You make a lot of interesting (and colorful) points, but I'm not sure crisis is the right word. When you write:
> Masculinity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell men all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.
...I feel like I could change it like this and it would be equally "true":
> Femininity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell women all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.
I'm not sure what it is other than some general insecurity common to humanity.
Sacha Chua is an undersung emacs hero. She has faithfully published Emacs News for so long, quietly pushing good things forward, quietly helping people understand the weird thing about emacs ... there actually is a "there" there.
When I was about 20, I went to the local Barnes and Noble to find a book about programming.
Picked up the O'Reilly Javascript book from around 2000. Had no idea what javascript was, just wanted to learn how to program and trying to pick the most popular language.
$40 later, I got home and started reading! Very confusing, the first half of the book covered the language runtime (I think?) and the second half covered the browser sandbox, and it took me 200 pages to realize that I can't easily read or write to files on my machine with this language. Not what I was hoping for!
Back to Barnes and Noble, another $40 and I came home with the O'Reilly camel book, Beginning Perl I think? Cover to cover read, probably the last time I did that with a programming manual.
Decades have passed, I'm in the same camp as those that prefer Ruby now, but man what a breath of fresh air Perl was back in 2000.
Keto community generally recommends replacing carbs with fat and keeping protein constant. Protein consumption is almost a constant (with some variability due to workout regimen, etc).
I think of it like a see-saw, with protein level being the axis of rotation (ie., it stays the same). Now you have 2 remaining macro variables: carbs and fat. If you decrease one, you need to increase the other or else caloric intake might be too low.
Keto community generally refers to the diet as Low Carb High Fat because not eating enough fat can cause problems on the diet.
Edit: To be clear, assuming sufficient consumption of protein, if calories are still deficient, keto community recommends making up the deficit with fat rather than protein.
I agree that this should always be considered, no matter the activity. But it is hard, and games like Chess make it particularly challenging.
I will start a game of Go, completely relaxed and with the goal of staying relaxed and enjoying the game. Sometimes it works if my opponent falls behind early, but if my opponent is worthy... watch my heart rate over the course of the game.
There is no point in playing if you don't care about the outcome. I wish there was, I wish it was like making a painting, I wish it was nothing more than making something beautiful with the go stones.
It's impossible to play as much Chess as he does and truly not care, but I think he is figuring out ways to care differently, and that might be key.
Cue the org-mode brigade! (Of which I consider myself a member.)
I haven't used FreeMind specifically, but when I hear hierarchical organization with folding, I remember the rabbit hole that I fell into 20 years ago...and still haven't climbed out quite yet. From Shadow Plan[0] on Palm OS, through so many others, and landing at org-mode for the last decade or so.
I have this also. So many things to say I don't know where to begin. I feel like there is a distinct difference between the experiences of seeing the images when you are falling asleep vs seeing the images when you have recently come out of sleep. And then there is a third state where you have recently come out of sleep but you aren't done sleeping yet so you are also falling back to sleep. This last one often allows me to start having a lucid dream.
1) Weird things like this happen to me most often in the early morning hours when I'm still drowsy but I've woken up for a few minutes.
2) It is sometimes accompanied by a "whooshing" sensation that used to frighten me and usually caused me to "back out" into normal consciousness. Eventually I learned how to relax and let it unfold without panicking. Quite often I have the sensation of rolling out of my body, off the bed and onto the floor.
3) I am paralyzed when it happens, in the sense that if I move my hand, the hand that moves is a dream hand. My real hand of course doesn't move. It doesn't feel like paralysis because I can "move" in my dream. But I am consciously aware that my real body is lying still in bed.
4) I have to be very careful not to wake myself especially at the beginning (edit: and being careful is paradoxical because if I am too careful then that will wake me too, sort of like the paradox of needing to be both loose and tight in sports). I am also aware that if my wife coughs or makes some kind of noise, I might wake up. I have discovered an odd remedy for this however: if I make "dream noise" - for instance, if I shuffle my feet loudly in the dream - I am less likely to be woken by real noise from the real world.
This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim to not perceive the purported benefit of their effort.
I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.
A Brief History of Time changed my life too. My dad gave it to me when I was about 13 years old. It taught me 2 big things that I had not yet realized:
1) That science was graspable, even by me, given enough time to reflect (and a good teacher helps).
2) That science requires sparks of creativity, in addition to all of its methodology, and that being a scientist can involve being creative.