Today was complicated and busy, but not as much as I had intended it to be. Studying in the morning, short work shift before training - a formality of a shift in order to be present and paid for the training. Think most of the marks on my arms are gone now - had to dig in with nails a bit to keep focused, was surprised they lasted at all that long. Had to keep backing off after deciding to experiment with drawing blood because I lacked the courage for that much of that pain, so I expected them to be gone after a few minutes. I should have been satisfied with distracting myself into focus because now am disappointed by not being able to follow through.
Collected a package I had ordered, a gift for my sister. Filed the paperwork to get my name changed. I don't know what I am doing with that. Felt sick. Wondering. Why am I doing this? Is it right? I feel like I never analyse possible actions and come to conclusions, I just act. Without clear head or heart. When it gets back I will put it through to get my passport and driver licence, etc. updated. I don't understand what I am doing. I don't understand why. I'm just going to keep going because I am terrified of death and not living. Felt sick to be giving up my birth certificate
I feel very confused. Not the sort of thing one should be saying, for fear it would be used against, but that is not relevant. I just don't know what I am or what I want. I have no particular skills, abilities, talents. So I don't know who I am.
Trying out withdrawing from people so I have space for school, space to work on myself. Maybe get to be someone? Maybe I could learn some skills, get good at something. Learn how to exist as a person. If I can manage school maybe even try and meet some local people.
I see people having and being things I wish I could have, like social activities and identities and goals, and it hurts. It has been very difficult so far to cut off contact from the people I normally talk to, to avoid twitter. My habits are very entwined around that contact and I wish I had someone to talk things over with but my head feels quieter than it has for days, I think. Reduction in visions of killing myself (I think); I don't want to but it feels like I need to, like a pressure bearing down on me. But I don't want to and I won't. If I can hold firm then maybe I will be able to make something of myself, have something to bring back.
I don't like to leave people without explanation but I can't talk to them to explain because I know my weakness and that if we start talking I will keep talking and all my efforts will be undone. I will drift back into my social habits and lose all my days, all my focus that I am trying to capture. For now it is just dividing between works and leisure. Maybe I can keep that up. I hope so. It is hard and I want to go back to company even though that hurts too.
Everything hurts and there is no release. I remind myself that death is no freedom of pain, it is an absence of existing entirely. There will be no future lives, there will be no me to appreciate and feel that lightened relief and because I am terrified of nonexistence that helps. I have never been able to surrender my grip on this world or self so that is an anchoring incentive. There is a dangerous thought which says that is a lie planted to keep me from discovering I won't die, but will escape this world created to torment me, or have its truth revealed. But that is nonsense and anyway might be a bluff to goad me into the attempt. It is an idea to be disregarded.
I perhaps should delete the above paragraph if I am going to post this, although that may be difficult as words written have weight. But to post this has been partly the intent in writing, for as I said above I cannot talk to people without being undone. I must take care of myself but it would be cruel to abandon people without notice or information, and having realised this I must act in some way to inform or else am driving them to worry about me. I suppose they will still worry reading this, which cannot be helped from any true or even perhaps untrue account I would give, but at least with honest information people might be diverted from terrible imaginings.
I am okay. Am fairly sure the pain is less, although my thoughts still are not clear. But this is analogous to a detoxification period with many habits and recurrent topics of thought still pulling back on me. Very easy to fall back in, and I might end up doing so. It is a struggle and I have been so long without myself. I just don't know what I will do. I hope I will find something good. Something to be proud of.
Ghostpocalypse
2015-02-19 12:03When I read this post on ghosts and zombies immediately I thought it could potentially make a really interesting story, if only I could think where to go with it.
Start with a zombie apocalypse scenario sweeping across the Earth, leading to almost the entire population of the world ending up as ghosts and... then what? The whole species having to decide "we've been wiped out, we're extinct but we're still here, now what do we do?"
Visualising plot strands of despair, would-be suicidal reactions, religious crises, some maybe want to zoom off to explore space, or persuade the ghost-species to adopt a frame of philosophical contemplation, ennui over being and observing but inability to affect any thing in the world. Interactions with the elder ghosts of humanity's past and trying to negotiate a place in / replacement for whatever society they had constructed. Maybe side-strands with the living who are still trying to survive and the question of whether they could eventually prevail, if humanity might re-emerge as a living species.
