I have been working from home full time for around five years. This is not my first remote-work job; I have pretty much always done this in some form or another, even when I was supposed to go to the office.

Going to an office gives your brain a strong context-switch. When you go to the office, you have: home -> commute -> office -> commute -> home. Now you don’t have travel modes, which are natural context switchers. You’ll have to adapt. It’s easy, but requires discipline.

The first and most important things are routine and distance.

Routine

You need to create a routine. This routine will include what you should call your “working hours”. Your working hours do not need to be consecutive. Spread them out in chunks if you like or do them all at once – it’s up to you. However, I’m going to tell you that you will have problems getting a straight eight hours in, and in fact will advise you not to try.

You will develop a routine. You used to have one, but it involved commuting for an hour and then sitting in an office and then commuting for another hour. Now you have those two hours back! Fill them.

My daily routine goes: Wake, Run, Shower, Coffee, Email. That brings me to about 9 am. Then: Grocery store across the street (food for the day). At eleven I take the pup out to pee. After that I begin my first “work block”.

Work blocks are usually 2 to 4 hours – enough time to handle a set of tasks. This is how you should think about working: not as “time spent on the clock” but “tasks accomplished”. You’ll have several work blocks throughout the day. Schedule them when you feel right.

Think of your day as “slots”. Sometimes slots get filled, sometimes they don’t. I have a slot for “errands that require me to get in a car”, and it goes between “running” and “groceries”.

Don’t feel bad if you work really late! You may find yourself doing work at two a.m. because why not? An important thing is that you must give yourself permission to break the norms because the norms are broken already (more on this in a bit).

Distance

The second thing that you need to create is distance – psychologically – between your “work life” and your “home life.” This is most easily accomplished by creating a “working space” – a place you go to do your work that isn’t part of the “daily routine” of your household.

Maybe you work from the guest room. Maybe on the porch. Maybe you set up your nest at the end of your dining room table. Where ever this place is it must allow you to create a “transistion”.

I used to work on my building’s roof where I could smoke cigars all day. Now I use our guest room.

Never work from your bed or your bedroom. Consider that to be a sacrosanct line and crossing it is always moving to “home life”.

Some people like going to cafes. I find that they are hit-or-miss, with lots of distractions. You do you, but in the age of COVID-19, I’d avoid them.

Take phone calls outside if you can. That helps create distance as well.

Productivity Anxiety

You may get really anxious because you don’t think you’re being productive. Ignore that shit; it’s a lie. Productivity really can’t be measured that way.

You’ll spend hours doing nothing because you’re stuck and you’ll feel shitty about it. You’ll get unstuck eventually, but until then it’s anxiety-town. This is a terrible place to be.

Here’s how to fix it: Go play a game for an hour or take a walk or vacuum the floors or cook a meal or take a yoga class.

Is this fucking off? No. No, it is not.

You have days in the office where you don’t get fuck-all done, too – only you had to pay the Commute Troll its toll.

The difference between getting nothing done at the office and getting nothing done at home is that you can fake what you think of as “productivity” in the office. You can always look busy if there are other people around.

Here’s the thing: that’s not being productive. It’s all a bias illusion. You are no more or less productive or stuck at work or at home; it’s just at home you can only compare your apparent lack of progress to yourself.

Freedom comes from realizing that this is an illusion and knowing that your brain does not stop working. It is always solving problems, always working to unstick you. It will let you know when it’s solved your problem. Trust it.

Don’t spend your “stuck” time feeling anxious. Use that time to do something useful or fun. Use it for yourself! Just do not feel guilty about it.

Procrastination

You may find that you end up taking on more and more chores around the house. Fight this impulse. It’s procrastination.

If a thing needs doing (the dishes are dirty), do it (wash them). But don’t do extra stuff (sharpen the knives). Does your bookshelf really need organizing right now? Probably not; lower the priority of that task.

Self Care

Now that you’ve got all this time you’ll find that you start filling it. It is super easy to fill up all your time with work and chores. A really important thing that you need to do is carve out an hour of time every day for yourself and only yourself.

I’m talking about “set your phone on do not disturb for an hour and do a thing.” I will play a game or run around the lake, maybe. Do the thing for yourself and only for yourself. Schedule this time if you have to.

Get dressed every day. Take a shower at least every other day. You will likely have video conference meetings, sometimes randomly, and you need to be ready for those.

Go outside at least once a day – if only to get the mail or see another human being.

Make your bed every day. Making your bed creates a psychological marker: Now is the time that the day starts. It’s time to get busy.

Buy a french press. Make your own coffee.

Substance Use

Regarding substance use: I have no advice for you. You’re at home. You know how you work best. Get the job done.

Maybe you drink a beer or two when you code. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done. Maybe you eat some marijuana gummies. Maybe you don’t. Get the job done.

I used to smoke cigars on the roof in the sun. Now I don’t.

However that works out is between you, your employers, and the Great Programmers Of Our Simulation.

Communication

You’ll find that you change the way you want to communicate with your co-workers. This is going to be different for everyone, but my experience is that people tend to avoid spammy communication systems while working from home (e.g., you’ll learn to hate Slack).

