Monument ([info]marnanel) wrote,
@ 2007-11-26 21:31:00
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Current mood: sleepy
Entry tags:day, gnome, plexq, ringing, riordon

Just another day inside Tommy Westphall's head
I haven't been posting so much recently because not much has been happening that's worth talking about. Either things have been too trivial to post publicly, or they have been about work and so I haven't been able to post them (much as I'd like to keep the log; I keep it in emacs instead), or they've been about GNOME and so have gone on the Metacity blog, or something. Maybe I should just post every day whatever happens.

I suppose I could give you some links: here's an interview with Alan Moore (who is, as always, fascinating); here's ringing from the point of view of a non-ringer (thanks, [info]jezebel_z). But I doubt you want to come here to read links. What do you want?

Actually, today was quite an interesting day. I woke up early, and ate breakfast; Sharon honked as I was eating and I scrambled into my clothes, forgetting to wear a jumper, and so I was cold all day; I got all the code written that I wanted to write, but not all the tests finished, and I'm working on them this evening. When I got home I walked a mile in the darkness along the side of the road with [info]plexq to the chemist's, and another mile back. I went up to read Alanna to [info]riordon (which [info]dimethirwen sent her) and found a pile of blankets with a sign saying "SIT ON ME!" Giggling was to be heard from under the bed. All very odd.

Emacs's longlines-mode is hugely useful.

With the cold weather coming in, I am thinking about writing stories again...

Oh yeah, I remember something I wanted to talk to you all about. I've said before that I've been thinking of moving my day-to-day public blogging (anything with a "day" tag, really) off of LJ and onto somewhere else. I had previously thought about moving it onto marnanel.org, since most of my public LJ is already mirrored there anyway. But jdub has suggested that I could move it onto blogs.gnome.org; I am seriously considering it. (I might keep it automatically updating to marnanel.org and LJ as mirrors so that posts would be in all three places.)

Updated: Oh, and another thing: I don't like talking about this, but I feel with today's events I should. I have mild Asperger syndrome and I've been on medication for bipolar disorder for about ten years now. As they say, you get busy living or you get busy dying-- but sometimes you're dying alive inside. Times like that, it's difficult to get anything done for a bit, at least until they sort your medication out, and at the worst times, in the past, especially when I didn't have health insurance, I've had difficulty keeping jobs and relationships going. I'm pretty much stable now, but if Jeff is a "paranoid psycho", so am I, and so are



more people around you than you imagine.


(19 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]desh
2007-11-27 03:21 am UTC (link)
How is this entry already the top Google hit for "Tommy Westphall's head" (without quotes), pushing Wikipedia to #2 and the grid to #3? Crazy.

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 03:21 am UTC (link)
I HAVE THE GOOGLE POWER. FEAR ME, PUNY MORTALS.

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[info]redbird
2007-11-27 04:00 am UTC (link)
Mental illness is a subset of illness. Some of it, fortunately, is treatable; I'm glad there are meds that work for you.

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 04:10 am UTC (link)
"Work" is a relative sort of thing; I'm not as well as I was before I was on them. I don't want to talk about it too much in a public post (though I'm fine with telling you).

Anyway, that's beside my point: yes, mental illness is a subset of illness, and it's unfair to use a person's mental illness for name-calling like "paranoid psycho".

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[info]redbird
2007-11-27 04:29 am UTC (link)
I'm happy to take it to email if you'd be happier there. And yes, "work" is a relative term, and I've seen some of the tradeoffs of medications, psych, neurological -- and there's an interesting distinction -- and other.

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 04:31 am UTC (link)
Sure, or I'll make a friendslocked post if anyone else would like to talk about it.

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[info]ghoti
2007-11-27 06:27 pm UTC (link)
It's a thing which I generally find interesting.

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[info]emmavescence
2007-11-27 07:19 pm UTC (link)
Me too, both from a perspective of having struggled with mental illness myself, and because I've studied it.

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[info]happymrlocust
2007-11-27 04:22 am UTC (link)
I read that post, and I think the guy came off as a jerk.

He might possibly have had a point, maybe it's not the best idea to let someone who maybe can't deal with it head up a project. Maybe. But he didn't put it across as a frank discussion or even as a weighing up of pros and cons.

