. His hot circuit just does not work. He has no normal human emotions and has to fake everything. He is very intelligent and has learned to fake it extremely well, but he is still a cold fish.

Oh, and he kills people who kill other people.

And he makes me think about my own hot circuit. Mine works, but sometimes I feel like it doesn’t work well enough. I worry that I am too cold and detached. I definitely feel like there is the calculating, analytical, hyperintelligent, incisive me… the cold me… and the warm, sentimental, friendly, cuddly me… the hot me.

I won’t torture myself by asking which is the real me. That would be pointless. They both are the real me.

But I do worry that they don’t integrate well enough and that is why I am so cold and alone inside. Sometime happened to me at some point and the two got out of phase.

I hope that can be fixed.

The real focus for today, though, is this little vid from the awesome people at Soul Pancake.

What a brilliant idea for both a project and for a source of inspiring Web content. Like most brilliant ideas, it is deceptively simple : get people to write a letter to the most inspiring person in their lives, then get them to call that person up and read them the letter.

Admittedly, oversensitive me picked up their embarrassment and awkwardness (that’s hot circuit stuff, right?), so I found watching it kind of hard, even though the outcomes were all good and I knew they probably would be.

Being sensitive isn’t for wimps.

What really fascinated me though is this idea that gratitude is a strong determinant of happiness. There is a lot of what is true about being human encoded in that notion.

As I incessantly say, we are a social species with social instincts. Seen from that angle, gratitude is clearly the way we socially reward those who help us. Thus, it is very natural human emotion. If someone does good things for us, we feel gratitude toward them, and with that comes the urge to reciprocate. We want to do something nice for the person who did something nice for that.

Thus, positive human reaction is encouraged, and our group, whatever that may be, is strengthened by both parties helping one another.

Extend that to the rest of the social group, and you begin to see how a social species comes to dominate all others by constant mutual reinforcement.

Sadly, this noble and natural instinct towards gratitude and reciprocity is routinely used by the rich and powerful to co-opt the average citizen. No actual bribery is needed. If you invite the person to your mansion, treat them as equal in status, introduce them to the finest pleasures of the world in a setting that radiates status, wealth, and comfort, and give them a ride home in your limo, that person is going to feel grateful to you and want to reciprocate whether they want to or not.

And when you start in with other wonderful things, like the promise of a cushy job with a fat salary, trips with you are your rich friends to exotic and luxurious locales, help getting your wife a job and your kids into a very high class private school… well, who wouldn’t feel intense gratitude towards someone who had done so much for them? Only a cold-hearted bastard.

As for myself, I have a natural instinct to express gratitude enthusiastically (if not gushingly). I have no problem praising others sincerely. I have never understood why some people just cannot bring themselves to say anything nice about someone.

But I am limited by my shyness. And we are all limited by the question of how much gratitude to express, and when, for the everyday kindnesses shown to us by others.

My roomies do a lot for me, and I am truly grateful for it all. But it seems weird to tell them that all the time. So what do I do?

I tell them whenever I can, that’s what. That sort of thing is really important to me.

I guess I am not that cold after all.

Gettin’ linky wid it

Posted on by
1

Tempted to do more soul squeezing tonight, but I got a lot of links cluttering up my browser so I will do that instead, and leave all that catharsis for another time.

Fun fact : A nuclear bomb almost wiped North Carolina off the map.

The year was 1961. Cold War level : intense. A B-52 bomber crashed in North Carolina. It was carrying two 4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs, each 260 time more powerful than the bomb that level Hiroshima.

One bomb landed safely with all four safety mechanisms having done exactly what they were supposed to do, namely prevented the bomb from detonating.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that in the other bomb, which landed around 12 miles from Goldsboro, North Carolina, three of the four safety mechanisms failed and the only thing that kept the Eastern Seaboard from disappearing in a nuclear fireball was a simple low-tech low-voltage switch.

Let that one roll around in your head for a while. If that little switch from the era of the vacuum tube had not done its job, millions would have died in the blast and millions more would have died from the secondary effects like the shockwave and the fallout.

