Blech

I wake up in the morning and I am not depressed.  A minute later and I am again.  I leave the house and the feelings do not subside.  Am I hiding out in Tim Hortons?  Avoiding?  I left the house and did not jump on my bike, but shoveled off the driveway first.  What does that say?  Before I left yesterday, I walked the dog and cleaned the house, (downstairs bathroom, vacuumed the floors, swept the floors first, washed the dishes that did not go in the dishwasher and turned the dishwasher on.  I cleaned the kitchen surfaces and cleaned the kids toys up and hid the train set downstairs).  Did they notice, no one said anything when I got home, the kids toys were everywhere again.  Do they understand?  Do they hate me like I hate me?

Wastage

So I heard that 25% to 50% of all food in the west is wasted, thrown away.  I know from myself that this is close to the truth.  I had a garden and I grew vegetables and I decided to give most of it away and the stuff that I did take home I did not eat.  Apathy towards my health and cooking was the main source of not eating them.  The second year I gave away most of the food I grew, because I knew that I would not eat it.  I still wasted food because I bought food that expired or was planing to make something but never did.  In the end my refrigerator stood mostly empty, fear of putting food in it that would be thrown out and my freezer was overstocked.  When I moved I had to throw out my freezer load of food.  

I am not a big contributor to food waste, even taking into account the above.  Grocery stores themselves are the biggest contributor.  The food that does not get eaten gets thrown away, for insurance purposes.  In cities the food is moved around a lot, from the premiums store to the regular store to the discount store as the expiry gets closer to the present date, but that still does not mean all the food is not sold.  Restaurants are another major contributor.  When I worked at McDonalds, when there were still dinosaurs walking the Earth, they were throwing out a large garbage bag of food each night.  Other fast food restaurants were as bad with donuts, pizza, chicken and pastries all being dumped in the back.  Then there is the unbeaten food that is served.

Then I moved in with another family.  Small children don't always eat what is on their plate, and that goes in the garbage.  "Standards" of acceptable quality accounts for more waste.  Something that gets stained gets tossed, something that requires a minor repair gets tossed.  Pizza left ofer from the day before, gone.  Can't clean an appliance to your level of satisfaction, throw it away.  Dishcloth discoloured, gone.  There is a lays new stuff entering the house, so there is always stuff leaving the house as garbage that still has some use in it.  Discoloured fruit, gone.  

If I ruled the World, I know I could not put a stop to this.  There are compost programs but these might not be enough.  Diversion programs that divert food waste to three different ends, the poor: a close to expired or even expired product may still be edible and cooking the food can extend its shelf life.  Day old pastry is not bad, it may not even be truly stale.  Cooked items from fast food and spoiled food can still be eaten by pigs.  Things that pigs can eat safely that humans would find revolting is quite large.  They will eat spoiled and fermenting fruit and vegetables, they will eat spoilt milk and they will eat a lot of the waste vegetable matter humans don't want to like rinds.  The last diversion would be volumes the pigs can't handle nor eat and these can be composted.  

Animal waste is diverted to farms to grow things.  Once composted the bacteria in the waste digest organics and create heat, which kills the bacteria.  The heat can be used by people and the methane gas as fuel too. The composited manure is used to fertilize the feilds.  Why should human waste be treated differently.  There are a lot more of us and we eat every day, some times more than once, but our waste is not composted and not reused on the fields.  Most often it is simply buried or incinerated.  We use lots of chemical fertilizers and nitrogen pulled from the air or taken from fossil fuels.  Essentially we are mining the fertile lands of everything that makes them fertile to feed ourselves.  Organic matter tends to accumulate in the ground provided the plant matter that makes it, stays where it was made.  but farming removes plant matter.  If we brought back the plant matter back to the soil in the form of processed waste, then the soils would be better for it and more productive.  It should be thought of as a built in price of food.  When people purchase food, they purchase the cost of producing the food, transporting the food and displaying the food.  Why not add in the cost of processing the waste and redistributing it back to the farms?  Which would also remove this cost from the municipalities, potentially lowering taxes.  Or perhaps allowing them to reinvest the excess monies in services.

If the diversion of compost was in effect, there would need to be more pig farms located close to where people live.  Close proximity to the source of food for people would lower the wastage of food for people more aware where the food is coming from.  

Wastage of hard consumables can only be done by introducing the total cost of the waste processing of the item into the cost of the product.  If a toaster costs $20 and $30 to repurpose, the cost of the toaster would be $50.  This would lead to a few things: less wastage to be sure,  less complicated to recycle items and more durable products that last longer.  There will always be people that throw things away because they are dirty and cannot be bothered to clean them, but they should pay for their indulgences.

Dungeons of Despair

I was told that my blog can be a little repetitive, obsessive was the term that my friend used.  I am currently deeply depressed.  It is an Autistic depression, the kind that Autistic people get when they are confronted with the fact that they are not normal and can never be normal and if I were "cured" today, how much of my life has been wasted being autistic.  Not all autistic people get this depression, only the ones that are not living their dream and being introspective.  Life is not good and I can see it; people around me remind me that everyday recently.

