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| Friday, May 25th, 2012 | | 9:49 pm |
Happy to report I've been very calm and content lately, I think I've taken some of the realizations from my last bout of debugging to heart…
One oddly encouraging thing is, today I'm actually having a rather manic/stressy day, but it's not affecting me as much emotionally!
Yesterday felt like it was going to be an endorphin-seeking missile day, but I actually calmed down out of it instead.
Change is possible. :)
(I suppose the real test will be the con next weekend…!)
Today made me realise that I don't understand what panic is supposed to accomplish. And how can I feel like "I need to do something pleasant to offset all this stuff I have to worry about", when pleasant things don't actually do anything to make the worrying things go away? How can I "need" pleasant things instead of just enjoying them, to put it another way? I've set my whole life up around the idea of what I can "manage", mood-wise. And while certainly mood is an important factor -- why even keep living if there's nothing to enjoy about it -- the idea that I can't "make it through" something temporary if it isn't pleasant enough is suddenly striking me as a really bizarre way to live... I mean, in what way would the lack of pleasantness "stop" me? The idea of being stopped dead in my tracks if anything ever makes me bored... I dunno, it all seems so obvious now, but the fact that I felt self-evidently powerless to it before makes me worry that it's a state I've just temporarily slipped out of, and as soon as I'm back in it I'll understand why. I guess it's a kind of psychic pain... though, pain can be overlooked... it could certainly be a sort of mental exhaustion, I've definitely been in states where I can't finish a thought because my brain feels so depleted (though if that were it, would pleasure really rejuvenate against it?)... Anyway, as with most of my problems, the fear of encountering the problem is worse than the problem itself, so even if I'm not free from it for good, hopefully remembering this mindset will at least keep me from automatically driving myself into the ditch anytime I'm close enough to it to worry myself into paralysis by worrying about worrying myself into paralysis. ;p | | Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 | | 11:05 pm |
| | Friday, May 18th, 2012 | | 9:34 am |
Dreamt I was playing a game that was 1/3 Out Of This World, 1/3 Prince Of Persia, and 1/3 Switch... if you selected easy mode, the game consisted of an animation of the programmer's mother beating up gang members in new york city (though the animation would only keep playing as long as you kept shaking the motion-sensitive controller ;p). The game was for some weird, obscure console that for some reason had become really popular onboard the space station of the mining consortium slash parasite-worship cult I was producing a documentary about. | | Thursday, May 17th, 2012 | | 10:11 am |
I spend all this time trying to cook up convoluted ways to meet people, and then I'm afraid of them when I do meet them. :P
like the dog who chases a car, with no idea what he'd do when he catches it…
and the only reason I'm even trying to meet new people is because my brain automatically discredits any praise from anyone I already know :P
The trouble with my brand of anxiety is, it's self-inflicted; I keep catching my brain trying to escalate things to "AAAAAAGH" levels, just because it seems to be bored if it doesn't.... like, if I decide to do something (like pour a bowl of cereal), my brain will just on reflex try and make me feel like it'll be a disaster if I don't do it, just so I'll have some motivation to get out of my chair.... I'm getting better at catching that habit before it happens and shutting it down, but it's an awful lot to keep track of, and when I have something more immediate on my mind (like a deadline at work), that mindfulness is the first thing to go... Long story short, I couldn't figure out why I've been stumped trying to come up with a concept for an Ask Blog on Tumblr (think amateur Strong Bad), until it finally sank in that while I'm very fond of the theoretical idea of attracting people's attention.... I can't think of any actual group of people who I would want the attention of in practice :P And I can't figure out which reflex is the invalid one.... are there people whose attention I'd want, if I weren't startled out of the idea on reflex? Or is the desire to seek more peoples' attention when I already have more nice friends than I can understand just a vague longing for the validation of a stranger, which is the only kind of validation my bias-fearing brain will accept, even though as soon as it's received I disregard it by definition? :P Looking back on how much crazy introspection I've been doing lately, I know I've been down this road before, and I can already smell that pretty soon I'll decide to just disregard it all and live my life without introspection for a while, and that's probably the way to go... I think the need to introspect so hard is actually just the result of another one of those brain escalations; I'm mildly discontent, so my brain just sticks its foot on the accelerator as far down as it goes and waits for my head to resonate into an explosion of over-thinking attempts to codify vague unimportant longings into problems that have to be solved.... still, I know I've learned to get over a few bad reflexes through all this, so I guess it's a question of learning to find a happy medium. Off to work! | | Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 | | 10:43 pm |
Also:
Does anyone know any calendar software that plots the year as a straight line?
