Five years ago today, I wrote A Unusual Anniversary to Celebrate, which was my five-year reflection on the day I realized I wanted to kill myself, and almost did. Another half-decade has passed, so I think it's time to revisit the story.
( Read more... )Something interesting about Dreamwidth is how much more easily I encounter abandoned accounts compared to on other social websites. Honestly, this place feels more like a cemetery than anything else a lot of the time. That's probably my single biggest hurdle to being more active: it's very difficult to find people to follow who are still posting regularly.
Like, sure, there's plenty of people posting. But if we're trying to find people with similar interests, it can get a lot harder. I don't think I'm the only person who's registered any of the interests I've listed on my profile, but often it's a small number and I'm the only one who's posted in years. Today I added "cosmism" and realized there's only one other account listing that, and they last posted in 2012. So much for finding people who want to talk about that!
The same thing goes when looking at accounts that subscribe or are subscribed to—for the most part, they're pretty quiet. Now, that's often the case on other sites, as well, but the usual way we find new people on sites like Tumblr or Twitter is that their content was shared with us. That doesn't really happen here. If you don't already have an active crew, it can be very quiet.
I still kinda think this is an interesting platform, probably due to some misplaced nostalgia for the internet when I was just a kid lurking with my parents' tower computer, but there's a reason I'm using Tumblr daily and forget to log in here for months at a time. There's just not really anything to see or do here. Does anybody want to set up a Neocities webring?
Everyone calls me a pessimist but the truth is that I'm an insufferable optimist.
I had such high hopes for 2023 and instead it's become a nightmare. I've been stuck living back at my parents house since March, and spent most of April and June playing 24-7 caregiver while also trying to work my 40 hours a week. This has not gone well, I'm approaching my physical and emotional breaking point, and I'm getting basically no cooperation on getting back to place where we all can resume something that vaguely resembles our lives.
Since I've had basically zero social life since the end of March (and precious little fun of any sort), I've tried out dating apps and now suspect more strongly than ever before that I'll be forever alone. So that's not helping one bit.
I don't really have a point here besides what I said back on Tumblr. Death and dying delenda est, let me live my frakking life for a change.
I basically didn't use Dreamwidth this year. Turns out, having a 9-to-5 is rather time-consuming, and even moreso now that I have to commute. But with the centralized socials seemingly committing coordinated seppuku, I figure I ought to give this site another shot.
All told, I feel like I'm doing a lot better in my life. My new job is a lot more in-line with my interests and skills (and comes with more status). My coworkers are friendlier and actually kind of fun to work with. I'm making some friends through the local rationalist group, which is more than I managed back in Virginia. I have a longer commute, but I'm starting to use that time for audiobooks to keep my reading progress moving forward. I have a nicer, larger, quieter apartment that I'm paying less for. And even on the winter solstice, I'm not feeling remotely as much seasonal affective crap as I was by this time last year. Turns out, if an apartment doesn't have its own lighting*, it's really easy to get depressed!
I'm still trying to finish grad school, I still behave akratically, I'm still not at my optimal socialization level, and I'm still single. I still have problems. But I have a lot fewer problems than I had in my old job, and a clearer path forward from where I am now. Changing jobs after less than a year in the workforce was stressful, expensive, time-consuming, and exhausting, but in the end it was definitely worth it for me.
2022 was a year of transition. 2023 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for me for the first time since...ever? I guess the future finally is happening after all.
*I cannot for the life of me figure out what the builders were thinking with my old place. Only the kitchen and the bathroom were remotely well-lit by the installed lights. You'd have to buy a dozen lamps to make it properly light in there.
I quit my job, which I didn't like and wasn't at all good at, and took another position that I think is a better fit for my skills and career interests. Unfortunately, it's in another city, so I'm moving halfway across the country for a second time in less than a year. I'm not getting as much assistance in the process this time around, either.
