flyingblogspot.com (tales from urban dilettantia)

Over the last few months, I’ve started to see more and more incoming requests for an overview of non-monogamy resources, to the point where it’s become more practical to post them here than reply to everyone who asks. Feel free to be intimidated by the wall-of-text and run away, but I think skimming may be more useful!

Useful, Random Internet Stuff

Franklin is a guy I met on LiveJournal who happens to write some good poly / consensual non-monogamy stuff; his intro page is here: http://www.xeromag.com/fvpoly.html   The Polyamory 101, Practical Jealousy Management, and Making Relationships Suck articles linked too on the front page are all a good read, and there are a bunch of other practical entries linked to on the right hand side, He also writes about jealousy and refrigerators here! http://tacit.livejournal.com/157242.html

Gestalt is an ex-lover of a podcaster I discovered very early on when I was starting to research relationship models. He wrote this, and honestly, I just like this because it’s about burritos: http://polytripod.blogspot.com/2009/04/pgs-seven-layer-burrito-of-intimacy.html   And this guy writes polyamory and dim sum metaphors: http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/dimsum.html   Clearly I’m obsessed with food and food metaphors.

The Polyamorous Misanthrope is a very good blog; lots of common sense: http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/
The archives are huge and full of interesting of posts, but three I bookmarked for myself were these ones:

Am I Ready For Polyamory – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2008/11/03/am-i-ready-for-polyamory/

The Key Factor to Polyamory Relationship Success – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/10/05/the-key-factor-to-polyamory-relationship-success/

Handling Jealousy: How to Fuck Up – http://www.polyamorousmisanthrope.com/2010/08/18/handling-jealousy-how-to-fuck-up/

Also there’s an interesting blog called Polyamory in the News – http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com – which follows non-monogamy news from a more political and analytical point of view, which is a really nice break from interpersonal/communication/relationship stuff, which can get a bit overwhelming. (One of the things I’ve been learning in the past year is to try to back off sometimes and have a break from trying so goddamn hard. But it’s hard for perfectionists to try hard to back off from trying hard!)

Forums and Podcasts

Minx does the PolyWeekly podcasts, which are generally good value – there’s a huge archive, full of interesting stuff:  http://polyweekly.com/   I haven’t caught up with the podcasts during 2011, so not sure whether the quality of the content has remained high, but I was planning on downloading a whole bunch this month to see. It’s generally been a good resource in the past.

There are also forums on the PolyWeekly site – I don’t check in much anymore (used to a couple of years ago) – I’ve made a couple of good friends via the forum, but they tend to go through their cycles of good and snarkystupid fail (very much like any internet forum).

There are a couple of Australian forums – I have logins for most of them, but haven’t spent any significant time there, so can’t vouch for the quality. One of the main ones is PolyOz – http://polyoz.net.au/home

To be honest, after spending a little while on forums to get an idea of what people’s lives were like, I stopped looking at forums entirely. They’re so very full of people looking for support with their problems, and so lacking in people talking about enjoying the life they’ve chosen. Maybe worth a browse, but at least for me, far from being a really positive resource.

Books

There are also an increasing number of non-monogamy books out there, often from wildly differing points of view (although I’m sure you have a pretty good bullshit detector). I have these ones, which I’m always happy to lend out:

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/157344295X
(Tristan Taormino’s quite an interesting woman – she’s a pornographer, writer & sex educator, and has quite a good site full of non-monogamy resources too – http://www.openingup.net/ Because I am a big perve, I will also note that she is just gorgeous.)

The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1890159018
(This is the first major book written on the subject that I know of; it’s a bit fluffy, ‘love is awesome’ -esque for me, but it is interesting historically.)

Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/158005241X
(Nathalie’s late dog, Tessa, chewed this on up a bit, but it’s still good! It’s partly a narrative of the author’s experiences, with some more abstract discussion, if I recall.)

The Polyamory Handbook:  A User’s Guide:  http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1434373444
(Pretty thorough and pragmatic; haven’t looked at it for a while, but I think it ticks off most of the major areas worthy of consideration.)

New sites I’ve noticed recently but haven’t had time to look at yet; do not vouch for quality of content (let me know if they’re dreadful!):

http://www.notyourmothersplayground.com

http://www.modernpoly.com

http://polytical.org

http://www.polyday.org.uk

http://worldpolyamoryassociation.net

http:///www.polyamory.org.uk

http://www.lovemore.com

There are also a few other areas that are really worth taking some time to look into, although they’re wall-of-text topics in their own right:

Sexual-health:  Having open, specific and honest conversations, negotiating boundaries and engaging less awkwardly in a discussion of expectations and needs before entering a new relationship.

