From the ages of 26 to 46, I relied on SSRI's to handle my depression. This is what happened after....
I once greatly upset someone online by making a nerdy joke about a text editor. I didn't mean to; his reaction came as a surprise to me, which is why it stuck with me all this time. I should probably explain what a text editor is. A text editor is something like Microsoft Word, except it caters to the needs of the kind of people who need to edit large amounts of source code and configuration files…
(alternative title: scaring away the new readers) Like a moth to a flame, I keep being drawn to sanma , three-player Japanese mahjong. I know that it's bad for me, but the temptation is that it's quick. A normal four-player game takes half an hour or longer; sanma can be over in five minutes, and sometimes much quicker than that. The downside is that it's insane. I don't know how it's logically…
"I'm currently trending on Hacker News" is a sentence I never thought I would have occasion to use, but here I am, having my fifteen minutes of fame. It's a hot lazy afternoon here in Europe, and I was idly glancing at the Bear analytics. My recent little rant about the airport user experience had somehow made it onto the discover page, and I was getting more views than usual. Only a handful of…
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best. To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You know what is meant by a gate and a concourse, and the difference between a ticket and a boarding pass. The poor elderly Indian woman who you just told to "keep the gate area clear" does not, and she wasn't trying to make your life more difficult. It's…
We now return you to this blog's real topic: reviews of contemporary musical theatre. I have been to see Death Note The Musical at the Barbican . I had no idea what to expect. I wasn't sure if Death Note's ultra-dark, uncompromising high-stakes intellectual cat-and-mouse games set in a morally grey universe would really lend themselves to, you know, show tunes. Also, I had never seen a musical…
sanma, that way madness lies
I've been playing around a bit with using large language models to proofread my blog posts. My conclusions so far are: They are very good at spotting grammatical errors. I don't make a lot of spelling mistakes and I use a state of the art spellchecker to catch the few that make it through. But when reading back my own prose I just read what I meant to write, and the little bits of debris that are…
I have on occasion been mildly critical of the moral choices of the richest man in the world. In response to this I have been told more than once that my opinions don't count, because I am "just jealous". To this accusation I can only say: yes. Guilty as charged. I am jealous of people who have so much money that the concept loses all meaning to them. Money doesn't solve everything, these people…
Late last year I took the chance to taper off the SSRI's under medical supervision. I don't think there is any shame in needing antidepressants. They're medication: if you need them, you need them. But I also believe that one should strive to keep medication to a minimum, and I wanted to see if I could now do without. SSRI's have been good to me, but there were always one or two side effects that…
Earlier this year, I had my body analysed in a DEXA scanner. This is basically a huge flatbed scanner that you lie down on. For a few minutes, a robot arm moves around you and inspects you from all sides, accompanied by appropriate whirring and beeping noises. At the end of the process, you are handed a PDF with a detailed breakdown of what your body consists of, i.e. fat, and everything else. In…