Last night we had a lovely Thanksgiving, right up until close to bedtime when everyone became miserably overstimulated and emotionally dysregulated, including me. We got it together and managed to get to sleep, but there were some tense moments.
Tonight I marched everyone to the playground shortly before sunset and they had a good time despite S's objections, and despite the dark, cold, and wind. Hopefully it will help. We did a simple Shabbat dinner when we got back (I almost forgot, as usual), and we edited the cards from S's little Shabbat instruction kit to match the way we want to sing the prayers. Primarily, S and I both agree emphatically that we are swapping out "melech" for "ruach", like they sometimes do at Torah School, so I wrote that on a piece of white paper and taped it over the word with packing tape to match the lamination. I am so proud of her for having her own opinions about her preferred names for God, and it is sure nice that they happen to convergently match mine. C toddled over when he heard singing and warbled along.
I am enjoying treating this break like a real break, and I hope I don't regret it when we hit December and I have to hit the ground running for the last three school weeks of the year. We had a nice Facetime with my in-laws this morning. They are so much less stressful to arrange calls with than my parents. Like when I suggest we should schedule a Facetime, they respond and help plan one.
I had a lot going on today, although very little of it involved me doing things that are actually interesting and relevant to post here! I also got wet when it rained earlier than it was supposed to. Ah well. Have a photo of Merchants (the chippy in Bewdley) gift-wrapped for the season! I haven't seen the place do this before, but it's really effective considering the fairly minimal decoration used. Those picnic tables are a bit of a triumph of hope over experience, though!
This month's theme was "Fairies and Fey." I wrote from 12 PM to 3 AM, so about 13 hours, allowing for lunch and supper breaks. I wrote 3 poems on Tuesday plus 5 later in the week.
Participation was down slightly, with 9 comments on LiveJournal and another 23 on Dreamwidth. A total of 11 people sent prompts. You have new prompters ljgeoff and gs_silva to thank for the second freebie.
Buy some poetry! If you plan to sponsor some poetry but haven't made up your mind yet, see the unsold poetry list from November 4. That includes the title, length, price, and the original thumbnail description for the poems still available.
This month's donors include: janetmiles, librarygeek, and Anthony Barrette. All sponsored poems from this fishbowl have been posted. There are 2 tallies toward a bonus fishbowl.
"The Coracle in the Forest" Story Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025] Summary: Two teens go foraging for food and find something unexpected. 208 lines, Buy It Now = $104
Digby and Maerwynn Aldebourne grew up in Lancaster until 2022, when a heat wave killed their parents while the children were in a programme at the air-conditioned library.
"The Heart to Change the World" Story Date: Sunday, May 29, 2016 Summary: A fairy godmother has an idea to clean up after the Big One. 98 lines, Buy It Now = $49
Violanira had always been an oddball.
For a fairy, she was strangely attracted to human science and technology, especially now that more of it consisted of things like plastic and aluminum instead of cold iron.
"The Universal Assent to the World" Story Date: Saturday, September 26, 2015 Summary: Nebuly takes some of his friends to a Renaissance Faire. 355 lines, Buy It Now = $355 Double price for research.
Nebuly had convinced some of his friends to come to the Lyonesse Faire just outside River City, since it included a variety of fantasy elements.
Every year as the holiday season begins we’ve run a gift guide for the holidays, and over the years it’s been quite successful: Lots of people have found out about excellent books and crafts and charities and what have you, making for excellent gift-giving opportunities during the holiday season. We’ve decided to do it again this year.
So: Starting Monday, December 1, the Whatever Holiday Gift Guide returns! If you’re a writer or other creator, this will be an excellent time to promote your work on a site which gets tens of thousands of viewers daily, almost all of whom will be interested in stuff for the holidays. If you’re someone looking to give gifts, you’ll see lots of excellent ideas. And you’ll also have a day to suggest stuff from other folks too. Everybody wins!
To give you all time to prepare, here’s the schedule of what will be promoted on which days:
Monday, December 1: Traditionally Published Authors — If your work is being published by a publisher a) who is not you and b) gets your books into actual, physical bookstores on a returnable basis, this is your day to tell people about your books. This includes comics/graphic novels and audiobooks.