Despite all the stuff I have to do in the next *checks calendar* two weeks, I'm cautiously optimistic this will be a better environment than where I am right now. At the very least, I'll be closer to much of my family—weekending if not daytripping distance from my grandfather. Unfortunately, I'm so used to things being insanely far away that even the thought of meeting new people and seeing new things less than a month from now isn't motivating. I just want to avoid the work that really can't be put off any longer, and that isn't a remotely effective strategy.
This is my first New Year's Eve by myself, though I can't say I feel too alone with suddenly-noisy neighbors above my head. At least I can avoid the worst of the vapidity I complained about two years ago, though not to the extent I'd hoped.
All told, despite everyone's best efforts, this was a fairly successful year, and I'm at least cautiously optimistic about my prospects for the next. Having your own disposable income makes a huge difference in capacity to deal with the problems everyone seems so eager to manufacture. And maybe in another orbit's time, I won't have to spend it alone.
I think my biggest sociological takeaway as we cross two years of coronavirus is that a zombie apocalypse would have a tremendous amount of ground support from uninfected people on the ground. This support would be divided into two groups:
This probably isn't an exhaustive list, but these are two big camps I could easily see forming based on what we've seen with COVID-19.
I hate to feel this pessimistic about the long-term, but it's hard to be optimistic about the state of America. Between the Afghanistan "withdraw", Republicans continuing to side with pestilence, and Boeing having yet another delay with Starliner, there's not a lot of evidence for the civilizational competence I expect we'll need to survive the 21st century in roughly one piece. A poor night's sleep and the start of fall allergies obviously aren't helping my perception, but these things really are bad.
My personal life is basically fine; I need to wrap up my degree but I've got a decent job and have plans to move out in a few months. But all of this makes me think I should both put serious effort into minimizing potential future downsides (even well out into what I would have previously considered the long tail), as well as put some real effort into trying to construct that civilizational competence that I'm honestly not sure we ever actually had.
After many more years than I expected it would take, I've finally started my first full-time engineering job. I didn't even end up in structures and/or aviation; I'm training to be a communications satellite operations engineer.
It's not exactly the sort of work I wanted to be doing, and there's a good chance I won't be staying with this company for all that long. For the next couple of years, though, it'll be good money and get me some real-world experience with spacecraft systems. From there, I can start looking for work that's more aligned with my interests (hopefully before I get too-fully locked into a typecast).
I'm still not done with my thesis, and I also have an Incomplete in one of the classes I took this semester, so the next few months are still going to be pretty rough, even though I technically have real weekends now. My goal is to finish my degree before I relocate in the fall.
I've basically spent the past six weeks trying to characterize the radiation that astronauts would be exposed to in deep space, and develop a model for shielding astronauts from said radiation. I didn't think it would take remotely this long.
Part of the problem is that scientific and engineering researchers are terrible writers. I already knew this, but I'm being viscerally reminded of it every time I try to decipher the notation in some technical paper. I think that technological progress is probably significantly slowed by how opaque many results are, even when the whole point is ostensibly to share those results. I think there's two changes that we need to make here. First, we need to teach actual technical writing. English classes can't do it; we need dedicated technical composition classes. (We also need to beat every professor who insists their students write with passive voice and no pronouns with a stick until they confess the error of their ways.) Second, we need to fix the incentives in publishing that lead to prioritizing publication volume of quality. (I don't think there's a violent solution here; we're gonna have to do p o l i c y.)
That complaint aside, there's a lot of weirdness going on under the hood. Even if writers could communicate their positions clearly, many of them are using different figures of merit and reaching different results. Just combing through that to figure out the true shielding efficacy of aluminum versus water against galactic cosmic rays would be time-consuming enough.
