When did it all go wrong...

RHONDAAAAAAAAAAaa

goddammit it, Rhonda. Goddamn it. every day. Every day is like this, it seems, these days. Every goddamn day. Goddammit Rhonda.

#onethread #paymentforposts

everyone laughs now. but later, you'll get payment for posts. and someone will do a "first mentions" search and think "oh that's right, i guess karl really was trying to get us all payment for posts, something that we all take for granted now in the distant year of 2084. i'm glad the mods did a good job of keeping things stable while we all worked out the payment plan, and then we all got healthcare through #paymentforposts by 2040, just a couple years before uncle charlie here was born. uncle charlie would have died without those payments. think you ilx, from the future. don't make the mistake the alternate pasts did - there's a reason we're the prime now, here in 2084. it's because you made the right decision with regards to #paymentforposts in 2021, reading this now. paymentforposts.xyz - you're gonna check and see. and be disappointed either way. #paymentforposts"

Rhonda where are we on this hot new hashtag

Everywhere i do be nobody does be talking about it

#paymentforposts

what if we just got a cent per post. what if we all posted thousands of times per day. think about the traffic.

think about all the traffic and the ad revenue, and the #paymentforposts gained along the way. and not only that, but also the money.

not to mention the cookies

:P

Honestly that was kind of a flippant response of mine. I do think the internet has had a bad effect on me, my attention span, moods, capacity for accomplishing things, but it's been so gradual that it's hard to pinpoint a moment when Things Went Wrong. And there are some aspects of the internet that I'm grateful for, ilx being one of them.

This is a complicated question for me to answer because I feel a lot of regrets over my lack of professional accomplishments, and in some ways I wish I had made better choices, but also I was very backward at a lot of social stuff when I was younger, and I've been very gradually getting better at it. So a lot of my social milestones, such as they are, feel like they were just barely achieved and might not have been achieved if things had been even slightly different. It's easy to imagine a different version of my life in which - for instance - I became a professor or a journalist but never dated at all.

But if I had to pick a specific moment in my life that made a definite difference for the worse, it would be getting officially diagnosed with migraines when I was 21. I'd had headaches for years, mostly on the weekends, and I dealt with them by taking Aleve and lying down. Then I got a diagnosis, and that meant migraine meds, and the meds caused rebound headaches, until I was getting full-blown migraines two or three or four times a week. It took 14 years to get that figured out and get off those particular meds. I wonder what my twenties and early thirties would have been like if I'd never been on them to start with.

February 2013

Been reading Johanna Hurwitz books to my niece. Even in the recent ones, all her characters seem to be growing up in a pre-internet world. She acknowledges the internet, but barely ( "we can look up facts about kangaroos!"). It's more like a dot on the periphipery than an augmented reality filter in the Johanna Hurwitz universe. The kids are drawn to investigate things in a way that's very hands-on and their experiences are location-based. I remember when my life was like that too, kinda. But there's all this other stuff from my pre-internet childhood that hardly encroaches on the Johanna Hurwitz universe: designer toys, brand name junk food, blockbuster movies, the advertisements for these things, the places where they're bought and sold. Being seduced by all these things, lusting after them constantly, was a major driving force in my life before the internet and if I'm honest, it amounted to nothing less than the erasure of myself.

The thing is, my niece is def going through that too now. I don't think she experiences the world through a digital filter yet, though. Perhaps because she can't read or write enough to navigate the internet. Like, as much as I experience the internet increasingly as a barrage of images, it's still a text-based structure in some sense.

I'm not saying "entertainment franchises" or w/e ruined my life, to be clear. I would say it contributed to a kind of tunnel vision.

"as long as you keep going nothing has turned ~wrong" is bullshit

― Dan S, Saturday, July 17, 2021 11:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

worked for me!

series only get serious when the home team loses

"after it all going wrong, the team that is currently losing goes on to lose the whole thing over 85% of the time - this next year is critical"

Hasn’t happened yet

Hoping I don’t realise till I’m dead

To bring some sunshine here though.
Last year it finally went all right.

Married (happily)
Bought a our first home
Reduced work to to four days a week

The sunshines gotta rub off at some point tho I guess?

I'm not saying "entertainment franchises" or w/e ruined my life, to be clear. I would say it contributed to a kind of tunnel vision.

I don't know if I'd say the franchises erased my self, it was more like they partly constituted it (as in those horrifying Transformers commercials where the child's eyes start glowing; indeed, I professed a desire to be a Transformer). My dad had me join him in a lot of gardening, and he struggled to get me to remember the names of the things we planted — I simply was not interested. I had a very powerful preference for the synthetic world. In a way, even though I now live in a city and seek out more "natural" spaces, this hasn't changed — I still can't summon the will to learn horticultural vocabulary.

As for the thread question, I basically floundered in grad school and stuck around for an absurd amount of time (wish I wasn't stuck with "Neue Jesse Schule" here — that was meant to be a display name but somehow it ended up becoming the default). A lot of things particularly "went wrong" in the fall of 2016 (problematic roommate situation, a suddenly ailing hip, a professionally inappropriate flirtation, the election).... But I think I've really been shielded from the worst and suspect things will start going wronger for me in the next decade, and that I won't be ready for it.

