You are always going to get negative feedback. As you get more and more positive feedback, you get more and more negative feedback.

For example: this month I reduced my freelance photography rate from $50 per event to $20 per hour, with a minimum of $20 plus a $10 travel fee. Editing and a CD are free, but I provide no prints. I’ve done almost no freelance photography and I don’t even care about it, but I offer it because people ask about it all the time. The people who say I’m too expensive are actually MORE vocal now. Out of the ten who have asked this month, two have said I charge way too much. I have good equipment, 5 years experience, and a gallery of portraits, so I’m charging very little, but some people still complain. If I charged $5 there would be people saying “it will only take a few minutes!” There will ALWAYS be negative feedback.

Sometimes negative feedback is valid. More often negative feedback is bogus and positive feedback is legitimate. If you are evil this will be flipped: positive feedback (”good job gassing those Jews!”) is bogus and negative feedback (”murderer!”) is legitimate. You should ignore bogus feedback and cut off the source. In your email inbox, bogus feedback makes you want to click “Delete.” Constructive criticism makes you want to click “Archive” because everyone ignores constructive criticism. Accurate negative feedback makes you want to click “Archive” quickly because you are uneasy. If you keep mulling over a comment, it has truth.

A couple years ago I believed you should always speak your mind. Now I know you have to be cautious if you want to be part of normal institutions, i.e. public school, the university, or a bureaucratic place of employment.

For example: here are …

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Today is my 18th birthday. While I wrote a long and pompous article for my 17th birthday, I will be doing no such thing this year.

18 is a bigger milestone than 17, because I no longer have to do business in my father’s name. I can open my own bank account, eBay, PayPal, AdSense, and other accounts. I can be drafted by the army (I sure hope that doesn’t happen). The police can tase and clobber me with impunity. And I can claim virtual independence from my parents and family.

This year has been highly unproductive. I took off six months, basically doing nothing creative, eating junk food, playing video games, reading blogs rather than writing them, taking bad photos, idling, and not being in school. I lived at a lower frequency of awareness for most of this year. I would like to say that it was a learning experience, but it accomplished little. The only benefit is that I feel more wise and less driven now. I thought creativity was ingrained in my consciousness, but I found that it is an applied skill. I am perfectly capable of creating nothing and contributing nothing to the world.

While I wrote a lengthy article in October about becoming a vegetarian, and maintained that diet for ten weeks. I stopped last December when I started loosing my sense of taste and smell. It was a combination of eating bad foods, eating very little (1000 calories per day), and not sleeping properly. I’ve always been a night owl and was struggling to get up at 8 A.M. five days a week for my college courses at the end of last year, so I was only getting three hours of sleep or not being able to sleep at all for quite some time. Sleep deprivation …

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2009-12-20 Update: You need some negativity in your life to balance out the positivity, so be careful so as not to reframe all your negativity.

At the college, we have a ritual each semester where we have to evaluate our professors. Student feedback, or so it’s called.

There are 14 categories, including things like “gives examples,” “answers questions,” and “is fair.” You can rate 1 to 5 on each.

This seems like a negative thing, because you have to rate your professor’s performance objectively. You have to decide how he’s done, evaluate him in many categories, and then write suggestions (most people don’t do this). It’s a big responsibility, because college administrators will be judging his merits, worthiness, and teaching ability based on your report.

But in my reality, this isn’t the case at all. If you have a bad teacher, and you give him all 1’s on his evaluation, do you know what happens? He gets worse. Usually it’s quite noticeable. The next class day he will be all flustered and confused. He will say things that make no sense. The grade you’ve given him will be confirmed.

If you give him 5’s, on the other hand, he will become far better. The coursework will just start making sense to you, he’ll be expalining concepts and formulas in a clear manner, and everyone in the class will seem happier.

This totally contradicts the common belief of reality. The common belief is that your opinion is independent of circumstances or facts. But common beliefs are common in common people. You can’t expect to be extraordinary if you’re doing what everyone else does. It’s extraordinary to go from a medium telephoto lens to an extreme wide-angle lens, because everything looks so different. So pick the extraordinary lens.

With your new lens, thoughts are inextricably linked …

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2009-12-20 Update: Having a job is not so bad after all. I apologize to those I’ve misled and encourage you to keep your job if you enjoy it or to support your family.

I know a lot of people like to tear down gainful employment in general, but there really are some good benefits to be had.

