running with the legends of conspicuous men colubra

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/AA5eXSBDal0/how-to-invite-someone-out-for.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744122

We'll find a cloud to hide us
We'll keep the moon beside us

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/I6F5uBJrn44/say-their-names.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744111

Sesame Street continues its run of excellent, empathetic new muppets to help kids deal with a changing world: after introducing muppets experiencing homelessness, living with autism, and explaining marriage without recourse to gender norms, the show has introduced a muppet whose mother lost custody of her after becoming addicted to drugs.

The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers when their business, Purdue Pharma, used unethical and illegal tactics to sell their incredibly addictive opioid, Oxycontin. The epidemic has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war, and it's left far more families broken and traumatized by addiction.

The muppet, Karli, discusses her mother's addiction with ten year old Salia Woodbury, whose own parents have been in recovery for eight years. Karli's segments appear in Sesame Street Communities, a collection of online resources for families.

Karli, introduced earlier this year as a muppet who was in foster care, will tell her story through the Sesame Street in Communities project, which offers free content online. The show creators said they wanted to focus on addiction because 5.7 million children under 11 years old live with a parent who struggles with a substance addiction, according to The Associated Press.

"How they're impacted by addiction is often something that we don't hear about or, more importantly, don't hear [in] a children's voice or perspective," NBC News reported Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for U.S. social impact at Sesame Workshop.

Karli told NBC News that "I love my mom so much" but that "she couldn't take good care of me because she was having such a tough time."

Sesame Street to reveal muppet's mom suffered from addiction [Justine Coleman/The Hill]

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/DQo0sqle7RY/feff-200c-200d-200e-2060-180e.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744117

Unicode includes six "zero-width characters" that are not visibly rendered in browsers (U+FEFF, U+200C, U+200D, U+200E, U+2060, U+180E) -- they're used for some specialized cases in rendering non-Roman alphabets.

Inzerosight's browser extension allows you to insert and detect hidden messages encoded in zero-width characters; absent the plugin or a source-code inspection, these do not show up at all, not even when the text is highlighted.

‌‎­‍­­‍⁠⁠‌᠎­​‌​​⁠‍‍​​᠎​⁠‌‌᠎‍⁠⁠‌᠎⁠⁠​‍‌‌‌‌⁠⁠‌​‌⁠​‌⁠᠎­​​‍‍​​⁠‌­​‍​‌​​᠎‍⁠​​­

I may or may not have included some of this text in this post.

inØsight [Planetrenox]

(via Hackaday)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/aFUZP4DooxU/japanese-stalker-found-victim.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744116

Last month a Japanese entertainer named Ena Matsuoka was attacked in front of her home in Tokyo. Her alleged attacker, an obsessed fan, was able to figure out where she lived by zooming in on a high resolution photo and identifying a bus stop reflected in her pupils. According to Asia One, the alleged attacker "even approximated the storey Matsuoka lived on based on the windows and the angle of the sunlight in her eyes."

Image: Twitter/matsuokaena, screengrab/Internet, Asia One

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/o3_ltlu3lF8/diet-and-depression-what-you.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744089

For years a friend has been telling my diet was hurting my general demeanor. Last year I stopped ignoring her and switched to a diet more like what is described in this study.

I will never be Mr. Cheerful, but it really did help.

NPR:

A randomized controlled trial published in the journal PLOS ONE finds that symptoms of depression dropped significantly among a group of young adults after they followed a Mediterranean-style pattern of eating for three weeks. Participants saw their depression "score" fall from the "moderate" range down to the "normal" range, and they reported lower levels of anxiety and stress too.

Alternatively, the depression scores among the control group of participants — who didn't change their diets — didn't budge. These participants continued to eat a diet higher in refined carbohydrates, processed foods and sugary foods and beverages. Their depression scores remained in the "moderate severity" range.

"We were quite surprised by the findings," researcher Heather Francis, a lecturer in clinical neuropsychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told NPR via email. "I think the next step is to demonstrate the physiological mechanism underlying how diet can improve depression symptoms," Francis said.