Don't know where the story would go. My own inclinations probably take it as a quest for understanding with ghost-science and exploration and a lot of people wanting to find ways to interact with the world again, or maybe to cease existence entirely. I keep being drawn to the possibility of vistas on other worlds and mysteries and discoveries that could be made out there (ghost aliens? non-ghost aliens who can or cannot detect the ghost humans?).
Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.
A while back the folks at LibraryThing started an Open Shelves Classification project (OSC, which makes me think of Orson Scott Card whenever I read it). There was even a round of beta testing in which LibraryThing members were invited to try and sort books into top level categories, to see how well the system was working.
Recently I have been spending more time at LibraryThing and Musicbrainz, having decided that 'now' is the time to ensure my collections are properly catalogued. I got curious about the state of the OSC project, having not heard much about it since the beginning of the year, so for the past couple of days I have been reading the Build the Open Shelves Classification group. I started from the bottom of the page and have been reading upward, trying to build a sense of context. So far I am still early on, reading the discussion threads on the initial round of testing that was the last I heard of the project and getting a bit frustrated with what I see going on in it although I do not know how things have progressed since.
The project as I understand it is to build a system for shelving works which is open source and easily usable by most for finding things, and to overcome the shortcomings of existing shelving systems. It is supposed to be a system for deciding how to organise material in a physical space and not some sort of abstract classification or cataloguing system, yet because this involves arranging things according to what they are deemed to most be 'about' I think it cannot help touching upon those territories.
My frustration comes from things like this: after reading several threads discussing matters like dividing items by audience (e.g. Children's, Young Adult), language, or format (e.g. prose, play, DVD) and what appeared to be a consensus that optional facets should be used, so a library that wanted to separate by format would be able to do so while one that did not wish to do so was not required to if they followed the system. So it was frustrating to then see in the first round of testing Comics & Graphic Novels as its own top-level category. This was precisely the situation that apparent consensus on optional facets was seemed suited for handling, and there seemed no clear consensus on whether graphic works should be separated out or interfiled. It seemed a lot like a crisis of disorganisation, although I suspect whatever was done with graphic works there would have been some sort of panic since they can include both fiction and non-fiction.
There were also some complaints that science was granted a single top-level category, while what are often called the social sciences (and other areas) were spread around. Despite initially being reserved about that, it does make sense to me since there are plenty of works about science generally, although I don't know this isn't true for other areas that were split up, and a place elsewhere could presumably be found elsewhere for them (philosophy->science ?).
The point was made at the start, which I agree with, that a shelf-organising project like this is foredoomed to failure somewhere as soon as it begins. Compromises will have to be made somewhere, there will be some number of works which don't fit easily into one category and not others, and how people sort the world is going to be culturally biased. The goal is to create a system which maximises ease of browsing, but I think even if the terms and codes can be translated themselves, it may in the end be better to create a new shelving system from almost scratch for different cultures than attempt to be human-universal.
What all these misgivings did accomplish was getting me to consider how I would go about devising a shelving system. So now you get to see my thoughts on that unless you are quick enough to scroll or close the page in time. As I said just a paragraph above, I think any such system is going to have significant points of failure, especially concerning multidisciplinary works or syntheses, and I have little idea if my thoughts on the matter would be any better or worse at avoiding such. Probably worse, since I have conducted no study to inform myself on the subject (I don't think my minor library qualification counts, since we were taught to use catalogues, not judge them).
So, top-level categories in my personal 'this seems like a good idea to me' system:
Reference
This is something I think of as not really a subject area itself, but a shelving area which is handy to have. I think of 'reference' as a sort of mini-library containing works which are useful to have readily available for referring to. Important to have in most cases, but should be handled by whoever is organising the library it occurs in. That, I suppose is to an extent bowing to 'how people are accustomed to finding things organised' and maybe it would be better to do without a reference section? Maybe in some ways it is better suited to a personal library, where the person who owns it can decide which books ey finds useful to keep in arm's reach.
