Winks, links, they’re all the same.

• xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta – I don't link to XKCD much, in part because I don't read it much, and in part because everyone else in the world does. That said, this one uses real-deal National Hurricane Center advisories in it, and is really good.
• Ann Aguirre’s Blog – Authors Against Bullying: Blog Hop – "Things were bad. People made fun of me daily. They picked on my appearance, my weight, my geeky interests. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom rather than face a cafeteria full of people who didn’t like me."
• Utah Game Developer Jailed for Not Paying Wages – ABC News – "Hunter lasted two years before calling it quits, hanging onto promises of paychecks that appeared only erratically, with Rushton sometimes handing out checks selectively and demanding confidentiality while blaming companies that licensed games for being slow to pay for their development or royalties."
• Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – A bizarre thing for there to have been contention over: "Sometimes the fans are right, too. Like ladders. I did not want ladders in Minecraft at all. Ladders are never fun. They’re not fun in Minecraft either. But they’re a very good utility. It’s an easy way to get straight up without having stairs going back and forth."
• On Labeling Women “Crazy” | Paging Dr. NerdLove – "I started realizing that when my friends and I would talk about our crazy exes or what-have-you, more often than not, we weren’t talking about ex girlfriends or random dates who exhibited signs of  genuine mental health issues. [...] For the most part, crazy meant 'acting in a way I didn’t like.'"

It’s been a hot minute since I posted any links. Apparently this is also the Elf Sternberg addition, since three of his posts appear here. Good stuff.

• Lands of Dream Donation Drive – Jonas is doing one of the coolest donation drive ideas I’ve seen. Donate, and receive a detailed description and beautiful picture from the Lands of Dream. What in the hell is the Lands of Dream? Go play The Book of Living Magic. Took me about an hour (I read every description!), and everything about it is gorgeous: the art, the writing, and the music. Then take a look at some of the art/writing that Verena and Jonas are producing as part of their drive.

  Then donate. (Mine is in the queue, and I’m so excited to see what I get!)

• Embracing pain | dooce® – “What this therapy enabled me to do as well was hold that blight in my bare hands and cover it with tears. Because the Heather who had mounted all those excuses would have acknowledged it, tipped her hat, and moved right along. Too much to get done to dwell on such things.”
• Elf M. Sternberg – On picking up Stoicism… – My own struggle with Buddhism separation from other people led me to examine the idea of the Bodhisattva, but that feels… arrogant. Elitist. Dragging people to enlightenment. I don’t like it when skeptics who are assholes do it, so why would I want to join the party?

  I’ve become too much of a people person to want to detach and be a pure observer. I’m not sure that Stoicism is a good fit for me, but after reading Elf’s account, my curiosity is piqued. Keep reading >>

At some point in the last 2 weeks, I had 0 unread items in Google Reader.

It was a short-lived, joyous experience, but this is the result of my web branching:

• HCG Diet Dangers: Is Fast Weight Loss Worth the Risk? – MSN Health & Fitness – Healthy Living – "But the so-called hCG diet is either a weight-loss miracle or a dangerous fraud, depending on who's talking. The plan combines drops or injections of hCG, a pregnancy hormone, with just 500 calories a day."

  I don't even have words for how stupid this sounds. And how unhealthy. "Yeah, I'm going to shoot up with a hormone and engage in some disorderly eating to lose weight. It'll be great!"

• I like big butts and I cannot lie, but is there some evolutionary reason as to why? : AskReddit – This is a hilarious thread featuring the age-old song by Sir Mix-a-Lot.

On small houses:

I totally hadn’t realized that tiny houses are illegal/violate zoning. I knew they were tricky to place, but I figured if you buy a patch of land somewhere, you could put whatever kind of house on it you wanted.
Keep reading >>

This week’s internet cruising:

• Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post.
• Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely play around with a system like Sphinx.
• Buttersafe – Flowers – Bees’ knees!
• Baptist Press – N.C. court voids same-sex adoption – What? What?! (Warning: Christian news source)

  "'Many homosexuals and their sex partners may sincerely believe they can be good parents. But children are not guinea pigs for grand social experiments in redefining marriage, and should not be placed in settings that are unsuitable for raising children,' Dailey noted in the article. He cited a study in the Netherlands that found the average duration of a homosexual relationship to be 18 months and that 'committed' homosexual couples have an average of eight other sexual partners each year."

• Gay former service members praise Senate vote on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ – latimes.com – "Carpenter, who comes from a family with a tradition of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, thought that he would make a career in the Marine Corps. But when he fell in love with another Marine pilot, he decided he "couldn't continue living a lie" and left the military as a captain."
• Hawaii-bound, Obama signals his opposition to gay marriage ‘evolving’ – Key quotes:

  "I still believe that it doesn’t make sense for us to provide tax cuts to people like myself who don’t need them when our deficit and debts are growing."

  "With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, [...] my feelings about this are constantly evolving. [...] At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do."

  Keep reading >>

My mother always wanted a tight-knit family.

Instead, she got me and my father.

Twice in the last couple of days, I’ve been privy some eye-opening views on families. One of my friends is trying very, very hard to have a baby. She’s struggling, but it’s her goal, and what most of her energy seems to be going towards.

It was fascinating to sit and talk with her about her research on everything from breastfeeding to cloth diapers to her psych class education on child development. She’s a critical thinker who has a sharp eye for analyzing what she sees in other parents/kids and cutting through bullshit.

I love it. Didn’t make me want to have a kid, but I always enjoy being around someone geeking, and I still suffer from wanting to know something about (almost) everything.

Yesterday, one of my coworkers was talking about her family–her brother did this, her other brother did that. Most of the stories she tells–which are all great and funny–are about her family, which struck me as unusual. She has non-family friends, but doesn’t talk about them much.

Finally, I asked, “Your family seems very… family-oriented. What’s up with that?”

Keep reading >>