If a tiny piece of blotter can change your whole world outlook, everything else we eat must be pretty impactful too.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/w2_j0zYA1Dk/ciudad-del-este.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744094

Institutions like the IMF like to encourage poor countries to set up "free trade zones" (AKA "freeports," "special economic zones," etc): effectively unregulated import/export zones where environmental, labor, tax, customs, financial and other rules are either nonexistent or much looser than in the rest of the country. These are billed as a means to stimulate the local economy by bringing in international corporations.

That happens, sometimes, but the activities that take place in these FTZs are hardly beneficial for their host countries or the rest of the planet. They're hubs for "trade-based money-laundering" and trafficking in contraband and counterfeits.

Writing in Global Financial Integrity, Daniel Neale rounds up the world's most notorious and toxic FTZs: Paraguay's Ciudad del Este, which pumps billions in contraband into Brazil every year and is a hub for human trafficking, drug smuggling and illicit weapons deals; the 45 FTZ in the United Arab Emirates, which are used as financial secrecy cut-outs for arms-dealers, gold smugglers, cigarette counterfeiters, etc; and Panama's Colón Free Trade Zone, a favored hub for international crime families who need to launder their funds.

In many cases, FTZ are not currently bound by national laws or courts, and often rely on common law as a dispute settlement mechanism. Legislation should also address some key issues of concern regarding transparency and trade data collection. Part of the reason granular knowledge of FTZs is lacking is due to the limited amount of information on trade flows reported in FTZs. Making that information available would help quantify the problem and paint a clearer picture of the trading routes and commodities that pose a high risk.

If we are to see any significant improvements in FTZ governance and oversight, the WTO and WCO should, at the very least, enforce some basic requirements. Stricter measures need to be in place when it comes to issuing trading permits in FTZs, the national customs authority must be physically present and inspection of goods should be carried out routinely in warehouses. The cost of engaging in TBML practices in FTZs should always outweigh the benefits reaped from illicit activities, which means that prosecution of such crimes should be more aggressive, sustained and targeted by authorities.

Until these basic requirements are met, free trade zones will continue to be haven for free crime.

Free trade zones: a Pandora’s box for illicit money [Daniel Neale/Global Financial Integrity]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/004zIPnx58A/do-webrings-next.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744081

Mapquest was once the leading map site in the world; they were bought by Yahoo as part of Yahoo's decades' long spree of buying successful companies and running them into the ground -- finally, they were sold, along with the rest of Yahoo's mangled acquisitions, to Verizon.

Verizon has now dumped Mapquest to an ad-tech company called System1 for such a small sum it was "not material enough for Verizon to file paperwork."

This is part of a string of lowball Verizon selloffs of their Yahoo companies: WordPress parent-company Automattic bought Tumblr in August for "less than $3 million" (actual price undisclosed; Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1b in 2013); in April 2018, Smugmug rescued Flickr from Verizon hell.

The whole ignominious tale is a perfect parable about market concentration and antitrust: Yahoo was allowed to make all these acquisitions because of Reagan-era reforms to antitrust enforcement, and it was a catastrophe for dozens of promising startups (though it certainly transferred a lot of money to Yahoo execs and shareholders). Then Yahoo sold those holdings to Verizon for $4.48b, and Verizon has since written down those assets by $4.45b (that is, more than 99%). They even lost Shingy.

Mapquest claims a (dubious) 38m monthly users. The company blamed its precipitous fall on getting downranked by Google, whose competing Google Maps product claims 154.4m monthly users. Google insists it downranked Mapquest results because no one clicked on them.

It's clear that Google's attempt to corner the whole online vertical was bad for its competitors, but it's also obvious that Yahoo is the poster-child for diseconomies of scale, a place where good companies went to die, helmed by inverse King Midases who turned everything they touched to shit.

A eulogy for Mapquest [Greg Sterling/Search Engine Land]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/0RwQ-WcE-ek/lodestar-is-shannon-messen.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744071

I can not put down Shannon Messenger's Keeper of Lost Cities series. Lodestar continues Sophie Foster's waking nightmare.

Sophie Foster thought she was human pre-teen. Sophie loved her family and her pet cat. She had no idea that in reality she was a genetically tweaked elf with super super-powers! Ever since she found out things have been off the hook bad, but somehow she perseveres. No matter how bad it gets, Sophie rises to the occasion and then it gets worse.