Some of that fallout would likely have fallen on my home in the Maritimes.

Talk about a perfect starting off point for an alternate history tale. I can’t even begin to imagine how the world would have been changed if that little switch had failed. The consequences are just too profound to be calculated. It would have, no exaggeration, changed everything.

Thanks, little switch.

Next, we have a powerful piece of satire from an all-woman comedy group from India.

Warning, this is satire, but you probably won’t laugh.

If that was done by women in the USA or Europe, I would call it heavy-handed and overbearing, but India has a really bad rape problem.

Basically, they are where we were in the bad old days of the early 50s, where rape gangs roamed with impunity and the heavy institutional sexism meant law enforcement just did not listen to women or care if they got raped. They lazily assumed that any woman who got raped did something or other to deserve it, and women were hysterical anyhow, so she’s probably just making the whole thing up.

It’s hard to imagine, in the modern world, just how bad thing were for woman back then. But we can see it all happening again, live and in 3D, in places like India which are struggling to modernize.

It takes a very long and very brutal struggle to make your culture believe that women are people, and it is going to be a long time before the women of India have what every woman in the modern “top 2 billion” world takes for granted so deeply that she can’t even imagine things being otherwise.

Read your feminist histories, ladies, and you will realize that you are in the position to help do for women in places like India today what many strong, fearless, desperate women did for you before you were born.

To me, that is what modern feminism is all about.

A few short things now, like this absolutely killer anecdote related by rave-fave Stephen Fry :

Damned right it does! Take a real hearty, can-do, stiff-upper-lip, we-shall-fight-them-on-the-beaches spirit to go out for a bit of fun on one of the coldest nights of the year, yet alone the sort of fun that has to involve at least a minimum amount of genital exposure.

Presumably, their labours kept them warm until some jacked up cop had to make his quota by ruining it.

Then there’s this story, one I never ever get tired of, about Japanese cat islands.

Yes, there are two different Japanese islands (Japan has LOTS of islands) that feature a cat population far greater than their human populations, and these cats roam free in great numbers.

That looks like this :

I would love to take a nap with all these kitties.

I would love to take a nap with all these kitties.

I have got to go to one of these places some day. That looks so awesome. It reminds me of my childhood in a house full of cats.

Next, another example of Jimmy Fallon making it harder and harder for me to dislike him.

I mean, how can I argue with that? I love lip-sync! It’s such a wonderfully democratic art form. You don’t need to be able to sing or play an instrument, you just need to go out there and perform the hell out of the song just like you would if you were alone with nobody watching.

I was around for the lip-sync craze of the 80’s, and I loved it. There was a show on TV, I forget what it was called, but it was a network lip-sync show and it was ten tons of fun to watch. I love to see everyday people, just regular old nobodies, channel their inner performer and just put it out there with all their hearts.

So if this instigates a lip-sync revival, I will officially forgive Jimmy Fallon for being such an annoying, giggling, unprofessional, smarmy, Mike Myers wannabe jagoff when he was on SNL.

More or less.

Finally, of course, we have my little thang of the day.

Just another silly little slideshow. It turned out okay I guess.

I feel like I am entering a dangerous but potentially very important phase of my artistic development. I am not happy with the sort of things I am producing, but I don’t yet have the right combination of energy, focus, and confidence to do better.

So I get the feeling that it is time for one of those painful but productive painful phases where I don’t like my own work and spend a lot of time brooding and seething and grumbling to myself before the pressure finally leads to a growth spurt.

It’s not fun, but it was just such a process that led to me to start making videos in the first place.

We will see where this one takes me.

Another stupid song

Posted on by
2

So I did another stupid piece of music today.

As you might have guessed, I am not really happy with how it turned out. But I think I know where my problems lie.

One, I get way too impatient to be done. When I see that there’s only 15 seconds more to create, I lose my head and all sense of restraint or quality and just slap in any old thing or use any old trick to make an ending.

Like that totally out of place male chorus at the end of this piece. It really throws the whole thing off. It’s an awesome sample and I have been wanting to use it for ages, but that was not the way or the place.

