accidental linkspam

[firecat]

I was collecting these in an email post and sent it by accident, so I guess it's time to clean them up and post them already!

Cute decorations for your electrical outlets
https://www.etsy.com/listing/188515319/amaze-cat-electric-outlet-wall-art

Money is not a resource
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/06/02/what-is-money-alan-watts-on-the-false-idea-that-money-is-a-resource/

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking food illness by searching Yelp reviews. (Perhaps one of the few positive uses for government tracking powers.)
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/dining/reviews-on-yelp-help-track-illness.html

This article about how Japanese people make businesses out of American cultural icons has kind of a patronizing tone, but it's also interesting.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-japan-copied-american-culture-and-made-it-better-180950189/

They're right. I can't throw any of those things out.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-useless-products-that-nobody-can-throw-out/

This is part of the reason I like the asexual community even though I'm not asexual. http://meloukhia.net/2014/06/dont_be_a_sex-positive_jerk/

I’ve written here before about the very specific brand of sex-positivity I loathe, in which people seem bound and determined to press their sexuality on other people, insisting that sex is fantastic for everyone and everyone enjoys sex, creating a hypersexual, charged environment that refuses to acknowledge the complexities of human sexuality. Sex is awesome, under this framework, so everyone’s into it, and a ‘sex positive’ environment is not simply a place in which people can talk about sexuality without shame or judgement, but an environment in which sexuality is actively pushed on people. It’s all sexy, all the time.

Comments

[stardreamer]

Interestingly, I don't score 100% on any of the categories in that Cracked article.

I do dispose of some books in recycling -- old textbooks, falling-apart paperbacks, and a few cases of "what was I THINKING?" have all gone that route. And I cull my library every few years, sending some things to the used bookstore and others to an archive box in the attic, to make more room on the shelves for what I'm currently reading.

I rarely buy speculative clothing, and if I buy something and don't wear it for several years, eventually it'll go to the Goodwill box even though that hits me with the "you wasted money on this" guilt trip. What I do end up keeping are items with sentimental value that don't fit me any more. Oh, and the box of stuff I keep meaning to put up on eBay in my copious spare time.

Dead people's stuff is the least problematic category for me. There's rarely any sentimental value attached to it, so if I don't have a personal use for it, out it goes.

Photographs are where I come closest, although even there I've sat down and sorted out most of the old family pictures and sent them to distant relatives who do genealogy. But I have shit-tons of ancient con pictures that I really need to scan and discard, because they take up space I have better uses for.

Stuff that could be useful... we're working on this, with varying levels of success. It helps if we can find a useful way to pass it on, such as the large bag of plastic restaurant utensils (still in their sealed cellophane packets) that's getting donated to the consuite at ApolloCon. But generally speaking, we've been moving toward the concepts of:
- if we have a stash of it already, we don't need to keep more
- if it would be easy and cheap to replace, we don't need to keep it
- if we're not actively using it, it's a candidate for removal.

(Although that last one does sometimes bite, in the form of "dammit, I JUST threw that out last week!" OTOH, how many times have you re-bought something because you couldn't find the spare you had, or had forgotten that you had one?)

[firecat]

Yeah, I do get rid of some of that stuff, but never enough of it to feel like I'm free of clutter. And a lot of the clutter is hats and old family memorabilia.

[snippy]

I used to have some these issues, but I'm telling you, cleaning out my mother's stuff after she died cured me but quick. I don't want my kids having to go through the grief, pain, and stress of making all those decisions.

The one I've never had is holding onto things that belong to a person I either used to be or used to want to be, but either way, I'm not that person now and I'm not trying to be that person.

[firecat]

I know my mom tried to cull her stuff for the same reason you gave. There was still a lot of stuff to get rid of. And family memorabilia that she probably inherited from her mom, and that's why I can't throw it out either.

I don't buy or hold on to clothes that are too small but I buy clothes on vacation and then they don't seem appropriate to wear in my regular life, and I'm slow to get rid of them. I also buy costume stuff because I want to wear it at cons but then I end up not bringing it because I want to pack light.

[eggcrack]

That Cracked article is so, so true. I haven't experienced what it's like to hold onto dead person's things yet, but that sort of things runs in the family.

The article about sex positivity also rings true. However, while I understand that many people aren't 'broken' by their past and don't need to be told that they are, but I personally feel I'm broken in some ways, and that it's OK to be broken. I have the right to be, in a way, it doesn't make me a lesser me.

[firecat]

Very good point about being broken!

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Re: the sex positivity, yeah. I had an interesting revelation where I saw someone discussing another woman who wanted to "save herself for marriage" and I had to think about that.

When does someone else's choices become my business? When does my discomfort with something become cause for me to determine if they'd welcome discussion? When do I decide "they've heard this shit, they don't need to hear it from (me)"?

It's doubly interesting because... well, I have times when my libido is depressed, and times when sex seemed like a pain, and some of these happened when I was young - young enough that guys are more worried about lasting long enough, not "getting there, thank *god* that's over with!" It would have been good to have learned "wow, that's not actually very common, a doctor might figure out what's going on with you. Might not be anything - people are different! - but you might be missing out on a happymaking bit of life."

What's the line? And when is it crossed, and when is it too far?