Communication:   Spending some time reading general information on human communication in interpersonal relationships is so very worthwhile – I can’t overstate the importance of this one. The thing is, we’re not innately good at this (and rarely culturally conditioned to be). My personal experience is that it’s most valuable to look at this as an ongoing process, not as an end-point – owning our fuck-ups is equally important as doing things well in the first place, and we all make mistakes.

Consent & boundaries:  As much as I wish these were easy, clear-cut issues, they’re not. It’s worth – for any human being – putting some serious thought into this area. My own experience is that these issues really come into the foreground when one can’t cruise on ‘this is how ordinary relationships work’ privilege, and that as a socially anxious person, I’ve needed to learn some skills around having conversations I find fundamentally awkward, in spite of the awkwardness.

Kink:   There’s certainly a cross-over between the kink community and the non-monogamous. I suspect it’s because non-monogamy is often a doorway to asking for what you really want, and raising new ideas that are often intimidating to raise. But the non-monogamy community is not the kink community, and it’s important to say explicitly that no-one with an interest in different relationship models should ever feel pressured to be involved in anything beyond their own wishes. I realise that this is obvious, but also that it’s sometimes challenging to see something normalised in a community and to feel some social pressure to conform.

Slut-shaming:  There’s always going to be someone who’s going to deal out some slut-shaming. Such is our messed-up existence, and it’s not a bad idea to be aware of it and do some reading or talking on it. If it happens to you and you’re not dealing with it well (or start to worry that there’s some validity in it), the best approach can be to hand a little of your concern over to your friends or community. Hopefully you will find a kick-ass friend who can shout ‘bring it!’, hug you, and remind you that slut-shaming has roots in intolerance, bigotry and privilege.

Mental health:  Put some time into examining and caring for your own mental health. Just do the work. I cannot conceive of anything more important than this.

Social, aka You Are Not The Only One

For the locals, we have a small and friendly Perth meetup on the first Wednesday of every month (it’s usually at The Court, is purely social – drinks/coffee/food/no agenda) and can vary between around ten and twenty-something people on any given month. We get all sorts of people coming along; those in multi-person households, stable but open relationships, parents with kids, singles, non-monogamy-friendly people who aren’t currently looking for anyone new and so forth. In the last year we’ve started to do some thinking around pub meetings not being as inclusive for everyone as we’d like, and are keen to run some other things in 2012; picnics, rock-climbing and more have been suggested. You can get notifications by signing up to the super-low-volume announcement list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/perth-poly-meetup   There’s also a closed Facebook group and a Google Calendar available on request. It’s pretty relaxed, isn’t a meat market in any way, and so far we’ve managed to keep it free of creepy people looking to pick up by only spreading it by word-of-mouth. (I’m told that this one time, a guy came and waited until the end to say ‘so…we all know what happens now…’ and incurred the wrath of all, never to return.

As if this post were not sufficient in the way of information-saturation, please do add any of your useful links and recommendations in the comments!

Readers, there are Happenings baking. Happenings of the nature of a social experiment, a home, a community, an idea, a crazywonderful leap into the unknown.

Cary and I have been considering for some time the theoretical problem of introverted polyamorous beings trying to find a way to invent a household that accomodates shared space, creative space, private space and seclusion, sovereignty, sharing of labour, and room for lovers and friends and family. We’re also really interested in concepts of community and family-of-choice, and how to build these things into our lives, and playing with different models of togetherness.

Somehow, after two weeks of looking at houses ‘as if’ and ‘to get an idea what’s possible’ theory tumbled unexpectedly into launching a social experiment of fabulous proportions.

Today our unconditional approval of finance came through from the bank. We have impulsively purchased a townhouse a mere 750m from Flyingblogspot Cottage as joint investors in this madness. We’re about to move into a household that happens to be split into two separate buildings. We’ve bought it as joint investors rather than as partners in a relationship, so if our crazywonderful experiment yields a result of ‘this does not work’, it will be easy and financially sensible to rent it out as an investment.

