Report form one end of the spectrum
I guess every generation goes through the same process. Rediscovering hate, love and passion, thinking that we are unique, thinking that nobody has felt the same emotions before. Then we grow up, forget what we felt when we were young, and do not expect our children to feel the same.
It’s all so simple… Common human emotions. Cynical as it mat seem, no matter how strongly you feel an emotion (Say, love) somebody has felt the same way before.
(Abrupt ending)
Not spam, but it could just as well have been.
Mr Nitro3k01,
I Ham going to inform you that there is Six Thousand man Coming to you
in Apral and then We Will go and Blow Parlement house up and Blow up
all afour hus labrin Peple Cant Stand it No longer, dam all Such Roges
as England governs but Never mind Nead lud When generel nody and is
harmy Comes We Will Soon bring about the greate Revelution then all
these greate mans heads gose of
Hear all Confution menchester and Derby and yourk and Chesterfield
Shefild Nottingham mansfield local is going to fling Doon there
harmes!!!!
The Nation Will Never Sattel No more till these great heads is Cut of
We Will Nock doon the Presions and the Judge We Will murde whan he is
aslepe.
Music: Psilodump - Sov Gott
Looking back, it’s been almost a year since I wrote anything in this blog. I tend to have a sort of “timeout limit” for projects; if I leave a project for more than a certain amount of time I’m likely to abandon it, possibly because of some hidden fear that people (Or myself, when applicable) will judge me for having kept a project inactive for some time.
For this blog, that time was 2-3 months, after 2-3 months without posting, I felt that the blog was dead anyway and that I could just as well bury it. And so I did, and decided to leave it as it was for other people to read and possibly even enjoy. What made me remember this blog once again, and feel the will to revive it is my dear friend Optimus, and a post he made where he mentioned my blog. (Even though we haven’t met, I feel a connection with him, and that we have some things in common, and look upon him as a friend of mine) That literally filled my head with a rush of thoughts that I need to write down. Just as my blog seemed to be a source of inspiration for him when writing that post, his blog is a source of inspiration for me and for this post.
Just revisiting my old blog brought back a series of memories. I usually have a lousy short term memory, and solid long term memory, and that’s just the way it is. Except when it comes to my feelings. I tend to try to repress my feelings as much as possible, especially bad feelings. This is both positive and negative in different ways, but it’s very negative in the way that I can’t really remember how I felt at some given period of my life. I guess this has been a sort of defence mechanism which indeed has protected me from doing bad things, but in the same time restricted me by making me deny how I felt. In the end this was a destructive and restrictive behavior, as i turned out. In my depressive periods it made very introvert antisocial, because I was afraid to expose my bad sides to other people. In my non-depressive periods I literally couldn’t remember how my depressive periods were, so I couldn’t relate to it, and learn from it. In effect I was immobilized, and restricted myself in the fear of being rejected by others, which most likely would send me back to the depressive state of mind. And because people didn’t know anything about my mood swings, they probably just thought of mite my problems. So I was thinking that maybe I could just keep living my life like before, knowinge as strange. (More on that later)
Above all I wonder about what my life was like before I was 18. (Optimus’ point 1) I remember fragments of things that happened back then, I remember being lonely, and depressed. Apart from that, nothing. Whenever I’m trying to imagine how I felt back then, it’s like crashing my head into a brick wall. I just can’t, it’s surreal, it’s beyond imagination.
(The observant reader sees that I’m using past tense, but most of this applies in the present as well.)
When reading through some old posts, it feels like this blog has existed in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the world. Things have happened, friends have come and gone, thing have happened. But still, on the inside inside, I’ve felt more or less unaffected. The best way to describe it as if I’m just a passenger, a passive spectator watching the events of my life, without the ability to really affect them. It’s like I’m watching things from the outside, giving me a very crude and distanced view on life.
Some of this has gotten an explanation. I’ve been reluctant to tell this in public, but I realized I’d do it sooner or later anyway, so I decided not to keep it secret. (But no promote it more than necessary either) The thing is that I have Asperger syndrome (A quick recap for people who don’t know: AS is not a mental retardation, but it usually implies social impairments and perceptual difficulties) In the beginning I hesitated to accept the official diagnose. Not for personal reasons, after reading up on AS I immediately felt that this was it, as it explained a great deal of the difficulties I’ve been through in my life. The reason I didn’t want to accept the official diagnose was because I was worried about how other people would look at me. I wanted people to get to know for the person I am rather than a diagnose. I also felt that I had come along pretty well without a diagnose in my life, desp something in the back of my head without telling it to someone.
