Redditors having managed to compile a monster list of little tricks you can use to get your way in a negotiation, see whether someone is unconscious or just faking it, and convince people to do things for you.

It is, as Reddit threads tend to be, a highly entertaining read.

What is a “mind trick” you know of? — AskReddit.

Humanity Plus: How Transhumanism Could Change the Human Race

Transhumanism, as it’s known, is the process of augmenting ourselves with advanced technology; the point where the technology isn’t merely an extension of ourselves — like your smartphone probably is — but a part of ourselves.

Read more about transhumanism.

What is the Technological Singularity?

Technological singularity was a term coined by Vernor Vinge, the science fiction author, in 1983. “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own,” he wrote. “When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”

Read more about the Singularity.

Online games: where the real key to the future of social technology lies

We’ve been trying to wrangle this Internet thing to allow us to share an experience the way we can in real life. In real life, we can watch a movie together. Play poker and down a case of beer together. It can be as simple as sitting down to chat, sharing the same physical space — the atmosphere, food, music, all those things that add to an experience and make it stick out as something memorable.

Read more about the future of social technology.

What Would Colonization of the Final Frontier Look Like?

It’s not a huge surprise that governments and corporations aren’t investing heavily in space colonization itself. We still need to make many, many more of these ancillary but important advances before we’d make any significant progress in the area. And there’s that other issue – that governments and corporations don’t see a need to ramp up the timeline on this. But Stephen Hawking, one of the few physicists whose name regular people actually know, thinks differently. He’s worried that until we disperse, we’re in imminent danger of a catastrophic event destroying human civilization – heck, human life – for good. “One we spread out into space and establish colonies, our future should be safe,” Hawking once said to a BBC reporter.

Read more about space colonization.

I’ve made the decision to force myself to separate my leisure activities so that I can make the most of what rare downtime I do get. That doesn’t mean I’ve gone Luddite: I enjoy a range of shows, and I love gaming. I enjoy sitting with my daughter on my iPad and laughing as she sends every bird flying in the opposite direction of the green pigs, no matter what I say. I read a wide variety of books on that same device.

What I don’t love so much? Missing out on the real value in all of the above, because I’m too busy trying to get them done all at once.

Read the article on The Next Web.

Image Credit: Steve Jurvetson.

It’s not an invalid concern. Riley has been at the forefront of new media since it was, well, new, and is a member of a group of people who can be credited with bringing the medium to the mainstream by proving the concept in a business setting. He started The Blog Herald followed by b5media in 2003 and 2004.

He wrote for tech news giant TechCrunch in its early days, leaving when the workload and stress the site heaps upon its writers got too much. Since the web publishing industry started to stabilize, at least in a temporary sort of fashion, he’s run The Inquisitr with great success to the tune of over 7 million page views per month and $9,000 in net monthly revenue. Not at all bad, particularly for a low-key operation.

Riley’s not ecstatic about the sale either. “I’m sad to be selling it,” he said. “It’s never really done better and the money is still coming in: it’s broken even since December 2008 and it’s a profitable ongoing concern.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Riley’s anxiety disorder has made a big impact on his decision to sell — it’s something he has documented on his blog before, the onset of which was caused by a rough divorce that the man himself will tell you was as bizarre as it was painful.

“I just know now I need a serious break offline,” Duncan told me. “I’m not prepared to say that I’m burned out, but I know the signs that I might be getting close and I know I need a break now.”

The exhaustion that prefaces burn-out and coming to grips with a newly developed anxiety disorder isn’t a fun pairing. Anxiety, in its worst form, is psychologically crippling. Though it’s often dismissed by the lesser educated, as is depression, those afflicted with severe anxiety often can’t even answer the phone without paralysing fear of what could be on the other side affecting them.

When the site sells, Riley intends to take a few months off to recoup. He may finish his half-written tome on blogging in that time, he says. I asked Riley if he’d be back at web publishing after the break. “I’ve been doing it so long now I’m not sure I’m able to do another job,” he said.

When he returns, Riley intends to build up DoMoar, a relatively new blog traffic exchange site that he started with Inquisitr writer James Johnson. Duncan says of the site, “We’re looking to particularly target the tech sector in the long term; a lot of these traditional exchanges focus mostly on odd and funny content.”

Otherwise, Riley is playing his cards close to the chest. He indicates that he’ll be back in the Australian Spring with a new site that’s more serious and more niche, on a topic close to his heart and personal interests. I’ve got no idea what it is, though I could spring a few guesses — probably way off base — and I look forward to hearing about it.