Up till that it was doing decent. Nothing to blow away the voters of the Academy, but an interesting little exploration of a simple, pentatonic-ish scale and a vaguely Middle Eastern sound.

I think in my next piece, I will go further East and experiment with an Oriental, koto and taicho, black keys only kind of sound.

Or maybe not. Ya never know. Inspiration can strike at any time.

So yeah, being in a hurry to finish is definitely a problem. Impatience in general is a problem. I do much better work when I give myself whatever time I need to complete it.

Like with the Funky Duck. It’s not long, but it’s still the best work I have done lately. It’s fun, and upbeat, and perky, and silly. And I didn’t totally fuck up the ending.

So more patience and more follow-through would definitely improve the art. And you get more patience by simply giving it more time. No more deciding to just finish whatever music I am working on and then stuff it into video format and throw it up there on YouTube in order to do the day’s video in the laziest way possible either.

I am better than that, and my small but mighty audience deserves better.

I am just going to have to get better at doing this sort of thing, and that probably means not waiting until 4 PM, which is scientifically the time of day when I feel crappiest, to do the ding dang things.

It’s always been very hard for me to change a habit once it has been established. I have trouble acquiring and sticking to routine, but once it is in there, it is in there, and hard to get out.

But I might be able to convince myself to start working on the things at, like, 1 PM instead. That way I have plenty of time to fuss and fiddle and perfect.

And that leads to my biggest problem in art period, and in some ways in life as well, and that is this terror I have of going backwards. This mighty brain of mine is conspicuous in its lack of a reverse gear.

And that means that, historically, I have had a very hard time going back to things and editing them to make them better. I have to do it all in one session, with no breaks except for the bathroom, and then push it out into the world to fend for itself and never look back at it.

And while this has lead to me being more productive than I have ever been before in my life, and it has allowed me to give my writing and creative muscles a really good workout every single day.

But the quality is low, or at least, lower than it should be. I am capable of so much more than the scratchings in the mud that I have done so far. I could be a truly great writer if I could just get my shit together and develop the ability to make what I do all shiny and perfect before I show it to the world.

That’s so hard for me, though. In the past, when I try to go back to something and fix it up, I just end up staring at it, unable to do anything, trying to figure out how to start while anxiety shreds my confidence into confetti and instead of seeing a bunch of things I should be fixing up, I just end up seeing a bunch of reasons why I suck, my writing sucks, and I was a fool to think I could ever do anything competently.

You can see the problem. I need to build enough confidence in my work to be able to keep believing in it even as I am trying to correct all its flaws.

But how do you build confidence with such substandard work? If I can’t make it good enough to send anywhere, how can I get the positive feedback I need?

That is the conundrum of the kind of anxiety trap I live in. I am too scared of the world to interact with it, and thus I never get the kind of reinforcement that would be just the thing to counteract the fear.

Like how I have suffered with depression/anxiety for so long because the disease itself made me far too shy and scared to ask for help when I needed it, and even when I had some help, it kept me from successfully advocating for myself and saying “This is not working for me” or “maybe I need different meds”.

Like I said before, if a disease keeps you from seeking help, you are its bitch.

And I have to tell you folks, I have been struggling with my depression more lately than any other time recently. The doc said that going from 30 mg of Paxil to 25 would mean passing through a threshold and he was right. I feel way more emotional now than I did before the lowering of dosage.

Not suicidal, so don’t worry. But angry and frustrated and impatient and restless all the goddamned time.

Sometimes I even find myself feeling sullen, which is a new thing for me. I don’t think I have done “sullen” much in my life. Not even as a teen.

Oh well, I will weather this storm as well, as I did the ones previous, and at the end, I will be stronger, more whole, more completely, and far less scared as a result.

Now I am going to go stare into the darkness till it stares back. Bye folks!

We’re in charge

Posted on by
Reply

Today’s video is about a few unpleasant truths :

And so in that spirit, and to break up the soul squeezing introspection, I thought I would deal with another cold hard truths that human beings find very hard to accept.

We’re in charge.

