Jon HenshawPlus(he/him)

When friends plan to visit Nashville, TN, they often reach out to me to find the best things to do. My list of recommended things hasn't changed much, so I figured it was time to finally write a post that I could point friends to in the future. This is my list of the best things to do in Nashville.

1. Broadway: Broadway is Broadway. If you want to drink and dance and listen to live music, that’s the easiest thing you’ll do here. This review is as good as any.
2. Ryman: If you can time it with a good Ryman concert, that will significantly enhance your trip. If not, hitting a smaller venue like Exit/In or Marathon Music Works can be fun, too, if they have a band you like.
3. Museums: The museum scene is decent. Especially if you like music history.
4. Hatch Show Print: You’ll want to check out Hatch Show Print. I can almost guarantee that you won't leave there without buying a print.
5. Beer: If you like beer, there’s a decent brewing scene in Nashville.
6. The Catbird Seat: My favorite fancy pants amazaballs restaurant is The Catbird Seat. The food and experience are absolutely worth it if you can snag reservations.
7. Margot Cafe: My favorite all-time local Nashville restaurant is Margot Cafe.
8. Prince's: Go to Prince’s if you want the original Nashville hot chicken (Hattie B’s is good, but it’s not the original).
9. Martin's: Everyone has their favorite BBQ place, but mine is Martin’s. I recommend the dry-rubbed wings with white sauce.
10. Goo Goo Cluster: Lastly, you can make a custom Goo Goo Cluster which is fun and delicious.

I passed a dead possum on the road today. Its face was turned towards me and its eyes were open, staring at me, with stains of blood that had poured out of its eyes when it was dying.

What is this possum’s life worth? What is our own life worth?

As someone who no longer believes in the existence of an afterlife or an omniscient invisible being that’s pulling all of the strings, I have a new perspective on the meaning of life. The answer for me has merely become to live.

Living is being in the moment; observing nature; focusing on your breathing; tasting food; smelling pleasant scents; drinking water; intimacy; rest; and feeling the sun give you warmth.

As humans, we allow our complexities and higher reasoning to stack, smother, and obscure what it means to be alive. We build and participate in social constructs that enrage us or cause us severe depression. We become chronically anxious and will either eat too much or not enough. We commit ourselves to debt for things we don’t need, enabling what we owe to become the master of our future actions.

Am I that possum? Are we all that possum after you strip away all of the social constructs that forever occupy our minds?

For me, the possum is a reminder that life is short and our bodies are fragile. It’s a reminder to step away from the fictions we’ve created and participate in, and to reset my body and mind with things that are simple and true, like breathing, resting, smelling, feeling, helping, and loving.

I will continue to create, participate, and do all of the things that I just mentioned that make life messy. But I’ll also try to be mindful and attempt to remain tethered to what is simple and real.

If you’re living life as fully as possible, it will be a mixed bag of emotions and will most certainly involve uncertainty and risk. Some of those decisions will result in miserable failures, while others will reward you with unimaginable joy.

I’m thankful for my failures. They help keep my ambitions in check. And if left unchecked, might adversely affect the lives of others. That is a regret I do not want to visit again if I can avoid it.

I’m thankful for my successes. They give me hope that my dreams and ambitions are attainable.

After many failures, I was able to experience the success of helping build a company from nothing to a growing SaaS. A lot happened during those 12 years. There were many highs and many lows. Throughout it though, I never gave up, and I survived. Much of my survival is thanks to my business partner, Scott Holdren, who fought alongside me. We also survived because of the extraordinary people who chose to be a part of the Raven family.

Time and experiences have a way of changing you. For me, I felt finished with Raven and was ready to start a new adventure. Scott was in a similar place, but he, of course, had his own reasons. That’s why we decided to sell it. So we could eventually do something new and different with our lives.

We were fortunate to find an interested company that knew Raven well. They were a good fit and could take good care of it. They were generous and kept all of the employees, and gave us a chance to continue working with them. Ultimately though, my heart wasn’t in it anymore, and I was ready for a change. I will be forever grateful to them and wish them the best as they continue to grow their company.

So what’s next?

I want to do what I enjoy most, and one of the things I enjoy most is SEO. And by SEO, I mean all of it: IA, content strategies and tactics, finding untapped opportunities, killing it in organic search, testing new technologies, experimenting with new ideas, outreach, networking, link building…ALL OF IT.

I’ve found a place to do that and more at CBS Interactive. I will be a Senior SEO Analyst and it's a dream job for me.

I’m still an entrepreneur at heart, and I have something I’m cooking up in my own time that I’ll be debuting in the coming months. For now, though, I’m looking forward to what will hopefully be a long ride with the genius search team at CBSi.

Once you hit your mid-to-late-thirties, things start to slow down. It’s an interesting time because it coincides with you feeling fairly confident about yourself and the world around you. As in, you don’t give as much of a shit about things, because you’ve realized how insignificant those things actually are.

