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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Overcoming Webmaster Depression

This year is a rather easy year to be depressed. ;)

COVID-19, fearmongering media, polarized hyper-charged social media, mass unemployment, lockdowns that killed exercise routines and social connections, loss of hope / purpose / meaning, a guy who stuck a gun in the belly area of a pregnant woman overdosing on fentanyl shortly after he passed counterfeit currency, that broader background being utterly ignored so outrage could fuel widespread rioting with a man in dreadlocks kicking a man sitting in the street unconscious & other bonus random drive by shootings where actual heroes are murdered at random, cities being burned down, communist anarchy, social "justice" movements founded on the idiotic idea of improving society by ripping apart the family unit, etc.

This post is not a suicide letter, but an ode to reality of accepting today for what it is. :D

pic.twitter.com/OWBHGa5eKR— Zero Gravity Media (@zerogravityhxp) August 12, 2020

Last year was the first year where I managed an office with a bunch of employees in it. When the office opened my email inbox had under 2,000 emails built up in it over a 16 year period of working on the web. Far from inbox zero, I am now above 20,000. I think in a Bill Gates interview about a half year ago I smiled after hearing his sort of EGT was how his email inbox was doing. I timed that office opening almost perfectly for COVID-19 so I could have all the stress and cost associated with training a team, setting up a ton of computers, creating workflow, ... and then none of the benefits as the office would get shut down shortly after things began to operate smoothly. :D

By the end of last year a was a bit (err...lot) on the fat side from working too much, too much stress, and exercising too little. My weight and the length of my fuse are reciprocals.

In the past I used to harness negative energy into a form of rage to fuel drive, but now that I am over 40 I find it much harder to live that way. I've already had a number of near death experiences (including one when my wife was pregnant with our only child) and think at some point living that rage-drive way is just shitty. Just say no to endless rage.

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So when it was obvious this year was largely going to be dog crap, I started to look internally instead of externally & figured it made more sense to improve health & mood than to fight the gravity of the global depression we are currently living through.

Exogenous Shocks

When things change out of nowhere they can end up dramatically changing the social and economic order.

Many such changes are utterly arbitrary and orthogonal to the concepts of fairness, justice, human decency, etc.

Some parties are politically connected & shielded from actual market forces.

As a self-employed person living overseas I am certainly not one of those protected parties. That said, my family and the people who work for me look to me and hope I can help shield them from some of the crap reality served up this year.

As a rule, when exogenous shocks happen those who are not politically connected get screwed hardest.

Smaller firms tend to under-perform larger firms: "As the earnings season draws to a close, companies within the Russell 2000 stock index — the small-cap benchmark — have reported an aggregate loss of $1.1bn, compared to profits of almost $18bn a year earlier, according to data provider FactSet. Meantime, the much bigger companies within the benchmark S&P 500 index have posted a 34 per cent aggregate drop in earnings, to $233bn."

Poorer people are more likely to lose their jobs.

Emerging markets tend to get hit harder than developed markets. Which only adds to the powder keg of instability as the food price inflation tied to falling incomes makes many people rather desperate.

etc.

As people get desperate violence increases & many governments get overthrown.

Central banks printing cash to prop up the financial markets only increases the divide further.

Congratulations @federalreserve pic.twitter.com/8HxhLH9il5— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) August 17, 2020

That increased income & wealth inequality makes "the system" only feel that much more fraudulent, which in turn acts as a powder keg to fuel more arbitrary misdirected violence.

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Tesla now has a $340 billion market capitalization. They remain unprofitable outside of harvesting tax credits.

Beyond fueling increased violence, the sky high numbers for FOMO stocks also lead some people to feel like they are failures for only slightly succeeding or just getting by.

Others pile in to trashy cryptocurrencies in an attempt to catch up where they only further compound their losses.

Waiting Things Out

It is worth noting many of the jobs that are gone are gone for good.

We may very well be facing a global depression:

"The pandemic has created a massive economic contraction that will be followed by a financial crisis in many parts of the globe, as nonperforming corporate loans accumulate alongside bankruptcies. Sovereign defaults in the developing world are also poised to spike. This crisis will follow a path similar to the one the last crisis took, except worse, commensurate with the scale and scope of the collapse in global economic activity. And the crisis will hit lower-income households and countries harder than their wealthier counterparts. ... In all of the worst financial crises since the mid-nineteenth century, it took an average of eight years for per capita GDP to return to the pre-crisis level. (The median was seven years.) ... The last time all engines failed was in the Great Depression; the collapse this time will be similarly abrupt and steep."

If you can't afford to feed your family of course you have to solve that problem first. But if you are not absolutely financially desperate then this can be a good year to win in ways other than finances & only worry about money after other things are in a better place.

This is a good year to find meaning through various types of self-improvement and doing lots of small & kind things for the people around you. Yesterday was a good day to buy your wife flowers. So is today. Tomorrow is a good day to buy a friend a surprise gift.

