Is it better to have lunched and lost than never lunched at all?

+ received new remaster/re-release of Gang of Four's Entertainment!/Yellow E.P. Sounds great, very loud and bright, nice packaging. Thank you, Rhino!

+ received new Umberto Eco novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. I love me some Eco. Will begin reading it tonight. Hurray.

- I have to fill out a complicated document (in Excel of course) because HR says I "failed my S.M.A.R.T. goals for the year" necessitating a complete list of my achievements for the last year, or something.

- Self-loathing again.

+ Pizza!

Brains

Working on your brain is difficult but rewarding.

The current medical regimen is the most helpful yet. I'm not happy taking 3 separate psychiatric medications (plus one other prescription and a regular OTC drug for other things), but we're getting closer to a well-tuned head. The Adderall seems to take me to a more calm and focused place, and the other two have pretty much knocked out the anxiety and depression fits.

There are interesting links between depression and ADD. People with ADD do anything they can to fire up the forebrain, because it's dead and that feels awful. Therefore we self-medicate with stimulants, or arrange a life full of emergencies and extreme situations, or play lots of video games, etc. One way to stimulate the forebrain is to force yourself into a problem solving and pattern recognition mode: the brain function that tells us that a twig snapped in the forest 50 yards away, or that the dot on the horizon is a ship, or that our keys are across the room next to the hat.

Unfortunately, one way to stimulate the forebrain is to keep pushing at an insoluble problem. If your problem is something like "why can't I get anywhere in life?" or "why do all girls hate me?" or "how will I ever clean up this horrible mess of my existence?" it's going to be refractory to the usual problem-solving methods. If you're depressed, these things will come up a lot. And if you've got some form of ADD, working away at that problem will stimulate the forebrain and be irresistable, like picking at a scab or scratching an itch. What you get for your trouble is a spiral of repetitive negative thinking that gets tighter, and deeper, and worse.

This explains one of my worst depressive thought patterns. I do just that; I latch on to an unpleasant "problem" which is actually a reflexively depressive thought. Because thinking about it fires up the problem solving apparatus, I think I'm going to somehow solve the problem if I just think about it really hard. This makes the depression go deeper, and I'm in a feedback loop.

Long story short it's way easier to get out of one of these spirals on 15 mg of Adderall XR. The forebrain is running about normally and isn't saying "scratch my itch!", and when I slide into some self-critical repetitive negative thinking it only lasts a short time; I can pull out of it faster now.

The next step in brain maintenance is: regular exercise. This is gonna be interesting. I've never succeeded at that since it was enforced in high school.

argyria

Because colloidal silver is good for you!

This makes the Stan Jones case look minor. Argyria sucks.

I love it when public figures make incredible asses of themselves.

GO 49ers!

Another show stopper: "49ers love being in community. Very patriotic . . . support president and his George Bush erection."

"Erection?" Reynolds asks.

"Yes," the Chinese man responds. "It say, 'You like Bush — then you like his erection.'

"My name is Suck Hung,'' the Chinese man says as he's leaving. "My brother's name is Suck Young — my whole family suck."

Worst PR director ever.

I know you know what we all want.

Gang of Four put some re-recordings and remixes of old songs on their U.S. website, and they're pretty good. They put them up with a flash player than streams them, however, which is as the kids say "weaksauce". Communist rock band attempts to keep fans from downloading MP3s: hilarity ensues.

Here they are, in more reasonable mp3 form. Right-click and save, enjoy. If you want to give them to other people, please mirror them.

To Hell With Poverty (2005)

We All Want the Monster (mix)

What We All Want (mix 8)

These expire in a few days, or sooner if they get abused.

referer madness

When you host images on your own website and read your logs, one of the things you see is which friends group you're in. This is usually pretty basic, like "locals" or "people" or "not_from_work". As I think I mentioned once long ago, they can also be funny like "former_fucktoys" or "dumbfux" etc. I am on kateoninetails list called "not legal" although I am over 18, because she is in law school.

There's been a few funny ones over the years but I am happy to say now that I have just found out I am on gordonzola's list called "white guys"!