Apparently my double cousin Erena has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.

Interestingly, double cousins (which happen when you are a cousin to someone on both your mother's and your father's side -- in my case my father's brother had children with my mother's sister) are exactly as closely related genetically as half-siblings are.

Also interestingly, I read the symptoms of POTS and I experience a very mild form of one of its symptoms. Whenever I get up, my blood pressure takes a while to stabilize, and unless I do it carefully I'll feel faint. The same goes for standing up in the shower, standing in place for too long in general. This may be the reason I dislike chairs.

Nonetheless, compared to how bad she has it, it's not worth mentioning. I feel bad for her.

Trivia: her wedding was the first (and so far, the only) wedding I've ever been to, I think it was around 15-20 years ago or so. I don't remember it that well, only fragments, seeing as I was pretty young when it happened.

I think subcultures in general shouldn't be trusted. My experience with them and with seeing their affects on others is that they are forms of cults, except less organized, with no charismatic leader. But they're nonetheless parasites on people's minds and time. I'll mention a few.

I_am_carrie is in the Inu Yasha fanfiction subculture. She spends up to 10 hours a day talking to other fanfiction writers, reading fanfiction stories, writing them, entering contests, moderating communities of fanfiction contests and stories, and so on. Since entering it it has absorbed her life and her life now revolves around it.

Newedition was in the Objectivists subculture; it too absorbed much of her time and beliefs, until she finally managed to escape. Unfortunately she escaped into the 9/11 conspiracy theory and natural health & medicine subcultures, but at least that's an interesting change.

The same is true for many other people I know: Miyu and the elegant gothic lolita fashion subculture, charbile and the furry subculture, etc. etc. -- it just consumes most of a person's time with very little given back to them in return.

I myself was never very absorbed in any subculture, with the possible exception of one I invented myself (the Heroists, which are a group of artists who seek to alter world culture and the future through art), but at least that's just being absorbed by something you created.

There's also the independent games subculture, but that one's kind of unavoidable because that's what I do, and even so I intentionally try to limit my time spent within that subculture -- I'm not as into it as most of the people on the TIGSource forums for instance, and have beliefs that most of them find unorthodox, such as the idea that story is gameplay, the idea that games are not just for fun, the idea that creating games just because you like creating them isn't the only valid reason to create them, etc.

Now I do think subcultures can be worth dipping into, they're interesting and often have ideas of value and you can meet interesting people through them. And if a person spent time in a subculture or two it tends to make them more interesting people. But when it reaches the point that most of a person's life is consumed by them, and when most of their thoughts and reactions and beliefs become indistinguishable from most of the other people in that subculture, I think they're more trouble than they're worth.

Recently I've been realizing how useless and obstructive clothes are for most movements, they also irritate my skin; I wish I lived alone, then I could be naked most of the time. One day!

I think sometimes LJ's give the illusion that you're following someone's life when it's actually that you're only following what they report about their life, which tells you more about what they see as notable rather than what they're actually doing that is notable.

In an attempt to avoid that, here's a list of what I've been doing over the past few weeks, without notability considerations.

- Failing to complete a freelance writing assignment on Tanzania on time, but at the same time finding the assignment oddly fun; I'd say it's nearing completion even though most of the actual "writing" is yet to be done.
- Failing to complete the release of the Immortal Defense level editor on time. It's mostly done, but should have been released much earlier.
- Getting re-addicted to the French MMORPG Dofus. One of my old guild members, Effus, is the only one I remember from the old days of Dofus. He's been guiding me through the new areas of the game that they added since I left. I've also been forging daggers in the game and trying to figure out the best way to make money doing so, its internal economy is really engrossing. I'm at least happy I'm only addicted to a relatively simple and benign MMO game instead of the much more life-controlling ones like WoW or Second Life.
- Internet/information addiction, mainly centered on viewing random Wikipedia pages and seeing where they lead, popurls.com, my LJ friends list, youtube.com, and news.google.com.
- Feeling "guilty", inasmuch as I am capable of guilt, for all of the above. This probably takes up at least as much time as each of the individual items above.
- Organizing my goals over the next 5 years, weeding out the less important ones, prioritizing. This is difficult, because there's so much I want to do and so little time to do it in.