On-demand communication (things that ping you a lot) are easy to get lost in when you work in an office because it feeds into that whole “looking busy” part. How useful is the constant pinging really? Shut it off. Shut off your email and chat programs. Only open them once an hour, at best.

You will quickly learn which meetings could have been merely an email.

Good luck!

Let’s talk about how I did this, why I wanted to, and what happened.

The first thing I did was unfollow hella dudes. Mostly these were men who I don’t remember following and never posted, or people who I was following merely out of politeness’ sake, or because they were “industry luminaries” and had a reputation for being smart (which was rarely the case, I found).

The next thing I did was go through my follow list and find women whose opinions I respected or I thought were funny. Then I looked at the women that they retweeted and followed them without worrying too deeply about what they would post (or not). I figured that I could always unfollow later if their posts were distasteful or annoying or useless.

(Spoiler: I have unfollowed exactly zero of these women.)

My goal was to reach a ratio of 60/30/10 of Women/Dudes/Brands in my feed. I don’t mean this ratio applied to my “follow list”, which is a useless method, but instead to apply to the “posts I was seeing”.

(I managed to hit this ratio, but it’s actually more like 60/30/5/5 Women/Dudes/Brands/Dogs.)

Why did I want to do this? It’s based on a thing I tell all my students: Listen to music you don’t like or know.

Are you a metal head? Give Taylor Swift a spin. Listen to R&B? Try some Johnny Cash. Love country? Try some Godspeed you! Black Emperor!. Get out of your comfort zone. Hear tones you’re not used to. Listen to someone else’s story.

If you stay in one place mentally you will lay down roots. This will make you inflexible and slow. You will have fewer tools. So always seek out things you don’t know anything about and do what you can to experience them.

A lot of my life’s biggest changes have started from small changes like that. I am a big believer in will-to-power. About 30 years ago, I was a dumb teenager and depressed about something stupid, and I remember saying, “I want to change stuff but I don’t know how.” My friend Mike said, “Dude, just change your brand of cigarettes. Switch from Marlboro to Winston for a while. If you don’t like it, switch back.” I did this, and it worked: the small alteration in my routine had a larger butterfly effect.

(Man, can you believe I used to smoke cigarettes? What a world.)

When faced with a daunting task, small accomplishments lend vigor to your motivation and encourage you to do even more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a step, that sort of thing.

Want to expand your mind? Start with something manageable. Listen to music you aren’t familiar with. Change the layout of the furniture in your apartment. Change your brand of shampoo. Something. Make a change.

Making small changes makes leveraging larger changes easier.

I wanted to change my perspective. It was inadequate. I needed to see different points of view. I made a change.

So what happened?

First, I feel smarter. I know more today than I did a year ago.

I feel that I am better informed generally, but specifically about my industry and hobbies and their politics. A large part of this has to do with the way that men and women share knowledge.

Dude programmers and designers (including myself – I am not an innocent) share knowledge like this: “Check out this thing I wrote about $TOPIC.” Women programmers and designers share knowledge like this: “I learned a bunch of stuff about $TOPIC and I think you may find this useful.”

There’s an implication in this: Men are seeking recognition; women are seeking knowledge transfer (sadly, this this is often worded in a way that seeks permission to enact knowledge transfer). It’s a fascinating distinction.

Further: dudes, as a whole, do NOT hold nuanced opinions. I count myself in this group. I am very much a “this is the line” type of person, very black-and-white, especially when it comes to issues of justice. When you hear nothing but black-and-white opinions, your opinions tend to be black-and-white. That’s sub-optimal.

I dropped some really awful dude journalists (<cough>Glenn Greenwald</cough>) and for each one of them I followed two female journalists. I tried to skew towards more conservative journalists when possible to counteract my natural bias. I feel that this gives me a more informed, smarter opinion about politics. It definitely keeps me thinking.

Second, I’m happier. Oh man, I’m so much happier these days. A huge part of that is that Female Twitter (ugh, I hate these terms) is generally more supportive.

Let me rephrase. Not “generally more supportive”; I mean “absolutely more supportive”.

The small encouragements I get make me feel good. Even seeing someone give encouragement to someone else makes me feel good. This causes me to want to encourage others to feel good as well. It’s a virtuous cycle; the same cycle I banked heavily on when I designed the “thanks” system for Wikipedia.

A real-life side-effect that this has had in my life is that I respond to people’s posts on Facebook and Twitter with way more likes/favorites/smiles/prides/whatevers. I didn’t use to do that; now I do. I like spreading encouragement.

Another way that I am smarter is due to less raw anger in my feed. There’s less entitlement. Less shouting. There’s not always less “outrage”; there’s still plenty of that. But the outrage is tempered. More thoughtful.

Third, I think I’m funnier. Dudes, lemme tellya, women are funnier than we are. They just are.

The funny women I follow challenge my own comedy. They make me work harder for my laughs and, interestingly, they make me want to improve the calibre of my audience. It’s great.

Fourth, I’m calmer. I feel much more in control of my emotions and my responses to them.

Part of this has again to do with having less I AM STRAIGHT MAIL TESTOSTRNE GAH in my ear all day. Part of this is because women tend to talk with a more emotional language, which helps me to identify my own emotions. Being able to identify your emotions helps you get control over them.