Tuesday, December 2: Non-Traditionally Published Authors — Self-published? Electronically published? Or other? This is your day. This also includes comics/graphic novels and audiobooks.
Wednesday, December 3: Other Creators — Artists, knitters, jewelers, musicians, and anyone who has cool stuff to sell this holiday season, this will be the day to show off your creations.
Thursday, December 4: Fan Favorite Day — Not an author/artist/musician/other creator but know about some really cool stuff you think people will want to know about for the holidays? Share! Share with the crowd!
Friday, December 5: Charities — If you are involved in a charity, or have a favorite charity you’d like to let people know about, this is the day to do it.
If you have questions about how all of this will work, go ahead and ask them in the comment thread (Don’t start promoting your stuff today — it’s not time yet), although I will note that specific instructions for each day will appear on that day. Don’t worry, it’ll be pretty easy. Thanks and feel free to share this post with creative folks who will have things to sell this holiday season.
Rec Category: Rodney McKay Rating Explicit Characters: Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex Pairings: Rodney/John, John/OC Categories: slash, internalized homophobia (or not?), humor, jealousy Warnings: Creator choose to not use archive warnings Words: 11,136 Author's Journal: n/a Author's Website:objectlesson on AO3 Link:Bare
Author’s summary: “Did you not know,” Teyla says carefully, shooting a concerned look at Ronon over their mostly empty plates, “that Lt. Colonel Sheppard enjoys the company of—”
“No, I did not!” Rodney manages to grit out, sucking in air desperately before grabbing his glass of water and downing it. “Since fucking when?!”
Why This Must Be Read: This is truly an exceptional, fantastic fic—I promise, once you start, you won’t be able to stop. It’s an amazing journey through so many emotions, and it fits their characters perfectly. Objectlesson makes you laugh at the beginning and leaves you gasping for air at the end because of the intense feelings and the hot, dirty sex—in the best possible ways. There are so many wonderful little moments in this story. Rodney’s awkward, scientific, and curious Rodney-logic, and his step-by-step realization of his own feelings — while finally uncovering John’s deepest desires — are an incredible rollercoaster of obliviousness, humor, sweetness, raw emotion, and mind-blowing sex. They’re unstoppable, completely and deeply in love! It’s one of those stories everyone should read and reread. Go for it!
Last Monday, I had another Year of Adventure outing: kaytecat and I drove to Northfield, the city of both our alma maters (I went to St. Olaf, and she went to Carleton). Just outside of Northfield is a state park we were interested in exploring it. kaytecat had a state park pass on her car, which made things easy.
The weather was splendid, with a brilliantly blue, cloudless sky. We took things slowly, as both kaytecat and I have some impairment to our walking, but we greatly enjoyed exploring the looping hiking paths as we talked. We've known each other for years in our common sf community, but this was probably the longest conversation we've had for years, and it was nice to learn more about the life of a long-time acquaintance.
After a couple of hours on the paths, we went into Northfield and had lunch at a tea shop I've dined at before. The food was good, and I bought a pair of earrings shaped like a teacup and saucer. After eating some delicious quiche, we spent a little time poking around Northfield, exploring a couple of antique shops and kaytecat bought several small samples of different kinds of balsamic vinegar.
It was a day well-spent.
Image description: Lower third: two women (Peg and kaytecat) in winter coats wearing sunglasses in bright sunshine smile at the camera. Between them a waterfall flows (Hidden Falls in Nerstrand State Park). Upper two-thirds: a view looking straight up of a vividly blue sky, with bare tree tops ringing the view. In the center of the blue sky is a pair of earrings shaped as a china cup and saucer.
Nerstrand
Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
I find it quite unsettling how we talk about reading something “in” a book, but watching something “on” TikTok.
Previously, the word “in” was for a message, while the word “on” was for a medium. The metaphor was that the word “on” indicated a form of support, while “in” connoted immersion.1 If you put an actor on a stage, he is able to perform in a play.
Until the invention of the telephone, we were pretty good at keeping these prepositions separate, but now the means of communication is increasingly getting conflated with the communication itself.
Each technological advancement has eroded the distinction between the medium and the message. A book feels different from a page, but TikTok doesn’t feel different from a TikTok video. If you say “I saw that on TikTok,” your statement is essentially synonymous with “I saw that in a TikTok video.”
