Thinking about how Witchblade was a really horny ‘90s comic about a hot chick and her shapeshifting demonic symbiont, but the horny part was just that the symbiont would make itself look like a really slutty bikini
Well looking down at the magic mirror in my hand and being transported to the internet world where my friends live was never all that concrete and grounding, and everything else is a little Candyland
Well, the nice thing about the delirium coming back and my energy level being like stable 8mg creatine below norm is I basically wake up in permanent undertow effect
Thinking about how Witchblade was a really horny ‘90s comic about a hot chick and her shapeshifting demonic symbiont, but the horny part was just that the symbiont would make itself look like a really slutty bikini
Yeah, okay, the delirium kinda back now, reminding me one of my favorite parts about it was the “fuck it, I’m crazy, you can’t expect me to handle shit” vibe
"That said, how impressive is it that I can keep doing that while under the effects of a brain infection?" They uh, make these things called "doctors" now. Maybe look into that shit?
Doctors HATE Him: Local Blogger Reinvents Eastern Spiritualist Traditions Of Health Through Contemplation Of His Mortal Vessel
so after a meditation retreat in September I saw the light and realized that the effects I thought social media had on my attention span were a health emergency I could not afford to ignore and went on a strict 4.6h/week regimen. This lasted for six weeks, I changed for the better in predictable ways (reading more books), and also turned into a binge drinker. It turns out that my brain expects a certain amount of entertainment and socialization, and if it can’t post bullshit constantly or talk to people on Discord 4h/day, I will go to parties I only kind of want to attend (just because they’re happening NOW and I want stimulation NOW) and drinking too much.
This has been a humbling experience.
(Also, in addition to alcohol expenses, I spent too much money on the books, so my budget definitely didn’t like my attempt to evolve as a human being)
3 weeks after making the above post, I have a new hypothesis: Lexapro is making me slightly manic. (Hypomania is a thing that happens to me sometimes anyway when I’m sleep deprived, or just out of the blue after I read too much fanfiction, so I didn’t think it was too unusual.)
I went on the social media break at the same time I went on Lexapro, and even after coming back to social media, the drinking urges continue. So does an unusual amount of internet shopping, which I thought was because I was buying new clothes for the… er… clubbing habit I’ve picked up in the past few months…
Blue line: “day x" => “during the 7 day interval centered at day x, how many days were days when I had 3 or more drinks”
Red line: Lexapro dosage, scaled to have the same range as the drinking – 2 means 20mg
Heh that’s the antidepressant I went on, noticed within the 4-6 week window it made my anxiety worse, waited till the 6 weeks or something to confirm I was still as depressed, and went off it. It was straight up “my anxiety, but more of it”, which I suppose you might argue for me would probably accompany mania but I just noticed anxiety.
I think it was mostly because I had been misdiagnosed as unipolar depressive, but when I spent a month on Lexapro it made me nuts and part of it was giving me a taste for straight brown liquor
Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.
But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?
I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.
The thing where I keep having to solve these little riddles to maintain bodily function is getting tired, honestly.
That said, how impressive is it that I can keep doing that while under the effects of a brain infection?
Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.
But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?
I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.
The thing where I keep having to solve these little riddles to maintain bodily function is getting tired, honestly.
what the mayor of new york is doing with psych hospitalization is not a new application of the way psych wards are used–psych survivors know this and we’ve been talking about it for decades the way that involuntary hospitalization is used as a form of social control, and the power and danger that a mental illness diagnosis holds. what is frightening about the way the mayor is talking about this is the way he is giving this quiet rhetoric legitimacy and a voice. psych professionals have been using involuntary hospitalization as a form of incarceration for a long fucking time, and as psych survivors know, you can get hospitalized involuntarily for Many things beyond just “being a danger to yourself or others.” what’s making me nervous right now is that this likely will lead to more interactions between police and homeless people where police feel emboldened to enforce even more options of incarceration. I think it is important to understand that New York is not the only place doing this and in fact this is the way involuntary hospitalization generally operates. New york is not an aberration: the whole system is intended to work like this and is completely fucked, which is why we need to be fighting for psych abolition and building in mad liberation to our understanding of prison abolition.
Hm, at least the classic men in white coats (the ones coming to take you away, ha-haaa) were like, asylum orderlies, not cops, with sedative syringes, not guns.
Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.
But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?
I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.
Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.
Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
Since this came up in a chat, that I need to toe a line or something or like Tucker Carlson would come after me:
I am pretty sure members of the Tucker Carlson writers’ room follow me. Given how often I got invited to write for various “dissident right” outfits over the early-mid 2010s, I’m absolutely sure I’m on that scene’s radar.
But they know better than to shit where they eat.
Also there was that time early on I used an externally hosted image linked to a tracker that showed I got a bunch of hits from the Pentagon and the Rayburn Building, which doesn’t mean I was being tracked like some Weapon X, Jesus, but that junior staff officers and (almost certainly Republican) Hill staffers were fans. Not to mention my college friendships with some increasingly well-placed figures!
Plus I’ve got a pretty good sense of factions and stress points, and a solid guess where some bodies are buried!
Between the increasingly dated midcentury songs and TV specials, the legacy prewar department store stuff like the Macy’s parade, and Hallmark movies about rejecting yuppie urbanity for idealized small-town life, Christmas in the US is increasingly an American Golden Age nostalgia festival
Legacy prewar department store stuff like most of the Santa Claus canon, really
![[Description] Comic drawing of a man smiling, with speech bubbles around it. [Text] HA HA HA HA [newline] HA](/media/35c9b01acc2cba7bfde3ce2ee18a4da1df641cb9_6cee2c590f8d.png)