The biggest part, though, is the presence of more nuanced opinions. Hardline outrage feeds itself, getting louder with each cycle. That’s unnerving and it fills the mind with itself. While I am a Creature of Rage, constantly being filled with Rage is a less useful tool than one would think. Rage requires a single-mindedness that is defeated by nuance.

Fifth, I have more empathy. I understand more people better.

There’s another benefit of following people who are different from you. Say you find an account run by a woman of color. About half of what she posts is interesting or related to your industry but the other half is personal shit, stuff you won’t care about, make-up and hair tips? Follow her anyway and you’ll level up your Empathy score.

You’ll pick up a lot of ambient awareness about different parts of our culture. You will learn some glory and some heartbreak from this ambient awareness. For example, I will never, ever have the problems with my hair that black women do. I just won’t. Learning about relaxer and the costs involved in hair weaves seems like something trivial – until you understand it, and then you see it as anything but trivial. Knowing these types of things makes you smarter because you see more of the game board.

I don’t think I could have done this on Facebook, by the way. Twitter allows you to be a passive observer; Facebook invites interaction. Interaction is good! I love interaction. But on Facebook, the echo chambers are too loud. I cannot easily engage in conversation with my conservative friends on either my wall or theirs. This is because there are always the Asshole Donnies. You know the ones I’m talking about, too: they exist only to inject a special brand of stifling idiocy into conversations by calling folk “cuck” or “fascist”. The ones you want to shout “shut the fuck up” at.

So here’s my lesson to you, my young apprentice: Follow more women.

I need to open this entry with a trigger warning. It isn’t possible to talk about defending against harassment without being exposed to it.

That said, here we go.

I strongly believe that I have a duty to try to prevent harm from coming to those who choose to use the things I design. This means that I need to think about the bad parts of the system, which often isn’t very pleasant.

I want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian and the horrible things that have been happening to her over the past years but first I feel like I need to establish some street credentials.

Back in the year 2011, several employees of the Wikimedia Foundation were put up on the site’s yearly fundraising banners. I was one of these people. I was a very successful banner candidate. I’ve written about this experience before but I wasn’t very expansive about the darker side.

Whenever my banner went up for a test run, I could literally feel the internet turn its attention to me like the fucking Eye of Sauron. Hundreds of tweets, LinkedIn views, Facebook posts. Pow, pow, pow. Lots of it was fun and exciting. Some of it was . . . not.

It’s a bit of a bummer to be told by random strangers that you look like a pedophile. Almost especially when they don’t know anything about you.

Back to Anita.

I don’t want to write about Gamergate or the state of the art of misogyny on the internet but I need to provide some context.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist game critic. She produces a series of educational videos about how sexism pervades the game industry. She does not, in any way, call for censorship or banning of topics or anything like that. She really only says, “just be aware of what’s happening here and maybe try to do better.”

For these statements, she has been continually bombarded with harassment through every possible means available to trolls on the internet.

In early 2015, she posted a blog entry detailing a single week’s worth of harassment. Scrolling through it is an inexhaustible stream of sewage and hatred. Some of it is ironically self-aware.

Let’s scroll through a miniscule amount of Anita’s harassment.

I dare you to click over and scroll through the full list. See if you can get through Monday.

Anita gets thousands of times more hatred than I ever did. I almost buckled under the weight of the sewage directed at me. I can’t imagine how strong she must be to keep going.

I’ve not been very scientific in my investigations but it appears that only about half of these accounts have been suspended or blocked. Not that such action matters much: these shit-goblins simply create a new anonymous account and let the good times roll again.

This is the face of evil. Beelzebub with the thousand eyes and mouths.

It’s a true failure on Twitter’s part. One they have acknowledged in public but (at the time of this writing) have done nothing to address.

When you design a product without understanding how it will be used for evil, you are designing poorly.

On Trolls

Let’s take a moment to understand the basic mindset of internet trolls. There are, as near as I can tell, three primary motivations that any one troll will have at a time.

Understanding these things will help you defend your users against them.

To Defeat the System

These trolls want to break the system just to break it. To do it for the lulz or the thrill of doing it. The desire to defeat systems (hacking or cracking them) is a deep part of hacker psyche. They aren’t necessarily motivated by evil but they often will open the door for others who are.

These people will find holes in your systems. They do it just to find them. But once they’ve found them, they nearly always share these holes with others.

To Subvert the System

Trolls who subvert a system intend to use it against the spirit of the system. This is often for laughs but sometimes it has very, very dark results.

In 2008, Christopher Poole was elected as the most influential person of 2008 by Time Magazine, beating out Barack Obama, because users of 4chan figured out how to game the voting software. This year’s Hugo Awards have been hijacked because someone figured out how to bend the rules to their favor. No big deal, right? No one is getting hurt, right?

Some horrible people use Secret to disseminate revenge and child porn. Secret’s not a great way to do bulk distribution of child porn, though. Embedding zip archives of this stuff into svg files and uploading them to a site like Flickr or the Wikimedia Commons may be, however. Maybe as large attachments in un-sent emails on any one of a thousand free-to-use web mailers.

To Weaponize the System

This is when your system or design is being used against you or another person in a hostile, damaging manner. This nearly always happens because of “Not Thinking It Through”.

