Varku

Terminology Index

5 min read

Mental Health

Anhedonia

Inability to experience pleasure from daily activities and from activities or interactions that normally are considered pleasurable.

Persons affected by anhedonia may appear to enjoy an activity but may not actually experience or feel the corresponding emotions. Anhedonia is a common symptom of depression and a primary feature of major depressive disorder. It also is associated with borderline personality disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and schizophrenia.

Paracosm

A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood. The creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions. Commonly having its own geography, history, and language, it is an experience that is often developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time, months or even years, as a sophisticated reality that can last into adulthood.

Antagonomia

A characteristic of schizotypal personality disorder is a pervasive skepticism towards commonly shared belief systems, ways of thinking, assumptions, and values, and a choice to take an eccentric stance in opposition. Antagonomia is accompanied by the experience of being an “outsider” or “observer” of the social world which non-schizotypal individuals are embodied within, and drive to understand others in a detached, “morbid” intellectual, scientific-like manner and see what’s “behind the curtains”. Often individuals experience this as a gift, giving a sense of radical uniqueness and exceptionality of their being and their understanding of the world, which is referred to as “idionomia” . It is thought that antagonomia in high functioning persons may lead to scientific creativity due to tendencies of questioning what is normally taken for granted.

Anderssein

In the past, the German term Anderssein was used to describe a peculiar feature of schizophrenia - a seemingly unresolvable sense of difference to other people on an incredibly foundational level. This sense of difference was so bedrock that it even seemed to surpass full verbal or mental conceptualisation by patients. Sufferers could state that they felt different, but not why they felt different, and they couldn’t support their sense of difference via any real-world life experiences or circumstances. Such a difference, then, seemed almost prenatal. Primordial. Inevitable and inescapable (and, perhaps, it is…)

Personally, I view this Anderssein as one of the core experiences (or core symptoms, core disability facets) of schizophrenia-spectrum conditions. You can definitely see it in both schizophrenia and schizotypal disorder, and i’d personally argue that it is the defining disability that underpins schizoid personality disorder.

But here’s the thing: I think this Anderssein can manifest in different ways. For instance, some individuals with schizotypal disorder have their Anderssein form as a blanket paranoia of others. The individual feels fundamentally different (I.e. that they shouldn’t logically fit with other humans), and so a great paranoia develops that others will not accept them and that they might be persecuted by others for even trying to be like them or interact with them. For others though, we can have this Anderssein shaped through how we understand the world or human morality. Some people come to view themselves not as humans at all but as robots, or aliens. Some people - leaning on human morality - come to feel that they must be somehow dirty. Morally unclean, like they are hiding something or a disgrace to humanity as a whole. This Anderssein we carry could take many forms, and all of them are an expression of a very great disconnect we feel fundamentally to other people.

Anosognosia

Anosognosia is a condition where you can’t recognize other health conditions or problems that you have. Experts commonly describe it as “denial of deficit” or “lack of insight.” It falls under the family of agnosias, all of which happen when your brain can’t recognize or process what your senses tell it.

Technology

Indie Web

The Indie Web is composed of personally made independent websites that are often self-hosted or using hosting services to publish to the internet a user’s own data on their own domains.

A popular site builder used for the indie web is Neocities.

According to Wikipedia there are 10 core principals;

  1. Own your data
  2. Use and publish visible data for humans first, machines second
  3. Make what you need.
  4. Use what you make.
  5. Document your stuff.
  6. Open source your stuff.
  7. UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema, etc.
  8. Modularity
  9. Longevity
  10. Plurality
  11. The informal 11 principal being “Above all, have fun”

Digital Garden

A Digital Garden is a place where ideas are treated similar to plants, cultivated and nurtured from sapling to bloom. As the ideas grow and culminate into a garden connections can be made between them as well as prolonging their existence. Media now is made for mass consumption, doom-scrolling through hundreds of videos and pictures to be forgotten later on. Collecting things you find interesting in a centralized location can even increase your skills and knowledge of them.

  • [i] Similar Terms
  • Second Brain
  • PKMS - Personal Knowledge Management System

Software as a Service - SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS /sæs/) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike other software delivery models, it separates “the possession and ownership of software from its use”. SaaS use began around 2000, and by 2023 was the main form of software application deployment.

  • [i] Similar Terms
  • Infrastructure as a Service
  • Platform as a Service

Open Source Intelligence - OSINT

Open Source Intelligence (OISINT) refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources to gather insights, identify trends, or generate intelligence.

Miscellaneous

Abney Effect

As colours like red, green, blue mathematically get closer to white they change to adjacent colours instead. This is purely human perception. An example of this is as blue approaches white, it becomes closer to lavender.

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