Nathan Lane’s eyebrows

You may be familiar with the actor Nathan Lane from The Birdcage or The Producers, or from his recent guest spots on Modern Family. He voiced Timon the meerkat in the Lion King franchise.

He’s in possession of an incredible pair of eyebrows.

The right and center photos reflect fairly common eyebrow positions - “normal” and “raised”. But the photo on the left features the Nathan Lane trademark eyebrow expression. The left eyebrow arches up and forward, while the right one dips inwards, giving a plaintive effect that would melt the coldest heart. (Melting hearts would be an awesome supervillain power, incidentally.)

If I had eyebrows like Mr. Lane’s, I might go for days without speaking, communicating only through eyebrow expressions.

What’s the difference between lying and make believe?

I say a lot of things that aren’t true. For example, I wouldn’t really prefer drinking laundry detergent to Diet Pepsi. But recently, a friend of mine introduced me as “Jez, the source of all lies,” and that got me thinking. Where is the line between a joke and a lie?

Why are you even thinking about this?

Once upon a time, when I were just a lad, I was in the next door neighbor’ s back garden. They had a climbing frame which they were giving us, and I was there for a test drive. As I climbed up on it, the neighbor lady (who was a child psychologist) was chatting to me about something or other. On my way down, she waited until I was on the bottom rung of the ladder, and then asked me the question in the title of the post. I lost myself in thought so rapidly that I fell off the frame and broke my arm, which then took my mind off lying fairly rapidly.

Nowadays there are three kinds of falsehoods I enjoy sharing, but I never considered lies. I’ve been including common-or-garden sarcasm into my repertoire for a while now, and it always makes me feel a bit smug that I saw the opportunity. I also enjoy exaggeration for comic effect, which I think I probably learned from the television.

More recently, I’ve been trying out statements that have no relation to the truth, like claiming that some bottles had spiders living in them, or that I taught Ron Paul to read. I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of humor, but it’s a way for me to entertain myself using the power of make believe.

Is it really lying?

As I see it, a lie has to have two properties:

1. It is false.
2. The intent is for the listener to believe that it’s true – usually in order to give some advantage to the liar.

Sarcasm is clearly marked as falsehood by tone of voice and its absurdity, so I don’t think it meets the second criterion. Similarly for the exaggeration – no-one really believes that Midori has so many shoes we needed to build an extension to the house for more than a second.

But the absurd statements? I’m not expecting to convince anyone, but I am amused by the thought that someone might believe that I’m from Tennessee, or that I was a mail-order groom, or that I first met my friends by selling them illicit substances. Those few seconds of watching facial expressions as they parse the sentence and think “could he be… no, that’s not possible” make me giggle on the inside. So I suppose those really are lies. Sort of.

What do you think? What is it that pushes an untruth into the realm of lies? Am I missing something? Did a philosopher that I’ve heard of but never read have a theory about this?

Treatment

Now that I’ve broken the seal, the depression words are spilling out.

There’s, like, a stigma?

Even amongst people who acknowledge that depression is A Real Thing (as opposed to something you need to just get over), there’s an uneasiness around treating it with medication. People who have never been depressed believe that the first line of treatment should be enhanced diet and exercise, then changes to routine and sleep schedule, then self-help books, then talking therapy, then voodoo, then antidepressants.

Now, I’m not saying that lifestyle changes don’t help. But they didn’t get me close to functional – and I had professionals keeping me on track for 6 months. Without support, and without fairly immediate results, it’s not really feasible for someone who’s severely depressed to take on these kinds of changes. When you’re barely coping with life as it is, how do you fit in 5 hours a week of cardio?

Part of the problem is a misconception that antidepressants are “happy pills” which replace all genuine emotion with unspecified elation, and so taking them really just avoids the problem. This couldn’t be more wrong. If people want to feel good regardless of what’s happening in their lives, they have options – we go to doctors to feel normal again. Antidepressants don’t replace real feelings – they enable them in a person who would otherwise just see grey.

There’s also concerns about the effectiveness of some antidepressants (most notably the SSRIs, which have never worked for me but do for some other people) as well as generic fears of Big Pharma. No fears of Big Diet and Big Exercise, I would note.

Me and my meds

It wasn’t easy to find meds that work for me. I am currently on a cocktail of 3 different drugs (an antidepressant, a stimulant, and an anticonvulsant, for some reason) which get me out of bed in the morning and let me taste food. It took YEARS to find this combination, and it’s changed my life.

For a long time, each new treatment I tried worked for a while and then stopped. For medication, the pattern usually went something like this:

• One month to build up to a therapeutic dose.
• Two months of things working out pretty well.
• One month where it starts dropping off. I understand that people have good times and bad times, and put it down to bad times, and give things a chance to clear up on their own.
• One month where I stop being able to function. I miss work, can’t socialize, and otherwise exhibit full-on depression.
• One month to taper off the drug; and the cycle starts with the next one.

