Catching Up, With Weirdness

Wow. This just kinda dropped off the radar. Things have been happening, I guess, but still. The bastards are gaining on us!

I sort of have an excuse, in that I lost net access over the weekend. (Sort of.) But that still only covers that one weekend, couple of days.

Weird weekend, though. Got me thinking that I might be a net addict. I lose access to it for one weekend, and I get all weird. Interesting weird--I wouldn't quite say "fun," or "enjoyable," but I'd definitely want to repeat the experience--but weird. Vivid dreams in the format of Order of the Stick weird.

Not about OotS. No. Dreams presented in the format of the comic, that specific comic, the art style, the layout.

Same thing--or something similar--used to happen to me back when I watched TV. Only dreamed on the weekends, when I hadn't watched the usual show that day.

Anyway. Spent Monday morning freaking out about it. That was fun. I like having dreams that stick with me like that. I enjoy that half zoned-out kind of feeling. Same thing happened after I played Oblivion.

I don't know if I'm unusual in this. It doesn't happen too often (maybe once in six months, at most) but when it does, for at least a couple of days I'll be zoning out, talking to myself, and writing. I don't notice this behavior in other people, but I don't notice a lot of things.

Thoughts on Introversion

What I learned this weekend:

I am, officially, still an introvert.

Time alone is critical.

Specifically, having a day during the weekend that I spend mostly on my own terms is critical.

Otherwise, homework suffers, the game suffers, and mental health suffers.

Since Wednesday I've been feeling the "ragged edge" of exhaustion more or less constantly. It goes and comes, but I can always find it. I spent the entire day on Wednesday, 09:00 to 10:00, interacting with people, and I still haven't properly recovered. It's a different kind of tired from when I don't get enough sleep. I'm aware of my surroundings, and my mind works perfectly well. I just have a hard time processing people.

That's my basic definition for introversion. Being around people takes energy. Being alone recharges that energy. Extroverts, presumably, experience the opposite phenomena.

I'm not shy. (Found that out this weekend, too.) I like being around people, I like hanging out. But I need to spend time alone.

That puts me in the minority, in the United States. A strange minority. Invisible, but still discriminated against. Extroverts tend to have a very hard time understanding why someone wouldn't like being around people all the time. They tend to assume that it's because of fear, of shyness, that there's something wrong that needs to be fixed.

People in power are, generally, extroverts. Because being in power generally requires a lot of interaction with people, so extroverts are drawn to it.

Also: I'm going to need to keep my need for alone time in mind at college. Because--while I doubt it will be impossible to get--it will take action on my part to secure. Some kind of initiative.

Stupid, But Not Crazy

Used to be, I'd describe myself as crazy. Thought of myself that way. But I don't, anymore, because I'm actually fairly sane. To my lights. And I've discovered that people who describe themselves as mentally disturbed are (usually) somewhat pretentious.

Sure, there are people who have a disease, and are aware of that disease. I used to be one of those people. Depression is one of those things that you notice, when you have it. You might not care, but you know that there's something wrong. That's part of the point, really.

But most people who call themselves crazy aren't. There's just this romantic attraction to the idea. Makes you seem unusual, mysterious. There is a sort of a comfort in the idea that your brain works differently than the common folk, that the structure of your mentality is unique.

The thing is, it doesn't matter what goes in inside your head. No one else can see that; there's no confirmation. To everyone else, it doesn't exist, except by vague inference. And most people who call themselves crazy, they act fairly normal. To my eyes, anyway. Maybe I have a broad definition of the world normal. They act functional, at least.

So, with that in mind, I no longer consider myself crazy. Maybe I am anyway, but I don't think of myself that way. Because I'm fairly functional. Some people describe me as crazy, maybe, but my eccentricities don't interfere with my ability to interact with the world, do what I want to do.

I'm sane, because I act sane. The interface is stable. The matrix behind that, well, it's background, it doesn't figure into the equations. But, on the whole, I'm fairly stable, because I'm okay with the idea of being unstable. And with the idea of being stable. My identity doesn't rest on my disease.

