Blessed by the Potato

On the topic of suicide I have but three things to say:

1. It will be the last thing you ever do in your life. Don’t fuck it up.

Do some deep inner searching and be sure whether you just want to call out for attention or really want to end it all. If you just want attention then maybe ask for it politely, or stand up on a desk and scream at work or in an exam or something. Don’t go damaging your liver or cutting on yourself just to make a point, you’ll regret it later.

Oh, and it’s down the street, not across the block.

2. Think about it, seriously.

There are many religions in the world. Many of them believe in some form of afterlife or punative reincarnation. Almost all of them frown upon suicide, and the few that do allow it tend to have very specific rules for when it is and is not appropriate. For example, to avoid dishonour or capture, or to blow away any useful bits of brain before the zombies turn you is often acceptable, earning you a “good death.” Doing it because you’re sad, scared, chemically imbalanced, or just really, really fond of flavor-aide yet never developed the ability to critically survey your surroundings generally doesn’t score you any points.

So you need to ask yourself whether it’s worse to just endure what you’ve got going now, or get yourself onto the fasttrack for eternal suffering (or, another go round of a mortal life, only with worse starting conditions). Or, if you’re willing to bet heavily on the atheist point of view, would just going blank and having nothing be better?

Naturally, even after considering the above, many people do go ahead with suicide. Which brings me to an interesting point: where does suicide come from? Is it an evolutionarily supportive behaviour that can somehow perversely be explained along similar lines to altruism?

Basically, you start with depression, which is caused by improper neural firing in the brain that leads to extreme feelings of unwell. It’s a very primal emotion, telling you that things are not right, and it sends all sorts of reinforcement signals to try to get you to escape whatever situation you’re in, to change things, to call out for help. But the thing of it is, you often can’t just up and make things better, so you sort of retreat, and get this severe repression of initiative/action while at the same time an overactive emotional centre. So what I mean is that you sit there with all of this repression going on so that you almost can’t even move (lethargy, fatigue, etc.) but inside your mind is going a mile-a-minute, but you can’t focus on anything since it’s all emotional (so what you can focus on more consciously and logically tends to be your worries, which just makes the emotional state worse).

Since this depression is usually caused by factors outside your control (whether they be real-life factors like a sick relative, a chemical imbalance, or a life gone to the shitter so badly that you just want to call a mulligan and take the last three years over again) so you can’t really do much with your internally raging fight-or-flight type responses, even if you could get past the outer depression (or agoraphobia) holding you in place. So you’re stuck there with these negative feelings (“negative affect” as we call it in smarty-pants class) overwhelming you, sort of the worst thing your brain could do to you (right up there with chronic pain).

Now the interesting thing is that your brain does manage to find an out: via death (though as I said above, I’m not sure it’s necessarily a good out). I find it interesting because in order to see that as a way to stop the suffering, you have to first realize that you’re alive and that being dead will be something different, where maybe this won’t happen. So perhaps suicide is a sign of self-awareness? I’m not familiar with any reports of animals (not even primates) committing suicide, though I do find the prospect morbidly fascinating.

Anyhow, the point is: be sure you’ve thoroughly thought it through since science and almost every religion tells us that this will be a completely irreversable move (assuming you don’t fuck it up: see #1).

3. Be considerate to those you left behind.

I read an interesting statistic recently (one of those damned lies, I’m sure — consider it even less trustworthy than regular statistics since I can’t find the source now) that said that of troubled teens who had decided they would kill themselves, more than twice as many boys went through with it as girls. A correlation with that is that far more boys decided to use jumping, cutting, or death by firearm as their method of choice, while more girls chose drugs or asphyxiation. We can theorize that guys are less considerate, and less afraid of making a big giant mess (with some of the dumb kids I’ve seen around the university, I’m sure they’d be going “cool, look at the splatter!”) so they pick the method that is more effective; with pills you’ve got maybe a whole hour to reconsider and induce vomiting. But seriously, ick. Someone’s going to have to clean that up.

