Playing with Lists

I've been too depressed to get much work done.  My life, like my house, is falling to pieces around me.  I'm beyond caring.  So what do I do all day?  When not sleeping, watching TV, or reading (usually re-reading) comfort fiction I'm messing around with Spotify playlists.  Auto-Tuner has ruined radio for me.  Even the BBC World Service has been seduced by its ear-torturing evil.  I can no longer shop at the better of the two grocery stores within a 25 mile radius because they now pipe in the All Auto-Tuner station.  So it's either assorted nostalgia stations via satellite or my own playlists.

Current top jams:

• One of Those Days 
• House of Games Homage 
• Stone or Rock? Part 2: I Never Exhaled 
• Winter is Coming

All playlists, both mine and those created by other people.

Internet Radio Sucks Syphilitic Donkey Dong

How the fuck am I supposed to avoid my life by losing myself in my work if I don't have a good soundtrack?

Last.fm: I now need to restart Spotify and Last.fm (in that order) after five or six songs.  And it's now impossible to skip something when the YouTube selection is some fucked-up cell phone-recorded live performance of an artist who consistently does awful live performances.  Anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing J.G. Thirwell (Foetus) live knows what I mean.

Spotify:  No equivalent to Last.fm's randomly playing my library.  The closest I get is playing it in alphabetical order or by length of song.  It keeps dropping songs I've repeatedly added.  Is there an upper limit to the number of songs you can have in your library?  Not only do they have a shitload of ads, they have a shitload of ads featuring people using Auto-Tune, so I have to keep turning off my speakers.  Upgrade?  With what money?

Pandora:  Sounds like a CD player on permanent skip.  Plus huge gaps in their database of artists.

KEXP and other stations that still stream now that iTunes doesn't carry them: The CD-skipping effect isn't as bad as Pandora, but it's still bad.  And more talented idiots are using Auto-Tune when they don't need to, so I have to turn off the speakers.  But the taskbar doesn't show me the song title unless the cursor is on it, and that is delayed anyway, so I keep missing parts of other songs.

Satellite radio: It comes with my satellite TV service, so, radio on the TV.  Not Internet radio, but close enough.  In addition to being mostly genre-specific, and I like a lot of variety, I'm stuck with things like nostalgia and jazz stations because of the increasing use of fucking Auto-Tune.

What's my problem with Auto-Tune?  It physically hurts.  Fingernails on chalkboards don't bother me.  Sirens don't bother me.  Auto-Tune causes eardrum-shredding pain.  It has to be an autism thing because my daughter and many of her friends have a similar reaction.

I don't understand how someone singing in an empty room with bad acoustics while failing to harmonize with Stephen Hawking is supposed to sound pleasant.  Especially if they're singing off key, because it doesn't fix that.  Why the fuck do people like Megan James (Purity Ring) and Lauren Mayberry (CHVRCHES) use it?  Their voices don't need any help.

Fucking #whitepeopleproblems #firstworldproblems

Sleepwalking in Saint Regis

Sunday night / Monday morning (05 October / 06 October) I was on another nocturnal mission.

I awoke yesterday with a really bad headache and overall sense of malaise.  When I let the cats out I saw the side door to the shop/outbuilding/garage was open.  It was pretty obvious what happened.

I couldn't tell if I had driven anywhere, as I no longer record the mileage - that served its purpose by determining I do sleep drive.  I had rolled down the driver's side window - something I often do when sleep driving, or just sitting in my pickup while in that twilight state.  I suspect I did drive, as the truck seemed to be not quite where parked it.  As I no longer trust my memory all that much, I can't be sure.  It would only matter if I kept a diary of these events, continued to log mileage to know for sure if I drove anywhere in my sleep, and attempted to match hangover symptoms with activities.  Perhaps with the help of strategically placed webcams.  But to what end?  I don't do this nightly.  It happens once a month, if that. 

Regardless of driving or not, I didn't hide the garage-door opener this time, and that's what really matters.

One thing I have been tracking is how my sleep pattern is really different when I sleepwalk, even if what it typically is changes.  These days I usually wake up 2-3 hours after going to sleep, drink some water, go back to sleep anywhere from one minute to over an hour later, and repeat the process every 30 to 60 minutes after that.  When I wander around at night I don't wake up for five, six, even seven hours.  The only other time I'll sleep for six or more uninterrupted hours is if I take a benzo.

Interrupted sleep is normal for me.  For most of my life a typical night was four hours of sleep, 5-60 minutes of being awake, two hours of sleep, 5-60 minutes of being awake, an hour of sleep, then waking up and figuring out if I need more sleep our not.

If my now-unreliable memory is to be trusted, I slept through the night as a child only when I woke up with a bad headache and otherwise feeling sick.  As opposed to all those times I woke up, sometimes on the floor, after a night of the normal sleep pattern, feeling really sick after the scary dreams and having wet the bed.  Now I know those to be signs of having had one or more severe nocturnal secondarily generalized seizures.

That stopped when I was nine or ten.  The partial seizures when I was awake, presenting as visual distortions, continued until I was 24 (that was 1986) and took lithium.  The generalized seizures returned, the partial seizures got worse, and nothing has been the same since.  But I was also flipping the fuck out with bipolar disorder and other stuff was going on, so it's not entirely lithium's fault.