Preferably letting you set up event categories in their own 'lanes' on that highway…
I now realise, it's not even "the year" but time in general.... I want to only ever scroll left+right to move through time (none of this 'wrapping' nonsense) and I want to be able to scroll up and down to see different categories (birthdays, appointments, work milestones)... I know precisely how I want it to look because I always make them by hand when I need to chart something out, so I'll write the software myself if I have to, but surely I'm not the only person who wants a timeline calendar, it must already be out there somewhere. I've got enough projects hanging over me already without taking on one so pedestrian. ;p | | 10:29 pm |
Realising that I've got this weird subconscious notion that I don't deserve to be happy, for some reason…
My life is a battle between my (largely successful) conscious attempts to make myself happy, and my subconscious efforts to undermine them…!
So much of what motivates me is leftover guilt/fear from when I was young and I didn't understand how the world works.
A few years ago I forgave myself for it, but I haven't been able to forget, and I'm still obsessed with trying to atone…
This all sounds like such a downer, sorry :P
Still sort of semi-relaxed today... I still feel like I'm mostly in the rare "physically relaxed" state, but it feels much more tenuous than yesterday. Being physically relaxed is so odd, I feel it in the strangest places -- my sinuses feel so different, and my face is almost numb from all the tension that usually occupies it being absent.... plus I fart like crazy. I also get tired more easily, though not exhausted, which I think says a lot about how much anxiety usually props me up, and might be interfering with my normal sleep... but even just in the way I can feel my legs threatening to clench back up to how they usually are -- but when I AM stressed out, I never take notice of how taut they are..... it makes me sad to think how many people there probably are in the world who are that tense right now, and are so deep in the middle of it that they have no idea there's an alternative..... then again, most people drink :P Anyway, we'll see how long this calmness lasts -- even on the walk home, I was struggling to remain relaxed, and struggling by definition pretty much means you've lost :P -- but if nothing else it's served as a reminder of what the full spectrum of relaxation is, and an opportunity for a little bit of realisation. A long time ago I realised that I should never be afraid to reflect on or question anything..... somewhere along the way it feels like I forgot that until just now. I really need to get into that because I am spending exhausting amounts of energy being absolutely terrified of things for reasons that turn out to be utterly insubstantial when I actually stop and question them.
"There is nothing to lose by relaxing". I need to tape this to my computer or something.
| | 9:37 am |
Having AVG pop up every 10 minutes and ask me to reboot is doing an awfully effective job of keeping me aware of the passage of time... I'm half-tempted to rig up something like this to run constantly, at least until I develop a sense for it.... | | 9:27 am |
| | Monday, May 14th, 2012 | | 9:08 pm |
Also:
wth… okay, today's lesson is, flash's vector rendering is apparently smart enough to draw front-to-back and skip occluded pixels??
But it treats an ENTIRE image-with-transparency as transparent, even the 100% opaque pixels…
I'll probably write this up in more detail on LJ tonight…
Long story short, in a game with transparency-heavy background layers, I found that performance actually IMPROVED when I rendered the level overtop in opaque bitmap tiles... I don't just mean it improved over when the foreground tiles were semitransparent, I mean it improved over rendering NO FOREGROUND TILES AT ALL. This flies in the face of everything that I've observed about Flash's rendering over the years, but... I mean, there's no arguing with the results. :P Anyway, I'm too lazy to get into it now, but if anyone (anonymous googler or otherwise) is curious about the results, leave a comment... | | 9:00 pm |
A thought: what if my anxiety is just an aversion I've developed to an innate quality of my own thoughts…
Rather than looking for something external, it could be something in my own head, a habit…
and I don't have to stop that habit… just accept it and thus stop hating myself for it!