That's really about it right now. Pretty boring.

I remember thinking that I feel that my entries have become less personal since I started LJ, and that this is a trend for most LJ's. People start out with well-thought out, thoughtful entries like the kind you can find in arque (also known as the best LJ on LJ), and gradually descend into more plain stuff, like links to Raining McCain videos. Which I used to interpret as a bad thing, but now I'm not so sure.

For awhile I thought it was just habit that led to this, but now I think that it may be more likely that gradually someone covers every topic, thinks things through enough that they no longer need to. Kind of like the basic questions of life and what one believes become resolved more or less, making way for applying them to individual situations. Periodically you may need to think something through in the old level of detail, but for the most part you already did it.

Oddly, sometimes I feel that I want to say something in LJ, and yet when I open it I don't know what I want to say, only that I want to say it. The unconscious is a strange thing.

There are times when you need to do what your unconscious says, times when you need to ignore it, and times when you need to appease it.

Lately I've been feeling that the only things worth doing are things that I've never done before (in a broad sense). This doesn't mean that I'm actually doing new things more than before, just that I feel more than before that I should.

It's strange to remember how arbitrarily I met most of the people I know on LJ, and how chancey it was, how easily I could have never met them. Some of them made sense (such as friends-of-friends or similar LJ communities -- I met miyu_sakura and newedition through Objectivism communities for instance) but others are just totally random and arbitrary.

I think I met wynand because of his strange comments in ishalltriumph's LJ. Now we've made a game together and are working on another and have met each other in a few of his writing group meetings. But why did I even notice his comments there? Maybe it was his strange avatar, which was a picture of him with a turtleneck like shirt pulled up over most of his face, just under his eyes, which made me check out his LJ.

harlockhero and I, years ago, were using the "view random livejournal" button in search of anyone who wasn't boring, and one of the ones we came across was ubermensch. Eventually we'd have hundreds of IM discussions and go to a Skinny Puppy concert, and he let me use his book Raberata (which he sent me a free copy of) for the background universe/setting for one of my games. Yet it was all through a random number generator.

Strangest are those that I don't remember how I met. I don't remember how I found womanonfire's LJ at all for instance.

And even outside of LJ, a lot of my best online friends I met through the Ohrrpgce game engine community, between 1998 and 2002. But I could easily have chosen some other game engine (perhaps the horrible RPG Maker, or whatever) instead, and would have a completely different set of long-term friends. It'd be strange never having met komera or harlockhero or konami or moogle1 or jsangspar or orchard_l or longetech or charbile or fyrewulff or arque or dgowers or eternalhachi or novakaiser or specplosive, considering how much of my experience is related to doing things with them and talking to them.

Still playing Persona 3. To add to my negative points about it in the previous entry, I don't like insta-deaths -- Persona 1 had them too -- it's when you enter battle, an enemy uses a spell that kills you in one hit, and it's game over.

Mike Gravel has joined the Libertarian party, I see. Maybe I'll vote for him if he gets their nomination (which isn't likely).

Something I said to Harlock about a year ago returns to me now; I don't think I fully realized until now how many ways it's true and how widely it can be applied: it went something like "to dislike one thing in the universe is to dislike everything in the universe." Judging and comparing and knowing what's what are good, and can best be done without disliking anything. And they're even contradictory, it's impossible to dislike something if you know its position in reality.

I've been thinking that enlightenment / liminality is not only analogous to waking up / sleep, but actually operates on the same physical principle. Sleep isn't a pure state, it's a wide continuum where different parts of the brains are less active, less aware of their surroundings, etc., (sleepiness is a word to describe this between-state) -- but it's a spectrum, and it can go in both ways, one can also be more awake than fully awake, more aware than fully aware. Just as sleep goes all the way down to total unconsciousness, enlightenment should theoretically go all the way up, at least as far as the brain's physical nature allows.

It's too bad raspberries (and so on) can't experience what it's like to exist as well as people do, I feel bad for them.

One of my uncles (Victor) has prostate cancer; I was never really that close to him but have known him since I was young and we visited him about once a year or so. My mother tells me they are going to do chemotherapy on him pretty soon (which she and I are both against, we think he should do megadoses of vitamin D and a fever-machine and such first...).