It is a few things.  It is living with people who think they understand, but clearly do not understand.  It is me interacting with a greater number of new people and just talking.  It is the same old mainstays playing on my moods.  It is casual conversations with friends, while in this state, that push me down further.  It is the lack of privacy in my new home and the lack of understanding that exists.  It is the lack of signal and the lack of Internet; it is the fears that I made a big mistake.

It started with sex of course.  It started with a girl who I was chatting and texting to.  She said that she was looking for a relationship and she seemed pretty compatible.  She was bisexual and mostly monogamous.  She told me that she was too busy to be dating anyone but seems to want to talk.  I asked more questions than I am used to asking and she answered them all, even the provocative ones.  Then I asked her what her degree was in.  She responded that it was in Sociology.  I was surprised because she was so logically minded and scientifically based.  She corrected me saying that Sociology WAS a science.  I laughed, as clearly she was being ironic, as anything that dealt closely with only with human reactions and human interactions could not be a science, she was not.  I had insulted her.  And she ignored me for a few days.  I assumed that she was gone and I moved on.  She wasn't.  She texted me back to tell me about her wonderfully weekend when she had a threesome with the guy she was seeing, then she told me that I was not working for her.

Then it was a series of conversations with people over a few days about how their sex lives in their twenties were wild and exciting.  Mine wasn't, it was difficult and awkward and mostly alone and desperate, much like my thirties and forties.  Two of my three new co-workers are going through breakups and I can't stop thinking about that either.  One of them is only nine years younger than me and I do not want to have a crush on her because at first glance she is a match for me, but it never works for me.  I don't want this at this job.  I don't like this job as most of the time I am not needed.  

The job requires 3.4 employees, except when one person is on vacation, then it needs 3.8 employees.  Rather than hire a part time person, they hire a full time person.  The store is open 60 hours a week requires two people to be there each day, total hours therefore are 120 and divide that by 40 and you get 3 employees.  Simple math.  One of the employees working must be a manager or an assistant manager to open and close the store, so when a manager of one level or another goes on vacation, the other must work.  So that means one manager workers 60 hours and one employee works 40, and another person is needed to work 20 hours.  Since the store will not let ANYONE work more than 40 hours the manager working the double shift logs only 40 hours and gets 20 hours the next week off, so 20 hours that someone else needs to work.  Every full time employee gets two weeks paid vacation, so 3 times 2 times 2 is… 12 weeks of part time employment!  Of course people want days off, people get sick, so you could stretch it out to fifty-two weeks of part-time employment, but they don't want to do that, they hire a full time employee: me, who feels useless most days, a fifth wheel. 

The job is full-time and thus ends my time on Employment Insurance.  Never mind that I am earning a fraction of my wage previous.  How much of a fraction. I am earning a third less.  There are no raises in this job, it is what it is.  I am stuck.  Currently I am earning $24 less a month than I was earning on EI.  If I quit, I lose EI, because that is the way it works.  So I stay and learn the job well enough to get a Assistant Manager job that pays $3 more an hour and has higher sales targets or I find another job.  The people who I live with put their own pressure on me.  They are of the firm belief that earning a lower wage job for the full year is better than earning a lot more money for less time. Theoretically they are right, but they are not at the same time.  They are correct as their life is not defined by what they do and they are wrong because in the absence of everything else my life is defined by what I am doing.

When I flick my cell phone on to do something (send an email, receive an email, check the weather, surf the net) and I am greater by two messages: No Service, No Wifi, I get a little depressed.  It does not happen often, only when I check from my bed.  When I am in my bedroom. Or when I want to be alone.  No more than 90% of my time in the house.  I recall my friends telling me that my Internet where I used to live really sucked, it went down twice in two years and my router worked outside and down the road a good 100m.  Now, sitting in bed 15 m from the router I have much more stable Internet.  Sometimes the only indication that people have been trying to call me is the voice mail I get when I come upstairs.  I feel like I live in a dungeon.  I replaced my two square meter window, facing west, on the second story for a basement window an eighth it's size at ground level between floors facing an alley.  It is covered with snow now.  There is a second similar window in the family room that faces west into the backyard.  My plant resides in that window.  The family room has dark wood floors, almost black, and the walls which I was initially concerned that they were painted grey and would suck up the light, is quite light in contrast to the floors and reflects the light quite well after it bounces off the snow, adjacent buildings and sky before it goes through the window.  The 'wall' between the Family Room provides lots of privacy as it is a two sided cubby hole bookshelf.  My door is always open to the family room, the space between the bookshelf and the wall.  They tell me that my room looks much better after I purchased the Wardrobe in Dark wood that covers one of the Grey walls.  In it is hide my disgusting clothes from their eyes, but it does not cover the heating vent that blows cool air into the already cold basement.  Occasionally my friend opens the window down stairs to let it air out, if I am there when he does it I move my plant so it does not die.

