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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

Favourites articles and comments, organised by topic:

Work
- What's a good career for someone who doesn't want one?

- On 'Not being a part of the "Real World"'

- On the Problem with Unpaid Internships

- On Workplace Inappropriateness, Nurse edition

- On the Service Industry



Relationships and interpersonal stuff
- What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?

- Checklist for life practicalities? What do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?

- What experience most shaped who you are?

- How do you deal with the horribly cruel things people have said to you throughout your life?

- On Forgiveness

- When someone seems to enjoy "giving you a hard time," there's a simple litmus test for whether it's affectionate banter or cruelty disguised as humor.

- On Popular Culture and Fitting In

- On Offensive Humour

- On not wasting your girlfriend's time if you're in love with someone else

- How to succeed in being unfaithful

-I read a lot, and my receptive vocabulary is excellent. However, no so much on the expressive side. I tend to repeat the same word over and over in my writing, and sometimes have difficulty picking appropriate word to succinctly capture a concept. So, what's a good and specific exercise(s) for increasing one's expressive vocabulary?

- How can I become more intelligent?

- How do I end the cycle of self-sabotage?

- How can I develop a more stable, internal sense of self worth?

- Bill Clinton or John Edwards? Could it be better to stay with a known liar than take my chances on a new boyfriend?



Art
- The Forgiveness Machine: "When the person you love kills himself time stops," she says at one point. "It just stops at that moment. Life becomes another code, a language that you don't understand." An interview with Karen Green, visual artist, and widow of David Foster Wallace.

- Monet, the web experience



Film
- In the spirit of Danny Peary's definitive Cult Movies books, Scott Tobias's New Cult Canon sought to compile and review a grand roll of the offbeat oddities, midnight wonders, overlooked influencers, and otherwise cultish flicks of the last 20 odd years. The series began in 2008 with a retrospective of Donny Darko and ended today with a look at Michael Tolkin's The Rapture and the announcement of Tobias' resignation from the A.V. Club.

- Adam Sandler's House of Cruelty Now in his forties, Sandler is still remaking the same undemanding goofball comedies he's been churning out since he was in his twenties, about crude, infantile characters who behave like crude, infantile characters who are much younger -- which is the essence of the have-it-both-ways regression that has been his career hallmark.

- The Saddest Movie in the World has been used to make people cry in scientific studies, and the runner-up sad movie starred a famous animated deer. The scientific list of saddest (and most amusing/scariest/disgusting ) is now 16 years old, so Slate wants to update it. Their current suggestions to make people cry are these scenes from Finding Nemo , Dancer in the Dark, and Mystic River, but they are looking for others.

- What do you know about "identity transference"? I'd like to find more materials on it, be it films like Ingar Bergman's Persona, songs ("I'm slowing turning into you" by the white stripes?), or fiction/nonfiction writings.

- The Running of the Dead: How the shift from slow zombies to fast zombies inverts the political statement in the Dawn of the Dead remake, the Hobbesian influence on zombie narrative, and the implications for 28 Days Later. In four parts.

- An exegesis of sexual subtext in "Predator"



Literature and Language
- The History of English in Ten Minutes (Chapter I: Anglo-Saxon) , from Open University.

- "The surprise in Beckett's novels is merely what, in other novels, we have always been up to. The surprise is what a novel is."

- Reading as Therapy: Why do people read fiction anyway? To deal with personal problems Jon Baskin wrote a review of a book by Timothy Aubry titled: Reading as Therapy - Oprah, Amazon, and The Rise of Therapeutic Fiction.

- "Patrick Bateman was me. I was Patrick Bateman…" - Bret Easton Ellis interviewed.

- Please tell me a book you think everyone should read and why.

- Ayn Rand really hated C.S. Lewis

- You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. William Burroughs’ Curse on Truman Capote

-The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase "I saw."

- What are some of your absolute favourite online essays, articles and other pieces of non-fiction writing?

- Decoding Your E-Mail Personality Ben Zimmer, of Language Log discusses the Facebook case and forensic linguistics in the NY Times. More on forensic linguistics (and forensic stylistics) over at Language Log. For a much more in-depth discussion of the Facebook case, Language Log's post High-stakes forensic linguistics has got you covered.

- In this white darkness, we will take the place of everything: Conrad Aiken's most famous short story, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." About a small boy who increasingly slips into an ominous fantasy of isolation and endless snow, could be viewed as a metaphor about autism, Asperger's syndrome, and even schizophrenia before such conditions even had names. In addition to the 1934 short story, the tale has also been adapted as a creepy 1966 black-and-white short film and as a Night Gallery episode narrated by Orson Welles. Or for a more academic take, see the essay "The Delicious Progress" examining Aiken's use of white as a symbol of psychological regression.



