An explanation, of sorts...

Staying calm

There's been a lot of my favourite famous people dying this year, and today's one seems to be making a bigger impact than most of them. Whilst others have been tragic and/or unexpected, the death of Robin Williams is beyond tragic - this is someone who WANTED to die, how could anyone ever think like that?

Well, we all know the answer, and it's a horrible answer but an answer none the less. It's depression, it's a big thing. Judging by the amount of things popping up all over the Internet today you'd think mental illness had only just been discovered today, but at least it's getting people talking about it, which is something that NEEDS to happen a lot more often. Geoff Lloyd of Absolute Radio fame did a remarkably frank piece on his usually-jovial show this evening, along with a big push for the Campaign Against Living Miserably, and that wasn't an isolated incident either. Here's another thing worth reading, better than any preachy eulogy could ever do: 

Robin Williams - Why Funny People Kill Themselves.

Call this bandwagon-jumping if you will, but depression is ridiculously common, and the absolute best thing to do about it is to talk about it. This in itself is hard enough, in that it's so hard to explain exactly WHAT it is, without resorting to vague notions about chemical imbalances and crossed wires in the brain and suchlike. Here's as good an idea of it as I've ever read, and even that's alarmingly vague:

Tales of the Smear

(and then read this one as well)

If you'll bear with me, I'm going to talk about my experiences with it now. To be fair, I'll delay publishing this until I've got my next "proper" article ready, so they'll both be there at once, should you happen to be one of those sick fucks who prefers to think that depression is a made-up disease.

I was diagnosed as depressed in 2007 (or "psychotic", to be precise). I was living with a bunch of friends at the time, and it was those friends who noticed that something wasn't right with me. It was them who staged the "intervention", them who made me go to the hospital, and them who cut off all ties with me once I was safely in the hands of the NHS. This is a thing that happens with mental illness - it scares people, and not just those who are stuck with it. Despite going through school with these people, as soon as I was deemed "not normal" in their eyes they were gone. People get scared, fine, but if you really want to call yourself a friend you should be there when things go wrong - if not you'll no doubt make things worse, so they did a great job there.

What followed was around three years of medication in varying dosages and strengths; countless sessions with a counsellor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and several support workers; a somewhat terrifying CT scan; a few workshops which involved hanging around with other "disturbed" people of varying intensities; and lots and lots and lots of doing nothing. I got fat and slept a lot and most of those three years are a blur, but things gradually started picking up. 

Spending more time at home naturally meant spending more time on the Internet, and I joined a forum. About six months after joining, there was talk on there of a meet-up, which I convinced myself to go along to somehow. There were more and more of these, and I went along to as many as I could, each time meeting new, like-minded people. People who today I count as among my best friends, and one of whom is my ultimate reliance. Whenever things are getting bad or at their absolute worst, she's there to listen, and that's enough. If everyone would just get their selfish heads out of the sand and LISTEN when someone's falling to pieces... Idealism etc. My rock doesn't like comics so she's not likely to read this, so at least I'm not embarrassing anyone here.

Something else happened about a year or so after getting involved with "Internet people" - I was offered a job. Nothing fancy, but a job, which gave a reason to get up in the mornings, and this was a big development. I was active and speaking to people everyday, I lost weight, built muscles, earned my own money. Eventually I decided to bin the tablets and cut myself off from the support workers, and even got out of the house and moved into a place of my own.

I was lucky, is what I'm saying. Or "am" lucky, whatever. But just like any illness, the effects are long-lasting, sometimes even permanent. I still get angry, still get miserable, still get hopeless. Only three weeks ago I was reasoning with myself how I'd prefer to be dead, whilst at the same time telling myself I'm too much of a coward to actually go through with it. Seven years ago this would've been dangerous, but now I'm surrounded by people who actually give a fuck, people who can tell when something's wrong and are there to give me a kick up the pants and send me in the right direction again. Where I am right now isn't perfect, far from it, but as long as there are people willing to listen, I'm happy with that. People deal with depression in many different ways, and my way mostly involves making sure there's enough distractions around to keep me from thinking about it, so there.

Let's get back to the comics now and pretend everything's fantastic again.

Bowel-shifting

Every year since 1995, or at least whenever I've remembered or been able to, I try and find/purchase Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror, an annual anthology of "spooky" Simpsons comics. This year's was a bitter disappointment (in that it wasn't funny at all), but that's par for the course with The Simpsons these days.

Anyway, in that very first issue eighteen years ago, this page was in it:

That's Matt Groening listing a load of things that spooked him during his developing years. I'm going to have a go at doing that now! Probably the last opportunity I'll have to do something "thematic" for this month, so it's back to the comics after this. But just for now, here's as many things as I can remember that frightened, confused, perturbed or caused mild discomfort to me over the years...

This Is Not Who We Were

If there's anyone still "out there" in Internetland, my apologies. It's been a long, weird Summer. They could make a film out of it, maybe. It wouldn't be a very good film, but it'd involve extreme emotional opposites - dizzying heights of happiness, nauseous lows of depression, love and heartbreak, lies and deceit, scary gangsters, threats of every kind imaginable, death, courtroom dramas, some good music, a lot of booze...