1. Guaranteed payment for your work.

If you own a restaurant, and it’s losing money, can you get out of paying your employees? No—you still must pay them for the work they’ve done. While you can let them go, you can’t refuse to pay for the work they’ve already done, even if you’re going into debt yourself. In this relationship, employees are in a much safer position.

2. Trading time for money.

In a job, it doesn’t matter if you spend eight hours cleaning a mop bucket or finding the cure for cancer. You get the same wages either way. Your pay has nothing to do with the value of your contributions.

You can use this to your advantage by wasting time and reducing the value of your contribution. This way, you can become a leech rather than an asset. It feels fun, because you know assets aren’t valued anyway. This brings us to…

3. Innovation is discouraged.

As a cashier, you don’t have to invent a new method of barcode entry or re-organize the checkout lanes to flow more smoothly. You just have to do a repetitive job reasonably well, and then you can reasonably expect to continue being employed. Though you can be let go at any time, you can reasonably expect to find a similar job elsewhere. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

If you do find a way to make the checkout process twice as fast, you can bet your fellow employees are going to be quite unhappy that …

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When I think of a wiki, I think of a collection of articles that can be edited by anyone. But wikis have another core trait. If you’ve ever looked up an article on Wikipedia, you’ve noticed that practically every other word is a link to related articles in the wiki.

There are no direct links to external sites. All those are footnotes or references, appearing at the bottom of the page. But within the text, there are internal links all over the place. It’s a self-contained Internet.

I think your blog should be the same way. This isn’t reasonable until you’ve built up a good collection of content—perhaps thirty articles at least. But once you’ve done that, you should start linking to them whenever relevant. When I talk about artistic photography, I’ll link to my gallery, and when I talk about happiness, I’ll probably link to How to Be Happy. And when I talk about linking, darn it, I’ll link to The Perils of Redundant Linking. These links are redundant to people who read my whole blog from start to finish, but those people can just ignore the links. The larger majority skims two or three of my articles to take in the essential points, and for them, the links are invaluable, because they connect them with other subjects of interest. Because the links are contextual and manually added by me and me alone, they’re better and more relevant than what any search engine or group of people can offer.

I believe in subjective reality / multiple truths. Wikis are disconcerting because they try in vain to represent an objective reality by synthesizing and representing the beliefs of hundreds of people. Sometimes, it works, but within the whole wiki you always see incongruity. Certain articles read …

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I’m going down a hypothetical path where abortion is ethical and just, despite knowing it isn’t. I will prove that even if my knowledge is false and abortion is ethical, one who goes down that “ethical” path reaches a dead end, the end result for which is tenfold worse than believing abortion is unethical. Finally, with plain-old logic, I’ll prove that abortion is the wrong choice either way.

Definitions

First, let’s make the definition of “fetus” really clear. The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary defines it as this:

“In humans, the unborn young from the end of the eighth week after conception to the moment of birth.”

They say “unborn young” instead of “unborn baby.” But what is a “young”? In the American Heritage Dictionary, the only definitions of “young” as a noun are these:

1. Young persons considered as a group; youth: entertainment for the young.
2. Offspring; brood: a lioness with her young.

Young persons could be anyone up to eighteen, which is fairly broad. But we know what the lioness is with. She’s with her “young,” so she’s also with her “babies,” because the words are synonyms. Offspring and brood are both babies in their infancies. This means that fetus == unborn child, regardless of a pro or anti-abortion stance. It’s just meaningless semantics.

Now that we know that a mother carries an unborn child, we have to decide if he (or it) has human rights. And yes, I use “he” to mean he or she because I don’t use gender-neutral language.

The human rights question

There are three angles to human rights for unborn humans. They are:

1. The unborn baby has human rights regardless of his mother’s opinion.
2. The unborn baby has no human rights regardless of his mother’s opinion.
3. The unborn baby has human rights if the mother wants to keep him, but no rights …

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I don’t hate problems. Problems are challenges, and all challenges are an opportunity for growth. Big problems are an opportunity for big growth. But a problem that has only grown through negligence yields little growth.

A small hole in your roof is a small problem. Sure, the occasional bug will come in, but it isn’t any risk to your shelter. If it’s hot out, turn up the air conditioner. If it’s cold, put some more logs on the fire. If it rains, put a bucket under it.

Perhaps you grow tired of these kludges. Every month you’re paying more on your electric bill. You left the house for a week, the bucket filled up, and the overage flooded your living room. The hole has grown a little bit. Birds are beginning to nest in your house. They are feasting on the lizards that have also found refuge inside.