It is not really that bad.  I love the kids, who only occasionally have to be reminded that my room is not theirs to play in.  Soon I suspect that they will tell me that I should pack up the remaining hint of my furniture in favour of some soul sucking black piece of furniture.  My light pseudo wood table is in storage and I use their glass top table.  It is really nice and the glass top encourages me not to use my computer, my optical mouse can't sense the surface.  

When I am happy, this stuff does not matter, their four year old little girl hugs me and tells me that she loves me and all the bad stuff does not matter.  I get to watch some girlie cartoon about Barbie and a small warm body presses against my side and it is the best place I have ever lived, but when I am depressed it all exacerbates the situation.  Even the hugs don't matter.  I sleep and do not get rest, I am constantly tired and can't go to sleep.  I am hungry and not.  I am horny and not interested.  Currently I am earning enough to make my way barely, but I live in a more expensive area and if I can't find a life companion around here I will feel forced to seek out the empty love of someone I can't afford who won't cure me of my troubles.  

I hang out at Tim Hortons to write and to live in light.  Writing this down, you reading it helps me out.  Thanks

Exalted: Against the Slave States V

What happens when a Solar Exalt runs his face into his past, not just his past of centuries before, but of only decades or simply years.  What should he do when he meets people that knew his prior incarnation and had interactions with him.  He was a different person completely.  Whitewall represents a city where a previous incarnation spent decades living and working.  Everytime he walks down a street, it seems familiar to him.  A walk into a tea house stirs a memory or worse, the owner is oddly familiar, a granddaughter of a lover or a friend?  Does he owe something to a child of a previous host, a grandchild?  The Nameless does not want personal attachments, his goal is paramount, but a former host had different desires and here they will slap him in the face.

Looking for Books on:

Healing and building stuff like sawmill, carts and forges the world

Upon nearing the completion of his journey, the Nameless, has a vision, a memory of a time before, two times before.  The first memory is of a First Age city, complete and in perfect working order with it full essence accumulating powers focussing the essence towards the Unconquered Sun.  The Mandela pattern clear as the memory's approach is from the air.  The palace in the center glows with essence funneled up into the heavens.

The second memory is considerably after, when the fore section has been crumpled as if hit by a massive hammer, the wall and the buildings have been repaired but not to the same beauty and elegance as they were in the age before.  The approach is at night and the memory is that of an approach in stealth leaping over the walls and in to the city proper.  The bounding progress of the memory leads to an intact building on the edge of the region that was remade, up to the tallest part, a spire that could have once been a bell tower.  In the belfry a stone is removed and a hollow is made in it.  It is replaced with a package placed in its hollow.  The sense of great importance is placed on this memory, perhaps that is why you remember this so clearly.

The journey to Whitewall was to find an alternate trading partner, acquire essential items, and to acquire books on how to do things.  If all things go well in Whitewall, these things will happen.  But, what are the results?  Whitewall is a relic of the First Age, but not wholly intact and Whitewall was a religious centre and nothing else, so it does not have all the great workings of the First Age.  It has a dedicated artifact manufacturing core, but nothing like what existed before.  They smelt different kinds of Steel, they forge Jade-Steel Alloys.  They have a disused Solar forge.  They have training manuals and repair manuals for the equipments they maintain.  The difference problem with these books is that they are for the maintenance and not for building from scratch.  The process of building some of these items requires a forge to be build to make the forge and foundry to build the items.  If Whitewall was in the business of building up the barbarians around it, it might have tech manuals on how to build from scratch, but that would be counter to the policies of the city, as it is never wise to provide the means to build an army to your enemies.  Whitewall has a working sawmill too; it has several large circular saws powered by a small essence engine.  The complex that includes the Sawmill also includes the Refining smelter, the essence engine provides energy for both.  The finished raw materials, lumber and metal ingots are sent to the city for final processing.  The Nameless can acquire these texts, but they are unhelpful.  The texts on medicine and health can be acquired, but again many of the concepts are advanced and may recquired specialized knowledge to be helpful, but that can be helped too.

The Syndics want to help and they want all Solars to be strong and better.  They want the Solar Exalted back in creation in force.  So they will stretch what they would normally do to meet these goals.  They will extend their powers to affect Nowhere, but only if they can do so secretly.  Since it is a Realm Satrapy, it would do the people of Whitewall no favors to to antagonize them by supporting a foe in their midst.  Good luck and better health is one thing but no other Divine aid will be forthcoming.  

- White Wall, a city that could be any city made of white marble in single blocks the buildings capped in gold.  A city ruin single blocks of marble pulverized and in near total ruin beside intact buildings.

What if The Nameless was not the first Exalt since The Black Sun died.  What if there had been a few and one of them had already been to Whitewall and had already collected the First Age recorder and had moved it.  What if there was an entire life to read in the pages of a diary in the Solar Manse in Whitewall.  

- events of the life of Artful Demise, Dagger of Heaven based in Whitewall RY 657-701

- story of his exaltation fighting a marauding behemoth in 674 as part of the militia.  

