I've learned to handle most of life's bumps and scrapes pretty effectively, so prior to Monday, I hadn't needed this space to vent for some time. I try pretty hard to not make habits of negativity and need for sympathy, because I have a pretty good life and much prefer using it to make things that people enjoy. Over the past couple years, the artistic hobbies of mine that you've seen on my other blogs have been really effective for me, and I'm going to keep doing those.

But, by gods, I've had a really awful week, and I need to get it out of my head. So please pardon while I use this space to do so again, and please only keep reading if you want to know the morbid details.

Last Sunday, I was shaken to my core when a friend of a friend tried to intervene in my home situation. They tried to broker a truce after some tension broke out over the weekend, and did so in a way that did not get the results they wanted. Specifically, they put themselves in the position of telling me that I'd not be able to continue my housing situation past the end of the year, and did so in a way that injected them into a complex situation that I don't believe they were prepared to handle. This conversation ended with me barely holding back tears -- after all, I care for the people I'm with very much and have been here for five years -- and I lost basically the entire remainder of the weekend to feeling unwell.

On Monday, my manager of four years announced his departure. This was, as you might expect, awkward for me -- I had just successfully wrapped up a major project and was hoping it would reflect well on my performance for the year. I can't talk about any of the details of it, but I can say that I'm very proud of how well this went... and having that success lost in the noise of transition-to-new-manager was a blow on my already low morale.

Compounding this, I communicated myself legendarily poorly to my friend-of-a-friend, upsetting them enough that it scared me very deeply. And so, on Monday evening, I checked into a hotel across the street from my home, and spent a great deal of time trying to emotionally care for myself and convince myself that everything would be okay.

Around this time, I picked up a Talkspace subscription for myself. While I have a therapist that I see once a month, I desperately needed out-of-band care at this point to keep myself emotionally together. This service deserves a very high rating -- the therapist I've been paired with has done a phenomenal job of helping me work through this. And at the time, being able to get immediate care on the "he said she said"*, allowed me to insulate everyone in the situation for long enough to allow things to cool off.

For the remainder of that work week, I spent my time at my ex's home, working out of their bedroom.** My work is portable such that I was able to do this on a moment's notice, with a few awkward rough edges that I hadn't immediately considered (ie, having to use my phone to load a specific VPN, because Chromebooks are lacking in that department). For meetings, I worked out of a conference room at our local business center, which also happened to be useful because of fire alarm testing in our apartment complex that week.

Over the course of the week, I tried to make peace with my roommates over IM. Some very good progress happened on Wednesday, in which we determined that we had mostly been talking past one another, due to a difference in cultural expectations and strategies of phrasing and de-escalating an argument. For those who read here, I generally construct emotionally persuasive arguments that are redundant in nature, which tends to cross wires when I should be operating in a more technical mode. I typically freely toggle between these, but when I'm stressed and can't remove myself from a situation, I tend to operate in the emotional mode -- which had been causing communication to break down and become worse without my being aware of it.

On Friday, I attempted to make peace with my roommates in person. That was, at least partially, effective. But for a home in which I felt to some degree loved and cared for, it was an emotional slap in the face to discover just how deeply the resentment had run over my own miscommunication.

Add to all of this the fact I had already been looking to buy a house, and the metaphorical floor has fallen out from under me. I'm still healthy and financially solvent, so that's good -- but pretty much everything I had hoped to accomplish this year was crushed in one week. I have been sort of reeling semi-competently ever since as I tried to handle it, taking each day at a time to make it through, while ensuring I had enough emotional and cognitive energy left to do a competent job at work.

The tl;dr of this is: I'm probably not going to be cognitively well again for at least another few days, maybe as far as a week or three. I'm also unsure if I can make good art in this state. Astute viewers have probably recognized that the quality and definition of what I put out has been erratic in recent months, and that is directly attributable to the amount of tension I'd been experiencing inside of my own home. I'm not sure to what degree I can or should communicate this better, but things will, as I see them, recover.