The next step is to cover the hole. It’s still under control. Bits of your roof are being eaten away, but you can cover the hole with a frisbee. So you do that. The frisbee blows away. Darn it. Next step is to put a rock on the frisbee. You’re scared of heights, so it’s all you can do to go up there. In fact, the first time you threw it up there and got lucky. This time you aren’t so lucky and the frisbee lands far from the hole.

You don’t want to pay anyone to go up there and secure the frisbee, or, heaven forbid, fix the hole. This is because you aren’t convinced it’s a real problem yet. Instead, you fasten a rag to your inside ceiling with duct tape. The rag blocks the hole completely. A few rainy days go by, and only a few drops fall. You’re heating bills are back …

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If you follow my Twitter, you know I’ve been consumed with coding the OPAC for my public library these past seven days. Also, I pissed off greatly angered my Dad recently. I’m constantly negative / patronizing around him. It’s like a subconscious force. So much for trying to be personally developed.

The library is looking really great now; check out this search for example. I’m putting it on hold starting right now. I won’t work any more on it for one month. Hold me to that promise, okay?

The problem with it is that it’s not the best way for my to contribute to the world at the moment. The world starts at home, so it doesn’t matter how much you’re contributing if you’re leeching at home. I have some work to do.

I listened to a lot of back episodes from Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Fascinating talk show on librarianship. I didn’t know that people talked about things like taxonomy schemas and Library of Congress subject headings en masse.

I’m going to take and post some new photos. Maybe I’ll even write something. Or if I’m feeling lazy, I’ll take a photo and then write a short paragraph about it. It’s all good.

I wrote three posts on Daytona State College News a few days ago. That thing gets tons of search traffic. Must be because of it’s high ranking.

I’m counting… I have 18 days till the return to college. 10 days till birthday #17. I still have time to make some progress.

I replaced the $20/day plaque with one that says $1/day. That’s more reasonable. My online ventures are averaging 60 cents per day this month. It’s in reach, I say!

See y’all around. Actually, not around. Right here.

If I could just get my cat to wash the dishes and mop the floor, I’d have a cat worth millions of dollars. It doesn’t matter that you can hire someone to do the work for several dollars an hour. If the cat did it, it would be special and worth far more. Any sort of animal, for that matter.

Does that mean that the cat’s work is intrinsically more valuable than mine? Not in the slightest. In fact, it’s not as safe to have the cat do housework. Cats aren’t skillful homemakers. My cat has no proven track record, nor does her species. Who knows when she will tire of the work and start breaking stuff. She has to take naps every few hours. For the same work, a person should be paid far more than a cat.

Why then, is the value the cat commands so disparate, so far in excess of that of a normal person? Simply because it’s packaged in a unique, original, unheard-of form. People will pay you big money if you can do something that no one else can do, even if it’s totally useless. What real value do clowns contribute to the world–besides entertainment? If everyone is paid by the intrinsic value of their worth, clowns would get nothing.

To harness the power of disparate value, you need to be doing something that is eye-catching, entertaining, and different. It’s easy to have negative, disparate value. Just break a few limbs, and then see how hard it is to work efficiently. If you go to the bookstore and start ripping the covers off books, they really aren’t worth any less. There’s no unique information on the cover that the books’ contents cannot be without. All the informative and practical value remains untouched. Yet try selling …

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In life, it’s easy to go through a process called a series of near-hits, where you get close to the mark many times in a row without ever succeeding. An invisible wall stops you from reaching the goal, but you expend an increasing amount of effort for ever-reducing gains.

Sometimes, this is the story of a person’s whole life: a series of failures which were almost successes. “Failure,” of course, is a relative term. Perhaps he succeeded in supporting his family, but failed as a businessman. Perhaps he was a successful businessman who ignored his family. For my purposes, the shortcoming can be anything.

More often, the leech attacks you for just a day in your life, or perhaps in a minor hobby over a period of months. It could be just a few minutes. I had one of these experiences last week.

The night sky in my front yard was flashing with bolts of lightning; not a common sight in this area. Usually the sky flashes, but there are no bolts. As impressive as that is, it looks like nothing on film. This was different. I ran out with my camera, and, not owning a tripod, I braced the camera against the fence and took dozens of two-second exposures of the sky. These were the 15 best:

Click above to enlarge the thumbnails. If you can’t tell at this size, there are a bunch of shots of lightning; usually just a couple small branches across the clouds, or light in absence of a trunk. The top-right one looks good, but it’s blurry because I slipped with the camera. There is no bolt, so you can’t tell what it is except in this context. None of the photos are particularly good. They are a series of near-hits.

At this point, …

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