- talk about a vision that he received one day while traveling through the Foretown just after Exaltation and the discovery of the strange stone in a box that was identical to that of his vision.  Talking about the strange visions that he got when he committed a mote to it.

- talk goes further about his love for his city that he was born and his commitment to keep it safe and his decision to leave Whitewall when the Wyld hunt had begun to close in on his position.  He could handily evade the Wyld hunt, but there were fears that they would make reprisals on his home and his people if they ever found where he was from.  

- his decision to leave Whitewall in RY 694 and never return with hopes of finding more of the images that he saw from the recording device.  

- return in 697 talk about hitting the Wyld Hunt with hit and run tactics leading them through the north and past Nexus. Into the south.  Commissioning a new artifact from a chunk of Orichalcum found while traveling.

The memory stone has a series of images and memories loaded on to it.  The images are the region of his manse and the Manse itself

another is of a different Manse in a wide pastoral valley, green feilds covered with thick fresh snow and another manse, identical at the bottom of a clear dark sea, but with a prodigious quantity of sea flora growing around it. Wood manse that provides a hearthstone that grants bonuses to agriculture or something.  The manse is located under the icy sea not far north of Gethemane.  It is under thick polar ice and nearly 100 meters of water.  

  A memory of a study in a foreign location, a martial setting with slave pits and chambers of murder and death.  Constantly overcast skies and deathly sick vegetation.  Odd beasts being tortured and killed, torn limb from limb.  

A hardwood forest in bloom, flowers everywhere with a small city in the background and pastoral hills with bright sunshine everywhere, a smell of sweetness.  

A fleeting glimpse of a young petite woman in a suit made from black feathers. 

A tall stone building covered in vines with intricate statuary carved in relief.  

A shallow grotto under the sea, bright blue water oddly hot water jetting up from a fissure in the sea floor and a manse built into that chasam.

The location of four manses, his lunar manse, a wood manse, a fire manse under the sea, and a Solar Manse in a warm forested location.  Two memories, one of a Deathlord–The Princess Magnificent with Lips of Coral and Robes of Black Feathers, and another of death camp 17.  A puzzle to be solved.  Each manse has a memory stone to be found or a location where one can be found to add to the puzzle that his first incarnation wished to have solved.  As a way to regain his memories to regain his purpose as a Deathlord.

Exceptional Smashfist and God Kicking Boots matched pair

With the appearance of fine meshed gloves with maximum flexibility with the back discrete plated gauntlet with each knuckle forming a rigid protuberance.  The fist when formed has a particularly bony look (+1 damage) and several short blades extend (+1 defense).  The scale mesh is fashioned so that it naturally provides a defense to losing ones grip making disarming more difficult and climbing easier (+1 die)

The boots are made of articulated plates, for maximum mobility, with a solid reinforced foot guard with a rigid toe guard protruding forward and from the heel (+1 damage and +1 die for all climbing rolls and allows for heads free stability on vertical surfaces).  In addition, these boots diverge from the standard by having a hearthstone setting in each boot.  Both boots and gloves come with a set of black bear fur coverings to disguise their nature.  

 

God-Kicking Boots Speed 5, accuracy 2, damage 9B, defense 0, rate 3 attunement 6 two hearthstone settings

Smashfist speed 5/6 accuracy 1, damage 8/7B, defense 4, rate 3/1 attunement 6

Trying to figure out the motivation of my player.  He might be looking to pick up a hearthstone or two.  He can gain access to the Solar Manse there but the Solar that currently has the Hearthstone is out on a Mission further afield, to The Bull of the North, and can't be reached to grant permission to attune.  The Syndics don't see any reason he should not take over the rooms that he held in a former incarnation though.  The Outcaste dragon blooded also moved on to Nexus.  

The Syndics are anxious to draw additional Solar Exalted to Whitewall's sphere of influence as such they point out there is a claimed Manse located quite close to the city in the foothills near the jade mines.  That the only problem is that there are several small shadow lands in the area and a Domain of one persistent Rakasha who seems intent causing trouble.  The manse provides a safe bastion to keep both threats in check but this winter it was invaded by two large Wyld Creatures.  If the Manse could be cleared, it would allow the city to re-open additional mines and increase the safety of the city.  In exchange, the Sydics would allow the Nameless to attune to the Manse and lend him its hearthstone and gift him additional supplies, not to mention expertise and minor artifacts.  

••Stone of Earthweb p90 Oadenol's Codex.  Know everything within 10m on ground, effectively darkness/surprise removed if they are on the ground within 10m

Mated pair of Giant Ice Hollows:

Str 6. Dex 4. Sta 6.  Per 4. Int 3. Wits 3 Valor 4.  Join battle 8.  PDV 5. DDV 4.  Armour 3.  Nat soak 6B/3L.  

Bite S5. Acc 10. Dmg 7LP

Shriek intimidation MDV only. S6.  Acc 8. -1 die for 2DV refreshes

Ice Spray spray of ice to targets.  S6.  Acc 20 -1/meter distant. Dmg 4LP

Health 4x0, 5x-1, 4x-2, -4, I.