It’s a great fit for our needs – large for a townhouse in the area, with spaces for bikes and vehicles, a garage for a workshop and outdoor spaces to work in, space for a cat run, a big bright area upstairs with light that will be just perfect for art and sewing and electronics. The cottage appears to be destined to be library and gamerspace, the townhouse (yet to be named) to be artspace and makerspace.

The second time we went to view the house we took Grahame and Nathalie with us – two people who already have keys to Flyingblogspot Cottage and a standing invitation to treat it as home as required. They were excited too, and helpfully tried to balance our judgment by providing a list of pros and cons. Unfortunately, they were not successful in finding any significant cons, and so were forced to invent a claim that they’d heard that ‘this type of carpet causes Face Death’. Bravely, we decided we were willing to risk Face Death.

Then, suddenly and unrelatedly, Sky and Jason mentioned that they were considering moving into a new house near Hyde Park in the near future and we suggested that they might like to be a part of our extended enclave-based household too, should this happen. It turned out that they liked this very much. In spite of the risk of Face Death.

A few weeks later, we had breakfast with the lovely Alexa who lives around the corner, and I quietly told her about her about the plans and how dearly we would welcome her if she were interested. And then I had a moment of ‘argh, too many people!’ until I realised that there were not too many people, but just the right number of people. (Although I am not above trying to lure Nathalie and Grahame down to Highgate, should the opportunity arise. They are special and do not add to the critical mass of people.)

I’ve been trawling the web for some time to find other mad, land-owning-capitalist-pig hippie communists who’ve tried something like this and have had very little luck in finding precedents. And so, shaping the idea of a community of islands is something of a black hole where benefits and problems are not necessarily forseeable. But it’s thrilling too, in the sense that we are inventing something new that we can shape for ourselves. I keep coming up with a multitude of tiny ideas and asking ‘what if…?’

What if my chickens and garden could help feed us all? What if someone slow-cooks a big pot of food and everyone who wants dinner can wander over to eat together? What if, when there are leftovers that we may not eat ourselves, we can send the other houses a message and say to come and pick them up if they will be eaten? What if my garden becomes a our community garden? What if we order those big mixed boxes of fruit and vegetables and share them? What if we put up a pole and share our an internet connection? What if we turn Hyde Park into our weekend breakfast back yard? So many ideas; what if, what if, what if!

However, in my nervous, over-stimulated excitement over this project, I have neglected to mention that there’s a practical (and by ‘practical’ read ‘begging’) side too. Settlement will take place on the 12th of February. In the meantime, Cary is currently living in a big old rental place in Bayswater and has been there for a decade, and is not an enthusiastic declutterer. (An understatement – in fact he is more of a compulsive this-will-be-useful-er.) Somehow, over the weekends and evenings between now and February, we will need to cull, pack and move a house filled with a decade of collected items and I think we will be in desparate need of help. And so, I thought I’d post the list of things we need, in the hope that anyone who is supportive of our experiment might be able to offer some time and love.

Packing, wrapping and taping

Putting together an ‘everything’s free’ garage sale

Supportive company – bring your study, marking, whatever

Clapping

Lifting things

Supportive nods when Cary is making difficult decluttering decisions

Putting things into other things (hur hur hur)

Hugging

Supportive lunch/coffee delivering to lift spirits

Thing-taking-aparting

Freecycling and finding new homes for things

Slapping whenever we get lost in details or culling angst

Planning logistics and problem solving

Cat reassuring (do not wear kitty ears; Zeus hates and fears that)

Cleaning up

Removing plants we want to keep from the garden

Eleventy million other things I’ve probably forgotten

It’s a big job that we’ll need to tackle incrementally rather than an army-for-a-day job. Beers, food, hugs, eternal devotion and the like will naturally be provided to anyone who turns up at any time; we desparately need our friends and family to help us make our experiment happen!

Two posts in one day!  What is this?   This one is a bit frivolous and retrospective, in line with my lofty ambitions to become more frivolous and retrospective.

Music has, as ever, been my saving grace in an upsy-downsie year, and so I’m sharing a few of the songs that have been stuck in my head throughout. (If everyone could just take a moment to forget that I said I’d compile a playlist for Zoe and haven’t as yet done so, that would be lovely.)   Some of these took quite a bit of finding, being rare/old/live, and the last one I think, is surely one of my theme songs for the year almost gone.

My Friend the Chocolate Cake – More Heart Than Me

Jeff Martin – Love The One You’re With (cover) – I don’t think a good video of this exists, so you’ll just have to go buy the album.  It’s just about my favourite love song of all time.

