Slashdot Mirror
Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet
theodp writes "Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students 'What time do you go to bed?,' young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, 'Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.' She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world."
And here I thought the lack of interaction with people was a positive aspect of staying up late.
I find it funny this story popped up around 2am est as well. Now back to facebook...
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
I would guess a lot of slashdotters fall in to this category or at least at some point have. But the difference is that I enjoy the quiet and alone time during night and hence would stay away from sites like Facebook. You get insane amount of work done during night time - there's no people chitchatting all the time nor can you really go out somewhere so you don't get lazy. It does however lead to weird sleeping patterns, but as long as you don't need to go anywhere in the morning it doesn't really matter anymore.
She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world
Like most people in Britain then . . .
I'm in Australia you insensitive clod!
Once forums, IRC channels, and other websites that are driven by user-created content reach a certain size, there is no longer a difference between "daytime" and "night time" because while Americans slumber, Europeans are waking up, and Australians are coming home from work. "Peak" time ceases to mean anything once you're factoring in physical location and have at least two "peak" times. You use the same forum as others, but probably know different mods, OPs, and key players.
It is important that the Internet hang-out be user-driven, because groups who select content to publish tend to originate in geographic proximity, and a single time zone becomes favored.
Facebook isn't a place where it's easy to intrude on a social network in a geographical location outside your own, so I don't understand why the author isn't using a broader term.
Insomnia (307.42, DSM IV, pg. 599) [doesn't every geek have a copy of the official guide to crazy human behavior?] is not the word I would use (I don't have a problem getting to sleep or maintaining sleep). I'm a night owl. My whole life I have basically lived ~8 hours behind wherever I live (i.e. I go to bed at 4-5am local time), and I sleep for 8 to 8.5 hours like a clock (seriously, my primary experience of sleep is I put my head down and then *poof* I'm awake, rested, and it's 8 to 8.5 hours later). Fortunately I have found a way to use this to my benefit (tech writer/minimal interruptions, cover stuff that happens at night). But honestly the though of a "regular" 9-5 existence sort of ... well horrifies me (when do you normal people run errands? and rush hour, like WTF? you realize that you can belt across a city at 2pm in like 15 minutes, but at rush hour that will easily take an hour). Also added advantages: the internet (locally) is faster (the normals are asleep), no phone/email/SMS/IM/etc. interruptions(the normals are asleep) and as a result I am far more productive.
She was a stripper, is there anything else I need to know? I probably won't hear anything else after the word stripper, anyway....
I'll be here all night.
As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.
I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.
Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.
Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.
I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
This is obviously a desperate cry for help from Lily - she's never been able to escape the shadow of her more famous sister, Carmina.
#DeleteChrome
conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world
My problem goes a step further. I like to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for like 10. I spend the same amount of my life sleeping/awake as a normal person, just in longer chunks. Trouble is, left to my own devices, I effectively "stay up" 4 hours later each night untill I wrap back around. Before I had a job I could actually live like that. It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
My condolences.
"These lumivores reject the safety of darkness and appear to seek out light. Sickening !"
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
What does insomnia have to do with being nocturnal? Night owls still sleep, they just sleep in the daytime! Insomniacs can't sleep at all, the poor buggers. It figures, it was written by a journalist. They aren't the sharpest pencils in the box, you know.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The issue is not so much the amount of rain that falls. It's the number of days with rain or with lotsa clouds. I've lived in the Provence, which is reputedly dry, and in Brittany (the small one, west of France). Both get about as much rain, but
- the Provence gets it over a few days, pretty much always at the same time (spring, autumn, and a few thunderstrom is summer), with a clear build-up of clouds where you can see it's gonna rain tomorrow, gets hammered by a great big rain, and then goes for weeks without rain.
- Brittany gets its rain any day, any season. Any day can start off sunny with no clouds, and rain by midday. It often will be a pitiful drizzle, that counts for little water, except is f***ing wet and takes the fun out of doing anything outdoors.
Yearly statistics (http://www.worldweather.org/010/c00032.htm)
Number of rain days in London: 139, total rain = 600 mm, number of pure sunny days = N/A
Number of rain days in Marseilles: 55, total rain = 554mm, number of pure sunny days = N/A
So yeah, Marseilles gets as much rain as London. No, it is not, and does not feel, any way near as rainy.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
insomnia is a mark of depression or anxiety or a number of physical problems
if you are an insomniac, you have a problem that will eat into your ability to carry on with your jobs or your relationships
additionally, your health will suffer: many normal physical processes are tied into circadian rhythms, such as cholesterol production, and fat burning
insomnia is not a mark of subculture pride, it is a danger warning
treat your insomnia, it is not in any way cool
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it