After nearly destroying the Ogre capitol city in the last book,Lodestar picks up with one of Sophie's best friends, and budding love interests, betraying the cause and joining with the bad guys. He claims to be doing it for Sophie, and all living creates, but his Mom was the leader of the baddies and who knows what he is really up to!

Sophie makes ridiculous decisions about who to trust and why. Much like W, she goes with her gut.

Destroying the elf school where elf kids all learn their magical powers is just a start. Torture, immolation and wanton destruction follow as Lodestar leaves Sophie with little new information and several fewer people she can trust.

More parents and parental figures lie to Sophie than die on her in book 5, so there is that.

The novels are dancing towards Sophie picking a boyfriend! This seems to be momentous and cruel as elves apparently pick only once and are immortal. Big choice for a 12 or 13-year-old being constantly flirted with by every remotely age-appropriate boy.

Lodestar (5) (Keeper of the Lost Cities) via Amazon

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Z4zFUuHczL4/engineers-developed-a-mathemat.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744070

A favorite kitchen chemistry (and physics) experiment of kids (and adults), Ooblek is the weird result of mixing cornstarch with water. Now, MIT engineers have developed a mathematical model that can predict and simulate how the non-Newtonian fluid switches between liquid and solid depending on the pressure applied to it. From MIT News:

Aside from predicting what the stuff might do in the hands of toddlers, the new model can be useful in predicting how oobleck and other solutions of ultrafine particles might behave for military and industrial applications. Could an oobleck-like substance fill highway potholes and temporarily harden as a car drives over it? Or perhaps the slurry could pad the lining of bulletproof vests, morphing briefly into an added shield against sudden impacts. With the team’s new oobleck model, designers and engineers can start to explore such possibilities.

“It’s a simple material to make — you go to the grocery store, buy cornstarch, then turn on your faucet,” says Ken Kamrin, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “But it turns out the rules that govern how this material flows are very nuanced...”

Kamrin’s primary work focuses on characterizing the flow of granular material such as sand. Over the years, he’s developed a mathematical model that accurately predicts the flow of dry grains under a number of different conditions and environments. When (grad student Aaron) Baumgarten joined the group, the researchers started work on a model to describe how saturated wet sand moves. It was around this time that Kamrin and Baumgarten saw a scientific talk on oobleck.

“We’d seen this talk, and we had a lengthy debate over what is oobleck, and how is it different from wet sand,” Kamrin says. “After some vigorous back and forth with Aaron, he decided to see if we could turn this wet sand model into one for oobleck.”

"A general constitutive model for dense, fine-particle suspensions validated in many geometries" (PNAS)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/nR17EKcGtW0/how-to-speak-chimpanzee.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744074

Evolutionary psychologist Katja Liebal literally wrote the book on Primate Communication. A professor of developmental psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Liebal's research focuses "on the cognitive and communicative skills that might be uniquely human and those shared with other primate species." According to BBC Earth, Liebal observes chimps in "hopes to compile the world's first chimpanzee dictionary."

I think learning chimpanzee should be an educational requirement beginning in elementary school to prepare our children for when, y'know, they take over.

(via The Kid Should See This)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_5xGj72u8A0/massive-great-white-shark-bit.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744062

On Saturday, Danny McDaniel was kayaking near Santa Catalina island off the southern California coast when he felt something big strike the side of his boat. It was a great white shark that Ben Frable, Marine Vertebrates Collection Manager at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography later estimated to be 17-20 feet long. How did they know how big it was? They measured the teeth left lodged in the kayak. From CNN:

"I felt like I was being pushed like a toy in the water," said McDaniel, who lives in San Diego.

The shark had sunk its teeth into the back end of the boat and pushed McDaniel around till he was face-to-face with (his kayaking partner in another boat).

"The whole upper body of the shark was out of water," he said. "It was humongous." The shark soon let go and went deep into the water, according to McDaniel, who said the whole ordeal lasted about five seconds...

"It is pretty amazing and encouraging that such large animals are still able to exist out there with fishing activities and human encroachment and environmental change," Frable said.