Fair Folk in the neighbourhood:

Three in the North, the West and the East.  There is another to the South along the Travelers Road, but he is detailed, Lios, he is the leader of The Winter Folk, based in the north west.  The Nobles of the North and West are Winter Folk.  They owe fealty to Lios.  Each is in command of five cataphract and many hobgoblins.  Lios commands twenty-five himself mostly to keep the others in line and remind them who's who.  The Eastern noble is an independent who preys mostly along the roads to the north 

The Guild

The Nameless is anxious to meet his Guild benefactors.  This is important for him because it will determine how he deals with them. He has a name and he wants to meet him.  The truth of the matter is a little complex though.  The Nameless is suspicious and does not trust anyone.  Benefactornamehere is a Merchant Prince whose father made a fortune in the Slave Trade and Benefactornamehere is not proud or pleased with this past and has determined that he will devote his time to righting that wrong.  He is determined to free slaves and provide them with work that they might buy their own price and thus recoup their cost and provide a profit.  It is a long term goal but the young merchant prince is determined to prove his point.  

He managed to secure an island in the distant west that is far from the shipping lanes and thus far from pirates and slavers that has a unique set of resources with two problems.  They are a rare form of clam that needs a lot of labour intensive work to crush and prepare, but once done can be combined with a local kelp to create a dye that is a startlingly beautiful deep purple.  By adding it to the kelp, the dye can even adhere to mundane metals and can even be used to inhance Black Jade artifacts.  It is really quite valuable, but also labour intensive and currently only supplied by the Realm and then only to their citizens.  The second resource is mine that produces Phosphorous.  The rare mineral is only known to be mined on the Island of Coral and most of this resource is consumed again, the Realm, making it another valuable resource. 

The quantities that this island could produce of both of these materials would be small, but that just means that they could be sold at a premium.  Benefactornamehere. thinks that even given the expense of transporting slaves that far from the hub of creation, they would be able to refine enough of these materials to buy their contract in a year or less.  The island is remote, but the winters are temperate and the summers are not too hot either.  The only problem that he has had is that the Guild Slave trade is quite profitable and there is resistance to his ideas and while he could buy slaves directly from the slavers, that would just be him providing more of a market for slaves and increase the number of slaves taken, and that is something he wants to stop.  So the plan developed to figure a way to take slaves from slave owners, to relocate escaped slaves and thus hurt the people who buy slaves and reduce their resources.  Increasing their costs and thus undermining the trade.  His longer term plans include using profits to teach resistance techniques to populations that see a lot of slavers, to dissuade the slavers.  

He is true to his desires and his goals, but he is a patsy.  The West is a very dangerous place filled with horrible dangers.  The island has been known about for centuries.  And the products that it produces are valuable, but the expense has always been too high.  There are storms that sweep out from the Pole of Water that meet with winds from the Pole of Air and they come up suddenly and are deadly to any out at sea and these storms are very rare.  What is not known too well is the domain of Rakasha that live a few dozen miles further to the West.  Well, that is not true, it is known Hierarch Artemisia Sapphire, who made her vast fortune by procuring the best of the best Glamour stuff.  The best deals for Glamour are made by selling slaves to the Fair Folk and selling the used hollowed out husks as galley slaves to dishonest traders.  She dealt originally with Ragara Dinyacout, before he decided to cut her out of the deal.  Her new plan is to use the naïve Merchant Prince Benefactornamehere to do most of the work of acquiring product for her to sell.  A new hierarch, she still has many pokers in the fire all over creation; this is just business, but very profitable business.  

Re: artifacts current bow and armour add perfect to them

Bow add speed dropped to 4, rate up to 4 and a mystical power of obscuring, remote viewing is impossible.

Armour hardness up two to 8, self healing, no mobility penalty 

Orichalcum additional bonus, hearthstone settings eat into attunement cost by the value of the hearthstone.  Second hearthstone half rounded up, third by a third minimum 1.

Or do what my friend does and make Personal Essence pool equal to essence x willpower and Periferal Essence pool equal to essence x sum of virtues and willpower.  This results in about fifty present more essence.  

Taking a dive

I know why I don't want to roleplay with my friend.  He created the characters. He planned them out.  They are his characters.  He just told me as much.  He creates the story and he creates the characters, he just needs me there to watch his genius unfold.

My stories are character centered.  They create the character, I provide the setting, they provide the story, they get to live out their fantasies.  Sometimes my stories are not well planned out, but people tell me they have fun.   That is the point of role playing: having fun.  Some people have forgotten that.

My friend says that he wants me to play other characters in the story to see things from their perspective, but I feel that what he really wants to do is reset the character along the path that he feels he should be going down.

I know that some players cheat.  They use dice to manipulate the way things should go in their minds, but when people start manipulating my play, tell me what I need to do, I feel like manipulating the dice against me.  I don't believe in luck, but when I see dice rolls that are always favorable I get suspicious.  I have electronic dice and when I roll there is no chance to cheat, statistically I know what is likely to happen.  Statistically I have as many good rolls as bad rols, but they seem to be at inconvenient times.  When I play with my friend I want to take a dive and see what he would do when I lose a fight.

