The dumbing down of the Internet

Posted on March 12, 2015 by luckyotter

Even Bart Simpson knows what’s going on.

Up until 9/11 and its aftermath, and especially since the twin-monster births of Facebook and Twitter (and their older retarded brother MySpace), the Internet was like being set loose in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s or Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.

Ever since Facebook, Twitter and other major corporate-run websites came along and steamrolled the entire web, visiting the Internet is more like taking tours of the world’s most depressing slums with weekends spent in Disneyland.

I had a bad day.

Posted on March 5, 2015 by luckyotter

Shameless self pity alert. If you hate negative posts, don’t read this.

I barely even replied to my comments today, so if I didn’t reply to yours, don’t take it personally. I’ll try to catch up tomorrow. I didn’t even post anything today, and that’s a first in a long time.

You see, I had a terrible day. It should have been a great day. The weather was warm–in the 70s!–and sunny, and yet my day started out horrible and stayed that way. First of all my roommate got mad because I wouldn’t jump start her car (which needs more than just a jump start) even though I was rushing to get out of the house for work this morning. I asked her if she was going anywhere today that she needed the car and she said not really. I told her I would help her when I got home, and she got all pissy. She actually had the gall to ask me to call work and tell them I’d be late just so I could help her jump start her damn car. I didn’t do it. In fact, I told her how entitled she was acting and she went back in the house pouting. Whatever.

This isn’t the first time my roommate has acted entitled and petulant when she didn’t get her way. I’m beginning to think she’s another narc. There’s a lot of red flags. But she helps me with the rent and I trust her on that level and can’t pay my bills all by myself, and that’s the reason she’s here. There haven’t been any real problems except that her entitled attitude is annoying as hell. She was never supposed to be my best friend. But she invades boundaries, is nosy, and demands special treatment. I left the house angry and feeling put upon.

I was already in a bad mood because of that, and then at work I was paired up to work all day with a woman I dislike (and who I’m pretty sure dislikes me). She’s not a narc, but our personalities just don’t go together well. She doesn’t understand my Aspie ways. She is very social and also acts bossy without having any reason to (I get that a lot–people always try to boss me around like I have no brain). I went off on her twice and apologized, but I just don’t care for her at all. She just gets on my damn nerves. Being an Aspie is so hard sometimes.

We had four houses to clean and none of them were easy. Sometimes I wonder why at my age I’m still cleaning fucking houses for a living, when I have a college degree and I can write. Other people get to write for a living and I’m better than some of them so why can’t I make a living doing it? Oh, I know why. It’s my shitty self esteem, which was destroyed by the narcs that have been pulling my strings and reminding me I’m no more than their puppet since the day I was born. I was trained to be narcissistic supply, to have no self esteem and have no mind of my own. I was trained to be prey. I was a good student. It’s hard to untrain yourself, even after the narcs are gone.

Being as Aspie just exacerbates this unfortunate situation. It’s hard–almost impossible–for us to make the social connections neurotypicals are able to make to get ahead in life. And in these days where “networking” is so all-important, it seems to me that WHO you know is more important than WHAT you know. It really sucks.

I hate that management took away my regular partner, who I got along with well. Management never explains anything. They just play us like chess pieces. They do shit like this and never tell us why. I’m over this job and am looking for another. It will be another shitty job of course, but at least will be a change. I hate working with all women. I get along better with guys in working situations. I miss working with men.

I posted nothing today because I came home angry, exhausted and depressed, and crashed on the bed for a nap almost the minute I got home. I never woke up or even had dinner. I just woke up a few minutes ago and ate a piece of cheese. This was the only post I could think about writing. It’s a sucky post but at least it’s something.

I’m just feeling blah, depressed and uninspired. And I have to go back to my shitty job tomorrow. I’m afraid I’ll be paired with this woman again. If I am I am going to management and tell them I cannot work with her and ask why I can’t work with my old partner anymore–or better yet, work alone more often. You make more money that way and I like days when I can work alone and not have to deal with socializing.