And yet this conflation creates a dangerous fallacy, where the language of infrastructure is used to describe the act of communication itself.
I also see this happening with the word “platform.” A platform was originally a physical surface to stand on, like a soapbox. It was something that lifted you up, making it easier to directly communicate with your audience.
Meanwhile, a “platform” on social media is more like an intermediary—one that intercepts your speech and only distributes messages that are profitable for the company. You don’t know your audience, and your message is spread indirectly.
These are two distinct definitions, and yet the tech companies want you to confuse them. The wording is a trap—they’ll deliberately use the incorrect “platform as raised structure” metaphor when it benefits them.2 Each meaning subtly affects how we organize and understand information online.
On one hand, there is physical platform logic: this is a harmless, neutral venue enabling the exchange of ideas. Anybody “on” the platform has equal access to a potential audience. No matter what, the auditorium stays the same capacity; the stage stays the same height from the ground.
In reality, we should be using digital platform logic: there is an entity controlling the size of the auditorium. Any message going “into” this intermediary only succeeds if it optimizes for the metrics they established to profit off our ideas. The “platform” is anything but a neutral venue for ideas—but we lose that nuance when we think about it inhabiting physical space.
As an influencer, I’ve been to my fair share of events where a platform representative highlights the “digital town square” or “marketplace of ideas” available on their app. These phrases set up an assumption that our ideas have equal weight. Each person can show up, share what’s on their mind, and be heard by others. We forget that there is an asymmetry toward ideas that benefit the tech company. We are using physical platform logic.
Then there’s the fact that a physical stage doesn’t do anything; it is there for us to use it. A digital platform does everything: it decides what qualifies as an acceptable message and who gets to hear it.
Unlike a soapbox, then, a digital platform has agency, and yet they consistently use soapbox rhetoric to absolve themselves of responsibility. Any problems with radicalization, or misinformation, or slop, are the fault of creators who make it. We’re just a platform! It’s not our fault for what others say “on” the platform! Never mind that the intermediary structures incentives for influencers to talk a certain way, and then chooses how to distribute content.
Even our choice of preposition plays into physical platform logic. Research shows that we ascribe a different locus of control when we use the words “on” and “in.” An actor has less control in a play, since he’s just following directions, but he has more control on the stage, since a raised surface doesn’t tell him what to do.
“On” has figure control—the thing “on” the surface has more agency—while “in” has ground control—the container affects the embedded object.3 Essentially, we use physical platform logic when we talk about seeing things “on TikTok”; that implies TikTok is merely a supportive surface for communication. A more accurate metaphor might be that we see things “in TikTok,” where the platform indeed controls everything we say.
Once you start paying attention to platform logic, you’ll notice it every time a social media CEO does an interview or testifies in front of Congress. When it comes to something like regulating explicit content, they’ll proudly use digital platform language: “we have safeguards in place,” “we’re putting restrictions on that.” If the discussion pivots to the harmful effects of social media, they’ll switch to physical platform language: “we can’t control that,” “this is up to the users.” The more we notice this kind of fallacy, the more we can hold the platforms accountable.
But it’s even more important to extend this thinking to your own relationship with social media. Are you really looking at something “on” a “platform” when all your messages are being intercepted and all your information is being gathered? A physical, raised structure certainly doesn’t do that—but a digital intermediary does. Don’t use the wrong kind of logic, because it will affect how you understand reality.
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If you liked this essay, you should get my book Algospeak, which describes how platforms affect communication!!
Jamrozik, Anja, and Dedre Gentner. “Well‐Hidden Regularities: Abstract Uses of in and on Retain an Aspect of Their Spatial Meaning.” Cognitive Science 39.8 (2015): 1881-1911.
Very shortly after I posted my recent request for pointers on 3D printing education – a request which was occasioned by my getting excited over my new and improved typing capability courtesy of my new NocFree ergonomic keyboard and wanting to make it a peripheral – my shoulder/back went *spung* in the location and way I had had a repetitive strain injury a decade+ previously.
*le sigh*
I'm back to writing ("writing") slowly and miserably dictation, because all of my other forms of data entry aggravate this RSI. (This explains how rambly and poorly organized the previous post was and this one too will be.)
I'm going to try to debug my ergonomics, but it remains to be seen whether I can resume typing.