"Big individuals like these, especially if they are female, are very important for species' health and survival as they can produce and have produced more offspring than others."

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/h7crsGm5Ot0/kamprad-engdahl.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744063

Ingvar Kamprad founded Ikea and invented some of the modern tax-evasion playbook, while amassing billions; despite this, he is lionized both in Sweden and abroad for his quirky frugality and the ubiquity of his stores and their products.

But Kamprad was also a member and patron of the Swedish Nazi party, enlisting at 17 years old in 1943, as Member No. 4,014 of Swedish Socialist Unity (Sweden's Nazis). He was an active recruiter to the Nazi cause and brought in several friends to join the party. There's no record of Kamprad ever leaving the Swedish Nazis, and as an adult, he fell in with Per Engdahl and his Swedish fascist organization, the New Swedish Movement. He hosted fascist meetings in his home, published one of Engdahl's books, and had Engdahl give a speech at his wedding in 1951, and in correspondence, Kamprad and Engdahl called one another "BB" for "best brother."

Engdahl was instrumental in smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe, and he knit together the post-WWII pan-European fascist network that encompassed fascists in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Denmark and Norway. He gathered the leaders of these movements together for a meeting in Malmo, and dubbed the outcome of this meeting the "Malmo Movement," AKA "Europäische Soziale Bewegung." The Movement published a Holocaust denial journal called Nation Europe, and Engdahl published a book that was the central text of the movement, called "The Renewal of the West" which Kamprad praised in a 1951 letter to Engdahl.

When all this came to light through Elisabeth Åsbrink's 2011 book "Och i Wienerwald står träden kvar," and Ikea headed off the negative publicity by making its largest-ever charitable donation, $51m for the UN High Commission on Refugees.

Åsbrink interviewed Kamprad in 2010 and asked him about Engdahl, and Kamprad reiterated his support for his Nazi "Best Brother," saying, "There’s no contradiction as far as I’m concerned. Per Engdahl was a great man, and I’ll maintain that as long as I live."

When did Kamprad leave the Swedish Nazi Party? No one has so far managed to find out the answer to that question. On the other hand, we know that his involvement in Per Engdahl’s fascist organization, the New Swedish Movement, continued after the end of the war. He invited comrades from the movement to his home in Elmtaryd and was regarded as their benefactor. There are letters where he is asked to donate or thanked for the latest contribution. Kamprad also acted as publisher for one of the fascist leader Per Engdahl’s books. The two had become close friends and called each other “BB”: best brother. Engdahl was invited to Kamprad’s first wedding in 1951, a quiet affair in a church outside Stockholm, at which he gave a beautiful speech.

On the Far Right Past of Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of Ikea [Elisabeth Åsbrink/Lithub]

(Image: Ardfern, CC BY-SA)

(via Kottke)

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/wJL-SDdXfys/new-bar-where-you-pay-by-the-h.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744056

"At our bar we don't sell drinks, we sell time," states their website.

From St. Louis magazine:

Proprietor Michael Butler, the city's current recorder of deeds, got the idea from fundraising parties while running for office. “I would hold events where we charged by the hour for admission and have an open bar,” he recalls. “We got a lot of presale tickets online, and we created large-batch drinks in order to cut costs.” After a series of successful events, he imagined the same model could be applied to a business. He believes the price is "what the market can afford and will feel is a good value...."

When patrons book their time at Open Concept, they create a profile and are assigned a confirmation code, which is used to place drink orders at the bar. Bartenders will only serve one drink per person at a time, and a proprietary point-of-sale system will track consumption. Butler says the system will scan driver’s licenses and use a patron’s height and weight to assign a number of drinks per hour to keep the bar in compliance with legal limits.

