Having grown up in Alaska, I feel I have a different set of assumptions about infrastructure than most who grew up with higher population density. For a long time after I left the north, I still carried a knife, lighter, and flashlight. Convenient tools, if for no other reason than that others usually don't have them when they need them, but reflecting a lack of assumption on my part that wherever I find myself, I will necessarily have light and warmth, or need nothing more than my bare hands. Infrastructure is the difference, and its ubiquity in most lives is both freeing and limiting.
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Nonfiction audio is my main thing. Autobiographies, parenting, science, social issues, and some business or anything educational.
I consider nonfiction to be a healthier and more useful view of the world than the news.
I have a few Mastodon accounts, like @travisfw@fosstodon.org
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Travis F W's books
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Travis F W wants to read How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra
Travis F W wants to read Social Chemistry by Marissa King
Travis F W replied to Phil in SF's status
@kingrat Must be what the French call a French press?
Travis F W wants to read The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
Travis F W rated Self-Compassion: 1 star
Travis F W rated Debt: The First 5000 Years: 5 stars

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
The author shows that before there was money, there was debt. For 5,000 years humans have lived in societies divided …
Travis F W commented on The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord
Nord's chapter 4, Motivation Drive and Wanting, strikes directly at the crux of my personal life challenges. The difference between wanting and pleasure. I want, and I have sometimes extreme drive, but I do not feel good about it, and am almost always disappointed. The countless times I have finished doing something and found myself pretending to be happy about it for the sake of others…
Travis F W started reading The Book of (More) Delights: Essays by Ross Gay
I enjoying these, specifically the account of drama beetween neighborhood cats which I just finished. A nice book I don't have to pay much attention to, but am glad to, when I do. A reminder to take delight where I can, not just think hard about everything and stay busy.
Travis F W quoted The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord
"Although hedonic hotspots [in the brain] are both small and distributed, they also function together as a pleasure network. […] These hedonic hotspots are your brain's map of pleasure, and their biology gives us a route into understanding the role of pleasure in mental health."
— The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord (12%)
This is interesting to me because of the drug-induced anhedonia I experienced as a side effect of the ritalin I was forced to take for five years in my childhood. My experience of pleasure of all kinds never recovered to healthy levels, as is easy to rediscover at any time by comparing my experience with anyone who claims to enjoy anything that I also try to enjoy. (It is often difficult to describe not feeling pleasure because people are looking for an objective reason in the world, but it is easy to see that I don't reach the level of pleasure others express, even if I am finding some level of pleasure.)
Now I know the injury is not specific to a brain region.
Travis F W commented on Together by Vivek H. Murthy
Content warning Judgment of insightfulness
In this section on male and female culture I really feel like the Surgeon General is two decades behind. Maybe he is watering it down to be broadly accessible? Or maybe he doesn't know as many psychologists as I do? But he really missed how feminist culture is bringing loneliness to the previously socially adept sex by adopting masculine individualistic values, and he really missed the huge trove of insight into the psychology of relationships that can be gleaned from queer, lgbt, ace and aro communities, and he only scratched the surface of intergenerational social trauma in men, and the possibilities for healing that young boys have access to now that their fathers and grandfathers should be paying attention to. I hope I am speaking too soon.
Travis F W started reading Together by Vivek H. Murthy
Travis F W started reading The Balanced Brain by Camilla Nord
Travis F W started reading How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
Travis F W commented on The abundant community by John McKnight (BK currents book)
As an anarchist systems thinker I have to say I don't appreciate how they clearly and emphatically imply that social systems are necessarily hierarchical. They draw a false dichotomy between community and systems. Systems are not diametrically opposed to communities. Systems are just repeating and interrelated behavior patterns plus the other resources that support those behavior patterns. Communities have systems, sometimes named, sometimes unrealized, sometimes designed, sometimes appreciated, and sometimes dysfunctional. Systems are a way to match complicated dynamics with declarative semantics so it can be acknowledged and manipulated, instantiated, moderated, or ended. Hierarchical organizations are just one type of a huge range of human systems.