“I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.”

From Steven Fry’s letter to himself, via Charles Miller

The creator, Nina Paley, wrote, animated, directed, and produced the whole thing. A film of this caliber could only have come from a Hollywood studio at a budget of million a decade ago. Now one (admittedly very talented, ambitious, hard-working) person can do nearly the whole thing herself.

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons License. If you’re not familiar with the CC licenses, recall the FBI warning at the beginning of most DVDs: it states that you’ll go to jail if you give a copy of the movie to your friend, or show it to a group of people in a public place (a “screening”). Now, imagine the exact opposite of the FBI warning. That’s the Creative Commons License. It encourages you to freely share, copy, and remix the work in any way you like.

“As a man, one experiences very heavy socialisation from an early age to constrain violent impulses. Agression is channeled out of us in every way (other than on the sports field) which is absolutely correct of course. Anyone who hits another person is a criminal. And all the more so with regards to girls – you never, ever hit girls.

[…]

In fact, spanking is okay (great!) because it is highly ritualised, that is, has associated codes and rules which define actions and limits (the key ones are bottom only + consensuality). It is okay exactly in the sense that other code-constrained violence, notably contact sports and martial arts are okay. These also allow and imply consent to violence-within-the-rules. The rules make the violence productive rather than destructive.”

From How to get the spanking you want from Art of Authority

“This dissolving of the ego is akin to what Freud, borrowing the expression from novelist Romain Rolland, called ‘the oceanic feeling.’ He described it as ‘a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal,’ very much as a wave or a drop of water belongs to the ocean. Most of the time, this is indeed no more than a feeling. But occasionally it is an experience, and a powerful one - what contemporary American psychologists call an altered state of consciousness. [..]

There is nothing innately religious about the oceanic feeling. Indeed, my own experience of it is quite the opposite. When you feel ‘at one with the All,’ you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.”

From The Little Book of Athiest Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville

Cell phone carriers typically subsidize the retail cost of a phone in exchange for locking you into a one or two year contract. AT&T pays Apple a few hundred dollars for every iPhone sold. State law requires sales tax be paid on the non-contract, retail price of the phone, which means your $56.91 in tax is actually against an estimated $700 cost of the phone.

Somewhat related: cell phone service fee taxes are linked to the area code of the phone, regardless of where you currently live. This means you’re paying taxes to whatever city you lived in when you bought the phone.

“Many people would agree that drug culture reform is needed, but we must recognize that “the drug culture” now includes everyone. Modern life involves daily decisions about psychoactives. The option of caffeine use is encountered multiple times a day. It is rare to watch an hour-long television show without seeing an advertisement for a mind altering pharmaceutical or a legal recreational drug.”

From Towards a Culture of Responsible Psychoactive Drug Use by Earth & Fire of Erowid

From Bent’s 4th of July event page.

“Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.”

From Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them by Derek Sivers

• One is that you just don’t get its deal.
• The other is that you get it, but you don’t like its deal.

Figuring out the deal is part of the fun intellectual stimulation of our recreational activities. A process of exploration and discovery.

Jerry Holkins puts it like this:

“It is my goal to play a game until I discover its thesis. […] Essentially, I want to know a game’s intention. That intention is surprisingly close to the surface in games most people consider to be of high quality, and so I don’t need to play them very long to discern it. I will still finish games that I have come to understand, but a large part of my enjoyment is bound up in this interpretive process.”

“These low-hipped gobbies never worry me,” she said. “I keep my cash straight and my decimal points in order. Furthermore, if some dumbbell starts hanging onto the cage I tell him to move on. They don’t block traffic outside my cell. Why, then, should they be starting all this plain-jane-and-no-nonsense business? They’ll be putting us in gunnysacks with nothing but our hands sticking out the next thing you know.”

A quote in the San Francisco Chronicle from a female bank teller and self-identified flapper, circa 1922. She’s fighting the power, vintage style.

