-18 Comics Icons
-->10 Marvel
--->3 Captain America
--->4 Mary Jane Watson (SM<3MJ)
--->3 Wanda Maximoff
-->8 DC
--->4 Catwoman
--->4 Misc (Adventure Comics, Nightwing, Wonder Woman)
-9 Joseph Gordon-Levitt (+1 variant)

( a disco ball is just hanging by a thread )

This one's for Cam, if you haven't already seen it. Check the first line. xD

Nice little thing on a sleep-deprived Thursday.

=D So this year I've decided to design and then have printed some of my own artwork as $HOLIDAY cards, and I was wondering if anyone wanted one~

They're going to be Mucha-inspired angel type thing, with a red, green, and gold color scheme. Deal. Bobber. I'll let you see when it's done? xD Just post your address if you want, it's screened.

I might actually have to figure out international mail for mah UK peeps, but I'll manage.

I feel like crap rec me fic you guys. I just want it to have a happy ending instead of soul crushing angst because I have enough of that here thank-you-very-much.

-Trek XI kirk/bones, kirk/spock, anything with Checkov or Scotty
-Young Avengers (really if you can find something I haven't read I will give you a cookie)
-Runners (femslash appreciated)
-Teen Titans/Young Justice era crew. Tim/Kon.
-anything with Iruka in it
-Harry/Draco
-KH fic




mmmmph i know i'm picky anything you've read that's good recently really.

hey look it's an entry that's neither fandom or pointless kvetching.

gasp, awe.

-Austen. All of it. By which I mean: re-read Pride and Prejudice for the eleventy-billionth time and finally read Emma or Sense and Sensibility or Mansfield Park. What's your favorite Austen, guys?

-Unseen Athletics WHY IS IT ONLY IN HARD BACK AND WHY DOES IT ONLY COST SO MUCH MONEY SOB

-Sandman, which is not actually a book but a comic series. I'm hoping to borrow this when I go visit Madb, but at least the first volume is worth the price in paperback. I"m not wild about Neil Gaimen's prose (it's too jerky -- Only Neverwhere and American Gods held my interest enough for me to ignore it). I'm hoping his comics will be on par with his screenplays, which are usually fantastic.

-Inkheart. I've had the first book on my shelf for ages and haven't ever sat down to read it. I should.

-The sequel to the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker cycle. I forget what it's called, but it should be out in hardback sometime this year.

-Life Of Pi -- another I've been wanting to read forever and haven't gotten the chance.

-Lord of the Rings -- I'm due for a reread so bad. It's been a few years and I miiisss it.

More added as I think of them

Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever music player you have on random.
Step 2: Post a line/stanza from the first 20 10 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.

1. Everybody look left/everybody look right/everywhere you look I'm/Standin' spotlight~ (this one should probably preemptively go to cursedpanda)
2. So stay there / cause I'll be coming over
3. we were at a party / his earlobe fell in the deep
4. out by the fire breathing / outside we wait 'til face turns blue
5. The cops, they'll steal your dreams / And they'll kill your prayers.
6. Light a cigarette / I only smoke when I'm with you.
7. More beer? / What for? Nothing helps.
8. Maybe he's right. Maybe there is something the matter with me.
9. Keep your hand in my hand and your heart on your sleeve.
10. We are a thousand voices strong / we are each girl that sings this song

self.


you are not allowed to get a Xion muse.




NOT ALLOWED D'YOU HEAR ME?



sob everyone hates her

why am i torturing myself looking at art schools I could never afford and would never cut it at anyway



why





why


I already tried that once, it didn't work, I can't afford to try it again right now. Polisci, damn it, Hannah.

Hey, if you have a little extra cash around this month? Please consider commissioning my friend Madb</a>. She&hers are running a bit low on rent so you should, you know, get artwork and good karma at the same time.

My brother (who has Down's Syndrome and is in a kindergarten-level class) just tested proficient in fourth grade language arts. Meaning he can read, he just usually chooses not to. =.=

that is all

The How's My Driving? Meme

=D Also cute kid story:

Dalton has decided that knives are called "cut 'em up." Because that's what you do with them, clearly.

oO today the world has lost its mind.

Seriously I have no idea.

1. Officer-involved shooting a block from my house. The guy ran down a motorcycle cop, injured him, and when backup arrived GOT OUT OF THE CAR WITH A MOTHERFUCKING SAMURAI SWORD (ETA: damn it's a machete, according to the news. There goes my 'disgruntled weeaboo' theory.) TRYING TO DECAPITATE PEOPLE. Of course the officer on the scene deemed this guy to be a threat, and shot him. So now he dead from cop. A block from my house. asldkfjasldkjf

2. Someone tried to snatch a kid from a local park and the cops are now chasing them. Including my dad. wheee.



so everyone please report in that you are alive and unkidnapped please.

VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION


IF KATE BISHOP WERE A MUTANT WOULD HER POWER BE:

-the ability to talk her way out of anything via some type of verbal hypnosis
-psi-weapons ala Psylock.
-both aldkfaklsdfj would that be too overpowered?

I think the first one has more applications for CRACK in the xi setting but idkkkk. decisions are hard.




(pee ess she is going to run for student council so hard. There will be billboards. And cake.)

Depression as an evolutionary adaption.

