It's been a while since I've done one of these. This one is gonna be kind of special: I've got three scattered thoughts that tie in with three older blog posts of mine. They will get progressively more personal as they go; you've been warned. Let's get right into it:
- 1 -
On the topic of OCD-unfriendly software, nothing triggers my OCD more than when a program has sequential indices directly visible in its UI, like in the address bar, sorted menus, etc. It makes my workflow significantly slower and more stressful; I'm hyper-aware of which items I create first, and systematic in ensuring that when certain items are similar, they are created at the same time, in proper succession. And don't even get me STARTED on deleting - I'll straight-up change each item to give it the properties of its successor before I do that.
Of course, none of this matters if the serial numbers aren't sequential. But when they are, it's a much bigger deal-breaker for me than I might like to admit when choosing between software alternatives.
I mentioned this on Twitter a while back, and a friend of mine made a very colourful analogy: he said that "[w]henever I create a post/entry in these kinds of tools, then delete it and create a new one, and the new one has "ID: 2" etc, I feel like I fucked up making a snow angel and even if I make another one beside it, the sign of my fuckup will remain forever."
- 2 -
On the topic of toxic online arguments, I'm struck by how often I see them just devolve into both people accusing the other person of being "the one who's really mad, I'm not mad, you're mad", back and forth, ad infinitum.
Maybe at those moments this is just the only strategy; the only way to break the cycle is to post like a long paragraph of explanation, to which the other person can just respond "lmao I knew you were mad". It seems childish, but maybe they've gotten themselves in a prisoner's dilemma where each person just has to try to provoke the other one first.
All I can say is I've never done this. I've never once in my life suggested to someone that they're mad, to provoke them or for any other reason. It's never even crossed my mind to do so. And I dunno, but I'm proud of that.
- 3 -
During the week of November 16, I was more depressed and desperate than I've ever been before. If I had, in that moment, abandoned my atheism and prayed for divine intervention, I would have recovered from my various mystifying illnesses just as quickly and just as miraculously. And I would now be a convert.
Thankfully, it never even occurred to me to do that - and if it did, I would need to have a substantially different worldview to actually go through with it. But there are people with those kinds of worldviews out there, and if this had happened to them, it would be more than enough justification for their religious convictions, whatever they may be.
Of course, many of those people have had experiences exactly like this, where an inexplicable or untreatable ailment magically goes away through the "power of prayer". And now, if someone cites one of those personal experiences as their evidence for divinity, I have the perfect counter-anecdote.