Thanksgiving came at an opportune time, because it took me away from computers for a day. But I had wanted to get another post out before the end of the month. We'll see what happens.
So, uh, I had been going to post about how I have worked back up to something like 80%, maybe 90%, of my keyboard fluency on the NocFree. Eit.
New fossils reveal a second hominin species living beside Lucy—walking differently, eating differently, and thriving in its own evolutionary niche.
Researchers have finally assigned a strange 3.4-million-year-old foot to Australopithecus deyiremeda, confirming that Lucy’s species wasn’t alone in ancient Ethiopia. This hominin had an opposable big toe for climbing but still walked upright in a distinct style. Isotope tests show it ate different foods from A. afarensis, revealing clear ecological separation. These insights help explain how multiple early human species co-existed without wiping each other out.
Niche partitioning is a standard way to minimize competition between species. It's most extreme in dense habitat like rainforests but it appears elsewhere too.
So one of my current projects-in-rotation is doing an extremely geeky analysis of the history and dynamics of the Best Related* Hugo category.
The initial stage was to create a spreadsheet of all the known nominees (finalists, long-list, and any additional available data), track down additional data related to them, and categorize the nature and content of the works from various angles.
The second stage was to describe and document the procedural activities behind the creation and modification of the category, as well as to do the same for other Hugo categories that interacted with its scope in some way.**
The third stage was to put together simple descriptive statistics for nomination patterns, comparing the three "eras" of the category scope and (to the extent possible) comparing chronological changes within each era that give evidence for the evolution of nominator attitudes. (Graphs! We have graphs!)
Now I've moved on to a more narrative analysis of each of the various category axes (e.g., media format, content type, etc.) examining what they tell us about how the nominating community thinks about appropriate scope and noteworthiness. As I've hoped would happen, some interesting thoughts and observations are showing up as I work through the discussions, and I'm making notes towards an eventual Conclusions section.
To some extent, I have three sets of questions that I'd like to answer:
1) On a descriptive basis, what have people nominated for Best Related? How have changes in the official definition and name of the category affected what people nominate, and where are the places where nominators have pushed the edges of the official scope and, in so doing, affected future decisions about changing the official scope?
2) Can we determine what makes nominators consider a work worthy of nomination for Best Related? How do factors including format, subject, and creator visibility interact in the nomination dynamics? To what extent are larger socio-political currents reflected in what is nominated?
3) On an anecdotal basis, there are opinions that the Best Related category has "jumped the shark" in terms of works being nominated that are frivolous, trivial, out-of-scope, etc. Some ascribe this to the open-ended definition of the scope under the Best Related Work label. Are there quantitative or qualitative differences in what is being nominated currently that would support an opinion that the category is becoming less relevant in terms of recognizing "worthy" work? And if so (not saying I hold this opinion), does the data point to approaches that might discourage "outliers" from an agreed-on scope without the need for procedural gymnastics or ruthlessly excluding worthy works purely on the basis of format? (Works that would have no other route to recognition under the current Hugo Awards program.)
Please note that my purpose in doing this analysis is scientific curiosity (and a desire to keep my analytic brain in practice). I tend to be solidly on the "let the nominators decide" team outside of the scope definitions enshrined in the WSFS constitution (which Hugo administrators have often subsumed to the "let the nominators decide" position). But at the same time, I'm interested in answering the question of "how has the body of nominations/finalists/winners changed as the scope of the category has broadened?"
It will be several more months (at least) before I'll have a draft ready for anyone else to look at. At which point I'll be looking for some beta readers, not only for intelligibility and accuracy but for any points of context that I may be unaware of. I anticipate publishing the resulting work in my blog, though I may be looking for some other venue to mirror it for a wider audience.
*"Best Related" is my umbrella term for the three stages of the category: Best Non-Fiction Book, Best Related Book, and Best Related Work. Part of my analysis is to examine how changes in the category name and scope affected what got nominated.
**For example, how the creation of categories for Best Fancast, Best Game, etc. interacted with the nomination of those types of works under Best Related.
Most of the time when I read book reviews in The Atlantic, I think “Mmmm, glad someone else read this so I don’t have to.” But when I read their review of Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, I was like “I need this in my eyeballs NOW.”