Disc Earth

What was the 19^th century equivalent of Intelligent Design?  Pretty much the same thing, but with the added bonus of not just an Earth-centric universe, but a Flat Earth-centric universe!  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Disc Earth:

(Click on it to see it at full size on Wikipedia Commons.  You need to see it at full size to truly appreciate the the full-on, gonzo, Bible-based pseudoscience.)

Really.

I guess that, like today's believers in a 6,000-year-old Earth where everything was created, as it now is, by their version of God, they are incapable of understanding science and just refuse to admit that.

C'mon folks, it's not that difficult.  Once upon a time I used to be a top-flight programmer, now I can't code my way out of a paper bag.  I'm now unable to grasp the finer points of the mechanics behind how the Internet works.  I have absolutely no clue about how a lot of stuff works.  There should be no shame in admitting you just aren't able to understand something.

The same applies to everyone who does understand science.  Stop looking down on people who can't get it and accept that some people never will.  That doesn't make them any less worthwhile as people.  They can probably understand or do things you can't and never will be able to.


Antique space maps via bOINGbOING and Atlas Obscura.

America: Love It Or Leave It!

Retail Therapy

It's a fucking struggle to do anything.

I've been trying to buy groceries for over a week.  Even shopping online is too much effort.

Yet at the same time I feel as if buying a bunch of kitchen gadgets will solve all my problems.  I haven't thought like that for 13 years.

Once upon a time I could go garage saling, looking for obscure utensils.  Even if it was something I'd never use, a couple of cheap, culinary geegaws would frequently cheer me up.

Now that it's no longer a good idea for me to do any cooking more complicated than rice, the urge to buy kitchen gadgets is a sick joke my brain is playing on me.

What would really be useful: updated glasses.  The depression has reached that point of intensity and duration where it permanently affects my vision.  This has happened to me often.  I can go years without needing an adjustment in my lens prescriptions, or maybe just minor ones.  But there comes a time during these long-running periods of intense depression when my vision will begin to rapidly deteriorate and I need a significant change in my lenses.

The problem is: there's no point in seeing an eye doctor until it's over, as my eyes are just going to get worse until this episode is over.

I'm well aware of outdated lens prescriptions triggering depression.  That's not how it works with me.

Of course this has to hit me this time of year.  I'm much more depressed when the sun is out.  I've tried going nocturnal, but it doesn't work.

I'd really hate my life if I bothered to care enough about it.

Artifact from the Big Iron Age

This is what coding looked like from the 1980s through early 2000s.  Back when I could code my way out of a paper bag.  

There are probably all sorts of legacy systems still running on RPG, nurtured by tenured programmers who have no fear of ever being fired, because they are the only ones who know how the damned things work.

File Under: Why Bother?

Banging my head against the wall trying to make the wiki software do something that it probably can't do.  More likely can, but I just can't see how.

But it's a more attractive proposition than working on other stuff, because it reminds me of my life from 20 years ago when I could code my way out of a paper bag.

And I didn't hide from dealing with non-work aspects of said life. 

Working on something other than Crazymeds seems pointless in any event.

You're Killing Me, AdSense

Seriously Google?  Three ads for Dunkin' Donuts on the Wellubtrin page but only one on the Remeron page?

Don’t you read what I write?

At any dosage it will make you crave doughnuts. Seriously. You will want to invest in Krispy Kreme stock (or maybe something along similar lines that isn’t tanking); as Remeron’s antagonism of the serotonin 5HT2C and H1 receptors gives you the munchies for carbohydrates and sugars like you were 16 and smoking the best pot ever in the parking lot of a strip mall with a 24-hour doughnut shop beckoning you with glazed and jelly-filled ecstasy. People dipping spoons into a bag of sugar and eating it as is – not unheard of when on Remeron. This stuff is nothing more than legal marijuana, and if I knew crap about biochemistry I could probably prove that crazy statement.

People who take Wellbutrin don’t want to eat anything. It’s the “happy, skinny, horny pill”, remember? People who take Remeron want to eat doughnuts all day long.

Since writing the above comments on the Remeron page I've learned Remeron is also a 5HT1A agonist, and that is a key part of the sugar-and-carb-craving MOA.  I know this because my daughter and I each take a different TCA, and we both added BuSpar to our cocktails.  BuSpar + TCA = Remeron, and we've been craving doughnuts ever since.  It's hit me a lot harder, probably because there are gluten-free doughnuts she can eat, but none that I can.

This post is brought to you by:

The Remeron Made Me Eat It t-shirts.

Happy 100th Birthday World War 1 (the 2nd)

In honor of the WWI centenary I present the 1914 War Map of Europe:

Click to Enlarge

Aside from being its being in pretty bad shape - it was over 90 years old and pretty tattered when I bought it, and at 47.5 by 36 inches it is not suitable for framing - this map has a lot of things besides a few intentional or unintentional errors to make it unique.

Not that they needed to use any intentional errors to protect their copyright, as they used the information overload style popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and still popular with the cartographers with National Geographic and the Encyclopedia Britannica.  From what I've been able to find, this is Pitman's improved adjustable war map of Europe, which is really most of H. Buchardt Petersen's Map of Europe published by the A.R. Ohman Map Co.  Whom Pitman has actually credited.  I haven't been able to find any pictures of either, just listings in a couple of library catalogs, the Library of Congress' A List of Atlases and Maps Applicable to the World War and a couple of antiquarian book listings (in the shape it's in I'd guess mine's worth between US$100 & US$200).

