Cute little ad for Habitica.  The game has been pretty damn good to me these past couple years.

Beautiful song, but the video will ruin your day.  You've been warned.

Check this out --- in just a couple hours, I could drive to the latest place in which an awful lot of people are throwing a very public hissy fit over the fact that some of the high school students would like to maybe, please, in 2013, stop having racially segregated proms.  And this is just the one we're hearing about this year...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/segregated-prom-wilcox-county-ga-high-school_n_3013733.html

Can it really be this bad?  I always hear the high price of healthcare (and, in particular, healthcare for the uninsured and individually insured) defended by insinuating that all those poor hospitals would go out of business if they didn't charge those rates.  But if the articles Mano references here are accurate and representative, hospitals aren't just barely scraping by, they're absurdly profitable.  I've got nothing against companies being able to turn a decent profit, but gouging sick people into bankruptcy seems like a poor way to do it, particularly if you're doing it on behalf of something that should theoretically be a nonprofit organization.  What gives?

A little late to be posting this I guess, but my new year's resolution is to finish writing my dissertation this year. I have been using Habitica (http://habitica.com) to help me with this, although this year has gotten off to a bit of a rocky start with all the terrible political shit that needs dealing with. But there are going to be a lot of casualties caused by this upcoming administration; I need to make sure that my dissertation is not one.

Since it seems that activism is creeping towards taking over my life now, I need to set some limits. I am adding a daily dissertation writing appointment to my calendar, with a specific fixed time and place, and I'm going to enforce that with a corresponding daily Habitica task. I will make sure that social media notifications are shut off during that time. I may add other enforcement or encouragement mechanisms later, but I would like to keep it simple at first so that it is easier to modify.

We'll see how this goes.

#HabiticaResolutions

Here's my entry for the HabitRPG 2014 Halloween Costume Contest.  HabitRPG (http://habitrpg.com) is a fun "gamification of life" thing that I've been using lately.  I like it quite a lot. 

Little Things
I know I haven't posted here for a while. I've been busy, of course, and also I've kind of run out of interest in doing much other than tending my own garden for now. But a couple of pretty wildflowers showed up recently, so I figured I'd display them her...