Something that was truly helpful in the way I perceived substances and destructive behaviours was this video that essentially said that you see the problem as the substance or behaviour, but they see that as the solution. It really clicked something in my brain - especially as somebody who has done self-destructive behavioural things. It suddenly made sense why I saw that as the solution and outlet to my problems, when in reality, it was a very temporary relief that added to my pain in the long-run.

I think it's helpful to meet people where they're at - if they're addicts or engage in self-destructive behaviours. Because you'll be in a different situation than they are, you will perceive their issues in an entirely different context than they - don't treat them like they have no sense about them because you're perceiving their situation in a different way than they are.

In a platonic and intellectual way I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure right now. The Danels (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, creators of Everything Everywhere All At Once) just did a talk at SXSW. It's called 'How We Pulled Off Everything Everywhere All at Once.' Except as soon as they got on stage, they announced that they've already given that talk several times elsewhere, showed QR codes to watch those on YouTube if you're interested, and then pivoted to talking about so much real shit about humanity, inequity, climate change, the past, the future, now, storytelling, art, paradoxes, self-care, religion, addiction, AI, etc. instead that I still feel my brain vibrating about it. Some highlights (that I probably transcribed poorly but tried my best): "The earliest cultures, a lot of them, all around the world, believed in animism. And for those who don't know, [animism] is this belief, this story that they told themselves, that every living creature, rock, tree, river, had a soul, had a life. And a lot of modern people...kinda laugh at that, and think it's a little silly. But regardless of what you believe, that story was actually really beautiful, because it kept things in balance, right? There was this really beautiful relationship with the world around them. When we invented agriculture, we couldn't just force an oxen to drag a plow, because that oxen had a soul. And so we changed the story of the oxen and said, 'Oh, actually we're not all beautiful, soulful things. We're gonna lower the value of this one thing.' And you see this happening slowly throughout history, every new achievement. We've done it to the trees. The trees are incredible, beautiful things that provide food, water, shelter, cooling the Earth, giving us the oxygen we breathe, and we've reduced their story to $70 of lumber at Home Depot. And, like I said, some of this is necessary. Even the oldest cultures who believed in animism would kill, would chop down trees, but there was a narrative where there was grieving, and there was respect, and there was gratitude, and that has been lost. And we have slowly created an entire world where everything is disposable. Our shoes, our cars, our phones...we're all culpable, we're all responsible for this. But the worst part is we've done it to the people. And these devaluing stories, they become normalized and compounded through generational amnesia. And we slowly move the threshold of who is valuable and who isn't.

For instance, modern capitalism and the capitalist workforce only works if we are able to compel people to work, because we can't force them to work. And so we had to change the story we told ourselves, and say that your value is your job. You are only worth what you can do. And we are no longer beings with an inherent worth.

And this is why it is so hard to find fulfillment in this current system. The system works best when you're not fulfilled.

Which brings me back to AI.

There's gonna be a lot of people who are saying how amazing AI is, and it is. It's magic. It's probably going to solve cancers, probably gonna give us a lot of climate solutions. This is a powerful thing. But I'm really terrified of this new story we're gonna have to tell ourself in order to accept this new convenience, this new progress. ...to imagine what [AI] will do within this current system, within this current incentive structure...this is the same system that brought us climate change, income inequality, and the general lack of gratitude and understanding of our worth and the worth of those around us. And so one of the things I'm realizing we all have to be doing...is we have to really rewrite the system story, and center what is truly valuable." "We are addicted to a system. We know how to solve our problems, we understand what a lot of the solutions are, we just don't know how to actually have the will to do it. And so if you look at us, collectively, we are on step one. We are finally, after decades, admitting that there is a problem, specifically climate change amongst other things. And now we need to be actively thinking about, okay, what kind of stories are we gonna be telling to bring us into that second step?" HIGHLY RECOMMEND watching the entire 1-hour talk. I promise it does not feel like an hour, and it is 8000% worth your time:

A flare-up of Arkham Trilogy fandom has been triggered, and so I spent entirely too much money on the Arkham Knight Genesis comic. Art is nice, writing is pretty good. I'm not a comic person, and find most comics to have ugly art these days, but this one (and Soulfinder from Iconic Comics) impressed me.