My mother had an art showing today, lots of her paintings in this city's art center; I saw my father's friend Vinnie there for the first time in about fifteen years, and my aunt Lena for the first time in about four. Music from Immortal Defense was played, as well as music by my mother's boyfriend Armand on bass electric guitar, his cousin Chris on regular guitar, and my father on accordion and piano.

Too many other people were there to name, but I'll name them anyway: cousin Carrie, sisters Crystal and Elisa, brother Richie, Crystal's boyfriend Franco, Elisa's husband John and son Aiden, mother's friend Irma, local artist Don Kommit and his ex-wife Marie (both of whom lived in our apartment building as we were growing up), parents' friend Christine and her daughter and husband (they too lived in our apartment building as we were growing up), and a bunch of other people artist-like who I didn't recognize. Total around 50.

What's somewhat surprising to me is that my mother tells everyone, even people I never met or who never met me, that I make games, as if it's something special or amazing, treating it like this great achievement; they also usually treat it like that, which I find kind of ridiculous. Anyone can make a game. Or paint and make music. Creating things is natural and expected. It's the people who don't create things that are remarkable or out of the ordinary. Gladly those people are few.

Yesterday I ate too many honey-coated cashews and had that hypoglycemic reaction which causes fuzzy-mindedness for the day; hopefully this'll be the last time I have so much sugar at once (I probably should have just bought plain cashews instead).

I mother just bought a bunch of breakfast food and told me I could choose what I like -- but it was all eggs, cheese, bacon, bagels, etc. -- when will she learn that I don't like to eat that stuff? I hate disappointing her by not eating though, so it always makes me seem ruder than I want to be when I refuse foods I know to be harmful.

And I know this is subject to selection bias, but lately I've been noticing that all the most (for lack of a better word, I don't mean to imply a supernatural) spiritually developed people I know are also those that have the best diets. Whereas all the ones caught up in abstractions and religions and ideologies and empty concepts have terrible diets. There's likely causation both ways rather than one causing the other though.

1. http://gemtowerdefense.com/ -- I bought an ad there -- $40 for 100,000 impressions. I really like that flash game (even if it's just a typical TD game) so I like supporting the game's author too.

2. I hate banks; my debit card number somehow was stolen, someone charged money to my checking account causing an overdraft fee, I called and canceled the debit card and I may or may not get back the money they charged (about $100), but I probably won't get back the overdraft fees either way (about $50). :( :(

3. I started playing Breath of Fire 4 (it's the only game in that series I never played) and it's kind of annoying so far; in the first town and the first dungeon the camera is such that it's impossible to see where you're walking or which way to go, I'm not sure how that got through their testing.

There was a psychological study once when a bunch of inmates in a mental home were asked to pretend to be normal, to act in a way that they thought normal people acted. Surprisingly, this cured most of them, and they were soon able to be released.

Inversely, sometimes I get the feeling that the world is populated by insane people pretending to be sane; they're cunning enough to have learned all the tricks of sanity and not be picked out and recognized as crazy, but under the seeming order is a fairly big degree of chaos.

I think that if this is true, this used to be true of me too during my teenage years, but isn't anymore. Because I remember what I was like to be 12 or 14, and I remember that a lot of what I did and said and thought was pretty purposeless and irrational, although I was always able to give rationalizations and paint it as semi-sane.

And now that I actually do feel sane, it's harder to convince people that I am, and I act much more stereotypically crazy, because I can no longer rationalize or explain why I do things, and just kind of treat it as unknown and mysterious.

But returning to the original point, I kind of strongly suspect that most people are as crazy as I used to be. For instance, creating a rationalization for what you do or believe or say, and believing in that rationalization, instead of just recognizing that you don't know why you do things, is pretty crazy. And that's just one example of how most people are pretending to know what they're doing and pretending to be in control of what they do even though they don't and aren't. I can recognize it because I used to do it myself.

Not that I'm defending mental institutions, I think everyone in them should be released immediately. Except for those who got out of going to jail because of the 'insanity defense', they can stay.