This may not always happen directly in your product, mind. Data leakage may lead to someone being doxxed on another site, which may then lead to a swatting. Or worse.

Consider the proud young parent posting photos of their child at play to Facebook with open privacy settings. Are there things in that photo where a predator could identify the location?

Mitigation Strategies

How can you prevent your product or design or system from being abused? How can you deal with it?

Well, there’s no silver bullet on this. There are a series of strategies you can employ, though. Many will not apply. You will probably need to use multiple ones, each at differing degrees of strength or opacity.

Some of these strategies suck, but I’ll include them for completeness’ sake.

Ignore Everything

Just do jack and shit about it.

This is the worst strategy. You can do it – and some companies appear to remain successful while doing so. This is the way that car companies handle recalls: only deal when there’s sufficient blood on the pavement to affect the bottom line.

I personally find this to be odious and unethical.

Shut it Down

Just prevent anyone from doing it at all. This typically means shutting down your application entirely. It’s often a last-resort solution.

PostSecret had a short-lived application that allowed users to post their own photos and captions. It was pulled when people starting posting porn and gore because there were no features to limit this and there was insufficient moderation to work at scale.

This is not a good mitigation strategy because everyone loses.

Troll Personas

This is a strategy for understanding your weakness. Many design teams create personas for the users they want to service. The customers they want to have. Good personas are often an excellent tool for helping to understand the business needs of your product or market. These personas are almost universally nice, however, and always assume good faith on the part of the persona.

I say to you thus: you must always make at least one “troll” persona. You must learn to think like your enemy. Think about their motivations and how they will subvert your product to aid them.

Limit Feature Strength

This is reducing or intentionally crippling your product in order to protect your users.

Years ago I worked on a site that was intended as a social and games site for children. They wanted to have a chat system. Obviously, we wanted to make sure that foul language wasn’t a part of it.

It would be easy to write a series of regular expressions so that the chat catches and censors Carlin’s magic seven and all variations. It’s not so easy to catch “Hello, little girl, what time do you get out of school?” or “I am going to put you in a wood chipper.”

This is why Nintendo’s chat systems only allow you to pick from canned statements.

Banning Wrongdoers

Very simple. Have a very strong code-of-conduct and brook exactly zero violations. You must be merciless. You must not allow for rules-lawyering. Identify bad-actors and get rid of them.

Wikipedia has some editors who are simply horrible, toxic individuals. The way they conduct themselves and talk to new users drives new users away forever. They are allowed to remain because there is always some bullshit reason why the latest round of bad behavior is “okay”.

This is the type of behavior that creates gender gaps.

Educate Users

You can educate users as to the bad things that could potentially happen and things to prevent risk.

The biggest problem here is that no one wants to read a bunch of snooze-fest documentation. I didn’t join Facebook to have to take a class about it. Sometimes you can put up interstitial dialogs (like an end-user license agreement) but are you ever really sure that the user understands this?

Does the proud parent really understand that the photo of their daughter’s recital they just uploaded is geo-tagged? Did they think about the fact that they took it at the school? Do they really understand what “Friends of friends can see this” means?

Deny Anonymity

Simply prevent people from posting or using the service completely anonymously. Allowing pseudonymity is fine and even great (and recommended). Just make sure that there is a way to tie any activity back to a specific user.

Purely anonymous culture is fairly toxic so you don’t want that anywhere near you. There’s a reason moot stepped down from running 4chan. But you don’t want to force “real names”, either, because that will probably open you up to other scenarios (like dead-naming transexual people).

Access Control Systems

Give users controls over who can contact them and how. This nearly always requires both white and black lists to work along side a default setting.

Livejournal does this very well: my private posts are only readable by those I’ve set as “friends”, and I can even write elaborate rules about posting only to groups, or to specific people.

Facebook has this kind of fine control, too, but it falls apart very quickly. There are too many options and degrees of visibility and the lack of any serious group support makes managing access difficulty.

It should be terribly easy to add someone to a block list. Press-and-hold on a tweet and I can block it in one tap. Blocking someone on Secret, however, requires me to first read the offending secret (which usually contains a photo of gore or revenge porn), report it, and then I can block the user.

Shadow Reputation Systems

This is a great method but it requires a lot of research and technology. You’ll need to instrument everything in your product and identify several patterns of behavior used by your bad actors.

When your system sees someone engaging in these behaviors, you silently and secretly drop them off into the bucket. This is called shadow-banning or hell-banning.

For example, say your product is one that allows your users to rent out extra rooms in their apartments for short-term stays. If a new user joins your site and then their first several actions are to browse exclusively female profiles, you might be able to determine that they really aren’t there for the rooms but instead to creep on women. The system could then silently prevent messages they sent from arriving at their targets and they themselves may never appear in searches.

In order for shadow-bans to work, you cannot allow anonymous access to your site. You must sit behind a log-in wall. The reason is that if the banned user can see that their comments are not being seen, that they are invisible, they will know that they’ve been shadow-banned.

Ask Questions

When all is said and done, when you’ve set your ideas to paper, you have to sit down and ask yourself a very specific question:

How could this feature be exploited to harm someone?

Now, replace the word “could” with the word “will.”

How will this feature be exploited to harm someone?

You have to ask that question. You have to be unflinching about the answers, too.