Which brings me to another point: many people say that putting up suicide barriers on bridges and restricting handgun availability won’t reduce the suicide rate, since there are so many ways to kill yourself if you’re determined. Yet it is much easier to kill yourself with a handgun than it is with other methods — that is, after all, their purpose and heck, people do it accidentally sometimes by not unloading them before cleaning. Once you force them to take that extra step, you give them another chance to reconsider, and I’m sure that would lead to a drop (even if only a minor one). Similar reasoning applies to crime: while crooks can rob, kill, and maim with a knife or hunting rifle, it is decidedly harder to pull off than it is with a handgun or assault rifle.

Back to being considerate. This comes in two basic parts.

3-a. Leave a note. Be as accurate as you can, since you won’t be able to answer follow-up questions. Try to leave out some of the morbidity, and always try to spare the feelings of those who will be grieving (if you want to blame it all on your boss, then go ahead, since he’s a dick who probably isn’t grieving; after all, he’s the one that drove you to your early grave — but never, ever say anything that could be construed as blame on your mother).

No matter how moody, how depressed, how down-on-your-luck, no matter how goth, no matter how many hours you wasted on AOL before you got real internet, nobody ever sees your suicide coming, so you’ve got to explain it to them. They won’t understand. They probably won’t afterwards either, but you have to try. Remember, while you somehow came to the conclusion that it was the only way left, everyone else sees it as a hugely extreme move to take, something so far out there as to be inconceivable (or at the very least, unpredicatable).

This stipulation has other benefits: as you compose your thoughts into your last message to the universe you might just attain that moment of perfect clarity where you can see the solution the problems in your life (or at least put them in perspective), which may make you change your mind.

3-b. Don’t make a mess. Unless it really plays an important part in the artistic motif you’re going for, keep the gore to a minimum. Don’t disrupt traffic by jumping from an overpass or into the subway (come on, that’s just rude). Someone is at some point going to find you, so you probably want to find a balance between forcing your roommate/family to stumble on you and the severely public methods, while at the same time not being too hidden: when you go missing, they’ll look for you, and eventually they’ll find you. No point in being hidden so well that you get all gross and corpsified during the search. Also, as applies to #3 in general (consideration for the living), a long search is heart-wrenching, since the whole time they’ll be fearing the worst while still holding out hope. Remember, someone is going to have to find and clean up after you.

I think that’s all I have to say on the topic. More on important matters like Kraft Dinner later.

It’s been a recurring theme here, but it bears repeating: I have no idea what to do about hosting. Something that would go a long way towards helping me make my decision would be an idea of how many people use this site; a census of sorts. So I’m asking everyone who hasn’t already left a comment to please leave me one just so I know how many unique users there are. If you’re shy, you can email me at holypotato at gmail instead. Or, you can leave a comment with 3 or more URLs in it, which will then cause it to be caught by my spam filter. I can from there delete it without anyone seeing it.

To encourage you, I’m going to offer a cookie to anyone who leaves a comment to this post. I’m assuming, of course, that right now I’ve only got a small handful of readers located in a small geographic area (that is, friends of mine, or friends of friends). If it’s not feasible to get a cookie to you (or if you wish to remain pseudoanonymous, which I totally understand), then perhaps we can work out some other form of cheap-as-free incentive.

Edit: yes, a real sugary cookie, not some truly worthless tracking file in your web browser.

On to other matters: Kraft Dinner.

It really deserves it’s very own post, but I’ve been wondering lately why I like it so much, and couldn’t wait to author a proper post. It’s so artificial, and it’s not even all that cheap any more (the logs now run at just about a dollar, and the fancy white cheese, spirals, and three cheese flavours all top $1.50). But I love it any way. Not a month goes by where I don’t have a pot, and usually more like once a week. My cat likes it, too, which only strikes me as a little bit strange. What’s really weird though, is that I hate macaroni and cheese, by which I’m referring to that casserole stuff with real macaroni noodles and honest-to-goodness cheddar cheese baked on top.

