[The following is a complete account of how I arrived at devising this recipe, which is quite possibly very boring. If you want to skip ahead to the actual recipe, it's at the bottom.]

On Sunday night I caught a serious baking bug and decided I wanted to use shredded carrots in something. On the back of my package of Bob’s Red Mill Amaranth Flour is a recipe for amaranth carrot cookies. That sounded pretty good, but I didn’t want to make cookies; I wanted bars. Gluten-free (because I feel better that way), carrot-cake-tasting, chewy bars.

Oh, but oops: I ate the last 2 eggs this morning. Ok, so it’ll have to be vegan too.

So I looked online for vegan blondie recipes, finding this wholly approachable gluten-free gem (“Blondies”) on TheSensitivePantry.com. That might have worked, but I lacked the egg replacer and the applesauce.

Besides that, the next recipe reference I found was for carrot cake bars which included raisins and pineapple. Oh yeah, pineapple! Can’t have carrot cake without pineapple.

Finally, a nice looking (but not gluten-free) vegan carrot cake recipe revealed the solution to my particular no-egg problem: flax seeds. Ah, yes! 2 tablespoons of ground flax, hydrated with a bit of water, will replace 1 egg, though not without a bit of nuttiness and perceptible addition of fiber.

I stared at these recipes for a good 10 minutes, then threw a bunch of stuff in a 9×13″ glass casserole and baked it. It took a long time to bake (35 minutes), and I am not good at waiting.

So I stared at all the ingredients I had out in front of me and said, “what can I throw together with all of this stuff that would bake in about 10 minutes?”

Yes, this is how my mind — nay, my whole life — works.

Using roughly the same stuff as the carrot-pineapple bars in the oven, but resolving to reduce the amount of wetness after I saw how mushy were the bars-which-were-not-much-like-bars-at-all, a cookie batter emerged that I could tell would be perfect for oats. But I was fresh out of raisins… ah hah! These dates would do. I’d never cooked with black sphinx dates before, but since these cookies were a total experiment, I figured it was a good time to try.

The resultant cookies from this “method” were so amazing, I could hardly believe my luck at finding all the ingredients scribbled down afterwards. Thanks, younger me!

Well, here are the accidentally awesome oat date cookies.

Ingredients:

[dry]
1 C coconut flour
1 C Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free biscuit and baking flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/3 tsp salt
1 tbsp cinnamon

[wet]
5 Tb flax seed, freshly ground + 1/3 C water
1/2 C + 1 Tbsp oil
1/2 C honey
1/2 C light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla

[fillings]

2 cups quick-cooking oats (you could try regular oats; let me know how they turn out)
1/2 cup chopped dates (I used fresh black sphinx dates, which were delicious)

What to Do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Whip up the ground flax seed and water in a large bowl as if they were eggs. Leave to rest for at least 10 minutes. Do the next 3 steps while you’re waiting.
3. Mix up all the dry ingredients in another large bowl.
4. Pull out 2 baking sheets and grease them with a little coconut oil (or cooking spray, if you must).
5. Make tea.
6. Stir the rest of the wet ingredients into the flax seed mush, starting with the oil, then adding the brown sugar, and finishing with the honey.
7. Gradually pour and stir the dry ingredients into the wet ones.
8. You should now have a relatively wet batter that is ready to accept the “filling” ingredients. Start by stirring in the dates, trying as best you can to get them evenly distributed. Then stir in the oats a half-cup at a time. This will probably become physically difficult by the second cup. Your batter will be really sticky, as demonstrated by the picture.
9. Shape batter into 2- or 3-inch cookies about 1/2-inch tall on the baking sheets. These cookies will not change shape one iota when they bake. So I guess you could make fun shapes or something, if you wanted.
10. Bake for 12 minutes at 350 degrees F. For me, 12 minutes was PERFECT, but do check them after 10 minutes. They should look just slightly brown on top and on the edges.

Straight out of the oven, these cookies are a little odd. Go ahead and try them, but I guarantee you’ll like them better after they’ve rested and cooled. I liked them the best when I had to feed Calvin at 4am that morning.

