I don’t much like xkcd in general, but the “wrong on the internet” strip is a classic for a reason

It’s funny – people don’t say “the internet” in that way much anymore, do they?  “The internet” as this unique place with its own properties?  The boundaries are a lot more porous now, since Facebook (for instance) means it’s now socially normal (even normative) for people to host comment threads their friends and family and acquaintances can post in

But the pointless arguments that your college roommate has with your uncle on there?  Those are pointless in the same way that the dumb pointless arguments I was having on video game forums in 2004 were pointless.  The same special brew of social dynamics, unique to the internet, is still at work there.  But because it’s your college roommate and your uncle, it doesn’t feel like an “argument on the internet” – it’s just “an argument,” right?

But arguing on the internet is still as prone to be a frustrating timewaster as it used to be.

But the “wrong on the internet” strip is still funny and still describes a recognizable mental habit that is unique to internet arguments.

How often do you find yourself unexpectedly staying up late or wasting an afternoon because you’re having a heated argument with someone that’s not on the internet?

(Some people actually do this a lot, and some even like it, and more power to them.  But look, you don’t argue like this with your uncle when he comes to family gatherings.  You don’t argue like this with your friends when you’re talking one-on-one or in small groups.  This is not just what “arguing” is like)

If you’d told my ultra-nerdy, socially isolated 16-year-old self that everyone would be on forums in 2016 – getting mad at bad posts, losing themselves in sprawling threads, refreshing compulsively – I’d have been overjoyed.

But my god, not everything is my old video game forums, there is more in the world, okay

I remember, like, “the discourse” being an actual source of stress in my life at the start of this year.  I would have bad days because of “the discourse”

And for the most part I’ve just stepped away from the stuff that was stressful and, believe it or not this has not resulted in me becoming any more closed off from opposing views, because the kinds of posts that stressed me out were never ones that convinced me of anything to begin with

lmao i was looking for my steam account and instead found a never-seen post from 8 months ago where someone was yelling at me over an argument about whether there were any valid reasons to stay away from neo-nazi tumblr entirely as opposed to actively yelling at it and making it aware of you (i said “yes”)

i used to have a lot of these kinds of stupid arguments on here and i’m so glad i stopped

i love being a disgusting cowardly liberal and just using the blogging platform tumblr dot com for some blogging that i want to do

I’m reading a long old journal entry during the bad period I had in winter 2010 and the funny thing about it is that almost nothing in it is surprising.  It’s almost eerie, it reads exactly like what I’d write if I were trying to roleplay myself from that time, based on my spotty memories and (more significantly) my own understanding of my psychological development.  It’s like I’ve reached a sufficient level of self-understanding that I no longer feel like a three-dimensional character

(OK, there were some surprises – I’d forgotten my whole obsession of the time over “not being able to feel positive emotions,” like not getting crushes or feeling hopeful or affectionate or excited.  I’m not sure how much that’s actually changed and how much I’m viewing it differently?  Certainly I’m just happier overall and there are more things to feel positively about in my life, now.  But also I was looking back on a time of heightened emotions that I incorrectly assumed were normal, I may have internalized ideas about how you can only be ~human~ if you’re inflamed w/ passion 24/7, etc.)

(The thing I was mainly wondering is what I spent all my time doing back then.  The closest thing I got to an answer was “binging blogs to avoid thinking about grad school applications, and this has been going on for weeks,” which, OK, makes sense.  I also have no memory of what I ate during this whole time – since I don’t remember cooking, ordering delivery, or going out to eat – but no info on that front)

Anyway, I’m proud of Rob_2010 for this line, making reference to the fact that my housemates all shared coffee and liked to brew it extremely strong:

Even caffeine isn’t making me happy the way it usually does – I say, sitting here having consumed 2 rockstars and a few shots of DaveHouse™-Brand Cardiac-Function-Is-For-Pussies-Grade Hyperstrong-Hypershit Folgers Sludge Coffee, and just feeling paranoid and guilty.