When I picked out this topic, I thought it would be too easy. Just scale the shielding with mission length to hold exposure constant—easy, right? As if. As it turns out, there's a lot of complications here and the equations are anything if linear. I'm going to pick a half-value thickness for aluminum-cum-water shielding today and run with that, because otherwise I'm going to get stuck in analysis paralysis. My thesis isn't going to permanently settle any questions about manned Mars missions; it's just an engineering exercise to explore the design space and prove that I'm smart enough to hire. After all, getting a job is the whole reason I'm still a student.
I've been reading the Atomic Rockets website a lot lately for thesis-related reasons, and it's got me just as the verge of wanting to write fiction again. I did a little bit over winter break before everything fell apart, and aside from that I haven't really done any since I finished my summer NaNoWriMo book.
There's an obvious reason for that, which is that grad school is eating up all my time three-times over, and would be even if my parents weren't letting their abuser live rent-free in our house (and passing the corresponding emotional, and in many cases physical, labor on to me). But maybe once I finish classes in May, and have some sort of income—whether it's a full-time engineering position or whatever part-time work I can scrounge up around here—I can put a little energy into the various ideas I've been kicking around.
Unlike in 2019, both this year and last I'm making no effort to even try avoiding The Knowledge. We may not be particularly sports-focused family in general, but when the hometown team is in the Super Bowl, even my parents will watch a football game.
Even if I weren't living with my parents anymore, I would probably not make a serious attempt, but someone on some social media platform I use would make a post I'd see about it. I'm not sure if that would still be true if I weren't living at home and some other set of teams was there, however. It'll be interesting, one day, possibly in 2022, to find out.
Somehow, I've started thinking of myself as 27, even though there's still a few months till that particular birthday rolls around. I wonder why that's happening. Perhaps it's just another indicator of how ready I am to graduate and move out (which will happen around the same time).
Biden putting a moon rock in the Oval Office probably signals a stronger commitment to NASA and federal science/R&D investment in general than Trump actually achieved. Replacing the portrait of Andrew Jackson with Ben Franklin doesn't hurt, either.
This doesn't mean that Biden will ultimately deliver on Artemis etc., because the Trump Administration underfunded those efforts so drastically that I don't think any serious commentator still expects astronauts back on Luna by the end of 2024. We're not spending Apollo levels on Artemis—if we're going to start throwing that kind of money around, it ought to be for vaccination and contract-tracing. But more serious White House budget requests for NASA and other research agencies is probably on the table for the next four years.
There's a line of argumentation surrounding COVID-19 mitigation strategies which can be uncharitably summarized as "but we can't stay in lockdown forever, right?" This line of argumentation has fallen completely flat with me, and I've figured out why. Setting aside the fact that nowhere in the United States has a stay-at-home order even remotely approached a Wuhan-style lockdown, I don't really find this all that exceptional.
See, I've had to put my life on hold, for years at a time, on multiple occasions in my adult life—I am the ripe old age of 26—because so-called responsible adults were unable to think clearly and logically about a problem. Failing to deal with a pandemic because "cloth on a string" was too complicated for the Centers for Disease Control and President of the United States is, as far as my subconscious is concerned, par for the fucking course.
I'm certainly impatient to get the jab and get back to blasting my meatspace friends with particles, but let's be clear that saving lives is a much better value to pursue than my parents fucking over my junior and senior years of undergrad in the name of hosting parties.
Maybe this is old news for most people, but one of the side benefits of helping Mom set up a new laptop yesterday was finally find out why older adults tend to say "foxfire" when discussing Firefox (as in, the browser). Apparently there's a back-to-nature magazine named Foxfire that was popular back in the 1960s and 70s, which itself is named after a type of bioluminescent fungi.
This explanation, and my parent's generation's confusion about the browser name, now make perfect sense to me. It's a sufficiently non-obvious explanation that I could go a decade without realizing it, but sufficiently powerful to explain why the misnomer seems so pervasive.