Throughout this I’d have ups and downs at work and in my personal life, making commitments when things were going well that I’d break when they weren’t.

The current regime has been working for about 9 months now. Let’s hope there isn’t a next one.

Here comes the downer...

This blog is called Brain Heal for two reasons.

The first is a reference to the nickname of a healing spell in World of Warcraft that doesn’t require a lot of thought to use. I was planning on posting a lot about WoW, so having a reference to it would be relevant.

Every picture of "depression" on the internet is of a
person in this pose.

The second is a reference to my own mental health, which is not always good. I was also planning to post about my experiences, my challenges, and the treatments that have worked for me. I put it off for a long time – in part because it’s kind of a downer for me to think about, as well as for anyone to read. I’d much rather be sarcastic about people on the internet – that lets me feel like I’m better than them.

But then I saw this video, and read the accompanying post. It’s focused on people in the skeptic/atheist communities, but the call for people who have struggled with mental illness to speak out and let others know that they aren’t alone is universal. It's the only way we can change the culture that believes that the only cure for depression is to "just get over it."

I'm still going to post more about what I've been through, but I want to get this out there while I'm stalling:

I have suffered from depression off and on for much of my childhood, and my entire adult life. I am on a drug regime that is keeping me functional. And it's time for me to start talking about it.

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Third life crisis

I am 28 years old.

I own a house and a car. I pay bills for electricity, water and sewer, sewer capacity charge*, cable internet and television, voice over IP phone, mobile phone, rubbish collection, mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s association dues. They are all automated except for the water bill and the capacity charge. If I forget to pay the water bill, the city will cut off my water. I don’t know what they will do if I forget to pay the capacity charge.
I have been in the workforce for longer than I was at university. I have been a Subject Matter Expert in three technical areas. I have presented on one of those subjects to an audience of 200. I have trained my colleagues in my areas of expertise.
I have been in the same relationship for 2/3 of the time since I became sexually active, and married for half of that time. In the past 6 years, the longest we have spent without seeing each other is 2 days. I cannot imagine how I would live without her.

I am 28 years old.

Most of the “books” I read are comics about wizards. Many of the non-comic books feature people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, or pan-dimensional spiders.
Today I spent 4 hours virtually positioning guns to shoot aliens, preventing them from stealing my stuff. After the first 3 hours, I discovered a sneaky trick which made it a whole lot harder for the aliens to steal my stuff. This made me feel inordinately pleased with myself.
I spend an obscene amount of time watching television. I wish I could tell myself that it’s some form of high art, but 90% of what I watch is crud. I wish I could tell myself that it’s a social tool, giving me something to talk with my friends about, but I watch far more TV than any of my friends. I wish I could tell myself that it fulfills a critical role in my relaxation process, but I don’t have a relaxation process.

I am 28 years old.

When Seth MacFarlane was my age, Family Guy had been cancelled and renewed. Twice. When Freddie Mercury was my age, he wrote Killer Queen. When Johnny Depp was my age, he had played Edward Scissorhands. When Morgan Freeman was my age, he was an extra. When Jim Morrison was my age, he had been dead for a year.
I don’t have a clue what I want to be doing in 5 years’ time. I’m iffy on what I want to be doing in one year’s time. Not being entirely sure on where the apostrophes were supposed to go in that sentence made me feel uneasy.
I thought of myself as being 15-and-a-bit for years. Then I was 22-and-a-bit. I don’t think I can be 22-and-a-bit any longer. Midori says I’m 40-minus-a-bit.

I am 28 years old. I am an adult. And I have no idea what that means.


*My house is in a new development, so the city had to lay a new sewer pipe. To cover their costs, they charge a fee to residents for the first 10 years.

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Be like me, buy a flail!

A few months ago, Robin Hood - the Legend of Sherwood became available on Steam. It's currently on sale for $5. I wrote this email to some friends to express my feelings towards it. While I'm working on some longer posts, I thought I'd share it with a slightly wider audience.

This is a fantastic game, as in the best game EVAR. It was released in 2002 so will run on most hardware that's available today. The story is engaging (if a bit familiar), the control is intuitive, the characters are personable, and the dialogue is funny.

If you have ever played any kind of game, you will like this game and you should get this game and play it and then you should tell all of your friends so that they can play it.

This game is better than ice cream. This game will clean your house for you.

There is a lull in the plot about 80% of the way through. This low point is better than any other game you have ever played.

If I had to choose between never playing this game again and drinking a can of Diet Pepsi, I would drink the Diet Pepsi. And I hate Diet Pepsi with the heat of a thousand hot wings.