Unless you are 100% sure you will live forever, you are going to have to prioritize some optimizable metrics over others

For hundreds of different video games there is a person who is best at speedrunning that game, and you will have to accept that in most or perhaps all cases, you will not be that person

You have to be very smart and work very hard at theoretical physics to be able to contribute anything of worth to modern theoretical physics.  You might have to put other things by the wayside.

Could Edward Witten run a business?  Is he any good at Starcraft?

@funereal-disease

fwiw, the quotes you selected (1, 2) sound like they were written by the personification of my anxiety

Not specifically the focus on men – my brain typically goes for “there is something special about me and only me that makes me a constant danger to others,” and it tends to identify that something as “my brain is deficient somehow and I don’t understand the psychology of normal humans”

But the way the rules are vague and broad enough that it’s hard to be sure you’re ever not violating one of them, and the explicit encouragement to be constantly on guard for violations, along with the notion that the discomfort you feel over the broadness/vagueness is itself a sign of your deficiency and something you ought to hide in public, along with everything else

“Beware men who are uncomfortable with this list” is blatantly creepy/controlling but even leaving that aside – look, friend, I am uncomfortable with everything

nostalgebraist:

I saw what I guess you’d call a “medication positivity” post and while I didn’t want to derail by reblogging it, my reaction was “yes, this, except for antipsychotics/neuroleptics”

Even those, of course, are truly helpful in some cases – the costs don’t always outweigh the benefits.  What’s worrying about antipsychotics isn’t so much the cost and benefit sizes as the way they can mess with cost-benefit analysis itself

(Everything that follows is just based on my own experience and that of a few people I’ve talked to who had very similar experiences.  Everything should probably be qualified with a “can” or “in some cases” or etc.)

Antipsychotics can make you dumber.  So can a lot of other medications.  But with antipsychotics it isn’t the normal sort of drug-induced dumbness – feeling tired, or distracted, or mentally sluggish, say.  It’s more qualitative than that.  It’s like your capacity for abstract thought is reduced.

And one of the consequences of this is that you may lose the ability to notice that you have lost anything.  You agree to give the new med a try, and you start taking it, and then when you see your prescriber again you don’t report any problems because you’ve lost the ability to form thoughts like “my cognition has changed a lot recently, and the change coincided with the introduction of this new med.”

This can go on for years.  It did for me and for several people I know.

When I finally went off Risperdal – encouraged by my parents, I don’t remember really caring – it suddenly seemed obvious that I’d been cognitively altered for the past five years.  I didn’t remember the time before that very well (I had started Risperdal when I was about 10 years old), but there were objective indicators – for instance, I loved reading before Risperdal, and while on Risperdal I don’t think I read a single book cover-to-cover.

You’d think I would have noticed that I couldn’t read anymore.  Somehow I didn’t, for five years.  What did it feel like?  It’s hard to remember and also hard to describe.  Sort of a passivity.  The world acted upon me for mysterious reasons.  I did not draw correlations between present and past events, didn’t formulate ideas about the workings of things.  The present was simply given; I wasn’t frustrated when it refused to honor my theories.  “Reading is hard” was a datum, and was unpleasant, but I was not really surprised by it, or frustrated in the “this wasn’t supposed to happen!” way of abstract-reasoning-creatures.  It was a given datum and all I did was hope that given data would be pleasant and not unpleasant.

I think people should know that antipsychotics can do this.  They still may be worth trying, in certain situations.  But taking an antipsychotic is a special sort of decision, one that interferes with decision-making itself, like choosing to listen to the Sirens.

Reblog to note some interesting responses:

@kerapace says “my experience going on antipsychotics was a lot like yours going off them” in reference to Seroquel, but also says they were on Risperdal for a few months and “it does indeed turn you into a zombie.”

