Men & Grief

[All grief is one: like touching the ocean at any of the imaginary lines we’ve drawn, it’s all one body of water.]

[When my partner senses that I’m holding back grief and invites me with a simple gesture like a hand on the shoulder, it’s hard to meet them there but I try to anyway, because to say “no worries, everything’s fine” would be to negate their good instincts for how I’m feeling.]

[I appreciate things that make me cry because they give me the chance to shed a few more of the tears repressed during childhood, when I had learned that doing so was dangerous.]

When does it make sense to focus on not liking someone’s approach versus accepting and appreciating diverse ways?

[Journalism has a chance to present culture in a psychological order that helps us orient, but often submits to promotional calendars resulting in bestseller lists and cinema charts, as if popularity would be the most useful factor in making decisions.]

[Choosing of what we wish to be informed requires knowing ourselves well enough to not selectively ignore what we need; perhaps it’s a position that could be prepared for with therapy.]

[Political news could draw us into how our society works and equip us to improve it intelligently. Word news could humanize foreign cultures and add context beyond dramatic events to help break us from fixating too locally. Economic news could go beyond standard figures to instill understanong of the human realities behind our goods. Celebrity news could be refocused on people from who we can learn how to be better and realize our own talents. Disaster news could help us feel grateful for every pain-free moment. Consumer news could point us to what can help us live a more fulfilling existence.]

[As humans evolved from a time where not much would change, where when something that did might be important or deadly, we need to readjust our perceptions to clarify that what is novel is not always important.]

[We most desperately avoid introspection when forming awkward but vital ideas, and that’s when the news grabs us.]

[Not everything we need to round ourselves out can be found in the present; for some perspectives we will need to look to the past for ideas that will still be in our thoughts tomorrow.]

[Children, wildlife, and heavenly expanse of the galaxies can give us relief from the news-induced self absorption that our time and moment is the most important.]

Art is a tool to help us with a number of psychological frailties which we would otherwise have trouble handling: our inability to understand ourselves, to laugh sagely at our faults, to empathize with and forgive others, to accept the inevitability of suffering without falling prey to a sense of persecution, to remain tolerably hopeful, to appreciate the beauty of the everyday and to prepare adequately for death.

[‘Dining, Travel, Technology, Fashion’ headings can be renamed to ‘Conviviality, Calm, Resistance, Rationality’ as those are what we seek to acquire from our consumption in those domains.]

[The powerful in Europe often decorated their rooms with a human skull, positioned in a way to get their attention, so that they might be reminded of death and refocused on more important considerations in life. The bad news of our day can function as the modern version of those skulls.]

[Hearing about a plane crash that doesn’t affect anyone we know can still transform us into a panicked relative or air accident investigator: we want to research details and receive regular updates (which media organizations will happily use for their purposes]

[Societies where everyone wants to be famous also fail to prove that being ordinary will make you feel respected adequate for basic dignity.]

[If celebrities have become so as a response to emotional needs not being met during their formative years, a child wanting to become famous can be a useful gauge to how well the parenting is going]

Erin Kissane leaving the internet

[Pretender technologies may only appear to be the next thing, without eventually changing anything, but they can function as a playspace to try possible futures.]

[If we want better networks, we must concretely understand what happened to us, and then use that knowledge to try new things deliberately, with painstaking attention to the human cost.]

I was told a long time ago that ‘modeling your classical music performance on recordings can ruin your artistic integrity because it distracts you from finding your own interpretation’. Only now have I considered how this can parallel in improvised music, where playing ’like the recording’ leads me to be detached from my current needs and capacity. It’s more honest to understand a song from the recording, but without using it as an excuse to skip over dealing with current challenges, which might mean performing it in a way that bears little resemblance to the original, and this can be constructive.

How to Stand Up for Yourself

[When someone asks ‘why’ after you respond to their request with ’no, you can say “it’s not what’s best for me right now”, “it’s outside my focus right now”, “I need to make another choice”.]

How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

[When you feel the tightening up and defensiveness that comes with someone trying to ‘prove’ or ‘persuade’ their perspective, consider focusing on what question to ask so that you can learn something.]

[Feeling triggered is a prompt to understand what provoked it.]

Does AI benefit the world?

[We did this three-session activity three times during the year: first for cars, then the internet, then generative AI.]

[Global impact doesn’t lend itself to simple numerical representations, as what the numbers represent may not be evenly distributed.]

[Generative models are often discussed in terms of potential impact decades from now, so to start by measuring something that has already existed for decades helps ground discussion in less theoretical terms.]

[If we network homogeneously, our surrounding opinions will tend to conform similarly.]

Peanut butter soya cucumber salad

Ingredients

• 1 cucumber, sliced
• 2 tbsp peanut butter
• 1 splash of soya
• msg
• chilli crunch
• rice wine vinegar
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• sesame seeds
• sesame oil

Method

• Put everything in a container, then close and shake well to mix.

Poncianinho’s Vlog 8 “Other Side”

[The sun made me want to practice.]

Capoeira Podcast

[Advice should be like snow: the more gentle it falls, the longer it stays.]

The road to mastery 1 by Mestre Poncianinho

[Learn to be comfortable with getting motivated to work when you plateau and not give up.]

[Scoping out a scene that isn’t aware of itself.]

Cachila: Uruguay – Tambores del Candombe N° 2 (2009)

Pure vocal percussion, sometimes with actual drums. Can’t help but solo or move on some of these explosive rhythmic drives. Some tracks fuse conversation, sound play, and humour.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber on Blinkist.

[Technical skill alone is insufficient to kickstart a successful business and can easily lead to unsustainable models where the founder does everything.]

[Turnkey businesses are popular because they have a far higher success rate; they consider and plan all aspects of the business beforehand so that the owner doesn’t need to be present.]

[Every single process needs to be documented in order for someone to run the business without you.]

[Structure all aspects of the business to support your personal objectives.]

[Your marketing should consider the customer and ignore everything else. Get to know their profile as best as you can and market in ways that are appealing to them. Adapt your strategy as they change.]

[All of this ‘business development process’ never stops, continuing as you learn while in motion and understand through testing.]