Last edited Wed Jul 30, 2025, 03:25 AM - Edit history (6)

But (extremely mediocre) “art” i.e. vicious (if mostly accurate) caricatures have helped me with my largely non-existent mental health issues.

I did suffer severe burnout at work years ago I am finally over. I was reviewing the whole for the last time. I can’t remember the various things I posted when I was not doing that well, but going by stuff I wince at when I clean rant debris from my comp now, it was probably hideous.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I don’t think I ever seriously blamed anyone beyond taking general swipes at (in fairness) mostly unrelated if generally icky, repellant and sleazy private sector entities.

My mentor/lab/extraneous scientists were nice. I remembered recently that my mentor’s wife registered as cool if understated - I presume those are referred to as ‘stored internal representations’ by shrinky types.

My landlords were mostly generic - the first place was okay but not the best fit (nice people but bible bangers-not my thing), the second place was kinda creepy and the last one was cool-I barely ever saw them which is what you want in a landlord. It was okay overall as such things go.

The postdoc counsellor was sympathetic as was the first HR lady. That was a relief.

The hospital processed me as such pompous, meninist douchebags would (Reefer Madness/sobriety types imo). They probably consider being childfree and godless a personality disorder in itself not to mention spoilt, lazy and juvenile.


Thankfully, both the shrink/the therapist they had me see outside were civilized as well as competent.

Still, altogether it was too conservative a school/city/experience for me..shrug. The respectable type of conservative I suppose, but I am not conservative and so it wasn’t a good fit.

I now live in podunk-which is part creepy men’s rights central and part oblivious/harmless podunk. Oh well..life huh ;-/.

As I wrap up a long, personal crisis that is finally over thanks to internal processes and DIY fixes, I thought I would post my ugly “art” here for the last time before moving on.

I posted them in another thread, but the post became too verbose. I don’t want to ruin it with non-essential text. I am fond and proud of my mediocre “art” & don’t care what anyone else thinks about it. At least it’s all human if mediocre, derivative, overly broad etc. etc.

As a forward-thinking and considerate person I usually preempt the necessity for any douchebag -well ie some douchey assigned shrink-from having to state the obvious..I am very thoughtful I have noticed..one of my many virtues..









I always found the term “advanced schizophrenia” darkly funny..”oh you know I have advanced schizophrenia not the four-week course kind.” Ecstatic truth but that’s the only way these days..

I was lucky in my lab prior to the breakdown. I had a one of a kind postdoc mentor prior to this job. Good man..I was and still vaguely am sorry I wasn’t a better mentee..

Shrug..Neither overpopulation nor the privatization of education churn out the best people. And I am an example of that. My parents had/have stronger foundations than I did.

Clearly education among other things deteriorates with population explosion, whatever any political-industrial complex tells you. It’s the primary environmental and social crisis there is and addressed execrably. Koch/Cato style migration makes it worse. Humans need real investment-education, work or healthcare-in an increasingly complex/technology driven society and neither an app nor a gig worker nor a bullshit job can provide that.

I usually like my physical health doctors here in podunk. I have an absolutely awesome oncologist who was my mom’s doctor as well. I hope I don’t require his care. Thanks to the chronic stresses I have faced I wonder.

And one older female shrink was okay, but I prefer my own strategy as it works better for me. Normally I dislike rule breaking where it is medicine or science - hate that Apple Cider Vinegar shit (wtf is an influencer anyway? Most idiotic concept ever).

But when the rules don’t make sense repeatedly one is forced to improvise. Nothing I do is ever recommended for anyone else.

I rarely outright dislike scientists and doctors (minus any and all dickheads/douchebags/creeps/sleazebags etc of course).

And the tech creeps and their shills (that data and AI crowd) are not scientists. They are usually creepy little people (typically male). Sundar Pichai who just became a billionaire is an example.

The predatory healthcare industry (which is distinct from doctors) I avoid except for rare useful services which are not the same thing as the type of foul app that a Pentland or Insel type of shill would peddle.