Such is my life.  I want to take a dive.

Gateway beliefs

Everyone knows that marijuana is a gateway drug, that if you use marijuana, you will soon be homeless and destitute and hooked on crack.  Everyone knows this and everyone is wrong.  Mostly wrong.  Marijuana is not addictive and it's effects are mild even with heavy usage and all negative effects are temporary.  It does not have major performance enhancing effects and that is it.  If you tell people what I was told as a kid and you try it you may conclude that the other drugs are also equally beniegn, they are not, not all of them.  LSD appears to have only positive effects, if you are happy.  If you are not happy LSD can be a negative experience.  LSD is also absorbed by fat cells and if you burn off those fat cells later in life you will have a second trip, called a flash back.  Other drugs are addictive and you can become physically dependent to them, they can be dangerous, but marijuana is not.  The only way marijuana can be a gateway drug is if you are exposed to other drugs by drug dealers either by free samples or by dealers cutting other drugs into your supply of marijuana.  Other than that, marijuana is not a gateway drug.

Gateway beliefs are different.  They are insidious and are widely told to the most vulnerable sector of the population: children.  Gateway beliefs are beliefs that reduce the mind's effectiveness from combatting silly ideas with critical thinking.  Children who are taught gateway beliefs are more likely to believe other nonsensical ideas are true as well.  They will believe that vaccines are dangerous.  They will believe that Monsanto is trying to take over the world.  They will believe that the government is hiding the truth that aliens are visiting the government.  They will be susceptible to the belief that a cable of powerful men is dictating the history of the world, the Illuminati and the New World Order.

Gateway beliefs will lead people to think that people who do not believe what they believe are wrong and that critical thinking should be discouraged.  They will start treating fairy tales as equal to scientific journals.  They will start to ignore the advancement of society, the advancement of science, the advancement of the species.  They will believe that people who do not believe what they believe should die.

The Gateway Beliefs I am talking about are Religions.  I am serious.  There have been studies that have shown that religious indoctrination at an early age inhibits critical thinking skills.  Children who are read stories that contain magical characters and non magical characters, there are two groups of children, one who has been indoctornated with a religion and those who are raised without.  The children who are raised with religion feel that both stories are realistic and those raised without religion, can say that magical characters are fantasy.  

I have a friend, Seventh, she was indoctornated late in her childhood.  She was a smart girl, but she was indoctornated nonetheless.  After joining her religion, her critical thinking skills plummeted.  When she was presented with an easy answer or an answer that required facts and knowledge and critical thinking she resorted to the proscribed stance of her religion.  After only a few years of doing this her ability to think critically has diminished.  She now argues tooth and nails against anyone who uses science to argue their case.  Vaccinations are bad, the New World Order is pushing Vaccines, and the rest.  GMO foods too.  

The big push of religions as to why their ideas are still relevant have been that they provide morals that secular non religious families do not and the proof is in, religions do provide a unique set of morality that non religious families do not provide; they are typically more racist, more homophobic and loose with their morality in general.  Secular families tend to follow only one rule for their morality, the Golden Rule: do on to others as you would have them do to you.  As Christians will tell you, that comes from Jesus Christ and his teachings.  And they do, but they do not originate from him, they are far older.  The Golden Rule is the rule that sentient societies realized at the dawn of time as the only way to do things and still function as a social group.  Jesus taught this and he taught us that all the religion that came before was also good.  And that is the problem with Christianity.  

The teachings of Jesus were very Buddhist, but the old testament with the Ten Commandments and the laws of Leviticus fuck up his teachings.  The Old Testament says you should not kill, then in the next chapter Moses kills thousands of people.  It teaches that all rules are flexible.  It teaches that slavery is bad when it is your own people, but it is good when they are not your people.  The Bible teaches moral flexibility.

Not all religions are as bad as others.  Some teach that it is okay to lie and steal and kill people who are not part of your religion, Islam.  Some teach that the World is only 6000 years old, higher knowledge is bad and women are only doing good when they are pregnant, fundamentalist Christian.  Some treat women as untouchable unholy creatures for half of their life and that gays are less than human, Fundementalist Jews.  Some teach that certain classes of society can be used like toilet paper, raped, murdered, allowed to starve to death etcetera, believe that women most fill men's needs above their own and are second class citizens, Hinduism, Buddhism.  

When you look at any religion it is tough to see it as a force for good in the world.  When you add that they all rob people to think critically and leave them susceptible to silly ideas.  But there is hope, people who have left religion at a later date have learned to think critically and learn to embrace new ideas after thinking about them critically.

Remember if you have children and you want them to have fun reading Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings knowing that they are fun stories and not heretical true stories and want them to read the bibletoo, treat them the same, as fanciful fairy tales like the rest.

Vaccines and anecdotal evidence

I don't like repeating this stuf because it is in the news a lot, but it came to me that if everyone writes about this stuff then the world mig drown out the noise coming from the others and when people google, "Dangers of Vaccination", they get a science based answer and not a anti-Vaxers idea.  

