(no subject)
Aug. 8th, 2019 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I've been having an absurd argument with the folks on scans daily about whether Magneto can be Xavier's representative requesting amnesty from the humans in exchange for meds. Forgetting of course that the human ambassadors that the human governments sent are well also similar to Magneto.
My difficulty with scans daily is it is reminding of why I haven't been able to get involved with a good comic fandom.
It's very frustrating to be fannish about something and not be able to find like minded souls to share it with. DW may not be the place for it. I've tried Twitter -- but they have their own insane drama. (They are busy shipping characters and don't seem to understand the comics.) The one's on FB are gamers, which doesn't quite work either.
Have had better luck with people on Good Reads.
It's really frigging hard to find like-minded fans who share your fannish interest. I had to work hard to find the section of the Buffy fandom that I did. I ended up leap-frogging from site to site -- it wasn't until I started madly writing meta (because I found someone else who did it and sort of decided to attempt it myself), and madly posting it -- that I found a fandom. Meta gave me the fandom. Maybe I should start posting meta about the X-men? Eh, no...scans daily wants scans not meta.
2. The Myth of Self Control
Many of us assume that if we want to make big changes in our lives, we have to sweat for it.
But if, for example, the change is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, researchers say the pile of cookies has already won.
“Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out,” Fujita says. “We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.”
This idea was crystallized in the results of a 2011 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study tracked 205 people for one week in Germany. The study participants were given BlackBerrys that would go off at random, asking them questions about what desires, temptations, and self-control they were experiencing in the moment.
The paper stumbled on a paradox: The people who were the best at self-control — the ones who most readily agreed to survey questions like “I am good at resisting temptations” — reported fewer temptations throughout the study period.
To put it more simply: The people who said they excel at self-control were hardly using it at all.
Psychologists Marina Milyavskaya and Michael Inzlicht recently confirmed and expanded on this idea. In their study, they monitored 159 students at McGill University in Canada in a similar manner for a week.
If resisting temptation is a virtue, then more resistance should lead to greater achievement, right? That’s not what the results, pending publication in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found.
The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.
“There’s a strong assumption still that exerting self-control is beneficial,” Milyavskaya, a professor at Carleton University, tells me. “And we’re showing in the long term, it’s not.”
I'm actually very good at self-control -- except when I get depressed or anxious, then self-control goes out the window and I buy things I shouldn't. I'm beginning to think this is human.
3. An Incredibly Clever Hack for People Who Want To Read More Books
In an exceedingly clever recent Medium post, Design for Hackers author David Kadavy suggested those looking to read more hijack their Facebook habit to achieve this goal. Just like a smoker reaching for a cigarette, many of us regularly feel a tingle of anxiety and mindlessly open up Facebook. Kadavy asks, what if you arranged things so that you opened up a book instead?
Here's his exact prescription, in his own words:
Reduce friction. For this particular habit, there's something that blocks you from enjoying books the way you read Facebook. Opening a book feels like a big commitment. You can talk yourself out of it if you only have a few minutes to spare. So, you need to give yourself permission to read tiny chunks of books.
Hijack your trigger. Every time you feel your "Facebook Trigger," instead of reaching for your mobile device, grab a book. It's best if it's a physical book at first, because a mobile device is too tempting. If you have to use a mobile, rearrange your icons so Facebook is hidden and Kindle is prominent.
Replace your action. Now, read the book! To start, just pick a page in the book and start reading. Remember, you have to eliminate any friction that makes you think a book is too big of an investment. Daily Rituals is a good book to start with, because it has lots of small sections; or try Dangerous Liaisons if you prefer fiction.
In just a couple of weeks, you'll find yourself not only reading more, Kadavy promises, but also starting to feel more invested in your identity as a reader, which should only reinforce your new good habit. Sounds plausible, so why not give it a try?
Hee Hee. Works better if you aren't at work and using FB as a way to deal with work stress.
