11.15.07
Posted in Suggestions at 7:00 am by Ode to Joy
If you are in an intimate relationship, or even if you aren’t, there’s no reason not to be having more fun getting it on, either with yourself or other people. You owe it to yourself to roleplay, dress-up, and keep things interesting by exploring new forms of sensual experience. There is a new site called the sex toys db that describes itself as an erotic encyclopedia. Have a look at resources like that to get ideas about how you could be having more fun between the sheets.
The key is to relax, feel good about yourself, and let yourself go. Why not? should be the question you ask yourself when it comes to new physical experiences.
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05.18.07
Posted in Suggestions at 7:29 pm by Ode to Joy
Trying to get in shape? Forget stair climbers and treadmills. Get a swingset.
Unless you are very young (in which case you hopefully don’t need ideas on how to make life more fun) it has probably been a while since you were on the swings. What a shame. Swinging is one of the true joys of life, especially if you push it to the limit and engage in my favorite swingset passtime, free-swinging.
Free-swinging is freestyle swinging. It’s like the X Games on a swingset. You spin, curl, bend, spread, jump, and so much more. The only limiting factor is your courage. Of course, don’t be stupid. You should be careful. Look for a very open swingset with a wide arch (like the one in this picture).
You can find our more about free-swinging and other fun games here. >>
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12.17.06
Posted in Suggestions at 5:27 pm by Ode to Joy
For those that might not know of it, Gamefly is a Netflix like service for video games. You pay a monthly subscription price and receive video games in the mail that you can return when you are finished with them (or bored of them). It’s great because you can get games delivered right to your door and instead of sinking a bunch of money into games, you can get new ones all the time for a low monthly subscription price. It costs about $9 a month to have one game out at a time, or $13 for 2 games at a time. When you finish the game, you can send it back and get another one. There are no overdue fees so you don’t have to worry about returning the games on time. All postage is prepaid, so you don’t waste money on shipping either.
Gamefly makes a great gift for someone you know that loves games. For about the price of 2 games, you can give someone a year long subscription to the service where they may go through 20 or more games in a year. The way kids play games these days, you can finish a game in a weekend, so a service like this is great for serious gamers.
Gamefly even offers a free trial option to allow you to check it out and see if you like the service before committing to a paid subscription. I am a big fan and highly recommend their service to anyone.
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06.13.06
Posted in Suggestions at 3:18 pm by Ode to Joy
A few months ago I found the games Carcassonne and the Settlers of Catan, two of the finest and most engaging board games you’ll ever play. One of the frustrating things about these games though is it is sometimes difficult to find other people to play them with. This is no longer an issue thanks to Games.AsoBrain.com.
Asobrain has developed a nice web-based interface for playing Carcassonne or Settlers online, and there is a good community of regular players so you can usually find a game if you want one. If you would prefer to practice on your own, you can play bots, which have excellent AI, though experienced players will have little trouble finishing them off. Amazingly, Asobrain offers all this for free, though you can give them money, which I highly recommend for their great effort.
If you’ve never tried these games, now you can do so for free. You no longer have an excuse.
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03.04.06
Posted in Suggestions at 6:53 pm by Ode to Joy
Many of us spend a ton of time working on things which we hope to sell to someone else.
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02.28.06
Posted in Suggestions at 10:40 pm by Ode to Joy
There are lots of people (Americans anyway) that don’t have the patience for board games in their adult lives. This is a great shame and due in large part I believe to how boring many of the popular American board games are. Monopoly, Risk, Life, Candy land, they just don’t have the same appeal past the age of 12. However, if you expand your horizon a bit, you’ll find a ton of great games out there that are entertaining and engaging for even the most jaded member of the intelligentsia among you.
Two games that I have been playing lately that I’m quite fond of are The Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne. Settlers is a strategy game that is somewhat of a cross between monopoly, risk, and civilization. You are competing with the other plays to build roads, settlements, and armed forces to wrest control of an Island. The seemingly simple sets of rules you play with lend themselves to a wide variety of strategic options, and the replay value is extremely high. The only downside to this game is you need 3 people to play. Also, there is an element of chance to the game, as the roll of the dice determines how resources are distributed to players. There are a ton of expansion packs you can get, so if you find you like this game, there are accessories galore to keep you busy for years to come. Carcassonne can be played with only 2 players, and has a quite different premise. Rather than starting with a pre-built world which you subsequently occupy, in Carcassonne, each turn you take a card and help build out a world, choosing how you wish to connect your new piece of territory to the existing game board map. In addition to deciding how to build out the map, you have control over where you place your minions, which can become thieves, knights, farmers or monks depending on what type of territory you set them in. This game is incredibly addictive and again gives rise to a wide variety of playing scenarios based on a few simple rules. Again, there are also a ton of add on accessories and alternate rule sets, so if you grow bored with the initial variation there are lots more to choose from.
For both of these games, there are large communities of fans on and offline, so chances are if your living companion isn’t a game player you’ll be able to find some other like-minded souls to play with you.
Follow this link to learn more about the Settlers of Catan board game.