One of the best books you can read about developing positive personal habits is Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. It is 8 years old now but it is still a great read.

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Pushing for broad structural changes in a crisis through ideology which removes ordinary feedback loops often ends up creating only further injustice with the campaign "hero" looking like their polar opposite. Ideology pushed hard enough wraps around to the other side.

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When things are absolutely screwed the world over it is better to focus on improving yourself and your family rather than promoting arbitrary extrajudicial justice and burning things down further.

Here are the steps I took to improve a good bit so far this year.

Coronavirus Lockdowns

When I saw a video of a guy walking down the street in Wuhan cough blood and fall over dead I immediately ordered facemasks for everyone in my extended family. I also bought facemasks and gloves into the office for workers. As it turns out gloves were largely a non-winner because using them is more likely to spread virus and bacteria, but the intent was good.

Cygnus recommended taking the supplement quercetin & so did Dr. Zev, so I do that.

Our government does not want us to treat covid early. If I get covid and no hcq access-I would take IMMEDIATELY quercetin 500mg three times a day for 7 days and elemental zinc 50mg one a day for 7 days, and z-pack. Every American home should have quercetin and zinc.— Dr. Zev Zelenko (@zev_dr) August 16, 2020

When lockdowns were announced I hoarded months worth of baby formula so I know my daughter would be ok & bought her a couple birthday presents in case the lockdowns were extended repeatedly. They were, so that worked out ok.

When lockdowns ended I bought a ton of different toys for my daughter so I could share them with her and make up for the limited outside contact for the time being. I also brought my lead graphic & web designer a dual monitor computer to his house to improve his efficiency.

Any day where there is not a lockdown I try to make the most of it knowing another couple months or quarter year can disappear arbitrarily.

Making the most out of the day for me often means doing something positive on the health front & meaning front right away. Things like getting food for my daughter or going for a walk are big wins early in the day as we tend to slow down and get tired as the day drags on.

Health / Fitness

Early in the year when I could use the gym I was walking at a brisk pace for about an hour a day while reading books and listening to podcasts.

After gyms were forced to be closed I started walking outside. Initially this was often to get groceries or various baby supplies, though I continued to walk daily even when there wasn't a real direct need just to keep mood up with all the ridiculous crap going on in the world. I used to think the Philippines was way too hot when I had to drive everywhere, but even if it is hot as hell it isn't bad to be out in the sun and heat so long as you are only walking especially if the walk has a purpose which helps your loved ones in some way.

Walking regularly with nothing else going on can be boring as hell, of course, so to offset the boredom I bring my iPhone and have some Airpod Pro earbuds with their killer noise canceling features. When nobody is near me I sometimes pull down my face mask and jog or sprint for a while to add variety to the day. I also sometimes make people's ears bleed by singing along in an effort to share the joy of whatever I am listening to. :D

There are many awesome acoustic songs on YouTube. Revisiting unheard versions of songs you liked a long time ago can make the lyrics more powerful.

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Some of the spoken-word song introductions are quite powerful: "everyone wants you to forget you are gonna die, because if they convince you your not gonna die you waste your time doing what they want you to do. Spend money on what they're selling. ... one day I'm gonna die, but before then I'm gonna live, live, live, the way I want to live and I hope you do too."

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Whenever I exercise I usually have caffeine as well. I view it a bit like a band aid or kick start, but I try to only use it either explicitly when walking or when intensely focusing on work.

If my back hurts from sitting at the chair too long that is a cue to get up and take a break even if it is a short one to go play with my daughter.

Sometimes I will walk two or three times throughout the day to break up the monotony.

Most my exercise is walking or jogging, but occasionally I will do a few push ups or sit ups.

In a world of gloom it is hard to look in the mirror and see a steaming pile of garbage which is not well maintained and feel good about yourself.

You know what sacrifices you have made and what the costs were, but it is easy to go down the path of resentment if outcomes are subpar and beyond your control in the short term.

If you don't feel alive you aren't. :D

It's a lifeless life, with no fixed address to give But you're not mine to die for anymore so I must live

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Diet

I try to eat salad, Indian food, quiche, nuts, beef jerky, and all sorts of other foods where carbohydrates are sort of only incidental and are not core to the dish.

Anything that looks/smells/feels/sounds like sugar, rice, potatoes, bread, derivatives thereof, etc. I consider to be poison / systemic inflammation / weight gain and try to skip it.

I also consider drinking calories to be a disaster as the glycemic index on things like a soda are through the roof.

If you are fat and eat a lot of carbs you are repeatedly spiking your blood sugar, then it crashes, then you are hungry again. This habit & addictive cycle works on some of the same neural pathways that hardcore drugs do.

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Sometimes I still do eat a bit of peanut butter or chocolate or frozen chocolate dipped in peanut butter, though I try not to use it meal replacement style very often & try not to be "full jar now empty" Aaron.