I guess I'm not entirely appealing for sympathy here; I'm just rather freaked out by all of this and trying to gain traction on it by writing my own thoughts. I just wish that things were not so socially treacherous for me right now, and I feel that getting the hell out of Dodge, so to speak, will do me a lot of good.

Until that happens, please understand when I seem quiet or distant on my personal blogs. I do that to stay positive, and to buffer actionless negativity from all of you, because no one needs that in their timelines. I like all of you very much, and the conversation I'd rather have is a positive one that, as things get better, I'd like to make more candid as I go.

I'll be okay. Just... fuck this past week.


---

* This idiom wants for a gender-neutral alternative. Does one exist?

** My ex lives in the same complex that I do (I actually share their lease on top of my own, because they needed a place to stay after their own bad situation), so this was something of a surprising windfall.

I recently revived one of my old Tumblr accounts to start sharing thoughts and triviata on a more regularly-scheduled basis. Please feel free to follow me at http://goldkin.tumblr.com, should this medium please you.

I will likely continue to keep more focused, personal accounts here, especially when I desire the friend lock. I'm experimenting with different forms of social media again to see if they fit my thoughts. We'll see how that goes.

I have a chronic fear of visible failure. This is especially true in the context of potential passive-aggressive and resentful behavior.

I attribute much of this to my heritage: among other social values, my family raised me to only present my best successes to the world and secretly hide all of my failures. Meanwhile, I grew up in an extremely extroverted and charisma-based society that was heavily obsessed with cataloging and preserving gossip.

This ill-equipped me to build an identity for myself, as identity construction took more of a back seat to manipulating my social image to prevent exposure. It made me paranoid: I simply couldn't let my non-Christian spirituality, my bizarre kinks, or my personal desire to be with other like-minded people, out of my head. I was quizzed for compliance regularly, and in middle and high school, openly attacked if I failed this compliance check on a semi-daily basis.

This acquired fear and manipulative tendency quickly made me a highly competent social chameleon in my then-home state. However, this failed utterly around people whom knew me better, spent longer amounts of time around me, and generally anyone with whom I tried to maintain a long-lasting and ongoing social relationship with or wanted to get to know better. They got to see someone that is extremely evasive, persnickety, and uncomfortable about people getting close to him, for the simple fear that they'll see through the facade and not like what they see. This even applies self-referentially: I'm not convinced I'm an especially good person, for the simple reason that I do not actually know the sort of person that I am.

Which is bizarre, in a way. Based upon my prior actions and early life, I am a primarily loving and caring individual. I am highly tactile; I love elegance, and I love bringing light and joy into this world. Yet this is all buried under a dour, faux-stoic veneer that makes me completely unapproachable by the people I'd like to do so.

I am trying to conquer this fear, because it's costing me dearly. I would also like the luxury of camaraderie, and of being able to develop my identity without seeming false. I certainly have some form of a current identity: I evaluate strongly between asexual and male, as otherkin, and certainly as a dragon on a very regular and healthy basis (among other recreational forms). But, there is this entire spectrum of matters I am too fearful, too evasive, or just plain too uneasy to talk about, for the simple reason it risks me exposure.

Perhaps as a result, I am deeply jealous of those I know whom have a public identity that works for them. I am more opaque; not by choice, but because I have yet to experience better.

I have great difficulty finding my voice with others. While I take more of a measured stance online, interpersonal communication is simply too immediate for me. I am frequently caught flatfooted, feeling as if I've planted one of those flat feet firmly in my mouth for the duration of conversation, and I frequently feel remiss with much of what I've said after the fact.

This is partially because of my natural introversion: after all, I simply don't spend as much time around people. But, having observed the same patterns in others that share my heritage and have moved out here, I also believe this has to do with how Floridian culture meets the Pacific Northwest. We have completely different standards of conversational nuance, content quality, and quality control out here, and I am still struggling to attain competency.

On a related note: I'm trying to shift my tone towards something lighter, more playful, and more representative of who I actually am. I like expressing as a being of cheer and happy, which I very commonly am. I just need to learn to reign in my self-consciousness and allow myself to express it in ways that are meaningful.

