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Warning: if you suffer from depression, don't read this. It might mess with your head. Not kidding.

This is probably the first time I've written to you, universe. I may have prayed to God or others, but I doubt I've spoken to you before.

I need to drop on my knees, and sob out my thanks to god for Prozac 60mg. I've suffered more than I imagine near anyone else can comprehend. It's such a sick, bent agony laced with petrifying fear, covered in 'my-universe-is-broken' sauce. The OCD I was dealt in 2011 is the most indescribable hell I can imagine. I can laugh at the atrocities I see on the news because I would have traded places for something as simple and benign as physical pain, the pain of four broken limbs or having my skin peeled off with a steak knife. Instead I was given 24-hour terror equivalent to being eaten alive by a monster. I wanted to die so bad during this. I wanted to die so badly.
I was alive for my family but even their need was getting to not be enough to justify my living in this carnival from hell.

So as you know I ended up in a crisis center in September, right in time for 9/11, and was put on several medications, none of which worked, and one (Invega, the only antipsychotic they tried), actually made it far worse. Then they gave me the Prozac. I knew that SSRIs needed to be a high dose to help OCD, so I bothered them until they raised it to 60mg.
It took the month and a half to start working they said it would. A little longer.

We both know I was not given the hand-washing or germ phobias with my OCD, I was given the horrible obsessive existential stuff, the really horrible painful questions that I'd obsess over until every fiber of my being believed them to be true. The kind of stuff that can blacken your sky and make you feel like you're falling into an infinite pit of pitch black tar. The stuff that makes you want to die, but be too afraid of what nightmare would await you if you did. The one the sufferers called Pure-O. I suppose I deserve some positive reward for living through this at all, or perhaps just an absence of punishment for a while, since if I wasn't wanted by family and friends, I'd be two years dead by now.

I'm writing this because I want to tell you what I need now. I hope you'll give it to me. As you know, the last few months, during my recovery, I've stopped all work, all projects, all programming and just played Warzone 2100 all day. I've gotten as good as I was before. I'm happy for the first time in years. I plan to start my work again soon, but I need some guarantees from you before I do so.

The first thing is, as an example, my famous gerbil jokes, such as 'fear the gerbils', no longer appeal to me, because I've had enough fear. Horror movies are no longer something I watch, I don't enjoy Halloween anymore, and although you know that historically I've preferred sad music when sad, now, I find myself playing uplifting songs in an attempt to drown out the memories. Christmas is probably forever ruined for me because of the onset of the OCD that time in 2011. Kinda a PTSD thing going on there.
Whenever I hear a christmas song, instant trip down memory lane from hell.
Fourth of July is ruined too thanks to my relapse in July this year.

I want to be surrounded by joy, by kindness, by peace, by good things. I have seen enough of the other side of the spectrum for this lifetime.

I want to be loved, and to love others, I want to have a fulfilling and useful purpose and still have time for myself.
I want to be followed by a hundred billion times more light than I ever was darkness.

The tagline at the bottom of the site today says "Today is the first day of the rest of the mess.", but I vehemently disagree. Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and it's going to be good now, because I deserve it. I've paid my dues. I'd just like your blessing for the good plan I've laid out, and your help in making it come to pass.

Sincerely, SubsentientneitnesbuS.

It was a dark and stormy night.

There was a sexual harasser on the loose.

Somebody who had been learning programming well told her mentor that she was a feminist.

A few hundred miles away there was a great guy who had dated over 20 different women that year alone and was rejected every time and was still a virgin. His married sister had sex on his couch with a man who was not her husband.

In the nearby city of Pine Rapids, Iowa, a frustrated trans woman reached her limit of reading about the drivel womyn-born-womyn publish about fields they don't understand. Maybe it was gamergate that made her crack, or maybe it was systemd.

In Derry, Maine, her estranged sister, who had begun living as a man, Maxfield Stanton, three years ago, was accused the day before yesterday of sexually assaulting a mutual friend of a man he had started to develop feelings for.

-=-

Don't worry. I'll tie this all together in scene 24.

I've scrambled my password and email on the green site. I had to use Chrome under Windows! Midori on BodhiLinux wouldn't work! Good riddance to that site.

I've made an account on the blue site just to reserve this username, but I can't figure out how to scramble it quite yet. Maybe I'm just too confused at life at the moment.

I'm now scrambling my password and email here.

It's not you; it's me.

This has been the year from hell, and it's not over yet.

Clearly my knowledge about feminism, or at least those who call themselves feminists, is about 15 years old. Some of it may still be true to a certain degree, but I feel I no longer know what the movement is and my comments earlier today were probably putting blame on the wrong people. Thus, I'm as guilty as the feminists of 15 years ago for what they did to me.

Given enough time, everything changes.

I may be returning, but not with this UID. You won't need to hear any more trans-this cis-that from me, hopefully. I understand that may no longer be an issue for the feminists, so it's no longer an issue for me.