There are days, like today, where I feel like I’ve made no improvement at all, and haven’t really changed from the mousy little person I was a year ago. I’m just a mousy little person who writes a blog. I feel like my life will always be like this, that I’ll always be poor, always have a crappy job, always feel inferior to others, and never really be able to have fun or enjoy life. I’m aware a lot of this is just my pessimism and having a negative attitude. I know not every day will be like this. There are always going to be bad days even when things are generally going pretty well. I’m angry I didn’t get to enjoy the beautiful weather today. But there will be plenty more pretty days to enjoy very soon.

God help me. I have to get up for work again in a few hours. I really hope it’s a better day. I always feel guilty when I wallow in negative thinking, the way I’m doing right now. At least I can write about it.

No water. Is this 2015 or 1915?

Posted on February 19, 2015 by luckyotter

What century am I living in?

Now I’m without water or a car. My car’s still in the shop (probably until Monday), my roommate’s car needs a new battery, and for two days the bathroom pipes have been frozen even though I let them drip when the temperatures dropped below freezing the other night. The only running water in the house is the toilet and the kitchen faucet.

But two hours ago I lost those too. And I can’t get to the store to fill my water jugs that I keep around for emergencies, or even buy bottled water. It’s -2 degrees out, with an even colder wind chill. That’s somewhat unusual in this part of the country, where even in the mountains, the temperatures rarely get below the 20’s if you’re in a valley (as I am).

There’s a little hard, icy snow on the ground but not much. I may have to go outside and try to withstand the ice cold temps to scrape some off the ground to fill some pots and pans, which I can then boil. At least there’s electricity.
Oops, I had better shut up. I could jinx that too.

I called the water company to find out if the problem was my pipes (since my tub and bathroom sink haven’t worked for two days) or something else. It turns out there’s a water outage that is effecting the entire neighborhood. I was assured it should be back on by 10 PM tonight–that is if the pipes to my kitchen sink and toilet don’t freeze too, since I haven’t been able to drip the faucet or flush the toilet.

But you know what? People lived like this for thousands of years. You will never miss what you never had, or have no concept of. People even today, in developing countries, live with no running water or electricity, and they never complain. We have become so entitled.

At least I have the Internet so I can whine.

Toxic guilt

Posted on January 22, 2015 by luckyotter

I’m sick with 103F fever and can barely eat or move, and I still feel guilty about not going to work today even though there was no way I could have gotten through today. When I called they told me to “feel better, get some rest” but I still always feel so guilty, so unproductive.
I feel like I should go scrub the kitchen or something. I’ve been in bed all day and it’s almost 4 PM. I feel like a slug.

I still feel guilty when I take care of myself. I still feel like if I’m not doing things for other people, I’m not a good person. I know that makes no sense, but it’s how I was trained.
I also start to worry about things when I feel overwhelmed with guilt. That somehow I’ll be punished. This is a toxic sort of guilt that leads to toxic worry.

There’s good guilt (when you have hurt someone and feel sorry later) and bad guilt.
This is definitely unhealthy, bad guilt, residue of being surrounded by narcs my whole life, and it’s very toxic.

I just wrote two short posts (including this one) and that does makes me feel a little better but not enough to ease my sense of being useless.

Payday loan troubles

Posted on January 22, 2015 by luckyotter

In 2011 I did something stupid. I took out a payday loan for $750 but I have since lost all the paperwork so I have proof of nothing. I was living with my MN ex at the time and he was the one to convince me to take out the payday loan. We were desperate at the time and he had me believing this was a smart thing to do. It wasn’t. Now it’s me stuck holding the bag.

I was never able to pay the loan back and all kinds of interest I didn’t understand was being tacked onto my debit card. I had to cancel the card to keep mysterious charges from continuing to be deducted from my bank account.

