Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
Orson Scott

Comment preview: I was curious as to his impact velocity. I used [this](http://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1231475371) calculator. I assume 160 lbs, and use 53 meters as the fall distance. Normal air resistance. He fell for 3.38 seconds reaching a velocity of 29.61 m/s or ....


Comment preview: I am actually a survivor of a few suicide attempts, and this was true for me about 50% of the time. I had four really serious attempts - two of them I woke up from really devastated that it hadn't worked, and two I tried to abort halfway through because I ....


Comment preview: Here s the other story. 2 years ago I was flying to Los Angeles with a friend. I had contact to a family who is living near San Francisco and we decided to visit hem. We arrived in LA at Sunday Evening and had the car booked for Monday morning so we slept ....


Comment preview: When I was seven and my brother was 4 or 5 we got separated from our parents the night of 4th of July at 6 Flags in Vallejo, CA. There were lots of sketchy people and it really wasn't a place for kids to be past 9pm. I'm holding on to my crying little brot ....


Comment preview: Maybe not the kind of story you're looking for, but I have one. When I was fifteen, one of my friends didn't show up to school, which wasn't too unusual, and after school I got a call from her while waiting for my dad to pick me up. I picked up, and instea ....


Comment preview: In September of 2004, after going through a long period of depression, I tried to kill myself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Somehow I didn't die. I woke up, perfectly fine and uninjured, in a small town by the bay called Bolinas. Feeling like I ....


Comment preview: let me preface this by saying, watch a movie called "The Bridge". It's a documentary about people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. You might find some comfort in your decision. Now, let me say my peace. YOU'RE 20 FUCKING YEARS OLD! You haven't begun ....


Comment preview: Not a mathematician but ran a few numbers. Let's make the assumption that all the Asians are 5'-7" and 165 lbs (average Asian height roughly). In the video they stack from feet to shoulders so their effective height per body is 4'7" (assuming the distance ....


Comment preview: There is a maximum height that is survivable, but it's sort of unknown. People have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived, and maybe from higher, but even then they fell for only a few seconds. It takes about 20 seconds for a falling human to reach t ....


Comment preview: One example is through smell. After their birth salmon learn the smells associated with their seaward migration and follow them back years later. Source: Homing in Pacific Salmon: Mechanics and Ecological Basis. Published 1996 in the Journal of Experimenta ....


Comment preview: I'm a psychiatric nurse and I won't tell you not to do it (since you've heard that before and it obviously didn't work) but I will tell you that killing yourself is not an option. It isn't an option because there's nothing that comes after it. Saying it' ....


Comment preview: Here's a fun fact about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. A lot of the time it's not the fall that immediately kills them. It's the inability to swim after jumping. Broken bones make it difficult to swim and they drown. As a mortician I've had to pick up ....


Comment preview: I jumped from a bridge in a suicide attempt several years ago. The second I let go I was engulfed in terror. I ended up breaking my back, a burst fracture, my clavicle bone, my ankles and my skull. I'd like to write a book about the event itself and the ev ....


Comment preview: You have to forget about where you came from and who the world thinks you should be. This is your life, your one and only *life*, and you can do with it whatever you want. I am not an awesome person, I just had a realization that my life was within my co ....


Comment preview: I was admitted to an adolescent mental health ward in the bay area. I was there for 6 days. The basic mantra was, okay, you aren't going to kill yourself, so you can go. It was a mixed ward mostly with depression, but some anger management and psychosis t ....


Comment preview: A basic research methods course will tell you why studies like this can't ever find causal links. You need an experimental design, not a correlational design. This is the caveat for all correlational studies--if you were to use the same design with jumping ....


Comment preview: But as somebody told me long ago, the only time it's too late is when you're dead. It's like that story where they interviewed people who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived (I'm paraphrasing here): >"All at once, I realized that all of m ....


Comment preview: Joseph Campbell at age 82, interviewed in 1986: There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life t ....


Comment preview: I am the youngest by far in my family and I only have older sisters. My dad's brother was a very successful, and wealthy, lawyer. He got into heavy drug use and basically over the course of two years he was kicked out of the house and became insane. He wou ....


Comment preview: yeah, i agree suicide certainly would have been slightly less tragic, but there were so many other possible outcomes, that would have been far less tragic. I know it is easy to say that there must have been warning signs, and yeah, they shouldn't have had ....