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:
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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 the study proved yet again is that lifestyle interventions don’t produce much, if anything, in the way of long-term weight loss."
• Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic – "I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers."
• accountablogity: Here is a workout challenge I… – Fitocracy Blog – I'm totally doing this the next time I watch a violent/horror movie, even if it was Halloween-ish themed. Keep reading >>

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.'"

I think the last time I posted a link dump, I was flaking from my new tattoo. This week, I’m flaking from the tattoo’s touch-up! Much less pain for the touch-up, but the itching may drive me nuts if it doesn’t end soon.

Luckily, it’s healing very quickly.

Have some good reading:

• Tony and Hilary’s Tiny Loft Apartment – I feel like it's been forever since I read The Tiny Life blog, but what a purdy little house to come back to.
• Six Thoughts On The Case Of The Breast-Feeding Professor | Alas, a Blog – "The child was allowed to crawl on a floor! Shocking! She had to take a paper clip out of its mouth! Shocking! Etc, etc. Makes me wonder if these people have ever met an actual infant. Seriously, the things are like a cross between a stumbling drunk and a vacuum cleaner."
• Emptyage — Yes, I was hacked. Hard. – The more personal telling of the @mat hacking.
• S.Lott-Software Architect: Performance "Tuning": running in 1/100th the time – "The idea of 'tweaking' a working program to improve performance is generally misleading.  It might happen, but the impact is minuscule at best. [...] Generally, reduce Cyclomatic Complexity." Keep reading >>

I’m now fully in the flaky phase of the tattoo process, and am losing large black/grey flakes at a pleasantly quick rate.

It’s really, really hard not to encourage the process, though, especially when (squick alert!) attached flakes are catching on my shirt at work.

Grody!

Sleeping has been rough since Saturday. When it was all raw and fresh, it just (ha!) hurt badly. Once it dried out, it hurt to do anything that stretched the skin, like lie on my stomach. Or lie on my side. Or relax my shoulder.

The winning solution for sleep so far is to use a small pillow under the front of my tattoo’d shoulder so I can sorta sleep on my stomach and keep the shoulder propped up. It’s not unlike my sleep solution for when I first hurt my shoulder, except that was on my back.

An even better solution (thanks, Angi!) was to switch from using lotion to using vitamin E oil. So soothing. Difficult to avoid overuse, though.

I’ve been conflicted between wanting all this to be over with–to just have a damn tattoo already–and enjoying the strangeness of what’s happening. Now that the pain’s mostly abated, I’m feeling more in-the-moment.

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, I’ve finally caught up on some innernet reading:
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