Now it’s little more than a year since I left the doctor’s office with the report in my hand, and today, I don’t regret it. Having it official has helped motivating myself to look for information and contact other people with AS. Looking back, it has helped me a great lot in understanding myself, why I react the way I do to things and so on.
I know I’m different. During the years, I have been forced to realize that I percieve and interpret the world differently than other people. I know I react differently than many other people in different situations. I clearly suspect that I think different compared to other people.
Because of this people don’t understand me, and even though I’m trying my best I sometimes don’t understand people. This is something that Optimus describes as well. His diagnose of himself is the PO form of OCD. (The Purely/Primarily Obsessive form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) I’ve been trying to diagnose myself since my early teens, but I never got anywhere, partly because of lack of information, partly because of lack of self-awareness. Some of the things I thought I had was AS, OCD and bipolar disorder (AKA mano-depression)
The first one turned out to be correct, the other two are undiagnosed, but still possible candidates. Especially the last one has a story. I had seen a movie about a guy who appearantly was BP, and his ups and downs. I immediately identified myself with that movie.
Do I suffer from BPD? I don’t know enough about to diagnose myself. And in the end oit doesn’t matter. What matters is that I can understand the way I’m thinking, and why. Having a name of a disease probably won’t help me in doing that, but self-analysis and insight about who I am, and how others see me, will.
Because of my AS I sometimes have troubles to intuitively estimate what people think about me. Combined with a fear that people will think I’m a freak or otherwise not like me, I’ve developed what I think is a mild form of paranoia.
Whenever I meet someone, be it IRL or online, I’m always over-sensitive to any signs that the person doesn’t like me. The side effect of this is that I tend to keep a low profile, and not contact them. Probably some people look at me as a suspicious or antisocial because of this.
Furthermore, I have been pretty restrictive about details about myself. I’ve had this weird feeling that if I said too much about myself, some people could in the end collect all the pieces and put them together to form a picture of who I am. (Not everyone, but some people motivated to do so, whoever that might be)
Of course this is bullshit. Very few people would be motivated to do so. Even if they did, the pieces of informations are so scattered and inconsistent (The latter because I as a person has changed over time, which of course means that my reactions differed over time) that nobody could ever form a real picture of me. I’m just suspicious because I can somehow keep track in my head over the blurbs I’ve left on the internets (Intentional spelling)
Yet, for every single thing I write, down to every word, I try to think if there’s anything in what I write that could cause people to hate or otherwise not like me. And still when I’m finished, I’m convinced that I’ve failed in doing so. That, if anything is an obsession, but on the other hand it has helped to keep a distance from some bad things. (But still I think the disadvantages > the advantages)
Optimus says in his blog that he’s 27, still a virgin, and a little shameful for it. Well, I’m 21, also a virgin, also a bit shameful about it, but personally, I don’t have a problem telling other people about it. It just seems very natural to me. It’s the way it’s always been, and probably will keep on being until I’m 27 and beyond.
However, I’m a virgin in so many other ways than sexually. For example:
Alcohol/drugs: I’ve never been drunk in my life. The greatest amount alcohol I’ve drunk in one night is 2 beer, which made me a bit dizzy, but not quite drunk. I don’t smoke tobacco. I tried it once in the back of the schoolyard with some so called “friends”, but it ended with me coughing, dropping the cigarette on the ground, which was the end of that. I’ve tried to smoke marijuana twice, but both times, I didn’t feel shit. Possibly this was because I don’t have the smoking routine, possibly because of a phenomenon that makes some people unable to feel the rush the first time they do it. Eitherway, I decided it was not for me, and I won’t try it again. My only real (chemical) drug is caffeine, which I try to drink everyday to stay awake and alert.
Friends: This point I’m ashamed for in the same way as Opt is ashamed of his sexual virginity. I don’t really have any close friends. You could call me a “friend virgin”. Because of the way I’ve felt when I’ve grown up, I’ve never really been able to put trust in other people, and likewise other people haven’t been able to put their trust in me. I’ve been going oscillating between panicing over the fact that I don’t have any friends and being ashamed that I needed solitude.
