"Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole..."
-- "It's a Wonderful Life"
Even though I worked with zidanax on the ActRaiser TAS, I never did get to know him well. He was a great person to work with; he was always very friendly and easy going. He was always patient waiting for me to complete my part of the TAS, even though I took a long time. He was a great TASer; the ActRaiser TAS would not have been as great as it is without his route planning for the entire game. I hope I can fill his shoes when I improve the TAS. I was looking forward to working with him again, but now that I won't be able to, I am deeply saddened. His controller input will be used for the most part, so he will be coauthor in the new TAS. This screenshot comes to mind:
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
I finally found this and it's so sad! It really hit me when I realized that his last post was a discussion with me about his Lufia run. Man, I was really looking forward to that. He was clearly a real smart guy to be able to put together a run for that game. I'm tempted to continue his work but don't have time right now.
Coincidentally, I have spent a lot of time in Corvallis myself. The weather averages only 100 sunny days a year, almost all of them from June-Sept. So by "spring" the rain gets really painful. Famously, Kurt Cobain's suicide was in Seattle on April 5.
Anyway, if you have or suspect you have any mental health problem you need to take care of yourself! I was about the same age as Zidanax when I finally figured out that I have a severe form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. It took a lot of work and some significant changes to my life (moving to someplace with nicer weather) to manage it, but it was all worth it. If you can control your mood swings you really can do anything.
If you want to be an ally to us moody people I suggest just being a little more sensitive in general. Depression magnifies any perception of social rejection. Keep in mind that you can't see the other person online. Also, give us moody people some extra space. Sometimes we just need to be alone to wait out our mood swings.
I spent three years in Seattle and just couldn't hack it. The sun seriously goes away in September and you basically don't see it at all until April. For some people that's great, but not so much for me.
There are tricks you can pull to mitigate the effects without having to move -- full-spectrum lightbulbs, light boxes, etc. It's worth researching if you think it might be affecting you.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I spent three years in Seattle and just couldn't hack it. The sun seriously goes away in September and you basically don't see it at all until April. For some people that's great, but not so much for me.
Compare the latitude of Seattle to the latitude of even the southernmost places in Finland...
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
Yeah, light therapy takes me from severe depression to functional depression. It helps but it's no substitute for real sunlight. Apparently it works for most people though.
Higher latitude does affect things but in the Pacific Northwest US cloud cover is really the killer (literally in some unfortunate cases). Unless you are a vampire you probably don't like cloudy days. But if you have SAD then it becomes a serious health issue!
There are also some extra challenges in the US. We don't have universal health insurance yet, so college students like Zidanax are often uninsured or underinsured. Americans assume that the early 20s are a healthy age but it happens to be when disorders like this often begin or pick up. Check out 'A Beautiful Mind' for a well-known example.
Another American problem is that there is a huge stigma associated with mental health issues. So if you have depression you not only need to overcome your lack of motivation but also figure out how your health insurance works and decide who you can trust with your secret. You end up either hiding a big part of yourself or distancing yourself from everyone. Everyone rushes to help out the guy in a wheelchair but we look the other way and avoid those with mental issues.
Yeah, light therapy takes me from severe depression to functional depression. It helps but it's no substitute for real sunlight. Apparently it works for most people though.
Higher latitude does affect things but in the Pacific Northwest US cloud cover is really the killer (literally in some unfortunate cases). Unless you are a vampire you probably don't like cloudy days. But if you have SAD then it becomes a serious health issue!
There are also some extra challenges in the US. We don't have universal health insurance yet, so college students like Zidanax are often uninsured or underinsured. Americans assume that the early 20s are a healthy age but it happens to be when disorders like this often begin or pick up. Check out 'A Beautiful Mind' for a well-known example.
Another American problem is that there is a huge stigma associated with mental health issues. So if you have depression you not only need to overcome your lack of motivation but also figure out how your health insurance works and decide who you can trust with your secret. You end up either hiding a big part of yourself or distancing yourself from everyone. Everyone rushes to help out the guy in a wheelchair but we look the other way and avoid those with mental issues.