Knowledge and ideas
I don't know what to call this category, but my idea behind it is 'knowledge about things'. If you want to know how something works, this is the appropriate section. Subsections include things like astronomy, psychology, mechanical engineering, history, religion, law. To a fair degree it approximates what we refer to as 'non fiction', but is not equivalent to that category. I am uncertain if it would be appropriate to separate 'how to' into a separate category, but for consistency with my ideas elsewhere, have not attempted to do so.
Games, sports and recreation
This includes subjects like cricket, World of Warcraft, whist or Dungeons & Dragons. Activities performed for leisure, for entertainment, or competitively. I suspect this is also a place for guides and (non-academic) information on practical activities like cooking, caring for pets, gardening, or sex.
Creative and critical works
This includes subjects like painting, poetry, sculpture, music, essays, films and prose fiction. Criticism, analysis and instructive materials go along with the works they are about. I think biographical works go here, since the material is not necessarily 'fiction', but I could see a case for it going with history in the knowledge section.
That's it. That's the whole listing of my current ideas on how I would organise a shelving and classifying system. My own if no one else's.
I was also talking with Tess about how to solve the 'one location per book' problem, so perhaps there will be a post later with (probably very impractical) ideas on that.
This post? It's wrong. Infuriatingly, enragingly wrong. I hope that's just for rhetorical purposes.
Not the bit saying it is hard to confront people on their use of language, and I wouldn't disagree about it being harder taking the extra step of opening oneself up to that defensive hostility which so often arises when people are called on the ways their unexamined habits perpetuate systems of abuse and oppression, but to say changing one's language use is easy in such a derisive mocking way?
Oh dear. No, no it isn't. For most people, particularly the abled, language is a deeply ingrained automatic part of themselves. These words they use, they don't think about them most of the time and attempting to make a shift in long established usage is a very difficult habit to change. Words that rise up unbidden as part of commonplace speech as natural as breathing, words that have a lifetime of casual use behind them, words which are used pervasively in the surrounding environment as if they are ordinary acceptable terms?
No, not easy. Simple maybe. As simple as 'just say no'. As simple as uninternalising the messages I have picked up and believing myself to be a person of worth. 'Just change your mind', 'I know they were wrong and hurtful, so I can stop believing what they said of me'. It is simple, but it is not easy, and mistaking conceptual simplicity for ease of action has tripped me up many times in trying to recover... so. It quite aggravates me to see someone saying that because the concept of checking and altering one's habits of thought and action is simple, the doing of it is correspondingly easy.
What it takes in my experience and observation is mindfulness and sustained effort. Not slipping up is difficult. Try removing religiously based language from your non-technical vocabulary because it isn't your belief system; I've been working to control my vocabulary since primary school and it is still difficult to remove compromise words like 'darn' and 'drat' and 'bloody'. I'm fortunate I suppose that I never picked up most (not all, definitely some slipped through) ablist and homophobic and sexist language and was committed from a young age to not doing so, but it doesn't actually get easier as life goes on. Those words are normalised as part of our social discourse, they still get embedded in our lives and presented as language for our brains to pick up on and parse and use.
Quitting isn't so easy, no, but I have no fondness for people saying it is too hard even to try. Not for something like this when the message is "Please try to be less hurtful and more respectful in what you say, please be more mindful of others". Not the easiest thing to do, fine, but I'd say it is less than the minimum required of trying to be an ally, and well worth doing in itself. Pfah.
But it isn't fun anymore
2008-06-11 17:24Most often this seems to be prompted by another person expressing distaste for an obligate activity. The purpose of it seems to be to convince the complainant to accept the current situation, to meet the expectations of others and to cease expressing dissatisfaction with things as they are.
It also reads to me as carrying a vague disapproval of pleasure, as if a person who enjoys life is somehow doing it wrong. That life ought not to be a pleasurable experience, that it ought to consist of drudgery and duty and anyone who does have fun with eir life must be doing so at the expense of other persons.
Of course I am leading up to disagreeing. If a person does not enjoy living, why should ey be expected to continue doing so? Perhaps for the sake of others, and they enjoined likewise against enjoyment of it, network existing because it has been told it must.
And I do not believe life is 'meant to be' anything. Life is.