As is common for me when I visit my family home in Florida, I'm bitten by the writing bug.

All of the qualia of my first memorable home -- the same one I was raised in since I was just a little over one year old -- comes flooding back, and practically everything I observe, touch, or interact with is filled with immediate nuance and significance from previous experiences.

In a way, it's a little like being otherkin while being otherkin (yo dawg...). Much of what I can call up to memory feels like it's from another life. The feelings are similar, and the memories are warm and familiar, but they feel as though they happened to a different "me" -- one that reacted to them in very different ways than the me of today.


In part, it's experience. Before leaving Florida to live in Washington state, I had seen very little of the world beyond a small collection of other states, some of the Bahamas, and some of Europe. I was pretty naive, and that naivete figured into a rather deep local bias for the culture to which I was exposed.

Standard fare, except Miami culture is a bit... bad, for the exceedingly-nerdy introvert. It's difficult for me to articulate the precise factors responsible -- perhaps a combination of extreme heat, humidity-enhanced mold, and a culture of deeply charisma-based meritocracy -- but the local culture is very strongly anti-intellectual, and anti-creative for activities that strongly cross perceived gender norms.*

This was difficult for me, because my heritage was very polarized. On my father's side, strict gender roles dominated much of his family's history. On my mother's side, a more liberal, gender-ambiguous stance was held for social acceptability. This instilled in me what I can only describe as deep existential confusion as I struggled to make sense of diametrically-opposed social views in the home, while being a creative, in an environment strongly repressive to highly creative and artistic males.**

This ensured that, for purely social reasons, I kept my creativity confined to my bedroom. I also kept it to what meager art supplies I could squirrel away, computer included.


Now, not all of that is bad. After all, I learned to be shockingly efficient with very little in the way of traditional media, tools, and personal space, while finding newer and better ways to hide my actions, interests, and behaviors among the ordinary. Years went by. And, when I finally moved, I brought these patterns with me. It was all quite isolating.

In understanding what it means to me when I say I feel like a completely different person, I mean it in the sense of a caged bird that, once freed, regards their old home as such a small thing. It is to say that I've transcended that previous, isolating existence, and returning to it brings a re-evaluation of old motives and habits within this newer mental context. It also brings more than its fair share of simple nostalgia.

Thinking back to these experiences, I honestly believe I did the best by myself. When I'm away from my family house, I constantly find ways to fault my old patterns of behavior as well-meaning but ineffective. My return trips home, meanwhile, underscore that at the time, not only was I doing the most reasonable things for myself: I was building myself up into who I am today.

Still, it feels almost dualistic and dichotomic, this tangible feeling of being home in the physical sense, with this constant mental and emotional overlay from my previous Floridian life. Much of it is even exceedingly positive, and for that, I know precisely where to look.

It is fitting, then, that I just watched my sister graduate today.*** Watching her graduate from my own alma mater brought its own share of nostalgia. Nostalgia from a previous life that I've chosen to build upon, while the touchstones, experiences, objects, and people that I love are still here.


* In the suburbs. Miami Beach is a completely different, and unambiguously fabulous, matter.

** Perhaps I should back up a bit and explain why that last part matters.

By my very nature, I'm a creative. Naturally, this expresses in some rather flamboyant displays of color, pattern, and thought out of me. Yet, unlike some in my newer, draconic peer group, I am not gender-fluid: I identify strongly as male. I am species-fluid in my identity, but that's a subject for another post. I'm also still trying to figure out my orientation. Again, another post, or possibly in the comments.

*** The graduation itself went very well, by the way. I don't feel comfortable posting the details on this journal, save to say that the ceremony was very similar to when I, myself, graduated and that I'm very proud of my younger sister.

Every so often, when I hit my darker moods on social media, you'll see something like this:

‏@Goldkin: I really wish my mind would stop feeling enshamed and self-deprecatory for my prior, years-past mistakes. It would do me lots of good.

‏@Goldkin: I fear the eternal albatross-around-the-neck. The result: I hide most information about myself, am ponderous to reply, and am less engaging.