Someone called this morning threatening me with a civil suit. She wasn’t very nice about it. I wasn’t sure what to say. Stupidly I admitted it was me when she asked. I’m not good at thinking when I’m under duress, especially when I’m under duress and suffering from The Martian Death Flu.

This operation has been calling and harassing me for years and has even called my place of work (they no longer know where I work since I changed jobs). I know they probably won’t actually do anything but I still worry about it and don’t know what my legal rights are or if I need a lawyer (which I cannot afford). Should I just ignore these calls? Maybe I can settle with them for the $750 after I get my tax return but I have no proof anymore that was the amount I borrowed. I’m not sure what I should do but it’s causing me stress I really don’t need.

Never, ever mess with payday loans, especially the kind you obtain online.

10 reasons why Facebook drives me insane.

Posted on January 19, 2015 by luckyotter

I don’t like Facebook. Here’s the reasons why.

1. EVERYONE is on there. I mean EVERYONE. And they WILL find you.

2. It’s the new Big Brother. Potential employers and actual employers use FB to check up on you. You can be fired or rejected for a job for “liking” the wrong thing or posting the wrong photo or meme. Make no mistake. You are being watched.

3. The layout is confusing, cluttered and not attractive.

4. Way too many notifications about dumb things you don’t care about and invitations to “like” commercial products and suggestions of who to “friend.” Okay, well all social media has that. Still, it’s more annoying on Facebook.

5. Too many people posting selfies and photos of themselves with all their friends partying and having fun all the time. Or photos of their renovated house or their Caribbean vacation or their ugly new baby. It’s a narcissist’s wet dream.

6. This breeds envy in people who see those photos. You always wind up comparing yourself to others and you always seem to come up short.

7. Too many games and “gifts” from games you don’t play appearing on your wall. Although I’ll confess in around 2007-8 when Facebook was new and seemed cool, I got addicted to Cafe World and Farmville. Those games were fun, I won’t lie.

8. Overrated.

9. Too many people from my RL trying to get me to “friend” them.

10. You can’t choose your own theme or change the look of your profile much. Even Twitter allows more creativity than Facebook. Not that I think we should go back to the days of MySpace with its jarring profiles of neon green on shocking pink backgrounds with their glittering Blingies, flashing signs, badly sized photos that took a year to load, and other digital doodads that slowed your system down to a crawl and sometimes made it crash.

Mainly, I like to keep my online life separate from my personal life, and Facebook doesn’t make that easy because EVERY PERSON IN THE FREAKING WORLD IS ON THERE and THEY WILL FIND YOU. Yep, all 7 billion human beings on this planet. They’re all there. Waiting. Watching.

I’ll check my Facebook sometimes but I hesitate to post anything there. I never, EVER share this blog on my own profile. I wouldn’t dare. And once I’ve checked whatever I’m looking for, I sign out ASAP. Facebook is scary.

Maybe that’s what Hell is. After you die, you go into the Matrix and find yourself trapped in Facebook for all eternity.

I’m frustrated.

Posted on January 18, 2015 by luckyotter

For old times’ sake–

This article was my first big “win” after I started this blog. I only had this blog for 8 days at the time I wrote this post. I’m not the world’s most patient person, and was frustrated and discouraged because my blog had no visibility and I only had 12 followers, and no likes or comments to speak of. It was so disheartening to work on a post all night, and in the morning I’d find nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds under the post. So I wrote this whiny little rant.

OM (Opinionated Man, for those of you who might not know him by his famous initials) , decided to help me out and reblog it. Because OM is hugely popular with an enormous following (51,000 followers last I saw) , I was overloaded with views, comments, likes and new followers that day. It kept me so busy all weekend I practically got nothing else done!
After this happened, there was no stopping me. I was hooked.

I have also worked very, very hard to get this blog to where it is now. At first I had to force myself to write and sometimes it was a chore. But I kept at it, and soon it wasn’t work anymore it was play. November’s Nano Poblano challenge helped a lot. But even by then I was writing 2-3 posts a day. Now I average 4-5!