• Rich Celebrities Agreeing With Ellen's "You Can Be Friends With War Criminals" Stance


• Mark Ruffalo: George W. Bush should be "brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War"


• (23) 5 Books that scared people into stop reading them


• Jameela Jamil finds out that the Iraq war is bad


• Football WAG Coleen Rooney says fellow WAG Rebekah Vardy is selling fake stories of her to The Sun


• Rihanna calls Trump the "most mentally ill human being in America


• A ton of companies are getting sued over the X-Men cartoon theme


• Felicity Huffman's Desperate Housewives co-star on her 2-week jail sentence: "White Privilege"


• Yesterday's Roundup

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/I-ln2YmE7iM/enjoy-life-make-the-perler.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=743913

What's more fun than playing The Legend of Zelda? Not making Perler bead art of the characters and icons in the game, that's for sure. But Perler beading is enjoyable, in a non-creative way (unless you are using it to make art without a pattern, which makes it enjoyable and creative) . If you aren't familiar with Perler beads, they are small colored plastic beads. Each bead is like a pixel. You place the beads on a pegboard according to a pattern sheet, then fuse the beads together by running a hot iron over them. The Legend of Zelda Perler Bead Kit has 2000 beads, a pegboard, a pattern sheet with 12 designs, an ironing paper. You supply the iron.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/jZ8hShpGTog/mike-monteiros-put-a-pro-uni.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744047

From The Verge:

While Monteiro says he’s sold over 10,000 copies of the book so far, only 150 paperbacks have been printed since he changed the cover, which isn’t a lot of opportunities for it to catch the right person’s eye.

Monteiro says he was working on some union organizing when he came up with the idea: “We were discussing how to get messages in front of people and I realized ‘Oh, huh. I have this thing that Amazon workers see every time a book gets ordered. Let’s put a message there.’”

Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amazon)

Every time you buy my book from Amazon, a warehouse worker has to pull it off the shelf. From now on, this is what that worker will see. At least until Amazon shitcans the whole thing. Hurry up. https://t.co/l5jxdz1azW pic.twitter.com/DqWZT5MI9q

— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) October 4, 2019

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/i1_NVxhBv9o/nice-animation-of-zuckerberg-a.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744049

Mike Winkelmann (homepage, behance) animated a few illustrative seconds of the immediate future: "ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA"

Here's another, starring that darn mouse.

Embedded below is a short movie he made in 2015, "Zero-Day"

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/RIKD7R3CWp4/its-world-mental-health-day.html

https://boingboing.net/?p=744042

My friend Maureen Herman (former bassist for Babes in Toyland) is writing a book called "It's a Memoir, Motherfucker." Here's an excerpt in which she gives her account of living life with an invisible disability and how those who do not suffer can best support those in their lives who do. -- Mark

I think when the chasm between who you really are and who people think you are is too wide, that's where true despair lives. It makes you feel so literally alone, to feel you are the only one who knows you. Loneliness of being unknown, that is the dullest, greyest, flattest, and most overwhelming of voids a human can experience. Prolonged periods of that dehydrate your soul. They may be biochemical, delusional, or situational, or some combination thereof, but what I do know is that at some point, it is literal agony.

Short term gratification fills the gap. It gets you through. When people tell you how much you've accomplished, and what great things lie before you, it sounds like the teacher talking in the Charlie Brown cartoons. Blah blah blah. It means nothing. Some of us have minds live with no sense of the long game. So when people ask how someone could kill themselves when they had done such great things and had the world at their feet, I understand how they could. You don't take any of that into account. It's meaningless. Your only reality is how you feel right now, and when it is that deafening void, and no drink or drug or relationship or amount of positive attention can mute it, it feels permanent.

I feel it sometimes. Living with Major Depressive Disorder, Complex-PTSD, and being in recovery from addiction and alcoholism means I sometimes feel the wave of grey permanence come on. But through years of AA meetings, psychotherapy, biochemical psychiatric treatment, research, and writing, I am sometimes able to watch these episodes as an observer, knowing that somehow these slides of negativity got inserted into my mind's slideshow. I understand that it will be a drag to watch them, to go through the thoughts and feel like they're mine. But I'm lucky to have learned that I am not my thoughts. I forget it sometimesall the time in fact. That's why I still have to go to AA meetings. Someone in AA once shared one of the most important concepts in my recovery from everything, when she described what she called Step Zero: "We admitted we were powerless over our thoughts; that our thought life had become unmanageable." That's really the crux of it with all of my conditions.

That simple sentence eradicated many hours and years of time spent believing the thoughts I was having were reality. That doesn't mean I don't get clinically depressed. I know when to accept that depression is shutting me down, because I understand it will pass. It doesn't make the experience of it any less frustrating and debilitating. But it has been ingrained in me enough through all my forms of treatment to believe it is not a permanent state.

