Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, videos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

From Illumination:

There’s light everywhere, even in these darkening days. You just have to look for it.

Do I Look Fat? I often get uncomfortable when other people bring up weight loss/gain. It’s too easy to unintentionally offend someone so I end up saying nothing at all.

Open Thread: Book Recommendations. Someday I’d love to invite all of my readers out to dinner. We’d eat and drink delicious things and talk about books all night. Who’s in? 🙂

How an Invitation to Tea Curbed a Slew of Suicide Attempts. What would you do if you moved to a new house and realized that it was across the street from a cliff where desperate people often chose to end their lives?

Marriage Was Not Designed to Make You Happy. This isn’t to say that marriage was designed to make you miserable, just that there’s no such thing as being completed by another person. Love is wonderful but it isn’t a magical potion that fixes all of your problems.

From Silhouette of a Sparrow:

I was born blue. Life ripped me early from my safe place and thrust me into the world. It was all so astonishing that I forgot to breathe.

My mother gave me life that day, but I was the one who decided to take it. I claimed it for myself.

What have you been reading?

Today I learned my friend Bruce Gerencser is shutting down his blog. While I completely understand his reasons for doing so I’m really going to miss his voice in the blogosphere.

There’s only so much time in an hour, a day, a lifetime and sometimes you have to prioritize to fit the important stuff in.

Just after I read Bruce’s final post I stumbled across this video of the history of the world. It compresses 13.75 billion years into 1 minute, 37 seconds of wonder. Somehow this seemed like a fitting tribute to all of the things Bruce has shared over the years.

Mike Hanttula recently shared some Halloween links on his site. This one was my favourite:

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, pictures, websites and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Some People Are Going to Leave. I’d love to hear the story behind this.

Social Consumption Pyramid. If my family lived nearby I’d have a much easier time living this way.

Don’t Call Me Baby. Comedy gold.

We Are Atheism. An “It Gets Better” project for Atheists. It’s amazing to compare the wildly different experience non-theists have depending on where they live. Here in Toronto there’s so much religious diversity that most people don’t make any assumptions about this topic and don’t care what you believe. I have friends living in other communities who are social pariahs because they choose to be honest about their non-theism.

Civilized Politics. Here’s an interesting link for those of you who like debating controversial subjects. This message board was created by the same people who run Etiquette Hell and is designed to be a polite place to talk about politics.

Click Here to Win Autographed Books From Susan Hill. Ok, this is exciting. Susan Hill is the author of my favourite ghost story of all time, The Woman in Black. Until October 31 readers can enter a contest to win signed copies of all of her ghost novels.

The Midwife of Hope River kept me up late reading a few nights this week. Patience Murphy doesn’t know it yet but the U.S. has just begun to slide into the Great Depression. As the economy worsens and public funds for healthcare dry up she finds her role as town midwife expanding rapidly into social and political controversies. The boundaries between her personal and professional life also blur and some painful secrets from her past begin to worm their way into her present day life.

What have you been reading?

In early 2012 I quietly shut down my Facebook profile. As much as I enjoyed hearing about the daily lives of family and friends I was disturbed by how often Facebook’s updates made my experience worse and how difficult it was to find, much less adjust, their privacy settings.

Longtime readers know that I tend to be a fairly private person. You’ll never see me walk up to an acquaintance and tell him or her the story of my life. It’s not that I have anything to hide, I simply prefer to get to know people as individuals before sharing every thought that rattles through my mind.

I’ll be honest – there have been times when I’ve really missed Facebook and have almost signed up with them again. It’s so much easier to log into one website and see status updates from almost all of my favourite people in this world than it is to email or call them individually.

A news story that came to my attention earlier today confirmed I made the right decision last winter, though. Apparently Facebook will soon be charging people to promote their posts to friends. Pay the fee and your post will be bumped to the top of everyone’s new feeds.

This is the opposite of what social media is supposed to accomplish. What I love(d) about Facebook and presently love about twitter is the element of surprise. When I log on and read tweets these days I have no idea what everyone will talk about this time: local or national news, cute animal photos, pictures of my friend’s food, rants about the frustrations of daily life from celebrities and average folks alike.

If I wanted to listen to monologues I’d read a newspaper.

99% of the time I don’t so I use Twitter instead.

Why is this so difficult for Facebook to understand?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, videos, quotes and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.- Toni Morrison

Principles of a Good Relationship that I Wish I Had Learned in Kindergarten. I don’t normally link to the same site week after week but Frankin Veaux had another fantastic post several days ago. Once again this link is work-safe but the rest of the site may not be.

From Darger Family is Because:

For us it is important that we are who we are and we remain responsible for who we are. It often takes courage to be authentic. Courage is to be afraid and to do it any way. Most of us when we are in fear are not in action. Where the action is we are not. We become reactive instead of activists in our own lives.

Would Having an “End Date” Help Marriage? I don’t think it would but this is a great discussion.

The world would be a better place if we had more astronomy raps:

This video makes me so grateful for legal, safe and effective birth control. A few generations ago it was much more difficult for women in industrialized countries to choose whether, when and how often they had children. I hope we live to see the day when all women have this kind of autonomy.

Shadows, the sequel I mentioned really looking forward to reading in last week’s Suggestion Saturday, turned out to be a big disappointment. The tone was much darker than I’d expected and while I’m a fan of dystopian stories I don’t like it when characters I’ve grown attached to sink into total hopelessness.

With that being said I can recommend a much better example of this type of fiction, After the Snow. Willo was born years after the ocean currents stopped bringing warm water to North America.  He’s heard a few stories about life before the climate changed so drastically but right now he’s too busy keeping himself alive after being separated from his family. When he stumbles across two orphans also trying to survive on their own the decision he makes changes everything.
What have you been reading?