As a fellow also living in the US, I have to disagree with all of this.
First of all, health insurance is a non-issue, especially for American college students, as all of them are insured under their school's coverage. In addition to that, just about every college has a free health clinic on-campus AND mental health counselors available 24/7.
Also, I would highly dispute the idea that there is a "huge stigma associated with mental health issues".
I have multiple friends who have seen psychiatrists for issues such as depression and various mental disorders, and not once has any of them gotten anything but support for it. If anything, seeing a psychiatrist is considered a very normal and healthy way to tackle one's mental health problems here.
My point is that the resources are out there in US society. If you're struggling with mental health issues, go and see a psychiatrist and see if they can help.
On a totally unrelated note, love your FF1 runs, TheAxeMan!
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
IronSlayer wrote:
As a fellow also living in the US, I have to disagree with all of this.
If what I said before is wrong then great. I've been out of college for a few years now and hopefully things have gotten better. One school I went to had very poor coverage on account of being in a small town and having no medical campus. There was a small, limited service student health center with a limit on the number of free clinic visits you got.
I also hope you are right about the mental health stigma going away. I think things are definitely better among younger people. Unfortunately we have a lot of stubborn older folks who are less accepting yet control many of our institutions. I am probably a bit jaded because my parents are in that group.
We definitely have health resources in the US but accessing them is not as easy as it should be. Ease of access is also not very equal at all. Dealing with something like this is never easy but can be much harder in some situations.
Anyway, glad you like my runs! One of my motivations in TASing is to stick with a big project to prove to myself that I have my disorder under control. I also want to prove that us moody people can do amazing things. Not just to earn the respect of deniers but also to inspire other moody people to work harder at managing their disorders.
If what I said before is wrong then great. I've been out of college for a few years now and hopefully things have gotten better. One school I went to had very poor coverage on account of being in a small town and having no medical campus. There was a small, limited service student health center with a limit on the number of free clinic visits you got.
I completed undergrad myself a few years ago. It was a small, private technical school in SoCal with a very big reputation in subjects like physics, chemistry, etc.It didn't have a lot of the student amenities that many other schools did, but was very good on the medical coverage/free health services front. I'm sure it differs from school to school, but most colleges do address these issues.
TheAxeMan wrote:
I also hope you are right about the mental health stigma going away. I think things are definitely better among younger people. Unfortunately we have a lot of stubborn older folks who are less accepting yet control many of our institutions. I am probably a bit jaded because my parents are in that group.
We definitely have health resources in the US but accessing them is not as easy as it should be. Ease of access is also not very equal at all. Dealing with something like this is never easy but can be much harder in some situations.
Well, it's hard to speak in pure generalities about the subject.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, lived in Los Angeles County for 5 years for undergrad and work, and then moved back to the Bay Area. I can't speak to older generations in other parts of the US, but the people I came across (young and old) were very accepting and often encouraging towards seeing a psychiatrist, mental health counselor, etc.
TheAxeMan wrote:
Anyway, glad you like my runs! One of my motivations in TASing is to stick with a big project to prove to myself that I have my disorder under control. I also want to prove that us moody people can do amazing things. Not just to earn the respect of deniers but also to inspire other moody people to work harder at managing their disorders.
Yeah, one thing that impressed me about your FF1 runs is how much "juice" you manage to squeeze out of a game that at first, seems like a very straightforward and dull choice for an RPG run. Instead, you manage to find a lot of creative and neat tricks, even in such an old game with such limited mechanics.
