Random thoughts

[Futhark]

I had a psychotic break 5 years ago (I'm bipolar) and became a little suicidal after the medication started working. It can be a long and difficult recovery, but with the love and support of my wife and children I am in a better place. The only advice I can offer is to accept help wherever you can and to take some time to care for yourself. Best wishes from me and mine to you and yours.

 

[Chessie]

I had a psychotic break 5 years ago (I'm bipolar) and became a little suicidal after the medication started working. It can be a long and difficult recovery, but with the love and support of my wife and children I am in a better place. The only advice I can offer is to accept help wherever you can and to take some time to care for yourself. Best wishes from me and mine to you and yours.

I'm so glad to hear you were able to recover under much love and support. It's so necessary to have a system like that in place to aid recovery. Normally, I don't like to put my personal life out there like this but I also want people to know they aren't alone when suffering through a mental health crisis. My husband and I went through some tough times in December (exterior circumstances aka life can be stupid sometimes) and basically he just broke. For a strong, healthy, vibrant man, this is a world of difference. We'll make it though. He's really fighting. Thank you for sharing that, Futhark.

 

[Futhark]

You're more than welcome Chessie. Once upon a time I wouldn't have shared information like that about myself but, as I experienced months in an elevated manic state, I basically cooked my brain and lost my mind. For a guy who could play chess thinking 5 steps ahead to not even be able to beat freecell (that simple solitaire game), well, it was a humbling time. However, it also gave me the opportunity to rebuild myself (I think I've lost half my childhood memories, but I can't remember, and they weren't that great anyway LOL). I feel liberated, a new man. The point I'm making is; life is strange and you never can tell what positives can come from a negative. Nurture hope and love; they will bloom again.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

Compared to most people, my life has been quite tame so far--except for...well, everything.

On a more random note, does anyone have any experience writing in the second person?

 

[Malik]

I started working on a children's book with my wife today. A bit of a departure for me.

 

[ThinkerX]

I started working on a children's book with my wife today. A bit of a departure for me.

Age group?

 

[Malik]

Age group?

I have no idea. Very young. It's a picture book. She found a tiny frog inside a rose, and then came inside and spent the morning painting it. I started doodling rhymes about toads in rose abodes while making lunch and here it is 7 PM and two bottles of wine later and we've storyboarded the first half of Rosie the Toad and the Pie a la Mode Overload. This may just be a way to blow off steam; it's been an intellectually challenging week.

This will probably just be a thing that we give to friends with small children for Christmas this year.

 

[ThinkerX]

I'm so glad to hear you were able to recover under much love and support. It's so necessary to have a system like that in place to aid recovery. Normally, I don't like to put my personal life out there like this but I also want people to know they aren't alone when suffering through a mental health crisis. My husband and I went through some tough times in December (exterior circumstances aka life can be stupid sometimes) and basically he just broke. For a strong, healthy, vibrant man, this is a world of difference. We'll make it though. He's really fighting. Thank you for sharing that, Futhark.

Growing up, my cousin was among my best friends, though he dwelt in Anchorage and I in the NW Kenai Peninsula. We collaborated on a novel or three that went nowhere (this was the era of typewriters, when PC's were far and few between.) Then he went to college in the states while I remained in the frequently frozen north. I drove down to visit him once on campus, something like 7000 miles.

It was then he started saying strange things. 'Sleep is a waste of time' being the biggie. I started getting paranoid letters from him. One demanded I burn past correspondence, because he was being watched. This was about the time he started working for a succession of computer magazines. From there, he went into computer programing in San Francisco, the city he'd call home for the rest of his life.

Matters grew worse. October, 2000. I'd just completed the house when I got a phone call from him - from a mental institution. He'd cut himself and had been held for psychiatric observation. I almost flew down to be with him - except my bank account was past empty because of the house thing. He got released, took pills, found another computer job in late 2001. That company self destructed three months after he started. Worse, his severance check bounced. That bounced him back into the mental ward. After that, there were no more computer jobs, just 'wage slave' type deals, none of which he held for more than a couple weeks. After a year, he gave up even on those.

For most of the next decade, he bounced in and out of psych wards and was treated with meds that ranged from 'no effect whatsoever' to 'zombie pills' that drained the life right out of him. Even with those, his grasp on reality weakened - his long and short term memory went to Hell. He said people were 'attacking him with their eyes.' His brother arranged for him to be put on Disability. He moved from a relatively nice 1 room apartment to a hotel room where his bed literally took up half the available space.

Me? I went through a tough patch myself in those days. Money, not mental. Couldn't visit him, though a few times his brother accumulated enough airline miles to send him north. I remember how he almost collapsed walking through a not especially crowded supermarket with me at one point. Didn't stop me from trying to help him. I sent him stories. A 'Where's Waldo' calendar. Tried to get him to collaborate on a writing project. The low point was when I called the cops on him because he'd convinced me he'd latched onto a gun.

In 2011, I took the daughter to Disneyland - and we stopped off to visit my cousin along the way. My first trip out of state in something like fifteen years. That was an eye opener. When we left, I told the daughter I thought I'd probably outlive him. I was right - flew south for his funeral (natural causes, not suicide) a couple years ago. His brother was the only other attendee. (Would have been a third guy, but he was a fireman, and half the SF Bay area was literally going up in smoke at the time.)

