There are certain places on the internet I have never had an interest in visiting, as I understand them to be packed to the brim with soul-shaking perversion. Two of those sites are 4chan and Reddit. Whenever I heard about either of those sites it was because of something completely unallowable like Doppelbanghers .

Recently, though, I was introduced to a subreddit called /r/BritishProblems , which concerns itself with the difficulties of being socially awkward at all times, in all situations, including when alone. And messing up tea in one form or another.

From there, I tentatively inched out into other parts of Reddit and discovered it was a just like every other sphere of reality; the most obnoxious and obnoxiously loud receive the most attention, but, by and large, it was harmless and some things were quite worthwhile.

For example, there is an entire hub of Safe For Work (SFW) porn subreddits, consisting of gorgeous photos of gorgeous things. (Or, occasionally, crudy photos of gorgeous things.) This is the page where you can browse the newest posts to all of the SFW porn subreddits, but if you go to any particular site in that multireddit, this appears at the top of the screen:

Each main section has a drop down list when you hover over them.

My fav SFW porn subreddits are: bookporn , cemeteryporn , abandonedporn , winterporn , and fireporn .

My husband’s favourite subreddits are:
dubstep : He’s discovered a lot of new dubstep, and learned quite a bit about the genre and subgenres, here.
birdswitharms : Birds photoshopped with arms on. I’m surprised at how freaking hilarious  it is.
explainlikeImfive : Where you can ask to have things explained as though you were very young, without being judged.
fiftyfiftysfw : You’re given two descriptions. The picture or video in the post could be either one. Do you gamble and click?
futureporn : SFW porn of what people in the past thought the future would look like, and what we think the future will look like.
speculativeevolution : Animals that do not exist (but could have done).
theendofyoutube : We’ve all done it. Clicked on one YouTube video, to another, to another x 85 and then… you’re at the end of YouTube. And it’s a weird place. This subreddit is full of videos that save you the bother of clicking the 85 links between sanity and ‘WTF is happening in front of my eyes?’ These are labelled if they’re NSFW, most are SFW.
cringe : Full of the sort of videos that make you think, ‘Did you not watch this before you posted it? You do know the entire world can see this, right?’
timeonhand : Things done by people who have far too much time on their hands. Usually impressive, sometimes just sad.

The most recent subreddits are at newreddits

After this adventure I realised the Internet in general, and Reddit specifically, is Manhattan. Once I was in New York, just wandering around–going no place in particular (but going really quickly and with purpose so people thought I was local)–and suddenly I realised I was in a sketchy area. I did NOT feel safe. Rather than freaking out and declaring all of New York terrifying and awful, I simply turned around–after pretending I’d forgotten an appointment in the other direction–and returned to the last place I felt comfortable, which was about one street up.

That’s Reddit, folks. You’re minding your own business, looking at interesting things, learning about the world around you, reveling in the incredible diversity of humanity on the planet, and you turn a corner and you’re … there. The place everyone eventually finds themselves. Just turn around and return to the last place you felt comfortable.

Reddit is good about tagging things NSFW if something is Not Safe For Work, so, if you see that acronym just turn around (unless you’re into that sort of thing).

Reddit also practises something called Hellbanning , which is a brilliant way of dealing with trolls. It lets them think they’re participating in the forum, but no one can see them. It’s taking the concept of not feeding the trolls to the next level. Brilliant.

Reddit Enhancement Suite (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera) is incredibly useful, if only for its night-time mode, which replaces that whiteWHITE glare of the screen to a darker screen.

The subreddits above are a small number in comparison to the 24,000+ named subreddits [though over 1,ooo of those have no posts and a few thousand only have one post.] So if you enjoy any in particular, please share in the comments.

And I’m still not going to 4chan.

I was going to use the cover for 1913 but this one was so much more… wow. It’s only been a hundred years since women got the vote in the US, Hilary in 2016!

1 January, 2013 is the start of a new you. You’re going to wake up that day and not do one single thing you’re not supposed to and you’re going to start a load of new, good habits. Going against an entire life’s worth of experience and a full DNA sequence of  genetics, you shall be reborn into the perfect person you know you can be. Sure, you’ve tried it before–every year, in fact–but the willpower wasn’t there. This time will be different.