From the Sparkletack podcast.

“By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65—three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.”

From The end of retirement

At another extreme is what critical thinking defines as an argument: an assertion based on a premise. This has nothing to do with people or emotions, but is a tool of logic and communication.

Thomas Jefferson purportedly would not abide in-person arguing. He had a rule for dinner guests: they may state their position, then he would state his, and then they would drop the subject. He felt that back-and-forth discussion was fruitless: it never changed anyone’s mind, only further entrenched the preexisting beliefs of the arguers.

I disagree with Jefferson on this point. In-person argument is extremely healthy, done right.

The key to accomplishing healthy debate - as opposed to unhealthy quarreling - is that the advocates for each side have to avoid feeling personally tied to the point they are arguing. The arguers have to be free to critically attack the other position with full force. For a position to prove its merit, it must pass the gauntlet presented by a skilled, informed, and highly critical devil’s advocate.

“We see laws as nothing more than the shadows of our predecessor’s customs, lengthened by the years to seem more wise than our own judgement.”

From Fighting For Our Lives: An Anarchist Primer

“Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience, economics, and psychology to study how people make decisions. It looks at the role of the brain when we evaluate decisions, categorize risks and rewards, and interact with each other.”

From Wikipedia. This is right up my alley.

“[Neuroeconomics] measures brain activity while experimental subjects make decisions. Because the brains of all animals are “economic,” that is, they have limited resources to achieve necessary goals, neuroeconomics experiments are not limited to studies of human beings, but have also employed apes, monkeys, and rodents.”

From Neuroeconomics Explained.

Some neuroeconomics blogs: George Mason University’s Neuroeconomics dept, and The Moral Molecule in Psychology Today.

• Ambiguity and Pessimism Bias - Humans are hard-wired to anticipate bad outcomes when outcome is uncertain.
• Oxytocin-Raising Tips to Make This Valentine’s Day the Best Ever - Oxytocin is a chemical which serves double-duty as both a brain neurotransmitter and a hormone, and (we are starting to discover) plays a substantial role in human bonding. For example, it’s released after sex (especially in females), and in huge quantities for mothers during childbirth. This short video outlines five activities which release oxytocin. None of them are surprises, but we now have scientific evidence based on brain imaging that (for example) sitting in a hot tub releases oxytocin, thereby creating feelings of bonding.
• How to Run a Con - Malicious hacking on the human brain’s tendancy to mirror apparent trust that is shown to us.
• Why We Cry at Movies - Oxytocin may play a part here as well.

And watch the embedded video of Teller showing the seven basic techniques of stage illusion - it’s awesome.

“Government is just another industry, where countries offer services to citizens, but it has some unfortunate features. It is a geographically segmented monopoly, and since all land is taken, the industry has an enormous barrier to entry. To start a new government you have to beat an old one, which means winning a war, an election, or a revolution. And it has very high customer lock-in: there are barriers to emigration and immigration, and switching countries involves both high financial and emotional costs. These characteristics result in a horribly uncompetitive industry, so it is no surprise that existing firms tend to exploit customers instead of innovating to attract them.”

From Beyond Folk Activism by Patri Friedman

But I don’t like the technology. The good news is that standards-based, browser-friendly technologies like SVG and the canvas tag may be getting good enough to replace Flash. Rahaeljs is one example.

I’ve been through five cars (AMC Concord, Fiat Spyder, Mercury Mystique, Ford Mustang, Saturn VUE). Each one was one of those tools that, like my laptop or cell phone today, I reach for with such habit in my everyday life that it starts to feel like a part of me.

But this time I’ll be letting go of my vehicle, and not replacing it with another.

Part of what makes this possible (and indeed, wise) is that I now live in a dense urban area with reasonably good alternate transportation options (buses, trains, bikes, taxis) and short travel distances (making walking a viable choice in many cases).