I’ve had an interesting few days over here. As far as I know, I’ve only slept 8 hours in 2 days (based on time clocked in bed since I got back to the L-dot on Sunday night), yet I’m missing more time than that. For instance, I’ve been working on 4 things since I got up from my nap yesterday: my BEMs abstract, shopping for a new computer online with Wayfare, looking for information on my Windoze error (see last post), and these two posts.

Somehow, it’s tomorrow morning, and I never went to bed.

I know I’m a lot slower in the head lately, especially since my kidney incident, but I know I “only” spent 2.5 hours laptop shopping with Wayfare, an hour on the website and windoze error, and there’s no way it took me another 7 to do my BEMs abstract. Makes me wonder if I’m blacking out or something. Quite possible, since I don’t feel any more tired after this unintentional all-nighter than I have for the last month or so. In fact, right now I’m feeling less tired than I was yesterday afternoon when I just had to stop and take a nap.

Having watched Fight Club recently, it makes me wonder if my kidney pain might have an alternative explanation…

Edit: I just rememered, I played almost an hour of Warcraft as well, but that was multitasked with the laptop shopping (I just tabbed out a lot; I was just making potions and stuff to get ready for tonight’s raid). Other than that, I haven’t played any video games in almost a week (since Thursday’s raid). I haven’t even installed Civ4 on my desktop here. Maybe the stress of not playing that really did make me go crazy…

I’ve had a strange error in Windows XP for several months now. It’s intermittent and as far as I can tell, random. I’ve had no luck searching the web for solutions, so any advice would be greatly valued.

What happens is basically folders will stop responding. I can open up one folder, and then a few seconds later if I try to open another folder file within that folder, there will be no response. No error message, nothing. Right-clicking a file to try to get properties also yields no information. During this error opening subfolders never works, but sometimes I can open files (though I can’t right-click for properties, and if files do open, there’s always a 20 second or so delay).

Usually the last folder I successfully open won’t have a menu bar, just a white space with the windows logo (see the image below). In case you don’t see the distinction, that space usually contains “File, Edit, View…” etc.

If I wait long enough (usually 10 minutes or more), functionality comes back. If it happened once though, it will likely happen again within a few hours, and every few hours until I reset. It very rarely happens within a day of a reset.

In other news, another record number of hits yesterday: a whopping 79. It’s enough to make me wonder if there’s someone out there hitting refresh a million times a day (or if my own testing of the RSS capabilities did the same… I don’t think they would, but it’s possible). Hardly anyone’s leaving comments, so I’m inclined to think that this isn’t real traffic. If it is though, it might be time to look into a new web host to handle that sort of load. I’ve had suggestions for blacksun.ca, hostgator.com, and lunarpages.com. If anyone has any other suggestions, or more importantly, if you get any sort of kickback for referring me, leave a comment! (All else being equal, I might as well go with the host who’ll give my friends a free month, eh?)

I’ve been a long-time fan of Mozilla (now known as SeaMonkey). Except for those few sites that have poor HTML compatability or use ActiveX (or just don’t work for no reason at all, like Yahoo Launchcast), it works really well. I love tabbed browsing, since even in the Netscape 3.0 days I had a billion windows open, usually flowing over into the second level of my start menu (how my 486 handled it, I’ll never know).

Things I love about Mozilla:

1. Tabbed browsing. ‘Nuff said.
2. Tabbed bookmarks: I can open a bunch of tabs, and bookmark them all together. This is handy first off for essentially saving your session if you need to shutdown and reset, but also for streamlining daily browsing. Every day, I read Dilbert, check the weather, check the space weather, check the news, some other comics, etc. Rather than going through my bookmarks one at a time, I simply click on the tabbed bookmark and it opens all of them at once in separate tabs.
3. Not having to always second guess what I’m opening. True, you have to have some modicum of common sense when surfing, since no platform is invulnerable, but it’s nice not having the software compeletly riddled with security holes, and moreover, not having it so intimately tied into the operating system.
4. A decent email client. It does everything I want it to, and again, I don’t have to worry quite so much about what viruses I might get sent, since it’s not outlook.
5. Password/form saves that are protected by a master password.

