5 minutes of meditation. It won’t solve the anxiety, but it will insert just enough perspective and space to help you recognize a couple things:

• you are not your anxiety, it’s more like weather that you’re experiencing.
• the things that you’re worried about may be real, but your experience of them is warped by the anxiety.

My therapist gave me a really helpful metaphor. Anxiety is kind of like putting your hand right in front of your face. It blocks everything else out. It’s all you can see. It’s all you can experience. While this isn’t the desired state, you also can’t get rid of your hand without losing a real part of yourself. So instead, what if you focus on inserting space. Move your hand further from your face, and it becomes an element of the environment. It’s a thing you can observe. It’s still real, and it’s still there, but it’s now more in perspective.

That’s what meditation, even 5 minutes, can do. It pushes your anxiety into perspective. It won’t get rid of it, but it will help you see it as an element rather than your entire experience.

Halfway through it starts hawking gold and subscriptions to Masterworks 😂

As with anything web design, we should think about context and nuance. Is this a web tool where the user needs to do work? Is it designed with small buttons (for function or aesthetics)?

If so, probably keep the default pointer. Though if it’s a splashy brand page with tiny buttons, I could imagine some other pointer styles that might be good.

Speaking of, is it something splashy and marketing heavy? Is it intended more as an experiment, experience, or intentional maximalist design?

If so, then I can see the argument. Accessibility still matters, though so implement graceful depredation so that folks who prefer motion effects disabled get a default pointer.

The answer is not “never change the pointer” but rather, “only break web standards if you have a good, well considered reason.”

I honestly think a circular Y axis is a really interesting twist on chess. Having to defend and attack ahead and behind? Sounds hard but very cool.

Came for the comments making fun of his gun safety. Left because of all the fat shaming.

https://pca.st/episode/a8bc145d-94d8-4c4f-b3c6-635e3f8e81e4

If Books Could Kill did a great episode on this. “Who Moved My Cheese”

And you weren’t lying about the orange juice. Simply incredible out here.

I’m curious about the larger ecological impact here. Does a desert benefit from this? Is it good for the flora and fauna currently living there? I imagine some additional rainfall is appreciated by a little desert mouse, but how much is too much? How close is this change to that threshold?

Any desert specialists in the thread, lmk. I’ll buy you some boba.

Go with the Benchmade Guided Field Sharpener. It’s dead simple (important to overcome the “It’s fine if I don’t sharpen my knife this time” feeling) and super compact, so it can easily fit in a drawer. I got one a year ago and never looked back.

https://www.benchmade.com/products/100604f

Before he sharpens them? I guess so.

Done!

My two cents: start your own shop. Find a customer segment that you care about and build valuable things for them. It takes a fair amount of effort, but I’ve learned after several layoffs that it’s a lot harder to lose 10 customers than it is to lose one W2 job. Precarity is constant. Diversifying your income is a much better mitigator for a terrible job market than pivoting.

This is all assuming that you like your current line of work. If not, pivot sooner rather than later. Take an online course or watch a YouTube video, and then start doing the new thing to learn it. Build some case studies to develop and showcase your skills. What would a data science portfolio look like? What do other data scientists demonstrate on their sites? Learn enough to do that, and pepper in the current experience you have to differentiate yourself.

I’m traveling through Portugal at the moment, and an Australian guy struck up a conversation with me on the train yesterday. He and I start talking politics, and he starts talking about how illegal immigration is a massive problem. He’s supportive of mass deportation, and generally likes how Trump is handling things. We debate this back and forth, and then move on to other subjects.

Later in the conversation he reveals, without a hint of irony, that his visa in Portugal has expired while waiting on residence paperwork. I just stare at him for a moment, and then ask him if he realized he was an illegal immigrant. He doesn’t really see the irony. Absolutely stunned.

“yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off.”

As an American white dude traveling full time, I haven’t really gotten any of this yet personally. I have sat next to some really loud Americans and felt irritated at them, but the same goes for the British lady who walked into a cafe I was in and loudly insisted they make her a sandwich that wasn’t on the menu.

Most people are kind and curious. Those who aren’t, regardless of nationality, are the ones who irritate the locals.

Of course, the world is big and I obviously haven’t been everywhere. In each place I have been to, though, learning a few words and being extra polite goes a long way. Locals welcome you and return the curiosity and respect.

:fiddles with phone: Where’s the dang über-upvote button on this thing?

There’s actually a word for this!

Tmesis Tmesis is a rhetorical device where a word is split into two parts with another word inserted between them, often for emphasis or comic effect.

They don’t even post the bootlicker author’s info. Even if this was AI, a human still decided to publish this propaganda. It would be nice to have a public record for accountability.

“The impediment to action advances action. What’s in the way becomes the way.”

This is basically saying that anything that gets in the way of you solving a problem becomes the new problem to solve.

“The tool works at both ends.”

This is about skill building and practice. Making cool stuff improves you as a result.

Something I like about each is that they work in reverse. No impediment in your way? You’re probably not going to have very focused forward movement. No need to use tools (literally or metaphorically)? You won’t become more skilled.

Remember that buying things online always atomizes community. The less you know your local community, the harder it feels to go out and buy local and the more you crave the convenience of buying online. The more you buy online, the less you go out into your community.