It was quite inspirational, in fact.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1978
Location: Making an escape
People talk about stigmas as though the only "stigma" is that of being ostracization. I know my fear of being open with certain issues I have falls under the much broader category of "being different", whether it's a good or bad difference, when I want to be treated like everyone else. What if your fear is finding yourself on the end of a massive pity party and you want to be left alone? It doesn't matter if you're receiving tons of support, you're still "different" and can't quite get along with anyone anymore. You go from being, "That nice but quiet guy seen wandering the halls sometimes," to, "Oh, it's that poor dear getting psychotherapy for whatever ails him, we should send him cookies to cheer him up."
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Joined: 7/17/2004
Posts: 985
Location: The FLOATING CASTLE
IronSlayer wrote:
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area
Ah, there you have it. Socially, the west coast is like a completely different country from the midwest where I grew up and went to school. I am much happier now in the Bay Area and I'll never move back. There are reasons beyond jobs for the net migration out of the area.
Ferret Warlord wrote:
People talk about stigmas...
Yeah, I do worry about that, even when people are otherwise very accepting. You also need to worry about not pitying yourself. That's why these days I sort of go on a need-to-know basis. Even if I can't completely hide it, most people will just assume that I'm a bit eccentric. But I definitely don't mind discussing it if there's a good reason. Like preventing other tragedies like Zidanax.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
The post was exactly made on 2012-03-05 04:22:19 (UTC). Presumably the poster is from Oregon (as was zidanax, who he was coworker/classmate of). The majority of Oregon would be at time zone UTC -8 at the time, so in his area, the time he made the post would be 2012-03-04 20:22:19. The fourth of March 2012 was a sunday. The poster mentioned "last weekend", and considering for him it was still weekend at the time, "last weekend" would more than likely refer to the previous weekend, which was February 25th and 26th. Zidanax was considered missing since saturday on the 25th of February, which would be considered "last weekend" at the time of posting. Based on knowledge about zidanax' issues and the fact that he had been missing for 8 days by that point, suicide was a likely conclusion (there may have been other factors unbeknownst to us too).
It does all add up.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
Mothrayas wrote:
Based on knowledge about zidanax' issues and the fact that he had been missing for 8 days by that point, suicide was a likely conclusion (there may have been other factors unbeknownst to us too).
Well, it seems all that was known was that some man had jumped off the bridge by the same time he disappeared.
For all the police cared about, at that point he was still missing.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Honestly, I don't think any of us should look into that post for more then what it is. We are never going to have all the answers of why zidanax did what he did. There's the possibilities of a suicide note, or of him telling other people that he's "going to do it", or other similar actions. Typically people who commit suicide will make actions like that not because they want to commit suicide, but because they don't.
Now why he didn't mention anything to us is hard to say. Maybe because he didn't consider us his friends? Maybe because the internet isn't serious business? Or maybe because he felt we couldn't help? It's impossible to say and we will never know.
At this point we just need to accept that he has left us, moved on to a better place, and help others in ways that make their life better.
...or something like that. I'm always bad at these speeches.
Now why he didn't mention anything to us is hard to say. Maybe because he didn't consider us his friends? Maybe because the internet isn't serious business? Or maybe because he felt we couldn't help? It's impossible to say and we will never know.
While suicide can sometimes be very spontaneous and surprising (even to the person him/herself), it's more often the result of a long period of depression and desperation (when it's not caused by an outright mental illness). Often people in this state show early warning signs (such as giving references to the problems they are experiencing and the subsequent depression, which might escalate over time), but every person is different, and not all depressed and desperate people necessarily show any signs, even to their closest friends.
In fact, if someone like that feels deterred from talking about their problems and depression to others (eg. because of a feel of shame or the fear of being shunned or laughed at), that usually only worsens the problem.
Often they do talk about it, but only to close friends. They might feel that his problems are best not divulged to the internet because they are personal.
Unfortunately, many times these close friends fail to see the warning signs. They may listen and be understanding, but might still just shrug it off as just a passing phase, or something minor. The majority of people wouldn't even know how to help such a person. (Some people try to give empty advise that's not helpful, others just realize that they don't know how to handle the situation and just let it be. Seldom do they suspect that this person might actually be suicidal, though.)