I know it all sounds abstract in words, but this feels like it fits better than anything yet…
Even though I haven't put my finger on exactly what mental process I'm averse to, I've been startlingly calm ever since this realisation set in... Just realising that I'm afraid of something in my own head was apparently enough for me to realise it can't hurt me, I guess..? More to the point, though: The hardest part of making psychological progress isn't actually making it – it's keeping it, instead of slipping when you get distracted :P I was reading the other day about the phenomenon called spontaneous recovery, whereby it is far far easier to teach a brain that a pattern exists than to teach it that one does not exist... once an association has been made, it can subsequently be un-taught by enough observation of the pattern's nonexistence -- but at the first indication that the pattern might exist after all, the brain immediately snaps back into total belief in it, and will need to be talked all the way back out of it all over again. This happens in rats, and goodness knows it happens in humans... Anyway, all that to say, it's very easy to get discouraged by an apparent lack of progress. I keep catching myself fretting about the same things I've already addressed -- even if I remember how I addressed them, sometimes! It seems like, when I catch myself worrying, that remembering that a problem has been solved is enough to prevent the worry from worsening, but not usually enough to undo the worrying damage that's been done.... I dunno, it's all so vague. It seems so weird and ethereal now, despite how omnipresent it's been for the past few weeks. I truly do believe, though, that even though it keeps getting bad, every time it gets bad it's a little less bad than the time before.... so maybe I really am internalizing some of this, if painfully little every time. ;P But really, trying to emotionally accept the realisations that I reach intellectually is always the one step that I don't know how to lead myself to, so hopefully when it does happen, it counts for something... I feel like there's a lot more to this narrative to address, but like I said, I'm actually feeling mercifully distanced from the whole thing at the moment, so I think I might leave it that way for now. ;) | | Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | | 10:00 am |
Dreamt there was this creepy dude in a creepy mask who was standing in the office elevator all day, staring creepily at anyone who got in
and when I finally got up the nerve to ask Security who he is, he revealed himself to be this totally friendly guy who was just pranking us.
Can't figure out if that's some reflection of the assumptions I make about people's hostility or what. :P
I realised the other day, something like... I think I've caught myself dealing with the threat of random people potentially being dangerous through a wonderful feat of flawed logic; if I just act like every stranger is out to get me, then when none of them actually do, I feel like I'm doing a good job of dealing with threats! Whereas, if I admitted that most people would be fine to hold a conversation with, then if I ever found myself in a situation where I DID feel threatened, I wouldn't feel like I have a body of experience "dealing with the problem" to fall back on :P Not to mention, I guess some of it involves feeling like I seem like less of a target when I seem aggressive-by-default, rather than having to suddenly take on that appearance once a bad situation presents itself... I mean, there isn't shit all I could do to defend myself if anything ever happened, but being 6'3 and scowly, I can give an imposing look that hopefully makes muggers and such walk past me in hopes of finding an easier target... (as they say, when outrunning a bear, you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the slowest person in the crowd :p) I feel like this is darker than most of my recent introspective posts! I apologize for that... just sorta startling to realise that my general lack of concern over stranger danger is predicated on a fallacy, and one that's arguably having a negative impact on how I interact with potentially-friendly people, while probably not actually having any effect on the people who would actually threaten me... (although it's so hard to justify deciding to just take that risk...!) Anyway, I feel like this ties into larger issues (not being willing to change my behaviour to reflect things that I don't want to believe are true, I mean) but I should probably just get going X3 | | Monday, May 7th, 2012 | | 8:58 pm |
[9:30 AM]
drowsybraaaaaain…
Torn between trying to rest before work, and just dragging myself in so I'll be home sooner X3
work'll probably wake me up faster than FA, off I go ;p
[10:30 AM]
...