I guess my writing is my way of trying to bridge that gap between who I am and who people think I am or should be. Maybe that's what saves me in the end, because by constantly exposing my faults, weaknesses, and shame, they cannot fester in the dark.

Me and those like me, our lives are not linear. I do not build upon past successes or learn from past failures and mistakes. Instead, I am like a sieve, riddled with holes, life in all its emotional constancy leaking a rich, red blood, leaving me never full, never satisfied, always short of something.

But it also provides a great capacity for intense emotion and empathy. The barrage of my life experiences give me an armor with which I face the inevitable adversities of a life lived exposed. I bring sensitivity and a large capacity for expression to the table, but I also leave it littered with the undone, the failures, the broken promises, and an inability to retain any constancy of well-being. I only live in the short term reliefs I can collect like flowers before they wilt. I often live in the short terms horrors of my mind that cause me to focus, razor-like, on immediate relief. If we cannot find it, non-existence seems a rational solution.

To understand that, you have to believe me when I tell you that it is not about feeling sad. No, it is the feeling, the certainty of an eternity living in futility. With every congratulations and adulation you almost feel the universe is mocking you, and you burrow even further to hide who you really are. People like me are not on a path to success, built by logical steps. We are not encouraged by "I know you can do it" cheerleading. Let me know that it's OK if I can't do it. Let me know it's OK to not be the success and superstar that your well-intentioned support has projected onto my ravaged and fragile identity.

And the more people tell you they love you, and how great you are, the more you feel like a fraud and imposter. Your inner hypocrisy becomes intolerable. The dissonance between the world's view of you and your inner reality makes you want to turn the sound completely off. Some people do. For them it is the treatment of last resort.

When I talk about mental illness, I am not talking about low self-esteem, insecurity, or bad patches. I am talking about the recurring, periodic and unpredictable hijacking of my brain to neurological thought patterns that, over time, have worn deep grooves on my neural pathways like the favorite notes on my fretboard. I don't mean to keep going there, but it's where my fingers end up.

I think it is in the hiding that the tragedies occur. The lack of a friend who will let you be a failure, who is not a cheerleader, but rather, an objective spectator not rooting for either team. Someone who doesn't need you to be "well" or happy, or cured or better or on a logical trajectory, but will allow you to tread water until you know if you want to drown or get out of the water.

I am damaged and imperfect and will never be cured of depression. That is not a concession or defeat, it is a hard-won acceptance of my right to be psychologically different than you are. Some took as much as they could. It was literally the most they were capable of.

I have never once had a plan to commit suicide. Never, ever, ever. I would consider my suicide risk to be .0000000001%. But I have thought about the relief non-existence would bring almost daily since my twenties. It's a thought, and that's where my brain goes, like the tires on a rutted road. Can the default be changed? Yes, here and there, with great awareness and effort. And that is what my various treatments, meetings, and the right medications have brought me. But when I hear of someone who committed suicide, I don't see them as having given up. I see a member of my tribe. I see them as having given it their all, and that was all they had left.

I do not think of their exits as failures or mistakes, no matter how tragic. I must witness the magnificence of the life lived before its end, and I know that they were doing the very, very best they could. Their unique mind brought unique talents, perspectives, and humor. It's the things we all loved them for.

I say let their whole life be a triumph, that they made it as long as they did, and accomplished as much as they did. I wish people would have compassion for the choices made--even the ones that cause others pain, that seem senseless and selfish, and the ones you think, "if only this," or "if only that." If it was drugs, or addiction, or illness, or depression, or lack of treatment or the wrong meds, have the compassion to understand that they were seeking relief in that moment, and that what they did made sense for them.

None of this is to say that suicide is inevitable. But for those who are left behind with gnawing questions, pain, and guilt, know that suicide is the option when you feel you are out of options. For those suffering, whether correctly or incorrectly, they feel they have no other source of relief. Their existence is something they can control, something they can end to find the peace you have watched them struggle for their whole lives. Sometimes, as for one friend of mine, just knowing she has that option provides a comfort that actually prevents her from doing it. You need to feel like there's a way out if you can't find a way through.