@Goldkin: I think there's something to be said about safe harbors for promiscuous online sharing. The likes of what happens on Facebook terrifies me.

@Goldkin: ... insofar as it should be socially acceptable to share one's self without fear that it'll become a static data point. I'd like to do that.

‏@Goldkin: I see those assumptions of immutability as giving rise to resentment and bigotry, and I just feel it's too narrow a space to live within.


What this displays is a fundamental insecurity of mine that shapes many of my actions. I am extremely fretful of how my previous actions color how people see me, even if they may have no reflection on my future performance or behavior.

This is, for the most part, a product of my heritage. I grew up within a highly conservative, and for the most part judgmental, family. This same family has been known to take its facts primarily as immutable and at face value. Without wishing to do so, I internalized this view as a representation of how others would see me... and began to deeply fear resentment and bigotry as a result.

This makes me a security professional, because I've become really good at hiding and obscuring information. But this comes at a severe social cost: I don't feel comfortable sharing the details of my private life as often as I'd like to. I feel as if I am far less engaging in conversation with the people that I enjoy being around, because I fear creating poor quality, insurmountable, and immutable data. This fear actually causes me to realize exactly what I otherwise wish to avoid, because it affects my logical centers, my abilities to process information, and my abilities to speak eloquently, due to the applied, slow filter of withholding dangerous information.

This filter makes some sense to maintain, however. Almost daily, we're reminded of some "schmuck" that was too promiscuous on Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of social media. They'll have said something socially hazardous, or they'll have revealed some personal detail, that costs them a lot of credibility. And this galvanizes my fears, because I am afraid of precisely what people would think of me if I shared more of who I am.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to be more open in general. This is very difficult for me, because the past few decades have taught me to be a master of protecting information. Information, I add, that I'd like people I do trust and care about to know and be able to share.

Basically, I'd like to be less envious of the people I know whom I do believe have healthy modes of communication. I'd like to transmute this into action that makes me feel supported and connected by those I care about... which is already difficult for me, given my introverted tendencies. I certainly don't aspire to be an extrovert, but for those small few I communicate with regularly, I'd like to feel as if I'm providing the best communication I can offer.


In a way, this post is sort of a form of social advertising. There's a lot that I keep trapped under the hood, and frankly, I'd like much of it to be less of a tightly-guarded secret. Because, for most of it -- my draconity and spiritual identity, my aspirations, my loves and crushes for others, my carnal desires, and my general zeal for life -- there's actually nothing to be ashamed of. It's frustrating for me to take such a Victorian stance about myself, when the specific predators I'm afraid of are no longer present. Furthermore, I find it highly cathartic to be able to get more of what makes me myself out there for inspection.

But, perhaps most importantly, being more open would alleviate the specific isolation that I've suffered from these past several decades. I certainly wouldn't like to share everything, due to the intersection of healthy secret-keeping and tl;dr. But, just being able to share more, and to establish a sort of safe clearing house for who and what I am, would do me a lot of good.

I'm not yet sure what form that will take. But, the thought of it greatly appeals to me.

For the past several months, the concept of laziness has been heavily on my mind. I mean this both within and without, because, for the same set of months, my energy levels have been very erratic.

Previously, I would have just enough time to get my tasks done for work in a given day. I would then switch over to housework (with no commute; I work from home). When it came time to take a break for the evening, I would find myself completely exhausted, unable to participate in the wholesome activities that give my life so much meaning.

Yet, despite all of my energies and efforts towards work and the home on a daily basis, not much seemed to actually be getting done. Work was going well (and I've been treated especially well by my peers, I note). Yet, I found myself increasingly embarrassed by my quality of output. It was certainly acceptable, but my past abilities and attentiveness to detail were clearly starting to slip.

Working on the house seemed literally insurmountable: I would perform quasi-heroic, full-kitchen and full-room cleans on a weekly (sometimes, daily) basis. Yet, the mess piled up again within hours of my efforts. I had not experienced this when living alone, so I surmised that there must be some disparity of labor involved. Yet, try as I might to catalog and communicate this, my energies were too scattered to make much headway, let alone reverse the trend of slipping chores and an unsanitary lifestyle.