And that’s it. There’s no higher level to appeal to, no cosmic parent taking care of things for us so we can continue in innocence, no wise alpha entity looking out for us.

It’s just us naked beach apes clinging to the skin of a dirtball called Earth as it careens through space completely outside of our control.

And we hate that idea. If it’s just us, then we are responsible for our actions and there is no cosmic purpose for our existence, no afterlife where perfect justice will be meted out, no escape clause from the truth of our mortality (and that of every person we have ever loved), no Infinite Parent offering unconditional love in infinite depth and quantity.

There is just us bunch of monkeys fucking around and trying to be human beings.

It’s an awful thought, isn’t it? That all there is to life is what we humans manage to get done? That we are naked before the Cosmos, vulnerable to forces beyond our control, trying to make the best of things in an imperfect, unjust, uncaring universe in which we are no more important than the dirt between our toes.

Our naive egotism and social species insecurities can’t stand that thought, and so we invent ways to hide the ugly cold truth and continue playing make believe that we really are important, special, loved, protected, and that the Infinite Parent will take care of everything and everything will all work out in the end.

Because if we truly are all there is… then we would seriously have to grow up and get out shit together.

And like the children we are, we really do not want to have to do that. If we grow up, we will have to face reality, behave responsibly, be good to one another without reward, and do all the things we have always known we should do but never quite seem to get around to doing.

Being crazy poo-flinging monkeys is so much easier, and way more fun.

So we use those great big brains of ours to pretend there is Someone Else In Charge. We put our faith in leaders, nations, institutions, movements, organizations, and of course, in deities which are clearly simply imaginary friends for supposed grownups.

Anything to protect us from the idea that it really is just us dirty little monkeys in charge.

But what’s that about leaders? Surely our leaders are in charge and they are looking after things for us so that we don’t have to worry about them, right?

And maybe they are.

But maybe they are just regular naked beach apes like the rest of us, no better suited for being in charge of things than you or I or that guy down the street, and what we call “leadership” is actually elaborate social theater whose true purpose is to simply fulfill the need in us to think there is Someone In Charge so we can go back to being self-absorbed and irresponsible.

And this continues even in this modern age of democracy and freedom. Politicians come and go, fulfilling their role of thinking they are in charge as we fulfill our roles of believing them, and we are happy.

We are happy even though the whole extent of our influence on our governments is one vote once every four years or so. That is just enough to give us the comforting feeling that we are in control without the very dangerous and unpleasant feeling that we are actually in charge and hence responsible for what our governments do.

Thus, modernity continues, and most of us can get away with hardly ever thinking about politics even during election periods, and we can all relax, safe and secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens, it is not our responsibility and there’s nothing we can do about it.

But it’s all a big lie we tell ourselves to avoid facing the facts.

It just us horny moody monkeys in charge of this whole big planet. We only have one life, one planet, one chance, one chip to play in the casino of life.

If there is justice, it is because we created it. If there is someone out there taking care of everything so that we don’t have to think about it, they are still us, regular people like you and me, people called “civil servants”. If there is a source of unlimited unconditional love, compassion, and understand, it is because we dreamed it up.

And if there is mercy and compassion and comfort in the world, it is because we stepped up and provided it. If a starving beggar finds earthly salvation in a bowl of soup and a kind word from a stranger, it is because one of us, a human being just like you, decided to provide that. If a battered wife finds refuge and protection in a shelter, it is because other human beings made the decision to be there for her. If a mother driven to despondency because she realizes she has destroyed her relationships with her children finds someone in the same position to talk her down from the ledge, it’s because someone made sure that someone like that would be there for someone like her.

In short, if there is good in the world, it is because we made the decision to put it there.

We. Us. We crazy big brained sex crazed monkeys did it by ourselves, for ourselves, without any Infinite Parent or Wise Old Alpha needed.

Because when you realize how alone we are, you realize how important it is for us to stick together, look out for one another, and be there for each other when we are down.

We are all we’ve got.

God I hate afternoons

Posted on by
Reply

I am learning to just plain accept that I am going to feel like ancient shit every afternoon.