By "most" I mean it's obvious (even with my atrocious photography) part of the map is missing.  Note how names are cropped:

It's even blurrier up close

Why was part of the map cut off?  To make room for the sidebar of of information about demographics, infrastructure, and the militaries of the combatant nations, or ones that, at the time, seemed likely to join the festivities.  Appending these sorts of data to maps was popular in atlases of the time, but this is the only instance where I've seen it done on a map independent of an atlas:

I Guess Size Does Matter

Something I've never seen in an atlas is pictures of the heads of state.  Which makes sense, as atlases are supposed to last longer than the reigns of kings.  Or something like that:

Europe's Most Wanted

Note the bullshit term "Mikado" for Japan's Emperor that was popular at the time.  Missing from the pictures is the inbreeding.  King George and Emperor William were both grandsons of Queen Victoria.  Czar Nicholas was a first cousin of King George (their mothers were sisters), and his wife was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, thus a first cousin of George and William.  No wonder his son was a hemophiliac.  Another grandchild of Victoria, their cousin Marie, was married to the King of Romania, and William's daughter Sophia was married to the King of Greece.  It could have been worse.  Franz Joseph may have lost his heirs to suicide and Balkan anarchists, but he managed to avoid the Habsburg Jaw.  Granted, the Habsburgs managed to inbreed themselves into extinction 50 years before Franz Joseph was born, but you never can tell.

Back to the cartography.  For some reason someone, my guess is Pitman, thought it necessary to slap the name of each country in big, red letters near, or over, the same name that was already there in large, black letters in a typeface reserved for country names.

Most glaring error: Misspelling Luxembourg in big red letters:

Who Cares About Those Luxembourgers Anyway?

Bonus irony points: Luxembourg the country isn't identified in black letters with the appropriate typeface, just the capital city.  That may have been an intentional error of omission.

Close second: Making the Balearic Islands look like they belong to France.  That, however, could have been the printer's fault.  Some of the Greek islands, notably Corfu, look as if they belong to Serbia.  Yes, it's spelled "Servia" all over the place.  It was often spelled that way in the US, especially in places with a large Greek population, like New York City.  Anyway it's annoying that neither Buchardt nor Pitman bothered to identify which islands belonged to whom.  Then again, it may have been expected that the audience for this map was going to know that sort of thing.  Even Gibraltar has no indication that it was a British possession.  An atlas I have from 1907 is the same way.  The prevailing attitude seems to have been: If you didn't learn that in school you have no business looking at our fine cartographic products.  This sucker cost $1.50 in 1914, when the average worker, who never attended high school, was making around $2 a day.
 
Except, they did indicate a couple of things were Spanish:

Mistakes Were Made

I guess these are intentional errors used as copyright protectors.  Ceuta wasn't an island then and it isn't now, although it is still a Spanish enclave in Morocco.  Perejil 'Island' is little more than a large rock poking above the surface of the Mediterranean.  Spain is still holding onto its claim of it, because you never know what you'll find under the seabed in a three mile radius ... or however the hell they determine who gets what where in a narrow strait with three countries involved.  Listing anything in Morocco visible on this map as being Spanish is redundant, as all of northern Morocco was a Spanish 'protectorate' by 1912, but listing only three of the named features as such implies that the rest aren't Spanish, and thus incorrect.

If you think this is obsessive, you should hear me yell at the Hitler Channels whenever they display incorrect maps.

And what the fuck do I mean by World War 1 the 2nd?  WWI was the first global conflict fought where most combatant nations used all-out total war - where each nation uses practically, if not actually all of its resources, infrastructure, policies, and social structures, for the war effort - but it was the second truly global conflict.  The first, where the concept of total war began, is generally considered a series of wars that happened 100 years prior to WWI: the Napoleonic wars of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.  They are not so much a series of wars with a bunch of treaties everyone ignored than a single prolonged war fought at a much slower pace than today, with more time between battles.  Battles that were fought in Europe, Africa, Asia (barely), the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and North America.  The US was involved as well.  Our disastrous War of 1812 was siding with Napoleon for his original reasons (spreading revolutionary democracy) as well as getting tired of having our ships stolen and sailors kidnapped by the British Navy.  We botched it for a lot of reasons, like joining in on the fun several years too late and not taking the invasion of Canada seriously.

While the war was basically between the French and British empires, it really pitted France, and later Denmark (after it was attacked by England for being in the way), a newly liberated Poland, Persia (briefly), and eventually the US, against England, Russia, Sweden, Sardinia (it was an important country back then), the Ottoman Empire (thus the battles in Africa and Asia), and whatever countries failed to keep Napoleon from conquering them, including Switzerland.  Prussia, Spain and Austria fought on both sides at one time or another.  So did some other countries, but they weren't seriously on Napoleon's side.

The aspects of total war developed at the time included the mass conscription of soldiers and having most of the industrial output of France and England being dedicated to producing war matériel.  There were also insurgencies in occupied countries, most notably Spain, and brutal repression of same.  Modern guerrilla tactics were born during Napoleon's occupation of Spain, and they haven't had to change much in 200 years.  While they didn't invent it, nobody does scorched earth like the Russians.  Invading Russia is a sucker's game.  For the technology available at the time, the Napoleonic Wars were the closest thing to total war seen until the American civil war, the first true total war.