Technorati Tags: cookies, dates, flax seeds, gluten-free, oats, vegan

Ok. Would you like to describe to me the kind of pain it’s going to be? Would that help? I think it wouldn’t. I think it’s going to have be experienced to be believed and understood, and when you feel it, you’ll just have to find some tools within yourself that match what needs to be done to get through it.

There are techniques that martial arts teaches that give you tools to deal with extreme situations of many kinds. Pain is just one kind of extreme experience.

I’ve had a lot of extreme experiences in my life as I’ve studied Goju-Ryu Karate-Do, Koryu Iaido, Wu-style Tai Chi, and a bit of yama-bushido with waterfall training. That last one is a doozy. Try standing under a mountain waterfall in early December, holding your balance on slippery rocks for at least 5 minutes while heavy, freezing cold water hits your head and your body basically goes into shock at about the 2.5-minute mark.

I digress. Tonight I found a blog post done by a woman at 1st kyu rank in Goju-Ryu karate regarding how it helped her in labor.

What’s particularly empowering to me is her mention of Sanchin kata, because that was the first thing that came to mind when I read about “breathing the baby down”.

Her blog seems to be down right now, so I’m reprinting the whole thing from Google cache here.

This is Google’s cache of http://www.otgka.co.uk/kath1.htm. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Sep 12, 2010 17:51:31 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime.

Text-only version

Pregnancy and Karate – My Experience

I start this article with the glad tidings of the birth of our daughter, Emma Louise Grant, on the 14th September 2000. For those whom did not realise, this is why I haven’t been training since January – no, I hadn’t emigrated or been abducted by aliens!!

I took the decision to rest and be cautious on realising I was pregnant, despite the fact that many women do continue their karate training to full term. I applaud those who do achieve this – personally, I was too tired after work and I did not want to disrupt the dojo’s training routines, despite reassurances from my sensei, Andy Barker, that this would not be the case! Having said this, Goju Ryu Karate did have a role to play in my pregnancy. I found the whole experience of training and taking gradings had equipped me quite uniquely for the rigours of labour!

I am currently first kyu, which has meant that gradings over the last four-five years have become more demanding physically and mentally. They have tested my personal metal to achieve higher standards and to push my body to the best of its ability. The mental focus required for all kata and particularly the technique of breathing in Sanchin kata enabled me to address the issues of relaxing and controlling my breathing during labour – an aspect of karate which I’m sure can be applied to many other situations, such as stress at work or confrontations…

The relaxation and breathing techniques from karate helped enormously in alleviating the labour pains. I was also able to overcome the additional birth complications which I experienced by drawing on the same determination, focus and spirit required to succeed in my gradings.

I feel Goju Ryu Karate provides unique skills not attained from most team sports; it is more than just a way of keeping fit, I think it is about developing yourself from the inside spiritually and mentally; about pushing mind and body to your own perceived boundaries and beyond. The sense of achievement at the end of a grading – at all levels – supports this. I might also add that there is a wonderful sense of achievement and relief at the end of having given birth too!! When you see what you have laboured for – quite literally!!

Now Emma is with us, I hope to return to training soon and I would like to thank all our friends at Sheffield Hallam Dojo for their support over the last 9 months. I hope this article shows how much karate influences all aspects of our lives and is an encouragement to other expectant mothers amongst us!

Kathleen Grant
Sheffield Hallam Dojo

Technorati Tags: karate, martial arts, pain, pregnancy

An Identity forms a concept first, and seeks to mold the Meat to that concept, or at least to hold Meat up to the standards of that concept. An Identity can’t be content with the Meat’s reactions and adaptations to its conditions unless the two are in perfect alignment — which can never happen, as Identity and Meat, as separate entities, constantly shift and change at different rates.

A Whole Body is subject to and (most importantly) accepting of the forces within it that are responding to the forces outside of it. A Whole Body realizes the purposes it’s fulfilling and their context in the grander scheme, and forms a concept of itself on those parameters — not the other way around.

That may not sound all too positive — who wants to feel like they’re being led around by the whims of genetics and biochemistry? But it’s not as simple as that.

In fact, I find it rather liberating. Some things are going to happen with your body no matter how you may think your Identity matches or doesn’t match up to it. Pregnancy just puts a huge, bright spotlight on this reality whilst it knocks you on your ass and flips your brain inside out.

