I’m in Dublin waiting for a connecting flight and in 2 hours (or maybe 3 accounting for immigration) I will be in Esther Land, kissing Esther, as one does in Esther Land

(!!!!!!!)

I just drank a giant cup of coffee and so I may make a few shitposts in the next half hour, after which I will disappear for a while and then at some point your dash will be revitalized with new Iodised Salt Shipping Content

I am back

ursaeinsilviscacant:

This is the artist formerly known as queenshulamit. I am back.

Tell me all the hot Discourse I missed.

(I probably didn’t miss it, I’ve been reading people’s blogs.)

Signal boosting for people who know Esther queenshulamit ursaeinsilviscacant and will want to know that she’s back in the game

Promo’ing for people who don’t know Esther queenshulamit ursaeinsilviscacant, who is awesome, and also my girlfriend

Real talk though: I think NAB is actually becoming an unhealthy anxiety-related obsessional target for me, like Undertale was a while ago.  This became clear to me earlier on, but I ran with it for a while because it was producing tumblr posts I felt proud of.  But even after finishing up those posts, my brain is still doing the thing, and it’s making it hard to like … relax or read books or do normal stuff like that

(I don’t blame anyone for this, this kind of thing just happens for me every 4-6 months or so, the things it latches onto are in part arbitrary, and in this case I even encouraged it a bit myself)

The upshot for you guys is mostly (1) I’m actually doing a hard commitment not to talk about the book anymore, at least for like say the next month, so hold me to that, and (2) I may start blacklisting “neoreaction a basilisk” and “NAB babble” so if you could tag related posts with one of those, that would be helpful

(I’ll be seeing Esther in person on Tuesday [!!!!!] and then staying with her for a whole month, so that should nip all this in the bud anyway)

Esther: God is like Robin Hanson. Mary is like Julia Wise.

nostalgebraist:

Esther, just now: “In my head at work today I was composing a rap about why the Repugnant Conclusion is bad”

N.B. she actually did this, and finished it, and now it is online

Esther, just now: “In my head at work today I was composing a rap about why the Repugnant Conclusion is bad”

Am looking through my anxiety tag because I think there’s a post in there somewhere that can point me to a paper that could be helpful with work (I was being anxious about the existence of this paper at some point long ago)

And what strikes me is that I seemed to have a lot more problems with anxiety 1-2 years ago then I do now.  At least measuring by how much I post about them on tumblr, but even then, I just basically no longer have the sorts of “awful days” I used to post about, not in the same way.

A usual answer would be “the meds are working,” but I was taking the meds back then too.  (Well, I was taking Lexapro, but not Wellbutrin, so maybe Wellbutrin’s working.)

Maybe it’s Esther.

One silver lining to anxiety is that it’s often hilarious just how implausible the things I worry about are

Because my brain is like “we are in a state indicating danger, but there are no currently known dangers, so something not believed to be dangerous must actually be dangerous”

“but we can’t think of any sensible reasons why that might be true”

“let’s randomly conjecture that some seemingly good part of our life is actually bad due to some ludicrous M. Night Shyamalan plot twist”

(Example: at one point when I was skyping with Esther before I had actually met her IRL, my brain somehow generated the worry that she might be a computer simulation with no tangible physical form)

[talking about Mundum]

Esther:  (Also my brain hears it and thinks “Moon dom” )

Me:  hahahaha

Esther:  (This guy, who is gonna whip you for not obeying arbitrary moral rules… on the moon?)

Me:  in the celestial realm!

Esther:  Of course!!!!

He is not intereseted in your sublunary concerns

because he is lunary!

Me:  oh my god