When we last left off, we were identifying power-ups; little things that make you happy pretty much 100% of the time.  I was lamenting that Jane McGonigal’s power-ups in SuperBetter were wholesome — a handful of almonds or petting her dog — and mine felt less healthy — watch a few minutes of a Dungeons and Dragons game on YouTube or play a round of Shuffle Cats.  But cats playing cards beats out complex proteins in my book every day of the week.

Power-ups are important.  As she says on page 169, “It’s much easier to find little ways to feel happy and connected than it is to block or prevent negative emotions entirely.”  You don’t want to feel stressed, but making yourself not feel stressed is harder than making yourself happy for a few minutes with Shuffle Cats (Shuffle Cats makes you happy, too, right?).  And by making yourself happy for those few minutes, you break the cycle and may even have a fighting chance of making yourself not feel stressed.  Win-win!

You need these power-ups in place if you’re going to fight your bad guys.  Your bad guys are the ways you keep yourself from your goals.  They’re your emotional obstacles.

Naming them takes away some of their power because once you have proven their existence by giving them a name and description, you can figure out how to fight them.  You can dismiss them.  You do not need to give them more power than they deserve.

I sat down at Whole Foods and started making a list.  There was Imogen the Imposter, who makes me doubt my capabilities.  (Side note, I really wish I hadn’t named her Imogen because I love that name and intended to use it on a future pet.)  Seymour the Self-Doubter.  He’s actually a lot like Imogen.  They may be dating.  They mess up my life in the same way.  Tess the Talker-Outer, who convinces me not to try things.  Walter What If, who freaks me out with his predictions.  Wally the Waster of Time.

Was it a little silly?  Yes.  Yes, I felt silly sitting at a table at Whole Foods, writing out a list of self-sabotaging traits and pairing them with drippy names.  At this point, I know in the future that I (and perhaps you, if you’re doing this, too) will put together an opposition team to fight these bad guys, but when I did this exercise, I didn’t understand why I had to identify the bad before I identified the good.

But now, looking back at it, I think it’s important to know what you’re up against before you choose the correct tools to fight it.  Everyone has self-doubt, everyone has little what ifs that tug at their heart. (I say “everyone,” even though I know, since this is the Internet, that I’m going to get a comment from someone informing me that they have never felt a moment of self-doubt or fear in their life.)  But every internal self-doubt or what if generator is unique.  And you need to know your stumbling blocks — identify them, name them, picture them — and in doing so, you will know exactly how to fight them.

So who are the super villains who haunt your brain and heart?

I’m writing about SuperBetter the app as well as SuperBetter the book because… well… I learned about them via a podcast and now I want to talk about everything I’m learning on them. If you want to talk about them, too, join along. If not, skip the posts marked SuperBetter.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Justine told me about a game her child was playing called Little Alchemy.  You start off with four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and you combine them to create 560 other items — from werewolves to cookies.

I love this game.

I’ll admit that I cheat and will pull up an item — let’s say, the sun — and then try it against every other item that I’ve already found.  You end up finding a lot of things that way.  Most of the combinations make sense: Wax and thread form a candle (of course!).  Others do not make sense:  Sugar cube and campfire form a marshmallow (what?).  And others are sobering: Gun plus human equals corpse.

Considering that I am not making actual candles and marshmallows, this app probably qualifies as a time waster.  But it’s a really fun time waster.

What is currently your favourite time waster?

And if you want to try Little Alchemy, it looks like you can play it via the website.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I don’t have a lot of secrets.  By “secrets,” I mean things I tell no one.  Josh will attest that I like to tell him everything I’m thinking and feeling (usually beginning around 11 pm).  If he is out, I will tell my parents, siblings, or friends.  The things I don’t tell are pretty boring, and I wouldn’t call them secrets.

And this article about brain hacking still gave me pause.

There is a difference between choosing to tell Josh my thoughts or choosing to write about events here, and having someone else pluck those opinions or beliefs out of my brain.  Like the technological equivalent to a steaming mug of veritaserum (“Three drops of this and even You-Know-Who himself would spill out his darkest secrets.” –Snape)

The article explains how it could happen… now:

At the Enigma security conference here on Tuesday, University of Washington researcher Tamara Bonaci described an experiment that demonstrated how a simple video game could be used to covertly harvest neural responses to periodically displayed subliminal images. While her game, dubbed Flappy Whale, measured subjects’ reactions to relatively innocuous things, such as logos of fast food restaurants and cars, she said the same setup could be used to extract much more sensitive information, including a person’s religious beliefs, political leanings, medical conditions, and prejudices.

Okay, so not exactly the same thing as knowing that I purchased a chocolate bar this week (by the way, Josh, I purchased a chocolate bar and didn’t share it), but still.  This is especially true if that data was mined unknowingly: if companies or organizations used signals from wearable technology, timing the images with information from the device.

Except… it’s not as if they have to do anything that drastic.  At any given moment, Facebook can look down my wall, see what I’ve posted or liked or read or lingered on, and deduce my political leanings, future purchases, or medical conditions.  And I’ve knowingly given those secrets away, if we can call them secrets.

We give away our thought privacy every time we interact with Facebook content, so why did this article give me pause? 

It was a bit of perfect timing because I just signed up for Note to Self’s Privacy Paradox with the kids.  I’m a Believer.  Take the quiz and find out your privacy personality.