When you play this game, you will know what it truly means to be alive. On the fourth Thursday of November, you will list this game as one of the things you are thankful for. You will want to thank me for introducing you, but instead of the traditional blow jobs and cocaine, please send money.

Awkward and creepy

I have had phases of my life when I’ve been incredibly shy and socially awkward, and then phases when I’ve overcompensated and been loud and obnoxious. The past few years, I thought I’d kind of found a sensible middle ground, where I can talk to people without either worrying about how they’ll perceive tiny body language cues that I’m not even aware of, or making them the audience to The Fantastic Dolbia Show. And then there are days like today.

I have been going to my current hairdresser for a little over a year, I think. She does cuts and colours and we banter and it’s always been great. I had an appointment today to have my hair done, and it’s little overdue, so I’ve been feeling scruffy. For those of you who have not had their hair dyed by a professional, typically they colour it and then cut it, rather than the other way round. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because it means they’re dyeing hair that’s just going to be cut off and thrown away, but there must be reasons.

Today my hairdresser, who I shall call Mandy in order to preserve her identity, started by putting in the dye and foils on the left side of my head, and then spun me round so that I faced away from the mirror while she did the right side. When she turned me back towards it, I saw the ridiculous image of myself in a black smock with a head full of foil. I looked like a volcano that spewed out silver instead of magma. And I said – and this where it all started to go wrong – “I look so pretty today!” Mandy misheard me and said “Thank you! Some people have said!”

Now, Mandy was looking cute today, which she always does. She’s curvy and has a couple of facial piercings, and a bright smile. I never say anything, because I’m terrified of sounding really creepy: “You look so pretty today. I want to touch your face.” It would be extra awful if I did something that grossed Mandy out and then she felt she had no choice but to cut my hair for another 45 minutes when she’d really rather be scrubbing her hands. So I never tell her that she looks nice because I don’t want her to see me as “that customer who’s always perving on me” and dread our appointments. So when she thought that I had told her that she looked pretty, I started damage control and said “No sorry, I said that I look so pretty today.”

And this is worse, because now I’ve taken back what sounded like a compliment. Shit. And she was OK with the compliment in the first place so if I’d just let it go, it wouldn’t have mattered! But now I’ve implied that she’s not pretty, which is worse than telling her she is. Aaargh! And at this point, I look a bit lower down in the mirror, and I realize that under the smock, I’m tenting my hands in my lap. Which means that there’s a suspicious looking bulge coming from my crotch.

And after I’ve collapsed my hands, too much time has passed for me to really say anything without making it worse. Besides which, there’s lots of people around so if I dug myself in even deeper, it would just escalate and escalate. So through the rest of the appointment, I’m contemplating apologizing and ultimately I decide that the moment’s passed and it wasn’t a big deal. Mandy’s still very chatty so I don’t think she’s actually upset.

But now 9 hours later, I’m still thinking about it and whether there’s any way to recover now. I could track Mandy down on facebook and send her an apology, but I’m worried that that would only reinforce the creepiness. I could bring a card to my next appointment saying I was sorry, but that’s in 6 weeks and she’ll probably have forgotten by then, so bringing it up again would be weird.

But then, is blogging about it any less creepy?

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes

It’s been a while since I did a game review, which is what this blog is supposed to be about. I’ve been playing Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes. I was eyeing it on Steam for several months before the Big Sale, and I’m glad I was able to snap it up cheap. I have mixed feelings about it.

The gameplay is very simple – you have many characters who run around and smack monsters. When you smack enough monsters, your characters level up and get more powerful. They have special attacks and equipment which you can also improve over time. It’s almost like it’s an action RPG. There are quests and stuff. It starts to feel pretty samey after a while.

The characters are intentionally RPG stereotypes – the brooding hero, the healing lady, and so on. There are cute jokes and references. The story is not sophisticated – people send you to kill things and fetch other things, and along the way you pick up more party members. There is an evil empire that at some point you will have to defeat, but I didn’t get that far.

The game itself has been a bit unstable, although I’m not sure how much of that is the laptop I’ve been playing it on. It takes two tries to launch it each time – the first time Steam gets stuck trying to install a Visual C++ runtime or something. It’s also plauged with spelling errors which make the experience feel a little unpolished. I stopped playing after it crashed on the same zone a few times in a row.

Overall, I’d give it 6 maidens out of 10. It could make 7 or 8 by fixing the technical problems.

More Harry Potter

I'm probably spending too much time and energy on this, but something further occurred to me about one of my earlier points. Specifically, this:

No-one loves their kids. The story starts with Harry miraculously surviving a murder attempt, and it’s revealed later that when his mother threw herself in the path of the spell, the force of her love for him caused it to rebound. But… the killing spell has been around for centuries. Surely in that time SOMEONE would have noticed that sacrificing yourself to protect a loved one causes rebounds?