It never went wrong for me, hardships are par the course.

― Van Horn Street, Saturday, 17 July 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe you could go and live in Gaza, find out more about hardships and reconsider the nonsense you post.

you really are a tremendous ass

my life is pretty good and things eventually went right for me but I had two big fucked up moments in my life

1) 7th grade, I got busted for "shoplifting". I put that in quotes because I hadn't actually stolen anything, but the school cop says I was "caught", shows me a video of "something" going up my jacket sleeve, but won't say what, also says I stole something a second day even though I knew I wasn't even there. My parents come, my friend's parents come, I burst into tears saying I'm innocent, and the cop tells me if I say I'm guilty I can get away with a $45 "Second Chance" program instead of the $360 worth of citations. I decide not to risk it and just "admit guilt". In retrospect not a big deal but I felt like I lot the trust of my parents. It was a lot like that one Simpsons episode!

Anyway, two weeks after that, I get suspended from school. Here's what happened. I was bullied a lot by these 2 particular kids and one day I say something like "you guys better stop it!!" and one of them is like, "or what? You'll put me on your hit list?" I said "yeah" and made a "hit list" with their names on it. They think it's hilarious and start telling me other names to put on it. which I do, because deep down I wanted the bullies to like me. One caveat: I did not know what a hit list was. I thought it was a list of people you wanted to punch? Christ, I was 12. I throw out the list. A few weeks later, Columbine happens. Turns out one of the bullies saved the list and gave it to a teacher. A week after I was suspended for "threatening to shoot up the school". Needless to say my social status was not very good after that. I was whispered about all the time. Nobody wanted to hang around me. Both these things happening at the same time really hurt...I felt like I lost the trust of everyone. Even years later, I was at a party and chatting with some dude and he says "aren't you the guy who wanted to shoot up the school?" Like this is a small town, EVERYONE knew about it. It tanked my social life for years.

2) About seven years ago. By now I finally have a nice group of friends hanging out fairly regularly, people who I consider my brothers in a sense, including the few people who actually were my friends during high school. Some of them get into drugs but it's not clear who's doing what and how much. I hear them talk about morphine and sometimes when I see them they're in a state which in retrospect had to be heavy withdrawal just disconnected, grouchy, texting people all the time (one thing I kept asking..."who do you keep texting, everyone you know is here!"). Anyway, one of them, the guy who basically held the group together, overdoses on something I've never heard of: fentanyl. His family really liked me, even picking me to deliver the eulogy on behalf of his friend group. A week later, they find the person who sold him the drugs: my older brother. I had no idea. Suddenly his family won't talk to me, which is understandable, and everything with my friends is kinda weird. They don't blame me at all, it's just a fucked up thing. Nobody knows what to say. It culminates in us at the sentencing, with my family on one end and his family on the other, along with a bunch of my friends (who they'd asked to be there for moral support). His mom, someone who I'd always considered a second mother, got on the stand and asked for life in prison for my older brother. Such an immensely fucked situation. To make matters even more intense, I'm there with my wife who was 8.5 months pregnant. It was such a miserable time. I'd just get home and stare at the wall for an hour, not knowing what to say, how to feel, anything. But things were never the same with my group of friends after that...not because of me or my brother, it's just that was the guy who planned everything. The other dudes who were into drugs quit everything cold turkey and a few of them went kinda nuts after. Two of them are basically unrecognizable now and another one nearly committed suicide because the cops kept badgering him (offering him immunity in exchange for a recorded phone call with me, which was fine because I didn't know anything!) Fuck! That was crazy!!

fess up frogs, what did ya steal

they wouldn't tell me! like that's the worst part, I asked "what do you think I took?" and the cop said "I don't know, but they checked the inventory and it was off by one so clearly you took it"

I heard rumors later that the cop had a quota of arrests he had to meet each month, idk if that's true or not but needless to say this did kick off a lifelong distrust of cops

and that cop's name....

was....

Karl

Malone

we are the law!!

In light of the above, I guess someone should lock the "who would you put on your ILX hit list" thread.

i will arrest anyone and sue anyone who deserves it, but also i am willing to represent the "profitable majority" for a class action suit against anyone who is wronged. and i think there's a lot of wrong here.

i ask everyone to stand up if they have NOT been wronged.

your honor, i see that you remain sitting

you really are a tremendous ass

― it is to laugh, like so, ha! (Aimless), Monday, 19 July 2021 bookmarkflaglink

I think my ass is quite good. But if you want to call it tremendous I will let you

tbh posting “hardships are par for the course” does come across a bit like Prince Gautama Buddha still in the aristocratic family palace, and protected by family and servants from seeing as yet that life is subject to old age, and death.

(And sickness).

otm and much more eloquently put than the stfu you insufferable clown post I deleted!