Because if you don’t, someone else will.

I have only one memory of my grandfather. He died when I was very young, from a heart attack, and is interred in a military graveyard inside the borders of the great state of Minnesota.

During World War II, Howard Nyquist served in the Third Army during a campaign in Austria. By all measures and weights, he was a brave man.

Listen: my grandfather, Howard, was entrusted to run communications lines between his unit and another unit, across a battlefield. This he did; it was an act of heroism worthy of a Silver Star.

Let us be very clear as to what “running communications lines” meant.

When two units were separated on a battlefield, if a series of copper wires could be connected between the two, voice communication could exist. No power was needed, of course: military phones at that time were powered by the vibration of a speaker’s voice alone. So only the wire needed to be passed.

This meant that some people – two soldiers, nearly always – would grab a spool of copper wire and run with it across the battlefield towards the distant unit.

Until they were killed.

At this point, two more soldiers were sent to run out, grab the spool, and continue the death march. Until they, too, were broken with bullets. At which time another pair would be sent.

And so forth.

Howard made it across.

In my life there have been men who I trusted who have called me “courageous” and yet I do not believe that I can stand in my grandfather’s shadow.

These things – these elements of war, the brutal truths of it – they are not spoken of. Did Howard kill men? Probably. Did he talk of this, boast of it?

No. He did not.

My only solid memory of Howard was when I was four years old. My mother, brother, and I had gone north to pay a visit to the family. Howard had suffered a heart attack in previous months; he was unwell.

I played at cowboys and indians. I had a small, toy “cowboy” gun, made of tin, with plastic handgrips and a faux-leather holster. I’d burnt the caps the instant they were loaded, but that meant nothing: I could still lay out imaginary Indian Braves.

Howard, my grandfather, his voice, rumbling: “Hello, little cowboy. Come with me a moment. I want to teach you something,” and he ushered me into his study.

Howard was a gun collector. Us children, my cousins and I – we were never allowed into the Study: that room was for the Guns and for the Model Airplanes. He collected antiques. For many years after his death, his friends would hold memorial powder shoots in his honor.

(When he died, I inherited a couple of his unbuilt model kits. Today, I regret my pathetic fumblings at their assembly.)

I had never been let into the Study. It smelled of wood and smoke and varnish. Old things, things to be respected. Its walls were decorated with rifles and the plastic ghosts of Japanese Zero planes.

“I see you have a cowboy gun,” he said. “Do you know how to twirl it?”

“No,” I said. Dim references of what had to be John Wayne and Gary Cooper filled my head.

“Well. I’ll show you.”

Howard produced a gun from somewhere. Today, my mind recognizes it as a Walker Colt. It was a dark, ominous thing, dirty and yet clean at the same time.

His deft hand twirled it around and around. Backwards, now forwards, like a coin dancing over a juggler’s knuckles. Fast, so very, very, fast.

“Now you.”

And I couldn’t.

After my initial failures, he helped me to hold my little tin gun, showed my how to spin it around my finger. How to use the weight of the barrel to force the grip to spin, and vice versa. He showed me how to draw and twirl. How to twirl and holster.

“Son, listen to me,” he said. “This, this twirling? This is theatricality.

“It is not a gun. Guns are violence, and violence should never done for enjoyment.”

He cracked open the chamber of his Walker Colt, checking it to make sure it was empty. Satisfied, he closed it with a flick of his wrist, and spun the weapon so that the handle was facing me.

“Go on,” he said. “Take it.”

I fumbled a moment, holstering my Roy Rogers “weapon,” and then grasped the Colt. The handle was too big for one of my four-year-old hands so I grabbed it with two. When he let go of the barrel, its weight bore me down: a thunk sound as it immediately hit the carpet.

The gun weighed near as much as I did. I could barely hold the handle up.

“Go on,” he said. “Twirl it.”

It was a weight greater than any I’d ever known. I struggled for a bit, simply trying to lift the damned thing before I gave up, saying, “I can’t. It’s too heavy.”

“Good,” he said. “Violence should always be too heavy to carry.

“You remember that.”

Several weeks ago, I found myself in a (non-emergency) situation where having a broader set of medical supplies would have been useful. A switch clicked in my brain about this and I asked myself:

“Self, what would you do if, say, you were waiting for the train and someone stepped to close to it and got hit?”

And the answer, sadly, was “watch them bleed out and die.” I did’t like that answer.

So I started building a portable medical kit.

I am not an emergency medical technician nor do I pretend to be. Applying a tourniquet to the stump of someone’s train-amputated arm is pretty much the epitome of an extreme scenario here but who knows? I wasn’t a Boy Scout but I kind of dig the motto: “Be prepared.”

In addition to bandages (which I increased the stock of), I added several symptom-addressing medications (like theraflu packets, pepto-bismol tablets, benadryl, etc). I got some ace bandages. Flashlight. Multitool. Disposable gloves. 100 feet of wound paracord that JD made for me.

Did you know that Superglue is great for closing deep cuts? It’s like instant stitching.

I’m not finished building the kit. I need some haemostatic powder, for instance, and some scissors and tweezers, and a strip of rubber. But it’s a start.

My medical kit (mostly) fits into a small pouch that weighs about a pound (the flashlight, multitool, and paracord bring the entire thing to about three pounds).