In the past, and like countless others in this culture, my self-talk has often been critical of perceived substandard Meaty qualities. These days, I am apt to look at myself in the mirror and perhaps giggle at some of the changes I’ve undergone (yes, even the varicose veins) while realizing that I am physically becoming a reflection of a lovely purpose.

Well. On to the real topic of this blog post.

My Fundus

According to the midwife I saw at St Luke’s before I got my Rhogam shot at the beginning of the week and the homebirth midwife I saw toward the end of this week, my belly is indeed on the smaller side (33 inches or so)… AND my fundus is growing underneath my ribs.

Yes! It certainly is! I don’t know that I’ve ever had more upright, brigadier-general-like posture in my entire life.

The baby made a bruise under my ribs a couple of weeks ago. This seems not to have healed entirely, but instead has continued to be abused by the encroachment of the fundus and the roving kicks of a growing boy.

Sleep for the past 2 weeks has been extremely difficult, as I need to maintain that elongation in my torso to keep my fundus from choking its own blood supply and going numb like a big squashed muscle would reasonably be expected to do.

So between the bruise and the pins-and-needles, AND the night-time itching, AND the fact that I can’t sleep on one side for longer than an hour… it looks like the next few weeks of pregnancy are going to make all these previous months look like swimming the backstroke.

I am very much looking forward to going into labor.

Technorati Tags: fundus, george, identity, pregnancy, rhogam, sleep

So I gave it a go. Ended up devouring the whole tome in 2 or 3 hours. It was good for me in an echo chamber sort of way — reading obvious things in all-caps like, “CRAZY PEOPLE ARE THE LAST PEOPLE TO KNOW THEY ARE CRAZY” kinda hits the spot — but with a few “oh really?” sorts of things sprinkled in too.

But this passage from the chapter entitled “Pregnancy Insanity” has special significance and verisimilitude:

“Here is another bit of Girlfriend advice: if your friends who have been pregnant tell you that it was the most emotionally fulfilling and happiest time of their life, don’t believe them. Those kinds of comments invariably make you feel that something is wrong with you if you don’t feel equally ecstatic, and they are undoubtedly inaccurate. Some strange biological force gives women amnesia about pregnancy, so that they forget the less savory details and see the whole thing in a sort of rosy glow. This is just nature’s way of making sure that women get pregnant more than once; if you remembered too much, you might never voluntarily repeat the experience.”

Yes, it does seem that way. Of course, it would also seem to me that there are some much better neurological reasons for this to happen, such as the fact that everything progresses on such a tiny timeframe compared to the rest of human life, and also that when we are faced with a happy outcome (such as a healthy child), we are apt to “correct” our prior memories to match.

But no matter. The point is, start writing more. And so I shall. Because pregnancy, while interesting, has not been the glowy happy-go-lucky time you always hear about. Or when it was/is, it’s because I’ve WORKED FOR IT, dammit. (Which reminds me to polish off the pending blog post about Relaxation, which I based a 5-minute talk on recently.)

I’m not going to do a full auto-expose here — there’s quite a bit I don’t really want to share with just anyone, and probably shouldn’t. But I might post a few sensitive things in passworded posts which will show up as Protected. If you want access, let me know. The qualifications are that you are female (or if male, be related to me by blood or marriage), that the post is tagged “pregnancy” or “post-partum”, and that “TMI” is not in your active vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: amnesia, neurology, post-partum, pregnancy

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Technorati Tags: hormones, pregnancy, sex

I keep having interesting ideas for blog posts while I’m out and about, and then I wish I had a laptop or something to hash it out on the spot, and I don’t write the idea down anywhere and it usually slips my mind.

Lately, when the writing actually works out, it’s because I’ve felt COMPELLED by circumstances — perhaps being trapped on a train, or perhaps being itched awake and unable to sleep but unable to do anything of import.

I’ve observed for a long time that creativity emerges from constraints.  As Jack White sings,

When you’re in your little room / and you’re working on something good / but if it’s really good / you’re gonna need a bigger room. / And when you’re in the bigger room / you might not know what to do / You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.

