• Play therapy prescribes video games to combat anxiety | Rock Paper Shotgun

  Daramus also links gaming activity to her specific treatment goals. She gives the example of playing Animal Crossing and reflecting with clients on how befriending villagers honed their social skills, or waiting to hook a rare fish built their distress tolerance. While spending hours upon days waiting for that final drop is indeed distressing, there are even benefits when it pushes to the point of frustration.

• The Year of Head Empty

  As we confronted the Delta variant — and were then introduced Omicron — some of the early 2020 panic reemerged. Today it seems we’re back at square one. Like the past year didn’t happen.

• Will My Money Anxiety Ever Go Away?

  To escape poverty, they say it takes as long as 20 years with nothing going wrong. So naturally it was everything in the world going wrong that gave me a chance.

• Shaquille O’Neal’s Workout and Diet He’s Using to Get Fit at 50

  This, along with protecting his endurance and vitality, is what Shaq was trying to prevent when he went to visit a doctor for the first time in his life about two years ago. When he says this, I ask him to repeat it to make sure I heard him correctly. Shaq had never been to a doctor before? Ever?

• Every Sport Could Use A John Madden | Defector

  So here’s one last thing to miss about John Madden: that he started with the excitement of what the game was, and explained every moment in a way that suggested he thought that those moments were not just valuable, but meaningful in their own right.

• Wordle Is a Love Story - The New York Times

• Simon Collison | Leaving Spotify for Apple: a music obsessive’s observations

  Occasional introductory notes about essential albums; something I loved about Rdio and is completely missing from Spotify.

• 40 for 40 - Chris Coyier

  Little is more powerful than writing. Look, it’s working! You’re getting to know me, and that’s a powerful thing.

• Reality is Very Weird and You Need to be Prepared for That — SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD

  This is really good, and we think it’s reason to be optimistic. We might be closer than we think to cures for depression, hypertension, and yes, even obesity.

My favourite articles of the year:

• Exercise Doesn’t Have To Suck

  Do you remember the high of ditching? It really wakes you up! I remember being existentially sleepy in a geometry class, eyelids heavy enough to weigh down a bounce house, almost too tired to keep my commitment to ditch and meet in the parking lot, but then as soon as I did, I suddenly had enough energy to power the school generator.

• Street Fighter 3: An oral history - Polygon

  . There’s competitive games like that, where the match is essentially a confrontation of theoretical knowledge that each player has built up. But Street Fighter 3 is a game that, by design, doesn’t have a fixed answer to those questions. There is no “best” tactic; you can spend your whole life trying to find the perfect theoretical approach to a situation in SF3, but it will never be quite right.

• A Personal Digital Reset

  About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I hope that sharing some of what I do might help inspire you to manage the technology in your life in a way that reduces stress or distractions, and makes your time in front of the screen more fun.

• A More Accessible Web. Some of the web technologies that The… | by The NYT Open Team | NYT Open

  Implementing web accessibility standards is not always hard. There are numerous ways designers and developers can incorporate accessibility principles in their web applications by using basic CSS and HTML.

• Age of distractions or how to calmly enjoy what you are doing in 2021

  So I stop and think. When was the last moment that took longer than 10 seconds, where I didn’t have an urge to check an app on my phone, see if I got new email, or impulsively do something else?

• Why “Gentle Writing Advice,” Exactly? — Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

  Too much of our advice presents for us a map, a magic incantation, an instruction manual, but those inevitably fail under rigorous testing. The map is to a forgotten world, the incantation was unique to the wizard who first spoke it, and the instruction manual is in Swedish.

• Why Am I Sp Bad At Typign?

  The act of typing — either fluid touch typing or making mistakes — is a miracle of our brains.

• Feeling Blah During the Pandemic? It’s Called Languishing - The New York Times

• Every Blogging Option Sucks - Marius Masalar

  Perfect is the enemy of good, and I know all too well that fussing over platforms distracts from doing the work of writing, but now and then it’s nice to reassure myself that I’m building this thing on sturdy foundations.

• How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body

  Blurred vision, blurring eyes, and eyestrain were reported by 70 percent to 90 percent of the sample, and some of the strong disparities between the clerical workers and the control subjects—such as with changes in color perception or stiff or sore wrists—were clear indicators of the impact of the soft repetitive strain of computer terminal use.

• Commuting is psychological torture - by Luke O’Neil

• Nobody Cares What You Have to Say—That’s a Good Thing |

  Whether you’re pitching editors or querying agents, trying to get your work published can feel an awful lot like calling out into the void and hearing nothing back except the mocking echo of your own voice, crowing that your idea or your writing or you, yourself, are worthless. It often feels disheartening, like nobody cares what you have to say. But it can also be incredibly freeing.

• You’re Still Exhausted - by Anne Helen Petersen

  So the first step is recognizing that you, too, need rest. Don’t just want it, don’t just fantasize about it, don’t just talk about it and then deny it, but need it, require it, in order to keep going. The second step is advocating for the structures that make it possible — on a personal, professional, and societal level — so that others can ask and receive rest too.

• How To Deflect Compliments - The Chatner

  “I don’t even use the compliments I already have at home!”

• How To Not Suck At Writing | Defector

• A Chemical Hunger — Part X: What to Do About It

  Our suggestions are very prosaic: Be nice to yourself. Eat mostly what you want. Trust your instincts.

• How to Stop Caring What Other People Think of You - The Atlantic

• Trying to Get Famous Might Make You Miserable - The Atlantic

• “Should I Just Give Up on My Writing?”

  There are so many new ways to count and measure and monitor your success these days, too, and you can see the detrimental effects it has on writers’ understanding of themselves and their work. The more you worry about how the world sees you, how your words land, whether or not you matter, the more neurotic and self-obsessed your writing gets.

• The Unofficial Rules of Posting

  No matter what you post, or how you word it, or how many asterisks and caveats you attach to it, you will suffer the worst-faith readings you have ever experienced.