Simon Thorn and the Wolf's Den (Simon Thorn 1) EPub tải xuống miễn phí

Helio Osako wenfear — sorry, this is not a review, just my notes for myself: -people often feel a need to EXERCISE CONTROL, not just have nice things happen to them; and we tend to overestimate our actual level of control over our lives/futures. people who realize they lose the ability to control things end up depressed (actually depressed people tend to be the group with the most realistic sense of the level of control they have... so a feeling of control, be it real or imagined, is necessary for mental health... even though later in the book he tells us that having the actual ability to reconsider our decisions makes us anxious/unhappy whereas we rationalize a bad but irreversible decision and end up okay with it.) -when we see the present, or imagine past or future, we only notice/recall/imagine some details but not ALL; the things we don't consciously think about or remember, our brains just patch up automatically with what we see around the area, or how we feel NOW (instead of how we actually felt / will feel then) -IF we happen to be feeling neutral and not thinking too hard, our gut instinct will be a better judge of how we'll feel about something in the future, vs. overthinking it and trying to make a "sensible" decision that overrides our gut instinct... but if we're feeling something strong right now, our predictions will be affected strongly by it. -when we imagine how we'll feel when event A happens in the distant future, we start by imagining how we'd feel if event A happened now, and then we adjust... but not too well, so if we start with two different initial feelings, we're likely to end up with 2 different final guesses. and if we're distracted while we're asked to make our guess, we'll just stick with our initial hunch entirely! -when considering buying something whose price has just increased, you "should" compare not with its past price, but with what else you can possibly get for the new price... but most of us do the past-comparison, not the possible-comparison. on the other hand, if we're undecided about whether to buy something at all, many stores have a current-possible-comparison ready for you (a row of TVs all lined up) to trick you into thinking at least ONE of their items is a good buy (compared to the other super-pricy ones they have) so you end up buying it there even if you weren't necessarily planning to, or even if you could get it cheaper on craigslist or somewhere else that you're not easily able to compare with at the moment. -in any case, we tend to think of "relative dollars" instead of "absolute ones" so be wary of this! -the comparison you make now, when deciding, is NOT necessarily the one you'll make later, when enjoying! so you choose the uglier speakers that sound better than pretty ones, then get home and can't compare the two speaker sounds anymore but CAN compare the ugliness of yours to the prettyness of the rest of your furniture. or you meet Americans in Europe and enjoy their company more than that of snobby Europeans, but when you see the same folks again in the States you realize they're not as fun as your usual friends here are. -!!!people DON'T change their minds when the facts contradict them -- they ignore or invalidate the "wrong" facts. -!!!people EXPECT to regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions... but looking back, they DO regret inaction (failing to spend time with friends, go to college, etc) more than most actions. if you acted, you can rationalize about all the things you learned from even a bad experience, but never from a non-experience. -people who experience a minor annoyance feel bad about it; if you experience MAJOR painful badness, your brain rationalizes it and makes you feel better about it. also, you feel better about an irrevocable, inescapable thing than about one you could avoid or change (or an inconclusive possibility of badness)... so don't pay a premium for the freedom to change your mind later -- having to worry about whether or not you made the right decision will hurt, while rationalizing that you DID make the right decision comes naturally if you can't change your mind anyway. -simply explaining away a bad event can help you feel much better about it -- writing about a traumatic event helps a lot. but explaining a good event can also make you feel less fantastic about it -- knowing that X admires you specifically because you have such-and-so in common with them is less cool than knowing you have a secret admirer. so don't try "explaining away" good fortune to your friends! unexplained events are rare/unusual, and we keep thinking about them longer than about "explained" events, so they have a greater emotional impact. (if you liked a movie but can't quite figure out something, you're more likely to think about it and like it for longer than if you liked it but everything made perfect sense and you can stop thinking as soon as you leave the theater.) -...so... uncertainty about whether you made a good decision is to be avoided, but uncertainty about the explanation for a good event is to be desired. -you learn everything that you learn through practice and/or coaching -we THINK that the most-memorable things must be the