I (again) no longer care for the argument "You only get one life". Irrelevant. Only one life, why not live it and enjoy it? Many lives, why not have fun with this one if there'll be another (after?)?
Although I do wonder if it would affect people's responses for the number of lifetimes posited to be somewhere between singular and infinite.
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"It is a mess in here. Someone needs to do some cleaning."
I have been struggling to write a reply to this post. Trying to put together words to say something. Doing this, something which might be a realisation happened.
Possibly I am not as good at talking - communicating - as I think I am. It is very difficult for me to say things directly. Gaps in typing this for apparently unnecessary reasons, to tap on the keyboard or look around or retreat inside for various lengths of time, often when the next thing to type is known or is classed as 'should not be difficult to find'. The previous sentence is not what I was trying to say, although it is reflective of it[1].
What I mean is, attempting to communicate directly with someone is very difficult for me. Most of the time I spin words together, poetic flights and allusions which hopefully carry implicitly what I mean, although since so often they are misunderstood this is doubted. The possible realisation is that much of my communication is pulled from a sort of library which is then assembled in a way which seeks to approach or reference the intention behind my communication but does not often match it. So I do this, which is like the 'classic' idea of aspie-type people compositing speech from television, radio, etc., albeit in a non-standard way and trying to... not do it, to speak in a direct manner, is far more difficult. Often that fails and I end up talking about what I want to say, instead ("I want to say how wonderful the colours in this painting are" vs. "The colours in this painting are wonderful").
This comment is another example, in which successive iterations of a communication attempt are made and refined. I hope this comment will be understandable to people but I cannot really tell; I am not actually sure I am typing English words rather than some other arrangement of letters (but I think I am).
At some point in the past I think you told me I was speaking too fast for you to follow well. If I were doing this I would be very slow indeed, but it would be nice for that to not be a problem.
I want to write about this and place considerations of it and other aspie/autie type things on my journal, but do not know how. Perhaps reposting this comment will help.
[1]as something allusive of what I am trying to say but not actually holding that meaning. The previous sentence was postponed due to being considered nonsensical in original context.
I think this is not always true*, but I think it is also true far more often than I have been realising.
*'true' here meaning something like 'an accurate description of my functioning'
The new order of things
2008-05-13 20:32A great majority of the persons with whom I am in correspondence exist in a separate 'time zone' to me; possibly they are phase-shifted from reality or from another planet, I can't be bothered sorting out all these finicky details. This causes any communication involving named days of the week to become wracked with ambiguity, and not any of the fun kinds.
Therefore, I am instituting the following reforms, effective immediately:
Illusory Day | Real Day | Unified Reference Scheme (URS) Day |
---|---|---|
Monday | Sunday | Smunday |
Tuesday | Monday | Tuensday |
Wednesday | Tuesday | Wuesday |
Thursday | Wednesday | Thrensday |
Friday | Thursday | Frursday |
Saturday | Friday | Sriday |
Sunday | Saturday | Sunturday |
Your compliance is appreciated.
With flourish,
Summer Snow, Tyrant of the Seven Seas
P.S. Would someone mind telling me how long we have been having Tuesdays, and why I was not informed? It is as if there is a blank space in my mind which does not want to acknowledge their existence.
Specifically, nearly every world on each show is a forest, and the same forest within the show, but a different one between shows. Clearly significant - this researcher thinks the Atlantis forest looks greener and has higher resolution leaves than the SG1 forest, and possibly indicative of seeding by a hitherto unknown precursor species separate to the Ancients, or possibly merely a shift in Ancient aesthetic.
Songs from
krank_kether
2008-04-22 02:36- Grainger - Country Gardens
- Luciana Souza/Romero Lubambo - Muita Bobeira - I think this track came with Vista *shrug*
- Queen - Killer Queen
- Akira Yamaoka - April Fool's Song
- Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories - (would have been: Jason Rennie - The Sci Phi Show Outcast #53 - Sci Fi and Politics with Dr Courtney Brown)
- Starsailor - Don't Stop Moving
- Yuki Kajiura - Sweet Memories #2
- See-Saw - interlude
- The Beatles - Love Me Do
- Delerium - Forgotten Worlds
I desire to include some substance of my own deliberate composition so I will say that over the past few months I have been working to abandon the rich text interface as much as possible, using it only long enough to learn how to input something I did not know before. So I am proud at knowing how to format this list without having to consult any outside source.
