Doreen Michele

Yesterday, I wrote a short post about Eating Cleaner . The first draft had a completely different title -- Eating Less Meat -- and I was having enormous difficulty trying to write it. One of the things that makes my first drafts suck is they often contain a brain dump of a lot of my fears of what could go sideways. So instead of making my point -- in this case about a simple rule of thumb for eating cleaner, which is to eat less meat (and dairy) -- I get bogged down in trying to figure out how to address a raftload of boogeymen, in this case about political stuff related to veganism, essentially. Years ago, I read the book Diet for a Small Planet . It's an excellent book about vegetarianism but only about half of it is recipes. The first half makes a strong case for why and how first-world bad habits, including meat-centered diets, foster starvation elsewhere. It's been a lot of years since I read it but my recollection is that there are a number of things that go on ro...

I've recently taken several of my blogs offline. As is often the case, I don't yet know exactly why that is or where I am going from here. My health is better than it's been and my thinking is clearer. One valid interpretation: I need to consolidate my writing onto fewer blogs and spread myself less thin and I have a clearer idea of where I am going with this stuff. Several of the blogs I took offline were health related blogs. One valid interpretation: I've tried various approaches to writing about the topic and found that some approaches simply don't work. Another valid interpretation: Writing about health topics is a waste of my time. It's more downside than up and something I would kind of like to abandon. Some months ago, I rewatched The Saint . It has a plot similar to Chain Reaction -- someone invents clean, unlimited energy and people want to prevent it from being given away for free -- only the inventor is a woman with a serious health defect ...

Comments to date by me with more than 100 karma on HN. 1. 188 points I have an incurable condition and spent about 3.5 months bedridden before finally getting a proper diagnosis. My condition has a significant respiratory component. While bedridden, I hallucinated wordless conversations with the Grim Reaper... 2. 169 points Why is there not more focus on the police investigation. Why did they police decide not to press charges? If our police forces are failing to press charges against rapists, shouldn't that be a big priority to change? I'm a woman. I have been raped. I also have two adult sons. So, here are some issues as I see it:... 3. 165 points It was probably so successful precisely because it was seeing the world through the eyes of a 50 year old Japanese biker with the face people expect in influencers... 4. 155 points I've studied social/psychological stuff, spent a lot of years suicidal and spent a number of years homeless which was incred...

I've done little websites of various sorts for around twenty years or so. Some years after I began doing little websites on various topics, I watched the 1995 docudrama Apollo 13 about the real world incident . The movie shows how the people on the ground were able to help save the lives of the astronauts and get them home again by providing useful information, researching how to solve the problems they had and so forth even though they could share no physical sources. They could only share information with the astronauts. To me, that was a powerful mental model for how to relate effectively to website work. I guess I had always been doing that -- or trying to do that -- but the movie gave me some means to clarify what was already sort of a half-baked idea. I had always seen websites as a means to "do" something real, not just a way to share memes for lols or something like that. When I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU while living in F...

For years and years, I had too little in my Amazon account to qualify for a payout. Fifty cents here and ten cents there just was not adding up to the minimum payout threshold. I got my first very small payout a few months back. It seemed likely to me that it was a consequence of Project Bike Rack adding enough money to my balance to put me over the payout threshold. I also had the impression that the bike racks I was seeing in town and not entirely happy with were not living up to my vision in part because probably someone had bought whatever was readily available through Amazon and I suspected it was likely they did so in part to find some means to kick a few bucks my way. It's generally easier to get money out of people by directing them to affiliate links than by some other means, so you get a lot of garbage websites doing fake "reviews" that are really thinly disguised ads because that's a means to make money online. Clearly, I need to eat but I don...

One of the problems plaguing the internet is a failure to effectively communicate. When people leave comments online, a lot of them write similar to how they talk and this tends to go astray. When you talk to people in person, there are a great many contextual cues that help inform the interpretation of your words. In online written communication, people often mostly have your actual words and those words need to be a great deal more precise and detailed to have any hope of being good communication. If you use a lot of sarcasm, irony or similar and tend to rely on voice tone to convey your actual intent, you may run into a lot of unexpected drama online. You may need to actively work at using some means to convey your real intent or ditch those habits. Even seemingly very simple things can go wildly astray when you move from talking to local people who know you well in person to talking to mere acquaintances or strangers. If I write "sodas" on my grocery list, I and relati...

Words are an amazing thing and the written word is this incredible, magical means to communicate what is in one person's mind to someone else's mind when they have never met and even potentially across time. You can read the written words of people who are no longer alive, sometimes in cases where they died centuries before you were ever born. But there are lots of ways this form of communication can go wrong. I generally think of this as the chair problem . Chair is a perfectly useful word but it it somewhat vague. There are many objects that can rightly be called a chair and they differ wildly. If you are trying to give someone instructions for how to accomplish a thing, telling them to put a chair in that spot is probably not sufficient information, especially if they have to purchase said chair. If they are grabbing one from the supply room or elsewhere in the same building, you may not need to give a lot of specifics because there may be a limited selection of chai...