OMG, this is so much fun! Dan Antion of No Facilities told me about this site. Atom Smasher is seriously too much fun. You choose what kind of sign you want to generate, fill in the blanks, and BOOM! You can make your own Wheel of Fortune-style sign. Or error messages like the one above. Or road construction. Much choices. Many fun.

My online friend Evelyn Holingue is doing April A-to-Z on odd French phrases. An odd American phrase is “the elephant in the room,” which is short for “the elephant in the room which nobody talks about.” It means something that is huge and important but unacknowledged. In the case of this post on Thrive Global, the elephant is our blind spots.

The biases we aren’t aware of affect our behavior more profoundly than the ones we are aware of. This is why people who blurt out racist or unkind statements can honestly say, “I’m not that kind of person!” They mean they don’t want to be or intend to be that kind of person. They’ve addressed their conscious decisions and attitudes, but there are underlying biases they haven’t examined, and those pop up out of their subconscious at moments of compromised control. I say “they” as if it couldn’t happen to me, yeah?

I especially love this post because it contains the Johari Window, which Alice Friman, one of my favorite poets, talked about in a poetry workshop I took under her. MOST useful in puzzling out characters and their behaviors and effects.

NOW, if you know me, you know the only time I go outside is to get the mail or look for morel mushrooms. I have a perfectly good house, and the wild animals don’t feel free to come inside and wander around, so I limit my outdoor wanderings as a matter of respect. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. HOWEVER, not all of my characters feel the same way. This being so, I need to know something about the outside sometimes. One of the sites I can go to learn outsidey stuff is Outside. I mean a website, obviously, not the actual OUTSIDE outside, where the bugs and stuff live.

A WRITING PROMPT BASED ON MY POST: Put an indoor kind of person outside and/or make them face beliefs they didn’t know they hold.

MA