Or. You can begin with just one habit. Any habit . Regularly doing one thing–be it exercise, eating healthily, studying regularly–has a positive knock-on effect on the rest of your life. People doing one good thing smoked less, spent less impulsively, exercised more and had more willpower in general (and that’s when those specific things weren’t what the person was trying to change).

So don’t try to change all the habits, just start with one.

Whilst you’re waiting for the one good habit to build your willpower, Productivity Owl can help, at least when it comes to reminding to stop staring at the internet and do something productive. Incredibly customisable, it also gives you a score for how well you use it (e.g. if you turn it off when you want to waste time). It’s Chrome only. Here’s a great post by the developer.

This is an excellent post about Four Strategies that Build Lasting Motivation , which includes the very useful SMARTER system.

This one builds upon one of the bits from the previous page, which is to start with small, easily attainable goals and explains how to expand on that to create a more complex, more productive habit. Then what to do when you break that very nice habit.

More pragmatic advice (and good news for those of us night-people who believe we have to get up at the arse-crack of dawn to be productive): Seven Productivity Myths Debunked by Science and Common Sense

So get out there, older you, and be productive. I’ll just be on the sofa fiddling with my iPod.

If you live in the world, you have to deal with other people. Some of those people are going to be awkward. Fear not! Lifehacker has given us:  The Awkward Human Survival Guide , which has tips for coping with people who don’t know what to say/don’t know when to stop saying things/only know how to say the wrong things.

From the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum  FB page:

The Poe Murders is a graphic retelling of many of Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery and horror stories meshed into a single tale. The stories included in this graphic-novel are: The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death, The Purloined Letter, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven, as well as others. The graphic-novel will be told in the style of a mystery, in which the characters are searching for the mysterious source causing rational men and women to commit these horrific murders.

They have a limited time to raise the funds necessary; if you’d like to contribute for swell prizes go to their  Indiegogo page .

TEDx is the body that licenses people to have TED-style talks in various parts of the world. When it came to the attention of the TED folks that some pseudoscience was making its way into these talks, they issued this  letter, which is an excellent introduction to critical thinking. Hat tip to Lifehacker’s article:  How to Avoid Bad Science in TED Talks

The Most Common Grammar Gaffes Writers Make and How to Avoid Them . Nothing particularly new on this list, though these are rules that bear repeating. The thing that most WTFd my face was the first line of the article, which was, ‘In 2011, the publisher of my book  Enchantment  could not fill an order for 500 e-book copies.’ How… ? I mean… Nope, ‘How…?’ is all I have

Speaking of writers, here  are some beautiful posters of quotes from famous authors. All of them are elegant, but this is one of my favourites:

From The Guardian:  Writers’ Favourite Classic Book Illustrations with Pictures . The captions make it, for me. Beatrix Potter was… interesting. [Bonus 1: I've just started playing Peter Rabbit's Garden on my iPod and it's lovely--really captures the feel of the books, but without the horrors. Bonus 2: The illustration below was Bryan Talbot's choice for the article. Complete set of Dore illustrations of with the Longfellow translation of The Divine Comedy in this 30MB zip file .]

Does anyone else hear ominous music… ?

This article from Slate  explains why we think disasters make people regress to their primal selves, when it’s simply not so. Bonus info: There’s something called ‘disaster science’ and I’m loving the new term ‘elite panic’, which is when white people get a-scared the non-white people are going to start looting and robbing the second the electrics are off for more than ten minutes. The big takeaway from this article is that people are kinda great when it benefits the entire tribe (meaning all the people).

Brown people are going to take my stuff!

Gawker has an article about an advice column  about how men can best deal with women-times . The title of the article is ‘MEN: Is Your Lady on ‘a Period’: Learn How to Deal in the Most Ridiculous Period-Advice Column Ever’ and I thought I was in for one of those delightfully amusing advice columns from the 1820s. But no. How I wish that had been the case.

