User Profile

Travis F W

travisfw@sfba.club

Joined 1 year, 3 months ago

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

Currently Reading (View all 12)

Deb Chachra: How Infrastructure Works (2023, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …

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.

Camilla Nord: The Balanced Brain (Paperback, 2024, Princeton University Press) No rating

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers …

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…

Ross Gay: The Book of (More) Delights: Essays (2023, Algonquin Books) 5 stars

The New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy is …

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.

Camilla Nord: The Balanced Brain (Paperback, 2024, Princeton University Press) No rating

There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers …

"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  (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.

Vivek H. Murthy: Together (2023, HarperCollins Publishers, Harper Wave) 4 stars

Content warning Judgment of insightfulness

commented on The abundant community by John McKnight (BK currents book)

John McKnight: The abundant community (2012) No rating

There is a growing movement of people with a different vision for their local communities. …

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.