What this means is that when Lily sacrificed herself, she had no idea that the curse would bounce back to Voldemort, banishing him and so setting up the major plot of the series. To her, she was buying Harry the 4 seconds it would take Voldemort to cast another curse (slightly more if he's a slow speaker). There was nothing apparent that would stop him just killing Harry afterwards - no-one else was around to interrupt him, he wasn't going to run out of bullets, and it wasn't likely that he'd just change his mind. 


I understand that faced with the imminent death of a child, a parent will do anything that has a chance of saving them, no matter how unlikely. But as far as Lily knew at the time, it was very unlikely.

Steam summer sale

I started this blog in response to last year’s Steam summer sale, when I bought an obscene number of games for a slightly less obscene sum of money. This year’s sale has just finished, and yes, a good blogger would have mentioned it while it was still going on. I’ve been a little overwhelmed, though. After a while, all of the different games in a class (World War II first person shooters, sci-fi shooters, Western fantasy RPGs, JRPGs, puzzle platformers, abstract puzzles, and so on) start to blend into one, and I can’t remember whether I’m looking at Dungeon Siege III or The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

As well as the blanket sale, they’ve been having daily deals which are even more heavily discounted, and daily challenges, where getting specific achievements in some games will get you points. And what do you points mean? The daily sales and challenges tend to overlap, but not be identical, so there’s a decent sized set of games that you need to get TODAY RIGHT NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. So far, I’ve mostly restricted myself to getting these daily ones – aside from anything else, I would be irritated with myself if I paid $13 for a game only for it to be available for $11, three days later. On the last day, I picked up a bunch of games that I’ve wanted for a while but haven’t been daily features.

All in all, I ended up buying 57 games, costing something over $320. I can’t tell for sure, because the receipt for one of the days has gone missing. At full price, these games would have been $960. So who’s laughing now, overdraft fees? Using a non-strict taxonomy, there are:

• 17 Action games
• 5 Adventure games
• 2 Driving games
• 6 first person shooters
• 2 Platformers
• 3 Puzzle games
• 3 Puzzle platformers
• 7 RPGs
• 10 Strategy games
• 2 Tower Defences

After all the rush, I’m not sure I can face playing any games for about 3 months.

I am done with Diet Pepsi

No more. Life is too short for me to continue to drink this odious beverage. I will order water instead. I will knowingly pay $1.85 for water that came out of the tap and was bottled by an unscrupulous corporation, rather than subjecting my tongue to Diet Pepsi. It is the worst of all the diet drinks. Here is a list of diet sodas, in my order of preference:

1. Diet Coke
2. Caffeine Free Diet Coke
3. Diet Dr Pepper
4. Diet A&W root beer from a small bottle
5. Diet Cherry Coke
6. Sprite Zero/Diet 7-Up (tie)
7. Coke Zero (has the questionable benefit of making me feel a little bit like Scott Pilgrim.)
8. Toothpaste with baking soda
9. Diet A&W root beer from a large bottle
10. Diet Mountain Dew
11. Diet MUG Root Beer
12. Toothpaste without baking soda
13. Diet laundry detergent
14. Diet Pepsi

The worst thing about Diet Pepsi is that it tricks your brain into expecting Diet Coke. There’s a split second before it hits your tongue, when you get a flickering notion that it might taste okay this time, maybe the other Diet Pepsi you had was just poorly rehydrated due to problems with the syrup canister or the water supply – and then your hopes are dashed against the rocks and your mouth is filled with what might as well be mole urine.

And then the self-loathing starts. How could you have been so stupid as to order Diet Pepsi again when you KNEW that it was this bad? What kind of person continues choosing something so unpleasant when there are better options available, like drinking your own sweat, or dehydration?

It's Thursday, Thursday

I'm repurposing this blog, slightly. This far it has been all about games, with an emphasis on World of Warcraft. This no longer really works for me:
1) I stopped playing games in January 2011. I just lost interest and needed a break. Without playing, writing about them didn't make a lot of sense. Over the past month I've started again, but...
2) I'm not planning on going back to WoW in the foreseeable future. It just wasn't working for me anymore, for various reasons, and if a game isn't fun you shouldn't play it. That's one of the rules of sanity.
3) I want to write about other stuff, too. I can't count the number of times I've read a book or seen a film and thought "The Internet needs to know my thoughts on this."

As such, I'm opening the blog up to be about whatever the hell I want it to be. I'm keeping the name and URL, because when you have 3 followers you don't want to lose them by moving around the whole time.

Next post will be about Magicka. Because Magicka is awesome. See, not that much change.