So for a while I thought about trying to build one using the principles in the linked article. It’s actually a very simple device, mechanically. All you have to is make a chamber that your hand fits in along with a source of cold, like an ice pack. You make the chamber airtight, with a simple seal around your wrist. Then you pull a slight vacuum in the chamber. Just enough to bring all the blood in your palm to the surface. The seal doesn’t have to be all that tight. Then you leave it for a minute or so while your blood circulates.

The vacuum counteracts the vasoconstriction effect that naturally happens when your skin encounters cold, allowing the heat to be transferred out much more efficiently than without a vacuum.

But I never did build it. I’m not a very mechanically-minded person. I’m much more of a programmer than an engineer. So when I discovered a few days ago that the product had finally come to market (a few years ago), I was pretty excited. How much would I spend on it? Oh, probably a few hundred dollars.

How much does it cost? They don’t say on their website. So I called them. $3000. Wow. So I told them, you know, you should consider offering a set of plans for hobbyists, who are most likely not among your potential customers at that price. (Nor are your potential customers likely to be frugal or nerdy enough to build one themselves.)

The fucking sales lady hung up on me. Not even a “no thanks”.

Fuck Avacore.

If anyone reading this has any talent for building things, how about let’s make some do-it-yourself instructions and post them online? You know, using basic tools and materials you can get from a general hardware store.

Of course, me using this would mean that I would have to actually start working on this project again, which is unlikely to happen. There are many projects vying for my attention. (Some more productive than others.)

Satoshi Kon, congratulations.

Runners up would be NGE, FLCL, and perhaps Jacob’s Ladder, although those first two managed to be entertaining enough to laugh off the lack of coherency.

I don’t think therapy is ever going to work for me. Successful therapy requires trust in the therapist. But I’m smarter than therapists. I’m more balanced than them. I’m more insightful than them. Why should I trust them?

In fact, I don’t think I really trust anyone. I don’t actually know why, for sure. I’m not even sure where to start explaining it.

For me, being open with someone doesn’t create trust in them. I’m a very open person anyway, and self-revelation doesn’t leave me feeling vulnerable at all. There’s nothing anyone could do with that information that could hurt me. (With a small number of exceptions. About those things I am private, even with therapists, but only because I believe society unjustly stigmatizes those things.)

So what would leave me feeling vulnerable? I’m not sure, honestly. Well, an expression of admiration or love. Or a desire to spend time with them. None of which are really appropriate for a therapeutic session.

Can I learn to trust anyone? Do I really want to? Am I doomed to a life of solitude? Well, I’m capable of interacting with people, I just find it kind of awkward. Not awkward because of me, but because of them. I feel superior to them. I feel unappreciated, detached, and alienated from them. Unappreciated because almost none of my interests or beliefs are shared by almost everyone. So I look more like a crank, or some incredible unapproachable genius, to a lot of people. And I don’t think any of that is necessary, or inherent in my personality. It’s just reacting to their common, vulgar qualities.

Am I hopelessly arrogant? Very possibly. I have never viewed arrogance as a negative quality. At a certain point, it’s just obvious that (in certain ways) one is better than most other people, and to believe otherwise, or to act otherwise, would be foolish. That is the source of my arrogance. And in the company of my true peers, I don’t believe I am arrogant. At certain blogs, I’m pretty humble.

I have never been in a physical, real-life group in which I was merely average, or above average. I haven’t attended college (well, except for a semester). (You might say that it would therefore be a good idea for me to attend a competitive college, like MIT or Caltech or something. But I hate college—the pedagogy (I could write several posts), the outrageous expense, the stress. Plus I have a learning disability.) I haven’t been in any Mensa group, or any other sort of highly-self-selected group (outside of blogs, of course). I’ve tried a few meetup groups, but nothing that really made me feel part of a group. Nothing where I really felt I was among peers.

I pretty much hate this post. It doesn’t give me any new insight at all. Well, at least it’s a start.

So I’m going to try to stop reading. Finding another good blog to comment at is going to be quite hard. I’ll have some regrets. It’ll be a lot like breaking up with an old girlfriend when you’ve drifted apart. But it’ll be a positive thing. Less Wrong is already a good blog I’m reading regularly. Overcoming Bias is also a pretty good source of stuff. But neither will quite fill the hole left by Unfogged. The blogosphere is so huge, and it’s so hard to sift through. Well, maybe I should focus less on online time-wasting anyway.

Of course, now I have to figure out where I’m going to get my news.

I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’ve been in a pretty sweet position as regards the tolerance I’ve had for my current style of life, which involves a lower salary than might be expected for my position, but with the ability to come in late and have lots of free time. I’m not sure if I could ever adjust to having to get up at 7 AM every day. So anyway, I’m going to be taking a bit of time off once I leave. Part of that will involve, perhaps, moving in with some family to cut down on rent costs. I’m a bit conflicted about the decision, as it involves moving from here in Austin to way out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t really get out all the time, but still, the city’s nice. And the job market in Austin is probably way better than the one in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve been thinking that maybe I should go into a different line of work, though. Perhaps one with more time flexibility, even if that means giving up advancement opportunities. Perhaps one where I work from home. That would be nice.

I’d kind of like to stay more independent, but I’m just not sure I’m up to handle the job market right now. I’m still not feeling very great. I just dumped my new therapist and I don’t think I’m going to look for another one. I just don’t see therapy ever helping me. I’m way too untrusting of people to ever really form the connections needed to make therapy efficacious. Especially not some random dumbass therapist. (In fact, I very well might be the most untrusting person you’ve ever met. I should do a post on this.) And honestly, I’m not too thrilled about psychiatry either. I articulated some of my concerns to my psychiatrist once, and all he did was feed me the standard bullshit pharma line about chemical imbalances. Apparently they’re even indoctrinating the medical students nowadays. Either that or he was just too arrogant to acknowledge that my concerns were legitimate. But I think the former is more likely.