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02.20.06
Posted in Suggestions at 10:35 pm by Ode to Joy
One of the things I used to enjoy doing was watching a movie with friends with the sound turned off. You and your friends pick characters and make up your own soundtrack, acting out the movie as it is going along with your own script that you create on the fly. It was kind of a like a do it yourself mystery science 3000 kind of activity. I call this Soundhacking.
If you’ve never done it, I would say give it a try. If you have a digital recorder, you can even tape the session and later synch it up with the video. There are a couple of movies (most notably It’s A Wonderful life) where the soundtrack is still under copyright protection but the visual aspect is in the public sphere. So, if you can come up with something funny that you record and synch to the movie, you can even distribute it legally.
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02.19.06
Posted in Suggestions at 9:37 pm by Ode to Joy
TV is an invention with infinite possibility. Unfortunately, the content that is available for TV doesn’t often live up to this potential. The experience of watching itself is also so similar to sleep physiologically that you should spend a good portion of your leisure time away from the happy box.
I challenge you to spend an entire month without watching TV. There are lots of months without a meaningful sports series, or new shows, when you can safely wean yourself away without falling out of step with the culture. Plus, if you have TIVO, you can always watch it later anyway. So, just turn it off, and see what happens.
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02.16.06
Posted in Suggestions at 2:00 am by Ode to Joy
Winning is great, but losing in a really extreme fashion can be even better.
To give you an example, I play on a soccer team at work. We are generally pretty terrible but continue to improve all the time. One week, our goalie was absent, so I played substitute goalkeeper. Not only did I play during my team’s match, but 2 subsequent teams asked me to play for them as well (I suppose there was a goalie strike that week or somesuch nonsense).
To say that things went badly would be an understatement. I would have been thrilled if things had gone well enough to be described as merely a poor performance. I was a disaster, letting in 14 goals over the 3 games. For those of you that aren’t soccer fans, to put this in perspective, there are professional goalkeepers that can go for half a season without allowing in 14 goals. To my credit, I did stop a number of shots, and the teams I played with weren’t good defenders, but it was a disaster, plain and simple.
Not only was the scoreline a problem, but the teams I was playing for were very vocal in their displeasure with my performance. Each game, things started off friendly, but by the end I was almost as afraid of my team as of our opponents.
At this point, you are probably saying to yourself, what does this have to do with fun? Despite the misery of the experience at the time, I have to say, it is one of the better days of my life. Never have I so abjectly failed at anything. I now know what a true disaster is like, and it all happened in a very controlled way with no long term consequences. I have known tons of people that won’t try new things because they are worried they will be bad at them. Well, I tell you all, that is the precise reason you should try new things. You are terrible at first, and can experience the intense awareness of your inability in a direct way with no real impact on your life. Being acutely aware of your lack of ability in an area shows you how much room you have for self improvement. It is only that feeling that gets you motivated to do anything of any substance in the world. So get our there and start failing today!
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02.12.06
Posted in Suggestions at 7:19 pm by Ode to Joy
There are few things as exciting as changing the nature of your physical & mental relationship to the world. Last summer I read a book called Geomancy which looked at common threads in the design and implementation of sacred spaces in different world systems and religions. Common to most of them was some form of altered consciousness, either created by having a user climb a hill, or sit for a long period of time in a space with little light (or tons of colored light - stained glass cathedrals for example), or somesuch similar technique.
This book resonated with me as I’ve always been a big believer in pushing yourself to physical and mental limits for purely pleasurable purposes. Once in a while for example, I like to either go without sleep or food for a long period of time. If you go two days without sleep for example, and then sleep next to an alarm that is going off every 15 minutes, you’ll find yourself dropping back into REM sleep over and over again, and can have a full day of vivid dreams. If you go without food, you’ll find your mind becomes sharper and you’ll become more imaginative as well. Vacations can often be boring I believe because people over satisfy themselves, eating and sleeping too much.
Physical exercise can alter the conciousness as well. Many people have talked about the joys of the natural high they experience. I would suggest trying different types of exertion though to see what they do to you. For example, really work out your legs a lot by going for a really long hike for example. Then another time, really work your arms and not your legs. See what it does to the way you think and feel.
Food can be a great drug as well. Try eating a ton of sugar for example, or go without sugar for a long period of time. The second week of the atkins diet for example can be an amazing experience mentally as you all of a sudden have tons of even energy without the highs and lows the day usually brings.
As my brother once pointed out, one of the most dynamic ways to alter your consciousness is to have an encounter with someone else. Interacting with someone you’ve never met is a complex and engaging process which requires you to rethink who you are and what your boundaries should be. Old friends are great, but after a while they won’t challenge you like a new person in your life will.
If you don’t have living, breathing people to interact with, don’t forget the communities available in books or online. Once in a while, instead of reading a mystery novel, read a really difficult book put together by someone really trying to piece together the universe. Check out The Book of Disquiet
by Pessoa for example, or the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, an encyclopedia of an imaginary world written in an imaginary language. The challenges school gives you as a child can still be exciting when you’re older.
Time speeds up I believe as you grow older precisely because you get the resources to prevent your conciousness from being altered in these simple ways. If things go well, you have a group of friends, enough food to eat, time to sleep, and can smooth out the edges of an otherwise rough physical existence. As you simplify your environment and your world though, your consciousness fades into the background, and your mind is less challenged. Keep your brain alive! Change your world up today!
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