Cindy Evanier Posted April 18, 2020 Share Posted April 18, 2020 *hands @Seicher Rae a mug of something hot and a soft cushion to cuddle or punch* We're all here to listen when you need it and you don't need to worry about how the words come out with us. (most of us) 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Gregoire Posted April 18, 2020 Share Posted April 18, 2020 Since facial recognition can't be relied on in SL I've had to substitute name recognition. Now that we have name changes, that's gone out the window and I'm surrounded by a bunch of strangers. I don't normally speak to people I don't recognize. *sigh* I can't win for losing. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kali Wylder Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 On 4/17/2020 at 9:07 PM, Seicher Rae said: Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess. Mine too! I can't even remember how I discovered her but she is one blogger that i keep on my bookmarks bar so I won't forget to go see what's new. about whats his name, take your time, you can answer when you're ready and you'll know what to say. You don't have to say anything until you want to. Man, relationships can really be the pits. I found my self thinking about a failed one again tonight. I've been with Carson for over a year now, but there was one that didn't work out before him, not right before because I always need to be alone for a while after a break up. But some time after things didn't work out for us, he had a stroke. It left him somewhat paralyzed in one arm and he left SL because he couldn't type a conversation anymore. I've thought about him a few times since the plague struck.... He was very isolated. I'm sure he's even more isolated now. Makes my heart ache. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kali Wylder Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 21 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said: Since facial recognition can't be relied on in SL I've had to substitute name recognition. Now that we have name changes, that's gone out the window and I'm surrounded by a bunch of strangers. I don't normally speak to people I don't recognize. *sigh* I can't win for losing. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marigold Devin Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 (edited) 23 hours ago, TDD123 said: @Maryanne Solo I highly recommend : Look Mum, No Computer ! Oh my word! The Furby computer!!!! That is just AMAZING - all the little blighters singing along! Must show my brother, he loved faddling about with the soldering iron. Edited April 19, 2020 by Marigold Devin 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panteleeva Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 the most popular videos on youtube are voice messages from parents discussing school study while quarantine,.LOTS of hate, annoy,all are angry ,too much dirty words,screaming.etc.And then kids chat where all of them just cry and ask anyone to save them. And all these parents screaming OUR kids are stpd!!!! thank god i graduated from school many years ago... i m afraid for these kids,all these parents just raise children,who will be dead inside....Ok maybe it s not that bad.but still. Also coming to any grocery is a big stress now.,all the workers looks at you like a beast,full of hate. I don t ask for unconditional love lol . But i m tired of having nightmares and panick attacks after grocery store. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marigold Devin Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 5 minutes ago, Panteleeva said: the most popular videos on youtube are voice messages from parents discussing school study while quarantine,.LOTS of hate, annoy,all are angry ,too much dirty words,screaming.etc.And then kids chat where all of them just cry and ask anyone to save them. And all these parents screaming OUR kids are stpd!!!! thank god i graduated from school many years ago... i m afraid for these kids,all these parents just raise children,who will be dead inside....Ok maybe it s not that bad.but still. Also coming to any grocery is a big stress now.,all the workers looks at you like a beast,full of hate. I don t ask for unconditional love lol . But i m tired of having nightmares and panick attacks after grocery store. It really is a difficult time. A lot of people are so worried inside, they have forgotten how to just be ... normal! I mean, whatever is normal. Shop workers are either putting on fake smiles for regular customers, or they are looking quite mean or stern - but it is only because they are there on the front line, fearing the worst themselves. We are no longer people - we are all potential carriers of the virus. All of us. I walk 1.6 miles between my home and that of my brother's. This is my main exercise. And on these walks, I call into a shop maybe to pick up something essential for myself or for my brother. And on these walks, there are other people also out walking. For exercise. To go from A to B. To shop for essential items. I always give a larger space - it is always me that is the one to move - but I always smile and acknowledge the other person/people. Mostly they do not talk. They do not look at me. As if I have the disease already. BUT some will smile back, and they will be relieved that another person is still a person and there is then a connection, and if only one person out of ten does this for me, my day feels MUCH better. I would say to you, continue being wonderful you, do not assume anyone dislikes you or hates you (which I know is hard because of your family that have damaged you somewhat). Say inside yourself every single day "I am a worthwhile person, I am a good person", because you ARE. And when you go out, maintain the social distance rules, keep yourself safe above all else, but always remember, behind that other person's facial expression is not mistrust, it is fear. These are fearful times. 