When I wake I often wait at least 4 or 5 hours before eating my first meal. In some cases I stretch that out to 6 or 8.

Communicating

I know a lot of people are in a bad state this year, so I try to offset that at least slightly by overcommunicating.

I send my mom pictures or videos of my daughter every day as she told me those help her sleep better at night and her watch even shows her blood pressure is lower and she feels much more well rested the next morning. I have bought my daughter a ton of extra clothes to wear just so my mom gets a bit more variety in the pictures and my daughter will have a ton of memories to sort through when she is older.

Our daughter has quite a bit of energy so sometimes she makes communicating with my wife hard. Sometimes we have better luck texting back and forth if something is urgent and then discuss it in more detail over email or when our daughter is taking a nap.

A lot of people around me have recently went through hardships beyond the financial uncertainties many are facing.

Our web designer's mom had a heart attack then got COVID-19 but I think she is ok now.

Our lead writer had a friend younger than I who after going to the hospital with COVID-19.

Our lead programmer's parents recently had their house broken into with some of their sentimental jewelry stolen & he is the glue guy for the whole family.

One of my buddies recently broke up with his long time girlfriend.

I am sure there are a lot more similar stories that I have not been told yet. So as a rule of thumb I sort of consider that if people have historically been good its ok to give them more leeway this year & be extra kind.

Mental Health

I generally am not a fan of taking prescription drugs to solve symptoms of real problems as in many cases those can cause additional bonus problems. I get that some people need various drugs to get by and survive, though outside of caffeine I typically try not to drink much or do much of anything else that can add more instability or create more bonus issues.

The above said, I think my baseline mood (especially if I am not in great health) tends to be a bit darker than average.

The early web was quite cool and you could do things like email Tim Berners-Lee and get a response, or someone would read your site and see you mentioned Carl Sagan and shoot you an email like this one:

I wrote the first modern book on depression in 1980. It was the first book to present depression as a biochemical disease, rather than a 'mental' illness (whatever that is). And, I was the one who introduced Carl Sagan to television as a local TV personality in L. A., Carl was a good family friend who came to watch a taping of my PBS show, he got really intense when he realized what a medium for communication TV was, and I introduced him to the GM of the station, that's how he got to TV. He was more of a scientist than an actor, I coached him on TV persona. He was a very intense person, and did not have a big ego; he was always open to new information, whether it came from experiences or ideas. He would have loved living now.

To solve both depression and weight gain problems, try an over-the-counter nutrient called 5HTP. The Walmarts here sell the least expensive and best pills. Take about nine a day for about nine days, you will notice you haven't felt the urge to eat all day and you don't have as much depression symptoms; the griffonia seed from which 5HTP is made increases serotonin in the brain.

Then a follow up after I asked about the FDA ban of L-Tryptophan:

Now something gets clearer! When tryotophan was banned because of one supposedly contaminated batch, I used every tiny bit of influence I had as a journalist, talked to every politician I could get in touch with. It was like going up against a brick wall. I wrote articles, did everything, could not understand at all why the nutrient was being banned for one bad batch in Japan and why resistance to overturning the ban was so solid. I even tried to obtain the animal version, and was told it 'wasn't the same,' yet according to a chemical analysis, it was. Now I understand....

My book is "Depression, How to Recognize It, Cure It and Grow From It, Prentice Hall hardback, Simon Schuster paperback.

She also mentioned

Depression research is such big business that I feel they don't want to find a real cure. The way the research should have gone is to study the chemical makeup of depression, then match the medication effect to different brain hormones (as well as cortisol-though it's not a biogenic amine, it's a definite precursor), and find accurate ways of testing which hormone or combination thereof is/are out of balance, so the correct medication can be prescribed right off the bat. So, if it's a seratonin imbalance, the doc gives one medication, if it's monomaine oxadase, the patient gets another, and so on. Prosac is like a huge blanket device, rather than an accurate laser beam going to the exact place it is needed.

Depression research really hasn't progressed that much in the last 20 years, imho.

I know a big part of my improved mood was from taking 5-HTP along with Vitamin B & Vitamin C just before bed. When I take those I can fall asleep a bit quicker, sleep about an hour less, wake up feeling more refreshed, and am less hungry the following morning. If I had to guess, I would say the 5-hydroxytryptophan contributed to my recent 40 pound weight loss more than anything else did.

Anyhow, I would not recommend 5-HTP for anyone who is on SSRIs, MAO inhibitors, or many other drug classes (talk to your doctor first, etc.). But I figured a lot of people feel like crap this year so I should mention it has worked well for me.

Before writing this blog post I also recommended it to a few other people.

Our lead content writer was down after her friend died & I recommended it to her. She said she felt a difference the very next day.

Our backend developer took some after I told him about it and said his personal doom loop he was going through was better within 2 days.

