• On Life and Love

    Good reads

    It’s been a loooong time since I posted some good reading. 5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person | Cracked.com "I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life." They Are Not Trolls. They Are Men.…

  • On Life and Love

    Links! Dat Social Justice

    I’ve been (relatively) all over the twitter space lately on the social justice tip. I’ve started following some new and amazing folks in the last couple months, including Ashe Dryden, Julie Pagano, and Justine Arreche, who are probably the first folks I’ve followed who are specifically interested in social justice within the tech community/industry. Mutual following of these folks led to some fun discussions with a former colleague on considerations like, “How often can I call my colleagues out on *ist behavior and still get invites out to lunch? Once in three occurrences?” After all, no one likes a feminazi. The first two links come from Pagano’s “101 off limits”…

  • On Life and Love

    APW 2013: Intellectualism, Anarchy, Privilege and Power

    (This is the fifth in a way-too-long-running series on APW 2013.) I am not educated on anarchy or intentional communities. I consider this a lack in my education. (Seems like reddit may have a good starting place for me.) Dennis Fox is a psychologist from Boston who focuses on a few interesting topics: intentional communities and critical psychology. What is critical psychology, you ask? When speaking of truths, Fox said, “current psychology’s truth is in finding ways for unhappy people to adapt to the current world, rather than in changing the current world.” That really resonated with me. So many of the unhappinesses we struggle with derive from trying to…

  • On Life and Love

    Forever and a Year Ago Linkage

    Don’t ask where I’ve been. It’s been dark and full of things like strangely proud “humble views”, polka dots and stripes, mock objects, skiing, the IRS, gradients, and a strange dampness. Still not sure where the dampness is from. Getting back into the swing of things, have some links! Google’s Pseudonym Problem: New Implementation Revealed | ZDNet – Looks like Google's attempt to lighten up their real name policy on Google+ is something of a farce. How I see things / How my cat sees things – All I have to say is, "True dat." Why Indies Rock – Example #488 – Aside from the coolness of accepting the feature…

  • On Life and Love

    Untenable Workplace Hotshots

    “When Smart People are Bad Employees” offers up three types of hotshots in the workplace: The Heretic: “However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.” The Flake: “Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused.” The Jerk:…