[11:00 AM]
okay, well, on the way to the front door I decided to lie down in the hallway and couldn't get up for half an hour… 9.9
finally stumbled to bed, gonna see if I can't nap my way out of this
never did ask if I tested positive for narcolepsy, I should check next time I'm talking to the sleep doc
[11:00 AM]
...
[12:30 PM]
okay, been in bed for an hour and a half, oscillating between sleep and paralysis… clearly rest is not the solution…
Arright, gonna have a stab at heading into the office, we'll see if I'm of any use by the time I get there
The weird thing is, this doesn't even feel like the same exhaustion as last week, it's soupy-headedness instead of weariness…
[1:00 PM]
...
[6:00 PM]
Brain's finally starting to come back to normal. Phwoof…
I've certainly had drowsy days before, but today might be the worst one I can remember. I can't tell you exactly how my brain talked me into lying down in the hallway -- I think I bent down to pick something up, and then just decided it was a good place to continue being -- but I was literally there for half an hour before I talked myself into at least walking 20 feet to the bed. That was... something unexpected. As luck would have it, I actually got a call today about the results of my sleep study coming in -- and as Quebec would have it, my appointment to find out what those results SAY is sometime next month. On the other hand, my appointment to talk about the (non-)results of my stomach x-rays is tomorrow, so that's something! I imagine it's mostly going to consist of him saying "book an appointment for an endoscope", but it'll also be a chance for me to bring up a few things I forgot to mention last time... but, more importantly, it also means that I have tomorrow off work, hopefully giving me a chance to recover from this ;p (I mostly just feel "normal tired" now, not the aggressive, drugged-feeling tiredness from this morning, but, we'll see whether a night's sleep makes things better or worse...) The "bad" news is that I have to be up before 9 to let a guy install a thicker window in my bedroom (so cars won't wake me up in the middle of the night), but lately, kids have been screaming and stomping and sprinting on the floor above me at 8:00 like clockwork anyway, so, probably no big difference. ;p (I should be fine for letting the guy in even if I'm drowsy again upon waking, since the one weird consistency with these aggressively-sleepy mornings is that talking to someone or approaching a hard deadline will temporarily snap me out of them.... I'm not sure what that means, other than it's probably tied into the reflex that wakes a person from sleep, since this mostly seems to be that my brain isn't shutting off the "lie still; you're sleeping" chemical when I wake up, or something...) Also, that night I'm going to see Avengers, so that should be fun, I can finally start clicking on all the spoilery comics and articles and such :P | | Friday, May 4th, 2012 | | 10:21 am |
Finally, successfully finished an 8-hour day :P Still feeling weird, but less weird than the past couple days, so that's something. ;)
Starting to realise how much this all resembles severe anxiety symptoms, despite the fact that I don't FEEL that anxious…
Then again, I've often had a weird disconnect between physical symptoms of an emotional state, and actually feeling the emotion in question.