I want to start out by saying that violence over free speech – even the threat of violence – is something I find deplorable at all levels. If one is enlightened, one should seek diplomacy as a solution first and violence last.

Let me further say that “Freedom of Speech” is probably my favorite right granted to me by the founding fathers. If I could Facebook “like” it, I would.

However, having freedom of speech does not grant one freedom of responsibility for those words, nor freedom to be a douchebag. Citizenship in America is hard fucking work and it requires patience, tact, and a willingness to forgive.

“Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” is not an attempt to “win the rights to draw Mohammed”, nor is it “standing up to the radical Muslim right.” It’s a bandwagon event where a bunch of people try to piss all over the beliefs of a large percentage of the world’s population.

It is against Muslim belief to create an image of Mohammed. Those who ascribe to that religion believe there is power there. By drawing Mohammed, what you are saying “I disrespect your beliefs, what they stand for, and by extension, I disrespect you and everything you stand for.”

Congratulations. You’ve just declared yourself as a douchebag without empathy.

To every Muslim. Everywhere.

There will be a small fringe group who may threaten (or even perform) violent acts over this. That’s horrible. But, you know: it’s unlikely that you, safe in your internet anonymity in the basement, will encounter this (bully for you, Mr. Man!). However, the large majority of people you offend will be just that: offended. And now you’ve lost any shred of respect they may have had for you, and done a damned good job of sinking diplomatic relations with them.

Why would they want to talk to you? You’ve just spit on something they care about.

See, you’re not fighting the radical fringe. You’re starting a war with the center. Why would you do that?

Everyone has something in their lives that they consider “sacred”. For some people, this is their religious beliefs. For others, patriotism. Family. Gender or sexual identity. Hell, I’ve seen people get into fistfights over their choice of computer operating systems.

Consider the American Flag. Say I wanted to set one on fire – for no reason other than to provoke a reaction.

I could go to downtown San Francisco and do this and have a fairly tame reaction. There would probably be many people who cheered and an equal number of people booing. There would probably quickly be a police presence, and I’d likely get cited for disturbing the peace if things got ugly.

Now, think about doing that in the great state of Mississippi.

It would be a different experience. Few (if any) individuals would applaud my actions and I could expect a classic beatdown that I would remember for decades.

What would happen if burned a gay pride flag in the middle of the Castro?

Them’s fightin’ words.

As my friend Chip points out, participating in “Draw Mohammed Day” puts you in the same crowd as the students trying to start shit on Cinco de Mayo. You’re just stirring the pot to stir the pot; nothing of value is going to be gained.

This is why I’ve never been a fan of Piss Christ.

So, okay. Maybe you don’t have any religious beliefs, and you could give a fuck about patriotism or whatever. What would you do if I wiped my ass with, oh, the first crayon drawing your child brings home from nursery school? Decided to melt down your wedding ring?

For no reason except to piss you off.

Ultimately, we’re talking about vandalizing someone else’s beliefs.

Lance: Still got your Malibu?
Vincent: Aw, man. You know what some fucker did the other day?
Lance: What?
Vincent: Fucking keyed it.
Lance: Oh, man, that’s fucked up.
Vincent: Tell me about it. I had it in storage for three years, it was out for five days and some dickless piece of shit fucked with it.
Lance: They should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
Vincent: Boy, I wish I could’ve caught him doing it. I’d have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It’d been worth him doing it just so I could’ve caught him doing it.

In the United States of America, there exists a large group of people who believe in the Rapture. For those of you who never went to Sunday School, the Rapture (sometimes called the “Second Coming”) is the equivalent of the Christian apocalypse:

The baby^H^H^H^Hadult^H^H^H^H^Hundead (?) Jesus will come down from Heaven, say hi to everyone, and then take only the worthy and good back up into the clouds with him. This has the effect of leaving all the sinners on Earth, presumably to spend the rest of their lives lamenting the fact that all the killjoys disappeared.

(I’m going to point out that I have “Second Comings” fairly often as long as I’ve not had too much to drink. But I digress.)

So, okay. Let me just get this out of the way: According to these people, I am going to Hell. I mean, eventually. Not tomorrow. I’m definitely not getting past the Pearly Gates.

This means that once Undead Jesus calls the faithful home, I’ll be one of the Left Behind, which I think I’ll be okay with since it means that I finish out my days with rampant gambling, boozing, and sodomy.

But those poor people! The ones called home? They probably had a bunch of shit left undone. People they hadn’t judged. Abortion clinics they hadn’t bombed. Whatever.

So here’s the crux of my plan:

Rapture Wills.

If you plan on getting “taken up”, you probably want some shit done. I expect that the Rapture happens a lot like, oh, a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a Republican convention. There’s going to be lots of sound and fury followed by nothing. So it’s like dying only there are probably fewer hookers killed in the process.

Which means you need a will. “In the event of my Rapture, I want someone to tell Cindy that I think she is a skeevy whore and is going to hell.” Or “Please provide for my pet dog” or even “Please provide for my retarded brother Billo.”

I figure I can charge a one-time fee of a hundred bucks for this. It’s like Jesus insurance.

And you know that there are people willing to pay this.

So, the question I am left with is this: is it ethical for me to bilk money out of these people?