It was all quite disheartening. And, for a while, I quietly slipped back into depression. During my more energetic periods, I built personal spaces for myself to recover energy: small, wholesome outposts of activity that I could use to make myself feel good about myself again. And this worked for awhile... until those spaces started to become disrespected or overtaken. I then began hiding in my room, only coming out for personal needs. My housework plummeted, though my work efforts (via my personal laptop) redoubled. I was still exhausted and rapidly burning out, though.

It should be glaringly apparent at this point that this wasn't healthy. And, any time I was away from the house, for business or personal reasons, my energy levels would return to their original, high levels. It thus became abundantly clear that there was an energy leak, and that something needed to be done to make amends.

I fault no one in particular. However, I do fault a very specific form of predatory laziness that all of us experience from time to time. This can have a multitude of causes, but its primary symptom is unmistakable: the taking of someone else's energies and time to maintain one's own comfortable quality of living.

This is usually abstracted away in our lives. Every good and every service inherently has a cost associated with it, and try as we might to reduce disparity, many are unfairly exploited as a result. I am personally for (and will continue to be for) the reduction of human abuses in the professional textile industry, for example. But, this specific drain is at a more personal level.

At this level, three abuses were in play:

1) A seemingly reasonable request that is targeted, primarily, at deferring the cost of an action to another.

2) The repeated assertion that one's efforts are inadequate, so as to keep them hungry and wanting after performing any given task.

3) The assertion that these observations generalize, such that in any other, reasonable scenario, the same observations will also be present.


This is a crippling combination. It is to say that, globally, one is inadequate, such that only through one's infinite effort (as no finite effort will ever be sufficient), that person will be able to progress into a state of adequacy.

This is the sort of logical fallacy that developed within me. I am not the person whom directly made these three assertions. I do not believe these assertions were ever explicitly given to me. But, through the combined statements, actions, and negative space of others as they impacted me, it seemed as if these premises were given by implication. I felt understandably upset and abused. And I wanted to find any way that I could, out.

Psychologically, it's useful to note how such a pattern gains purchase within the brain in the first place. The human mind has very strong recency and primacy biases, and it tries to limit cognitive dissonance whenever possible, usually through dreams and storytelling. Given the information presented to me, the persistent theme became my own inadequacy, through repetition, recency, and because it was the simplest and most compelling story that explained my then-position within the household. My own performance, abilities, desires to recover, and desires to improve all plummeted. I sought escape, primarily in video games, which allowed me to properly distance myself without becoming clinically dissociative. And, through plodding, directed effort, I began to unpack my circumstances and learn how to adapt them to my needs.

One takeaway here is that no one should have to experience this, yet many of us do. At the same time, this pattern isn't one of depression. It is all too common the result of circumstance, which, often unbeknownst to the instigators, causes these patterns of thought to arise. And it is much too common in the employment treadmill, and in how many artists are treated.

Before I continue, I note that I am not wholly blameless. Nor am I the victim of circumstance. It simply took me this long to unpackage and identify my needs accordingly.

What corrected it in my specific instance is a rebalancing of households and household needs. By splitting our joint efforts in two, tasks can now be adequately assessed, communication on how time is spent can open up once again, and calcified processes that had decayed into inefficiency can finally be approached and reorganized. While I once again directly fault no one, I have no qualms about stating that negatively-reinforcing feedback loops bring out the worst in people, and that I am no exception.

In other words: we had a reorg.


The net result is that we're seeing immediate improvements in all of our energy levels. My own battered emotional state, in particular, is recovering rapidly. My productivity and abilities are finally pulling out of their nosedive in quality. And, most importantly of all, I'm starting to feel cheerful and good about myself again.

It isn't perfection. In fact, my goal in writing this out is simply to define it for what it is. All too often, cognitive abuse, be it from others or from oneself, is too quickly labeled and dismissed as an aspect of depression, when other biases and stimuli are in play.