Oddly enough, despite being such a big fan of the full Mozilla suite, I’ve never quite made the shift to Firefox. The minor differences in Firefox never really appealed to me. For example, since it’s more of a browser for the masses, the configuration options are more limited (at least the ones through the menu: you can still tweak everything by going into the prefs.js file). One thing that really irks me is that when I bookmark a group of tabs, I have to do one more step to get them all to open up (previously it was simply bookmarks->morning_reading now it’s bookmarks->morning_reading->open in tabs). It does have some things not present in the old suite, such as live bookmarks (which don’t work for my own site due to the way I tried to ensure I could survive a change in IP — the live bookmark requires some absolute URLs where I have relative ones). They’re kind of neat: you access a site’s RSS feed to see what’s new so you can tell if it’s been updated before you even open the link.

It’s also a bit leaner, so it loads faster. But other than that, I’m not hugely impressed with Firefox vs. the full Mozilla suite. Sadly, they’re no longer maintaining the full suite (at least not to the same degree, from what I understand the SeaMonkey project, aside from a horrible new name, doesn’t have the same resources as before).

For email, I’m using Thunderbird. I find it’s actually an improvment over the mail package of the full suite, largely in the ability to search messages (not just by sender or subject or within current message, but you can do full-text searches of all your messages when looking for that one archived email). However, I miss having them integrated. True, it makes those rare browser crashes a little more graceful, but I miss being able to right-click on a link in my email and choosing whether to open it in the current window, a new one, or bookmark it. Ah, well, I suppose I’ll learn to live with it.

Both of these packages are highly expandable with add-ons, which is handy. One that is hilarious and completely useless is Bork Bork Bork! an extension to view webpages as though read by the Swedish Chef. One that I’m fond of is the calendar extension… for the old Mozilla suite. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with the current Firefox or Thunderbird, and has somehow perversely spun off into its own stand-alone program Sunbird. One sad downside of this spin-off is that since it no longer has a bundled email client, the email reminders no longer work. These were great for using my calendar at home to email me reminders while I was at work. The only problem was when I forgot to put my meetings in the calendar in the first place.

Correction: If you search for the calendar on its own, rather than from the Thunderbird extensions, you’ll find the days-old update that does work with the current version of Thunderbird. Sadly, it didn’t automagically import the events from my old calendar install. Everything else seems to work just fine, though. Another disappointment is that in the old Mozilla Suite, the calendar had a start menu icon of a calendar, now it shares the same icon as Thunderbird.

So I don’t really know what I’m going to do now. Tonight I installed Firefox & Thunderbird, and this is the first blog post I’m writing on it. These are all minor problems, and I still prefer this over IE/OE, but I have a feeling I might slip back towards SeaMonkey. Of course, I can see how for many people, the stand-alone Firefox is better. After all, many people only have webmail accounts now, and so have no need for a POP/IMAP client like Thunderbird. Plus, separate programs (even though they are incestually related in their rich content message rendering) is the way Micro$oft does things, so why shouldn’t Mozilla follow that lead?

Some quick tips for new Firefox/Mozilla users:

• F11 will get rid of the title bar and status bar, making your viewable page area as large as possible. F11 again to bring it all back.
• CTRL-T opens a new tab; CTRL-N for a new window.
• CTRL-click a link to open it in a new tab.
• The bookmarks toolbar is a handy way to keep those most essential dozen or so bookmarks readily available. If you don’t really need it though, then you might as well uncheck it from the “view” menu and give yourself another line of viewable page space.
• You can use Thunderbird to subscribe to blogs and get them automagically downloaded to your computer just like an email message. It’s not as pretty, but it can be faster. Note that this does work for my site, unlike the live bookmarks. I’m in the process of writing a quick tutorial on it, watch the page pane on the right for more.