Delete Yourself From Web Services With JustDelete.me
JustDelete.me is a directory that allows you to permanently remove yourself from different web services such as Facebook, PayPal, Amazon, etc.
Why can’t you just go to the listed sites on your own and delete yourself that way, you ask? It’s not that easy.
A lot of sites have dark patterns — interfaces created to trick users into agreeing to terms they otherwise wouldn’t — and JustDelete.me is designed to work around those patterns.
For example, Facebook’s Account Settings menu only offers people the option to deactivate their accounts, so many think that it’s not possible to completely delete themselves from the site; the “Delete Account” button can only be found if you hunt it down. With JustDelete.me, you can click the Facebook link and be taken directly to the “Delete Account” page without all the hassle.
JustDelete.me even color codes web services by how difficult it is to delete yourself from each site, with green being the easiest, and black being impossible. (Good luck deleting yourself from Craigslist.)
Image: Screenshot of JustDelete.me
6 Tips for Speaking In Public
A friend of mine wrote to me recently and wanted to know about public speaking. He was going to have to give his first ever speech, and asked if I had any advice or tips.
This was my reply to him. And I’m posting it here because it might be of use to some of you.
tips for speaking. Let’s see…
1) Mean it. Whatever you have to say, mean it.
2) Either write exactly what you want to say, or just make notes, and extemporise around it.
3) If you’ve never given a speech before, give it to your wife, your dog, friends, walls, cows, children, trees first. Get over the weirdness of talking aloud. Make sure it flows. Practice.
4) Have a point. Go somewhere. Start somewhere and go somewhere else.
5) Putting a joke in at the beginning is a good thing. Not something particularly funny, just something comfortable to put people at their ease. But you don’t have to worry about it - and it doesn’t have to be a joke. Just something that says that you know where you are.
6) Relax. When all’s said and done, it’s just a speech.
Reposted as something that can be reblogged. ON WRITER’S BLOCK.
You turn off your inner critic. You do not listen to your inner police force. You ignore the little voices that tell you that it’s all stupid, and you keep going.
Your grade isn’t suffering because your writing is bad, it’s suffering because you aren’t finishing things and handing them in.
So, finish them and hand them in. Even if a story’s lousy, you’ll learn something from it that will be useful as a writer, even if it’s just “don’t do that again”.
You’re always going to be dissatisfied with what you write. That’s part of being human. In our heads, stories are perfect, flawless, glittering, magical. Then we start to put them down on paper, one unsatisfactory word at a time. And each time our inner critics tell us that it’s a rotten idea and we should abandon it.
If you’re going to write, ignore your inner critic, while you’re writing. Do whatever you can to finish. Know that anything can be fixed later.
Remember: you don’t have to be brilliant when you start out. You just have to write. Every story you finish puts you closer to being a writer, and makes you a better writer.
Blaming “Writer’s Block” is wonderful. It removes any responsibility from the person with the “block”. It gives you something to blame, and it sounds fancy.
But it’s probably more honest to think of it as a combination of laziness, perfectionism and Getting Stuck. If you’re being lazy, don’t be. If you’re being a perfectionist, don’t be. And if you’re stuck, figure out where the story went off the rails, or what you got wrong, or where you need to go deeper, or what you need to add to make it work, and then start writing again.