So, where do I go from here? I have a lot of energy again, primarily from ending old patterns, and I intend to devote it to those people and aspects of my life that are wholesome for me. This means that I will not have time for everyone, and in some specific and rare instances, I'll be making cuts.

This does not mean I do not love you. It means that I will be focusing on those aspects that make me feel holistically good again, and I will be directing my efforts accordingly. A cut is simply an acknowledgement that I haven't made that work, yet.

I hope that isn't too alarming. I'd very much like to open myself up again, and in the interests of doing so, this post is public. But this time, I will be more wary of specific predators and predatory behavior patterns, and I'll be tuning myself accordingly.

For your review, a small pen-and-paper game that congealed in the back of my mind during the various holiday festivities:

Consider an arbitrarily large, square board of Connect Four. At the start of play, players are randomly assigned, or may choose to self-assign, a color ("black" or "white") and a direction ("across" or "down"). Starting with white, players alternate placing weighted pieces into the field of play (hereafter, "well"), Connect Four style. During play or once the well is full, its pattern is recorded on a sheet of plain fax paper.

Play then proceeds to the paper representation of the board. Starting with the player that was assigned "across", players alternate filling in the board using words of a single language (with right-left mirroring for nations that require it). The only constraints are:

• The chosen word must fill the available space in the assigned direction, starting with an edge of the board or a black space and ending with an edge of the board or a black space. Words of length one are allowed. "Words of length zero" are not.
  
  
• When a white square in that region is already filled with a letter, that letter must be used at that location in the chosen word.
  
  
• On a player's assigned turn, instead of filling in a word, that player may instead choose to pass. If they do, they name a set of contiguous white spaces in their direction that isn't already occupied by a word or otherwise filled by play. Each unfilled character in this region receives an asterisk (*) character, which scores no points at the conclusion of play, but works as a wildcard for any letter.
  

At the end of game, each word is scored using the Scrabble points for each letter. Contiguous regions that do not contain valid words in the official Scrabble dictionary are not considered. Wildcards always score zero points, and words are always scored once, regardless of the number of valid words a contiguous region may create. The player with the most points in their direction wins. If a tie occurs, the game results in a draw.

Because the board is so easy to simulate, all that's required for play is a sheet of fax paper, a pencil, a fair coin (to choose color and direction randomly), and a scoring guide.

Does such a game already exist? For example, this is similar, but not quite an exact match. I'm curious to try playing this and see any variations that arise.


Bonus errata:

• This is not currently salable by me: it conflicts with many of the patents for Connect Four, Scrabble, and similar properties. It's a fun little thing, though.
  
• This game actually scales nicely to multiple players, if you place each of them in one of two opposing teams. Play then proceeds, alternating through the participants of each team.
  
• For an individual multiplayer variant, just add a dimension for each player. So, for three players, the game would be played in a cube, for four a hypercube, and so forth. Unfortunately, only professional mathematicians and computer nerds would be likely to play this variation.
  
• Play is significantly more challenging if, instead of a square, different shapes are considered vis variants of chess. I leave you to consider the possibilities.

While writing on another topic, I came up with an idea that I feel deserves a post of its own. I call it: the Internet Cat Test.

The formula is, for any given collection of elements:
[Information Content] = 1 - ( [Elements with Cat Photos] / [Size of Collection] )

Yielding: decimal percentages between 0 and 1, where 0 indicates minimal information, 1 indicates maximum information.

While this measure is just applied silliness, what it offers is a heuristic for how information rich a feed is, as an inverse proportion of information to cats. If the majority of content is images that create small, endorphin-rich feedback loops in the brain (ie, pictures of cats), that's far less exciting, mentally stimulating, and rewarding for long-term growth than content that's about just about anything else. Including Advice Animals.

Of course, we can teach computers to identify cats with at least 74.8% accuracy, so relying on meta information to identify cat images isn't strictly necessary. This is nothing more than a simplification of concepts like entropy theory and information density as they apply to the human brain, distilled into a small test you can try at home. Plenty of extension can be made, as we attain a better grasp of how information is encoded within the realms of human psychology and neuroscience.