Culturally/Musically: If you know me as a musician, you might get the impression that I hang with all the cool guys and have a lot of musical references. Well, it’s rather the opposite. I don’t know as many cool people as I should, and I have practically no musical references. People often get surprised when they take for granted I’ve heard a song, and are really surprised to find out I haven’t heard it. The same goes for games, I haven’t really played any computer game released after 1998 or so, and even before that I didn’t play much. Some people are amazed how I’ve been able to stay away from modern games. To me it’s natural. I haven’t had any personal motivation to play games, I’ve been using me computer for other things like music, graphics and programming. I haven’t had any social motivation either. Since I haven’t really had any friends, it’s never come natural to me to sit down and play with your friends.
Point zero (Additional): I have some fetishes too, even though I don’t like to expose them too much.
So that was five points, more or less. Yet it feels so incomplete. It leaves so many things out, but in the same way it exposes so many things. I still haven’t given proper answer to questions like “Why do I hate myself?”
Indeed, I haven’t even clearly said there is such a question. Even though it’s clear to that In do, and even though I imagine that only a person who hates himself could write something like what I have written above, this porbably isn’t how most peoples think.
I consider the text to be something like an almost inpenetrable mass. I think I did it that way partly because of undiagnosed, but probable hyperlexia/hypergraphia, part because of self-defence, that I don’t want people to read it.
After writing all this, I must say that it was a bit of a physical experience. Along the way, I’ve blushed, cried, laughed and started to sweat because of my internal pressure when thinking about different things. Now I feel relieved, having gotten all of these things out.
So, here’s the hard part. According to the rules, I’m supposed to pass the word onto five people. Problem is I can’t come to think of five people to summon. But, Optimus, I hope that you will continue blogging about how you feel, which will probably encourage me to do the same. And I’ll just keep on pretending I know Greek properly, and ask you for advice when I need. (I’ll do it right away: Is the title somehow understandable? (: )
As an end to this post I’d like to take this opportunity to post a link to the album Sov Gott by Psilodump. Why? Because in my opinion it reflects lot of the loneliness and different thinking that I feel.
Music: shev-new_year_trance_(29-12-2004).mp3
I don't know if it's just me, but when I'm debugging code, I too often find myself looking for the error in one place and miss other part, where the problem probably originates from.
I just started working on a piece of HTML for a person. I have gotten a PSD and my job is to translate the design into HTML code. I have chosen to translate it into a piece of table free valid XHTML code. It all worked fine until I decided to test the code in IE. Not surprisingly the dimensions of the containers were faulty due to the quirky box model and the transparent PNGs were opaque.
So I downloaded WebFX's PNG Behavior, which usually does the job. Not this time though! The behavior just caused frecken images to disappear, there was no visible sign of them at all on the page. After looking through the htc file for potential involontary changes to it, and looking through the demo file thrice, I finally found the error. It seemed as if the images got a default with and height of 0px unless explicitely set. So I set the width and height to the images' dimensions.
Were my troubles gone? No! Oh yeah, the box model… This should be an easy one, just add a doctype and IE 6+ should render the HTML in standards compliance mode. (I'm ditching the ugly hacks for ie5.5) SoI made a quick Google, and found a page with a table over a few doctypes, and their resulting rendering modes. I inserted the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype, without the prolog, as recommended, and annoyingly enough IE didn't render the page as I wanted it too. (I refreshed FF a little now and then and it renderded correctly all the way through.) I tried the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype, still no luck. Before ripping my eyes out I tried commenting all code inside the container, and whoa!, the container got its right size. Apparently, it wasn't IE's fault this time. (At least not from the second I inserted the doctype) I inserted overflow-x: hidden; to fix that IE problem, and all of a sudden it worked like a charm.
This is a damn good looking design, and it will be damn good coded too. However, it's nowhere near complete. If I could ditch IE my life would be easier. But that's not realistic of course.