It was a rant. It was a nasty, bile filled rant that said more about the writer than it said about the subject. As a reader, I felt that you started reading and by the first paragraph you either had to decide "Yeah! Right On!" or "Man, you're full of shit".

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 04:25 am UTC (link)
Which post, Murray Cumming's post or Jeff Murray's post?

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[info]happymrlocust
2007-11-27 04:35 am UTC (link)
Murray Cummings post.

I didn't know that Jeff Murray's post existed.

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 04:37 am UTC (link)
Oops, I mistyped, I meant Jeff Waugh's. Sorry.

Jeff Waugh was the person Murray Cumming was saying all that stuff about. There has been some other reaction, too.

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[info]happymrlocust
2007-11-27 04:40 am UTC (link)
I was wondering what you meant as well. I thought "What? I've gotten Murrays confused? argh!"

Ah, so many people saying lots of different things.

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[info]machineplay
2007-11-27 03:55 pm UTC (link)
I picked up and read that post by Cumming on Waugh and, honestly, it's a trainwreck. He could have said everything he needed to say there without making a single reference to Waugh's depression (I've lived with someone who had psychotic episodes who was also a depressive and it's a whole other kettle of fish). Anything he really had to say about Waugh's efficacy as a leader is completely lost in his vitriol. If he were working within a corporation and made those remarks, he could be fired for them. Further, it's possible that Cumming's post is libelous (not slanderous, people, slander is spoken, they both start with an 's').

I have absolutely no clue what Cumming was after there except that maybe he wanted to make himself look bad. If he actually cared about the organization more than smearing Waugh, he could have made a very effective post to that end. And I say that as someone with depression who recognizes some of their own avoidant behaviours through the viciousness of Cumming's post.

It sounds classic and I, too, would have concerns if the underlying accusations (avoidance, prevarication, deflection, etc) were true. I would also have concerns for Waugh, that during a positive time he would be putting himself in a position that would cause him terrible strain when he was going through a depressive period. The whole affair could be a catastrophe waiting to happen -- and I do mean to say that with complete compassion for someone for whom these things are very difficult.

Who wants to get caught in a spiral and damage what they love? Maybe Waugh is receiving effective treatment now and feels able to handle the strain. Maybe his depressive episodes have been small and Cumming is blowing them out of proportion.

But Cumming's victim-turned-aggressor mentality and that ugly blog post have really poisoned the waters. Waugh comes off looking pretty good, but doesn't answer the concerns that might have been raised if Cumming hadn't turned things into an issue of insanity as opposed to disability. A stunning display of offensiveness, all around, and an excellent way to miss any kind of point that could have done some good.

[Edits for clarity and spelling.]

Edited at 2007-11-27 03:57 pm UTC

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[info]secretlondon
2007-11-27 09:46 pm UTC (link)
I'll obviously miss the blog if you move it from here. I tend to use LJ for all my blog reading - you can't obviously get RSS feeds but it makes commenting a hassle..

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[info]marnanel
2007-11-27 11:51 pm UTC (link)
No, if I do I'll use a script to make it synch from one to the other (like [info]happymrlocust does). I'm not sure what I'll do about comments; most people who do this appear to have "n" comment areas, but I'd just as soon make a device to synch them too.

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[info]hairyears
2007-12-03 02:21 am UTC (link)


The advantage of blogging on (say) Wordpress is that it's easier to search than Livejournal.

I mention this because a comment on a recent post of mine hints that you have said something interesting about peer-to-peer social networks. However I have no way of tracking this down.

However, searchability isn't the whole of a blog, and withdrawing from the social features of LiveJournal carries other costs that might not be ameliorated by a clever script to carry over LJ comments.

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[info]marnanel
2007-12-03 02:56 am UTC (link)
The thing is that this journal has for a while existed in two forms: there's been the friends-only version which fulfils the social side, and the public posts which get syndicated, and they're not really connected all that much. I don't think I'll lose much by moving the public part elsewhere.

FWIW, I can't think off the top of my head what your commenter was referring to there, but I have the entire public contents of my LJ greppable if it's any help: I can send it to you in a tarball. (Hey, maybe I should make that a generally-available service, though I can't think who'd use it.)

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[info]hairyears
2007-12-03 03:38 am UTC (link)
I may, eventually, get a link from [info]juggsy, the comment's author. This is easier than swallowing a tarball and attempting to digest it.

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