Writer: science fiction and fantasy, personal finance, and Esperanto
Two of my Wise Bread posts, The Ethics of Hoarding and Healthy, Frugal Eating, got very kind mentions in the Doctor Oz blog:
Wow. Just a stellar post… Philip Brewer strikes again with a straightforward, no-bull piece on why we gotta suck it up and stop eating expensive crap. Stern, but informative!
I find it surprisingly difficult to extract quotes like that—it seems too much like bragging. I guess that’s why it’s useful to have a publicist.
My Wise Bread post Have Style, Not a Lifestyle was featured on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green.
Here’s the gist of what I had to say:
The key to resisting the Diderot effect is to have style. Not just any old style, but a particular style. Something nicer than everything else you own isn’t in keeping with your style and that makes it easier to resist: It’s just not you.
Check out the Planet Green’s Watch Out For the Diderot Effect which includes a link to a translation of Diderot’s famous essay.
I was invited to write a guest post for Self Reliance Exchange and was pleased to give them Find Your Self-Sufficient Sweet Spot.
There’s a reason we don’t see more self-sufficiency: It’s not frugal. It almost always takes more time to make something than it takes to earn enough money to buy one—and that’s without even considering the time it takes to learn the skills (let alone the cost of tools and materials). On the other hand, frugality is a powerful enabler for self-sufficiency. So, how do you find the sweet spot?
My wife spins and weaves. I have a beautiful sweater that she hand knit from hand spun yarn. It’s wonderful—and it’s comforting to know that my household is not only self-sufficient in woolens, we produce a surplus that we can sell or trade. But the fact is you can buy a perfectly good sweater at Wal-Mart for less than the cost of the yarn to knit it.
There’s a lot of useful tips and trick for living a more self-sufficient life at the Self Reliance Exchange. Totally aside from my article there, it’s worth checking them out.
Ginger sparkle cookies, originally uploaded by bradipo.
I was thinking brownies, but Jackie bakes the brownies and she was already spending as much time in the kitchen today as she really wanted. So I baked a post-holiday batch of ginger sparkles.
Ginger sparkle cookies by Philip Brewer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
The road is snow-covered such that it is impossible to see the lines of the crosswalk. Does this make it more or less important to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk?
At brunch yesterday the topic of burial instructions came up, and I was surprised to discover that Jackie didn’t remember that I’d already documented my wishes for dealing with my remains. The gist of my instructions is that (although I’d urge her to be guided by frugality) she should do whatever she wants. However, I did add this proviso:
4. If there’s no good reason to prefer one thing over another for reasons of convenience or cost, I’d really like to have my body eaten by vultures.
Sadly, I’ve seen no move toward making sky burial socially acceptable in the United States.
I published one short story in 2009:
My story submission database isn’t really set up to answer the question of how many new stories I wrote this year, but I see three whose first submission to an editor was in 2009. Hopefully some of those will appear in 2010.
Two articles of mine appeared as guest posts at personal financial blogs:
I wrote 71 posts for Wise Bread. I’ve bolded a few where I thought I managed to say just what I was trying to say, and commend them to your attention:
One of my Wise Bread posts (Understand Capital Costs) was featured in in US Airways Magazine (October 2009, page 22).
Since the demise of Hilary Moon Murphy’s Clarion Ex Machina site, there hasn’t been a good collection of links to all the various Clarion journals. Now Liz Argall has fixed that with her page of Clarion blogs, journals, articles and interviews.
There’s lots of good stuff there. I don’t know of a better source of raw material for people who are interested in the Clarion experience.
A while back Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar invited me to do a guest post and I finally came up with an idea that I liked: Living off Capital.
People who come from wealthy families learn how to live off capital. The rules are taught along with all the other things they learn from their parents–how to dress, how to eat, how deal with bankers and trust officers. But even though most people don’t learn the rules, living off capital is just a skill, and it’s one that everybody should learn, because everybody lives off capital sometimes.
It talks about investing for income, reinvesting to preserve capital, diversifying, and keeping your expenses flexible.
The sf-writer universe today is full of links to the BoingBoing report on how Canadian sf writer Peter Watts was beaten by US border guards, arrested, his possessions impounded, and then dumped across the border in mid-December without even a coat. You can read Watts’s own account on his blog.
Now, I don’t have any actual knowledge of what happened. I hope there’ll turn out to be some impartial witnesses or some video of the occurrence. But in the absence of that, I find that I’m all too willing to assume that Watts’s account is true. The fact is, I don’t really expect better from anonymous border guards. I ought to be able to expect better, but I don’t.
If you want to donate to support his (sure to be large) legal expenses, you can contribute via his paypal account at <donate@rifters.com>.
