Hello and welcome to sunday links, my weekly break from the regular blog to link to some things I like. Typically I write every day. A recent post you might enjoy is when i ended my relationship with stuff, a personal essay about my journey into minimalism and anticapitalism.

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There are no junior jumble winners this week. The answers were HEDGEHOG, TAILS, ROBOTNIK, KNUCKLES, and RINGS; And the solution to the puzzle "What snack does Sonic the Hedgehog always order on the side when he gets chili dogs" is, of course, ONION GRINS.

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Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money by Dana Miranda

In the same way diet culture is quick to blame health conditions on a person’s weight, or prescribe food restriction as treatment toward the goal of being thin, budget culture sees measures like credit scores and debt as signifiers of financial health, and prescribes spending restrictions as the first step toward wellness — defined, at its core, as being (on the way to becoming) rich.

The simplest problem with this approach is that budgeting, like dieting, doesn’t work.

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Build Your Own Social Anxiety Toolkit by Fran Blanche (20m35s)

Fran's advice is very similar to the steps I took to reduce my own social anxiety. She recommends custom-fit musician's earplugs to reduce environmental sound, and I'd like to get a pair someday for situations where I can't wear headphones, but my go-to environmental volume control is 24dB NRR bluetooth earmuffs. Her other advice mirrors what I did almost exactly.

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Jenny Ondioline by Stereolab

This is my favorite song for anxiety reduction. It's a long, meditative piece of shoegazey dream pop. I find the repetitiveness of it comforting, and Lætitia Sadier's soothing vocal melodies help me feel calm.

I should note that if you look the lyrics up, it's the opposite of comforting, but I can't parse the lyrics and hopefully you won't either. It's not offensive or anything, it's just kind of a bummer.

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Play BASIC Computer Games in Your Browser

101-ish games from the 1973 book BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl. There's an ongoing project to port every game in the book to 10 modern programming languages, which I think is a tremendous idea. I never had this exact book, but Guess is still the first program I write when I'm trying to learn a new language 🦝