The Tallest Man on Earth – The Wheel – rare piano version; this just breaks my heart.

The Tallest Man on Earth – The Gardener

Billy Bragg – Greetings to the New Brunette

Machine Gun Fellatio – Unsent Letter

Nick Drake – Time Has Told Me

Pendulum – Propane Nightmares

Manic Street Preachers – You Stole the Sun from My Heart

Radiohead – No Surprises

Tom Waits – The Piano Has Been Drinking

The Triffids – Tender is the Night

Tool – Wings for Marie

Lou Reed – Perfect Day

Warren Zevon – Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Karnivool – Sleeping Satellite (cover)

Kaki King – Pull Me Out Alive

Amanda Palmer – In My Mind

But maybe it isn’t all that funny,
   but I’ve been fighting all my life.
   But maybe I have to think it’s funny,
   if I want to live before I die,
   and maybe it’s funniest of all, to think I’ll die before I actually see
   that I am exactly the person that I want to be.

I spent five days hiking through the forest, over the dunes, and along the beach this week. 72.4km along the coast of the Southern Ocean between Denmark and Albany; no internet, no phone. Just me, 12kg on my back, a camera, my barefoot running shoes and a hammock.

For some of the journey, hilarity, stories, silliness, life, the universe and everything flowed between me and the two dear friends who accompanied me on the trail. But much of the time was spent re-reading Marcus Aurelius in the long, light evenings, and contemplating, untangling, thinking, step after step.

There were birds and beetles, tiger snakes – so very many tiger snakes, venomous and shy – and many hours walking under and through the wind farms, the gentle sound of them rocking me to sleep at night.

One night at sunset, I climbed the hill and lay in the grass, photographing the wildflowers in the fading light. There, alone up the hill with nothing but the wind, for a moment holding the logos of the Stoics in my mind and knowing that this is all there is. Remember.

I’ve been playing for a while with the idea of mixing up a couple of the things I love – genealogy and the concept of family-of-choice.

My first attempt to represent this is pretty light in terms of the individuals it encompasses and some of the links and visualisations have been simplified more than I would like, but it’s the genesis for constructing a family-tree-of-choice.  That said, while the number of individuals is not large, the vast majority of you spiral out from the people in the people in the drawing, or from the social hubs there.  (At some point I may have the time and ambition to construct a much bigger and more detailed version, but my relationships with others are something of a moving target since they seem to be stuck in a state of expansion.)

The blue boxes are active social hubs filled with people I care about.  The green boxes are individuals who have connected me to hubs, tending to result in me meeting a whole lot of new people at once.  And the purple boxes are my big damn hero connectors who have individually linked me to three or more other individuals in the chart.

I discovered a few interesting things from this exercise.   Firstly, all of my most active social networks and best loved people spin out from beginning architecture school in 1997.   Secondly,  Siobhan and Sky are unusual in having connected me to both individuals and social hubs.  Thirdly, my brother Dave is a unique and special snowflake (sorry Dave, you are not a unique and special snowflake; you know what you are) and is the only person here that doesn’t have links in or out, although he knows many of the people in the picture.

Most amusingly though, is that The Man With The Hashtag is sitting in equal first place when it comes to connecting me to individuals.  In the face of this evidence, I must humbly concede that he has indirectly been responsible for so much love, support and happiness in my life.  Bless.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of my maps.  And now there are two!

The first is a picture of something I’ve been working on since January; namely, the idea of sovereignty.  The idea is a work in progress, and the map is one of many spanning that progress.  I am posting it for Nathalie and Jaunita, who are right there with me when I need them.

The second is a picture of change.  Once upon a time I was the girl who could not walk across campus without tensing every muscle for fear people were looking at her.  The girl who would blush and stammer rather than hold a conversation.  The very queen of awkwardness, the non-phone-answerer, the one who declined every invitation.  Twenty years on, I am the woman who will pounce upon a friendly looking stranger with a ‘hi, I’m an enormous introvert; pleased to meet you!’  How did this happen you ask?  Still trying to work that one out, and I am posting this map for a dear friend who is on the journey too.

Pictures make me feel less mopey about the ten half-finished blog posts in my notebook. Let’s all forget about those posts and enjoy the shiny.  Or else.