So the problem I haven’t yet solved — and which many great authors, musicians, and inventors seem to have — is the question of how to “artificially” set up those constraints to turn a creator into a creation machine.  Those same creators, of course, often have an extremely high tolerance for discomfort, the side effect of constraint.  Those constraints could be things like sequestering oneself in a cabin in near-Vancouver for months on end (Neal Stephenson), suppressing one’s mental activity with alcohol to the point of liver disease (the majority of Nobel Prize winning authors to date), or setting up an elaborate, public-ridicule-susceptible ritual around what you’ve committed to do, complete with magic talismans and lucky shoelaces (Steven Pressfield).

At any rate, I suppose I should try and actually make use of my mini notebooks and pens that I diligently carry everywhere.  I will start pulling off to the side of the road when I come up with something on my bike.  Or, you know, try to convince myself that what I thought of wasn’t that interesting.  Because the alternative route, “I’ll try and remember it for later,” proves to be a dead end.

“Sometimes I’ll be in bed, and I’ll have a funny idea. But if I don’t have a pen and paper nearby, I have to convince myself that the idea wasn’t that funny.” – Mitch Hedberg

Pregnancy truly is a delicate process, and I have to think that humanity’s joyous tribal intermingling has made the process just that much more fraught with peril.  The mother’s body has a plan for creating life that will mirror the path she took to get here; the baby has half of his own plan from a source that may not at all concur.  The result is that every pregnancy in this day and age, in this melting pot of genetics, marches to the beat of its own drummer. The greatest danger to any particular pregnancy can often be a stubborn adherence to an inappropriate doctrine.

Is it perhaps all the more rewarding for the species, then, when we (women) survive the process, and our babies survive to embody a brand new combination of genetics?  Humans are amazingly resilient and hardy — AFTER they are born.  It’s as if the creation of a new life is a crucible both for the mother and the child, a proving process, making sure baby is worthy of mama’s energy, and vice versa.

Months ago, I got a blood test result back of O negative.  All my life, however, I’ve been told I’m O positive.  I don’t think people’s bodies just stop producing Rh factor.  I did my homework, learned how to say “possible weak agglutinative for the Rh factor”, and had the test re-done.  Sure enough, I have no Rhesus factor in my blood.

What’s implied in this assessment: I could either make damn sure that the little boy in my womb is Rh-negative himself by doing a cord blood extraction, or I need to take a prophylactic intravenous medication called RhoGam to prevent the possibility of my immune system developing an antigen to the Rhesus factor either during or after birth, when mine and baby’s bloods may intermingle.

The consequence of NOT preventing such antigens from forming may not affect this little pumpkin at all, once he’s on the outside.  But if I ever conceived a child with Rh positive blood, I’d be likely to miscarry — to reject the body inside my body who is forming with the “wrong” plan.   It’s possible that Queen Catherine and Anne Boleyne were the most famous Rh negative women in history, each carrying one child who survived, and then miscarrying all following children conceived with King Henry.

There is also a chance I COULD severely harm this baby, in the very unusual but scary-enough-to-do-something-about case in which my blood comingles with fetal blood.  My body would then immediately become hostile to the foreign Rh antigens, generating antibodies that reach the baby and actually destroy fetal blood cells.  This is Rh Disease, and it used to be a leading cause of preterm death.

All of this means that I need two shots in the butt — one right about now (I’m at 29 weeks of pregnancy), and one right after this little boy is born.

Such morbid gravity over a genetic mutation.

I’ve started thinking about the cultural implications of a society like the Basques with their extremely high incidence of Rh negative that probably see quite a few perfectly fine first children and then extremely risky and tragic follow-up pregnancies.  Perhaps a topic for a future blog post.

Research and Entertainment:

• A quick history and explanation of the Rhesus factor [discoveriesinmedicine.com]
• Simple explanations of Rh disease and risks [marchofdimes.com]
• The story of Sir Cyril Astley Clark who discovered how to prevent Rh disease [realityismyreligion.wordpress.com]
• Apparently, the Reptilians prefer abducting Rh negative humans [reptilianagenda.com]
• Some people believe Rh negative blood gives you SPOOoOokY POWERS [abovetopsecret.com]
• Lizardfolk, Hyperboreans, and ETs, oh my! A catalog of a lot of other stupid shit people think about the existence of Rh negative blood [rhregistry.com]

Incidentally, I’ve also just learned that my father’s mother is O-negative, and my father — an only child — is AB positive…

Technorati Tags: blood type, pregnancy, rhesus

The powerful thing about STYLE is that when it’s approached consciously by the style leaders — i.e. with the understanding that it can and will be co-opted by corporatism at any opporunity — it can become a powerful tool for subversion. (In fact that’s how corporations do it, but I’m not going into that specifically.)