most common ones, since they happen so often we should remember them most; but in many cases the LEAST common event is the most memorable precisely because it's unusual and stands out so much that it's easy to recall. we really remember the best and worst of times, NOT the most likely of times. -we don't remember how we actually felt, but how we currently BELIEVE we must have felt based on who we are today -false/bad ideas that tend to promote stable societies will tend to propagate more than accurate/good ideas that promote instability/anarchy/disruption... which goes with haidt's ideas about conservatives vs liberals. -a healthy economy is the kind of stable environment that's good for communication... so the belief that money buys happiness causes people to strive and work for more money, which drives the economy, which creates stability. the belief that "more money = more happiness" is a self-perpetuating belief (just like belief that having kids is nice) -Gilbert describes experiments in which people who knew exactly what was going to happen made a prediction about their future happiness that, on average, was further off from the truth than the average predictions of the group who didn't know full details of what'd happen but did have a randomly-selected just-after-the-fact report from someone who'd undergone the event earlier. so he says that instead of relying on our faulty imaginations to predict our happiness under a given circumstance, just ask a random person who is currently in that circumstance. [but his research results show only the means -- maybe the report-readers had lower bias but higher variance? show the spread, people!!! i should check out the paper: Norwick, Gilbert, and Wilson, "Surrogation: An Antidote for Errors in Affective Forecasting," written 2005 but not actually published... hrm... OH YEAH -- also, when he says to ask another person how happy they are NOW to guess how happy you will be in the future in a similar situation, he doesn't reiterate what he said before -- that even asking someone how they feel NOW is imperfect, especially if you only ask one person, since in his field the answer is only really valid if you ask many many people and take the average... so really, the idea that I PERSONALLY will get a good guess as to how happy I will be by asking ONE other person ... seems pretty sketchy.] -he explains that people DON'T tend to trust others' reports as much as own imaginations because we all think we're really unique individuals, different from the average, and we think that others are too; so we're not likely to expect another person to respond the same way we do in similar circumstances. -he claims that we know people are unsuccessfully striving for happiness because we know that they tend to change jobs/houses/spouses a large number of times... but those changes can inevitably come from external sources (I DID find the perfect happy job for me until there were unexpected layoffs -- doesn't mean I'd made the wrong decision for maximizing happiness when I took the job) or the changes themselves can be the source of happiness (I AM happy to move from town to town because I like the variety -- the fact that I moved doesn't mean I was wrong to have lived in town 1 and expect to be happier in town 2 but that I've enjoyed town 1 to the point of diminishing return and now am finally ready to be happy in town 2 as well). -...so are we really all searching for happiness in the same way he claims? seems like the big takeaway point is: if you momentarily are unhappy, just remember that you can't successfully predict your feelings in the future in a SPECIFIC situation but IN GENERAL your brain will make you happy again soon -- unless you have depression, in which case ask your doctor for some frontal lobe damage.

Maria Guarneri guarneri_maria — Truly human and moving

Vincent Contamine _in_onta — the first in a new "paranormal romance" series (cuz apparently, i like my porn to involve fangs or werewolves) that's so far surprisingly good. my coworker who's been keeping me stocked in the supernatural crack that's been fueling a month-long book-bender has found a real winner in this new author. you can tell from the first book that there's some carefully considered world-building going on, and the plot is far more than mere filler between bedroom scenes. nutshell recap: a woman finds out as she's approaching her mid-20s that she's really a half-vampire. the ruler of the vampire race, good friends with her deceased father, arrives to see her through the physically dangerous transition to vampirehood. we get introduced to all of the rules of this particular universe at the same time our heroine does, and many of the supporting characters in here earn their own books from the get-go. i devoured this one in its entirety on a plane ride home, and its sequel the very next day. lots of fun.

Freon Tapican _izmo_remlin — Not as good as "Angela's Ashes" but still a pretty good memoir about the second phase of Frank McCourt's life.

Bivash Ojha ojhabivash2d99 — Probably my favorite work by her. Ties everything together.

Jason Reis _ason_eis — Don't be an ordinary seagull! Strive for excellence and self-fulfillment! And, the book is about some fancy flying, so that's a plus!