I do not think it is a magic cure-all or would work for everyone, but if you are a bit down combining a bit of 5-HTP with exercise, healthy diet, sleep, etc. can help you improve your worldview and outlook a bit to get through the challenging times we are going through.

My only complaint (glass is always at least half empty :D) would be that as I have discarded that sort of rage cycle I find it easier to be distracted and harder to focus on work. If you love what you do focus comes automatic, but if you don't then you do sometimes have to trick yourself a bit into being productive if you literally could be retired for life. But I suppose most people would say that is an absurd "problem" to complain about.

My only solution to the above is watching MJ on MJ. :D

I’m going to tweet this & pin it to my page so I can watch it every single day When MJ talks about winning & leadership has a price, he’s talking about sacrificing a part of who you are for all that your team can become. A Championship Standard!! pic.twitter.com/IbK95jFTVY— Jaycob Ammerman (@Jammer2233) May 13, 2020

Ending on a Positive Note

Destruction leads to a very rough road but it also breeds creation And earthquakes are to a girl's guitar, they're just another good vibration And tidal waves couldn't save the world from Californication

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If you are reading this blog post you are almost certainly involved in some part of web development, content production, internet marketing and/or e-commerce.

Ultimately as the world is reshaped you will benefit as long as you get through the current period as literally *everything* is moving online.

This chart on e-commerce continues to amaze me. pic.twitter.com/zW4EwKHW1N— David Schawel (@DavidSchawel) August 17, 2020

Given that the big platform monopolies are now getting the PR black eyes they deserve for their locked down ecosystems there is a good chance the web will be a much better place in the next half-decade.

The number of people rushing to become their own bosses is at a record level. Many will fail, but many will innovate and create new markets as they have no choice but to succeed. As more things move online, attention merchant platforms keep breaking culture into smaller and smaller chunks to fuel increasingly distorted views of reality that cater toward confirmation bias and rage.

At some point people will tire of the feed-based never-ending stream and want things they can complete. The growth of Neflix and their streaming competitors reflects the desire for something longer and more in-depth.

Some of legacy print media brands with high cost structures are now recycled selling marked-up garbage in parallel markets.

The combination of these trends will drive an increased appreciation for authenticity & the desire for human connection.

Long ago my original SEO mentor stated:

This is what I think, SEO is all about emotions, all about human interaction. People, search engineers even, try and force it into a numbers box. Numbers, math and formulas are for people not smart enough to think in concepts.

I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.

Or to put it another way, the best sites say - this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don't like it go somewhere else.

Ultimately though I think it comes down to desire and the will to win.

He later sold his business for a life changing sum, so unlike his favorite football club, I guess he had the will to win. The question remains if he will purchase the football club and "fix" them. :D

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from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/managing-depression

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

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October 22, 2019 at 07:00AM

I trust Bill Kristol. Not his political opinions, which are nuts. The guy wants to bomb Iran. No, I trust Bill Kristol’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism. He is the very model of a modern major elite: soft-spoken and chipper, with a default half smile that implies he’s looking at a world as if it were a beautiful painting that’s not quite centered on the wall. There are no photos from any period of Bill Kristol’s life where he does not look old.

Bill’s dad was Irving Kristol, a member of a group of writers redundantly called the New York Intellectuals, making Bill a second generation Intellectual Elite member. Bill spent more time at Harvard than John Harvard. He graduated magna cum laude in three years, got a PhD in history, and taught political philosophy there. Harvard is where Bill met his wife, who later got a PhD in classical philology. Do you know how hard it is for a Republican to get a girlfriend at an Ivy League school?

Bill’s commitment to Intellectual Elitism makes him the perfect Founding Father of the new political party that I want to create. The old parties are dying, the ones who argued over how much socialism you dipped into my capitalism. They’re being replaced in each country by parties representing populists versus parties who believe in globalism. Brexit has split the Conservatives. The McCain/Romney followers have left the Trumpists. In Italy, the Five Star Movement formed a government with the League; in Greece, Syriza aligned with Independent Greeks. In France, the left and right jointly protested gas taxes to reduce carbon emissions by burning cars in Paris while they wore yellow vests, because the French like to stay safe in traffic even when rioting. These groups have a thousand differences but one thing in common: a hatred of the Intellectual Elite.

So I want to form a new party. In the Intellectual Elite party, conservatives will sit at a table with liberals, saying grace over meals of cold-pressed juice.

Bill is already starting to work on this, in exactly the way I hoped he would: he’s joined a secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite. Even better, he is a member of two secretive, elitist organizations that do this. Patriots and Pragmatists consists of a mix of about fifty Republicans and Democrats who meet a few times a year. One conference was held at Sausalito’s Cavallo Point, a resort built on a former army base that has rooms that were former officers’s residences and a spa offering “energy work,” thereby pleasing and annoying both left and right. The group has yet to talk about forming a new political party, instead focusing on ways to tout democratic ideals. This sounds lazy to me. I fear they spend too much time in conference rooms and not enough time doing energy work.

