we're on month 18 of trying to start a family. Medical intervention started at month 12 and if things don't happen this month then we're going to start much more intense medical stuff. It's a really weird situation to be in - the mix of taboo and rarity, combined with being the gender that it "shouldn't effect" and the fact that I'm not great with my feelings make it hard to deal with.

I'm also building a greenhouse - so that's cool.

I still need to figure out some aspects of the footer, mostly how to minimize contact and potential rot, how to make a drain under it, and how to deal with the roof, but those are all fun challenges.

I'm signing for a new house with my new wife today (second house, first wife) and we're super excited.

I'm still trying to get the hang of corporate training . So far I'm focusing on:

1. Showing people that the lecture format they've seen their entire life is a super inefficient way of learning,

2. No one here is going to give you permission, so just implement the smallest version of the plan as quick as possible.

3. Good communicators treat people like humans regardless of the setting.

And I finally beat the main story of witcher 3. Damn that's a good game.

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/

Every time I see a solution like this, I just think about how little we learned from rat park.

We have a table top game going - it's the first game I've played that hasn't fallen apart so I'm really excited. Once we get to level 5, I'm taking over DM and guiding the group through level 10. This will be my first DM experience so while I'm dreaming big, I'm trying to keep it under control. One of the players will be becoming lord of a small outpost. I want to have the PCs build up the city to protect against attack. I'm also trying to figure out how to give them free reign to do as they want without stumbling on areas that are way too powerful for them.

I also caved and bought Skyrim on the switch. I was kicking myself while going through the tutorial, I've played the game so many times it seemed like a waste of money. About an hour later I found a brand new secret cave in a hut I had visited many times before and remembered how amazingly vast that game is. I'm pretty stoked about it.

I WENT CHASING WATERFALLS!

I think the problem, and problem might be too strong a word so we can go with sticking point, comes down to explicit vs implicit moderation.

Hubski is small and there aren't really a large number or a diverse selection of cliques, which seems especially true when a user is new. If that user lurks they meet the common cast and you fall near the top of the bill as the lovable asshole, a good but prickly role that doesn't have the most line but certainly has the most memorable dialogue. In this way you become a figurehead to the community.

This means your personal moderation is often seen for the implicit effects. Explicitly, you (or anyone using mod tools) are only controlling what you see. Implicitly, I think it feels as though you're shunning a person from the "in" crowd.

This, of course, is a hunch based on my thoughts, but the logic is pretty simple - the moderation system is just different enough to not be understood. When a person sees that they are muted, they might assume that blocks them from a much larger portion of the site, similar to being banned on a message board. They might also assume that their mute is a scarlet letter of sorts, something other users can see (which, to be honest, I'm not really sure that they can) and make judgement against.

Even outside of those theories, there's how the implicit moderation effects the person internally. If they do associate you to the in crowd as a public face and you shun them, no matter how privately, the likelihood of implying a feeling of alienation and spreading that to the larger perceived "in" group seems very high.

I would be very interested to see the analytics of a user's first 90 to 120 days, to see who those people gravitate too and to find out if there is any perceived controlling group. I know it's a complaint I've heard about hubski before, and I think understanding it could go a long way in changing how the system is explained.

Or I'm just rambling, work is boring this time of year.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS ACTUALLY MY USERNAME!

this is amouseinmyhouse. Apparently I signed up 555 days ago, used the site for two days, then forgot about it. I couldn't log in because of the capitalization.

Thanks hubski. I'm way more excited about this than I should be.

Holy shit, that was well done.

I can't remember where I got it, I think freakanomics, but I like the idea of giving people some control over the direction of their donations (the freakanomics example was talking about taxes).

So TNG would post three upcoming projects from the to-do list and when you donated you could donate those dollars to one of the three specific projects. Once one is "funded" it gets made.

It's a sort of very pragmatic value add that gives donors the feeling of control on a site.

There's an odd truth here that I'm going to try to get at, but I think I'll have to ramble before I arrive.

My father was a salesman and he taught me a lot of interesting things about people. One of those things was to never listen to what a man tells you he is. He may be right, he may be wrong, but you'll never know on his words alone. It's his actions that define him.

My mother was a feminist. Her first real job was a home economics professor. She taught college freshmen in the back country she grew up in how to cook, clean, and maintain a budget. She was chastised by compatriots of the good fight for being so complicit, but those people never took the time to understand what she did. Every day she would take a group of people who didn't seem to have a chance and give them the skills to spend within their means and take control of their lives. She taught both men and women skills traditionally reserved for one gender so that all could have an opportunity.

All of this is to say, I've never given much stock to what people say they are and don't plan to anytime soon. You are defined by your actions, and trying to define those actions for others just takes time from actually being helpful.

Both places were more expensive then what I typically spend going out.

This is an interesting idea. I've been thinking a lot about the ongoing battle between classical economists and behavioral economists. I think, and this is one of my broken record topics, the transition will come as economists start to look at more than financial capital as the constant prime motivator. As they start to apply their mathematical models to emotional currency social currency, currencies I haven't even thought of, the capital of capitalism will shift and move away from a money motivated system.

As for the loss of jobs and the rise of free time, I like the work of Shoshana Zuboff. Where most are saying that the rise of machines will result in the loss of service work and that nothing will take its place, she theorizes that the loss in service work will give rise to a support economy.

I hear bits and pieces of it in this article, and articles like it, where people are finding value not in simply providing a service but in providing actual support to another human being. The difference being in a service economy a service worker could show you where the clothes are. In a support economy a support worker could listen to you and your life story to learn about your style and preferences and support you as a person.

It might be a pipe dream, but a lot of the predictions of her first book, rise of the smart machine, came true and I like to think the support economy is equally as likely.

Anything. Literally, anything. My logic is that if nothing feels like what I should do, then anything I can do won't be wrong.

The more practical answer is that I read everything. Local newspapers, signs, flyers, whatever has local information, and I resolve to go to the first thing that I can. I end up at cookoffs, concerts, yard sales, grand openings, just stuff. Sometimes I can get people to go with me, but sometimes I go alone. A lot of times nothing happens, but every now and then something catches my eye or I get some inspiration of what I should actually be doing.

It's just that if I spend everyday doing the same thing, sitting in my house on the computer, I never get new information to put towards the problem and so the answer to the question "what should I do" never changes.

Change the input, change the output.