I always liked this version of Jason coming back best since I heard of the character. A plot device like a Lazarus Pit needs to be kept to a minimum because otherwise it just breaks everything and the Arkham version where the Pits are nearly exhausted and restricted to the Ra's plots is the best way to approach them. Jason being crazy because of torture and not mystical woo-woo side effects offers more interesting directions to go in to me, problems that can't be easily solved because they are choices he made while at least somewhat in possession of his faculties.

Man, I thought the backstory I cooked up for Arkham's Jason was dark but the canon one is darker. I had it where he never knew his dad and his mom was an addict who OD'd when he was young, but in the comic both parents are meth addicts who tried to sell him to the mob to pay their debts, which didn't work because that's nuts even in Gotham, and so abused him until he was thirteen, when Jason sold them out to the mob and watched them get killed in exchange for getting a small bit of turf where he was left alone to do small time crime.

I always liked the version of him meeting Batman by trying and semi-succeeding at stealing the wheels off the Batmobile, but the Arkham version where he saves Batman's life during a tussle with the Joker is a better fit for this universe.

There's conflict between the game City Stories version of how he got caught and the comic one. The game one is much darker, from what drove Jason after Joker (horrible murder and mutilation of children at a school in the game vs. pride I think in the comic) to the actual getting caught (Jason's hubris and sense of righteousness making him very stupid in the game vs. purely a trap the Joker laid in the comic). The game lore version of events is better, though harder to depict I think in the pages the comic had for various reasons.

One thing stands out about Arkham Jason: everyone in his life had given up on him from the moment he was born...except Bruce and the family. Bruce met him for only a few minutes at most and saw that Jason could be more than just another doomed rat in the dirty alleys of the city, wanted in some way to be more (Arkham Knight Jason disputes this in narration but it's clear from what happened that's the case). But a lifetime of being given up on doesn't just vanish in a year-ish of being really valued- and Joker brilliantly weaponized it against Jason and in doing so against Batman.

The comic is from Jason's bitter angry broken pre-Arkham Knight POV but there are hints that the darkness hasn't consumed him. I think Dick naming Tim as his brother in a fight hurt him- because I think they would have had that bond before Jason was taken and 'Tim as my replacement' is a big thing for Jason. He's ruthless, yes, and apathetic to the world around him but he sees that Bruce has a memorial to him in the Batcave and it triggers really intense emotions- anger because that's almost all he has anymore and then something else he can't and refuses to even try to process.

That's why, I think, Bruce extending a hand to Jason at the end of the boss fight destroyed the Arkham Knight. I also think that getting Gotham to evacuate civilians was Jason's idea. There's no logic to it from Scarecrow's POV; more people in the city would mean more fear to, uh, imbibe. It's not that Jason is worried about collateral damage, exactly, it's that he isn't totally gone. You can see that in the game audio logs. I wish we would have gotten an encounter with him and Dick, either as the Knight or as Red Hood. I think the rivalry there with Tim is built in as a matter of history and personality but with Dick there's a brotherhood that got broken through no fault of their own.

The Red Hood smart-assery is also present in the narration in the comic. I think it was there with the Arkham Knight, too, here and there, but he's on the furious hunt in most of what you hear from him so there isn't a lot of room for it.

Continuing from the conversation in the reblogs of the link below the keep-reading, since while the broad subject of "let's ramble about mental illness and substance abuse metaphors in this kids' show!" is still the same, I'm on to talking about a different character (Specifically, Fiddleford)/realized belatedly that the OP might appreciate this.

So, Fiddleford and his memory gun.

