• 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

    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

    APW 2013: (Mental) Ableism

    (This is fourth in a series of posts about Atlanta Poly Weekend 2013.) Now for a downside of my APW 2013 experience: ableism. I didn’t perceive very much physical ableism except for an awkward-as-hell “lame” reference in the closing ceremonies. I don’t think anyone even laughed. Then again, I know I’m also less sensitive to physical ableism than mental, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. For the mental ableism… it was everywhere. Therapists there used the word “crazy” and people talked about their “crazy, bipolar” exes. One person even said their ex was so crazy “they shouldn’t have been allowed to date.”

  • On Life and Love

    Too Many Links on the Dance Floor

    That’s a Flight of the Conchords reference (NSFW!). First, a couple of lengthy jokes: Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: AudioQuest K2 Terminated Speaker Cable – UST 2.44 m Plugs 8′ Pair – This is a $14,000 set of audio cables. The reviews had me laughing all day. Amazon.com: Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer: Kitchen & Dining – Another marvelous instance of reviews matching the seriousness of the product on Amazon. I'm really impressed at Hutzler not blasting away all these joke reviews. Then some psychology:

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly Linkage

    A fun chunk of links for the last couple of weeks. I’m not all caught up in my reading, but I’m catching up, too, despite some new video interests I’ll be writing about soon. Damn you, internet videos. Big Diabetes Study Ended Because Exercise And Diet Didn’t Do Squat | Alas, a Blog – "Note that, perhaps out of necessity, the study defined “significant long-term weight loss” quite modestly, since on average this intensive lifestyle intervention produced a little less than a 5 percent reduction in body mass (i.e., a 160-pound “overweight” woman in the program weighed, on average, 152 pounds after four years of participation). In other words, what…