In case Patriots and Pragmatists fails, the second secretive, elitist organization that works to save the Intellectual Elite that Bill belongs to has a more direct plan: Since the 2016 election, Bill and more than one hundred other Intellectual Elite Republicans meet every other week to figure out how to regain control of their party. This organization also has a great name: the Meeting of the Concerned. “Concerned is a euphemism. It’s the Meeting of the Freaked Out,” says member Brink Lindsey. To my chagrin, they do not drink brandy in a wood-paneled offices. “The aesthetics match the mood. We have a windowless conference room with various breakfast items,” says Brink about the basement offices of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank. I have never heard a term as sad as “various breakfast items.” Even the Holiday Inn calls them “hot and fresh fare.”

I am not allowed to attend the Meeting of the Concerned since some members are worried that I’ll reveal their names and Republicans will expunge them from the party, thereby decreasing their power to change it. The group is so secretive that CNN has never covered it despite the fact that their meetings are in the same building as CNN’s DC headquarters.

So I reproduced a meeting. I found out who the members were, called them while I ate a tiny muffin and cereal from one of those single-serving boxes you can pour milk into, and started the conversation by saying, “Can you believe what Trump did today?”

The first thing I learned in my pretend basement conference room was that members of the Meeting of the Concerned do not agree on how to handle populists. The two competing philosophies are change and fight: Is it better for the Intellectual Elite to study the populists’ criticisms and adjust our policies, or to shout at them for being racist idiots?

Every one of my liberal friends has chosen fight. They cheered the DC restaurant that kicked out Sarah Huckabee Sanders for working as Trump’s press secretary.

The Intellectual Elite didn’t used to embrace fight. Michelle Obama’s directive from her 2016 Democratic convention speech was “When they go low, we go high.” But two years later, former Obama attorney general Eric Holder told a crowd, “When they go low, we kick them.” Democratic representative Maxine Waters held a rally in Los Angeles that was 10 miles from my house and 1.8 miles from a Whole Foods, in which she said, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

These attacks seem like the oppressed fighting back against their oppressors, but they’re actually skirmishes in the war between two elites: The ones who care about ideas and the ones who care about money.

The restaurant yellers aren’t ethnic minorities. This is all rich-white-on-rich-white violence. More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree. Progressive activists are twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, three times more likely to have gone to grad school, and way more likely to be white. Only 3 percent of progressive activists are black. Progressive activists are me and my friends. We are the ones most scared about the Trumpists because they are coming to replace us.

Fear is not a good reason to surrender to the gut instinct to fight. The most important thing we elite can do is act elite. Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice, the swoopy haired Concerned member, is frustrated by seeing politicians host town hall meetings that devolve into mob shouting. “Having respect for Congress as an institution should be part of a ‘small c’ conservative culture. You put your hand on your heart when you salute the flag, you wear a suit to church, and you wear a suit when you talk to someone from Congress,” he says. “If you honestly thought you had a solution, would you come to a town hall unshaven in a T-shirt to talk to a member of Congress? I don’t think these people believe this is how political change happens. They just want to shout and feel good.”

Bill Kristol feels the same frustration. “The appeal to expertise doesn’t work, obviously. The appeals to history and common sense don’t work. Maybe modern liberal skepticism and rational argument has always been a little bit more tenuous than you think. People think, ‘That kind of society doesn’t do much for me and is kind of boring,’” he says. “I went to a couple of the Trump rallies in 2016 and there’s a lot of ‘This is a lot more fun than a boring political speech.’ It’s a combination of anger and entertainment.”

I want to make a plea solely to my fellow Intellectual Elite, largely because you’re the only ones who make it to the end of an article.

Our new party needs to embrace Humble Elitism. We don’t have a choice. Because an angry war is a war that populists will win.

In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech to the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis under the advice of his chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who undoubtedly regrets it. “We have two cultures: the cultural elite and the rest of us,” Quayle said. “I wear their scorn as a badge of honor.” It is hard to admit that the man who could not spell potato and thought it was likely that we could breathe on Mars understood something, but he did.

The fuel of populism is rage at those who claim higher status. To extinguish the populists’ fire, we have to stop dismissing them as deplorable, racist, ignorant, unsophisticated, sexist, and I’m going to stop here in case someone tweets this sentence, which will impede my strategy. We have to bite our lips, feel their pain, and do that thing where you slowly nod while squinting.

I fail when I’m smug. The thing I’ve been most smug about is not listening to decades of people telling me I’m smug. I was so young when people started calling me smug that they used the word precocious, which means “smug child.” My smugness is the least elite part of me. It’s insecurity stemming from yearning to be in The Loop. It’s tribal—a way to exclude others by drawing a circle around ourselves. It also fails our beloved scientific method because it almost never works. The only people who have ever been convinced by smugness are shoppers at Whole Foods.