Let’s be clear: these are people who believe that I am going to hell. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t give me money in the first place. They already don’t respect me, and I sure as fuck don’t respect their loopy asses.

And, honestly, if such an event did happen, I probably would go about honoring the wills. Because I’m That Guy.

Thoughts?

(Also, I own the domain “rapture-wills.com”)

(I’m the best there is at what I do and what I do is pretty stupid.)

I have a big joke that I have been using for several months. That I am a “Militant Apollo Fundamentalist” – that I worship the sun god. There’s a reason for this. I figure worshiping the sun – Apollo – is the most productive I can be with my deity worshiping time. Because, unlike other deities, Apollo actually grants shit to you, every day, without thanks:

1) Light
2) Warmth
3) Vitamin D
4) Photosynthesis in plants, which means “food”
3) Sun Tans

That’s a lot to be given for free!

Aside from Apollo, you might as well worship Danny DeVito. Because he’s the one most likely to hear and answer your prayers.

This makes me sound like an atheist with a bunch of jokes to play.

However, if the truth be told, I best fall into the category of “deist“. I believe, through logic, that there is a thing that we might call “god”.

How is that, you ask? Mostly, it’s Occam’s Razor. The most simple explanation is likely the most correct one. I can hear several of my skeptic friends right now screaming, “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!”

But it does work that way.

So, yeah. We have this Big Bang thing. Given that, everything falls utterly into what we call “science”. However, I have to ask the question: what caused the Big Bang? Well, okay. Many things, maybe? A previous universe collapsing on itself. Or something like that. Who knows?

But what caused that? And what caused the thing that caused that? And so forth, until we have turtles all the way down.

Eventually, we hit the idea of “First Cause”. Something existed first. And that’s a really fucked up concept. Something existed before time began. Think about it for a second. See if you can wrap your brain around that.

I’ll wait.

This is where we start using the word eternal. That word – “eternal” – has been thinned out by our culture. We use it a lot, to be sure. Mostly in Christian creeds, mind you, but even there it has lost its meaning. The word means something VERY specific:

“Something that has always existed, and will always exist, and, through that, becomes its own reason for existing”

Eternal things were not created. There was nothing to create them. They are their own first cause.

That we exist is a given (well, that I exist; I’m not so sure about you fuckers still). Once we have that, it’s an (admittedly complex) series of logic steps to find that there must be something that is eternal. And that thing, whatever it is, is the First Cause.

So. To my mind, the simplest explanation as to why the universe exists is that there is something that is Eternal. Occam’s Razor.

For lack of a better term, we can call this thing “god.”

Now, I am not certain that this “god” cares about us in ANY way, or is even aware that we exist any more than I am aware that there are bacterium swimming in the sweat my skin secretes. We are citizens of 1 planet among 8 (9!) in 1 solar system among, oh, 200 billion, in 1 galaxy among, oh, 10 trillion (easy). Those are some big numbers.

We’re pretty much alone, I think.

Further, this “god” is bereft of what we call “morality”. I don’t think it even cares what “good” or “evil” are. These concepts are things for mortal creatures. I think that ascribing morality to a deity is the height of arrogance. Ants may very well have an idea of what is right and wrong to them but I don’t give a fuck. I’ll still squash them.

So “god” doesn’t tell me what is fine and good or worthy of respect.

Without a deity to provide me with a map to what is right and wrong, I am left with my own, internal moral compass. That leaves me with a set of axioms to live by. They basically break down to a few simple rules, most of which are also driven by logic, and ultimately boil down to “greed is good.”

That sounds bad. But let’s be brutally honest with each other: you are the most important person that exists from your perspective. Oh, sure, you can try to deceive yourself into thinking “my partner or my children are more important than me” but that’s a deflection: the reason they are more important to you is because you place that value on them. You may be willing to die for them, but you do so because you put that value on them.

Everything we do – everything – is for ourselves. This isn’t a bad thing! Far from it. Selfishness is good! It’s good for everyone.

Why? Because you, me, all of us – we may be individuals, but we are still members of a society. You are a hive creature. You cannot escape being part of the hive: it is part of your very nature.

The stronger the hive, the stronger the individual members of the hive. So, the laws of selfishness dictate that it is to your advantage to make the hive stronger.

These axioms are dependent. If an axiom violates a higher number, you shouldn’t do it. Like the Laws of Robotics. Here are mine:

1) Don’t be a Dick. Jesus said this, only nicer: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Dude had some smarts until he got stabbed and left to die on a hunk of wood. You’re part of a hive. When the hive is stronger, you are stronger. If you’re a dick, you make the hive weaker. Thus, you become weaker. Don’t fuck over people. This is selfish, but good.

2) Take Care of your Peeps. You have a family. It may not be defined by blood. But you know who they are: the people you trust, the ones who will be there when the chips are down. You have to take care of these people as much as you can within your power. Because one day, they will take care of you. This is selfish, but good.

3) Pick a Brother Up. Your fellow hive members sometimes fall down. They may not be your family, but they are still part of the hive. Help them to become stronger, because as the hive grows, so do you. This is selfish, but good.