4. How to Keep Criticism From Sinking Your Confidence -- Walt Whitman and the Discipline of the Creative Self
To be sure, Whitman did not dismiss criticism wholesale — rather, he separated the wheat from the chaff through the sieve of confidence and surefooted creative vision. But criticism, he believed, could be far more valuable than praise. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote under the heading “STRONGER LESSONS”:
Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you? and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
The kind of criticism he readily dismissed was that of the professional critics and opinionators — those aimed at tearing down rather than improving a writer’s art, for their judgments are based on the standards of their time and therefore tend to censure any vigorous break with convention. Such critics are apt to pronounce any work of true originality bad, and then to embody W.H. Auden’s incisive observation that “one cannot review a bad book without showing off.”
Burroughs noted this in his praiseful biography of Whitman, composed at a time when the poet was still more rejected than celebrated by his era:
There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records of men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.
[…]
Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true to himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.
Whitman himself had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass:
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.
Later in life, he would reflect:
Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics?… I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict.
[…]
The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.
My difficulty with scans daily is it is reminding of why I haven't been able to get involved with a good comic fandom.
It's very frustrating to be fannish about something and not be able to find like minded souls to share it with. DW may not be the place for it. I've tried Twitter -- but they have their own insane drama. (They are busy shipping characters and don't seem to understand the comics.) The one's on FB are gamers, which doesn't quite work either.
Have had better luck with people on Good Reads.
It's really frigging hard to find like-minded fans who share your fannish interest. I had to work hard to find the section of the Buffy fandom that I did. I ended up leap-frogging from site to site -- it wasn't until I started madly writing meta (because I found someone else who did it and sort of decided to attempt it myself), and madly posting it -- that I found a fandom. Meta gave me the fandom. Maybe I should start posting meta about the X-men? Eh, no...scans daily wants scans not meta.
2. The Myth of Self Control
Many of us assume that if we want to make big changes in our lives, we have to sweat for it.
But if, for example, the change is to eat fewer sweets, and then you find yourself in front of a pile of cookies, researchers say the pile of cookies has already won.
“Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out,” Fujita says. “We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.”
This idea was crystallized in the results of a 2011 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study tracked 205 people for one week in Germany. The study participants were given BlackBerrys that would go off at random, asking them questions about what desires, temptations, and self-control they were experiencing in the moment.
The paper stumbled on a paradox: The people who were the best at self-control — the ones who most readily agreed to survey questions like “I am good at resisting temptations” — reported fewer temptations throughout the study period.
To put it more simply: The people who said they excel at self-control were hardly using it at all.
Psychologists Marina Milyavskaya and Michael Inzlicht recently confirmed and expanded on this idea. In their study, they monitored 159 students at McGill University in Canada in a similar manner for a week.
If resisting temptation is a virtue, then more resistance should lead to greater achievement, right? That’s not what the results, pending publication in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found.
The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester. What’s more, the people who exercised more effortful self-control also reported feeling more depleted. So not only were they not meeting their goals, they were also exhausted from trying.
“There’s a strong assumption still that exerting self-control is beneficial,” Milyavskaya, a professor at Carleton University, tells me. “And we’re showing in the long term, it’s not.”
I'm actually very good at self-control -- except when I get depressed or anxious, then self-control goes out the window and I buy things I shouldn't. I'm beginning to think this is human.
3. An Incredibly Clever Hack for People Who Want To Read More Books
In an exceedingly clever recent Medium post, Design for Hackers author David Kadavy suggested those looking to read more hijack their Facebook habit to achieve this goal. Just like a smoker reaching for a cigarette, many of us regularly feel a tingle of anxiety and mindlessly open up Facebook. Kadavy asks, what if you arranged things so that you opened up a book instead?
Here's his exact prescription, in his own words:
Reduce friction. For this particular habit, there's something that blocks you from enjoying books the way you read Facebook. Opening a book feels like a big commitment. You can talk yourself out of it if you only have a few minutes to spare. So, you need to give yourself permission to read tiny chunks of books.
Hijack your trigger. Every time you feel your "Facebook Trigger," instead of reaching for your mobile device, grab a book. It's best if it's a physical book at first, because a mobile device is too tempting. If you have to use a mobile, rearrange your icons so Facebook is hidden and Kindle is prominent.
Replace your action. Now, read the book! To start, just pick a page in the book and start reading. Remember, you have to eliminate any friction that makes you think a book is too big of an investment. Daily Rituals is a good book to start with, because it has lots of small sections; or try Dangerous Liaisons if you prefer fiction.