Photo Credit: Richard Giles (CC BY-NC 2.0).

My experience was a little different. I started my career as a freelancer, and when I was asked if I wanted to come and work at Envato (who was then a client of mine) full-time, I had the opposite fears. I was always a vocal proponent of freelancing as a more profitable and stable alternative to full-time employment, so I surprised a lot of people by taking the job. Everyone who worked at the then-much-smaller Envato was a pleasure to work with as a freelancer–I got paid quickly, and they were all both insanely creative and ridiculously kind-hearted. It still is that way, despite the company having grown in huge leaps over the years. I thought trying out the life of an employee would be an interesting change of pace, and it was.

In my time there, I was the lab rat at AudioJungle for the now-commonplace Site Manager role, I was the editor for Audiotuts+ and FreelanceSwitch, helped launch another site which I edited for a year, WorkAwesome, and helped convert the Netsetter into a proper Envato publication (and yes, then proceeded to edit it). In more recent times, I worked with a great team of editors comprised of Amanda Hackwith, Mike Vardy and Joseph Robert Lewis in my role as the Business Blogs Manager.

However, as of last Friday, I no longer work for Envato, and as of this week, I’m once again a freelancer. For the first time, I’m in the same position as those FreelanceSwitch readers. I always knew I’d eventually want to go back to working for myself, and luckily I’ve had a few years to think about what I could do differently if I laid the foundations of my business from scratch again. I’m excited to put that into practice.

If you’re in need of a writer or editor, check out my services page. Drop me a line and we’ll talk your project over.

I may write about the process of re-opening a freelance business from scratch here on the blog. For now, I’m off to work on a piece for my first client, who just so happens to be my former employer.

It is the same with writing. Many writers, and you’ll see a lot of them come out of the woodworks around this time of year, wonder how you can “enter the zone” and get your book done as if it’s some kind of magical thing that happens to you. My contention is and always has been that creation is an act, not a state. Your environment or your mood don’t matter because there is no ideal environment or ideal mood for getting the work done. These are romanticized notions that almost every writer believes in despite the fact that they do not exist. Writing isn’t a romantic thing. It’s a hard slog. You have to force yourself to get through your words for the day. There’s nothing magical or sexy about it–it’s about sitting in your chair and not stopping until you’ve written what you need to write.

So, the act of creating anything will always start with your conscious determination to sit down and do it, no matter how you feel, until you’re done. But thanks to the way our brain works, we can train it to kick into gear a little faster when you do make that decision to sit down and write. This is called the writing ritual by many, and while I find any phrase that includes the word ritual annoying and airy-fairy, I won’t be a contrarian for the sake of it and go changing it.

Creating the Ritual

There’s not a lot that defines the ritual itself because they’re all different. It comes down to the environment that you find most ideal for writing. There’s no ideal writing environment, but if we’re in control of developing the ritual, we can make it as close as possible.

You can tweak it until you’re happy with it, but try and get it right within the first few goes. The ritual doesn’t do anything special at first; you have to repeat the same set of circumstances until your brain learns to perceive the ritual as the signal to get creative and write. This takes time and consistency. Think about all the variables of the writing room. You want to minimize distraction and discomfort without getting so comfortable as to make yourself too drowsy for writing. There are generally a few common features of writing rituals which I’ll go through here.

Music

Music is primarily a tool for blocking out distractions such as noisy people in adjacent rooms. My kids like to laugh and cry loudly and my wife sure knows how to raise her voice when they play up. I close the door and play music loud enough to drown them out without being so loud that I can’t concentrate.

Your choice of music matters. Much of the music you listen to on a daily basis is probably going to be more distracting than screaming children or ringing phones. I use Chopin, a fifteen CD collection ripped into iTunes that goes for over a day so I never have to think about the playlist even during the longest of writing sessions. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata that inspired me to take up music and become just like the deaf old man at the age of six or seven, but for some reason Chopin makes me want to write. If you can’t think of any good writing music in your collection now, give it a shot.

Classical piano–or classical in general–is perfect for the job because it has no lyrics to take your mind away from your own words but has plenty of dynamic range to keep you awake.

The Brain Dump

Every morning I write three pages, long-hand, in a notebook. There’s no structure or plan for it. You just write whatever you’re thinking about. Maybe you’ll just end up writing about how terrible your coffee was today, or maybe it’ll be some existential revelation that’ll inspire you and make its way into a story. It doesn’t really matter, just keep going until you’ve got the three pages.