I realize belatedly that that’s a sign of brain scrambling (fading now)-conflating two distinct things -trust of doctors/medicine does not translate to trust of hospital admins. This doctor whose opinion pieces I like called Clayton Dalton gets the difference (well wrt the industrial aspect).
Psychiatry is also the one area of medicine that’s a bit uneven. Wider doctor to doctor variation. I did like two of my shrinks in the US though.

I am probably not the best fit for anything non-routine. Too many strong opinions etc - but I learnt something about myself thanks to this ordeal. Maybe being introverted, an only child, an animal loving green horrified by factory farming and many things human society normalizes casually, social mimicry is big part of my social veneer and it doesn’t work in a crisis. Science aside (where consensus is easier), I have disagreements not just with the right, but with many things in this frequently absurd world.

It’s usually fine in routine things, but anything somewhat less routine goes south fast. It ends up sounding very insulting when I try to guess how people think outside the routine, because I don’t see that there is any unsaid “we”.

I never get this society’s priorities, fads etc..ai! This new bullshit! That new bs! This random crap worked once-let’s do it a million times on repeat! More stale, homogenized random crap please! It may sell! Or not! Who knows?

This is derivative humor on the surface, but on the inside it was a real learning experience.

I stick with routine stuff, but can’t pull off being “sensible or pragmatic” in : a) superficial ways using the thought process of any human I would privately consider a total douche (key word privately-the internet doesn’t get that douchebags have feelings too. I get that and try to be civil as long as I can keep them out of my health/work/life/home etc) ; b) in some way that no longer applies once huge changes occur.

I felt kinda bad for my last mentor. He did and probably does have a difficult balancing act as a scientist. He was tolerable. Not an irredeemable arse like all of the rest of his institution with no exceptions (one British biology professor and maybe one other scientist aside-jury’s out on that one). The biology professor was a normal, classical academic and not essentially dead from the neck up, and yet somehow doing science and probably with an app stuffed up the butt. (Hat-tip to Cara Smith of Salon-she wrote two very funny pieces on Femtech and Girlbosses earlier this year. Ever the social if not stochastic parrot I try to copy her style to soften out my own which tends to be choleric strings of profanity which can seem maga adjacent if parsed casually. And worse alternating with sickeningly insincere apologies and gratitude. I used to think in horror that I sound exactly like Prof Guildea’s parrot).

It’s really hard being a mentee when most of the time you think “This place looks like it is entirely built by and filled with the kinds of dead-eyed computer creeps or creep acolytes whom I mock in private (when I think of them, which used to be never).” That’s that part of the world with no reprieve in sight.

I never had that problem at my previous schools (well okay the EECS dept at my first school was an example of how the crass privatization of education doesn’t work..).

Si valley..lol..those people are a joke. My “art” was a tribute to that type here in podunk, global south where I live and to the same creeps over there (Open Source! Privacy loss will give us high resolution insight into the contempt women have for us! Hostage situations don’t even lead to women seeing us as anything but creepy and brainless!). I found that crap earlier this year where those brainless DOGE creeps were harassing govt employees obscene.

Services will keep getting worse with this AI junk. Betty Boom had a good post about that last year on DU-how people will viscerally feel it in their lives, but not know what to make of it. Endless capcha for endless faux humanism! The humans in such an environment will also be poorly trained gig workers. I dispassionately thought about the past when that was going on and figured I got an early taste of that execrable worldview.

It’s such a scam-the internet is not addictive. It’s a bore to anyone with a life. I had an epiphany when that couch joke broke last year. After years of being inundated with this bullshit - humans are social and seek connection!- you give up and zombie like go “I must also be social and need connection with some random strangers I don’t know and don’t want to know”.

When I read about Rick, I realized this is the first real, non-retiree online. Someone with an actual offline life who gets that “going viral” is never a good thing. I never got how anyone could think posting your views online under your actual name is a good idea except for people in fields like media or politics where that is part of the job. I only joined that foul Facebook thing when my lab did en masse back when it was still .edu and even then I preferred DU and barely used it.

