TQ 🎹 @TQ@octodon.social

Time for a little update about my accounts:
@TQ is my main account. Posts switch between English and German, and I toot about more general stuff.
@TQ is my art account where I post all kinds of art like completed works, sketches and abstract paintings!
@TQ is my private account. Toots auf deutsch, close friends only.
@TQ is my gaming and DM account.
@TQ is my coding account, which I might use again when I have a project.
I often boost posts from my "special" accounts over on my main.

Hell is a kindergarten WhatsApp group chat after rapid testing against covid was made mandatory.

Negative! All three of us. Now we how the kid's friend's PCR test comes back negative, too.

So a friend with whom our kid always plays has had a positive rapid test. Jury on the PCR test is still out.
We're going to get tested later today.

This is scary.

Reading this book has not been a waste of time, though. I now know that I can happily put it in the trash instead of a community bookshelf, I know that the author is juuust another guy filled with speaches and great examples, devoid of the ability to reflect his and others' privilege, unable to give me any meaningful advice. Which is funny, because I had such high hopes about this book. I guess I projected a HUGE deal into it, with the "ART of NON-conformity" right at the cover.

And maybe, this book would have been helpful to 11 years younger and totally un-woke me. I'm not angry it isn't helpful now.

*puts book into trash bin*

There's nothing more in this for me. The author talks about debt, then about minimalism (very 2010, I think!), then there's more White Saviourism, then more "You can do it (if you have G*r-i.t!)".
I'm happy I can put this piece of trash down now and read something nice. Going back to Sanderson until my ordered book arrives.

This is a useless chapter for an abundance of reasons. Starting with the wildly changed way the internet works nowadays, my general disinterest in gaining "followers" and the arbitrary groups the author constructs and then discusses.
And he uses the world "army" for them. Yucky.

Ohhh, what an interesting, unconvential and widely experienced guy that author is! He says so himself every other sentence, so it must be true!
Chapter 6, "Graduate school vs. the Blogosphere" has not aged well and is, again, full of accumulated privilege. *sigh*

It's almost funny in a very tragic way how the author states that there are certain rules that gatekeepers like to set for people, and that you* can just break them or work around them. You* meaning: You, a white, at-least-middleclass, preferrably cis-het male. Because gatekeepers tend to be very unfair with applying their rules differently to different groups of people. Reinforcing and even creating marginalization in the first place.
So this has been quite unhelpful so far. I've learned almost nothing so far. This book will go to the trash if it doesn't get its stuff together soon!

Now the author tells me the story of a guy who moved to another country. "I wanted my kids to see another place without just taking them on a whirlwind trip. Would we kill each other in a city apartment? Would we go crazy from having to navigate in a place where we didn't speak the language?"

I mean! My gourd! Do these people even listen to themselves while they talk? Wow, there's so much being-a-dick-about-everything-ness, I can't even.

Things are getting less and less reflected on pp.91, where there's a list of businesses that were built with $100 or less of investment. Like, suuure, guy! This list is *dripping* with unmentioned privilege!
For example, the list mentions a news anchor who only needed "$9 domain registration" to become a successful Yoga mentor? Really? Who designed the website? How did they get connections and "fame" in the first place? How did they get the equipment needed to start that practice? And the license to become a Yoga teacher? The lesure time to do Yoga at all?

I really like the alternative interpretations he's giving for the purpose of some gatekeeping institutions. I think I can learn something here, like that there may be the openly communicated purpose and others, more self-serving ones.
There's also a subchapter called "Marginalization and the Department of No" - but there's not a word about marginalization. I mean, not in the sense I know this word in at least. That's a bit of a bummer, I had hoped he'd finally address some of my points.

I'm also a bit disgusted how this guy glorifies travel for travel's sake. Like wanting to visit every country in the world. There's so little reflection about his privilege to travel freely, both the freedom his papers grant him and the freedom his lifestyle itself lends him. I don't really like that.

Neither Lance Armstrong nor Michael Phelps make that great examples nowadays.

Also, that's the 3rd time I stumbled over him describing some white privileged brat going somewhere and helping the poor non-white people. Yuuuuck.

Where he does have a point, though, is that there really are lots of people who see any behaviour outside of what they allow themselves to do as a challenge to their life choices. I'm guilty of that myself for sure, more often than I'd like to admit. There really are people who "work hard at rationalizing their own life choices when they come across someone who has made different ones." (p.41)

I do not like how that book skips on addressing privilege and marginalization. The author almost mentions this when he says that he doesn't "care if you're a liberal or conservative, religious or agnostic, rich or poor, or any other category" (p.7). He might not care, but the world does. And when he writes that "you don't need to be especially intelligent, popular, rich or otherwise privileged. Those qualities, in fact, ca sometimes be detrimental to getting what you really want" (p.19) he misses the mark again, it's adding up. Because the world is so much more complex and complicated than he writes, and even if the point he wants to make is that true insight about one's life goals is a thing that can be achieved independently from money, race, gender etc., the opportunities to reach that goal are highly skewed.
And no, not in the direction he outlined, but in the opposite.