I'm not sure I buy it, but since I can't read the actual study, only the abstract, my arguments against might not be the best. There's also the fact that I'm a humanities undergrad and not a scientist, but hey. This is livejournal, I do what I want.

Putting aside the reference to obesity being caused by soda and cookies (ARG HAET RAGE):

But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

I'm given to understand that evolution is random. Mutation DOES allow us to form useful adaptions, but there are other factors at work beyond their so-called usefulness (ie traits that are 'neutral' or just not actively working toward our demise). So the idea that something that's NOT a helpful adaption shouldn't be wide-spread seems off. There are lots of things common in the human population that are either neutral or actively detrimental, such as bad eyesight. Our eyes also play a pretty huge role in 'promoting survival.' There's a point here about suicide somewhere, but I'm too tired to figure it out.

When scientists have compared the composition of the functional part rat 5HT1A receptor to that of humans, it is 99 percent similar, which suggests that it is so important that natural selection has preserved it. The ability to “turn on” depression would seem to be important, then, not an accident.

Again, natural selection is a blind force and not some big guy upstairs picking and choosing adaptions (unless you believe in intelligent design, which is a whole other kettle of fish). We also still have our appendix and tonsils, which possibly serve mildly useful functions but are not in fact necessary or even important to our survival (I am much better off without getting strep every other month, thank you).

Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

First of all: Again, I can't see beyond the abstract, but none of these seem to describe the analytical ruminations of depression as useful. In fact they seem to show that the judgments made under the impairment of depression are less accurate -- or, in the second one, less relevant -- than those made by non-depressed people. (I'm a little fuzzy on what "induced sadness" vs clinical depression actually means, since being sad and having a major depressive episode are two very different things.)

There is a reason the phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" is a negative one. Focusing on details is sometimes useful, but without any ability to see the big picture it's useless. When depressed you might be able to see each individual part of a problem but you're: a) not inclined to solve the individual parts you DO see, and b) unable to put all of the pieces back together again into anything coherent and useful. When I'm depressed, my thoughts usually turn backward instead of focusing on the present. I become hyper-critical of every decision and fault, sometimes things that happened years ago, and am paralyzed with a deep sense of self-loathing because of all those big and not-so-big mistakes I can't stop dwelling on.

. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. [...] people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.

This is roughly the point where my coherency begins to break down. There is a huge difference in feeling sad and frustrated when you can't work out a test problem and a depressive episode. For one thing, to qualify as a 'depressive episode' symptoms must be present for a two-week period (According to the DSM-IV). Becoming hyper-analytical in response to a difficult problem may very well be an 'adaption' but it is not depression.

The desire for social isolation, for instance...

But depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving.

These paragraphs makes the assumption that depression is always caused by a specific, rational problem that must and can be solved, which seems flawed to me given my own experiences and those of my friends and family. There's also the fact that depression is at least somewhat hereditary even in situations where a child is raised by someone other than the biological parents (hi, me.); complex social problems are not. There's also the flawed idea that knowing there's a problem and acting on it (which, by the way, is hard when you're paralyzingly depressed) are the same thing.

bouts of depression should be slower to resolve when people are given interventions that encourage rumination, such as having them write about their strongest thoughts and feelings.

Again this seems like an assumption re: the causes and functions of depression and therapy. It's not that writing out helps you solve your problems, thereby making you less depressed (though solving your problems reduces stress which may indeed help you get better). Writing down allows for clearer analysis of the irrational thought patterns and feelings that depressed people experience, allowing the depressed person to externalize and validate/invalidate them on terms other than their own brain's disordered thinking. It is not gaining insight into outside problems, it's gaining insight into problems with thinking and processing.

Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression.

I suspect the types of therapies the article refers to in the sentence after this are Cognitive Behavioral therapies (sloppy writing, being unspecific like that), which ... yeah, that's not what they're for. Some problems are unsolvable by the individual because they're caused by outside forces (I'd like to see CBT cure cancer and AIDS!). Sometimes there is no problem. CBT allows patients to refocus their thoughts and changes their ways of thinking and responding to depression and outside stress rather than solving the problems themselves. There's also a contradiction between the idea that depression is a useful process and the notion that therapy should attempt to prevent it from being triggered.

I honestly don't know where I'm going with this or how useful an exercise it is given that I haven't read the study in question (I will when I'm on campus tomorrow and can access it), but the notion that depression is a useful, rational response and not a harmful one makes me deeply uncomfortable.

I've suffered from depression since I was a young teenager, possibly earlier, including suicidal thoughts and urges toward self-harm. I think about slicing my thigh open every time I hold a knife; that's not being dramatic, that's just being honest.

Last year and through the beginning of this year I had the worst depressive period in my life. I've written about it a little, here and there, but never altogether in anywhere public. Essentially I stopped taking my medicine, brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, bathing, doing laundry, and getting out of bed. I also lied constantly to avoid dealing with or discussing my problems, cried all the time, and neglected all of my relationships outside of the internet to the point of losing contact with several friends. I still haven't worked up the courage to talk to most of them again given the way I behaved. It was probably in response to stress brought on by my graduation from high school, starting college, and most of all by my parents' separation combined with my natural tendency toward depression.

While anecdote is not the plural of data, I cannot believe something that made me want to die that much is anything but a disease.


ETA: oh, hell, they're evolutionary psychologists, y'all. I could've saved a lot of time and annoyance there.