Is there a name for that? Being in a situation where I should feel something, but I don't, but I feel side effects as though I were. I stayed high-strung straight into bed last night..... felt like there was something I didn't want to think about, and I guess I finally figured out what it was. I just want to reiterate for those who have been skimming, I have no reason to assume that my life is in any danger, but just because I'm a hypochondriac it's been on my mind.... and the one thing about mortality that I didn't address in my last post where I said that I could mostly die happy, is knowing what it would be like for my friends and family. Truthfully, I think I could be alright with dying if I were just in some kind of vacuum... but the thought of what it would be like if I had to tell my friends the bad news, and what I would be putting my parents through.... I can't think of ANY way to rationalize that as okay, and I think that's been driving me crazy. When I realised there was nothing I could do to make that alright, I decided to just push it out of my head.... but apparently that was more like burying it than accepting it? What this comes down to is, I need to work on my method of putting something out of my mind, because what I've been doing these past few days is seeming more like denial than actually moving past. At some point in bed last night, I started accepting the idea that I can't always do what would make my friends happy, in a case like that it would just be impossible to, and just conceiving of the fact that there's no way to do it right made me start to feel like it might be okay to consider loosening my death grip on the idea of always doing right by my friends no matter what, since I would still generally be disposed to continue doing right by them whenever possible.... this is kinda like how my realising that I don't have to work on projects isn't making me stop working on projects, it's just leaving me working on them because I want to rather than because I feel like I'm stealing valuable oxygen from more productive people if I don't ;P I mean.. it's weird to put into words, because I need to overstate it to do so, when really it's actually rather subtle -- I'd never think it consciously -- but it's pervasive enough that it gets to me because it never really goes away... Anyway, the whole thing just ties back into the 'control' thing I was going to write about the other day. A lot of my problems seem to arise from my constant sense of responsibility for every situation; and from that, my need to thus be in control of the situation... I'm afraid to talk to people, because I feel like if they aren't thrilled by the conversation they'll blame me for it, and refuse to bother talking to me in the future... I can't relax at conventions, because it's all going on without me, and I can't come up with a justification for any of the things that I could be doing... I mean really, any time I consider relaxing this for a subject (as opposed to just choosing to be confident that I'll be successful in my attempt to control it well, which is what I had been seeing as 'relaxing' until recently) I'll immediately get a mental image of almost literally being tempted to relax my physical grip on something, something that it's hurting my hands to keep such a tight grip on, and how good it would feel to relinquish that grip, but as soon as the command to relax those muscles reaches my imagined fingers, the horror over what would happen if I were to do so re-tightens them tighter than ever, even though I never actually find out what would happen in this weird mental metaphor. (Presumably I'm hanging from a helicopter or something...) I feel like this ties back to one of my earliest memories, where my dad was trying to teach me to swim, and we were practicing where I would push off the wall of the pool and grab his hands, which I was fine with.... then one time, he pulled away by a couple of inches after I had already kicked off, to encourage me to swim the remaining distance, but all I knew was suddenly I had nothing to hold on to, and I felt like I was going to drown..... I'm just rambling at this point, and I don't know how coherent any of that was, but it felt good to get it out; I'm already feeling a little calmer, relatively speaking. Well, a little shaken from stirring all that up, but I feel like I can see the floor again now that all that dust is in the air instead of my wading through it like a mire.. I just feel a little bit more in control of the situation now that I understand it I guess. ;p I really can't help but feel encouraged after posts like these; it feels like this is progress, even if the road always seems longer than I thought when I started. I dunno, I really shouldn't be getting wrapped up in the question of whether or not I should be on anxiety drugs when I'm in the middle of being tested for my intestinal and sleep ailments already anyway. :P Just gotta remember, spring is around the corner, there's an internet full of beautiful porn, and I'm still a pretty great programmer. ;) Life is good! | | Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | | 10:48 pm |
http://www.yourworldoftext.com/ Oh my god, somebody invented infiniwall, but for ascii D: Geez, it's been around since 2009? XD Argh. Even if I were to finish making infiniwall, it would just be seen as a ripoff. ;p (That's no reason not to do so, just... a bit disappointing. :p) | | 10:28 am |