It is, as usual, impossible to be 100% sure of much about the Portal era, considering that Ford's view of reality seems to have already started becoming distorted by the time he began writing Journal 3, and it is true that Fiddleford's signs of trauma after, say, the gremlobin incident, or his nerves when he realized what the probability of failure was, were actually pretty reasonable responses to the things that he was going through. However, Ford does act as though he's always been a bit concerned about Fiddleford's nerves, and when everything is taken into account, it seems more probable than not that the man does/did suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, probably in the OCD 'family.' Once I accept this premise, his story rapidly becomes a solid metaphor about the dangers of self-medicating.

Yes, yes, I know. The moral of the story is to deal with your problems...but nevertheless: the memory gun works as a metaphor for drugs and compulsions and how they don't really solve your problems, and it works especially well, I think, as a metaphor for alcohol and/or sedatives (Ativan, Valium, etc.). When used judiciously and with deliberate goals and limits, these things can be highly useful, or at least do more good than harm (alcohol is an antiseptic, for a lot of history it has been safer to drink than the average water supply, and it at least used to sometimes be 'prescribed' to people with certain heart problems who couldn't afford expensive medications, nerve pills are actual medicine, and as for the gun, we have the canon examples of the end of 'A Tale of Two Stans' and the finale). If you start to feel you need a drink after work every day to keep coping with your job, though, or needing a nightcap just to go to sleep...that can go real bad, and that's if you aren't developing this habit on top of OCD and/or one of its sister disorders. Fiddleford does appear to have such a disorder, and while he already had some ritualistic behavior (his Cubik's Cube, his alleged superstitions around graves, his tendency toward trichotillomania, the amount he checks and rechecks his work), he really loses control of himself when he gets access to the memory gun.

I suspect, between the temptation to instant relief it presented him every minute of every day and the secretive nature of it (no doctor supervising him, nobody frowning disapprovingly into his trash can, etc.) that memory gunning himself at the slightest inconvenience became both addictive drug and compulsion for him at some point, to the point that he was eventually frying his brain for even such a minor stressor as cutting himself shaving - or rather, for such seemingly minor stressors, since to him...who knows what that looked like? Anxiety Brain is wonderful at forming objectively sketchy connections that spiral into long chains of increasingly frantic 'reasoning.' From an outside viewer's perspective: it's a scratch, big deal. A path I could imagine Fiddleford's brain going along might run more like: "I cut myself shaving - why are my hands so shaky, why did that happen - were my hands even shaking, or was I just not paying attention? I can't do anything right! I can't even shave right, never mind raise a kid right! Which reminds me that I haven't seen my son in six months, I might as well have been cheating on my wife, I'm a terrible husband, a terrible father, just a terrible man, why didn't I do something before things got so out of control?? I could have stopped all of this, but now my Friend is out of his mind, he might end the world any day now, I don't know if my wife would have me back at this point if I even had the guts to go home and beg, and now I have this cult to run - but how can I run a cult when I can't even be man enough to face my own family? And it's slipping out of my control, I never meant things to go this far - They're all gonna turn on me, Stanford and Ivan and Emma-May are all gonna team up and murder me, oh God, it all makes sense now - !").

And then the gun made all that noise just...stop. He could sleep. He could run a cult. He could do things other than worry about Ford blowing up the planet any day now, or what was going on at home, or if the things he saw in the gremlobin's eyes could really happen. As soon as it started, he could just...make it all go away, as often as he wanted, at the click of a button. And by the time the side effects started becoming obvious, and he was losing his ability to speak properly and tearing his hair out without even remembering he'd done it and stealing clothes off scarecrows, well...thinking about those side effects, wondering if this thing he feels he cannot live without anymore could be responsible for them, was almost as distressing as thinking about all those motor accidents. Which, naturally, meant it was time for another mind wipe/drink....