So, at this time, after solving that inital problem, writing this blog post, my eyes are sore, my brain feels like fudge and there's only one minute left of the trance mix that has been keeping me alive the last half hour. In other words, it's bed time. If I manage to finish this project within the deadline, monday evening it will be a hell of a personal accomplishment. I have my doubts, but tomorrow's a new day with new energy. I'll sort it out…
I'm now participating in a new blog, Advance Together, hosted on mp3death. (A lo-fi netlabel) My main reason for posting there is because I'm writing an article series about Gameboy music programming. Apart from that I'll try to write about lo-phi music and other stuff there. I'll still be posting on this blog as ofton or seldom as I usually do.
Right now it seems that Wikicities (A wikimedia based wiki host, that hosts, among other wikis, wikipedia and uncyclopedia) is having troubles with their servers. It bothers me that hosts running FOSS software are having weird issues like that. (First the strange bugs at wordpress.com, then this) Makes wonder, are these just random events? Is there something coherently wrong with FOSS web software? Did someone plant malicious code in the source codes of these projects? Have they been experiencing a DoS attack? Or is it just a simple hardware error?
I'm not a fan of conspirancy theories, so I think the latter sounds the most likely; however I still have some sort of itch about this.
Well, well, here are the essential screenshots:
The last three weeks have been really bad for me. I've gotten some sort of depression lately. My work is not going too well, and I'm hardly making any money on it. I'm starting to seriously realize that my hearing is permanently damaged because of too much loud music. (And my hearing used to be really good before) I'm starting to get overweight, and I'm in a really bad physical shape. (But I'm not yet obese)
I've applied for a new job, that I'm hoping to get, but still I'm feeling as if I'm standing still on one spot in my life without being able to go on. And maybe it's even true, that's the danger of depression, you look at down at yourself which causes you to fail, thus feeding the depression. I'm rationally aware of this, and still I can't do anything about it. Weird, eh?
My last post? Well I wrote during one of those overcaffeinated nights at the lab. I wa getting that feeling of bliss that only too little sleep and too much caffeine can give. But at the same time, it was the start of the depression, since that day my life only went downhill. But hopefully, it's getting better now. But you never know, I've never been totally free from depression in my whole life, and for a good reason too.
So, this blog has been dead for three weeks now (Short of one day) because of my mental downage. Is this this blog dead for real? No! I will try to keep it up, and I'm also planning to start a separate blog devoted to javascript.
And I also have so many things I been wanting to blog about, that I haven't, because of lack of power.
So here's a new start. While I've been away from the blog, I've uploaded to new gameboy songs: But since it isn't (Weird name, eh?) and Jump.
And once again I feel admiration for Atariboy, who can write even nonsense posts that are interesting. I sounded like a fanboy there, didn't I?
Well, that's all for now!
(Listening to the the sony allstar - reflux and nitro2k01 - drummers dist)
I want to feel. I want to react. I want to exit from this state of numbness. The few times when I do, and realize and I am among the privileged, those who can feel, those who can react, I can't enjoy it.
I can feel, I can react, I'm not numb. I should be forever grateful and in debt for this. But somehow the feeling of a sunrise of sadness wont please me.
Reminder to self: Life is beautiful, not because of happiness, but because of the sadness that creates a contrast between black and white, so that not everything is soaked up in indistinguishable shades of gray.
Reminder to self: Life is beautiful, don't ever forget that!
Collecting junk at the end of the tunnel,
some trash to interfer beneath the surface.
Connecting wires to send the signals,
and bash the interface beyond the waves.
Expecting funk at the end of the process,
but destroyed the talking machine of mere laze.
Revising guidelines to mend the chipset,
and remove the gunk in the heart of it all.
Inventing sounds by redefining the arts,
uniquely creating engine driven craze.
By standing on the frontline of the wave,
seek we find a way deeper into the maze.
This one is dedicated to all circuit benders, and all lovers of analogue and digital sounds and gear, and especially Daniel Araya for giving me some electronic junk and much inspiration.
I’m now officially a user of wordpress. Forget the old location of my blog, and remember the new one.
I’ve started to make myself comfortable around here, and I’ve tagged up my imported blog posts real quick. I want to thank Atariboy for leading me to wordpress, and also for giving me a blogmad invite.
There are a few things I don’t like with wordpress, such as lack of javascript support for blog owners, and inability to create your own templates. Then again there are things that I love, such as tags and password protected posts. And freedom of Google. I’ve started to like Google less lately, for their China policy, for deleting gmail accounts and not being the best search engine any more.
All posts older than this one are the ones imported from my blogger account.