Other people do the work of getting it out there for me by sharing it on social media, even if you don’t like social media yourself. Making sure to have all available social media buttons under each post is essential for that. People probably won’t bother “sharing” your post it those buttons aren’t there.

Then there is the matter of connecting with the right people, or having the right people discover your blog and promote it. Sam Vaknin has a lot to do with this blog’s growing success, but I didn’t recruit him for that task. I just lucked out by writing one well timed article about him he happened to like (if you can call a mutually beneficial arrangement with a malignant narcissist/borderline psychopath a lucky thing). Now he’s here all the time and reads everything, even if he doesn’t comment (I can tell by how many views per day are from Macedonia).

Connecting with other bloggers, especially popular ones, helps a lot too. Fivehundredpoundpeep at Blogspot has me on her blogroll now that we’ve become friends and her blog is pretty popular so I get a lot “referrees” from there. This blog also appears on Narcwriters at Blogspot and people come here from there too. The stats give so much information it’s mindboggling.

Everything else just has to do with hard work and writing as much as you can. If I don’t feel like writing (because sometimes I don’t) I still will post something short or cute, a video or a photo. I also make every effort to answer all my comments. Even if a blog has the best written articles outside of Pulitzer Prize winners, if an admin ignores comments (or doesn’t allow comments, which is something I will never understand), that makes visitors feel ignored and eventually they will get bored and go away. No one wants to be ignored.
Lively discussions are the key to any successful blog.

If you told me in September this blog would have grown as much as it has in this amount of time (I even qualify to run ads on the site now due to a sufficient amount of traffic) I would have laughed in your face and called you deluded.

Now the sky’s the limit.

Lucky Otters Haven

I started my blog a week ago as a form of self therapy and didn’t care if anyone read my stuff. Or didn’t think I cared. But I admit it: I do.

I read a lot of other blogs here at WordPress and some of them have thousands of followers and hundreds of comments for each post. Of course I realize most of these people have been at WordPress for a long time, and naturally those people will have more followers and comments than a newbie. Some of them may be professional bloggers who have paid for SEO and know all sorts of tricks I don’t to increase the numbers of hits they get.

But all that said, I still find it frustrating and disheartening when I spend hours writing a post and then another hour or so editing and trying to make it look great, only to come back…

View original post 425 more words

Shame on you, WordPress.

Posted on January 16, 2015 by luckyotter

I am getting so tired of the automatic default to the “new” stats page, which I hate. I don’t think it’s better than the old one, and is in fact much worse. The graphs are unattractive and don’t show visitor/view comparisons. The layout is unattractive and makes you have to keep scrolling to see all the stats, especially if you’re trying to do it from a Smartphone, the way I sometimes do during the day when I’m not at the computer. The old stats page was easy to read, seemed to give more detailed information, and didn’t require constant scrolling to see the stat you want.

I always click on “see the old stats page” but sometimes before it lets me do so, I have to answer a survey asking why I prefer the old stats page. I find that very annoying. I can’t believe anyone would like the new stats page better. Aren’t enough people complaining about the new stats page that WordPress will scrap it and go back to the old stats page, which is so much better?

Does anyone actually like the new stats page, and if so, why?

WordPress, PLEASE get rid of the new stats page. “New Coke” didn’t go over well either.

Meh.

Posted on January 10, 2015 by luckyotter

Meh. Today wasn’t a very good day. Low activity on this blog today and I got absolutely nothing done. I started to read but only got through about 2 pages and then fell asleep. Then I just slept most of the day and didn’t even go outside even though it was beautiful and sunny out. Now I have too many things to do tomorrow. Then back to work on Monday. Ugh.

I didn’t even post much on this blog today. Just one article, but I don’t think it’s one of my better ones.