Seems like it would be worthwhile to find out which antipsychotics are the best/worst for this stuff – maybe Risperdal is especially bad?  (It makes me wonder why I was given it; I’d taken one other thing beforehand which didn’t help my Tourette’s at all, so it’s possible that giving me Risperdal was an attempt to “get more heavy-duty.”)

Similarly, @devipotato says some antipsychotics have this effect on her and some don’t.  She also notes that this varies a lot from person to person.

@brazenautomaton asks whether this kind of effect can be permanent; @notingisnoral reports just such an experience.

@arjan-de-lumens says they haven’t experienced such an effect, but suspects that the Risperdal-induced state I described is just their normal state, so there might just have been no further to go in that direction.

@trueculprit and @closeonmarksnosedive added tags reporting similar experiences from others – #(i’ve never been on this type of med but my partner has and. yeah) and #I cannot count how many psychotic ppl I’ve talked to who have had this experience

@metagorgon notes that my Risperdal experience resembles certain stories in the horror genre.  This makes me smile – “my teenage years were like a work of horror fiction” sounds so cool, y’know?  If bad stuff is to happen to me, at least let it be interesting bad stuff.

I saw what I guess you’d call a “medication positivity” post and while I didn’t want to derail by reblogging it, my reaction was “yes, this, except for antipsychotics/neuroleptics”

Even those, of course, are truly helpful in some cases – the costs don’t always outweigh the benefits.  What’s worrying about antipsychotics isn’t so much the cost and benefit sizes as the way they can mess with cost-benefit analysis itself

(Everything that follows is just based on my own experience and that of a few people I’ve talked to who had very similar experiences.  Everything should probably be qualified with a “can” or “in some cases” or etc.)

Antipsychotics can make you dumber.  So can a lot of other medications.  But with antipsychotics it isn’t the normal sort of drug-induced dumbness – feeling tired, or distracted, or mentally sluggish, say.  It’s more qualitative than that.  It’s like your capacity for abstract thought is reduced.

And one of the consequences of this is that you may lose the ability to notice that you have lost anything.  You agree to give the new med a try, and you start taking it, and then when you see your prescriber again you don’t report any problems because you’ve lost the ability to form thoughts like “my cognition has changed a lot recently, and the change coincided with the introduction of this new med.”

This can go on for years.  It did for me and for several people I know.

When I finally went off Risperdal – encouraged by my parents, I don’t remember really caring – it suddenly seemed obvious that I’d been cognitively altered for the past five years.  I didn’t remember the time before that very well (I had started Risperdal when I was about 10 years old), but there were objective indicators – for instance, I loved reading before Risperdal, and while on Risperdal I don’t think I read a single book cover-to-cover.

You’d think I would have noticed that I couldn’t read anymore.  Somehow I didn’t, for five years.  What did it feel like?  It’s hard to remember and also hard to describe.  Sort of a passivity.  The world acted upon me for mysterious reasons.  I did not draw correlations between present and past events, didn’t formulate ideas about the workings of things.  The present was simply given; I wasn’t frustrated when it refused to honor my theories.  “Reading is hard” was a datum, and was unpleasant, but I was not really surprised by it, or frustrated in the “this wasn’t supposed to happen!” way of abstract-reasoning-creatures.  It was a given datum and all I did was hope that given data would be pleasant and not unpleasant.

I think people should know that antipsychotics can do this.  They still may be worth trying, in certain situations.  But taking an antipsychotic is a special sort of decision, one that interferes with decision-making itself, like choosing to listen to the Sirens.

This is extremely vague, but: some very good things have been happening for me in the realm of Real Life Work-Type Stuff, and I’m getting a big boost to confidence/self-esteem

I think I’m mentioning this on tumblr because when I make “personal posts” they’re almost always about problems of some kind, and while that skew arises for good reason (looking for advice/sympathy/validation/etc.) and is standard tumblr procedure, I feel an inclination to correct any implicitly conveyed impression that I’m just experiencing problems constantly