CircleThrice

This is, by design, not a very personal blog. I made the decision early on to keep most of my real life away from CircleThrice. There are several reasons for this. First, most of my life appears pretty boring. I have a family and a good career and a house. I'm interested in food (cooking, baking, preserving) and crafty hobbies like knitting -- probably a reaction against my tech-focused day job. I generally appear like a mundane, middle-class person. Or at least that's my goal. See, years ago I figured it was better to look ordinary and actually be interesting than the reverse. I enjoy passing as normal. Of course, there are still people who react to me with discomfort, suspicion, and sometimes fear -- kind of modern witchfinders, I suppose -- but I can't help that so I don't worry about it. Second, the most interesting non-magical part of my life is my work, which I also can't talk much about. Much of it is protected by NDA. I like my job very much, but that doesn…

In case you're not familiar with jailbreak in the tech sense, it's "to enable use of a consumer electronics product not intended by the manufacturer through the exploitation of software hacks."  Kate MacDonald cracked open the idea in a new way when she asked (on a private discussion forum) for techniques for "Jailbreaking your mind."

Note: I fully expect this to immediately go viral, as it seemed to spark something that spoke directly to people's experiences and a bunch of us were all over it. So full credit to Kate.

The suggestions in the discussion that followed were good and interesting and you can probably guess a lot of them (meditation made an appearance, as did plant substances). But technique aside, it got me to thinking: what is jailbreaking your mind FOR? What's the purpose?
That night, as I was drifting off to sleep, it came to me. What's important is not jailbreaking your mind, but what you do with it afterward. Let's take an ex…

Back in 2010, I picked up a book from the library called: Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back. The title has been changed (to be more buzz-word worthy I suppose) but I prefer the original. This is a book that would naturally appeal to me but that was ultimately disappointing.

See, 9/10 of the book was about how the world became a corporation... and only about 1/10 at the end contained a few lukewarm suggestions as to how to take it back. It's like that essay you write in college where you conceive of a great two part hypothesis... but can only find textual or research evidence for the first part. So you tack a few flaccid ideas and unconvincing quotes at the end and your teacher marks it as 'weak' and suggests cutting it out.

Weak was the last chapter of this book. Clearly, Rushkin had problems finding good examples of 'taking it back'. Barter networks were suggested. A focus on local purchasing was a reasonable suggestion. I think…