This morning I have the time to be down in Forrest Place, sitting at OccupyPerth. On the other hand, this morning I have the time to write about OccupyPerth, and things to say. Regrettably, they’re mutually exclusive options, since my netbook isn’t charged. And so I’m here writing, because I believe it’s the more effective use of my time. And so, at greater than expected length, this is my Perth. This is my Occupy. This is my why.

For those who are reading this from afar, a small and peaceful happening in isolated Perth likely hasn’t made your news. Yesterday, the CHOGM – the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – opened here. It’s something that happens bi-annually in various cities, where a staggering amount of money is spent to close off public spaces, sweep the streets of the embarrassing homeless, and to host a summit of monarchs, prime ministers and presidents, not to mention war-criminals who also fall into one or another of those categories. But that’s another rant, and one that’s been well covered elsewhere.

Yesterday morning, a surprisingly large and enthusiastic protest march happened here. People came along for all kinds of reasons – a colourful and chaotic swirl of concerns that they have chosen to raise. Corporate greed, genocide in Sri Lanka, their objections to CHOGM, democracy (or rather, lack thereof) in Zimbabwe, fractional reserve banking, equal marriage, climate change, refugee rights, deaths in custody, mining, and more. All those and a profound wish to demonstrate that the shiny, sanitised face Perth has presented to the CHOGM delegates is not the city we inhabit from day-to-day. A photograph of a protester holding up a sign saying ‘shit’s fucked up and bullshit’ has been doing the rounds for the last couple of weeks, and that probably comes closest to expressing the overall sentiment.

Riot police and mounted police lined up along the perimeter of the restricted area, watching for violence that never came. Police officers herded me into the media pack, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t wearing the necessary credentials, which was surprising and pleasing given that I’d expected them to throw me out. The local media ranted about it being ‘unfocussed’. The people were there for a multitude of personal reasons, and few people agreed on all the things others were there to say. And I thought hard about it all.

Upon returning to Forrest Place, the protest shifted from the hands of the CHOGM demonstrators to those who had been working to get OccupyPerth off the ground, and people stayed there with their concerns, issues, signs and opinions. The previous month, I’d been reading a diverse mix of commentary around the OccupyX events, and until this week I’d not managed to form a consistent opinion. This month, after speaking to a number of people, and in particular one wonderful man who’d spend time at OccupySydney, my opinion has crystalised into solid support.

Like Perth’s CHOGM demonstration, I believe OccupyX isn’t fundamentally about presenting a single, coherent and targeted message or set of demands. Its value and meaning has everything to do with the stubborn occupation of a public space, generally in the face of disapproval and sometimes violent resistance, and to control that space in a manner such that people can express their frustration, anger, sadness, opinions, hopes and fears. People arrive, sometimes with well-argued concerns, but often with inarticulate, uninformed or plain incomprehensible things to say. Things are sometimes – often – organised poorly, randomly, or even in a manner that involves internal oppression within the gathering.

But the micromanagement, the perfection or otherwise, the execution, the persistent presence of only a small group of people in some cities, these things are not really the point. It’s okay for things not to be done optimally, because the point is to be there and – ever more in the face of official resistance – to occupy and to assert that we have every right to gather and to speak. To assert that we haven’t, that we can be moved away, to be told that we’ve made our point and must return home is against everything in which I believe. Return to your homes people; your government has everything under control.

Last night, in the midst of this, I had a realisation. To encroach upon the ability of ordinary people to gather and to speak of their concerns is to move collective dialogue into the domain of the privileged. The people with homes and private spaces that accommodate gathering. The people without thin common walls, and the threat of eviction in the event of such an action. The people who have never, and will never, have the experience of university that funnels many into large groups who have spaces in which to gather, but are so often elitist and alienate the working class. The people who live on our streets and simply don’t have a home.

And so (in addition to a fundamental belief that it is right for citizens to be able to assemble in a public space and to speak) no matter how bizarre, random, or even factually incorrect people’s words may seem to me, I have spent time at OccupyPerth because I cannot watch the crack-downs and removals in other cities without a rising horror that these remove the freedom to speak and organise from the people who need it most.

