The Eccentric Realist

It's World Suicide Prevention Day. This morning, a high school student went out with a self-inflicted gunshot, which sent ripples through the city. It's clear that we have to talk about this, but you can't slay your enemy if you don't understand it, so I'm going to help you understand a bit of what it's about. It's still a taboo subject in most places, and it's uncomfortable to talk about because it implies suffering, which we don't like to deal with. That's all right, that's instinct, but you're going to have to forego that instinct for a little while. Let's talk numbers first. I'm going to refer to the statistics on suicide in the United States, but note that this will vary per country. The rate is 13.32 per 100,000 individuals, which gives 123 suicides per day, of which 51% are done with firearms. men die by suicide 3.53 times more than women, with white males being 70% of total suicides, and with the highest rate being t...

It's a no-brainer that the way we live nowadays is so different from our more primal days, so much that, were any of us taken back to those times, death would be more likely than survival. The same could be said about the reverse, but the lifestyle that humanity used to have was better suited for us. After all, we'd evolved around it. When speaking of illness, there are two factors to consider, the physical and the mental. If we're dealing with a hierarchy of needs, though, and there is a hierarchy for everything, then we see that, to survive, the physical must be taken care of first. 5: Lights on One of the main things that we lost with the arrival of civilization and technology is that of the natural cycle of the day, from campfires and torches to the screen on your cell phone. The world is getting brighter, and it's less expensive as we go along. Places which have never been lit are getting illuminated, and where there is light, it can shine far into t...

Synesthesia is pretty close to a superpower. Think about sense. How we process the world impacts the way life itself can feel. Go to a concert with a blind person, deaf, and normal person, and they'll all give you wildly different accounts of what they went to do. That goes for just about anything. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Our senses can work together to paint a vivid picture of the world, but for most people, this is superficial. Food will taste better if you can smell it. You can predict how some texture will feel by sight alone. If you're in the wild, you'll rely on your sense of hearing because, by the time you actually see a predator, it'll be too late. We have more than those, of course, but today we're focusing on people who have a deep synergy between them. Imagine running your hand over this bad boy This is a tough one to diagnose, mostly because it's not a condition which gets in your way that much, and you could not even reali...

Fallacies exist in every way, shape, or form, including the cognitive, which is the type we're focusing on today. They shouldn't be confused with logical fallacies, which you can either use to fool your opponents or avoid it to be a more legitimate debater, rather, these are tricks that your mind plays on you. The mind is designed to make decisions as quickly as possible with the input that we have available. These mental shortcuts can be handy, especially in dire situations, but sometimes our mind just can't cope with different issues such as some overabundance of input, social pressure, or emotions. It's the same as stereotyping. Your mind needs to act quickly, but this can come at the expense of the best results from time to time.  Here are a few ways your mind can trick you.  5: Confirmation bias If you have some ideology or worldview, it's more than likely that you've fallen for this fallacy before. Facts are facts. Sometimes we can'...

So it's Friday and you've got nothing to do, so you might as well sit down and crunch a good story. The hard part is coming up with something to write about, fortunately, here are some more writing prompts just in case you need a little bit of inspiration. You can also check out the first and second parts of this series by clicking on the links Make your character as miserable as humanly possible Write about some place that you avoid in real life Take a story with common tropes, and make them stand out from the rest Make two characters with the same name, and distinguish them only through dialogue The whole world uses the same currency now Establish a character's greatness, and destroy it by the end of the story Take an everyday habit of yours and make it a horror story Everyone can only speak in rhyme, and they hate it The universe hates your character and always stacks the odds against him Aliens have invaded, but humanity can barely comprehend them Wr...

A caveat, a lot of these horror stories are shared throughout Latin America and even back in Spain so some of these may have other versions in other countries. Seeing as we just lived a horror story in our game against Sweden, it seems only appropriate to share the ones we have. Horror is the gift that keeps on giving. Everyone has their own boogeyman to deal with, and some excellent storytellers, like Guillermo del Toro, have given the world a taste of what we can come up with given enough imagination. Here are a few of the stories that we've inherited from our strange past. 5: El Chupacabra That's a naked bear, but you get the idea We're starting off with a simple concept. This is one of the more famous tales, and there have been "sightings" all across the continent, including in the southern United States, and it's not uncommon to see news from even reliable networks concerning the possibility that it chose to attack a farm. This beast i...