Style is not just SEEMING; it is also DOING. Humans have this interesting capacity for deciphering fakes and phonies from doers and believers. Something “feels wrong”, and it’s in that moment — a micromoment that happens all over the world a hundred times a second — that a choice is made: is part of this style an irony that encompasses NOT-doing (and so is fair-game for collection into the vast consumptive morass), or is this style one that must necessarily contain DOING?

The answer to this question comes from exemplars.

Why do we exhort our teenagers to be better examples for their younger siblings? Why do we chide fathers for not practicing what they preach? Why do we consider it the ultimate punk rock betrayal to “sell out” — i.e. to apparently give in to the commercialism that punk-ism alleged to intend to short-circuit?

Because the way you protect a style that incorporates a sort of DOING that you want to encourage is to make sure there are enough enviable persons being visible in that style and incorporating that DOING.

To bring it back to ground level, the point I’m making here is that Punk’s Not Dead, not fully dead, unless you proclaim that it’s dead and there’s no way you can be an exemplar of true punk.

So if punkness is to embody a certain DOING and not simply an ironic sort of SEEMING: take back the style.

In other words: I want to see librarians wearing spikes and sporting mohawks.

…Or flannel and ripped jeans. Or cat-eye glasses and leopard print dresses.

…Or none of the above. Because just saying “fuck off I’m a librarian” is pretty punk too.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, corporatism, culture, libraries, philosophy, punk rock, style, theory

Their hurry was evident, but as a kombucha brewer I couldn’t help but comment, “wow, you must love that stuff!”

“Oh yes,” answered the man, “it’s like our soda.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, growing curious, “you drink that much of it and don’t brew it yourself?”

The man suddenly took on a slightly suspecting look, as if I were about to accuse him of something. “You mean with the jar in the attic and the weird pancake and all that?”

I chuckled. “Well, sure. I don’t keep mine in the attic, more like the library. It’s pretty clean.”

“The library, eh. Well no,” said the man, “we don’t brew it. Ick. No thank you.”

I couldn’t resist prodding. “So you drink that much of it but you won’t brew it? Huh!” Wanting to soften the interaction, as I noticed the man turning away to coordinate with his wife to make sure they had everything they needed, I added, “Didn’t mean to bother you, I was just curious!” He looked a bit relieved.

Interesting. A family completely sold on the concept of kombucha, so enamored that they’ll pre-buy their kombucha in boxes to supply them with a $3 bottle every day, complete with active yeast bits floating around and all, but not willing to brew it themselves for ickiness reasons! That’s a cross-section of the kombucha aficionado market I hadn’t imagined.

Technorati Tags: kombucha, market

The world — and by “world” I of course mean “everybody who’s at SXSW right now” — is all a-twitter about FourSquare, a website aiming to turn your social life into an adventure game complete with experience points and trophies (they call ‘em badges), and the self-proclaimed sequel to the ill-fated Dodgeball.  While I am definitely #notatsxsw, the flood of SXSW tweets about #foursquare got me more than a little curious.

So I signed up, and of course my four bigshot social media maven friends (who are NOT #notatsxsw) were already on there.  I poke around a bit, getting a feel for what would be the “action” of this game.  The site is brand spanking new, so while the mechanics are largely in place, the content is not. 

It takes me 2 minutes to realize you could rack up a ton of points just clicking “sure I done that” on lots of random tasks.  My immediate reaction: this is a web-based button-masher.  So of course, since my brash editorial brain craves a global audience, I took it right to Twitter:

nthmost: #foursquare isn’t a fun game because there’s no accountability. It’s a web-based button-masher. iPhone app doubly so.