The Director (translated from German by Ross Benjamin) is a novelized biography of G. W. Pabst, one of the most important directors in the post-World War I German film scene, most famous today for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. (Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks is the one floating in my vague “I’d like to see that one day” mental cloud.)
After Hitler rose to power, Pabst left Germany and looked for work in Hollywood. He struggled to find work in America, returned to Europe not long before the outbreak of war, and ended up making films in Nazi Germany.
These are the basic outlines of Pabst’s life, and they’re a matter of historical record. From here on out, I’m going to be referring specifically to the Pabst of the book, who clearly has some points of divergence with the real Pabst. For instance: book!Pabst has a son of military age, who is clearly standing in for the experience of the Average German Youth, while the real Pabst’s baby son was born during the war.
Now clearly the central question of the book is, how do you go from hating a regime so much that you flee to another country to uneasily collaborating with it? Part of the answer being that Pabst, in his own mind, is not collaborating: he’s not making propaganda films, he’s making non-political films! And he just happens to be making them in, okay, Nazi Germany, but does making art under an evil regime necessarily make that art evil?
And, okay, yes, technically his films are funded by the Nazi film ministry because that’s the sole source of funding in Nazi Germany. But what if you’re taking the funds from the Nazi film ministry and making a film like Paracelsus, which has what might be taken as an anti-Nazi message…? The whole sequence where a madman starts dancing, and everyone else starts dancing in time with him……?
But, I mean. Is that an anti-Nazi message, or is that just Pabst fans trying to come up with a justification for why “made films for Nazi Germany” is not quite as bad as it looks?
And then you have Pabst’s next film, his lost Molander, based on a book by a Nazi party hack named Karrasch. (There’s a hilari-terrifying scene where Pabst’s wife finds herself in a book club entirely devoted to Karrasch, who sounds like Nazi Nicholas Sparks). The subject matter is foisted on Pabst, but he digs beneath the surface of the story till he can make the script his own, then heads to Prague to film it.
The city is being continually bombed, and the Soviets are getting closer every day. Pabst’s assistant Franz comments, “Don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse?”
“Times are always strange,” Pabst tells him. “Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that matters.”
They’re supposed to get a battalion of soldiers for extras, but the battalion is called away to the front right before they film. So - Pabst turns to the local concentration camp.
I should say that this is not a spoiler - we learn it in the first chapter - and also that Pabst’s concentration camp extras, specifically, are historical speculation. There really were directors who used concentration camp inmates as extras (famously Leni Riefenstahl), but there’s no evidence if Pabst used them in Molander, as the film really was lost. But that’s what everyone was doing to make up labor shortages. It’s plausible.
And Pabst tells his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.”
Only in the end, the film is lost. So it doesn’t exist, after all.
I fed the birds. I've seen a large mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus several cardinals.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- We hacked away at the brush pile today. I managed to cut up one bush that had berries on it and dump the bits in the firepit. We also got some kindling cut to size.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
I fed the birds. I've seen a large mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus several cardinals.
I put out water for the birds.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- We hacked away at the brush pile today. I managed to cut up one bush that had berries on it and dump the bits in the firepit. We also got some kindling cut to size.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
EDIT 11/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.
The YouTube video above fascinates me, because it details how people making $500,000 a year — economically fortunate by any sane measure — are still frequently living paycheck to paycheck. One signal reason for this is the issue of lifestyle comparison, and the fact that income disparity in the 1% is vastly wider than the income disparity within other segments of American life.
Huh? Well, as an example, let’s look at the third quartile of income in the US. In 2023 that third quintile had incomes roughly between $61,000 and $98,000, according to the US Census. Everyone within that quintile was within $37,000 dollars of each other in yearly income, more or less. That disparity is not nothing, obviously, but it’s all within economic hailing distance. In the one percent, the income range was between about $560,000 and, well, more than a billion dollars (this is reported income, not unrealized, illiquid wealth in things like stocks and real estate). Someone on the lowest rung of the 1% is vastly economically closer to someone in abject poverty than they are to that billionaire.