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cindy Evanier Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 I for one am loving having my youngest at home so much. How wonderful to spend so much quality time with a 14 year old boy before that teenage period sets in when they grunt and stay hidden in their room. We have our school day structed and it includes stuff like gardening, cooking and he has even learnt how to turn the washine machine on. I feel quite lucky to have this extra time with him. As for me today my legs are having a real off day. I am still in my PJs at 2 pm and plans for a sunday dinner are put on hold. Tomorrows burgers will do because the legs don't want me to stand long enough to do much else. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seicher Rae Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 (edited) I blog and have done for many, many years, but it has always been off and on. The last time I blogged was around August 2019. I just... couldn't. When I have blogged I was an avid participant in a prompt each Saturday, for a stream of consciousness post. I have been reading each week, for all these months, what the prompts have been but I just haven't been able to post. Until today. I don't know what that means for my mental health situation. I thought I'd post my little stream of consciousness here as well, because: why not? The prompt is the word "practice." The stream of consciousness was flavored by the post I made here, yesterday, about not wanting to lie and say I'm fine when I'm not. For the record, I'm not psychotic, the "whispers" are the nagging self talk that we all have. Edited April 19, 2020 by Seicher Rae 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Selene Gregoire Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 3 hours ago, Cindy Evanier said: I for one am loving having my youngest at home so much. How wonderful to spend so much quality time with a 14 year old boy before that teenage period sets in when they grunt and stay hidden in their room. We have our school day structed and it includes stuff like gardening, cooking and he has even learnt how to turn the washine machine on. I feel quite lucky to have this extra time with him. 3 hours ago, Cindy Evanier said: As for me today my legs are having a real off day. I am still in my PJs at 2 pm and plans for a sunday dinner are put on hold. Tomorrows burgers will do because the legs don't want me to stand long enough to do much else. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Da5id Weatherwax Posted April 19, 2020 Share Posted April 19, 2020 Well, I'm no quite as bummed today as I was yesterday. My weekend started with the smell of hot plastic where no such odor should have been. I traced it to my computer which had demonstrated the old engineering maxim that "failures accumulate unidirectionally towards catastrophe." Sometime over the last couple of years both my CPU and GPU had, independently, quietly lost their ability to detect an overtemp event and shut themselves down. Since my system was well cooled I never even knew this, let alone was impacted by it in any way. Then the cooler packed in when I had left the machine on overnight running the final render of a 20min video sequence in Blender and downloading updates. Ouch. The case, the PSU and the drives are fine. Everything else inside the case was toasted. Now, I was planning on a GPU refresh at the end of this month anyway, and had squirreled away the funds for that. This wasn't going to cover about a 1.5k bill to replace CPU, GPU, motherboard and potentially memory too. I spent most of a day trying to work out what kind of bare-bones system I could rebuild but then when I made my excuses for not joining a scheduled family zoom chat my brother pointed out that he'd just got a bonus and the brake job, clutch job and swapping out a cracked exhaust manifold I'd done on his car probably saved him more in mechanics fees than it would cost to rebuild my system. I managed to persuade this little netbook to run a viewer just long enough to IM the managers of places I was due to play this week and tell ''em it wasn't going to happen, but at least it was "I'm out for a week" instead of "I'm out for the foreseeable" My other Saturday downer was the news that my daughter, who is an anesthetist working the ICU at a hospital in the Southeast of England was off work having developed a cough. This morning she texted me to let me know that the test had come back negative. So a much more "hopeful" Sunday than Saturday and I am no longer looking for the tiniest smidgeon of an excuse to break things and hurt people. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cindy Evanier Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 11 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said: My other Saturday downer was the news that my daughter, who is an anesthetist working the ICU at a hospital in the Southeast of England was off work having developed a cough. This morning she texted me to let me know that the test had come back negative. That is really great to hear. It must be such a scary time for you both 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maitimo Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 Yesterday I was in a really pissy mood because I'd volunteered to do some overtime for work and my net connection was so slow I couldn't actually do anything. After an hour an a half I gave up and cancelled the rest of my overtime hours for the day, so I won't be getting paid as much extra this week as I was hoping for. On the plus side, the extra hours I did on Saturday have covered the cost of my name-change, and my net connection is back to normal today. I guess they were doing weekend maintenance or something. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanity Fair Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 (edited) I will be honest: I have been in self-isolation in my apartment since March 16th, 2020, when I received permission from my employer to work from home. I have several underlying health conditions that mean I could have a severe, possibly even fatal, reaction if I were to become infected with the coronavirus. So even if they do slightly ease the social distancing policies in my real-world location, I will still likely be stuck here until there is a vaccine, which at the soonest would be 12 to 18 months from now. I worry about it a lot. I also worry about my parents, who are in their eighties and live in a seniors life-lease condo. I have suffered from lifelong, chronic clinical depression (for which I receive antidepressant prescription medication and talk therapy from a psychiatrist), and frankly, there have been times over the past month when I have struggled with anxiety, insomnia, depression, and anger (the anger is mostly directed at U.S. President Donald Trump). I find I have to stay OFF the news feeds and social media, because it tends to bring me down. This is going to be a mental health marathon for me, as it is for many people. I believe that we are going to see a wave of mental health issues because of the pandemic and the resulting economic shock. I find my Second Life hobby is one of the things that is helping keep me sane right now, and my overall blog traffic is up significantly these past couple of weeks, most of that related to my coverage of Second Life steals, deals, and freebies. I just wanted to share what's going on with me. I am OK, and I want to stress that I am not in any danger of self-harm, but it has been so hard lately. I even went and set up a second, semi-regular informal counselling session in Second Life with the friend of a trusted friend, who has trained as a peer counselor in a healthcare setting and has worked as a volunteer for a crisis hotline. I just ping her and we meet up at my home in SL and we chat about how I'm doing. I have restricted access to my home, and set it so that nobody outside my parcel can hear our voice chat, so it secure and private. We've only had one session so far, but it seems to be helpful, so we will continue. Edited April 20, 2020 by Vanity Fair 4 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanity Fair Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 On 4/12/2020 at 10:40 PM, Beth Macbain said: So. Since I'm currently working from home, and will be for the foreseeable future, I realized that I won't be drug-tested for the foreseeable future, either. Good time to see if some pot would help with my nerves, right? So my fella gave me instructions for getting onto the dark web so I could, you know, order some to be delivered the way he does. While exploring my options, I realized that I was getting far more anxious worrying about the feds showing up at my door to arrest me for ordering a little weed during a pandemic, and that if I actually did order some, I'd be in a panic for however long it takes to be delivered. So... no pot for me. I'm pretty sad about that. You need to move to Canada. It's legal here now. The pot stores are doing booming business during the pandemic. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanity Fair Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 (edited) On 4/17/2020 at 9:25 PM, Seicher Rae said: I am currently reading Don Quixote because I never had to in school. I'm quite enjoying it, which I probably wouldn't have if I did have to read it in school. I'm feeling guilty because I haven't blogged since October, and wasn't blogging much even then and I'm losing contact with that virtual family. It is easier to type forum comments, because that's usually on a topic and I don't have to make it about me (except for this thread, oddly enough). Blogging regularly means having something to say regularly and while I blog about mental health issues it isn't all I blog about and ugh. I don't wanna. But I do. Guilt guilt guilt. I love Don Quixote! I read it as a teenager and it is sill one of my favourite novels. And I can relate about the blogging. Please don't be too hard on yourself with respect to feeling guilty. There's no "shoulds", or right or wrong ways to blog. Since April 1st, I have started to use my blog as a sort of pandemic diary, which is so NOT what I usually blog about, which is social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse. But some of my readers have told me they appreciate me sharing details of how I am feeling in between all the "regular" blog posts. Edited April 20, 2020 by Vanity Fair 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seicher Rae Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 (edited) Well @Beth Macbain, you'll be pleased to learn that I didn't lie to my therapist today during our weekly phone session. It started out that way, with me saying "nothing new to report" which really is NOT a lie, just not the whole truth. For once she asked the right question and that took us down a road about my PTSD. I have PTSD on top of PTSD on top of PTSD, seriously, from separate incidences separated by many years. I got very delayed PTSD (years later) after a horrendous event in my twenties. My latest bout is due to the fall I took nearly a year ago, and that is one that is impacting my life. My current new apartment still has stairs for me to deal with and... I'm petrified, both with fear and literally imobile when thinking about those dammed stairs. Anyway, we talked about it again today. In the past weeks when it has come up, the therapist has been less than helpful. For some reason today she hit upon some things I haven't thought of before, some real ways to maybe combat this stuff. I'm not used to being such a weannie. Meanwhile I've been crying over the parts of One World Together that I've been watching, thinking of all the people on the front lines who aren't getting near the attention as other people who are causing problems for political reasons. Sigh. I have a lot of thinking to do about my life, my mental and physical health. Discussions that I avoid like the well... plague. You'd think being squirreled up alone for ages would promote such self discussion, but nope nope nope, the last thing I want to hear about is me in any reality based chat. It is much easier to go numb watching streaming shows and playing Hellblade. Edited April 20, 2020 by Seicher Rae 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kali Wylder Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 So this happened in some other thread. Somebody said something to the effect that preventing one from having other friends is considered abusive, and it was just so matter of fact. Of course that's abusive. Yet I was married to a person who did that to me for 24 years. And he was never physically violent with me, although he had quite a temper. I've been ruminating about it ever since I saw that. I could never see that it was abuse. I see it now. But oh, how I wish I had known sooner. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LittleMe Jewell Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 It was busy, busy, busy at work, with barely any time to think. Then after work I decided to head to the store. It had been a week or more since I had gone. Our grocery store is in a large lot that also has a Home Depot in it. Well, the people at that store were most definitely NOT doing only essential shopping -- the freaking parking lot was packed. Apparently all the folks not working have decided that they'll all go get their gardening stuff for the year and get started on that. It just never even dawns on me right now to go out for anything that I don't actually need for day to day life. On a happier note, they did have quite a bit of TP on the shelf, though there were minimal eggs there and the deli was still out of my favorite hard salami. I did manage to get almost everything that I went for, so all in all it was a good trip. The mask that I grabbed from the box on our table was a different kind than the one I had worn before and it did not fit as well. My glasses kept fogging up so I couldn't see and the mask had an odd odor to it. It was all I could do to keep from ripping the damn thing off of my face while in the store - and it was promptly pulled down the minute I exited the building. We do still have 2 of the ones left that feel & fit much like the N95 ones, but aren't. I considered trying to make some out of various material here at home, but all of the pictures I see of those have them laying pretty flat across the mouth. I have horrid sinus issues and thus I am pretty much a total mouth breather and thus can't stand anything that lays directly across my mouth. I think I'll hate anything that is not the duck-bill style far worse than what I already have. For the most part I really just absolutely DETEST masks. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seicher Rae Posted April 20, 2020 Share Posted April 20, 2020 (edited) 2 hours ago, kali Wylder said: So this happened in some other thread. Somebody said something to the effect that preventing one from having other friends is considered abusive, and it was just so matter of fact. Of course that's abusive. Yet I was married to a person who did that to me for 24 years. And he was never physically violent with me, although he had quite a temper. I've been ruminating about it ever since I saw that. I could never see that it was abuse. I see it now. But oh, how I wish I had known sooner. I hope you're not beating yourself about not recognizing it. That's fairly normal not to see it at the time. Not seeing the forest for the trees, etc. People often think physical when they think of abuse, even the targets of other types of abuse. "Oh, I don't have it so bad; I'm not getting hit after all..." You're out of it now, and now you know. Win win. Edited April 21, 2020 by Seicher Rae 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marigold Devin Posted April 21, 2020 Share Posted April 21, 2020 (edited) . Edited April 21, 2020 by Marigold Devin wax on wax off 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evangeline Ling Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 I've managed to stay relatively positive during these really crazy times until today. I'm an introvert with an SL addiction so I'm well equipped to manage social distance... I've been training for it for much of my life... Today things got real... My friend and coworker of the last 15 years was placed in critical condition and is on a ventilator. Right now they don't think he will make it... 💔😢 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karynmaria Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 1 hour ago, Evangeline Ling said: I've managed to stay relatively positive during these really crazy times until today. I'm an introvert with an SL addiction so I'm well equipped to manage social distance... I've been training for it for much of my life... Today things got real... My friend and coworker of the last 15 years was placed in critical condition and is on a ventilator. Right now they don't think he will make it... 💔😢 I am so sorry to hear this Evangeline. I will be keeping him in my thoughts and prayers. 4 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marigold Devin Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 I am feeling very sore today. Well my buttocks are! I was in my brother's garden yesterday morning, had just put a load of feathers from a pillow onto his garden, because the sparrows and some other birds are nesting currently, and I was s-l-o-w-l-y walking backwards, watching these cute little birds all dive bombing into the feathers and flying off in all directions looking like birdie versions of Salvador Dali, when I somehow missed my footing and found myself falling in slow motion backwards, landing with full force, onto a hard top step. My arse cheeks are black and blue, and look like I've had a right royal spanking! Other than that, I am comfortably numb. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beth Macbain Posted April 22, 2020 Author Share Posted April 22, 2020 I am absolutely over it today. Just completely over all of it. Maybe because it's Wednesday. Is it Wednesday? I'm making Swedish meatballs right now and they smell divine so that may help with my mood... but damn, I am just over it. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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