Health Insurance Follies

I've needed to see a doctor for over a year.  Maybe even two.  I've got all sorts of symptoms that can't be written off as age, side effects, and/or depression.  I have health insurance, and I'm finally getting my act together to choose a PCP and make an appointment to see him.

Of course it can never be that easy.

First is choosing a doctor.  My insurance provider's website is one of the most user-hostile sites I've come across in some time.  My premiums hadn't been paid for three months because I thought all I needed to do to get the bills paid automagically was to sign up for it and enter all the information they need to pay the bill.  Turns out there's another page you need to go to in order to activate the fucking thing after all that.  And the first letter they sent me asking for the cash didn't arrive until two weeks after the second, which wasn't their fault, that's just how the mail is around here.  I'm glad they didn't cancel my policy.  

Trying to find a doctor through their site is painfully ... I don't know what the fuck they were trying to accomplish.  You can enter only one. parameter. at. a. time. regarding where you live, how far you're willing to drive, what sort of doctor you want to find, and what sort of coverage you have.  I can understand if they coded it that way in an attempt to speed things up, but the only thing it sped up that I can think of is how fast the code monkeys delivered it, because that's just lazy-ass coding.  Worst of all is the selection based on your coverage.  I can't remember what type of coverage I selected.  Can I look that up anywhere?  No.  It tells me where on the Olympic podium my plan is, but it doesn't tell me which network option I chose.  It's not on my card either.  As far as picking a local PCP is concerned, it didn't make any difference, but when it came to finding a shrink, therapist, and neurologist, I may as well just ignore their site and pick doctors based on whatever other info I can find.  Most of the shrinks they have are at the clinic where I went when I first moved to Missoula.  The clinic that was one of the reasons why I moved up here.  The clinic where every shrink I saw there retired on me and the EEG registered inconclusive when I was having a fucking aura during the test.  And the info they provide when comparing doctors is content-free.

Looking through the website of the regional health center to find a doctor was enlightening.  Two osteopaths (no thanks), three MDs, and five PAs.  Normally I would have gone with one of the PAs, but I think I need stronger medicine.  So of the three docs: 

One's an ENT.  Other than frequent nosebleeds, which are probably a side effect of fish oil as I used to get them all the time when I was a kid, and the occasional bout of tinnitus, those parts of me are OK.

One is ex-Navy who looks like he could play the part of a Navy doctor in a movie set on a ship during WWII.  He specializes in sticking things inside you and, based upon the results, cutting out stuff that's between your ribcage and thighs.  Ex-military I'm OK with.  I think I'd have a hard time convincing him I'd rather live with frequent minor kidney stones than seizures, or this fucking jamais vu I'm currently experiencing.

The third one is the Chief of Staff who specializes in family medicine and sports medicine.

The PAs are looking better and better.

I go with the Chief of Staff because he's also close to being a diagnostician, and that's what I really need.

So that's all set up.  The insurance company's website is happy I selected a PCP.  But it wants to know why I changed PCPs, and I can't update my policy without telling it something.  Selecting one because you enrolled in a new policy isn't an option.  Previous doc chosen in error is.

But can I make an appointment online?  Through either site?

Of course not.

I still have to deal with the phone.

I've been needing to make all sorts of fucking phone calls for three fucking weeks now.

On top of all that they limit prescriptions to 100 pills per fill.  That's 17 days of protriptyline, 20 days of 25mg topiramate and 25 days of buspirone.  My drug regimen is difficult enough as it is.  Not being able to get all my refills at once just makes my life that much more of a pain in the ass. 

I really need somebody to manage my life for me.
 

Alternative Geography

Courtesy of Bored Panda

40 Maps They Didn’t Teach You In School

There are a few selections from Yanko Tsvetkov / Alphadesigner. I especially like this one, showing the consolidation of social networks:

Is the Stigma *THAT* Bad?

I seem to be the only person on the planet selling Schizophrenia Sucks!, Fuck Schizophrenia, and Team Schizophrenia merchandise of any kind. I could possibly trademark the terms for use on crap like shirts & mugs. A concept that is crazier than I am.  Is the stigma against schizophrenia that fucking bad these days?

But why not be that fucking mercenary? I've got so many Amazon ads on Crazymeds I already feel like Jean Genet on the Marseille waterfront.  I'd still sell Team Schizophrenia stuff at cost, like I do now.  

I have a vague memory about getting a trademark on something, then making it available for use by the public, just to prevent someone from getting a trademark so no one else could use it.  If that is real and not a figment of my increasingly-unreliable memory, I'd do that for Team Schizophrenia.  As much as I dislike awarenessitis, apparently most people do need to be bitchslapped into the awareness that the mentally interesting, especially the schizophrenic, are not significantly more violent than everyone else.  So I wouldn't want any local organization doing a little fund- or awareness-raising to be prevented from creating Team Schizophrenia shirts if someone else wanted to corner the non-existent market of schizophrenia-related merchandise.

Plumbing Mystery Resolved

Mystery solved.  Thanks to a burst pipe.  In a wall.  Along the only pipe in the Monty Pythonesque plumbing that can't be isolated from the water pump.  So no running water, and the downstairs apartment is flooded.  I expect a nice crop of Peziza domiciliana any day now.