Someday I Will Explain, Maybe

I found an awesome thing. It was hiding in my mind.

I knew it was there, but I didn't know that I knew. Every time I would sit down to do campaign prep, I would get frustrated, and distracted. It was because the awesome thing was hiding, and I could not find it, and I was wasting my time with boring things that were not awesome.

So now I have found the excellent, awesome thing. Many excellent, awesome things. An entire trove of them, an entire tribe of them. The shadings were there, the signs, and for some reason I never put it together. But now I have. And it's awesome.

My mind does funny things sometimes, without my knowing about it. And then I find all the shiny things that it has made, and I am very, very happy. Because it did this while I was going to school, and playing Diablo 2

Too Many Thoughts To Think

I have way too many things zipping around inside my head right now.

The campaign I'm running. The character I'm working on for the school campaign. The school campaign itself, since I've been helping the GM brainstorm. Lord of the Rings, which I'm reading. A fantasy novel of my own

It's that last item that's been causing the trouble. I came up with this concept for how magic would work while I was watching the Lord of the Rings movies. It combines some things I came up with years ago, going back to fourth grade, with some ideas I had earlier this year. And then I started really thinking about it, and the implications of it, and I threw in some characters, and it just sort of obviously led to this neat climax. Well, not climax, because it doesn't come at the end. It comes towards the beginning, and it's what makes everything else that comes after it really bad.

So now when I sit down to do campaign prep, I keep getting distracted by this fantasy novel. Or fantasy something, anyway. It demands to be written. And I've already got a lot going on.

The Matrix

I love it when I run into a bunch of new ideas, all at once. A rich seam of the imagination, as it were.

It's not like coming up with new ideas. They're not new, I've just never noticed them before. Or, rather, I've found a new way of organizing them, that grants them some meaning I've never realized they had. It produces a sort of ripple effect, because that meaning allows me to put other ideas together in new ways, and that produces new meanings.

It opens a new corner of the matrix. That's how I think of my mind, when I'm in the mood. A collection of data, connected by links that are themselves data. The whole structure is prone to shifts of meaning when new ideas are added to it.

Logic Death

Nifty article on why horror heroines are so stupid.

There's some game theory, some evolutionary biology, some cognitive psychology. It's all good stuff.

The most interesting, to me, is this bit about halfway through:

But for better or worse, the neocortex is dominated by its left hemisphere, which tends to be not only logical but gullible, rationalizing and self-deceiving. You know that voice inside your head that says everything is all right, there's nothing to worry about here, just ignore your gut feeling and get on with the task at hand? That's your brilliantly stupid left brain talking, and if you listen to it long enough, eventually it will kill you.

I don't think I've ever heard the left/right brain divide categorized this way, but it makes sense. "Logical" and "sensible" aren't necessarily the same thing. Asimov makes this point in several stories; "Reason," a short story where a robot gets religion (and demonstrates that logic can prove anything, if you start with the right postulates), and The Caves of Steel, a novel that concerns a detective who worries about his robot partner replacing him as they solve a murder together. The detective in question discovers while working with the robot that this is not likely to happen, and one of the reasons is the difference between "logical" and "rational." Asimovian robots are both perfectly logical and perfectly irrational, and it turns out that being rational counts for more in terms of being human.

(Those summaries are horrible bastardizations, especially the Caves one, so go read them both to find out what I'm actually talking about. "Reason" is found in the book I, Robot.)

I'd argue that this ability to clamp down on fear, even when it might be more useful to listen to that fear, is a direct result of the brain's "right sided" imaginative, intuitive abilities. Human's aren't limited to fearing real things; we're perfectly capable of inventing things to fear, so there needs to be some mechanism to determine between reasonable and unreasonable fears. Sometimes this mechanism goes a bit haywire, as most mechanisms do.

You Are Not Conscious!

Consciousness is a Meaningless Accident!

This article is funny. Quantum computer? Consciousness neurons? I'm with Dennett, here.