A lot of assumptions are being made about someone you know next to nothing about… like everyone I’ve had my fair share of suffering, I just don’t think it’s a sign it’s ‘all gone wrong’, more so than it what it is and I chose to be happy and positive regardless.

Calzino it seems it’s in your best interest to ignore me or something.

it’s just a really tactless thing to post after people kind poured their hearts out in two long personal posts

I hope this thread was helpful and cathartic to people and not painful. I made it after a few beers, frustrated with the circularity of my recent psychoanalysis appointments. It was kind of a wry joke. Didn’t expect people to post seriously on it.

it was helpful for me at least.

helpful for me too. it's not for everyone, but i think it's a good to talk about what went wrong, and to see what (some) others deal with. seeing so many people here deal with illness and tragedy in their own lives, for years here, helps prepare me for the inevitable crap that i will deal with. i remember telling my therapist about that a few years ago, actually, that i felt like i was depressed and falling apart even _before_ something really awful happened like a death or illness. back then, my goal was to get to a stable state and try to avoid thinking about and dreading the inevitable terrible things that will happen.

don't know where i'm going with that. it's good to talk about problems, i think.

I've almost posted itt about a half dozen times before but I keep coming back around to the thing where I've thought it all went wrong at least a half dozen times in my life and then things kinda turned around (even if not quite a full return to the pre-'all went wrong' state). I'm not sure if we get to know when and if it all goes wrong. Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from. Otherwise who really knows when you're on an inexorable downward slide.

That said, I definitely tend to live like I'm awaiting an endless number of other shoes to drop, forever bracing for the next clobbering from life. Maybe I should stop that. Maybe if I just say 'maybe I should stop that' enough times I'll just stop that. I think that's how it works.

It can be awful to anticipate terrible events, sometimes one gets relief by causing those terrible events.

To bring some sunshine here though.
Last year it finally went all right.

Married (happily)
Bought a our first home
Reduced work to to four days a week

The sunshines gotta rub off at some point tho I guess?

― hrep (H.P), Monday, 19 July 2021 04:35 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

someone's new here!!!

it's good to talk about problems, i think.

The US Army, being what it is, decided back in the late 1990s when new mental health therapies were proliferating like mushrooms after rain, that it needed to commission a study to determine which kinds of mental health and wellness therapies were most successful and which were either ineffective or less effective, so it could figure out where to spend its bags full of money. After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Their definition of 'moderately successful' may have been somewhat skewed...

Therapies that makes people want to get back in the battlefield with the motivation to kill people - clearly successful
Therapies that enable people to revaluate their lives and that tend to lead to them dropping out of the military - clearly a failure!

I don't think the study was confined to active duty soldiers, but included the multitudes of discharged veterans.

After several years it issued a report that concluded that almost every kind of therapy seemed to be moderately successful, with none of them standing out as the statistically 'correct' approach, and the real benefit seemed to be derived from the patient feeling like they were getting good attention and sympathetic help in dealing with their problems.

Maybe sometimes, like if I opened my eyes one morning and I was just a head floating in a vat or something. That seems like something you don't come back from.

That could just as easily be something to aspire to, though. I mean, as long as my head had wi-fi — and Amazon Prime, so I could get hats delivered.

Yes but is the delivery drone equipped to place a hat atop my tank?

I reiterate my contention that theres nothing at all wrong with what VHS said and ppl are projecting onto it

ok

It all went wrong that time I said something on ilx that I thought was straightforward and fairly innocuous, but that some other ilxors strongly objected to.

it went wrong for me when the Eastern front fell. Up until then, I was confident that I could win a two-front war. but afterward, clearly at least one of those fronts had fallen, and I had lost the confidence of my troops

(x post)

Was it this one - Is there life on other planets? ?

Martin's not able to respond ow, so let's pass that one by.

Having just returned from a weeklong multi-generational family gathering in a big remote farmhouse, I am equipped with multiple possible answers to this question: It all went wrong when my mother felt compelled by social pressures and her own lack of confidence to marry my father (they're still married, 55 years on, but my mom makes relentlessly clear that it wasn't her idea); or maybe when my dad's parents were remote and judgmental toward their children; or possibly when my grandfather's father abandoned the family when my grandfather was very young, leading to him growing up with a bunch of resentment and hurt that he passed onto his own kids.

Were earlier generations still around to make their case, I'm sure we could push the original sins back much farther. (And to be clear, I love my family, I mostly have good relationships with them, and I think they all mean well, most of the time.) But it made me aware all over again that learning to let go of past pain and injuries is often the only way to deal with them, because you can't solve or fix them after the fact even if everyone involved is still alive. And also of course that "letting go" is tremendously difficult work, and something you generally have to do over and over and over.

otmfm

Yeah, that's otm for me too.

And made me think of Larkin's Winter Palace:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints.

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

possibly when I had teh racist couple next door move in.

Possibly when I had started cutting things at the start of the year but only finished 2 shirts and got halfway through a 3rd.

POssibly when I never got into a cleaning routine and now its too hot to start one.

Probably never getting into an exercise routine.

Probably sitting in the sun over the weekend without thinking of sunscreen.