Psychology/Philosophy/Religion
- Better Never To Have Been: No Life Is Good, by David Benatar. From The Philosophers' Magazine, via New Shelton.

- What are the five cognitive biases that everyone should know?

- Ten things not to say to a depressed person and Ten supportive things I’m glad somebody said to me

- You Are Not Your Name and Photo: A Call to Re-Imagine Identity.

- Are you depressed or is the world just a horrible place?



Gender politics/Feminism
- Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced.

- Makeup, the male gaze and the porn industry

- What resources would you suggest for someone wanting to learn about feminism?

- On Harassment and the Marking of Visible Womanhood

- When Women Wanted Sex Much More Than Men

- Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick, spoke in Dublin at the World Atheist Convention a month ago. Afterwards, in a video post, she discussed an incident that occurred there. She received some dismissive responses. PZ Myers is supportive. Richard Dawkins is dismissive. Dawkins is called out. PZ Myers weighs in again. Dawkins still doesn't get it.

- Undeniable examples of women geniuses

- On The Problem with Page 3

- I'm looking for a list of real-life female role models. Who are some of your raddest baddest lady muses? Times are tough, and I'm looking for icons to inspire me to buck up and carry on.

- Margaret Cho: 'I grew up hard and I am still hard and I don't care'.


- They talk about conquest and speak in militaristic jargon. They study propaganda and mind control. The Southern Poverty Law Center has linked their communities with hate groups. Who are they? Pickup Artists.

- "I’m bigger than most people, let alone most nutritionists — but I’m a pretty normal person. And a damn good nutritionist." The Fat Nutritionist wants to help you eat normally again.

- "The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others—and in my case, to the actual public." Actresses and female entertainers are frequently the subject of much ridicule and scrutiny vis-a-vis their appearance. Rarely do they publicly return similar scrutiny those doing the scrutinizing. Ashley Judd writes a searing condemnation of "the assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification" of women's (and men's) bodies.

- The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'

- "You should have your tongue ripped out." Female bloggers speak out about misogynist comments, rape threats and death threats.

- Rebecca Solnit explains The Problem With Men Explaining Things.

- Feminism's Uneven Success: "Class and racial and ethnic differences among women have intensified over time. The higher earnings of college-educated mothers make it possible for them to purchase child care and help with housework (typically performed by low-wage women workers)... the number of low-skill immigrants living in a large city reduces the tradeoff between employment and fertility for women college graduates. Outsourcing of care responsibilities can have many positive effects, but it reduces the potential for cross-class gender coalitions. Emphasis on changes in women’s average or median earnings relative to men often conceals growing inequality among women."

- Why I Resigned from The Good Men Project

- What is the most effective way for women to respond to street harassment from men?

- The crime against women that no one understands "They would be 10 educated, professional women versus a demonstrated liar—a man who had pretended to be a doctor, a CIA employee, even an astronaut—whom a court-appointed psychologist would decide met the legal definition of a "sexually violent predator." And yet the most remarkable thing about both trials wasn't the way they exposed the alleged tactics of a serial date rapist. It was that despite the outrageousness of the accusations against Marsalis, the testimony of 10 women wasn't enough to get a single rape conviction against him.

- What Reality TV Does To Girls

- Girlzone

- Miss Representation is a film by Jen Siebel Newsom about the images, representations and media constructions that shape American society in a harmful way for women. It explores the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence that result.

- Hello, I am fat. This is my body (over there—see it?). I have lived in this body my whole life. I have wanted to change this body my whole life. I have never wanted anything as much as I have wanted a new body. I am aware every day that other people find my body disgusting. I always thought that some day—when I finally stop failing—I will become smaller, and when I become smaller literally everything will get better (I've heard It Gets Better)! My life can begin!


General Politics/Activism
- Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities: We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time, Tc, taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.

- I've never known of a single colleague who has been tortured, or who lives with the threat of death and persecution for their work, in such a confused state of mind that they believe that working in the defence of individual and collective freedoms is an act of heroism. We know full well that it is nothing more than an exercise in survival and shared dignity.

- The Iron Lady has Rusted Away, (related) Tramp the Dirt Down

- On the Crash and where 'fault' lies


Music
- Help me extend my electro playlist

- Name a style of music you dislike and Reddit's hivemind will try to change your mind. Or most probably it'll confirm that your musical tastes are not that easy to change.



Blogs and Sites
- Top 5 Sites and Why

- In the midst of life I woke to find myself in East London: Blog about Spitalfields



Cooking and Baking
- Good recipes with the fewest possible ingredients

- What cooking secrets take your food to the alomst-pro level?

- Easy ways to improve my cooking and baking?

- Please share with me your favorite recipe for bread pudding.

- How can I modify a sponge cake recipe to make it lighter? Not in terms of fat content... i mean "air content"-wise. How do I make a cake as fluffy as possible?