Linus and I have been having a good time curling up on the sofa and reading the Washington Post.  He likes to face the iPad screen as if he is reading, too.  He’s just a really smart pig.

Reading the Washington Post is the way I’m going to quiet down the noise online.  I decided this week that I am only going to get my news from five sources: Washington Post, New York Times (less so, since I only have a certain number of free articles per month), NPR, BBC, and CNN (more news than commentator opinion).

If something is actually news, it will show up in one of those five sources above.  Not every story will hit all five spaces, but important information will hit one of those five spaces.  And if it doesn’t appear in any of those five spaces, I’m going to mark it down as somewhere between not true and too soon to tell.

The rest of my time online, I’m reading personal stories or emotional reactions to the news.  In other words, I’m reading your blogs.  I don’t mind reading about current events in a space where I already connect with the writer; in fact, I enjoy that.  But the constant barrage of opinion pieces of Medium and Huffington Post, not to mention the countless memes and tweets, have me burned out.  As I said earlier this week, it’s like one, on-going scream.  And I need things to be a little quieter if I want to think.

Where are you getting your news?

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

In Search of Motherhood has a post about making a hard choice.  She turns down an academic position despite wanting it badly due to how much it will take her away from her kids: “But it is so incredibly frustrating.  I am forced to choose between a satisfying professional life and dedicating time to my children.  It shouldn’t have to be this way.”  It shouldn’t, and that’s a fight worth having: making the workplace a healthy part of a life vs. the workplace overshadowing a life.  Everyone needs a work-life balance, whether parenting or not.

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post about immigration that contains an important reminder getting lost in the global conversation: “I think that people forget that people don’t want to NEED to leave home. They were proud not of what it had become but of its heart. They were proud of their language; my friend tried taught me some Vietnamese because I was interested. They were proud of their food and shared it with me. They had a large flag in the dining room. They also felt an obligation to the country that took them in.”  It is hard enough to leave what you know.  It is harder still to feel unwelcome where you land.

Lastly, Pages, Stages, and Rages has a post about how Broadway songs are keeping her sane.  She admits: “I then thought of what I used to do when I was uncomfortable and I thought of Man of La Mancha. Got the CD and listened to it. And today, today, it is helping me go on. Helping me say that I can follow the quest. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.”  I love this, from one musical theater geek to another.

The roundup to the Roundup: Where I’m getting my news.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 27th and February 3rd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

A long time ago (at least, it feels like a long time ago), every once in a while, something would happen and we would all react to it.  Sometimes it was something good — Princess Kate’s wedding — and sometimes it was something horrible — a mass shooting — but in all cases, we were hungry for connection; we were hungry to read each other’s words and feel comfort or collective joy.

But now the issues come fast and furious, every single day.

There is something new to write about every day; a new fear, a new outrageous action, a new protest.  It feels like this administration is strangling out everything else in the world, smothering out the day-to-day moments until the online world feels like one, enormous, on-going scream.

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When we first brought Linus home, ChickieNob whisked him away to her room and closed the door.  When I came up a little while later to check what was happening, I found them curled up together, watching an episode of Buffy.  Linus was attentively listening to her explain the basic plotline for the show, and the names and relationships of the various characters.

I don’t want that memory smothered out by someone else’s hate.  But it’s hard to remember to write about it when I peruse the news sites prior to opening an empty blog post.  Every sweet moment flies out of my head, replaced by the enormous, on-going scream.

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I finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (so good — it made me think back to my own, albeit-non-boarding-school high school experience) and started American Wife.  I borrowed the book from the library, and it smells like someone kept the copy in a nest of old pantyhose for several years.

I wanted to read it because my understanding of the book is that it’s a fictionalized account of Laura and George Bush, or a more liberal first lady speaking about her husband, a Republican President.

I know very little about Laura Bush.  My only Laura Bush story involves a wedding registry at a Crate and Barrel.  We had just come from the doctor’s office — this was before we started treatments — and we were trying to get a referral for the RE.  I was miserable, but we had to take care of a wedding gift.  It took about twenty minutes to get the registry up on their ancient computer, and we were just about to scroll down and see what they wanted when the Secret Service came in and said we had to leave because they had to sweep the store so Laura Bush could shop.

This is a pretty common occurrence in DC, like traffic stopping for the motorcade, but it’s annoying when you have one errand to run and you can’t complete it.  She browsed for all of five minutes, and then left without buying anything.  In the meantime, while we were standing outside for the sweep, the computer reset and we had to start from scratch bringing up the registry.  We gave up after a few minutes and our friends got a crepe pan — out go-to gift at the time.  So, sorry friends who got a crepe pan that wasn’t on your registry.

Anyway, I got this book because I was hoping that it would give insight into how we can live in this world for the next few years.  How we can get along with family and friends who have different views.  Maybe it’s only fiction and I’ll be disappointed to learn the answer is just suck it up.  Or maybe there will be a kernel of something useful in the pages.  Because right now, my instinct is to join that enormous, on-going scream every single day.

What other sound can you make right now?

There are so many stories out there that tell you how to vanquish hate.  You throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom or you destroy all the horcruxes.  But fewer stories that tell you how to keep someone close that stands on the other side of a deep divide.

Right now, that divide is so wide, I fear that not only will our hands never stretch and reach over that space, but that divide will remain for generations to come; the echoes of it repeating long after the original scream is gone.