I’d be remiss if I left an article on genitals of the other sex: Fleshbot has an…enlightening article about 3-D printing your willy . So, so very NSFW . My husband read this part to me, (italicized bit was his commentary):

They even hand mix their own colors, and not only do they do four flesh tones (cashew, caramel, hazelnut, and chocolate) [WHY ARE THEY ALL FOODS?!] but they can also capture undertones, such as the reddish-purple luster of a swollen dong. They’re true artisans.

The article is hilarious and reminds me a great deal of Grant Stoddard’s excellent I Did it For Science column on Nerve.

Here is an image of a 3D printer, as I’d like at least the *images* in this post to be safe for work.

And apparently, since sex seems to be the unofficial topic of this week’s links, have an article from The Atlantic entitled Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist , which is about the Aka and Ngandu tribes in central Africa. When a population has a high infant mortality rate but relies on having several children, sex, though enjoyable, is used as a reproduction tool (sorry). The article also discusses the way Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democratic societies (WEIRD)–which is even better than ‘elite panic’–approach the idea of sex when studying non-WEIRD groups. I find the sociology of anthropology very interesting, so this article was a great read.

These people are both WEIRD and would love it in central Africa, where I’d bet there’s no abortion, either.

A couple of unrelated, but no less lovely, links to start your week.

TEA

Matt Harbowy (who is a tea chemist because that’s a thing) says that dunking your tea bag doesn’t steep your beverage any faster . Also, as long as the tea is fresh, it doesn’t matter if it’s in a bag or loose.

A nice gift for a tea-lover would be this  handy mug that lets the person making your tea know how you like it with Pantone style colours inside the rim.

[Bonus info to me from the article is that "red wine typically leaves the skins in, and white wine typically takes the skins out, and both can be produced from the same red grape. "]

& FONTS!

For font lovers, like myself, it can be infuriating (I originally typed ‘infurianting’, which I think is the type of incoherent ranting you do when infuriated; it is now a word, my friends) when people misuse fonts. HOW can they not see that 85 different fonts looks shit when on the same page? HOW can they not know their cyan-text-on-rainbow-wallpaper website is going to make blood shoot out of their readers’ eyes? Spread this wisdom far and wide:  A Non-Designer’s Guide to Typefaces and Layout

[Bonus!  dafont is full of both free and paid fonts. Congratulations, you'll never accomplish anything ever again, as you'll never be capable of choosing between your 900 fonts. Join me in Hell.]

This week’s links is a short one (two entire entries), as I’m being lazy. I believe in honesty, so there it is.

First up, a fantastic video on the evolutionary explanation of addiction (drugs, alcohol, nicotine, video games, sex, gambling, everything-you-enjoy-doing). It’s also an excellent intro to neurochemicals in the brain. ‘Mo’ synapses, mo’ problems, yo.’

The Scishow has lots and lots of other entertaining and informative videos.

And secondly, for the animal lovers, put together a Pet First Aid Kit in case of an emergency. Animals are people, too.

I was re-watching this bit from IT Crowd and it made me wonder if there were actual sites that predict one’s date of death. And, being the internet, I was not disappointed. Here are a few.

When Will I Die : This one is close to the one on the show with questions about lifestyle and such. The interface is rather boring, but the maths seem sound.

Death Timer : The interface is perfect, and the stats are based on info from the CIA and UN, but it’s based only on BMI.

Death Forecast : A fun little site, which uses more info, like the first link in the list.

Just a warning, the How Will I Die quiz from Quiz Rocket only wants your information to email spam you. Bastards.

This week’s links are all about libraries. Rowr.

Biblio Coimbra, Portugal

This is a 360, zoomable pamorama of the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin.

This is an even more impressive 40 gigapixel 360 panorama of the Strahov library in Prague. Seriously, zoom in. You can see the woodgrain on the shelves. It’s completely mad.

Libraries at the Movies : A blog about libraries and librarians on film. Film reviews written by a librarian; each review explains what the film has to do with repositories of books and the people who work in them (the repositories, not the books. It isn’t about members of Jurisfiction , unfortunately.)

From Flavorwire: the 25 Most Beautiful Public Libraries in the World , the 25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World , and 20 Beautiful Private and Personal Libraries . Bonus! Bizarre Looking Libraries from All Over the World

From Mental Floss: 15 Spectacular Libraries in Europe

Libraries is a spectacularly beautiful book of photography of the world’s libraries by Candida Hofer.