Yet, I'm clearly triggered on a level that indicates PTSD just by the word feminism. I'll be seeking treatment. Things will change, one way or another. Either I end up in a gutter or I get well and go on to die when I'm 90. Either way, the cycle of death and rebirth continues, and afterwards I'll be somebody even more strange who won't even remember being here as gamers and male programmers come under increasing fire for all that we can guess are ulterior motives.

There's a new-age movement of the future for you: mediums who help people trawl through old message boards from the first quarter of the 21st century to attempt to find their previous life.

It's been great.

Goodbye

Alright, time for confessions. I only post journals in an attempt to get Ethanol_fueled's journals off the front page. So here is my anti-Ethanol_fueled journal entry. Maybe, in a future when Soylent News is a self-respecting news aggregator, such measures will not be necessary. (And yes, I know, that at present they are futile.)

Seems comment submission in article threads won't work properly. One has to click submit button upto 5 times before it works. Something wrong?

I just used my last moderation point to troll rate someone. OK, it was not someone, it was an asshole. Seriously, who are these people that in this day and age can keep spewing racism, sexism, and how they are metrically challenged in the organ department? Guns? F**king Cowards. If you need a gun to defend yourself, you are probably a criminal. Bad boyz? White Bad Boyz? KKK Boyz? You know, if you are an oath keeper, you are already a lying sack of it. Defend the Constitution? You do realize that this means you have to be able to read the Constitution first, so you know what it is you are defending? Else, perchance, you find yourself defending the Protocols of the Teutonic Knights! You know, Nazi shit?

Recently I came across a video of John Cleese explaining Fox News with the insight that you have to know at least enough to be right in order to know you are wrong, and this is exactly what conservatives are lacking. Ah, here it is! Now this is the problem, and it does point out how arguing with these people is really no use at all. Seriously? Cops saying they _are_ the cop that shot the kid? Are they actually saying that they are racist child-murderers? See: too stupid to know that they are stupid.

I think it is nice that Soylent News covers these terribly fascist events in American, if only for the edification of the rest of the world. But let not all these people who do in fact listen to Fox New think that somehow they are right, or even in the majority. Liberals have more guns that conservatives, and they are better shots, since they do not get all emotional about their targets.

So I am not saying that we kick out all the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals and neo-nazis, I am just saying that if you are one of those, expect no mercy from things like reality and logic and humanity, and ethics. We owe you nothing less.

Perhaps the wiki could go https just as the main site? considering the opportunity for manipulation and eavesdropping these days, it would be nice.

From this:
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Finances

To this:
https://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Finances

When one submits a story to the editors for publication on the site. It would be useful to have a separate input field where one could write comments on the submission itself. That should stay private between the submitter and the editors.

It could be something like "please check the links, good story but in a hurry" etc.

Leaving a comment inside the submission box in parenthesis or similar has the risk of getting unintended publication..

Niagara Celtic festival is this weekend (13-14) in Krull park in Olcott NY. I'll be there with the Sterling Invaders.

Next weekend is Queen City Con Quest - Downtown Buffalo, in the convention center. I should be there one of those days.

OK, my contributions of late seem to be more complaining than anything. I really try not to smite idiots with negmod points, seriously! But I do hang on to the last few mod points, just in case a late-breaking egregious post should be made. And here is my latest complaint. Mod points come with a nice notification, and even some direction to proper usage. That is all well and good. There also is a date and time of expiration for said mod points. But my expiration time always seems to be an hour off. I am assuming this time is changed to local 24-hour format, no problem. Perhaps Slashcode is unaware that not all time-zones practice Daylight Savings? Or perhaps I am not where I think I am. I guess I could just remember, for Soylent News Mod points, that 18:05 is not 6:05 local time, but in fact 5:05. Wait, is it leap ahead, or fall back, if you do not have Daylight Saving Time? (And what fools think we can save daylight? If we could, the whole solar power at night thing would already be solved.)

Any way, it is probably better that I lose mod points before I can use them in nasty ways. Live long and prosper, whatever time matrix you find yourself in.

For a few months now, aqu4bot's Windows support has been broken. Compilation would fail because nonblocking sockets were not properly doable in Windows the way it was intended. I was using the same network core I use on the IRC protocol to download HTTP.

It worked, except when it hung. This affected mainly the $title command. So I added the nonblocking, which was necessary, but this broke all Windows support. I was reluctant in using libcurl because although I love libcurl, I only had two commands for aqu4 that used HTTP. That was $ddg and $title.

The good news is libcurl is VERY portable and works well under Windows. So needless to say aqu4bot's Net_GetHTTP() function was removed in favor of a new CurlCore_GetHTTP().

There is now a hard dependency on libcurl, but that's fine I suppose, since I now have my precious and arguably useless Windows support once more.
To celebrate, I created a new icon for aqu4bot that is used as the icon for the Windows executable: http://universe2.us/collector/aqu4bot.png

There's still a small issue with $time, as Windows does not have zoneinfo so I can't set the timezone properly, but everything else appears to work!