If you’re like me, 🍺, 🥃 and 🍸 also start to taste better and you find yourself consuming them more often than not. That has been my case for several years now. I’ve fought off the unpleasant effects of alcohol (making me fatter) by 🏋️, 🚵 and 🏃‍♂️. However, an unexpected thing happened to me as soon as I hit 40-years-old. I started to develop chronic insertional achilles tendinitis (IAT).

IAT would make it impossible to walk for weeks at a time, which also kept me from 🏋️, 🚵 and 🏃‍♂️. Without exercise, I found myself drinking more often, especially when I felt more stressed out. I also started to notice that I was becoming more physically depressed. I felt more tired and my brain felt slower. It became a vicious cycle, similar to how overweight people (myself included) relieve themselves emotionally with unhealthy food over and over again.

🏃‍♂️ is my zen and 🏋️ makes me feel strong, but with IAT I was stuck. So after three years of off-and-on-again IAT, I finally sought out a specialist and got an MRI. I found out that absolutely nothing was wrong with me. There were no signs of arthritis or problems with my achilles. Everything looked completely healthy. After ruling out all of the other possibilities, my doctor diagnosed me with gout.

This was shocking to me, because I’ve always imagined gout as being an old person’s disease where they have this giant swelled up foot and ankle. After learning more about gout and how it first usually presents itself with a swelled up big toe knuckle, I immediately remembered the two times that happened to me in my right foot and I couldn’t walk very well for a week each time. Holy crap! I’ve been fighting gout all this time!

I learned that gout is caused by purines (which sounds completely made up to me) which are found in high quantities in 🍺, 🥃, 🍸, 🐮, 🐔, 🐷, 🐟 and 🦐. That’s basically my entire diet. Consuming any of those on a regular basis and in high volume can cause gout. In addition, not staying well hydrated can cause gout.

In most cases, gout is hereditary. It wasn’t until after I was diagnosed that my Dad said, “Oh yeah, your Mom and I have had gout several times.” That would have been good to know a long time ago 😕.

Bottom line, the cure for gout for me was to give up 🍺, 🥃, 🍸, 🐮, 🐔, 🐷, 🐟 and 🦐, and to stay💧. So that’s what I did, 🥶🦃.

Since I’ve stopped drinking alcohol and have only been eating a vegetarian diet, my symptoms have completely gone away. I’ve been exercising regularly again, and I have yet to experience any of the old symptoms. The other thing that’s changed significantly is what I call my brainergy. I feel more alert and energetic. I had no idea just how much alcohol was physically depressing my body and my mind. I’m sure it’s also because I’m eating healthier now, but not drinking alcohol has made my mind significantly more sharp and intellectually motivated. So in a weird way, gout has been a blessing.

It's become rare to find comment threads on news articles that are civil and thoughtful. Instead, most comments are full of people calling the opposing side names and telling them why they're wrong. People who reply typically use the same tone and defend their own points with religious-like vigor. Nobody is listening and nobody's minds are being changed. As a result, people who could positively and constructively be contributing to the discussion are vanishing.

Last week Google debuted a new toxicity detecting service for online discussions called Perspective. While some people see this approach as an affront to our freedom of speech (which it is not), it is an affront to intentionally contentious and pugnacious commenters.

The goal of the Perspective API is to bring back some semblance of online civil discourse. To help create it, Google partnered with the New York Times and Wikipedia and analyzed their comments data.

It analyzed the Times moderators' decisions as they triaged reader comments, and used that data to train itself to identify harmful speech. The training materials also included hundreds of thousands of comments on Wikipedia, evaluated by thousands of different moderators.

I tested Perspective and was impressed by its results.

While Perspective is promising, it's still no panacea and it is a form of censorship. Machine learning and algorithms can only go so far when it comes to human language and intent. Not only will there be false positives, but some of the incorrectly filtered comments may also end up being the most profound and irenic messages that nobody will ever get to see or consider. And like most technology, it can be gamed. Civil and relevant dissent may be filtered, while useless and sardonic comments may slip through undetected.

Perhaps, over time, weighting can be applied to authors. The algorithm could take that weighting into consideration and highlight conversations by authors who engage in civil discourse, regardless of their positions and ideology.

Civil discourse is how we progress as a people. The internet presents the most incredible communication medium of our time and we're currently squandering it with our inability to speak intelligently to each other. My hope is that technologies like Perspective will help save online civil discourse without censoring diverse ideas and perspectives.

Information is the enemy of religion. There's a direct correlation between access to dissenting, logical information about religion and one's beliefs and devotion to it. This becomes exasperated when you introduce cultural phenomena, like the mixture of politics and religion that are incongruent with each other and society as a whole. This is especially true for younger believers whose minds are more capable of plasticity.

My philosophical status as a None came from a direct result of religion mixed with politics. I was an Evangelical Christian for the first three decades of my life, but something significant happened in the early 2000s. I watched in dumbfounded despair as Christians across America were mindlessly controlled by fear-based rhetoric from our President and his Administration. It resulted in Christian books being published about when war was okay with God and the politicization of the pulpit. At the time, it was obvious to me that not only was the Administration lying, but the idea of rushing into the war was incongruent with my beliefs and scripture as I knew it. It was the first time I had ever witnessed firsthand the power of fear and groupthink.