And Unshelved . It’s a webcomic by Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes.

You can also check the ‘Libraries’ page at the left of this blog for photos of books and such. It’s under Images, then Photography faaaar down the page.

I’m working on a collection of short stories at the moment and, whilst I love writing, it can be a bit trying to get going. After staring at my screen for thirty seconds or so, the lint trap in the dryer begins reminding me how important it is to clean it thoroughly. And that’s after I’m checked all of my sites fifty times. So this week’s links are concerning something I spend a good deal of time doing…

P is for Putting things off til the last minute
R is for Reading pointless news articles instead
O is for Opening and closing unimportant emails
C is for Collecting loose paperclips and making metal animals
R is for Ridding my desk of post it notes
A is for Another biscuit please
S is for Speaking at length to people on the phone about nothing
T is for Tea and then more Tea
I is for I need to find a picture of a dog dancing for Fido Friday
N is for Now perhaps I need a coffee to get me focussed
A is for Actually, maybe a mint tea might be better
T is for Talking at length about what I’m supposed to be doing
I is for I’m really going to be in the shit if I don’t do this now
N is for No no no no I hate this, just do the work!
G is for Going onto G+ and ranting about my procrastination

(Originally posted by Joanna Ivison on Google+)

Clearing to Neutral : From Lifehacker, a post about removing your reasons to procrastinate before even having the need to think of them. I promise it makes sense in the article. I’ve done something similar in the past, where, if I have something important to do, I blast through the house and clean everything, rather than doing one chore, sitting down to ‘work’, and thinking of another chore. This article explains how to prep your workspaces in every area of your life.

An Algorithm for Beating Procrastination : From LessWrong, a mathematical equation to identify and beat the components of procrastination. It provides questions you can ask to work out what’s holding you back and why.

And for fun, this article from Cracked about how our brains are against us when we try to break bad habits . It’s humorous and informative. Enjoy.

Also, here are a couple wallpapers to help you on your journey to be Thuper Productive:

These links miss out the Necropolis in Glasgow, but it’s definitely worth the trip.

From National Geographic: Top 10 Cemeteries (in the world)

Merry Cemetery, Romania

Xoxocotlan, Oaxaca, Mexico: Where Day of the Dead celebrations are held October 31.

Old Jewish Cemetery , Prague. There are so many headstones because people are buried several deep and has been in use since the 15th century. Here’s a wallpaper-sized photo for you:

Several of these appear on the following list, as well.

From Weather.com: 15 Must-See Historic Cemeteries Across the U.S.

An excellent article on the whole (there are some technical difficulties, and you may have to manually change the page number in your address bar, but it’s worth it), it includes Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is very Victorian in design and would therefore delight Goths. Surrounded by gardens and ornamentation, it’s the sort of place one could go for a peaceful picnic or a bit of reading.

Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia has what you’d expect in a world-class cemetery–above-ground vaults and impressive sculpture, but what really makes it stand out is that at Halloween, they hold candle-lit night-time tours for three nights.

If you’re closer to New York than Atlanta, another cemetery that has late-night tours you may stop by Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Graceland Cemetery , Chicago, Illinois. Victorian-esque again, but this one is home to one of my favourite sculptures, ‘Eternal Silence’

The tomb of Dexter Graves, also known as ‘Statue of Death’, though heavens knows why.

Green-Wood Cemetery , Brooklyn, NY Holy Gothic-Architecture, Batman! If I lived anywhere near this place, I’d dress as an Edward Gorey character and drape myself along a wall or five and have photos taken.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery , Concord, Massachusetts. It’s in Sleepy Hollow.

5 Reasons Humanity Desperately Wants Monsters to Be Real The ways in which demonising entire groups of people benefits society. I was going to add some thoughts to this article, but David Wong covers everything. Yes, it’s on Cracked, but it’s an excellent introduction to group-think in terms of Us versus Them. Here’s an image from the article:

Before you get too smug…

Hell, Stanley Milgram began his experiment because he thought Americans would have morals about torturing innocent people–that the Holocaust couldn’t happen in the States, because Germans lacked compassion.