There is a falling when people push anecdotal evidence as equal to scientific evidence and statistical evidence.  I am going to throw simple math at you now. Pretend there is a horrible disease that strikes young girl between the ages of 18 and 25 and results in disfigurement followed by painfully death, but is rare, say 10 cases in a million girls, or 1 in 100,000 girls.  Tragic, but a very small number.  Let's say that girls age 16 are given a vaccine that prevents a virus strain from infecting girls that causes cancer.  Let's say also that some of them a few years later get that very horrible disease and their parents blame the vaccine for this disease.  Let's say that in there are a thousand cases of this disease reported and all these girls received the vaccine too.  And people then conclude that the vaccine gave them the disease.

This is human nature but it is not a fact, because it does not provide any context.  If it was a thousand cases in a thousand girl community, that would be serious.  If it were a thousand cases in a country with 100 million girls, that would be a tragedy,  but it would also be statistically what you would expect.  If it were in a billion girls, that would be important too, because it would mean that the vaccine works on that disease too, you would expect ten thousand cases not just a thousand. 

Facts without context mean nothing.  That there were some girls that got sick and had the vaccine means nothing, if the girls got sick at the same rate as girls who did not get that vaccine.  There are lots of kinds of medical studies.  The best are the double blind studies, which is when the patient and the doctor don't know what treatment or which dose that a patient gets.  It is best because there is no chance for that knowledge to affect the results.  Typically there are a segment of the study population that receive a placebo that has no effect and part that has the drug.  All patients are asked what symptoms they get and their health is monitored.  The treatment that patients are getting is only known after the study is completed.  People report all sorts of symptoms and side effects even when they are getting the placebo.

The second best kind of study is a blind study where the administrating doctor knows the treatment that patient received.  This can be dangerous, because the doctor can subtly influence the results with leading questions or purposely influence patients if they have a stake ing the study.  The worst kind of study is the one that both patient and doctor knows what they are getting.  The patient can assume that the new treatment is causing severe side effects or diseases that it simply is not.  

The most famous in the recent past was Andrew Wakefield who published a study that stated that a vaccine gave patients autism.  Never mind that the patients had been diagnosed with autism already.  Andrew Wakefield published the study, because he had a different vaccine that would have made him money if the other vaccine was found to be harmful.  What happened was that people, thanks to a brain compromised penthouse model, began to believe that vaccines cause autism, which they don't.  We all get vaccines and parents whose children are diagnosed with Autism are looking for a cause.  The cause is genetic, that the penthouse model grabbed hold of this information and has not let go of it despite the overwhelming evidence, suggests to me that she is e source of her son's Autism.

It is not true.  Autism is not increasing, autism is just being diagnosed more often.  I went through twenty-two years of school without being diagnosed.  These days, if a teacher notices an issue, the child will be quickly diagnosed and most often it will be earlier than later.  The point is, when you know that your child received a vaccine and later gets a disease, the human mind makes a quick association and assumes that the two events are linked. 

Hungry

Today I woke up hungry.  

What ever I ate did not fill the hole in my stomach, 

So I ate more.  

I watched things on TV, 

But that did nothing.  

I went for a ride in the freezing cold,

That did nothing too.

The sun is shining on the world,

But it is cloudy in my heart.

My friend pointed out my faults to me,

And told me how to overcome them,

Simple answers,

He is so wise.

So wise to see everything clearly,

So wise to see the answer,

If he were me.

He does not see clearly.

His observations are of what I do, not think.

He mistakes my ambivalence for passivity,

But does not see that I have no control.

There is only one thing that I control in my life,

I fight on days like this for that control.

Days like this I don't want to be here,

I don't want to be alive.

I moved to gain control and lost more.

I moved to get what I want, 

But only gained broken illusions.

The hole in my can't be filled, only ignored.

I am half a person, not real, only imagined.

If I went away, if I died, the story around me would close,

And the people would forget, going on as if I were not ever.

I imagine pulling a gun and publicly decorating the coffee shop's walls,

And life continuing, without skipping a beat.

Only a mop cleaning up aisle six,

Cleaning up the floor at night.

Perhaps then it might be noticed, 

That the mop water was a funny shade of red.

Maybe a trip over the husk,

Might illicit a foul curse, and a cast out the door.

Wasted time

The Catharsis of roleplaying is to be one of the important people in the world, because who is really important in this world anyways, clearly not you.  If you were important, you would not be reading this.

The problem with my current spate of roleplaying is that I feel s though the most important person in my game world is the person that is telling the story and not me.  I feel like that I could get up and leave the room and my game master could continue on without missing a beat.