Doing better! Not great, but better than yesterday. All this rampant exhaustion lately has got me all self-conscious and spooked about going to work, but I know that the best thing to deal with being spooked about something is just to confront it and be reminded that it's nothing. I've had mortality on the mind lately... I know there's absolutely no reason to think that whatever's wrong with me is in any way life-threatening, but just the gradual chipping away of my ability to generally deal as it's gotten worse over the past few weeks has forced me to reflect on it a little. I'm actually generally okay with it -- I'm having a pleasant life with a lot of cool accomplishments in it, so I don't really have any regrets, or anything in the "what would I have done differently" pile, other than getting over my aversion to practicing things I'm not good at (i.e. getting anywhere at all with the idea of making music). But I guess having the brevity of life on my mind is making me uncomfortable with spending all this time at work.... or maybe that's just bullshit, and I'm uncomfortable there because I'm so self-conscious about having missed so much of it. God, I've been there four (five?) years, countless successful projects and raises, and I've still got my tail tucked anytime I come within 100 feet of the building... I can't figure out if this means I should be on drugs, or I should just accept that some things aren't for me, and finally stop putting off my attempts to seriously become self-employed. As far as drugs are concerned... I mean, there's no question I'm still heavily anxious, but I also feel like I'm still making progress on learning not to be.... I guess it comes down to whether you believe the progress is actually leading somewhere, or if I'm just learning names for my bad habits without ever really changing any of them. I'm always changing habits, but, also losing progress on older ones.. :P But it also comes down to whether I would be happier with a drug dependance, and all its side-effects, than I am right now.... I mean, I could be more comfortable, but I'm not exactly miserable. I guess I can't know without trying, but... it still seems a bit extreme, especially considering the two-week adjustment period on either side of any trial I want to give it. :P Blah, I wanted to say more about the potential of self-employment to help me get my life in order -- not having to show up at an office, not feeling helpless to a schedule when deciding what kinds of things to do or try, vs the uncertainty of not having a salary to make sure the bank doesn't take my house away :P -- but I should probably just get going in to work already; one of the worst things about my job is how late I have to stay (because I sleep in so late), but I'm only making that worse by taking all this time to 'compose myself'. :P Catch-22... Anyway! All good, just stressy and frustrated and a little too thoughtful. ;) Actually, this has all been great practice for remembering not to dwell on things that I can't move forwards on... all human experience contains insight and opportunity, even the less-pleasant ones. ;) Maybe I really do just need that vacation... I feel weird saying "I need time off work" when I geniunely don't think I've worked an uninterrupted week since I came back from my last vacation (between doctors' appointments, and exhaustion), but a change of headspace might not hurt... I always say that I'm going to look up local weekend spas, but I never actually do... ah well, like I said, I shouldn't be taking MORE time off work the way things are right now anyway. God, I just remembered I was dreaming about programming last night. Something about authentication, and running searches over AJAX and formatting the results client-side, instead of making the server generate the markup, so it could be used from different platforms, and other sites could tie into the API... but of what? XD I've never written anything like that... (Also dreamt up a totally heartbreaking finale to Doctor Who, based around my ruminations on mortality, but that doesn't need to be repeated. :P) Anyway! This was supposed to end three paragraphs ago. :P Hopefully I will be feeling back to normal energy levels soon! And if not, hopefully work will stay quiet enough that it will continue being okay for me to collapse on the couch at home and read Fashion It So until sweet unconsciousness whisks me away to a morning where I feel slightly more assembled. ;p Okay, no more stalling. Laterz! | | Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 | | 8:28 am |
Okay, so "I'll be staying up for a bit" turned out to be a complete lie. ;) Dizzily crashed right into bed... this morning I'm feeling a bit better, but I'm also finally feeling the "I'm sick with something" feeling, which is a relief honestly. It's worrying when you feel physically unwell, but you can't just blame it on "oh it's just some passing virus"... Anyway, I guess I'll miss work today while I burn through this... I'm feeling really weird about missing so much work lately, but thank god the workload is still light enough that it isn't really setting me back much... if I were worried about making up for it, the stress of missing might counteract the rest.. :P (I still feel guilty, but I can work on that. :p) Anyway, I suppose that's that.. trying not to get too bogged down, despite how depressing it is being sick so much and not even knowing why.... the longer it drags on for, the farther the end of the forest seems to be... I already feel less scared of it than last night, though, so I guess part of it is just depression from exhaustion or something. Whatevs! | | Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 | | 9:25 pm |
Realising how much of my anxiety and impatience stems from a compulsive need to think ahead…
Trying to find the line between conscientiousness and obsession.
