I am a member of the Society for Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) – have been since 2017. I joined their yearly conferences every other year starting in 2017, but I will not be joining the 2025 conference in Budapest, Hungary. For me, the big selling point of SIPS are the people – the location choice for 2025 (unintentionally) signals that some people are less important.

If you are not familiar with why calling your organization a family is problematic, here is a very brief recap. While plenty of people have fantastic family environments, family is not a positive experience for everyone.

I want to recommit to writing, to recommit to actively and publicly think about what is happening. I want to recommit to the idea that thoughts are dynamic and never settled — that thinking in public helps move away from sharing only finalized arguments. Thoughts are produced and reproduced through the conversations we have, be it directly on the phone or indirectly through writing and reading.

The social media landscape is so different today from when I started participating around 2011. Things change, and that is okay — when the old dies, it becomes the compost for something new. For me, something new sprouted from Twitter's compost beyond just joining Mastodon: I am taking over as the admin for the Mastodon server akademienl.social.

I have been a bit stuck in my head over the past few months. The world's changing so rapidly, it is increasingly hard to come to grips with things big and small. This even though there is a desire to jump to quick conclusions (a typical sign of overconfidence!). As a result of being stuck in my head, I have been absent on here. I am getting back in a habit of writing, although this simple post took me almost a week to write.

For me, the end of the year is a time for reflecting on the past; summer is a time for reflecting on the future. This summer, I have been thinking about how I spend my labor energy in a rapidly changing world. What is meaningful and a good utilization of my skillset?

Leaving Twitter Today marks the thirty day period of my Twitter deactivation, which means my account is now slated for deletion. Taking this step is reminiscent of when I deleted my Facebook account over a decade ago. It again feels like a bigger thing than it practically is - I haven’t missed my account over the past thirty days, at all. Maybe some of you are thinking about keeping or deleting your Twitter account.

I used to think I was a man’s man and heterosexual — but why? Where I grew up there was little public exposure beyond the traditional gender roles and heteronormative behaviors.