Dunno why, and at this point, I don’t really care. Sleep issues? Psychological issues? Invisible demon that doesn’t do mornings? Whatever.

But like clockwork, I feel like shit in the afternoons, and often the only solution is more sleep. Maybe my body need a certain amount of sleep outside the influence of Zopiclone, I don’t know. Maybe the sleep apnea is making it so that I need extra sleep just to survive.

Or maybe the effects of the lowering of my Paxil dose are catching up with me and I am stuck having that super-intense dream-filled sweaty sleep every day purely from my mind’s need for dreamtime in order to deal with the psychological changes within me.

I do feel like change is occurring within me. I am starting to see my feeling sad and weak and lonely lately as a good thing because it means I am processing a lot of deeply suppressed emotion and that is always a good thing.

Still not good at just letting the emotions happen and riding the wave wherever it leads, though. Like I talked about yesterday, I have trouble staying with negative emotions. I am in then out again.

I have had the vast majority of my 40 years on Earth to practice avoidance via distraction. It will take some time to learn the opposite.

There is enormous power in the ability to choose pain.

I want that power.

Also on the psychological front, I find myself less and less interesting in video games lately. And that’s a good thing, assuming I can find something more useful to do with my time that satisfies me more.

But it’s a big change. Video games have consumed me for a long long time and the idea of living my life without them seems alien and bizarre, no matter how beneficial it might be or how much it might lead to further personal growth and expansion.

Often it is our sense of identity that is the biggest barrier to change, and I am not immune to that. One of the hardest things to do is go from your known identity to a new and unknown realm, even if it’s just something as simple and stupid as not playing video games any more.

It’s not like being a person who plays a lot of games is a vitally important part of my identity. But it is still change, and change is never easy.

The hardest part for the likes of me is letting go. I don’t let go of anything easily, not if it truly means anything to me. I instinctively cling to things, no matter what, and it doesn’t matter if those are things I would be a lot better off without.

It’s not like playing video games is going to improve my life. I am way better off playing around with music like I have been doing. It’s fun and it actually leads to a finished product.

Like today’s little musical interlude.

I am pretty happy with it. It is not at all what I set out to make, and yet it’s very cool in its own way. I enjoy that kind of serendipity.

What I sent out to do was fulfill my lifelong dream of making my own classical music. Ever since I was a wee tot marching around the living room to Colonel Bogey’s March or thrilling and chilling to Night On Bald Mountain, I want to be able to make that kind of music.

In fact, in all my dabbling with sample based music, my one overwhelming desire has been to make music that sounds “real”, like real musicians with real instruments were playing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the electronic sound and synths are fine by me. It’s this ineffable, undefinable quality of “realness” that I seek. Music that sounds totally professional and that, in effect, conceals the fact that it was made by some fat dude on a computer.

And I know that it will be a long time before I get there, especially because a lot of what I need to know is the more technical aspects of music production, the sort of stuff a studio engineer knows.

But I am patient. Making music is fun, and I will take whatever I happen to learn along the way as a bonus to the fun of just playing around.

That’s how I feel art should work in general. It should be play and fun before it is ever harnesses to the yoke of making a living or making a name for yourself.

That way, the intrinsic reward of playing around will keep you doing it, and doing it a lot will make you better at it, and all without the need for a deadline or a paycheck.

After all, nobody has to pay you to have fun, right? Nobody has to pay you to eat a chocolate bar.

So anyhow, the idea was to try to do a piece of classical music but I just don’t have the instruments I need in order to do it properly. I have lots of loops that might apply, but I am bored with loops now and I honestly do not want to be working with something premade and hence unwieldy any more.

My innate bias towards creative control has kicked in and I just don’t want to play with other people’s toys any more. I want it all to come right from my own creativity and talent.

And collage just will not cut it any more. I need to paint!

And perhaps when music isn’t enough to fill my time, I will start spending more and more time on my writing or my video productions, instead of segmenting my time into short bursts of productivity followed by long periods of just fucking around distracting myself.

But that’s for the future. Maybe it will happen, maybe not.

Right now, I just want to have fun.