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:40:46 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: #foursquare maybe scoring is not so revolutionary. # of friends on FB or followers here is already real world score

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:53:27 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim true, but that’s the #twitter game. #foursquare should be better at being the game it’s trying to be.

about a day ago

Sat Mar 14 23:56:54 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: hmm don’t have #foursquare but I got the idea that it effectively scored stupid acts not that it stupidly scored effective acts

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:10:50 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim I just signed up an hour ago to check out #foursquare . I already have 5 pts b/c I found stuff I could click “yeah me too” on.

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:13:50 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: re #foursquare ugh. Stupid scores for stupid acts

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:16:32 +0000 2009

nthmost: People make a lot of tasks like “go to We Be Sushi on Valencia and get the Early Bird Special”. Uh, yup. check. done it. #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:15:15 +0000 2009

nthmost: But okay, maybe it’s yet another form of lifestreaming, similar to how the stuff you click “favorite” in YouTube can show in your FriendFeed

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:16:45 +0000 2009

nthmost: But in that case #foursquare != game. If they don’t want to be a game, that’s cool too. Someone else could make the game I’m wanting here.

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:18:35 +0000 2009

nthmost: @MyFriendTim Tasks don’t have to be stupid. They’re player-created / controlled. Which of course means >95% stupid. #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:33:20 +0000 2009

MyFriendTim: I’ll check it out but I am with you. I don’t want amplifiers of current status games but want more interesting markers #foursquare

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 03:07:19 +0000 2009

nthmost: #foursquare Tasks could be interesting in aggregate. Could help suggest what to do in strange cities, help ppl find others who do cool stuff

about a day ago

Sun Mar 15 00:37:19 +0000 2009

As it happened, @foursquare was tracking mentions of #foursquare, and caught me in the act of my loudmouth editorializing.  [will clean up all Twitter copy-pasting later]

@nthmost Sorry you hate foursquare (and fun. & puppies). I hope we can still be friends. JK – we got tons of stuff to fix. Bear w/ us!  4:56 PM Mar 14th from web

@foursquare I kid because I love. I just submitted a nice fat suggestion for you. (I do hate fun though. >:-|  5:02 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck in reply to foursquare

@foursquare I actually just spent a lot of time looking at your site hoping to see a list of “what’s coming”… didn’t find it  5:04 PM Mar 14th from TweetDeck

@nthmost. Ha. We love you too. And no list of what’s “coming soon” because we ran out of time (I was fixing bugs at airport!). Soon tho!  5:10 PM Mar 14th from web

I honestly do love what they’re setting out to do.  I just think it could be a much better game, if a game is what they want to be, by incorporating some really basic principles of what makes any game fun and addictive.  Of course I briefly considered “well I’ll just make my OWN douchebag game!”, but that lasted all of 10 seconds as I realized I had no interest in starting a website defined as successful by having ever-increasing overhead and no income.

Hence, I headed over to the FourSquare suggestion box and wrote the following, complete with lovingly hand-crafted HTML for best readability (this is straight copy-paste):

More Fun with a Little Accountability

Accountability may not sound like Fun, but a little goes a long way in making a game more fun and addictive. How about sparking creativity by letting players optionally create simple tests to “prove” the task was done?

Examples:

• amount of the bill at the restaurant after ordering a specific meal
• color of the person’s hair that the player was supposed to meet
• name of the guy who owns that little hole-in-the-wall cafe
• second word in the last paragraph on page 31 of the King’s Quest III manual

In other words, tiny bits of data that would be really easy to get if you’re there doing it, and either impossible to get otherwise, or just a silly pain in the butt to remember to look up on the web just to get the points.

Format could be similar to a captcha. Task-creators should have the option of showing to the player that there will be a validation required, otherwise people might later click “I’ve done this” and find they’re missing the data they need, possibly being unable to get it again.

Certain badges could be comprised only of tasks that require proof. Since proofs would be totally optional, a feature like this would add a layer to the game rather than change the way the whole game works.

–Naomi Most, March 14, 2009

Tangential thoughts: This experience has caused me to evaluate my “voice” on Twitter and around the net.  I’m happy with all of the above interactions. “People love a loose cannon”, as a family member once quipped at me over 12 years ago.  But I have some thinking to do as to how best to capitalize upon this persona’s comfort with having strong, somewhat abrasive opinions.

Technorati Tags: editorializing, foursquare, fun, game design, twitter, voice