YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Intelligent life elsewhere probably contains contradictions and absurdities just like ours.

If the physical laws are universal, like gravity for instance, then locomotive intelligences might be prone to pratfalls and such, like in slapstick.

A couple of videos I found of primate behavior / intelligence, gravity related

https://youtu.be/yGA5JQNJceM

https://youtu.be/Ea1Meg6cQ_Q

Those are fantastic links!

But have you seen an octopus or a crow solving puzzles to get to treats?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7__r4FVj-EI

Hey, thanks for the reminder about Mark Rober, it's been a while since I checked his channel

The three obstacle course vids he made for his backyard squirrels are a hoot!

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZFjoX2cGg
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvS9lvRxZ8
  
  https://youtu.be/lg5wznn3IBE

Gotta love the squirrel bandits!

Here are some new things I want to try in order to unblock myself as a creative, in the form of commandments (work in progress, more to come):

1. You shall not fetishise art materials. Anything can be used either as a tool or as a support. Nothing is precious or essential.
2. You shall not compare yourself to or envy other artists. Everyone's thought patterns and mileage varies.
3. You may only copy or imitate techniques, not motifs except for exercise.
4. You shall have faith in yourself and not expect improvement without practice.

Adding 5/6:
Feeling very low and I have had several anxiety attacks the last few days. Everything seems to put me on edge. Instead of drawing and painting, every excuse to do something else seems valid: reupholstering an armchair, tinkering with broken tools, reorganising a cupboard. The tinnitus will give me a short break and then return with a vengeance. I have sudden thoughts of hurting myself, maybe cutting. I don’t feel there's any meaning in anything. Strangely, the worse I feel the less I'm drinking alcohol but Xanax is way up.

I have a large drawer filled with finished sketchbooks dating back a couple of years. They partly make me cringe and partly make me sad. It's mostly mindless scrawling and doesn't represent any value, and I've always thought that when I get "better" and start making stuff I'm actually proud of I'll do a massive weed out and burn the rest. Today I picked up one book and opened it randomly, and beside a mishmash of ink and watercolor I had scrawled something. It took me a while to decipher it and I first read: "THIS IS THE MONSTER AND I WILL KILL IT WITH MY PENIS". Wait...oh, "PENS". For a while there I thought my mind was in even worse shape than I imagined

troebia wrote: ↑June 6th, 2024, 8:03 am "THIS IS THE MONSTER AND I WILL KILL IT WITH MY PENIS"

heh

troebia wrote: ↑June 6th, 2024, 8:03 am I have a large drawer filled with finished sketchbooks dating back a couple of years. They partly make me cringe and partly make me sad.

I think I can access this feeling. With my high-school friends, made a lot of funny videos. I ended up throwing away all the tapes. That whole part of my life was colored with sadness and longing. In a moment of weakness, I reacted to that, and threw away all the tapes. Kinda sad.

manuel_moe_g wrote: ↑June 6th, 2024, 8:29 pm I think I can access this feeling. With my high-school friends, made a lot of funny videos. I ended up throwing away all the tapes. That whole part of my life was colored with sadness and longing. In a moment of weakness, I reacted to that, and threw away all the tapes. Kinda sad.

This makes me think that all the content of this forum will disappear sooner or later. I'm supposing the hosting provider doesn't have enterprise-grade data backups and full redundancy, which is rather expensive. Also if the server software isn't updated anymore, the probability of a hacker attack is rising. One day we may be met by a blank page. There are upsides and downsides to every loss.

yeah, the only real advantage to Paul G.'s setup here is that suicide talk and such can't be capriciously shut-down & scrubbed by a profit-driven corporation

one of the (many, many) projects on the backburner is to wrest control from Paul's current administrator of administration of this forum, but I don't want to drop the ball if it is given to me