We have to stop introducing ourselves by listing our jobs, our secret organizations, and what college we attended, which I am refraining from doing right here, although I would love for you to look it up on Wikipedia, which I should not mention that I’m listed on.

We need to stop acting as if our electric cars, our organic food, and our fair-trade, single-origin coffee make us more evolved humans, when they simply make us poorer humans. We need to stop lecturing West Virginians about the obvious inanity of remaining in the coal industry when we are working in the journalism industry.

Humility is not much of an ask. Part of embracing facts, logic, and history is knowing that we will sometimes be wrong. Galileo was wrong about tides. Albert Einstein was wrong about quantum physics. I was wrong about smugness. The point is: I’m exactly like Galileo and Einstein. This smugness thing is going to be tough to overcome. But if anyone can do it, it’s us. Seriously, this is not going to be easy.

Adapted from I Am Forming A New Political Party For Smug Elites Like Me by Joel Stein (Grand Central Publishing).

#IFTTT #Blogger

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teddgeek · 5 years

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The 15 Laws of Meeting Power

> Such a referee will even occasionally allow a fight to spiral dangerously out of control in order to exhaust the participants before stepping in. A ham-handed referee on a power trip gets in the way of resolution and forces the participants to waste some effort in cutting him/her out of the loop (101 on how to do this: undercut their credibility, draw in a different referee, collude with your opponent to escalate the tension beyond the amateur referee’s control).

> In a formal context, a LOT is determined by how well the chairperson and the room can see you and how well you can see the rest of the room. At Telluride, because of the way chairs were arranged (in semicircular rings rather than rows) I chose to sit near the back, but in a very visible portion of the back. Not because I am a typical back row “silent observer with one wise remark” kind, but because I can see and be seen. The benefit of being seen is obvious: your raised hand can rarely be overlooked, and it is easy to dominate the floor when it is your turn, when people don’t have to twist too much to see your facial and body language. The power of seeing is less obvious. One benefit of being able to survey the room is that you can read group body language: is the left side of the room unhappy? Face ‘em as you make your next conciliatory remark.

> […] one of the signs of sophistication she looked for in a candidate was an instance of referring back to something that was said more than 10 minutes ago.

> A corollary to the power of listening is the power of citation. Using what was said before gives you a lot of control. It is even more powerful if you remember who said it and what the exact words were, and can quote. Why? Because you automatically demonstrate that you were paying attention, making you more credible than others. Plus, you can temporarily borrow the “usual” supporters of the people you quote, because you did them the honor of remembering what their side said.

> Extra Credit: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Quoting your opponents more accurately than they can quote themselves is one of the most fascinating moves you can employ. The original speaker is put on the defensive, forced to fumble and clarify, and in the process loses control. If you want to experience true schadenfreude listen closely to what your opponents say. Do not admit to enjoying this experience.

> There are several good reasons why meetings should not be held to silly egalitarian standards. A matter of special knowledge is being discussed. Would you give the two opposed experts 90% of the airtime and leave 10% to the lay folk, or give each individual his/her 10%? Someone is prattling on idiotically, would you rather cut him/her off or let them waste an additional 20 minutes of everybody’s time? Yes, labeling a contribution as idiotic and useless is a judgment call. But the point of meetings is neither “respectful dialogue” nor formal competitive debate. A meeting is about talking for the sake of discovering collective wisdom, making decisions and solving problems. This calls for fundamentally different approaches to evaluating and controlling the value of what is being said. Adversarial weeding out of collectively-designated bullshit is the only know way to achieve this evaluation and control. Leave egalitarianism for the voting booth.

> Creating and manipulating debating stances in the group, creating polarizations and wars between entrenched positions, intentionally hurting feelings, framing issues in an “I win only if you lose” manner – each of these behaviors is morally suspect, particularly in the American imagination (other cultures tend to be a lot less nanny-like). Debate is rightly seen as a destructive force. Destruction is wrongly seen as a purely negative force. The element of genuine zero-sum debate is why meetings are creative-destruction processes and not candlelight vigils. Without clearing the deadwood of the collective mind with the controlled burns of aggressive and adversarial debating, collective decision-making and action is next to impossible. The forest fires of collective stupidity would take over. Don’t shy away from a fight when one is necessary. If you need to prevent a disastrous vote in one minute by carefully employing an ad hominem, do so. The ends sometimes justify the means.

Some excellent quotes I got from this post; good read, I'll try to learn them I see if they work while finding ways to apply them.

#strategy #power #dynamics #management #debate #dialogue #meeting

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/07/14/the-15-laws-of-meeting-power/

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darapnerd · 7 years

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G33k HQ Presents: MC Front-A-Lot Interview

Interview Questions From G33K-HQ & Darealwordsound (Wordy): Nerdcore Interview Collaboration Questions

MC Front: Thank you for bearing with me! So sorry to continually drop the ball on this. Here you go.

