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."

Comments

So?

[spiffmastercow]

And here I thought the lack of interaction with people was a positive aspect of staying up late.

Re:Anybody here?

[Slack0ff]

I find it funny this story popped up around 2am est as well. Now back to facebook...

Re:Anybody here?

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Anybody here?

[Veroxii]

I'm in Australia you insensitive clod!

Time Zones

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is the right word

[MichaelCrawford]

Wikipedia has a good article on Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

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.

Re:Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is the right word

[Nazlfrag]

Sleeping drugs won't fix it, they will help short term but you will build up resistance to the point your natural cycle again takes precedence.

I've had this all my life (a 3am-11am sleep window) and it can be altered by staying up an hour or two later a day until you hit where you want to be and then sticking to it, but those weeks of work are undone if you stay up late just once, and your body reverts to its natural cycle of 3am sleep (or whatever yours is).

It's really just better to work your life around it than force yourself into unnatural (for you) sleep patterns.

I find smoking weed helps if I need to get to sleep & wake early, otherwise staying awake all night is better than trying to sleep early if I absolutely must be alert and active before noon.

Poor girl

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:"insomnia" is probably the wrong word

[fahrbot-bot]

OK. I'm just guessing, but the structure and pacing of your paragraph lead me to think that you might benefit from less caffeine in your diet. :-)

Re:Anybody here?

[Insanity Defense]

My condolences.

Re:Anybody here?

[obarthelemy]

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.