But that's not what we're here to discuss. This is a "fun" and "happy" place where fun and happy things are looked at. Normal service will resume shortly, but for now (just to "tide things over"), here's some cultural sensitivity courtesy of DC Thomson, circa 1993. Enjoy in an "Oh we're so much more enlightened twenty years later" sort of way.

Spokojnoj Nochi, Fyodor Khitruk

A bit of a gloomy start to December. First we have the (final) death of the Dandy (my copy of the big fat farewell issue's still in the post, but it sounds like a good read), now I've learnt that Russian animation-man Fyodor Khitruk has left the planet at the ripe old age of 95.

It's a good age to live to, so it's not a "tragic" loss, but it's a loss all the same. In fifty years he made over a hundred films, and won even more awards. Here's several of them for the sake of enjoyment:

Story of One Crime (1962)

Man in the Frame (1966)




Film, film, film (1968)

Winnie-the-Pooh (1969)

Island (1973)

Lion and Ox (1983)

RIP to him. The planet's running out of talented folk at an alarming rate.

Greeneye

Them lot in the USA are having some elections right now. They've got a choice between a nice guy who's full of false promises, or a real-life Mr. Burns. Although the outcome won't affect me directly, I'm still hoping for the lesser of the two evils to come out on top in this one.

Meanwhile, let's stick with the theme, sort of. An idealistic view of a nation stripped of all prejudice, due to the actions of one cute little monster. From Jim and Christopher Slater in 1979, it's Greeneye!

A book about robots by someone who hates robots

In 1985, Wayland Publishers decided to put out another book in their Topics series of educational titles - this one would be about robots, and would introduce children to this fascinating and constantly evolving science. The man they chose for the task of writing said book was a Mr. Graham Rickard - who it turned out really didn't like robots. He just wanted to go skiing instead! But, ski poles don't pay for themselves, so the book had to be written. Graham wasn't going to go quietly though - here's an opportunity to grab the kids from an early age, and to tell them that robots are NOT a good thing. Here is that book, time to do some learning!

Terror in the Skies!

Several years ago, I read Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, and for a couple of months after that I was completely sold on the idea that we were visited by intelligent beings from other planets, at the dawn of civilization, and that all the ancient carvings and statues, supposedly of gods, were actually depicting those visitors wowing us with their technological know-how. Then once I tried discussing it with other people, as well as putting a bit of rational thought towards it, I realised it was complete and utter bollocks. Still, for that short space of time it was nice to have my view of the universe altered - I'd definitely recommend reading that book if you haven't, just don't take it seriously, 'kay?

This morning, I read something else, something NEW - something that no matter how much I think about it, I can't find any holes in it. A theory bandied about over the decades but one that's never really been given a lot of exposure. Something that had me grinning and laughing with the "Oh My!"-ness of it all - something that when I've tried to talk about with people in my daily life it's all fell to pieces because I was too excited. Something that's instantly made the whole world seem at once a lot more interesting, a lot more exciting, and a WHOLE lot more terrifying. That thing?

Giant airborne jellyfish.

2012 cobblers

Popular opinion may have changed within the last few weeks (what with that whole Higgs thing - but probably not), but there's still the nutters insisting that the world will end in 2012, due to some badly-misinterpreted "Mayan Prophecy". It's all bollocks, obviously - witness Harold Camping's hilarious failure to predict the dates for the end of the world TWICE in 2011 for an idea of what'll be happening on 21st December of this year.

And yet people carry on preaching. Don't they ever look for evidence of it, or are people happily anticipating the end times? It all falls down to general ignorance and/or boredom. There's an idea to hang onto, and a symbol easily accessible via Google Images to illustrate said ideas: 

Well, for a start, that's not even the Maya calendar - it's the Aztec Sun Stone. A calendrical glyph, yes, but not the fabled Maya Long Count (an artefact of which no pictoral evidence actually exists!). It's a doomsday prophecy for people who can't be bothered to differentiate between Mesoamerican cultures, and who can't understand that other cultures may have had different methods of measuring time. Where our calendars end on 31st December of the given year, the Mayans ended their ones on 21st December, 2012. That's it.

There's loads of information and misinformation on the whole sorry affair all over the Internet, and I'm not adding to or taking away anything of it here... I'm just here to praise Tom Paterson on educating the kids with a bit of rational thinking - in the most fun way possible.

Let's go - quick!

Well, it's taken a couple of years of doing nothing and a fair bit of research (ie: asking a couple of questions on one forum), but here we go. It was viewing this nice little animated piece this evening that finally made me pull my thumb out:

That's a short and somewhat depressing (but ultimately inspiring) monologue from Bruce Woodside, an animator who's worked on Ghostbusters, Space Jam, Lord of the Rings (the Bakshi version), Animalympics, the New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and so on. It's a bit of a demo reel too (bonus!), but it DOES remind you that at any moment in time, you can and will die a horrible, horrible death. And time goes really quickly, all of the time.


So, whilst a blog's just a blog, and there's millions of them out there, they all mean something to the people that are "doing" them, even if they only have a couple of readers (or none at all). So with that, here's my own space to go on and on about stuff. And if I should suddenly be crushed by a poorly-erected set of shelves, or have my head squashed between two train buffers, at least I'll've FINALLY gotten around to "doing a blog".

Bit of a melodramatic opening there, and for that I apologise - the rest of it'll be fun enough, hopefully. Maybe.