This is something I picked up after reading an excerpt from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She calls it the Morning Pages and it has something to do with getting your Inner Censor out of the way. No disrespect to Julia, since she inspired this practice for me to begin with, but I find her take on it to be a little too fluffy and spiritual for my tastes. I consider it a way to simply get the pen going and words spilling out on the page so that I’ve already bypassed the mental barrier to writing when it comes time to write something structured such as an article or story, which puts more pressure on the writer. It’s simply a daily exercise to remind myself–my subconscious, I suppose–that no set of special circumstances or flash of inspiration is required for productive writing.

Maybe you have too much going on in your head when you sit down to write, or maybe you just have mental roadblocks to writing that need to be erased by a few pages of zero-pressure jibberish. If that’s the case, try it out. Some people use word puzzles and games. Others use writing challenges–there are mailing lists out there you can subscribe to where you receive a weekly or daily challenge to write a page of a story based around a concept, sentence, or basic plot, just to get you going. Whatever floats your boat.

Location

I like to write in a dim room. Some people find they need the lights on or sunlight streaming through the window. I just open the blinds enough so that I can see everything in the room without letting in so much that it’s bright or increases the temperature (my descendants are all white Europeans, and lighting a cigarette near me will probably cause me to break out in a sweat). If you like to write in the morning when your head is full of melatonin, maybe you’ll prefer writing outside right under the sun. However you like your lighting, it’s an important thing to consider when you’re building your ritual. No wonder Catholics and pagans like candles.

The view from your writing spot and the air flow are also small things you might not have considered. Some people like to see their backyard or a pond or a mountain while they’re writing. I like my desk and computer just fine; they’re not very stimulating so they don’t interfere with what I’m seeing for a scene in my head, and they remind me that I’m here to get something done. I work with the window open right next to me. I always used to hate a breeze on me while working, but realized that the extra oxygen was helping me focus, so over the years I’ve come to depend on a good nearby window suppling a steady stream of fresh air and a little bit of natural lighting.

Dealing with Others

One of the biggest problems with getting anything done in any area, writing or not, is the steady stream of distractions we’re faced with. It can be family, Twitter, email, phone calls, or a whole list of other things. Some people recommend letting distractions in while you work in case something turns out to be a nugget of inspiration. I prefer to shut everything down and focus on the writing and replenish my pool of ideas and inspiration separately. My family knows that opening my office door when there’s some crazy piano music coming from the other side is a death sentence. I silence my phone and flip it so the screen faces the desk. I quit distracting programs like Skype and make my email and social media tabs disappear.

Fiercely defending your writing time from distractions is one of the most important parts about building a ritual. The ritual should help you accomplish that, not bring out more distractions. Put a sign on your door if you have to, and turn your phone off if you can’t ignore the faint glow of a face-down phone receiving a message.

Making the Writing Ritual Work

I once did some reading about neuro-linguistic programming for a story I was working on. Although I agree with Penn and Teller on pseudo-scientific stuff like this, I realized that the NLP practice of associating a mental state with a gesture, environment or other set of conditions is pretty much what the writing ritual is all about.

If I wasn’t clear earlier, coming up with some list of conditions and calling it a writing ritual doesn’t actually do anything. Replicating those conditions every time you write, and ensuring that you write no matter your mood every time you create those conditions, eventually trains your mind to recognize the signals to switch mental states so you have to fight yourself less to get started. You have to stick with it every day without expecting immediate results. Don’t expect magic. You’ll be disappointed.

I also recommend that you don’t recreate the conditions of your writing ritual at any other time. This will weaken the association between the conditions of the ritual and the act of writing, making it less effective. If you want to use the principles to become more effective in another area, that’s great. Come up with something else.

One final piece of advice: whenever you get a chance, do some writing without the ritual. In fact, get as far away from all the components of the ritual as you can. You don’t want to become too dependent on this ritual, so if you’re creatively lubricated enough to write without it, take advantage of the opportunity, or you’ll come back to the problem we encountered at the start of this article–requiring an ideal writing environment and mood to begin.

National Novel Writing Month

If you’re a writer and don’t know about NaNoWriMo, you should check it out. It’s a challenge to writers to complete a 50,000 novel in the month of November. You can’t start writing the novel before the challenge begins and only the words you write during November count, though of course you can keep working on it after NaNoWriMo ends. This year I’ve taken the challenge again, and I’m already behind thanks to my tendency to bite off more projects than I have personal time to chew. Whatever comes out of this if I succeed probably won’t ever become public, but I’ll let you know if I beat the word count monster this year!