Contemplating the future is good, but not if you aren't in a position to affect it. If you can't stop when the planning's done, you'll fret.
As always, it comes down to being unwilling to let go. Just letting the future arrive feels like letting a tidal wave overtake me…
Actually falling asleep in my chair now that I'm not propped up by stress. That probably explains something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
(Is stress keeping me from sleeping well? Or is stress my coping mechanism for functioning after poor sleep? Or BOTH?)
Okay, getting dizzy now. Maybe there's just something up. Going home. I can't figure out if relaxing makes me sick, or sickness forces me to relax through exhaustion or something.... I mean, I don't feel "sick" right now, insofar as I don't feel that "immune-system-ey" feeling, but I sure as hell don't feel well either... Anyway, I've got more to say about the scary degree to which endorphins influence my decisionmaking, and what it feels like when I contemplate potentially letting go of control, but I don't think I have it in me at the moment.... I'm feeling ridiculous about leaving work early so often, but man, I have just been WIPED lately... I'm gonna blame it on all the tummy upset I've been having lately, but that just pushes the question back further... it would be easy to blame that on all the tests I've been doing (which is probably at least a part of it) but the real trouble started about a week before my first test, so... maybe stress causes tummy upset causes exhaustion causes stress? :P Whatever.... The barium test results came back, btw - they couldn't find anything wrong. Seeing the intestinal specialist again next week to decide what to do now. I've still got a bunch of tests lined up to see if I've got any food intolerances, but that'll take over a month to finish because of having to wait in between each test... after that, I've just got my MRI lined up in mid-July, the one that the sleep doctor said was 99% certain to turn up nothing, but was being done as a precaution.... I believe him, because he marked it down as not being urgent when he arranged the appointment, but even so, after a day like today's absolutely debilitating, dizzying exhaustion, I'm more and more anxious about what it might find. :p Anyway! Everything I can think of needing is booked, so there's nothing I can accomplish by fretting, so I might as well take my mind off it. I feel like going to bed RIGHT now would be too early, but... I dunno how long I'll hold to that for. :P | | Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 | | 7:06 am |
Did my CPAP sleep study! It was awful. :P Some of that can probably be attributed to the technician experimenting with different airflow pressures and rhythms, though. Not to mention kind of an ill-fitting mask because of having to make do with what they had on hand... (man, the private clinic was like a spa compared to this XD) I feel the complete opposite of rested right now, so I'm not exactly eager to find out that I might be recommended to do that on a regular basis, but I have to remember that last night was more of a fact-finding mission than an actual attempt for me to have a solid night of sleep. Man, that damn CPAP machine.. she kept trying to use a mode that would stop the flow as soon as I started exhaling, but there was some bug in it.... it was making assumptions based on too broad of an average, so every other breath it would cut out early..... I was lying there in bed, debugging this thing in my head while it was toying with my lungs :P (I eventually just spoke up and she changed back to the constant mode...) Anyway, I'm exhausted, and hungry, and my eye's a little sore, and my hair's full of glue but I can't bring myself to get into the shower. ;p Not the "wow, CPAP is a miracle!" that I was hoping for, but.... data points! Failure is still a data point. (And I was able to get SOME sleep, until she would interrupt it to try another program... just hard to tell if it was better or worse than normal in such weird conditions...) Moving forward. :) | | 6:45 am |
Random medical question, I developed random red blotches in my eyes sometime last night, between leaving home and arriving at the sleep study. They didn't hurt at all at the time, and now the less red eye is just intermittently slightly sensitive, like if you've been staying up late looking at a screen too long, or swimming in a chlorinated pool. I feel like this is probably nothing to be worried about, right? Just seemed odd, wanted to reach out for some reassurance. :P (I've got the day off for my sleep study, so I could visit a clinic, but I'm always afraid that visiting a clinic for spurious reasons is just going to make me pick something up in the waiting room for nothing.. :P) Just freaked me out noticing that my eyes were like that after arriving in a hospital, like, what horrible eye-disease sent somebody to this hospital that I then picked up from a handrail :P (It's probably just being allergic to something in the taxi, right?) Anyway, speaking of the sleep study... | | Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 | | 12:00 pm |