Most people who try to lose weight will fail. It's my intention to help you be part of that small percentage of people who do get to succeed. Motivation, as I've mentioned in other posts, isn't what will get you through to losing weight, rather, discipline, which is more consistent. The problem with discipline is that it's like a muscle. Exert it too much, and it'll fail. The trick with dieting is that you have to organize yourself in a way that will help you need less discipline than usual when you're controlling what you eat. This can go from the types of foods you eat to how you eat them, and many other factors. Let's go through them.  5: Change your mindset Some people go on these extreme diets which involve restricting yourself for a week to the point of exhaustion, and after having lost a couple of pounds, usually water weight, they go back to eating like they used to, none the wiser. It's not unknown for some to compensate and actu...

Native Americans are a vastly diverse culture, despite many grouping them into one homogeneous group, and from the many tribes that have gotten to exist, we're bound to get some good stories. They're human, of course, so they have the same fears that we do, with a different way to express them. Here are some of their more interesting tales. 5: Kanontsistonties: The Flying Heads This one sounds almost likes something Junji Ito would have made up. These cannibalistic monsters came to exist because of a famine which wiped out most of a tribe. The young ones wanted to flee, but the elders were against the idea and would rather perish in their own land than leave it behind, so the young ones killed the old men. To dispose of their remains, they decided to decapitate the bodies and offer them to the gods for forgiveness, so they did, but one of the young chiefs entangled himself among the heads and drowned with them in the lake, and since then, the monsters appeared. As fo...

Sometimes it can feel like the universe is against you when the truth is that the universe can be pretty much indifferent. This applies to nature itself, which will function as it has for millions of years without us, and humanity, which hasn't evolved in preparation for high-speed, high-pressure lifestyles and coexisting with many other people, be it millions or even just thousands. Before we were domesticated by the Agricultural Revolution, we had to function as nomads, hunting, and harvesting until whichever spot we inhabited ran out of resources, and so we'd wander around an area in a cycle. This meant that there couldn't be too many people in the same place at the same time unless you wanted to risk running out of resources too quickly. So, imagine one person. Say it's a man, thirty years old, tanned skin, dark hair, average build. You don't need to wonder much about what he does, as he's just a hypothetical man, but what if I asked you to...

When you ask people why they want to lose weight, they'll usually tell you that it's for some health reason, or they're just looking to spend less on food. True as that might be, it's usually a secondary objective. Most people who want to lose weight want to look good. Is that a bad thing though? The fact of the matter is that anybody can empathize with you. Everybody's been picked on for their looks, skinny, tall, short, whatever, but if you're fat, at least you have the means to fix that. Perhaps your former significant other broke up with you and that was the straw that broke the camel's back, so hard that you had no choice but to go on a diet. Maybe you want to fit into your nice clothes again. God knows that leather jacket looked pretty good on you five years ago, so why not make the effort to fit in it again? It may sound like a case of vanity, and perhaps that goes against your personal values. For some people, this sort of mission repre...

Looking from the outside, one could imagine Japan as a foreign world. Their culture is vastly different than anything conceived in the West, likely due to the long distance and their isolated nature, which gave them time to develop something different. They're still human, though, and like humans, have the same root fears which birth their stories. Here are a few of them. 5: The Ghost of Oyuki This is a famous painting of a female yurei, which is what they call their ghosts. This one was painted by Maruyama Ōkyo, founder of the Maruyama-Shijō school of painting. According to the inscription, the artist had a mistress at the Tominaga geisha house, who died young, and he, naturally, mourned her death. One night, the woman appeared at the foot of his bed, and he couldn't get the image out of his head, so he painted her as he saw her, pale with black eyes and long, disheveled hair.  4: The Speaking Skull Back in 1300, from a temple in the Nara prefecture ca...

Language. Not entirely unique to humanity. Though we share the non-verbal with the rest of the animal kingdom, the ability to communicate precise thoughts through spoken or written words is unique to us. It's thought that some of the deepest thoughts by the greatest philosophers couldn't be fully expressed to us because there just weren't any words to express it, a terrible tragedy, to say the least. If you're not going to learn another language, which you should, then at least you can get an edge on your psyche with these emotions that just can't be put to a single word in English. 10: Sehnsucht "The inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what"; a yearning for a far, familiar, non-earthly land one can identify as one's home. If that's what the Germans coined, then the answer probably isn't over there. Although you can translate this word as simply "longing", or more literally to "long addiction,...