That moment in time – a lying President, fear-based rhetoric, and blind devotion – was the catalyst for my six-year-long deconversion away from Christianity. The internet played a significant role in my ability to find and access information. However, there was also an agnostic and atheist book publishing Renaissance during that time. Some of the books I read were considered heretical, like Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, which shed light on the origins of the Bible and questioned the validity of Jesus. While others were thoughtful, provocative, and atheistic in nature, like Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great and Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Without the internet and access to those books, it's possible that I could still be clinging to my faith and suffering from even worse cognitive dissonance.

It's now 2017 and one month into Trump's presidency. Trump brings an entirely new degree of incongruence between his ideology and Christianity. Taking into account 1) the continued trend away from religion; 2) access to more philosophical and dissenting views via the internet and books; and 3) the coupling of the Trump presidency with conservative Christians (a true deal with the devil), I expect a new wave of Nones as a result. If you want to know how to kill your own religious relevance within society and among an entire generation, all you need to do is sit back and watch how conservative Christians are self-destructing through their myopic worldview and desire for theocracy.

In a world of games like Candy Crush, game creators borrow from psychology to intentionally make their games as addictive as possible. Players then allow these games to rob them of their precious time. Time away from socializing, relating, loving, and even creating.

If the game creators are lucky, they can make a lot of money. The end result is a profitable company and a sea of people who wasted their time and potential on nothing.

And then you have Flappy Bird.

The creator of Flappy Bird wrote the game in a week and over time, it became one of the most successful games on iTunes. At its peak, it was making $50,000/day in advertising. And then Dong Nguyen, the game's creator, removed it.

Dong Nguyen told Forbes:

“Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed.”

“But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.”

Lan Anh Nguyen, Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App 'Gone Forever' Because It Was 'An Addictive Product', Forbes

So there you have it. Dong Nguyen is the only person looking out for your best interests in this cold and dark gaming world. He would rather you do something with your life than allow himself to get filthy, stinking rich.

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Update March 11, 2014

Rolling Stone caught with Dong Nguyen and was able to get him to further elucidate his decision to pull the game.

But the hardest thing of all, he says, was something else entirely. He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he's saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.

By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism, and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn't sleep, couldn't focus, didn't want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, "worried about my well-being." His tweets became darker and more cryptic. "I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine," read one. "But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it." He realized there was one thing to do: Pull the game. After tweeting that he was taking it down, 10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours. Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. "I'm master of my own fate," he says. "Independent thinker."

David Kushner, The Flight of the Birdman: Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out, Rolling Stone

Near the end of the article, the author, David Kushner, asked him "will Flappy Bird ever fly again?" His answer was maybe, but it will have to come with the warning, "Please take a break."

My son just turned eight and he wanted to have a Minecraft-themed party, so I figured why not throw a LAN party!

Minecraft Server

If you're going to have a Minecraft LAN party, you might as well run the server locally. I chose to go with McMyAdmin, because it's easy to use and also runs on OS X.

I installed it on an old Mac mini and had the server up and running in a few minutes.

Computers for Playing Minecraft

Finding enough computers for guests will probably be the hardest task for most people.

I highly recommend having a computer for everyone, otherwise, people will feel left out and will probably get bored. In most cases that will mean reducing the number of people you invite (which is actually a good thing).

At our party, we used my laptop, my wife's iMac, the kids' old iMac, and the old Mac mini running the server. We were short one computer, but one of the kids was able to bring his parent's laptop.

Everyone will need a Minecraft account, so make sure they know that in advance. And if they're young, get the login info from their parents before the party. Otherwise, you'll be stuck either setting up accounts or with some very disappointed kids.

Setting Up the LAN

I have a good WiFi network, but I wanted the network and gameplay to be super fast. So I set up a wired gigabit network!

I bought Netgear's 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch and hooked everything up with Cat6 ethernet cables. Needless to say, there was NO lag! :)

Minecraft Party Activities

When the kids showed up, they were greeted with Minecraft music. And by Minecraft music, I mean all of the random people who have changed the lyrics to popular songs and turned them into Minecraft songs.

I was able to do this by pulling up Spotify on my iPad mini and playing one of the numerous Minecraft playlists that were available. I used the awesome Big JamBox by Jawbone for the speakers.

We also took regular black and green balloons and Minecrafted them!

There was even a dance room, because why not!?

Before we started the LAN party, we had the kids create Minecraft objects using the Melty Beads Animal Friends kit.

We then found patterns online for them to use.

After the bead project, we started the main event. I'm pretty sure they could have kept playing for days. Lucky for us it was just two hours :)

For the finale, we made a Minecraft Pig cake out of homemade cupcakes. The boys didn't mind that it was pink, because it was a pig...and it's cake!

All-in-all, it was a great party.