I have not been learning much, have not been making a deliberate study as I have felt always more pressing things to do and then sleep, yet what I have been learning is very satisfying. It reminds me of the latter half of last year, when I had to learn some LaTeX formatting for the wiki on which I was keeping my Electromagnetism notes.
It is not something I know yet how to describe yet learning such things, seeing something of how they work and fit together, is a very... clean pleasure for me. Similar to how I have felt in my brief studies of Mandarin too, and now I am thinking if I could find this in mathematics too that would be rather wonderful. Perhaps my perspective has been mistaken? Focus on the operators rather than the individual problems maybe. Might help with astronomy/physics too.
... I was supposed to be writing.
I wondered about people who would be happier if their lives were one way rather than another and if such a thing could ever happen, if it ever had. I wondered, personally, if there could have been someone I knew who had been miserable, had had such a wish granted and so we never met, or met differently. If there were anyone I had or would meet who had done such a thing and were happier for it.
I wondered, if I were to encounter such a person, would I be able to tell? It was a general presumption that ve would not verself be aware, since that seemed rather the point. Maybe a person might once have been a great friend of mine and we could pass each other on the street and not be aware of that possibility.
What I would want to say if I did meet someone who made such a choice, who had such a wish come true, is that even if there might have been some good things which now never were, I am glad for them that they have found something better and even if it is not wonderful at all times, if they have found a happier life then I am happy for them.
I like to think that even if I never say this directly to someone, a person might read and realise it could be meant for them.
In all my wonderings I never did until now wonder if that person might be me. I did wonder if I might make such a wish and stick by it, and concluded no, but I do not recall ever wondering if I had already. Asked that way, I might have. This life contains very much happiness when I let myself feel it.
Love,
Millicent Skade
.noitcerid rehto eht ni ekam I srorre eht dna eseht neewteb ytiralimis eht morf trofmoc ward nac I tsael ta tub ,tbuod on ,gnidaer-foorp retfa neve srorre fo ytnelp gnikam ,esruoc fo margorp a sa tnetepmoc sa t'nia I
.ereh elbaliava loot luatca na osla si erehT .noitcerid rehtie ni railimaf sa ylraen sdrow nommoc ynam edam sah enim fo tibah siht taht spleh tI .erofeb deah ym ni secnetnes elgnis naht erom enod reven evah I neht tub ,sdrawrof gnisopmoc sa ysae sa ton llitS .sredo rettel tuoba kniht naht sdrawkcab etirw lypmis ot reisae gnimoceb ti won tub tsrif ta tluciffid etiuq saw tI .tfel-ot-thgir em saib ot rotide sight fo ycnednet eht rof edam secnawolla - sdrawkcab lla gnihtemos elttil a gnitirw ta dnah ym yrt d'I thguoht I os ,daer I tsop a ot stnemmoc eht yb dnim ot kcab thguorb saw sihT
.ddo smees dnuos a hcatta ot tpmetta ton dna drow a esrever ot, deednI .os meht gnicnuonorp dna sdrow gnisrever fo tibah a evah I
What I worry
2008-01-01 19:54Should dust off something old and finally post on it.
Further postables
2007-12-31 04:38The first is, the lead of one of my stories is living in a ten day week. I would like to build something calendrical to make tracking her time easier. Currently I am getting by with a spreadsheet but do not find it optimal. In about six months to a year her calendar will change, so that is a deadline of sorts. If I can learn and make before then, perhaps I can also make something flexible enough to handle new and old calendars both.
The second relates to something I created in my mid-teens, a transliteration of English. Possibly other languages using the Latin alphabet too but I do not know them well enough to say. It is a simple enough pattern, based on hexagonal tiling with text spread across a two-dimensional plane. I would like to build something to display this transliteration as an output.
At the moment it is seeming like a quite complicated project and I doubt it would be of any more use than passing encoded between friends (perhaps as an image?). I wonder if I could extend my original idea, perhaps into a third dimension (layers or angles?). Sentence arrangement was terrible in what I came up with, maybe I can fix that too.