I considered Virgil to be a good friend of mine for a very long time, and the last few years have been deeply saddening for me due to his increasingly bizarre beliefs and his irresponsible and inexcusable behavior, especially towards his female friends and colleagues. This is not the Virgil I knew when I first met him.
I cannot speak for other people, but for me personally, the pseudoscientific reactionary ideas you mention were very appealing to me at one point in time because I had, and still have, a very difficult time attracting women. There was a period of time in my life when I spent a lot of time reading pickup artist/RedPill/men's rights content on the Internet until I managed to escape it, mostly via the help of supportive friends. I think that there are a lot of misguided nerdy young men who fall into this frightening rabbit hole, where one bad ideology leads to another.
The worst part is that it drives good women even further away. Now you're not just a nerd but also an asshole.
The kinds of women you will get by being an asshole are the kinds who are assholes themselves. The result is usually an abusive relationship where she treats you like shit, which further reinforces the misogynistic ideology by "proving" once again how bad women are.
So yes it's an obvious downward spiral. Kudos for seeing it.
It sounds like Virgil slammed more kool aid than I thought.
Still waiting for the HyperCard source code to be released. I am acquainted with one of the members of the original HyperCard team, but he says his old floppies are no longer readable. :(
Actually, the Russians developed a completely different programming language Prolog and Prol2 that had nothing to do with the French Prolog. It just happened to have the same name.
I too am currently having the same problem. I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people. I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done. I feel very disappointed in myself and in my life because I was having high expectations about how awesome college would be after a crappy high school experience.
I'm sorry to hear that. It was a genuinely terrible phase of my life, and caused a lot of personal re-evaluation for me.
I actually adored high school. There were 330 people in my graduating class. I graduated third, only a sliver of GPA away from salutatorian. There were 6 National Merit Finalists in my class (including myself) and one of the things that always drove me to excel in high school was the sense of competition with my very intelligent peers, along with the support of some amazing teachers who actually cared about us and would be actively disappointed when one of us didn't live up to our potential. Many of my advanced classes in high school were very small. We had 12 people in our AP Chem class.
Then I got to college and I was just another number. I lost my peer support group and any meaningful feedback on my work from my instructors and with it, my motivation.
Until that point in my life, I'd always had my sense of self and identity tangled up with academic achievement. I was a "smart kid". Doing poorly in college didn't just feel like a failure to get a particular grade, it made me feel like I was a failure as a person.
It took me years to get over that. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I am completely over it. But at least I don't let it consume me anymore.
You're more than your grades, you're more than college. There is so. much. more. to any single person than a single facet. If you think you'd do better in a smaller school, try to transfer before it's too late. Or if you decide that college isn't for you, don't beat yourself up about it. You can still well, especially in technical fields where skill is more important than a sheet of paper.
And get help for the depression, if you aren't already. I spent about a year on Effexor (and Ambien for the crippling insomnia that piggybacked onto my depression - it was terrible, I used to get auditory hallucinations of alarms clocks and phones ringing in the distance) and it truly made the difference. True clinical depression is a chemical blackhole in your own mind, and the drugs can give you the foothold you need to find your way back out of it.
I feel like I have to get good grades, work research projects, and develop good relationships with other students, TAs, and professors in order to become better. I find it hard to relax because I feel like I'll be mediocre and end up working with third-rate soulless clock punchers; I want to work with first-rate colleagues.
> I am attending a very large state school (over 40,000 students) and I am struggling to connect with people.
Though the crowd might make you uncomfortable, you can take solace in the fact that you need not connect with all of them. Friends, or close friends, are mostly in single digit for most people.
> I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done.
Letting the mind wander isn't a bad thing, provided you get some stuff done as well. Plan for small tasks which you can get done. Are you familiar with lexers and parser? Implement an infix(a+b) to postfix(ab+) converter, where `a+b` can be an arbitrarily complex expression. Learning Python? Build a web app which takes a movie name as an input(use any web framework), searches twitter for mentions(use urlliib2 or equivalent), classifies tweets as negative/positivie(simple bayes classifier or use a library) and assigns a rating to the movie.
These are just examples. Getting things done makes you feel good and can help you counter the "disappointment" you mention.
So the way the OCD works is that I HAVE to have my documents formatted a certain way (e.g. characters per line), the time stamps a certain nice number, or I get super angry at myself. I HAVE to begin and finish eating, sleeping, and working at certain hours of the day. It suddenly arose within the last 8 months or so and I have no idea what causes it.
Doctor. Go see a doctor about it. If you're currently a student you probably have some sort of access to free/affordable healthcare, even if it just means starting at the university clinic. If the OCD started after/around the same time as the depression, then fixing the depression might fix the OCD.
Right now they're just feeding off each other. A big part of depression is feeling like you have no control over what's happening in your life. The OCD might be a way you're trying to feel like you have control over something again, even if it's just the formatting of your documents or when you wake up. Then when you can't achieve that you feel even more out of control and more depressed and the cycle is just going keep getting tighter.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go see someone and get this looked into. I know it's scary, I know it might feel like it's too hard or like it's pointless, but just do it. It took my mom actually showing up and physically taking me to the doctor before I started to get help, and by then school was ruined for me, and so was my credit. I had declare bankruptcy a few years later to shed the debt that I had run up while I was too depressed to make myself pay bills. Not the best way to start your mid-twenties.
