Personal Projects
Stuff I have done over the years, or things that don’t fit anywhere else.
Some websites that have happened:
A Skeptic's Inspirational
A daily inspirational that I have written from the ground up for skeptics, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and other non-deists of all kinds. Although people of faith are certainly welcome to follow along! Every day I post an inspirational quote with commentary about it and a positive affiration for you to meditate or mull on. This will eventually be a book, but for right now it is just a website. Yes, you’ve probably seen it before, I’ve tried launching this a few times. Now I’m doing it on my own site and expect to keep it there.
Patience and Fortitude: Grief Without God
Grieving as an atheist/agnostic/skeptic is different than the grief that religious people experience. This site has some older blog posts I made about grieving as an atheist, and also is the homepage for my book, “Grieving Futures.” The site is not updated anymore but the content still lives there.
"My Secret Life" - a bibliography of a book
This is the wiki site for my old (old!) academic project, an interdisciplinary study (bibliography/history of text/digital humanities) of the infamous Victorian erotica novel, My Secret Life.
These are a couple of short books I wrote years and years ago. One is very personal, and the other is about Machiavelli. Take that as you will:
Grieving Futures: Surviving the Deaths of My Parents
I was 24 when my mother died, and 26 when my father passed away. Because of that catastrophe, I lost the family home and any stability I ever counted on. It was, in the parlance, a clusterfuck.
In the aftermath I made some bad decisions, but mostly I did not make any decisions at all and fifteen years later I was falling down into a dark valley of emotional and psychological breakdowns. I think I hit bottom, but all I know for sure is that I hit hard. Grieving Futures is about how I got there.
A Princely Primer: The Wisdom of Machiavelli
This is a guide for anyone who wants to study the lessons of Machiavelli‘s great political treatise but who does not have the time, patience, or wherewithal to suffer through the real thing.
It is also a definitive answer to that nagging question: Did Machiavelli really write that? (I expect academicians will denounce me as plebian, but those rarefied hothouse flowers can go back to parsing Plato’s angels and leave the rest of us alone.)