4) Scotch is Awesome. Fuck it. We’ve got very little time. As long as you’re not hurting someone (axioms 1, 2, and 3), you might as well indulge in pleasure, since that is what makes life worthwhile. It’s better to regret something you did do than to regret not doing something. Love who you love, love what you love. Everything drives to this, which is the ultimate degree of selfishness.

Effectively, as long as you follow 1, 2, and 3, you can engage in #4 as much as you want. 1-3 are the base. That’s Taking Care of Business.

I am not saying “this is what you should do.” I’m saying “this is what I do”. It may or may not work for your personal situations or beliefs.

Given that statement, it hasn’t failed me at this point.

Here is the Manifesto of the Antidouchebagitarian Party. I am still working on some of the language and finer points. Feel free to comment.

1) Don’t Be a Douchebag. This should be self-explanatory, but for the morons in the crowd we’ll spell it out: leave me the fuck alone. The government should only be involved in the lives of its citizens where specific issues affect the society and not the individual. In other words, unless you have a specific legal reason to be sticking your fucking schnoz into my diapers, get the fuck away.

1a) End Governmental Recognition of Marriage. The word “marriage” is not a secular term; it has deep religious connotations and the government isn’t in the business of managing people’s belief in a wizard in the sky (or lack thereof). The government should recognize “civil partnerships” and afford the rights of what we call “marriage” to those unions; those are legal partnerships. It shouldn’t care what those partnerships are for.

1b) Women Get to Choose to be Pregnant or Not. A crazy idea, I know, but we don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Terminating pregnancies is a very personal choice, and one that the government has no right talking about.

1c) Fuck Off With Criminalized Prostitution and Marijuana Use. The taxes we could get from the decriminalization of these two things alone would be gangbusters. Plus, we could regulate two industries which are high-crime (and, in the case of prostitution, possible health threats). This also reduces police and court work load.

2) Science Makes the World Better. Ever wonder why no one you know is crippled from polio? Science. Ever wonder why smallpox doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands every year? Science. Ever wonder why cancer isn’t a death sentence? Science. As a species, we have one biological advantage that allowed us to get out of the trees and stop eating a diet that consists only of bananas: our fuckin’ brains. Let’s use ’em.

2a) Fund Research. This isn’t just about medical research, but scientific research in general. Research brings in all sorts of happy stuff to our lives. We had no real practical reason to go to the moon but because of the research into that we got ball point pens and Tang. Practical science is secondary to research science; it’s a result, not a cause. Smart people understand that general research will always make a society stronger (which leads to bullet point 3).

3) Be Selfish and Greedy. Don’t take more of my money than you need. However, we are aware that when our whole society is stronger, we are stronger as individuals (since we are members of that society). So the laws of selfishness dictate that we want to enable the bulk of society to be productive, educatated, and protected. This may mean taking a lot of my money, but I also recognize I’ll get the value back in other ways.

3a) Universal Health Care is a Must Have. Why? Because if everyone has even basic wellness check-ups, we will reduce our vulnerability, as a society, to interesting things like, oh, epidemics and bacteriological terrorism. Why is this greedy and selfish? Because if you don’t get sick, you can’t infect me with your cooties, dumbass.

3b) Education Spending Should Be Paramount. Why? Because if the populace is smarter, we do smarter things as a group. That means not passing dumbass laws based on the ten commandments, for example, which makes life better for everyone. It’s selfish because a smarter populace ensures my job stability – which, in turn, ensures yours.

3c) Municipal Organization Spending Should Also Be High on the List. I’m talking cops and firemen and paramedics. We need to spend more money on the police force. I don’t mean throwing more cops at crime; I mean throwing more money to make better cops (also maybe more cops). A handful of smarter police and fire departments with modern equipment will go further than a mass of poorly trained thugs.

3d) Infrastructure Spending Should Also Be High on the List. Sitting in traffic sucks. It makes my life less fun. Let’s make my life more fun. This may require spending money. Bridges, roads, tunnels, trains, planes. Transportation is very important, but so also are things like clean water and power.

4) Lead Through Example and Not Fear. We should want to be our leaders, not fear them or the boogymen they purport to protect us from. This sort of ties into bullet point 1. Actually, it really ties into bullet point one. But I leave it as its own point because we shouldn’t be doing shit like torturing people or starting wars over oil.

4a) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. If some group in the Congo decides to start butchering another group in the Congo, and we can stop it, we should. Because we can do it, even if others can’t. We have a moral imperative to not let people get raped and butchered. This speaks to a global society. I’d like to say we should be isolationist but I can’t: we are a global power.

4b) All For One and One For All. Civitas Romanae. This sounds stupid to say under point 4, but here goes: Fucking with one of us is fucking with all of us. This should be our foreign policy. I’m not talking about legal mumbo jumbo; I’m saying that if some stupid crew of fundies in the world decides to declare war on a citizen of our fair society, that we should step up to the plate and lay down the hammer.

4c) Don’t be Obstructionist. We are for the people. The people may not often want what we think is best for them (something we can theoretically cure with better education). Be loud, be aggressive, be inflammatory, but ultimately bend to the will of society.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the phenomenon of inadvertent assholes/i>. That is, the inability for many people I know (mostly nerds and geeks) to observe basic manners and, well, interact well with others. This is a long post, and I write it with self-awareness of my own shortcomings (historical and otherwise).