Fortunately I have 5 - 7 days of drinking water stashed away.  And plenty of snow.  It's not the heavy wet stuff, so bringing it to melt will be a pain, but at least I have something to wash with until I can find someone willing to come out here to fix the plumbing.  But I need to deal with the insurance first.  When they open on Monday.  

No matter what, I need to take care of this before all the snow is gone.  With any luck it will keep snowing and I can put this off indefinitely.

One Weird Trick to Banish Annoying Facebook Ads

Let me be clear: I have nothing against advertising, even the ultra-targeted ads on Facebook.  I make my living from the ads on Crazy Meds.  Crazy Meds wouldn't exist without AdSense and, face it, Facebook wouldn't be free without ads.  The increased use of things like AdBlocker is having a noticeable effect on how much money I make.

What bothers the shit out of me are ads featuring people with the bizarrely exaggerated chests and hips that are usually found only in hentai (Japanese erotic anime) who are selling "weird," "strange," "soon-to-be-banned," or similar secrets for weight loss, muscle growth, financial success, and other popular spam-subject-line miracles.  Although the most common thing they're selling is dating services.  Why they think those women with freakishly huge tits are attractive is beyond me.

In order to provide a higher quality infotainment experience for their customers (i.e. better ad targeting), FB lets you hide specific ads and asks why you don't like it.  So I hid anything featuring excessively top-heavy people and gave rotating reasons as to why I hid them.  I found all such ads to be one of:

• Obscene
• Uninteresting
• Misleading 

Just like some old episode of Star Trek, the conflicting reasons caused the ad serving software to have an aneurism.  I'm now into day three of no ads on my timeline and far fewer ads on my newsfeed.  The first dating service ads have returned after a 72-hour hiatus, but no bizarre models.  Yet.

I doubt this will last much longer.  I've been disappointed by teh Internets too often.  If they are promising weird hentai I expect to see demi-human schoolgirls in skimpy uniforms toting  MAC-10s in charge of hermaphrodites undergoing forced lactation.  I do have some standards.

Try it for yourself.  If there is one group of excessively annoying ads that are essentially variations on the same theme, give FB contradictory reasons why you don't want to see them.

Then Again, Maybe You Can...

OK, so maybe the retail therapy helped after all.  It required the stuff I bought to start showing up.  So far:

German atlas from 1933
I love German maps. The colors are the best. I really like the ones from the Nazi era, as the maps show the delusion that all German overseas territories lost after WWI, such as German South West Africa, now called Nambia, are still German possessions.  Other than those I've yet to find any unintentional errors.

Next:

Rand McNally Atlas from 1889
This is full of unintentional errors.  Facts known at the time, such as thinking the Nile was longer than the Amazon are one thing, but Sweden and Norway were still one country in 1889. It's full of diverse charts to help illustrate the facts that heavy atlases like this one are chock full of.  Mostly forgotten stuff, like how Britain was once the world's largest producer of coal and steel.  This one, on illiteracy in states and territories, is especially telling:

Some things never change.

As the first picture shows, there are pressed flowers and other plants saved throughout the book.  I have no idea how old they are.

From the same seller I also acquired this equally heavy volume:

People's Popular Atlas from 1907

It's a lot like the Rand McNally Atlas, just published 20 years later, with fewer errors, and full of surprising things for a book published over 100 years ago.  Such as classifying "Hindoos" and Arabs as Caucasians, and two essays on why you'd never want to go to war against the Russians or Japanese.  As the Russo-Japanese war had just ended, including those essays isn't a non sequitur, the surprising thing was the admiration the writer has for the Japanese soldier.  This book lacks the casual racism so prevalent in most of the American reference books and material I have from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Getting those books, great procrastination material, gave me enough of an emotional boost to finish getting my tax stuff together and take it to my accountant, go grocery shopping, start cleaning up around here, and hang some more maps I've had in storage for close to ten years.  Now I have all sorts of stuff to look at, trying to find unintentional errors on maps that are at least 70 years old - which has to be the world's geekiest hobby.

Can't Even Buy Happiness

I've been cycling through various stages of depression, each day, for several weeks.  At least it's not the hell of tripolar ultradian cycling where I'll swing between manic, mixed and depressed several times an hour.  This is the gentle wash flavor.  Although a mood state can still last no more than 20 minutes, I'm rarely doing anything extreme like plummeting from sub-baseline to in bed, fetal position, shivering, crying and scaring the cats.  It takes at least half an hour to get from one extreme, if mildly depressed can be called extreme, to the other, and six hours or longer to get back.  I'm not hitting bottom, not even close, and I don't even reach my current low point on a daily basis, so this isn't a particularly bad episode.

I can't decide if I should try the 25 mg of Topamax every hour.  Not being able to decide is a key symptom of depression.  When I cycle through mania and mixed along with depressed I know I'm fucked up enough to make the cycling stop no matter where I land.  When I'm like this, I'm not sure.  I could stop cycling, but where?  With tripolar ultradian cycling the decision is easy, euphoric mania, dysphoric mania or depressed.as.fuck is better than going through those and mixed states - I guess that really makes it quadrapolar cycling - every five to ten minutes, and I figure I stand at least a 75% chance of landing on something better.  Since I figure all that extra Topamax is going to knock the mania dead as well, the odds of ending up mixed or either flavor of manic are pretty long, so it's going to be baseline or depressed, and depressed is vastly better than ultradian cycling.  But now?  I have no idea how I'd end up.