I still think about him a lot. Last summer I made him the MC of a novelette that had been bouncing around in my skull for a while.

 

[Brian Scott Allen]

[video=youtube_share;3uTCI-XQuqo]https://youtu.be/3uTCI-XQuqo[/video]

IT'S QUIET UPTOWN | Hamilton Animatic - YouTube

So I was sitting at work today, just listening while reviewing documents n stuff. Then I come across this. It's pretty impress to me that someone took the time to do this. In any event, I'm listening then my thoughts stray to my perfectly healthy and happy son. And I get a lump on my throat and tears well up. That never happens. I am cold and heartless about music but this, of all things, makes my tears well up? Why? Because my idiot brain puts me in Hamiltons position in these songs. Asshole brain! Good thing I secluded in my office.

 

[Saigonnus]

My random thought of the day: I wonder if alien species have surveilled Earth. If so, and they watch our media, what would they think of all the Earthlings vs. Aliens stories like Predator, or Independence Day, or Falling Skies... if they have, would they believe them real history or would they recognize they are only a form of entertainment.


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[CupofJoe]

My random thought of the day: I wonder if alien species have surveilled Earth. If so, and they watch our media, what would they think of all the Earthlings vs. Aliens stories like Predator, or Independence Day, or Falling Skies... if they have, would they believe them real history or would they recognize they are only a form of entertainment.
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They'd have also seen Mork & Mindy, Alf, ET, Red Dwarf, Star Trek, Babylon 5 etc.
Not sure if that would make things better or worse...
I'd be more worried about them landing somewhere important and planting their equivalent of a flag, saying "All of this belongs to us now..." or telling us that we've got to make way for a hyperspace express way...

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

^Or that the plans for it were located in Alpha-Centuri for centuries beforehand.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

My random thought of the day: I wonder if alien species have surveilled Earth. If so, and they watch our media, what would they think of all the Earthlings vs. Aliens stories like Predator, or Independence Day, or Falling Skies... if they have, would they believe them real history or would they recognize they are only a form of entertainment.


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I've had a related thought. What would future historians think of our depictions of super heroes? Would they think they're our gods?

 

[Chessie]

So, apparently Goodreads won't let be me two people at once. I can't seem to claim the books under my pen name from my main pen account. Now I have faceless books on my main account because Goodreads says I can't claim the others. GRRR

 

[La Volpe]

I've had a related thought. What would future historians think of our depictions of super heroes? Would they think they're our gods?

Well, unless there's some huge loss of knowledge somewhere along the way, that shouldn't happen. The reason we struggle to understand the stone age humans is because there's no convenient records left for us (besides cave paintings etc., which aren't terribly clear). And even with this small amount of knowledge about them, we still got a pretty good idea of how they lived, I think.

 

[FifthView]

My random thought of the day: I wonder if alien species have surveilled Earth. If so, and they watch our media, what would they think of all the Earthlings vs. Aliens stories like Predator, or Independence Day, or Falling Skies... if they have, would they believe them real history or would they recognize they are only a form of entertainment.

They'd probably realize those shows are a fiction, but they might also be thinking: "Muwahaha, these tiny humans with their tiny imaginations! They haven't even begun to imagine the horrors we are about to commit upon them!"

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Well, unless there's some huge loss of knowledge somewhere along the way, that shouldn't happen. The reason we struggle to understand the stone age humans is because there's no convenient records left for us (besides cave paintings etc., which aren't terribly clear). And even with this small amount of knowledge about them, we still got a pretty good idea of how they lived, I think.

In the future, if almost everything became digital, few tangible things would survive an apocalypse of some kind...

 

[FifthView]

In the future, if almost everything became digital, few tangible things would survive an apocalypse of some kind...

If that's the case, how would these future historians possibly even know about "our depictions of super heroes" to begin with?

I think much depends on how far into the future we're talking. We still have a lot of hard copy lying around, artwork and books and the like, protected in durable structures. Three hundred thousand years after the massive extinction event, most of this might be gone, but a lot might survive a few thousand years.

But otoh, this is interesting: Scientists even now are able to encode a whole book or multiple books in very tiny structures, like synthetic DNA. Something the size of a small pebble could contain a vast store of history. So even if an apocalypse wiped out our WWW and computers all over the world, whatever, or simple passage of time wiped those out, a future historian might need to find only one such tiny storage device and could still have a vast amount of data about our culture.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

They'd probably realize those shows are a fiction

Ahem. What about Galaxy Quest?

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

If that's the case, how would these future historians possibly even know about "our depictions of super heroes" to begin with?

I think much depends on how far into the future we're talking. We still have a lot of hard copy lying around, artwork and books and the like, protected in durable structures. Three hundred thousand years after the massive extinction event, most of this might be gone, but a lot might survive a few thousand years.

But otoh, this is interesting: Scientists even now are able to encode a whole book or multiple books in very tiny structures, like synthetic DNA. Something the size of a small pebble could contain a vast store of history. So even if an apocalypse wiped out our WWW and computers all over the world, whatever, or simple passage of time wiped those out, a future historian might need to find only one such tiny storage device and could still have a vast amount of data about our culture.

Shhhh. It's a thought experiment, don't ruin it.