Anyway, independence would be nice, but more difficult than I think I’m ready to handle right now. I’ve never had any other job except this one, which I started when I was 18. So maybe a few months of just thinking and gathering myself would be good before I go out into the world again. Maybe.

Inevitably, someone is going to bring up school. Ugh.

I have limited my emotional investment in the possibility from the beginning with this scenario and others in mind, but it’s not possible to limit it enough to obviate the pain of rejection entirely. (Even rejection still floating off in the land of possibility.) But it’s not really the pain, so much as it is the possibility and tension and fear in the situation—the anxiety of it all—that really gets to me, drives me crazy, and drives me to distraction.

This has really preoccupied me. It’s driven me to feel more suicidal. I’ve already been feeling pretty goddamn suicidal. I’m at the stage now where I’m seriously getting close. I haven’t yet purchased the tools I’ll use, but I’ve gotten close a couple days to going out and buying the stuff.

So what’s my point here? I guess that, even with all this stress and drama, I think it’s worth it. The possibilities, the hope, the potential, make it worth it. Because nothing in life is worth quite as much as a good relationship, I think.

I’ve found the main limitation in pursuing such a dream is the lack of inspiration. I don’t really have many ideas for worlds that are much different than our own, dull, dreary, miserable, dissatisfying world to draw upon. I’m not creative in that way. If I were, I would definitely have been creating such a world and wouldn’t be here now posting. I’m a very practical person. More interested in science than art. More interested in programming languages than programs.

And even that’s not totally true. I’m totally not interested in new programming languages nowadays. I have C#, and I can do everything I want in C#, so why learn anything new? I bought a book on Scala just the other day. Made it halfway through so far. I’m having trouble finding the motivation to make it to the end of the book, let alone actually program something in the language. Which, actually, goes to prove the point that I’m a practical person. Not overly practical. I’ve thought about programming my own OS before. (I.e. building a car from scrap metal.)

Stagnation. That’s what I’m experiencing. Intellectual mortification. Growing old. I’m becoming more practical. Growing old can be good, and can be bad. I wonder if humans have evolved significantly for specialization. I bet we have. Practicality is the mark of the specialist.

World-building is unhealthy. In the sense that it’s non-adaptive. On the other hand, absolute non-reflectivity isn’t adaptive. Otherwise we wouldn’t have evolved it. I just wonder what the distribution of adaptivity versus head-in-the-sky world-building thinking is. Is it a normal distribution? Or bimodal? One thing’s for sure: world-building isn’t getting me any mates. Not anytime soon, anyway. On the other hand, nothing seems to be getting me any mates. I’m probably just defective somehow. I blame my parents.

I have so much animosity and violent will towards people in general. I blame my parents. Potential dates have this huge hurdle to overcome, rather than starting out in a neutral position. Which is probably perfectly normal, but maybe the extent to which I exhibit it isn’t normal. My standards are too high? Either that or I’m hopelessly incompatible with others compared to the normal person.

I want to write a new synthesizer/sequencer. One that provides 1) a cheap and dirty substitute for all the major instruments and 2) parameters that make up for the “cheap and dirtiness” of the sounds to provide all the range of the real instruments. Ideally, the sound would be more pure and abstract, but every bit as expressive. Not fighting against the abstract purity of computer synthesizers, but working with it.

My life is these projects. There’s nothing more to my life than these projects and work, and eating sleeping entertainment fucking (substitutes). Plenty of entertainment.

I always post when I’m drunk. Hmm.

Still single, and miserable. There’s no one out there like me. Well, close enough to no one that I haven’t been able to find them after three years of looking, off and on, through dating sites. Only a couple people that even come close, and those ones don’t respond.

They say that suicide is a disease in itself. Aside from depression, it takes a life of its own, and eats away at you even when you’d otherwise be happy. I’m not quite happy, but I’m close to it. Closer than I was a year ago. I still have plenty to justify suicide. I just wonder if I will ever run out of things to justify it. I clearly have a will to live. Just not a very strong one.

I’m learning Isabelle. I want to write a new user interface for it. Something awesome. I have a good idea of how to make it awesome, but I haven’t yet decided how to approach it. Or how to spend my free time working on it. Or how to deal with the stress of my job. Or the lack of a desire to live. Anyway, I’ve thought that I might take a bottom-up approach, reading the source code in order of how the compiler compiles it, which is guaranteed to be the most linear bottom-up approach available. (Unlike in languages like C# where source files can have circular dependencies up to the assembly (dll) level, which makes bottom-up reading potentially impossible.) But I’m not sure I’ll do that.

Due to an unfortunate incident, I’m required to attend AA meetings. It’s a shame, since I’m not an alcoholic, that I’m being forced to intrude on these meetings, but seeing the camaraderie between these people makes me want to attend something more appropriate for me. A bipolar meeting, perhaps? I don’t see anything in my city. Shame. I should call some hotlines that have better resources than google on this issue.

No real progress on lucid dreaming, despite the post title. I remember bits of dreams every few days. That’s about it. I promise not to subject you to any of my dreams. I may post here of some revelation I’ve had as a result of some dream. But that’ll be it. So far, the most significance any dream has had is that I needed to pee while I slept.

You know, I’m not even sure why I do this type of post. It’s not like there’s anyone who enjoys them. Now, my last post. That was one with popular appeal.