So, there, started a couple of days ago and then delayed until I found this tab again though it is, you have it, @gravi-mania - the tale of how one could, if so inclined, warp the backstory of Gravity Falls into a story about bright young things whose lives fall apart courtesy of one of them getting too many uppers and the other getting too many downers. Make the framing device "Stan finally got out of prison after thirty years and went to visit his brother in the state hospital, where Ford laid eyes on him and immediately started yelling about portals and the end of the world and Stan doesn't even know what; as a result, Stan decides to stick around long enough to narrate the whole sorry tale, Prince of Tides-style, to the new doctor Ford seems to think is their nephew," and you could even get some super-depressing sober commentary on society and the justice system in there, too, along with at least very slightly lowering the research load, since sticking to that point of view would limit the scope of things to what he could see/what he knows about rather than going too deep into everyone else's heads and happenings. Though tbh, I suspect going with "yeah, let's just...not" is still the wisest possible course of action all around. really.

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN ALARM

Who do I find myself quoting? No wonder you become cynical. Whatever was going to happen, and it will seem barbaric that people in the Valley. It was a mystery he was trying to solve a new problem, because that means we're going to have to try new things, and we couldn't see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the world, but have no other way to do business. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be shaped by admissions officers. Java applets. By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't link to them. What he sees are merely weird languages. If you have a special word for that. But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem, because that would dilute the character of the site, but also about existing things becoming more addictive.

Notice anything missing? There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. They think they're trying to convince investors of things they're not convinced of themselves? I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. Their lives are short too. They're all at the mercy of investors. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. I was in high school either.

When you're eight it's called playing instead of hanging out, but it's too late for them to change. It's like the word allopathic. In this respect trolling is a lot of potential energy built up, as the market has moved away from VCs's traditional business model. That's the absent-minded professor, who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. Moore's Law used to mean that if your software is slow you have to be a big enough deal that it takes almost everyone by surprise, because those big social shifts always do. One answer is the default, instead of the other, safer group. Once investors like you, you'll seem more confident, which they like, and grad school is thus synonymous with procrastination. And not in the middle of the abstractness continuum. Unless we want to be good at what you do instead of working on something: you could work on a particular problem is that they don't enjoy it.

But is it really impossible? How to Start a Startup I advised startups never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. If you find yourself shrinking away from them. So here's the recipe for impressing investors when you're not in the trivial sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are one of the most powerful is the desire to do something that didn't matter. And sitting in a cafe feels different from working. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you're not wasting your time. You probably need about the amount you need to in order to store something for them. It seems a mistake to program in machine language well into the 1980s. What if they fail? So if you're running a startup, you had to render display text as images. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're not used to asking that.

There is room for a new search engine means competing with Google, and Google does. Some people say this is one of the big successes? The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. 6 weeks. This concept is a simple one and yet seeing it as a rule of thumb in the VC business that there are today. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that have them in their grip, so I know most won't listen. Basically, what Ajax means is Javascript now works. A rounds—so those are good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would take.

The empirical evidence on that is already clear: investors make more money by doing the right thing. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches from meaningless to critical. Now there's a third: start your own company. Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did in search a few years down the line. But this meant a Google was now setting Microsoft's agenda, and b Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at. 0 conference in 2004. The stories on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a way to make my life better. History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask is this how I want to know what they're going to get replaced eventually, why not now?

It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret weapon—that high school students? If you chose technology that way, you'd be running Windows. That was a mistake. Y Combinator founders to exchange news. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic. Robert Morris and I started a startup called Friendfeed. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of big hits grow linearly with the total number of new startups? Arguing online is only incidentally addictive. It may have seemed as if not much was happening during the years after the Bubble burst.

The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things, and we needed to buy time to fix it. What people delete are wisecracks, because they know that as you run out of money you'll become increasingly pliable.1 Their only hope now is to buy all the best startups will do even better, because there is a lot more work than waiting. They seem to be what happens. He drew two intersecting circles, one labelled seems like a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me. They're half technology and half religion.

Notes

It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it. It seems quite likely that in fact I read most things I remember about the meaning of the bizarre stuff.