Wordy: What was your first creative outlet? MC Front: I seem to remember kindergarten involving a lot of drawing. First and second grade had poetry exercises sometimes. But the way we played D&D between 2nd and 6th grades was how my imagination really got fired up. We didn\'t like dice and maps that much. We\'d take turns DMing and just sort of freestyle the stories to each other at recess. Wordy: What was the first rap album you ever purchased? MC Front: It was also my first CD. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, He\'s the DJ, I\'m the Rapper. Wordy: Who are your biggest music inspirations?

MC Front: Tom Waits, Public Enemy, Bjork

Wordy: Describe your studio to us.

MC Front: I have an Ikea desk that\'s been out of print for 10 years so I get fussy when anyone leans on it. Creaky, cheap old thing. It\'s the only one where you can bolt the rotating side shelves at any height. Perfect for the near-field monitors and re-aiming them for any version of the stereo field. I mix there in my bedroom which isn\'t treated, but I\'ve been in there so long that I can work around most of the room effects. I have a coat closet fully treated, very dead and dry, for vocals. I keep some buttons in there to engineer myself, but everything\'s still happening on the studio computer. My pre-amp and mics and monitors are satisfactory. I could use a better ADC/DAC.

I will record occasional hand percussion, etc, in that closet booth, but very little fits in there. For other acoustic capture, I\'ll rent time at a real studio (any time I\'m tracking my drummers) or I\'ll go field-record strings at someone\'s apartment.

A solid two thirds of the non-vocal sound on the albums is electronic, and I can get keyboard performances or work on drum machine material in the project studio without worrying about the ambient noises of Brooklyn.

Wordy: Describe your ideal home studio if money wasn\'t a problem.

MC Front: A proper treatment of the mixing room would be great. I guess I\'d have twenty of these Avalon pre-amps and a little drum room, as well as a booth big enough for upright bass or cello. There is almost unlimited fanciness available in the hardware market... I guess I\'d have to make a hobby out of shopping. I\'d still use Reaper as my DAW, though -- the least expensive version of that kind of software, and also the best. I could probably spend sixty grand on plugins.

Wordy: What is your creative process for writing and or producing a song?

MC Front: Baddd Spellah, my Canadian beatsmithing partner, has been kind enough to work on grooves with me for the last fifteen years. Usually I will start with something he\'s been kicking around, or he\'ll take a pass at some live drum that I\'ve been chopping up, and we\'ll add keyboard material from Gm7 (Gaby Alter), my longtime music co-writer. When there is a verse-appropriate groove that is in pretty good shape, I\'ll leave it on loop and write. Once in a while, I\'ll write a hook over a groove that feels like a chorus, and start from there. After I\'ve got most of a lyric, I\'ll put down a scratch vocal so that Spellah and I can build a full song arrangement. Then I\'ll record too many takes of the final vocal, and spend too many months dicking around with the comp, the mix, and all the instrumental details. Finally I\'ll listen to it on as many different devices as I can, fine-tune the mix, and stay up for a week and a half making increasingly bad decisions about everything on the album, leading up to the mastering appointment I foolishly committed to several months prior.

Wordy: What is your happiest On-Stage Moment?

MC Front: I think a PAX crowd demanded a second encore once. That makes you feel like a superstar.

Wordy: What was your favorite song to write or record?

MC Front: Maybe Stoop Sale? But that might be because the video came out so well. For the most part, my happiness with the process relies entirely on the result: it makes me happy to listen to a track if I don\'t just hear a barrage of fuckups that it\'s too late to go back and fix. But there aren\'t very many of those. Of all my lyrics, I\'m probably proudest of Two Dreamers from the Question Bedtime album. I feel like I worked out every bit of the story and then obscured it just enough that the listener\'s careful attention is rewarded.

Wordy: What advice do you have for aspiring artists?

MC Front: Practice a lot, develop your talent. Get the skills you need to properly communicate with whoever your creative partners are. Take the craft seriously but give yourself a break for not having mastered it -- that is a lifelong process with no actual end goal.

Wordy: What project do you feel best describes you as an artist?

MC Front: The Nerdcore Rising documentary probably says more about me and the band than I\'d ever be able to, and in kinder words. Of my own projects, I like the Zero Day and Solved albums as a window into whatever it is I\'m trying to say about nerdcore.

Wordy: How do you feel about the disconnect between \"Nerdcore\" and \"HipHop\"?

MC Front: Well, hip-hop is a cultural movement with very specific origins and elements. Rap is a formal music style that emerged from hip-hop. Any \'variation\' or \'new perspective\' that someone brings to rap is fine -- if meaningless. It might matter that you came up with a new thing to say, but the fact that you chose an unusual form for your expression should be the least interesting thing about it. You can write a march for your peace movement, even if marches come from military music, because the march itself is just a formal style of composition. You\'d be smart to note the ironic relationship there, or you\'d be dumb to suggest that there isn\'t one, or that your choice to use a march as an expression of pacifism somehow reaches backward and affects the origin of the form. Anyone who thinks they\'re \'expanding\' or \'liberating\' hip-hop from its roots by rapping about things that haven\'t been rapped about traditionally is probably an idiot.