I'm surely not the first person to observe this, but I figured I'd write it up for humor's sake, because I couldn't find it anywhere else. Happy catting!



Extra Credit: get this accepted as a topic in a major scientific journal.

As an infovore, one of my biggest difficulties is prioritizing the information that I need for daily decision making. I receive and digest about 150 new articles a day from 154 separate news feeds (after several pruning passes). When I balance that against the social overhead of IRC, Email, Twitter, Google Plus, LiveJournal, and Dreamwidth, plus my reading and study buffers, that's a massive undertaking.

It probably comes as no surprise, then, that I simply don't read it all. Instead, I employ several heuristics to help me prioritize, in the form of rules that make reading less choreful and more pleasant to read and respond to.

From a high level, the system is very simple. I deploy two components: one to notify immediately when someone contacts me over any medium (pushing all notifications to my iPhone), and a second that packages up only the important parts and sends them to me each morning. It works quite well, and it deliberately skips the memetic trivia of he-said-she-said-cat-video that bogs down so much of social media.

The best part of the second category is running my own personal newspaper. I make liberal use of Calibre Periodicals and Yahoo Pipes to automatically send things to my Kindle every morning at 8AM, and then carry that around with me and to read over the rest of the day. It's gloriously simple, and it pars things down to just my interests, which I supplement with The News (I use the Seattle Times) in a separate periodical.

For the nosy, here's a selection of what I download daily, ordered by section number:

• Sythyry's Journal
  Really, can you argue with the musings of a little blue lizard wizard? I certainly can't, and I'm sure xir translator, bard_bloom, would agree. Oh, but this will be switching protagonists soon.



• LiveJournal Friends Feed
  Public posts from my friends on LJ. Note this version doesn't actually include my account name, but it's obvious if you're reading here!



• Coding Horror
  Jeff Atwood is simply inspiring and wonderful. If you're even vaguely interested in how computer programming works, read him.



• Everything2 Cool Archive
  A wonderful little feed from a proto-Wikipedia. E2 continues to provide random inspiration, because its noders are literate, insightful, and surprisingly comprehensive.



• Fark
  For when I just need to laugh at the world.



• Slashdot.org
  Bad summaries for tech news start here. Slashdot remains useful for figuring out what the rumor mill is talking about, though http://news.ycombinator.com/ is better if you like the nuts and bolts instead. I keep both.



• The Consumerist
  Retail and service provider PSAs, with the occasional (and blessedly skippable) cat thread.



• GrokLaw
  Once dedicated almost exclusively to SCO v. Novell, GrokLaw is still one of the best sources for interesting tech legal news. (Good luck, Samsung. Sincerely.)



• The Volokh Conspiracy
  And for all other interesting legal happenings in the US, I read here.



• Daily MTG
  Article feed for the latest happenings with Magic: The Gathering. This is basically a puzzle feed for me, because the metagame is just so combinatorially interesting.



• Nintendo Life
  I'm also a Nintendo fanboy. My first game console was an NES, so I suppose my experience has been tinted slightly.



• Futility Closet
  A daily selection of historical curiosities and word or chess puzzles. It's much higher quality than newsprint publications of the same, too.



• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
  It's something like XKCD meets Calvin and Hobbes in a mad toboggan race against killer snowmen. I read XKCD, too, because I'm exposed to it everywhere else.



• The Old New Thing
  Microsoft's own Raymond Chen ranting about Windows. This is always a special treat, because it illustrates why and how Windows is so Byzantinian. It's just plain interesting.

(Notable bits that are missing: Reddit (I use an official client instead), private entries for LiveJournal (ditto), and Dreamwidth reading (I use the web interface occasionally).

It all ends up nicely syndicated into a Kindle newspaper that I can download from my bedside and start reading in the morning. And I enjoy that; it gives me a start to what's going on in the world, without making me feel overwhelmed.

What do you read daily, and how do you make it work for you? I'm curious.