There will always be some measure of chaos, disagreement and sheer randomness in any movement that attempts to accommodate the ability of all to speak. Some people will inevitably be oppressed by the movement for the views they air, unfortunate as that is. Because we are human, fallible, confused, we will do things that are peculiar, strange, poorly thought out or articulated or plain half-arsed. And that is not the end of the world. The point of OccupyX is not, in the eyes of many, to evangelise, to overthrow or to charm the media or to change the whole world. It is okay not to be perfect, because the point is not, and never has been, perfection. The point of OccupyX is to occupy, and for it to exist – tautological is it is – is sufficient reason for it to exist.

Quite a long time ago, four long years ago.  Big, fancy house.  Husband.  Cats.  Three and a half years ago, suddenly looking hard at my tangled, messy, perpetual barely-hanging-on-ness.  Starting to think about ‘happiness’ even though – as many pointed out to me – this wasn’t quite the correct word, and it was prone to be confused with hedonism.  What I was trying to express was ‘rational, loving and sustainable well-being’.  But that’s too long and too difficult to explain.  So I talked about My Happiness Project.

Looking backwards for a moment, there are posts from that time on my old LiveJournal with tags like <a href=http://flyingblogspot.livejournal.com/?tag=my%20happiness%20project>my happiness project</a> and <a href=http://flyingblogspot.livejournal.com/tag/lifehacking>lifehacking</a>, arbitrary words for a much bigger thing, and recording fragments of a journey.   On that journey, I got somewhere; some great distance from the place where I had been before. It started to feel like it was somewhere I could stay forever.  And then moving out, immeasurable sadness, innumerable boxes, and constantly fighting everything down on every front.

The thing I regret the most over the last couple of years is not having had the capacity to hang onto tight the gentle, kind love for myself that I’d been carefully cultivating.  Finding that it was possible to actually <i>like</I> myself was – for various historical and then-current reasons – a great, unfolding knowledge and a completely new expereince.  It is utterly unacceptable to live in such a manner that when I look hard at myself, I sigh.

Somewhat unexpectedly over the past few weeks, the spark that triggered my first headlong crash into really, truly learning to be okay has been reignited.  I’m thinking about well-being, looking again at my mechanisms of self-sabotage, starting to clear out all the clutter – mental and physical – that has accumulated in every corner of my life.   Looking at being a woman who does something more than just hang on, just cope, just hoard every little bit of energy and sanity to be able to get up, go to work, and do it sufficiently well.

I’m waking the hell up and crashing back into it, in the passionate, enthusiastic way I crash into things when I’m  very excited.  I’m reading, re-reading, thinking, planning and considering two years’ worth of swirling chaos dissolve in the face of one little step after another.

And I’m going to write about it a little, because sometimes the best thing of all is remembering that you’re not the only one on the road.

I have all of these fragments of posts; the river, the garden, the mortgage belts, the city, maps, wanderings, chance meetings, the ends of the earth.

And – as so often – I’m not writing any of them, but am sitting around vaguely thinking about life, Rachmaninov, whisky, the universe and kitty.

I imagine it’s something to do with leaving Large Accounting Firm, painting more, raging less, and spending time at the gym and climbing, but I’ve got a peculiar feeling of being on the brink of something. Close to presque vu, but not quite. (If someone can give the correct name for what I’m feeling, I’ll buy them dinner. Fancy dinner. And then maybe we could make out on the couch and…wait, this is not the time nor the place. Ahem.)

I am given to understand that such feelings have much to do with the temporal lobes of one’s brain having a Moment which is quite exciting in itself, and I do feel it’s kinda sweet of my temporal lobes to troll me with a feeling of something, someone or somewhere soon. Pretty, existential vertigo.

For the moment, shiny illusions have not resolved themselves, and I’m currently working on settling into a new job, enjoying finally getting mobility and fitness back after the Stupid Bicycle Accident, and wondering what the next adventure will be. Oh, and propositioning a lot of people, with the goal of being Vegas-married to as many acquaintances as are willing. And so while the bigger posts simmer, find herein a small handful of links of various flavours.

Read them fast so we can run away to Vegas, sugarcube!

The Oatmeal on Tupperware

A tale of hoarding, in which I’m afraid I heard myself.

A nice idea for vertical gardening and pallet re-use.

David Foster Wallace on life and work.

Just about the best coat I’ve ever wanted.

Derek K Miller – The Last Post

20 Creative Public Works of Art

For years, I have been bookmarking articles of interest on Wikipedia.  There are several lengthy lists of Wikipedia articles floating around the web, but most of them have padded out the interesting articles with an assortment of conspiracies, UFOs and supposedly haunted houses.  And so, I thought I’d share the things that interest me – notably alien-encounter and ghost free.

