The Contradictory Feelings Thread

[Linguoboy]

Over an hour of trying ever possible combination of keywords I could think of and trolling various aggregator sites and I still haven't relocated the homepage of that Basque photomontagist I like. On the other hand, by sheer dumb luck I stumbled across where that video of me and my late husband trying Malört was squirreled away and I've been looking for that since I don't know when.

[Risla]

I just contacted a service that helps foreigners in Japan coordinate healthcare to help me set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for anxiety.

I'm proud of myself that I am finally taking steps to treat my anxiety, but I'm also frustrated with myself that I've let it get as bad as it has. And it has, indeed, gotten very, very, very bad; I feel like I've completely lost the ability to relax. You know that on-edge, jumpy feeling you get before a big presentation? That's been me. Almost every moment of every single day. For months and months and months. It's been fucking horrible. Why have I dismissed it so much until now?

[alice]

I just contacted a service that helps foreigners in Japan coordinate healthcare to help me set up an appointment with a psychiatrist for anxiety.

I'm proud of myself that I am finally taking steps to treat my anxiety, but I'm also frustrated with myself that I've let it get as bad as it has. And it has, indeed, gotten very, very, very bad; I feel like I've completely lost the ability to relax. You know that on-edge, jumpy feeling you get before a big presentation? That's been me. Almost every moment of every single day. For months and months and months. It's been fucking horrible. Why have I dismissed it so much until now?

Anxiety is like that; it took me several years to do something about it, too. It would jump on me without warning and lay me helpless for days afterwards. However, thanks to a few months of CBT (*not* that, stop giggling) and fluoxetine, I've been rid of it for five years now. So will you!

[mèþru]

I'mm not rid of it yet, but my depression and anxiety was building for years. I noticed it and tried reaching out, but no one, including myself, recognised that this was a condition I developed instead of something temporary. I've made lots of progress though and am occasionally hopeful about the future.

[Risla]

Anxiety is like that; it took me several years to do something about it, too. It would jump on me without warning and lay me helpless for days afterwards. However, thanks to a few months of CBT (*not* that, stop giggling) and fluoxetine, I've been rid of it for five years now. So will you!

Hope so. No CBT for me, though—it's not covered by insurance, and I just don't make enough money to be able to afford it. I desperately need therapy but I just can't.

[Vijay]

Do you think online therapy might be an option? I remember I ended up doing that for my own anxiety after seeing a specialist in person didn't really work out for me.

[Risla]

I tried it, but it was still too expensive. My monthly income is quite low.

[Frislander]

I'm having some issues with my music-making in Cambridge. I play the cello, and enjoy doing so in the few ensembles I'm part of, but I'm also acutely aware of just how insanely cliquey the Cambridge classic music scene is, which I feel insanely acutely when I'm ever at any music-related events/gatherings, like when musicians gather in pubs/at afterparties and I feel insanely isolated, because the conversation isn't even so much about classical music so much as the gossip around the musicians, which of course I'm the last to hear about if at all. So on the one hand when I'm at these gatherings I know I want to be friendly and actually gain a rapport, but at the same time I feel so isolated that I feel like I shouldn't even bother, save myself the pain, but then again if I did that I would feel like I was missing out even though I know I wouldn't enjoy being there much.

[alice]

No CBT for me, though—it's not covered by insurance, and I just don't make enough money to be able to afford it. I desperately need therapy but I just can't.

That's... rather unfortunate. I'd like to offer to help, but I'm not sure if I should since I'm not, actually, a qualified therapist.

[Vijay]

Yeah, I kind of felt like that as well.

[Travis B.]

On one hand I am happy that I got math routines (think ln, exp, sqrt, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, sinh, cosh, tanh, asinh, acosh, atanh) written in Forth working. On the other hand I am not happy that, compared to the math.* routines in Python which I assume are using C library routines which I assume are implemented in hardware, these functions have error that just doesn't go away no matter what I do in the last one or two decimal places of what double-precision floating point can represent. I imagine that is because the hardware implementations thereof are internally using 80-bit extended precision numbers which are only after computation converted to 64-bit double precision numbers, whereas I am limited to 64-bit double precision numbers from the get-go, so there is no way to get rid of any error that accumulates.

[Linguoboy]

TFL someone you don't know well shares an article from a far-right publication and you don't know if they're sharing it to mock it or because they agree with it.

[mèþru]

And then you don't want to ask because you are afraid of the answer.

[Vijay]

TFL?

[Travis B.]

When I googled "TFL" I got "Tip For Life", but that doesn't seem to fit what linguoboy is saying here.

[mèþru]

I think it's a typo of TFW. I didn't notice it when I replied. If it is a typo, it is odd; L and W aren't particularly close for me even when I type with Dvorak

[alice]

Transport for London?

[Vijay]

But that's TfL!

(To be honest, that is actually one of the first things I associate those letters with).

[Linguoboy]

I don't want to have a cold, but if I have to have a cold, better this week than next.

[Salmoneus]

Hooray, my copy of an improved and disabridged translation of Quiet Flows the Don has arrived!

It's a more fluent English, easier to read and more colourful, although it seems it may miss the odd interesting Russian idiom in the process - in places maybe it's a bit TOO idiomatically English. But it's clearly an improvement if for no other reason than it doesn't just randomly delete bits for no reason. It's also the complete thing, rather than just the first five volumes. So hooray!

...the thing is, though... my old translation was over 600 pages. The new one is nearly 1,400 (though a few hundred of those are appendices). And they're much bigger pages! The new book is about a third broader, and a third taller, and three times the length.

So stunned was I by its magnitude that I weighed it.
The old translation was 300g.
The new translation is 1,650g. And it's not a hardback. I know some of that will be the better-quality paper, but even so...

It may not be the biggest book I've read. I read Ash last year, and The Count of Monte Cristo the year before that. But... it's still kind of intimidating. It's like trying to read a paving stone. Even for someone who grew up with epic fantasy.