I like DU which is obvious since I continue to use it-it’s the old internet not the new rubbish (ie social media, Substack etc). I read DU not for social connection, but out of curiosity - like the Betty Boom post I mentioned. It’s not this heart and love saturated sugar fest of social drivel. Nathan Robinson had a piece on the Abita Mystery House-certainly more than a better life == McMansions/cars/malls, that was my vague image of America. DU has that more than a lot of the net imo..not exactly..it’s hard to explain.

I am a fan of atomization personally. Not the libertarian thing, but you should have the capacity to be alone and not hate your own company. Whether it’s tech or other humans, to constantly need external stimulation is sad. Again overpopulation. Too many damn people and now selling interactive junk tech. I used to love reading..it was my one solace prior to this increasingly worthless, unwanted and encroaching tech environment. I loathe my home becoming another junk tech offer filled putrid garbage fest. Self conscious podunk reminds me of South Park’s Cancelled-so lame and sad. Losing podunk charm such as it is and gaining creepiverse…lame

The other thing I learnt from Rick after digging in my own head is that I should be less lazy. I have been moving left my whole life, but it’s not superficial and so I shouldn’t pretend I casually adopt generic stuff..I never really excavated it before, but necessity forced me to recognize the rationales behind every part of my worldview. I don’t get this ..almost dysplasia. Oh this is the new thing? Okay! This now! Oh some other crap? Okay that!

Now I fashion my own distinctively mediocre take on Westernized left liberalism for private use, but as a proud if excruciatingly mediocre “product” if you will of global south podunk. I find these business types’ use of language so funny.. what is sad is that I have no expectation that self awareness will ever result from all this. Eternal confusion yes! Irony challenged? To the bloody (mediocre) end. Self-awareness in this society-never. Well not my deal. AI has underscored the truly obliviously pointless nature of most computer based industries.

lol..anyway that was catharsis adjacent. Society eh…

I must now go be mediocre in my actual real work which fortunately has nothing to do with bloody computers/the internet.

As sympathetic as I am to people whose jobs by necessity involve the net like say Ed Zitron or Yasha Levine or to small businesses which rely on advertising, mine doesn’t.

I was a researcher not a science communicator . And if you could read my mind, most of my “communications” tend to be a middle finger to just about everyone but my main postdoctoral mentor, my best friend from grad school, my ex husband (we are amicably divorced, but he is one of the few people I trust) and my oncologist. I am not sure sending out an endless stream of middle fingers counts as communication.

Anyway I always disliked talking. I never know what to say. I never have anything to say in my field and anything else I have to say that isn’t blatantly bogus tends to be stuff that’s best left unsaid in this society.

I cared about my actual job. I sucked at it-but it was a worthwhile job and once it’s gone there is no pipeline to drivel. It’s just gone adding insult to injury with worthless and tedious crap piling on cluelessly and apparently endlessly.

Can’t a person quietly be a mediocre failure anymore without a foul app or endlessly punitive and confusing dreck forced on them? A hospital potato is less of an insult to the intelligence than ending up being a non-oblivious pawn for endlessly self serving rubbishtech…the human use of humans..

I have to go work now, but a lot of the anger over this is because wherever you get an early headsup about these shit technologies it is clear that they are not even taking your job honestly. You are not being replaced by a competent machine or competent and honest people.

It’s brute force displacement (I don’t mean migration-I mean your working spaces-your devices, your computer being hogged using whatever fucking made up health or other bs red flag some meninist fascist comes up with as an excuse to pile on along with a side of worthless garbage you don’t want) where the built in assumption is that one day if you can exit a virtual strait jacket, you will also just dump your field and spend your time being some sort of bloody greasy influencer and professional EFF style “tech critic” but also pro tech! A feminist but Men Too! I like to chat! I like to connect!

It’s not even like gig work. They are paid a pittance but they are paid. This is just brute fucking force space grabbing.

And some other random creeps with nothing to do with anything of yours would find out thanks to poor data hygiene and this completely fucking moronic and douchebag prick driven version of “open” and another assortment of the worst fucking concepts ever or the nightmarish perversion of anything that might have once represented just about anything that doesn’t totally suck.

The use of the net or the owning of devices doesn’t mean a bloody creep plus creepy app or AI agent comes with it as the normal expectation.

Possibly a slightly jaded take..