I know there are loving, well-meaning people around me, But honestly, I don't feel like they understand when I do reach out. They believe they must offer advice, solutions, or fix it for you. With every action and word they are saying, "It's not OK for you to be like this. I can't love you like this. You need to get better."

I have a few rare friends that I don't have to avoid on the days when I am capable of little or nothing, because they will not try to cheerlead me into motivation. They are not driven by their own discomfort with my condition, needing me to change to suit their idea of how I should be. Instead, they accept me as I am, even when I am not doing well--especially when I am not doing well.

This is the most loving, healing thing a friend can do for a friend like me. It is exhausting to pretend I am well all the time, but if I share the truth with some people, I am barraged with advice, cures, chiding, or encouragement--the din of non-acceptance. It is the loneliest and most sorrowful thing to hear when I am depressed or in psychological pain, because I know I have to add them to the list of people not to turn to at times like this.

Gradually, your circle of support gets smaller, as mine has the past few years. There are those who think I am lazy or self-destructive, others who think I would be cured if I'd just do this or that, and some who have written me off completely as a failure and fraud. The unconditional friendships I am so lucky to have remind me that there is nothing "wrong" with me. There is only me, with all my talents, problems, successes, symptoms, diagnoses, features, and flaws, all rolled up into Mo. That helps to make the bad days just days, and helps me better see the continuum of existence that I forget so easily. The pendulum swings, and I find them at both ends.

I know some of my friends want to help at times like this, but don't understand how to help. It's not their fault. This isn't innate knowledge by any stretch. Mentally stable people respond to encouragement, consequences, and logical solutions. But it just doesn't work on some of us. In that case, chances are high they struggle with mental health stability, an addiction history, and/or trauma symptoms.

I have lost a lot of friends because of my disorders over the years, because of their frustration with their perception of my lack of progress or my failure to be symptom-free via their suggestions. I think it is worth pointing out how to be a friend to someone like me. Because feeling superunknown is a precarious existence, and largely unnecessary, I believe, if armed with a few tools of recovery, professional help, open-minded friends, and a steadfast commitment not to live in shame.

After my friend and neighbor, Michael, blew his brains out rather than be evicted from his longtime home, I went to the funeral. The priest asked if anyone wanted to say anything. A few people got up and spoke of what a tragedy and loss it was. It moved me to speak, because that's not how I remember Michael. I remember a devoted father who wanted the very best for his daughters. I remember an inventive and enthusiastic man who relished in introducing us to his favorite beach spot. So that's what I talked about. His suicide didn't erase his love for his daughters. It didn't mean he gave up on them. What I saw was a man who literally did the best he could, and it didn't go as planned. His marriage didn't work out, his job didn't work out, his dreams didn't work out. That was unacceptable in our society, and he must have felt it to his core to do what he did. Michael died from chronic expectations.

I have to wonder where these people were in the dark times, when he was clearly out of work for months and months, struggling with a bitter custody battle, and facing eviction. He did not need them at the funeral. He needed them to be OK with his abject failure. Instead, he was too ashamed to live.

Embracing failure and struggle doesn't enable it. It merely acknowledges its normalcy, and is accepting of mental health diversity. Being free of mental health disorders doesn't make you more successful or better than me. It primarily means you struggle far less to accomplish the same things, that everyday tasks are easy to you.

Someone with a disability isn't a failure for not being able to use stairs the same way you do. They adapt. They get resources, they do the best they can. But they will never walk again. Your encouragement for them to walk like you do will only make them feel horrible, gravely misunderstood, and certain that you are no friend to them. And they would be right, that is an unhealthy person to be around. That's why I had to detach from a lot of people I now miss.

As my three best psychiatrists all impressed upon me, mental health is not the state of being symptom-free. It is the state of acceptance and real-life adjustment to your disorders and symptoms. There was once a powerful statement I read from my longtime psychologist. In a letter supporting my need for assistance she wrote, "Ms. Herman puts a great deal of effort into trying to appear normal." I still do that. It is so hard not to do it, because then everyone doesn't get so upset.