The extra 10mg of protriptyline is helping, but only in keeping things from getting worse.


The local Equinox is Monday.  Looks like six more weeks of feeling like this.  Unless I manage to decide tomorrow to try the Topamax cure for ultradian cycling.  And it works.

I need to get my tax shit together.  I have most of it.  I'm stuck.  Dealing with my life is painful.

I tried some retail therapy.  I found some atlases from 1930s Germany and the USSR in the 1940s, as well as late 19th and early 20th century America.  I have my eye on similar items.  I picked up, all via teh interwebs of course, a CD of stuff from The Birthday Party that I didn't have and other music.  I looked around for records I used to own and miss.  The downside of having a bunch of vinyl worth over $100 the each means replacing a few lost items costs hundreds of dollars.  More reasons to buy current music I guess.

The Missoulian had an article about the Montana Valley Bookstore - a local portal to L-space - trying to reduce its inventory so they are closer to the advertised 100,000 books.  The article mentioned how the owners donated boxes of encyclopedia sets to the Missoula Library book sale.  Had I known they were giving away reference books I would have been there with my own boxes in the bed of my truck.  I have two full sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with books of the year, and various other encyclopedia, dictionaries, atlases, and other reference books going back to the 1870s.  I have four bookcases, two custom-made, dedicated to non-medical reference works, and two more for medical texts.  When do they publish this stellar news?  Right before my birthday.

Timing is everything.

I'm slowly moving the blogrolls back from my short-lived, personal crap-only blog.  The Panoply of Stupidity, Humiliation, Pain and Absurdity is up, although some of the defunct entries need to be added to the defunct list, and new sites need to be found to replace them.  The medical blogrolls need editing as well.

Crazy Meds Content Updates

Nothing spectacular, but more than the unannounced tweaks to pages I do all the time.

• Each Coming Night pointed out some changes & errors regarding the availability of norepinephrine-selective reuptake inhibiting antidepressants. The changes being Strattera (atomoxetine) is now available all over the place, not just Canadia; the errors being Edronax (reboxetine) is not yet available as a generic in the UK and Ireland. So I updated the Strattera (atomoxetine), Edronax (reboxetine), and Norepinephrine-Selective Reuptake Inhibitor (NSRI) Antidepressants pages to reflect that.
  • In addition to availability, I made a few other minor changes on the page about NSRIs clarifying their common attributes and relationship to TCAs.
  • I was also able to dig up some information on the Catatrol (viloxazine), the original, or at least older NSRI. It’s still around, but I doubt I’ll write up anything on it.
  • I also got to add SPC sheets from the UK & Ireland, and a New Zealand MDS sheet to the Strattera page, along with its shelf-life of three years.
• Instead of dealing with my life, I completely redid the Stats page. To make things easier for everyone, you can now see traffic stats from AwStats, Alexa, and whatever alternate universe version of Crazy Meds Quantcast is looking at.

Fine. Birthday. OK.

OK, I'll give in to popular demand and blog about my boring, stupid life.  Here.  One blog to to rule them all...

I guess it's like cable/satellite TV channels.  Back in the YIIKes decade, which is when TV peaked, specialty stations aired programs about whatever their manifesto stated they were about.  The Hitler Channel, AKA the History Channel, was all about History - especially WWII.  Now it's the Superstition, Greed, and Conjecture Channel.  The main problem I have with satellite TV is how most everything has become the Miscellaneous Channel, showing the same stupid movies, stupid 'reality' shows, and syndicated repeats that have nothing to do with whatever the fuck their name is.  Not enough people appreciate specialization.  Fine.

I'm sorry I haven't replied to everyone's birthday wishes.   I've been dealing with a bad case of depression, not wanting to talk to anyone, and anxiety over Google hating me for some reason.   I've also been avoiding my life for too long, and I'm trying to deal with that as well.   By procrastinating, of course.  I really need a personal assistant to deal with my life. 

I hope the pharmacy was able to get Roxane's protriptyline this month.  The stuff from Rising is just like Barr's: acceptable, but my depression threshold is low.  Although the pills themselves are pretty cool, all nice and slippery with a retro-futuristic imprint of Σ (sigma) on one side and 7 on the other.

What did I get for my birthday?  Google changed their search algorithm.  Crazy Meds is plummeting in search results.  Again.  It's April 2012 all over again.  When you do a search for Cymbalta, or Wellbutrin, or Effexor, or Lexapro, or Topamax, or Lamictal, or Invega, or most any drug I have a page on, you should see Crazy Meds in the top five results.  Now I'm lucky if it shows up in the top ten.  Traffic was at 15,000 - 21,000 visitors a day.  Now it's more like 11,000 - 19,000, with revenue down just as much.  If you think that's still a shitload of people and I should be stupidly happy about it, keep in mind this is how I make a living, and one of the things I'm having a hard time dealing with is finding health insurance.  Even though in Montana there are all of two companies selling insurance to individuals, trying to figure out which plan to get is daunting.  No matter what I'm looking at $500 a month, or more, with no idea what meds are going to cost.  And the domain host costs $5,000 a year.  Don't bother telling me about how great your host is and costs so much less, even if you get 21,000 people a day, or more, visiting your site.  While running resource-intensive applications like Invision Power Board and downloading a shitload of .pdf files.  Lunarpages is a great domain host, and there's more to hosting a site than technology.  So grossing $3,000 a month isn't as much as it seems, and I won't be making that much if the traffic and ad rates keep falling.