There is a game mechanic written into the game we play that says that if you describe your actions, they way you do them, how you do them - you get bonus dice.  You get one die bonus if you describe your move.  You get two dice bonus if you use the environment it your description and you get a three dice bonus if you do something very cool.  It is harder than most people think to come up with a description of what you are doing as you are doing it.  Some people can't do more than a simple description of how they attack, other people a good at coming up with exciting cool ideas, but almost everybody freezes up when they are put on the spot to do it, so the GM is supposed to reward the attempt, because it adds to the game and it adds to the players involvement and sense of accomplishment.  This is what you want, it is often the thing that makes the game memorable to them.  When a character uses the same description time and time again it is no longer a description that adds to the game so no reward.

When a GM does not reward dice for attempts to describe the action, the effect on the game is for the player to stop.  To describe what you are doing on short notice is hard and when there is no benefit, the appeal disappears.  When you think of an interesting way to involve the environment in a description and they reward you the bonus of a lesser value description it deflates the enjoyment in the game.  

Everytime I roleplay with my friend I wonder what I could have done  besides roleplay that would have made me happier than the time I spent with him.

Quest for Normalicy

Relationships get me more depressed than anything else that makes me depressed.  Relationships don't depress me; the lack depresses me.  My OCD like obsession on being in a relationship comes from my autism.  It is not my obsession that depresses me or the lack of success, but how I have no success.  It is my feeling that if it were not for my autism I would not still be single.  

I typically make loads of errors because of my obsession.  I become obsessed with one woman in particular.  I really like to do that, because it feels like that one sided relationship is the best kind of relationship for me.  No not the best kind for me, but the only kind I have had.  Which is not true.  I have had a relationship with an older woman, who had different life goal than I did.  I have had a relationship with a married woman, who was perfect in every way that mattered except that she was married already.  So when I say One-Sided-Obsessive relationships are the best ones for me, I mean the best of a bad set of relationship types.  The worst type of relationship to have is the right one, when you don't know yourself.  

When I get this way, porn loses its appeal; it has been losing its appeal more over the last long while.  Interest in the opposite sex has been waning.  Winning because when I try and fail it hurts.  When I see a profile that interests me and I give it a try, I put a little effort into trying to write something to appeal to them, to make something, a small paragraph to interest them into wanting to make enough effort to actually do more than click and click away.  I feel that a profile is a resume and people passing by me means that I am not me.  I am not real: I am just an image on a screen like so many others.

I was told once by a woman on these sites, that men tell her that the women looking for a relationship, end up sleeping with the man on the first date.  I want more than a one night stand.  

I want to find someone that I can come home to every day forever.  That's what I want.  That is the gold standard.  Silver place goes to the short term relationship and bronze is the one night stand.  I want to retire with a gold medal.  I want to do away with dating forever, but Silver is also a win.  Bronze does not work well for me, but I would rather take home a Bronze, than go home alone.

Some people, some women go for bronze, and collect a few bronze medals before realizing that that one bronze has become a silver or a gold.    Maybe that is what women are looking for: sex that becomes more and more.  It is clear I have no clue.  And I can't do that.  I wish I could.  I like sex, after a fashion, and I want more, but feel that I can't do that.  While I am obsessed about sex and obsessed about relationships, I am in a rut about how to do things, about the path to follow, the methodology to accomplish my goal.  Autism is not just about obsession it is about rigidity of behaviour.

Rigidity of behaviour caused by thinking in lines, straight lines. Logical deductions based on available evidence.  A leads to B leads to C and so on.  When new information comes out that A leads to C which leads to E is difficult to reconcile with everything that you know and so change is hard.  After a long time thinking you realize that sometimes A leads to B which leads to C, but that other times A leads to C which leads to E and this makes now makes sense to you and now the Laws of this behaviour are immutable again.  Then you find out that A leads to B, C, D, E, F, G, … X, Y and Z which then leads to some other letter or number.  And that is why I can't understand relationships and find them so difficult because I don't know the rules or that the rules are written in a language I can't understand and if I were able to read the rules I would find out that there are no rules.  Tell a person who is obsessive about follow the rules that there are no rules and watch them look for the rules anyways.  That is me.

There was this profile it said they were looking for me, every thing I was.  They stated they were looking for someone that open minded that was not too possessive who liked to read and write who would be okay if she had a girlfriend but understood that that did not mean a threesome was going to happen.  I am finding that just because someone matches exactly what they are looking for or that similarities are abound that they will take that moment to divide to look for differences and concentrate on those.  When someone is looking at the differences between people, it is time to give up, because if you list the differences between identical twins you will decide that these two people could not be siblings.

SuperGirl, who said that age was just a number, seemed to be very similar to me in many ways, but I got the feeling that had decided that I was to dissimilar.  Maybe it was more that it did not feel right.  And again we come back to that there are no rules and I can't comprehend a lack of rules.  When I am confronted with this fact I get depressed and I want to quit.  Quit life.

It is hard to put on a face that says that I am happy.  I have an autistic face, a face that does not reflect what I feel necessarily.  I can't tell what people feel, but I also don't project well either.  I want to be obsessed with the Girl at work.  I want to pretend that I have a reason to live, that I have something to look forward to.  I want to be normal, to have a relationship, like everyone else.  Wouldn't it be great if I were normal?