I'm not typical, average, or normal, but I do my best. That is not enough for some. Many people focus the blame on some perceived and assumed flaw I must have, not considering, and not aware, that my brain is sometimes randomly hijacked. I can write a chapter in one sitting that requires almost no editing. I can also spend two weeks on a chapter, and fail to complete it or even have a coherent draft.

The missing ingredient is not capability or lack of a life skill, it is consistent inconsistency. Normal people rely on their moods being stable, their thoughts being their own, their long-term plans coming along in satisfying stages. Now pretend you get kidnapped, randomly, every few weeks. You're dumped back into your life, and have to somehow pick up where you left off. It takes time. Sometimes you're just getting oriented when it happens again. Sometimes you go a long time without getting kidnapped, and your life is going really well, you're getting a lot done, and you think you'll never get kidnapped again. Then one day, you do. For two weeks. By the time you get back, all the progress you've made is unraveled by inertia, lost time, and confusion.

This is what it's like for me, living with mental illness. At some point, you have to work around the kidnappings, or you're just going to destroy yourself trying to make up for lost time. You have to accept that your output is different than a person who doesn't get kidnapped periodically. You don't know why you're being targeted for kidnapping and others aren't. You have friends who do, and you commiserate.

But again, the distinction is the chasm of what people think your life should be like and what it's really like, and how much shame you have about it. What if you had to hide the kidnappings from everybody or you'd lose your job, or your relationship, or your reputation? It is, after all, pretty embarrassing to keep getting kidnapped. I mean, you must be doing something wrong to attract the kidnappers, right?

Lying in bed because you want to, and lying in bed because you have no choice are two different experiences. One is restful, the other is torture. They are not "days off." They are days missing, days lost, days stolen from us, and we have no control over when it happens, or when it will end and we can return to our lives. Lying in bed is frustrating and boring as fuck and the tape playing in my head is generally agonizing.

Now that my mental illnesses are treated and I am more stable, my experience is different, but I am not cured. I don't lose weeks very often anymore, in fact I rarely have severe symptoms for more than a few days in a row, and they are far more infrequent. Still, once in awhile, a two-week hit job comes, usually in the fall and winter, when Seasonal Affective Disorder comes into the mix, and there's nothing I can do about it.

When I am doing well for long stretches, some friends and family proclaim me cured, saying "you can go off your meds now!" as though that is the ultimate goal, to get off the meds that have brought my mind relief and balance. The well-meaning will become accustomed to your improved productivity, and when a mild episode comes, they will ask if you're eating right, or wonder if you're still sober.

They don't understand the constancy, the inevitability of my symptoms. That's OK. But that's why I am telling you what it's like. So maybe more people would understand that their quiet, aligned presence can be the best support to those in their life who suffer from depression or other mental health disorders. Because it's exhausting not to be allowed to experience our lives openly as things hit us, or to have to hide our range of emotions to fall in the normal range when interacting with others. I will never cured of depression, but I am doing all I can to treat it, including tell you what it's like for us. So when you ask me how I am, and I say, "Never better," know that I am telling you the truth.

Maureen Herman is a writer and former bassist of Babes in Toyland. Her book, "It's a Memoir, Motherfucker" is due out on Flatiron Press in Fall 2020. You can follow her writing and video blogs at patreon.com/maureenherman. She lives in Marseilles, Illinois with her daughter.

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Here’s the trailer to The Life Cycle, a new podcast starting next week. Featuring renowned thinkers like Bryan Johnson of Kernel, Neural Signals’ Dr. Philip Kennedy, and many more, it’s an offbeat series about tech, transhumanism, future politics, brain uploads, and life as we do not yet know it.

Hosted by writers John Holten and Eva Kelley, it’s a spinoff project of Seed, the upcoming space colony simulation MMO. (Watch the game teaser here.) The first season of The Life Cycle features experts interviewed during Seed’s development, turning their talks into a free-form conversation and soundscape about our future as a species. Subscribe here.

‘Guess Who?’: Endemol Shine North America & Hasbro’s Allspark Pictures To Adapt Board Game Into TV Format https://t.co/pc7IiyIEYL pic.twitter.com/RPogZCHgAF

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) October 10, 2019