Thing is, if you are in the 1%, you’re not comparing your lifestyle to someone living in a tarpaper shack, you’re comparing your lifestyle to other people in the 1%. This often means comparing yourself to people who have ten or a hundred times more income than you do, with similar inequalities in overall wealth. Your lifestyle costs more, and because it costs more, the temptation of the “lower rung rich” to financially overextend themselves to keep up appearances is real — and also, in the world of the upper classes, things just cost more, because companies catering to rich people know their customers don’t want to be seen counting their coins. The person in the market for a BMW 7 series is a fundamentally different economic entity than the person in the market for a Honda Accord. This person is shopping at Erewhon, not Aldi. In the 1%, apparently, you are who you appear to be, or at least, who you appear to be to your neighbors and co-workers.
(Mind you, shit’s getting more expensive for everyone everywhere, it’s not just the 1% feeling the inflationary pinch. But as the video points out, businesses and economists are aware that most people in lower four quintiles are as squeezed as they’re going to get; any new growth in sales/revenues are going to come from the top end, which makes them ripe for price increases on goods and services directed to them specifically.)
“Well, Scalzi, you’re bougie as fuck and yet you don’t seem to be living paycheck to paycheck,” I hear you say. And it’s true! There are reasons for that. One, I’m a writer, and my “paychecks” — advances, royalties, the occasional film/TV option — arrive so sporadically that if we tried to budget around their arrival we would be screwed. Early on, when I was still a freelancer (and, to be clear, with the help of Krissy having a more regular income) we built up a “buffer account” to make sure our paying of bills was not dependent on waiting for any one particular check of mine to arrive. That buffer account still exists, just a little more padded out.
Two, we’ve largely avoided the comparison trap. We live in rural Ohio, a location not exactly swimming with people whose income we directly index our own against, and not a place where shops cater to the higher end of incomes. I’m a writer, which means the professional community I am part of does not generally have the same incomes as, say, neurosurgeons or finance dudes. The highly sporadic nature of writer income also means I am aware the income is not reliable, and watching the careers of other writers through the years means I know one can’t just assume everything will be golden forever. Also, you know. Krissy and I both grew up with periods of our lives where we experienced, shall we say, a deficit of money. This has made each of us relatively conservative with what we do with our money, both individually and together. We’re not going to spend money to impress other people. We’re sure as hell not going to pile up debt to do it.
Three, we have other advantages and strategies. Where we live means we are able to acquire property at a discount to other areas (this means we’re unlikely to sell it later at ridiculously inflated prices, as we might if we lived in a city stuffed with high-income earners, but that’s fine). We don’t have any debt, which means we don’t have to pay out of our income to service it. I am financially literate and numerate (my very first book was on finance) and I don’t like to gamble, so our overall investment strategy is very much predicated on the idea that compound interest is our friend. Whenever I feel like trying to get rich quick, I buy a lottery ticket. It has roughly the same odds as me or any other non-professional without access to advanced financial market tools successfully day trading or timing the market.
Finally, for both Krissy and me, there’s a point where the use of money has diminishing returns, and we don’t tend to spend after that bend of the curve. Last year Krissy bought a Honda CR-V hybrid. Could we have afforded something more upscale? Sure. But inasmuch as the CR-V had everything Krissy wanted and needed in a car, and going upscale from there would have meant a lot more money for only marginal improvement in utility, was it worth it to her? No. Likewise, my 2011 MINI Countryman lacks some modern technological amenities that I would like in a car, but not so many or so much that I’m going to spend for a whole new car when my own car still runs perfectly well and, frankly, sticking my phone into an eye-level holder and using an adapter to plug the thing into my car speakers will handle 90% of what I want.
(This doesn’t mean I have never done silly things with money, as my frankly over-endowed guitar collection will indicate. But I don’t get out over my skis on stuff like that. I always check in with Krissy, who is our day-day-money manager, before I make any such purchases. If she tells me “no” then it doesn’t happen.)
Krissy and I have been smart, and also we have been lucky, which should not be discounted either. There are lots of points in our lives where we could have been one bad break away from real financial problems. Beyond this, I don’t pretend I haven’t been incredibly fortunate in my own career, sometimes for reasons that have very little to do with me directly. It also doesn’t hurt that my own skills were portable, which allowed us to live somewhere housing and living costs were not ridiculously high.
At the end of the day, however, we’ve avoided so many problems by simply not worrying about how we stacked up against other people financially, and by being able to be content when things are good enough. We didn’t need to keep up with the Joneses, or the Bezoses. We’re doing well enough to be happy. And that’s the thing.
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