While many of the articles on this list are work-friendly and generally inoffensive, do be aware that my interests sometimes stray into the gory, morbid and pornographic, and click accordingly.  If you come across any broken links, leave me a comment and I’ll fix them up.

001    2006 Mumbai sweet seawater incident
002    Acoustic Kitty
003    Acoustic Mirror
004    Action Park
005    Alexander Litvinenko Poisoning
006    Alternate reality game
007    Amber Room
008    Amelia Dyer
009    Ampelmännchen
010    Anna Anderson
011    Anscombe’s quartet
012    Ant on a rubber rope
013    Anthropic principle
014    Antikythera mechanism
015    Anti-pattern
016    Aokigahara
017    Aptostichus stephencolberti
018    Arbre du Ténéré
019    Argleton
020    As Slow As Possible
021    Assassin
022    Atari video game burial
023    Baby hatch
024    Bacon mania
025    Ballooning (spiders)
026    Battle of Los Angeles
027    Beale Ciphers
028    Committee to End Pay Toilets in America
029    Beaumont children disappearance
030    Benjaman Kyle
031    Berlin Wall
032    Berners Street Hoax
033    Bible errata
034    Bielefeld Conspiracy
035    Bigfin squid
036    Black Dahlia suspects
037    Black Swan Theory
038    Bloop
039    Bodil Joensen
040    Bogle-Chandler Case
041    Boston Molasses Disaster
042    Brainfuck (programming language)
043    Brian Wells (bank robber)
044    Bubbly Creek
045    Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
046    Burning Man
047    Cadaver Synod
048    Carl Tanzler
049    Centralia, Pennsylvania
050    Chappaquiddick incident
051    Checkpoint Charlie
052    Christine Chubbuck
053    Cincinnati Subway
054    Cleveland Torso Murders
055    Closed London Underground stations
056    Closed New York City Subway stations
057    Coastline paradox
058    Collinwood school fire
059    Collyer Brothers
060    Colonial Street
061    Color of water
062    Conspiracy 58
063    Corrupted Blood incident
064    Cosmic latte
065    Cross Bones
066    Crush, Texas
067    D. B. Cooper
068    D’Agapeyeff cipher
069    Dagen H
070    Dancing Mania
071    Dancing Plague of 1518
072    David Bain
073    Defeat in Detail
074    Defenestrations of Prague
075    Degree Confluence Project
076    Demon Core
077    Dérive
078    Digesting Duck
079    Distinguishing blue from green in language
080    Dollar Auction
081    Dorabella Ciper
082    Drake’s Plate of Brass
083    Dyatlov Pass Incident
084    Ebenezer Place
085    Eigengrau
086    Eltanin Antenna
087    Elvis taxon
088    Emperor Norton
089    Encounter
090    Enigma
091    ETAOIN SHRDLU
092    Eton wall game
093    Eugenia Falleni
094    Evolutionary psychology of religion
095    Fan Death
096    Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat
097    Fermi paradox
098    Fine Cotton
099    Flannan Isles
100    Forest swastika
101    Brown_Dog_affair
102    Friendly Floatees
103    Frost flower
104    Georgi Markov
105    Ghost stations of the Paris Métro
106    Glasgow Ice Cream Wars
107    Gloria Ramirez
108    GoldenPalace.com Monkey
109    Gravitational lensing
110    Great Fire of London
111    Great Pacific Garbage Patch
112    Green Belt Europe
113    Green Boots
114    Green Children of Woolpit
115    Gropecunt Lane
116    Guerrilla gardening
117    Guess 2/3 of the average
118    Hampton-on-Sea
119    Hannah Twynnoy
120    Harold Shipman
121    Hartford circus fire
122    Henry Darger
123    Herd instinct
124    HeroRAT
125    Hinterkaifeck
126    History of the World Wide Web
127    If-by-whiskey
128    Illegal prime
129    Information Cascade
130    IP over Avian Carriers
131    I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!
132    Ivory-billed Woodpecker
133    Jandek
134    Jeanne Calment
135    Jimmy Carter rabbit incident
136    John Murray Spear
137    John Titor
138    Joseph Force Crater
139    Joybubbles
140    June 1962 Alcatraz escape
141    June and Jennifer Gibbons
142    Kasper Hauser
143    Keron Thomas
144    Kilroy Was Here
145    Kitty Genovese
146    Kryptos
147    La choutte d’or
148    Lazarus taxon
149    Le_Rêve_(painting)
150    Lead Masks Case
151    Lech mich in Arsch