Where was I?  So what may or may not be related to the decline of the Crazy Meds brand in Google's search results is vanishing +1 numbers and page rank status.  Take a look at the Crazy Meds home page.  Now look at it from this link.  Notice any difference?  The +1 count in the first one is 18.  I don't know what it is in the second one, but it's a fuck of a lot more than 18.  The +1 counts on some pages differ depending on if you look at it on www.crazymeds.us or crazymeds.us, on some pages it makes no difference, and on some pages they've just vanished no matter which version of the URL you use.  If you have the Google page rank indicator plugin you'll see that the home page is unranked.  It should have a rank of at least five.  A couple other pages that were ranked three or four are also unranked.

This is being discussed on a Google+ Developers' G+ Community, because anyone with a website who implements the +1 button is now a 'developer'.

Google has become the corporation Dilbert works for and I get to feel as frustrated, depressed, and anxious as some code monkey trapped in a cubicle without the pleasure being able to write code any more.

Depending on how bad my need to procrastinate gets, I'll move the Panoply of Stupidity, Humiliation, Pain and Absurdity back here, along with other bits and pieces of the other blogs.  Everything is miscellaneous bullshit.


Update 1: The +1 button problem apparently wasn't complicated enough.  It seems like the version at www.crazymeds.us is incrementing again, although it started at 18, so as of Monday, 25 February, it's at 20 something.  The count at crazymeds.us, no www, was over 200 yesterday.  This morning it was at 193.

Update 2: The pharmacy didn't have Roxane's flavor of protriptyline, so it's another month of Rising.

Guns and Mental Illness - No Easy Answer

Whenever some horrible event like that at Newtown or the Clackamas Town Center happens the immediate assumption is the killer was mentally ill, even though more than half the time he wasn’t.  Regardless of the killer’s frame of mind, two never-implemented aspects of the never-implemented solution to prevent such a thing from happening again are to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill and the easier, yet less frequently discussed, to improve mental health care.

For purposes of keeping guns out of the hands of people who really aren't that much more violent than the general population, let’s define "crazy."  Sorry, “severely mentally ill.”  The first thing most people think of is either “schizophrenia” or “psychopath.”  One problem is “psychopath” isn’t a diagnosis.  “Psychopathic traits” shows up in the DSM, but mainly in the reference section.  What you’re looking for is “Antisocial (Dyssocial) Personality Disorder,” which includes sociopathy, AKA what Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy had.  We can all agree keeping guns away from the next Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer is good; except, like every sociopath, they weren’t diagnosed until after they were convicted of crimes that would have prevented them from buying a gun at a place that does a background check.  As for schizophrenia, while only a very small percentage of people with schizophrenia are violent, I can understand why everyone would want to keep guns away from someone who says things like, “God directed that bullet” and everything he learned in school was “lies straight from the pits of Hell.”  Good luck in taking away Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-GA) guns.

What about the bipolar?  You don’t want me buying a gun, right?  When I was hearing people in my bathroom and on the radio plotting to murder me and seeing fires they set in the corners of rooms throughout my house, did I want to get a gun and kill them?  No.  I did what the vast majority of the mentally interesting do: I called my doctor to talk about increasing the dosage of my meds.  I also wanted to buy every kitchen gadget I saw advertised on TV, which would have been cheaper than the Risperdal but probably less effective.  Doing something that makes no sense (to someone who isn’t crazy, or in retrospect) but isn’t violent is also a popular option.  Actually getting violent in response to an imaginary threat is rare among the mentally interesting.  It’s things like physical abuse, substance abuse, actual threats, recent divorce, unemployment, victimization, you know, the same stuff that sets off normal people, that causes some of use to really lose it.

Does taking Ambien or Lunesta count? Because people with sleep disorders do all sorts of crazy stuff.  Just ask Patrick Kennedy.  How about the epileptic? I ended up in the lock ward of a psych hospital due to a long run of complex partial seizures and having a history of bipolar disorder.  As with sleep disorders, people with complex partial seizures do all sorts of bizarre things.  While we’re on the subject of seizures, the epileptic have a suicide rate of 12%, not only that, if we also have a psychiatric condition the suicide rate can be up to nine times what it is for someone with the same condition who isn’t epileptic!  Is preventing suicide as well as multicide reason enough to keep guns away from us nutjobs?  The bipolar have a lifetime suicide rate of 26%*, people with major depression 13%, and the suicide rate of combat veterans, with or without a diagnosis of any form of brain cooties, is…rising, but even the reliable numbers I can find about what the rate actually is are all over the map, from 0.15% (the same as normal people) to 20%.  One thing is certain: about three quarters of vets who kill themselves do so with firearms.