Finished the Prince of Persia book last night... interestingly, almost half of the entire book takes place after he's finished the game, and is mostly him toodling around Paris, trying to be creative... and while at first I was let down over how little technical stuff there was in these entries, before long the introspective stuff wound up becoming my favourite parts, because he was going through a lot of the same stuff I and many of my friends are... waiting for his life to start, discrediting his successes because they came too easily, getting hung up on everything he hasn't done.. the journal ended too soon to tell if he ever reached any conclusions over them, but it was valuable to see that it's not just some product of the last decade or something. :P Although now that I'm trying to write about it, it's interesting to see how vague it all is in recollection, when it was always so distinct when I came across it... I think that's part of the problem, really... I do remember one quote about that in particular; "That dry adult whisper that counsels prudence[...] I'm fighting it on the big stuff, but on the small stuff, it's winning." It's so hard to fight a force that operates too subtly for you to get a clear fix on.... that's why I'm almost glad for the moments where I'm pushed to such stress that my reflexive coping mechanisms all get pushed to their breaking points. It's a little sad to see the book end just as he's starting to get really excited about The Last Express, knowing what a flop it wound up being commercially... My dad actually bought a copy back in the day, but as a kid I was so incredibly uninterested in the concept that I never even ran it... I am looking forward to it hitting iOS later this year though, now that I can appreciate the cleverness he brings to his projects. Think I'm just about done playing Fez... charming environment, some great puzzles, and reasonably stress-free gameplay... but, I've reached the point where rather than exploring freely, I feel like I'm going around tidying up all the things I didn't finish, and I'm starting to sigh instead of "ooh!" every time I run into yet another puzzle... I hear some of the really late post-game puzzles are so big that the entire internet is still collectively working on them (clues in the soundtrack, etc, that kind of thing), but I've had my fun I think. :P I am glad I saw the 'ending', though, was awfully pretty; if anything I'm just a little annoyed that there wasn't more stuff like that in the game proper.. :P Really making me want to get back into watching demoscene stuff, though. Penny Arcade linked to a documentary the other day that I've been meaning to watch... I need to learn more names (or at least group names!). I am still dying to get into making more of that stuff myself, I used to do a lot of vector-based stuff when I was bored in school, and I started fussing with shader stuff when Pixel Bender rolled out, but there's a gigantic possibility space out there that I'm just not spending the time it would take to explore... I guess part of that is because I had work smothering me for so long, and now that it's calmed down, I've got all this medical stuff to worry about... I mean, I'm glad it's all moving forwards, but it also leaves me a bit more interested in just relaxing at the end of the day. I suppose the whole second half of this paragraph is nothing new, I'm not sure why I started writing it down. :P Spring is near, I keep almost grasping its coattails as they flutter around every corner just ahead of me... I keep meaning to go to the park, but keep never getting around to it; I need to get over my own inertia. I was speaking to a friend the other day about his habit of cancelling plans because when it becomes time to follow through on them, he no longer wants to... I've managed to teach myself to ignore that reflex, because I know from experience that I'm usually glad that I did, but it's different when there isn't a specific external thing forcing you to act... my dad always says that everyone in this family "needs deadlines", and I guess my failure to ever make (or at least execute) plans is just an extension of that, to some extent. It used to be more of an anxiety thing, but now the anxiety is mostly gone... but I've just got apathy in its place instead of enthusiasm. I'm still looking for external, artificial ways to make myself likeable instead of just being friendly.. Some part of me thinks it might be useful experience if I were forced to come into contact with strangers more often, but it might also just drive me crazy if it were the case. Alright, this post is getting rambly and redundant, I'm going to leave it. ;p Today's plan is to clean this damn place up and get some groceries... |
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