It sounds like you are super depressed right now, and I’m sad you’re going through that.

There are a lot of things out there that are worth living for, and some great experiences to be had. But I’ve had severe depression in the past myself… and I’ll be honest, no one could convince me in that moment that life was ever going to be a positive experience again. So I doubt I will be able to convince you right now.

What I do hope you’ll hear right now, is that your own assessment of life can’t be trusted at the moment. Depression is like a feedback loop. It makes us feel hopeless, and prevents us from believing better things are ever possible. I promise you, there is some way to get help. And your depression is going to tell you I’m wrong. Or that if you could find help, there wouldn’t be any thing they could actually do to help. Don’t trust your depression. It makes us lie to ourselves. There’s help to be had, and you’ll never know if it could help if you don’t actually try.

Don’t trust your self right now. Look for help. Tell professional people that you feel suicidal and trust them to help.

Not necessarily. I definitely go through waves like this, and it doesn’t feel like depression to me.

I’ll have a couple of days (or weeks) where I want to do things, but not enough to actually motivate myself to start any of it. Then I’ll bounce back for a while and be so focused on something that I’ll forget about taking care of basic needs like eating and sleeping.

I’ve kinda learned to embrace those extremes. What I hate is the middle ground where I want to focus and get something done, but I realize about every 5 minutes that my brain is off topic again.

Tough question, because there are some great ones.

A recent favorite from the Netflix era has been “Cry Wilderness”. The movie was laughably bad in the first place, but that just made it great for the MST3k treatment.

So many great lines in there. Like the old man talking about how all the animals and nature are his family and friends and they voice the bird responding with “He’s not my friend. I’m not indigenous to this area. Please call the police.” That cracked me up so bad the first time I didn’t hear anything else for at least the next few minutes.

And also the running gag around terribly unsafe firearm handling: “BANG!”

That now goes through my head whenever a show just waves a gun around like an obvious prop instead of at least pretending it could be dangerous.

Awesome that you are doing this! I’ll throw in for a chance at the Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remasters.

FF1 was the first RPG I ever played! Fell in love with the series and the genre. But some of those early ones that got strangely named releases (or no release at all) in the U.S. made me miss out on a few of these. I’d be super excited to play through all of them! Middle age has turned me into a nostalgia gamer lol

previous theories that equine brains respond only to immediate stimuli and are not complex enough to strategise

Who held those theories? And have they ever been around horses?

Just this weekend my spouse and I had to move our mare and almost 4 month old colt. She’s quite used to riding in a small horse trailer, but the little guy was terrified of getting into it. When his mom realized it, she started getting on and off the trailer several times to show him it was fine. Then she went behind him and kept nudging him towards the trailer. Seemed pretty obvious to me that she knew what was going on and was trying her best to help the little guy understand it was all ok.

I’ve certainly met some horses that could have made me question the species’ intelligence if they were the only ones I knew. But there are plenty of intelligent horses out there. I’m really surprised that the prevailing theory was that they only respond to immediate stimuli.

I think the hard part is, almost no one realizes that they felt that way until they are finally on the outside.

I remember a really interesting article I read a few years ago that indicated the best way to change someone’s viewpoint was to welcome them into your community or group without requiring a change of mind first.

Turns out our social and emotional needs will trump our rational or logical side almost every time.

So you’re 100% right. What people need is a caring group of family and friends who encourage each other to question themselves in an effort to learn and grow.

It was definitely a journey and I know lots of things had an influence. Probably some that I didn’t even recognize were impacting me in the moment.

I can tell you that friends made a large difference. No one has more influence on you than someone that actually cares about you. So having several friends that cared about me despite my warped viewpoint was probably a fundamental fulcrum for shifting my views.

I also had the opportunity to befriend a lot of people who are often “othered” in conservative circles. It becomes a lot harder to accept someone painting a group in a negative light, when you actually know people that clearly don’t fit that narrative. It forced me to question the narrative.

Finally though, I think it was me starting to recognize the hypocrisy. An obvious one is that Christianity is strongly tied into the culture, but nothing about modern conservatism exemplifies “love your neighbor as yourself”. Another big point of hypocrisy for me was when Trump was made the candidate in 2016. I’m old enough to remember that one of the large talking points made against Bill Clinton in the 1992 election was a lack of character. And I just couldn’t comprehend how character was so important to the Republicans then, but clearly wasn’t an issue for their current candidate. Character and integrity are important attributes to me, and in retrospect Trump’s candidacy was really a final straw for me.

As for why I moved towards socialism specifically? Largely because I don’t believe capitalism scales well, and the free market leads to too many competing priorities that basically boil down to the Prisoner’s Dilemma (the best outcome for the individual versus the best outcome for the group). I think there has to be an authority external to the market who can intervene when advancements are clearly coming at the expense of the society.

As a former conservative republican turned socialist, I’ll say that it can happen. Certainly some will never change their minds or see the world any other way.

But some of us will. And some of us only will if we are exposed to thoughts and viewpoints outside our usual echo chamber.

I agree that I’d rather A24 wasn’t offering any financial boost to extreme conservative viewpoints. But I am hopeful that at least a few people in those audiences will be drawn to watch and that it will make them ask questions they never thought about before.

I did bad.

But I expected to do bad. AI generation has become too good.

You tell yourself you can identify them, because sometimes you notice weird artifacts and spot the AI quickly. But we’re really only noticing the bad ones. We’ll never even know the good ones were AI most of the time, so we can’t balance how good we think we are at spotting them against how often we were actually wrong.

This morning actually. I ran the sound system for a memorial service today. Young man lost to gun violence, not even 25 yet.

Felt weird for getting choked up, because I didn’t actually know him personally. Just hard to see all those people hurting because of a senseless and violent tragedy. And rough to know that his life ended so early and all that potential was just gone in a moment.