I'm in the south and recently went on a "church tour" with my wife. We found our fair share of hellfire and brimstone evangelicals, but we were also pleased to find a strong counter culture of small and actually loving churches.

In that tour, I really started to believe that the sin of man was in the fact that we only have half of what it takes to be gods. We ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but we don't have the immortality required to put good and evil into context.

To me, that defines the center of Christian love - we all have our own beliefs, our own habits, and our own lives, and we all want to weigh the world on the scale of good and bad. The good Christians that I know can see the limitations of their judgement, put little stock in it, and can lean into being in a community with people who are different.

This is the value of empathy to me. It's not the distanced condolences of sympathy, but an earnest desire to understand the feelings of a person whose life you haven't lived, but which rhymes very neatly with your own. Empathy is not the enemy, it's the belief that you wield god's judgement of a person's value.

I SURVIVED!

It was beautiful when we were in the mountains and snowed the day we left. Your weather is weird.

If you liked Serial, try S-Town. It's like a modern day Faulkner novel, but a documentary podcast.

I will never not watch this.

Thanks, I kind of reached a breaking point last month and I'm just bringing it up as much as I can. It makes a lot of people feel awkward, but I figure that's just part of making it acceptable. Plus, a bunch of people will talk to my wife about it because she's a woman, which she's super over, but not me because dudes don't talk about it. I'm getting in the habit of inserting myself in those conversations, which is interesting in its own right.

I have no answer to this, but the thing I immediately wondered about was the "a little help from my parents" section of that post.

How much of their post was enabled by that little bit of help? How much was that little bit? Was it down played because we as a nation have a very weird relationship with the story of the self made man.

The narrative has always existed, the economy has just made it more noticeable.

Very interesting stuff. Tangentially related - I've always wondered how a currency with a half life would work, where the longer you sit on it the less it's worth. Would that be enough to keep currency in circulation, or would it just create an industry of individuals who just launder old money for new?

Pretty fascinating. I like shows like primitive technology for showing what really early construction looks like and even on to the middle ages, and shows like grand designs to show some of the more novel modern construction methods, but I haven't spent much time learning about the middle times, where people have access to high quality tools, but not necessarily access to supply chains or industrial production. Really neat.

No. I was thinking more about the mindset that creates an objectively good mate as opposed to the more subjective, romantic notion.

I think there's a lot of value in local government for this reason. Like, our city council is made up of people who generally want to help shape their immediate community. When there was a company that wanted to level some woods and build a new grocery store while strip malls were empty and in need of renters, the council stopped it and demanded the grocery make use of existing structures.

It wasn't changing the nation, but it had more impact on me than 90% of national legislation.

There's a certain irony to a democratic party that's not able to give people the candidates they want.

Reading the articles makes the whole party sounds like some MLM scheme. You have to pay to get in, raise X dollars every quarter to stay in, and get out there and lean on your network if you want any kind of leg up.

But I feel like it makes sense that it would be that way, I think it's a symptom of how we view money. I think a lot of people see it as a morally negative commodity - not so much that having a lot of money makes you bad, but more that if you're good you don't need money.

My wife is a grant writer and there are so many grant organizations that say their grants can't be used for salaries - as though accounting software and paint brushes are what's keeping at risk kids from falling into destructive patterns. But there's this societal trope that goodness is it's own reward and that the people who help don't need to be compensated for it.

I think that gets mirrored in our political system. When we want something good, we have the belief that the goodness of that thing is enough - that it has tangible value. The people who don't believe that, the ones who believe dollars have tangible value, are the ones who are right and the ones who get into the positions as gatekeepers.

I'm not saying that there's not value in being good, I'm saying that good is not the antithesis of money (not in this society anyway) and if we want to see beneficial change, we have to change our relationship to money.

It seems like a bummer for the DM to just end a campaign. Like that's a lot of content left on the table. But I guess it's just part of table top life?

I'm a really quiet guy, I don't like drawing a lot of attention to myself and I tend to be a people pleaser. Because of this, most people at my company can see me as a well intentioned pushover - which is fine, it's a part I know how to play.

But I'm also really, really good at presenting. Like, storytelling championship good.

Last week I finally had enough information to pitch a solution for a company problem and I destroyed it. I now have two VPs actively working to put the project in motion and get me a budget. They're also trying to bring me to the attention of a lot of powerful people. I still don't like that part, I want people to focus on the problem and it's solution, but at least it's progress.

I also have to make eight loaves of bread this weekend. I'm using nearly 18 pounds of flour. I'm really worried I didn't do the volume calculations correctly and there's going to be dough everywhere.

Is this not what you're looking for?

I loved the emergence of the religion and fabled Americans, despite Ish's inclination not to have organized faith. One man can't control the culture.

Hey, I know that book.

I'm reading Ghosts in the Yew and I can't, for the life of me, figure out if it's good or not.

I mean, I like it so far, but there are times when the characters are silly tropes or completely one dimensional - then there are times when characters have this amazing depth and insightfulness. I can't figure out if the female character is supposed to be a little flat as a point of growth, or if it's some male power fantasy. Whatever, it's intriguing.

It placed me in Arlington which is equidistant from where I grew up and where my parents grew up.

Pretty neat.

This article feels like a big ol stack of false premises. I think ads can appeal to emotion, but that doesn't mean they're incepting an emotion. Take disney for example - they aren't talking to customers who have never experienced a disney product before, they are talking to customers who have had a good experience with disney before. They aren't telling people how to feel, they're reminding people how they felt.

As for the second section quoted - that process actually works for a lot of people. It's very common for people to tape pictures of their goals to their morning mirror as a motivator. You might be more familiar with a much more common version of this tactic - people keeping pictures of their kids on their desks at work. But once again, this technique is to an emotional appeal that was already within the person.

Advertising is a part of marketing - and good marketing is aware of how a product is viewed in a market. The marketer then makes advertisements to play up the product's strength while downplaying the weakness. If the product's strength is an emotional association - like Coke, which is largely consumed by kids, outside the home, on special outings - then a good marketer will play to that strength.

But all that aside, this is all just one strategy in a huge sea of advertising strategies. The premise that advertising works in one way is like saying all stories are dramas, the funny ones are just very bad dramas.

The article feels overly complicating and overly simplifying at the same time. Ugh, I've gotten myself flustered.

https://omfgdogs.com/

epilepsy and sound warning. That said, this is one of those sites that just always makes me happy.

God all of these systems suck. How do I start a company?

I'm sorry to inform you that you are mistaken. The science clearly shows that you're unhappy, please present yourself accordingly.

My philosophy is that deleting is as important as organizing. If I can't bring myself to delete something, then I have to turn it into something. If I don't want to use it and I don't want to delete it then it's a stagnation in my life and I need to assess that stagnation.

Such a terrible sentence to have the word probably in.

Goddamn you're patronizing.

Well now I wish badges actually worked like a currency. It would be interesting to see how they move about the site

So the thing that says I have 4 badges isn't telling me I have four to give away?

I'm always really hesitant to badge people because I thought I only had 3 and didn't want to waste them.

Yeah, I think I'm scared of something. There's this idea of jobs that do and don't "make a living". I think I like the idea of some of the work in the latter category but it seems scary to pursue. I'll have to stew on that one.

"Any headline in the form of a question can always be answered with one word - 'no.'"