152    Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle
153    Limerence
154    Lina Medina
155    L’Inconnue de la Seine
156    Lizzie Borden
157    London Beer Flood
158    London Necropolis Company
159    London Pneumatic Despatch Company
160    Lord Lucan
161    Lost Doctor Who Episodes
162    Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
163    Louis Slotin
164    lp0 on fire
165    Mad Gasser of Mattoon
166    Magdalene asylum
167    Manhattanhenge
168    Manor of Northstead
169    Mary Toft
170    Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion
171    Maze solving algorithm
172    McMartin preschool trial
173    Metal umlaut
174    Michael Larson
175    Michael Malloy
176    Milgram Experiment
177    Mir diamond pipe
178    Mitochondrial Eve
179    MKULTRA
180    Mobro 4000
181    Mojave phone booth
182    MONIAC Computer
183    Monty Hall Problem
184    Mornington Crescent (game)
185    Mortsafe
186    Moscow Metro 2
187    Münchausen by Internet
188    Nannie Doss
189    Nash equilibrium
190    National Hotel Disease
191    Nemesis (hypothetical star)
192    No soap radio
193    Nuclear football
194    Numbers Station
195    Oak island
196    Oliver Cromwell’s Head
197    One red paperclip
198    Onion Futures Act
199    Open source religion
200    Operation Mincemeat
201    Original Spanish Kitchen
202    Our Lady of the Angels school fire
203    Oxford English Dictionary
204    Parkinson’s Law of Triviality
205    Patent medicine
206    Patricia Pulling
207    Percussive Maintenance
208    Phineas Gage
209    Pigeon photography
210    Pirate loot problem
211    Pitch drop experiment
212    Poe Toaster
213    Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko
214    Pole of inaccessibility
215    Post-mortem photography
216    Presecutor’s fallacy
217    Prisoner’s dilemma
218    Psychogeography
219    Publius Enigma
220    Quantum suicide thought experiment
221    R. Budd Dwyer
222    Raymond Robinson (Green Man)
223    Red Barn Murder
224    Red Rain in Kerala
225    Republic of Indian Stream
226    Resignation from the British House of Commons
227    Richey Edwards
228    Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes
229    RKO Forty Acres
230    Roanoke Colony
231    Robert Shields (diarist)
232    Rogue wave
233    Rongorongo
234    Rosenhan Experiment
235    S. A. Andrée’s Arctic balloon expedition of 1897
236    Safety coffin
237    Sailing Stones
238    Salish Sea human foot discoveries
239    Sedlec Ossuary
240    Semantic satiation
241    Seven Bridges of Königsberg
242    Shape of the Universe
243    Shugborough inscription
244    Slow Down (unidentified sound)
245    Snuff film
246    Snuffy’s Parents Get a Divorce
247    Social engineering
248    Social traps
249    Solved game
250    Spite House
251    Spring Heeled Jack
252    Stanford Prison Experiment
253    Subterranean Rivers of London
254    Taman Shud
255    Tamworth Two
256    Tanganyika laughter epidemic
257    The Aristocrats (joke)
258    The Bottle Imp
259    The Hum
260    The Incident at Petrich
261    The Third Wave
262    Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War -
263    Tidal locking
264    Tower Subway
265    Toynbee tiles
266    Tragedy of the commons
267    Trap street
268    Traveling salesman problem
269    Trepanning
270    Treva Throneberry
271    Trolley problem
272    Tube Map
273    Tulip mania
274    Tupper’s self-referential formula
275    Turritopsis nutricula
276    Tyche (hypothetical planet)
277    Tyranny of small decisions
278    Ultimatum game
279    Uncanny valley
280    Underarm bowling incident of 1981
281    Underground City, Montreal
282    Unexpected hanging paradox
283    Utah teapot
284    UVB-76
285    Valentich Disappearance
286    Verona
287    Voynich manuscript
288    Wardriving
289    Watermelon Snow
290    Whitechapel Murders
291    Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?
292    Wick Effect
293    Wicked Bible
294    Wife Selling
295    William Herbert Wallace
296    Williamson Tunnels
297    Winchester Mystery House
298    Wittenoom
299    Wow! Signal
300    Zero-sum game