Yeah, alright, that terrible Wednesday was the peak of this anxiety mania, in retrospect for a few days before I had even noticed my acid reflux was getting worse, which was a precursor of the chest- and stomach-tightness (maybe related to smooth muscle tonus?) that had me vomiting at worst.
Been too far into the habit of looking at things with the right eye closed so to compensate I closed my left eye, it took a bit for things to readjust and then I opened both and worked on binocular 3D until that settled in all naturally.
For all its advantages I find myself retreating to 2D both specifically for reading text on my phone and more generally because if I focus on something in the foreground the background gets all fuzzed and blurry; in contrast with the 2D vision where the parts of my visual field I was not currently fixated on remained much sharper and I could get more detail from peripheral vision, so 3D doesn’t automatically pass the “getting more visual information” test.
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I cannot emphasize enough that this was the historical way markets operated and it was a failure, that governments required that staples like flour be sold at “customary prices”, stable over time and matched to the economic capacity of customers.
But to the extent the product had any relation to a larger market (which in fairness, bulky or quickly perishable goods might largely not) affected by actual supply and demand (from say annually variable harvests and military campaigns) and yielding actual market prices, the market price rising above this regulated price would not lead to customers receiving goods below cost (opportunity cost is cost too), instead they would find shortages, shortchanging, and adulterated goods.
Still readjusting to the anxiety, it’s like “I’m up, I had creatine, I had coffee, yet I’m just sitting here and not doing things, what gives?”
Also it’s increasing my muscle tonus and I have to really dig into my back with my self-massager stick before and after bed. (Also makes me realize that some of the improved sleep quality I’d been crediting the new mattress with was really that going away.)
ALL I WANNA DO IS *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* *musket shot* *minutes-long period of silence interspersed with the sounds of a lead ball rolling down the barrel, fiddling with a cartridge, pouring powder, and locking the mechanism in place* AND *sound of a small coin purse being bluntly dropped onto a wooden countertop* AND TAKE YOUR MONEY
Okay, didn’t have initiative for… initiatives, but the non-disorder anxiety let me take action against things annoying me in my direct line of sight, and then things I can see from there, so I tidied up the front room some and did a round of weeding to catch the stuff that last rain brought.
At one point an old blackberry rhizome put up its first shoot in a while, I got it with the mattock but just swinging that thing tangibly decreased my mental/spiritual initiative, which was interesting.
this anime passed the bechdel test during the hot springs episode when the girls were comparing titty sizes
to be fair the original point of the bechdel test was “can i interpret these two characters as lesbians” and there is quite a lot of bad harem anime where the answer is “yes”
You might have thought card sharks and loan sharks were named after the predatory fish, but apparently there’s a decent chance it’s the other way around from an old Dutch word meaning “person that takes unfair advantage of other people”. Before that they were known in English as a haye or dogfish, which means sometime in the ~1400s enough English sailors started saying “don’t get in the water, it’s infested with those jerks”
[Image description: Text that reads as follows:
The etymology of the word shark is uncertain, the most likely etymology states that the original sense of the word was that of “predator, one who preys on others” from the Dutch schurk, meaning ‘villain, scoundrel’ (cf. card shark, loan shark, etc.), which was later applied to the fish due to its predatory behaviour.
Image description end.]
fun fact: in german der Schurke / die Schurkin are villains, while der Hai is the predatory fish.
robots posting memes like “metal rusts and algorithms are flawed, i’m gonna become a pristine meat creature that can grow and heal” and when reminded that disease & death exist they’re like “no i would be the epic flawless organic lifeform that i just imagined”
Interesting to watch as the exact same energy in considering my environment and how to affect it that under zeroed anxiety was translating instantly into action, is now channeled into more comprehensively considering and creating a complete plan I only later execute
Well, even as bad as it got yesterday with anxiety attacks inflicting, ah, let’s say psychic damage, the basic mood effects were still normal, not disordered anxiety, just VERY.
And so my mind’s turning to Portland, with my more balanced projective/evaluative sense. And what if it continues developing as a great city to live but just never particularly realizes the promise of the early 2010s.
Like, when I was first here it felt like most everyone in a bar was a potential friend and/or lover. Among the new crowd, who’s not suburban normie as I was fearing but still not really “keeping it weird”, there’s some promise if you go looking but like you have to look for them.
It really seems that the Portland I came to was filled with the quality people from other cities who looked around, saw that was no place for a quality life, and all came here for a personality-enriched environment.
Well, that and Oregonians who came through the 1980s collapse of the timber industry and much of the traditional… well, not “redneck”, but a PNW-equivalent small town and rural white outdoorsy good-time laboring class. And not just that group entire but a selection of the most “urbany” among that – the ones who left their collapsing hometowns in the woods for Portland and often food service, not the ones who left for other outdoors manual and vehicular work in oil fields or the service.
And they are not in fact making more people with memories of 1988, and even a purely equivalent “looking to get out of town as a 20-year-old prep cook”, economically I’m not sure that Portland would make sense as a destination even if it and his hometown elect the same governor.
Like Portland was like “the city” that kids from the country all over the northwest who were not suited to rural isolation would leave their hometowns for –
not just from Oregon and Washington itself, but the Mormon desert and the forested terrain of western Montana and Idaho, even Alaska, the logging industry collapsing just as the pipelines were being built means there’s actually a lot of AK-OR connections, you actually see a solid Hawaiian population, with their state outline, or turtle, or “808” window decals.
(Maybe the Dakotas even but you don’t notice even a high rate of them coming because barely anyone is from there to start with)
And it was funny how that worked, like they’d show up with more modern musical taste already but it would be like “dude you are 23 and married”, but they enriched the place in a way I’m not sure even (interesting!) tech types coming to make it Seattle2/SF3 would.