I got called out by another blogger for an article I wrote in November where apparently I gave some misinformation about MPD (not NPD). I could have argued with this blogger (who suffers from that disorder) to keep it up by updating my outdated information (MPD is now called DID–Dissociative Identity Disorder in the most current DSM) and correcting the misinformation, but the blogger told me I also insulted all people with DID by saying their personalities were “fragmented” instead of calling them “alters.”

It seems like I’m inadvertently insulting a lot of people lately. What’s up with that? I hate insulting anyone.

In spite of pointing out my Disclaimer and explaining my blog focused on NPD and to a lesser extent on other mental disorders and conditions, this blogger snarkily questioned me about what made me qualified to even write about NPD since I didn’t suffer from the condition myself? (I guess my Disclaimer wasn’t enough). So I just deleted the whole thing. Like the one I wrote today, that one wasn’t one of my best articles anyway. (I checked and this is a legitimate blogger, not a particular other person whose recent anger at me might cause them to want to troll my site or sneak attack, even though they apologized. I’m always so damned hypervigilant).

I’m inexplicably depressed. When I’m depressed I just lie around doing nothing at all. And sleep a lot. And there’s no food in the house because I’m too lazy to go out and get any. I wonder if there’s a can of soup or some eggs or something.

I did get my W2 today though, but every year I worry that I won’t get a refund or have to owe, even though that’s patently ridiculous since I make next to nothing.

Sickie

Posted on December 24, 2014 by luckyotter

My face is melting and my throat is full of sand. My eyes are gross and gummy. My hair is lank and greasy and my nose is raw as sushi. I’m hacking up unspeakable things.

Oh, wait, I feel a sneeze coming on. Ahhhhh—

Dammit! It’s one of those infuriating swallowed sneezes, you know, when you feel like you have to sneeze but it doesn’t come–or maybe your nose just emits a mouselike squeak . Non-sneezes must be one of God’s little practical jokes.

So, what was I talking about?

Oh, right. My danged cold.

I still had to work today (otherwise I lose my Christmas holiday pay) but I felt like I was dragging around a 100 pound weight as I moved around today, sniffling and sneezing and spewing my germs everywhere like Typhoid Mary. I took Dayquil to cope with the symptoms, but still felt horrible, and sleepy on the way home in the car from the medicine. (By the way, Dayquil will make you groggy, so drive with caution if you must).

I drank about a gallon of orange juice and popped vitamin C like a crackhead pops rocks, but all it does is make my bladder work overtime making bright orange urine, which I guess is the point since all that peeing is supposed to rid your body of the illness. Eventually. I’ve been eating so much canned chicken noodle soup I think I might lay an egg if I eat too much more.

In the meantime I have no choice but to power through this. Thankfully, day after tomorrow I’ll have a nice 4 day long weekend to relax and get better. I’ll be cooking my incredible (yes, I don’t mind saying so) spinach and meat lasagna at Paul’s house and my daughter will be home. I’ll also be baking a red velvet cake (with buttercream icing, not cream cheese, which I hate).
All my Christmas shopping is finally done and I’m anticipating a small but lovely Christmas dinner. I’ll still be glad when all this holiday business is over for another year.

As I sit here sipping my peppermint tea with honey, I’m dreaming of spring.

Once the stores start putting up the Valentines day merchandise (which happens the minute Christmas is over), I start to see spring on the horizon. Here in North Carolina (with the exception of last year, which was exceptionally cold for this part of the country), by the end of February it starts to warm up a bit and even a few of the trees begin to take on a pale green tinge. (Has anyone ever noticed, even before the green begins to show, in the very early spring the trees have a diluted form of the same colors they do in the fall?)

The days are already getting longer by one minute a day. By the end of January, it will be noticeable. Ah, spring. I can’t wait for you. I love you. I wish I could hibernate until then.

I hate everything about winter. The dark. The cold. The gloominess. The damned SNOW. But most of all I hate colds and flu. It’s getting late. Guess it’s time to take some Nyquil and rest my body for one more day of work until the long weekend.

But before I do that, I think I’ll take another eucalyptus bath and light my Silver Birch Yankee candle.