I tried and failed to read this article at the Niskanen Center about the failure of the small government movement the other day. Despite an initially strong analysis, it quickly fell apart into another, extremely sloppy instance of the "libertarians wish we had that kind of influence in the halls of power" think-piece genre. Despite that, it got me thinking about the failure of pro-market messaging on the mainstream.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that libertarians are atrociously bad at messaging. The fact that Dan Behrman wasn't laughed out of the 2020 primary (to say nothing of Vermin Supreme) should be more than enough evidence of that fact. Radicals of all stripes stay attached to slogans long past any marginal rhetorical return has vanished, and the "taxation is theft" types are no exception.
I can see a couple of reasons for this. First and perhaps foremost, radicals are not trying to convince moderates, but signalling their radicalism to other radicals of the same stripe. This dynamic turns radicals into extremists in real time. There's a joke that the difference between Ron Paul Republican and an anarcho-capitalist is six months. It exaggerates, but not greatly. I've seen it play out among those who didn't have other ideological obligations to forestall the process.
Second, non-mainstream ideologies select for systematizing thinkers who see and cannot accept the contradictions of modern liberalism and conservatism. If anything, libertarianism overselects for systematizing types moreso than other forms of radicalism, because it doesn't promise the loot that things like socialism and neoreaction do.
Combine these and probably many other important factors I'm not considering, and you get the current state of affairs, where politicians play lip service to free markets, but in practice just blow up the deficit with tax cuts while keeping the subsidies for their corporate cronies and leaving the regulations choking small business growth intact.
I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think a good starting point would be an emphasis on clear, precise, and complete messaging. Many, many capitalist ideas get watered-down into something that serves special interests instead of leveling the playing field. My favorite example of this is supply-side economics, which was originally about reducing the cost of goods and service by increasing production. Somehow, this got reimagined as trickle-down economics, which implies that giving money to rich people is the most efficient way to help poor people. The equation of these two could only be achieved by the loosest, muddiest of thinkers—which is to say, exactly the sort of person who thrives in Washington, D. C.
Rhetorical and terminological shortcuts may save time, but at the cost of the message. Avoid them like the plague—or how we liked to think people would avoid the plague, before we had one and found that everyone is desperate to spread disease if it interferes with brunch. Virtually any existing term or slogan is emotionally-loaded, so explain the idea as clearly as possible before introducing the word or phrase in question. This is a good strategy in general, because it pushes an audience to confront its implicit associations. But it's especially valuable if you're trying to explain what you mean by concepts like "capitalism". Simply saying the words isn't enough, because many people use conflicting definitions. Don't let your message get caught in that.
Spotify keeps serving up ads about businesses that are open again, and phrasing it as "good news". Personally, I find this terrifying because we haven't gotten coronavirus remotely under control, and nevertheless most of the country is throwing in the towel. This is a national marshmallow test and American is failing.
I'm taking a few days off social media (DreamWidth excepted, of course) because I could feel it affecting my mental health, and I'm struck by how different my Internet experience is. My overall experience, frankly, because right now I don't have a whole lot specifically going on.
It's a bit like the summers during my first couple years of high school. I don't have anywhere to be, I don't have anywhere to go, and I don't have anything in particular to do. Normally—as in, as recently as yesterday morning—I would spend much this time on Tumblr or Twitter. Without that, I'm sort of at loose ends. Back in high school, I spent a lot of time online, reading assorted websites and debating in comments sections. I have no desire to do that anymore, so I'm left wondering what to do.
In practice, the answer is spending more time reading physical books in the last 24 hours than the previous week. I can't complain about this change that much. I'm also toying around with how to approach Summer NaNoWriMo (more on that later) and pondering what I should do for my thesis. But I was doing those last two already.
All told, it's a kind of strange experience. I see why I was much more open to watching TV and rereading the same books ad nauseam, to say nothing of my endless Word documents and packs of notebook paper with abandoned story ideas.
I did not have the outgoing Libertarian National Committee Chairman publicly telling off the crypto-fascists in the party on my 2020 political bingo card, but I am absolutely here for it.
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