In just a couple of weeks, you'll find yourself not only reading more, Kadavy promises, but also starting to feel more invested in your identity as a reader, which should only reinforce your new good habit. Sounds plausible, so why not give it a try?
Hee Hee. Works better if you aren't at work and using FB as a way to deal with work stress.
4. How to Keep Criticism From Sinking Your Confidence -- Walt Whitman and the Discipline of the Creative Self
To be sure, Whitman did not dismiss criticism wholesale — rather, he separated the wheat from the chaff through the sieve of confidence and surefooted creative vision. But criticism, he believed, could be far more valuable than praise. In Leaves of Grass, he wrote under the heading “STRONGER LESSONS”:
Have you learn’d lessons only of those who admired you and were tender with you? and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn’d great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
The kind of criticism he readily dismissed was that of the professional critics and opinionators — those aimed at tearing down rather than improving a writer’s art, for their judgments are based on the standards of their time and therefore tend to censure any vigorous break with convention. Such critics are apt to pronounce any work of true originality bad, and then to embody W.H. Auden’s incisive observation that “one cannot review a bad book without showing off.”
Burroughs noted this in his praiseful biography of Whitman, composed at a time when the poet was still more rejected than celebrated by his era:
There are no more precious and tonic pages in history than the records of men who have faced unpopularity, odium, hatred, ridicule, detraction, in obedience to an inward voice, and never lost courage or good-nature.
[…]
Every man is a partaker in the triumph of him who is always true to himself and makes no compromises with customs, schools, or opinions.
Whitman himself had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass:
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.
Later in life, he would reflect:
Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics?… I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict.
[…]
The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto — not criticism by other standards, and adjustments thereto — is the lesson of Nature.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 02:26 am (UTC)Pat, on the other hand, says those things call to him, even in the middle of the night.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 02:38 am (UTC)(I was better off when they didn't have it. I'm afraid of eating anything with gluten in it -- because it makes me really sick.)
I tend to get compulsive about things. And my mind will obsess over it.
"Things calling out to me."
But like I said...the meditation is helping. But I've also been doing it on and off since 2013, and can only really meditate for 10-20 minutes tops. I don't know how people do it for longer than that.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 02:51 am (UTC)But it took a long ass time. And a lot of the time -- I don't want to do it.
Learning to meditate isn't easy...you are basically learning how to not think. Or how to watch your thoughts, without necessarily engaging with them. There's lots of books on it, most of it is BS...but the headspace app I liked and the mindfulness approach is somewhat logical -- in that it's talking about focusing on what is happening now. For example -- now I am writing this response. Nothing else.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 10:35 am (UTC)I think the closest I get to meditation is boxing and climbing. I can only focus on exactly what is in front of me with both of those. Everything else falls away. If other thoughts creep in, I fall (literally in climbing).
I know that it's one of the reasons I love both so much.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 12:10 pm (UTC)I don't think I have...he doesn't sound familiar.
But what you describe with boxing and climbing is in a way mindfulness. I used to be able to get there when I ran -- but my knees gave out on me when I was running on a treadmill at the age of 22, and I haven't been able to successfully run ever since -- without the reoccurrence. So now, walking, writing a novel, and meditation work the best.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 09:38 pm (UTC)So I climb and I box. No impact, no pain!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 10:19 pm (UTC)I've been told to try biking -- but I have back issues -- bulging discs in lower back, and arthritis in the L5 and L4, also curvature in the upper back -- which is possibly causing issues with the lower back.
So..walking and yoga. Nothing to high impact. I'd do swimming - but alas, NYC. There are pools, but they are also over-populated by small children.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 10:34 pm (UTC)And yes, boxing is a no impact thing. Most boxers do run, but my coach has fixed my training so that I don't run, I do a warm-up slow jog, and then it's all stretches, abdominals, some weight work, and I go straight into technique. You find a good coach, they can tailor the lesson to what you can do!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 11:23 pm (UTC)The climbing sounds like fun, and if you are lowered slowly to the ground -- yeah, low impact.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-09 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-10 12:39 am (UTC)