My idea about hip-hop was only to observe that it was cool. Like, it was the coolest thing happening in American culture when I was a kid, and it probably still is. Breakdancers were the coolest kids on the playground. Graffiti kids were the coolest outlaws in fourth grade. And rappers were the coolest possible composers of verse.

To want to compose and perform verse in that formal style without having any direct connection to hip-hop, and without being cool, is the sort of desire nerd kids might express by themselves, away from arbiters of hipness, and share only with other uncool kids. The idea of nerdcore went no deeper than that, originally. I\'m glad that a lot of other DIY rappers have found that resonant enough to expand upon.

Wordy: Do you feel more \"Nerdcore\" rappers should know about its roots in \"HipHop\"?

MC Front: Definitely. I remember trying to write a Villanelle in a college poetry class. First, we had to read and dissect a sheaf of them. The professor was of the opinion that we would all flounder in the assignment, because there had been only a handful of good Villanelles ever written. I\'m sure none of us wrote one of lasting value. The point was to learn how formal composition connects works, and to appreciate the complications. You can always just do it anyway. But knowing where it comes from and how it\'s been attempted before teaches you how to try to do it well. I think anyone who wants to compose lyrics within the rap genre should know all they can about how raps have been composed so far.

That doesn\'t even begin to address the cultural issue. Some artists misidentify nerdcore as comedy music, and worse yet, think the joke is \"it\'s rap, but white kids are doing it.\" I think that outlook leads to the weakest possible songs, and is generally disrespectful of hip-hop in a way that concerns me and offends anyone who cares about American culture. Of course, not all of the nerdcore rappers are white, but all of the schticky ones are. I wonder if a delve into hip-hop\'s history would cure them of that impulse, or at least afford them the humility to hush it up.

Wordy: Are you involved in any philanthropy in your local communities or abroad?

MC Front: I try to do something in support of Child\'s Play every year. I\'m going to contribute to the upcoming Worldbuilders album project.

Wordy: Can you freestyle? Meaning rap off the top of the head? If so, can we see you drop a few bars next time live?

MC Front: I never do this! I think I\'ve conditioned myself into a certain kind of vanity. Almost everything on the albums is rapped in complete sentences, with rhymes that I\'ve never used previously. Freestyling doesn\'t work that way. I\'m too ashamed to let anyone see me freestyling about the frog, on a log, in a bog, who got sog-gy.

Wordy: Do you consider yourself a “GEEK”?

MC Front: Of course.

Wordy: In your own words, describe what the word “GEEK” means to you?

MC Front: I decided at some point a long time ago that geeks are all direct descendants of the side-show geek, whose job was biting heads off of chickens. They weren\'t special in any way, except that they were willing and able to do that thing, and it was a fairly extreme thing to do. But because nobody else at the carnival was willing to go to that extreme, the geekery came to seem like a highly specialized skill.

That\'s why you can be a geek about anything. You just need a topic where your knowledge or expertise is so specialized that it seems distastefully extreme to non-geeks. You can geek out about fantasy novels or about robot AIs. But you can also geek out about car engines or cooking. You don\'t have to be a nerd to geek out.

Nerds are almost always geeks, and their subjects of geekery are often recognizably nerdy. But a nerd is something else, a person who was already too weird or too smart, and felt alienated, and embraced geekery as an alternative to whatever broader pursuits the cool kids enjoyed.

Wordy: What is your earliest geek memory?

MC Front: I was a Star Wars geek starting at age three and a half when the first one came out. It was the only thing I wanted to do. I made adults take me to see it 11 times before Empire came out (I kept careful count). I collected the Kenner figures obsessively until they stopped making new ones a year or two after Jedi.

Wordy: What is your \"Geek\" hobby? Do you collect comic books? Anime? Video games?

MC Front: I do still love comics, but I own too many. Video games take up less space. I spend more time gaming than I do working on music, occasionally 70 or 80 hours in a week. It\'s as much an emotional self-medication as it is a hobby.

Wordy: Who are your Top 5 emcees dead or alive?

MC Front: In no order: Busdriver, MF Doom, Del, Q-Tip, Chuck D

Wordy: When is your next show or tour?

MC Front: When I get the dang old album done! Maybe spring 2017 for tour. PAX South is the soonest lone show.

Wordy: Do you have a new album coming out?

MC Front: It\'s called INTERNET SUCKS, and it is going to have a heavy \'get off my lawn\' vibe. Everyone will be mad at me, yet secretly agree with every word on the record. Watch for it to take your feeds by storm.

http://frontalot.com

more at darealwordsound

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