You want to know who is really more likely to kill someone with a gun, knife, crowbar, etc. than anyone else?  Someone who is drunk.  Seriously, alcohol consumption is responsible for a huge chunk of violent crimes, especially assaults with firearms.  Even living in an area where they sell a lot of booze is dangerous.  Cocaine makes people violent as well, and other illicit drugs cause their share of problems, but booze is cheaper, legal, and has had way more studies published about it.  The point I'm trying to hammer into everyone's skull (and I restrained myself) as often as the crazy = violent canard already is: something as socially acceptable as getting drunk is more likely to cause someone to get violent and kill people than the far less acceptable act of being born crazy.  So including DUIs and other substance-related offenses in the background check database would probably reduce the number of individual people killed by guns significantly, but it wouldn't do much in the way of preventing mass murder.  Improving the collection of domestic violence data might help prevent would-be family annihilators from obtaining guns to turn office parks into shooting galleries, as long as they don’t persuade their partners to buy the firearms for them.

Next: exactly how do you go about doing a mental health background check?  The way it works now is if you’ve been involuntarily committed to a psych hospital, or otherwise decreed a danger to yourself or others by a judge, you’re supposed to be in the FBI database that pawn shops and merchants at gun shows don’t bother with, but anyone willing to send $40 to a sketchy website can look at.  As is repeatedly pointed out, even this system barely works.  Worst case example: Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, was deemed officially crazy by a judge and he didn’t make it into the database.  Anyone who receives federal benefits via a trustee because they are mentally incompetent is supposed to be in the database, but only The Department of Veterans Affairs is currently sending those data.  Republicans in Congress have introduced the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act to stop the VA from doing that.

Since the mentally interesting are lower than undocumented terrorists who illegally enter this country in order to steal the jobs of domestic terrorists, the simple answer is to put our medical records in the world’s least-secure database full of all the information you need to steal someone’s identity.  Screw HIPAA.  Anyone diagnosed with a no-gun-for-you mental illness is immediately flagged.  As is everyone currently diagnosed with such.  Which means everyone’s medical records need to be scanned for brain cooties to see who needs to have their guns taken away.  Those paranoid teabaggers were right!  Obamacare does mean they’re coming for our guns!  And everyone thought they were crazy.

Adam Lanza had no history of being mentally ill.  A week after the shooting there is still no proof that he was mentally ill, so he wouldn’t have been in the nutjob section of the FBI background check database.   Even if someone in that database wanted to go postal, what if that person does the same thing Lanza did and use guns that belong to his mother?  Are relatives to be included?  Spouses?  Parents?  Siblings?  Children?  Aunts and uncles?  Nieces and nephews?  In-laws?  And why stop at the mentally interesting for that one, as felons sometimes have families.

Even though we are not much more violent than normal people, just perceived as such, the mentally ill are a convenient scapegoat to explain the inexplicable.  The only proof most people need that someone is crazy is the fact they killed a lot of people.  Most people can’t accept a motive that doesn’t involve voices in someone’s head.  It doesn’t matter if the shooter survived like Anders Breivik, or it was obvious from his history like Wade Page.  Racism and idiocy aren’t enough, so crazy has to be involved.  When Bruce Pardo dressed up like Santa and, on Christmas Eve 2008, killed his ex-wife and almost all of her family with a homemade flamethrower, the overwhelming rage many people feel when you combine a messy divorce with severe financial problems apparently were not motive enough.  Add shame and failure to the mix and the same can said for every family annihilator who kills a bunch of people he feels were responsible for getting him fired, his family, and himself.  Mental illness is the only acceptable explanation because people are afraid to confront the fact that humans are inherently violent creatures; that our hands evolved to use fists as weapons as well as to hold other tools.  They are afraid to confront how easy it is for the veneer of civilization to slip away; that anger and alcohol disinhibit more effectively than an abnormal psyche or neurological architecture.  They are afraid to confront how a neighbor, coworker, family member, spouse, partner, or they themselves could be just a couple more drinks or one more bad performance review away from being the next person to go on a killing spree.  It’s far better for the mentally interesting to be the sin eaters than to face that possibility.

Still, the unknown motive is the worst of all.  It’s better to have some reason, any reason to explain what happened.  Otherwise the universe is a random, uncaring place that could have already sent a gamma ray burst our way that will destroy all life on Earth just as easily as someone can send a message in the blood of the innocent while neglecting to tell anyone how to read it.

Has anyone considered how counterproductive the constant equating of mass murder with mental illness is?   How many people who are already skittish about seeking help for a mental health problem because of the social stigma will want to seek help if there is a chance, real or perceived, that their name, address, phone number, and social security number, along with the indication that they are crazy enough to kill their family and coworkers, are all going into an FBI database?  One recent survey of crazy people found that 38% of the severely mentally ill who didn’t bother to seek treatment cited structural reasons: lack of money, availability, or the inability to get to where the services are; while 21% said it was due to the stigma of being crazy and 26% because they thought the available services weren’t good enough.  Of those who started treatment and then quit within a year, 30% dropped out within a year due to structural reasons, 36% dropped out due to stigma, and 35% quit because the available services sucked.  So, yes, improving the mental health system will benefit a lot of people who, while somewhat more violent than everyone else, are also ten times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than you normal people!  We will never be a protected class, the NRA will never use us as an example of people who need concealed carry permits in order to protect ourselves, and loudly using the prevention of gun-related violence as the reason to expand access to improved mental health services will probably scare off more people who would have otherwise sought treatment.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.


* No wonder Ian Curtis hanged himself.  I'm damn lucky to have made it to 50.