Gaming

As I’ve mentioned before playing World of Warcraft became an exercise in boredom after my guild raid team defeated the Lich King earlier this year, the boss in the top tier of challenging content for the current expansion. The filler patch that introduced Ruby Sanctum did nothing to change that. Last month Blizzard released patch 4.0.1, moving up a full version number to indicate that the third expansion (and thus fourth major release of the game) is nearing and many of the changes are being put into place. Patch 4.0.1 changed a lot about how each class is played, so everyone from the game’s best players down spent a few days in confusion figuring it all out again. Quite a painful experience for players with multiple high-level characters. That brought some interest back to the game for a few days before it quickly died off again, so if Cataclysm doesn’t deliver then I may not be returning to the world of Azeroth for long.

What has interested me about WoW recently is the preview available of the redesigned community site. Who says you have to bow to the minimalism trend to produce a web design that looks awesome?

I believe it was back in January or February when I played some closed beta Star Trek Online right before launch. The game didn’t appeal to me then, though it wasn’t because of a lack of trying–anyone raised on Star Trek will tell you how cool the idea of being able to play an open-ended game like an MMO in that universe is. After the WoW patch lost my interest I decided to give STO a shot again. Not much seems to have changed in the first few levels, but for some reason I found it much more enjoyable this time around. Here’s hoping I’ve found a new way to relax after a long day working on secret projects!

Lord of the Rings Online recently went free to play. I’ve wanted to give LOTRO a shot beyond the trial for a while but I can’t justify more than two MMO subscriptions at a time. Like Star Trek Online, the appeal of Lord of the Rings Online–at least for me–is the familiar setting. I’ve spent a lot of time building worlds, cultures and languages for science fiction and fantasy works and Tolkien is the father of fiction worldbuilding, a community in which he’s respected far more for his ability to create incredibly detailed settings than his ability to tell stories.

Recently at Envato

While I didn’t have any involvement in this myself, this week Envato put up a cool new mini-site at WP.Envato. In the past, there have been some criticisms of Envato’s relationship with the WordPress community–the complaint is that we profit from WordPress via ThemeForest without giving back to the community. Unfortunately for those who like to complain, nothing could be further from the truth. Envato produces some of the leading WordPress educational resources through Rockable Press and Nettuts+, and contributes to the expansion of the WordPress adoption rate by promoting WordPress themes on ThemeForest and WordPress plugins at CodeCanyon as solutions for the majority of customer’s web presence needs. WP.Envato responds to these criticisms in a really positive way and it introduces WordCamp sponsorship packages and a bunch of open source plugins including Option Tree which I had the pleasure of taking a look at during beta.

In my corner of the company, we’ve got some cool projects underway right now. There’s a freelancer survey happening (if you’re a freelancer, take it–there’s an iPad to be won) so that we can release an updated Freelancer Statistics Report, we’re writing our first WorkAwesome Guide to be sold on the Tuts+ Marketplace, and there’s another big secret FreelanceSwitch project that I’ll let you know about when it’s ready. If you’ve ever wanted to start a freelance business but don’t know how to start, you’re going to love it.

After reading this one, I felt a little nauseated by the thought of weightless food floating in my stomach. Still, it’s an interesting piece!

There is a subtle art to moving around without crashing into anything – or, more annoyingly, others – knocking computers, equipment and other objects off the walls to which they are attached with Velcro pads. One serving shuttle pilot confessed to leaving a wake of laptops and other vital belongings behind him the first time he tried to fly from one room to another. “When you first turn up, you are like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I had no idea where to put any of it back.”

via Life aboard the International Space Station | Science | The Guardian.

Rather, it is how the player handles an inevitable losing streak and the extent to which he will allow losing to affect his idea of himself. After a month straight of losses, a player can become convinced that losing is his role. Going broke becomes his thing to do, his inevitable outcome. The fog of losing, which feels like a seething, dirty steam in the veins, seeps into everything.

via The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High by Jay Kang – The Morning News.

YOU’RE sick of Helvetica, aren’t you? That show-off changed its birth name, Neue Haas Grotesk, had plastic surgery in the 1980s to get thinner (and fatter), and even has its own movie. Helvetica and its online type brethren Arial, Georgia, Times and Verdana appear on billions of Web pages. You’re sick of these other faces, too, even if you don’t know them by name.

via Web fonts will flourish: True to type | The Economist.