Perhaps more significantly, recent advances in technology have made not owning a car a much more workable option. Google Maps gives bus and walking directions; nextmuni.com gives extremely accurate predications of bus arrivals; Taxi Magic makes easy to summon taxis nearly anywhere; and Zipcar and City Car Share mean that I can still get access to a vehicle when I wish to leave the city, or go buy something at Home Depot, or take a road trip. (Zipcar and City Car Share can be seen as fractional ownership of a car.)

Still, being without guaranteed, instant, 24/7 access to a familiar vehicle is a bit unnerving. We’ll see how it goes.

Some examples:

• The Usual Suspects - complicated, caper, twisty
• Batman Begins - crusader, brooding, dark
• Harry Potter - magic, kids, wizard
• Finding Nemo - cute, enchanted, graphics

By looking for similarities among the keywords, it’s possible to group movies or music together in a method that is more organic and complex than the crude “Drama” / “Comedy” / “Thriller” style of single-categorization normally used.

“In the beginning I would meet a beautiful new person, we would broaden each others’ horizons and have wonderful experiences together, and thus fall in love. At first we would feel more free together than either of us ever had, and the world would seem full to overflowing with possibility and wild joy. But slowly, not trusting the rest of the world, or the future in which we might not feel such wonderful things, we would build our relationship into a castle, to keep out the cold and dangerous outside world, and protect our passion by turning it into an institution. Sex, which at the beginning had been something that came more naturally and freely than anything else, became jealously guarded as the seal sanctifying our love relationship, as proof that it was different than all our other relationships. [This seems, in retrospect, like a really strange role for sex to play.] Inevitably, I would wake up one day and realize that the free, feral passion that we’d been united by was gone, replaced by habit, routine, fear of change; the castle we’d built had become a tomb, sealing us inside and away from the outside world.”

“I want to be valued for what I am, for what I do naturally, not how well I conform to some pre-set list of needs that someone has. If someone else can fill some of those needs, I wouldn’t deny that to anyone, and I don’t want to be jealous when others have something different to offer.”

“My friendships had a lot going for them that my love affairs never did: my friends were never jealous or possessive, my friendships didn’t tend to adhere to some strict socialized image of what they “should” be, and while my friendships generally continued on in one form or another through my life, once it turned out that a romantic relationship wasn’t storybook-perfect it would end and I wouldn’t see the lover any more.”

“Just as in your friendships, there may be people in the world with whom you can spend some wonderfully romantic time once or twice a month, but with whom you don’t have enough in common to date steadily and then marry, etc. (although you often see such mismatched couples, who would have been happy as more sporadic partners, making each other miserable in fifty-year marriages). Non-monogamous relationships make such things possible without paying any price of mutual unhappiness.”

“We’re always so thrilled when our desires happen to coincide with social rules: then it’s easy for us to feel proud of our desires, to think they’re beautiful, since they are universally accepted.”

“An open relationship is just that: it is a relationship in which people can be open with each other, and with themselves—in which nothing need be hidden or suppressed or off limits, in which the whole world can be ours to explore without fear of transgressing imaginary boundaries.”

This piece conveys what I believe to be the philosophical core of polyamory: how to have relationships in which you give and get the things that are right for you. Multiple partners are one possible (indeed, likely) effect of this philosophy, but that’s not what poly is ultimately about.

“It can be very difficult for a woman to accept sexual rejection. Even the temporary rebuff can feel like a strike at the core of our femininity. Hey, aren’t men supposed to always want it, while we imperiously decide whether to grant their petition?

For centuries, women otherwise subject to the whims of men have drawn power from controlling an artificially created shortage. We have reinforced the myth that men always want what we could live without. Our unwritten bargain has been, “Men, be really nice to us and we will give you sex.” Withdrawal from this position is painful. Revising our sexual attitudes with our male friends is something we can suffer through together if we support rather than combat each other.”

From Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns by Philip Miller and Molly Devon