About

This is where I’m supposed to sell myself and what I’m doing here, but it’s not really that complicated. My name is Dorian Minors, and I started btrmt. over a decade ago as a way of sharing the psychology I was studying with people who weren’t, or couldn’t. We each live such peculiarly turbulent lives, “the halt, lame, half-made creatures that we are”. Psychology seemed an incredible way of applying rules of thumb to transform some of the chaos of this human experience into meaning. Why, then, should these rules only be accessible for people with the right degree?

I’ve since continued to study the sciences of mind, culminating with a PhD in brain science at the University of Cambridge. In between, I’ve practiced this stuff in clinical contexts, taught it at schools, universities, and businesses, and even found it to have surprising utility during a six-year military career.

Sadly, I found no neat instruction manual for this device in our head that seems to hold such potential to smooth the rough edges of our lives. Anyone who tells you that they did is lying to you. But I did discover something else along the way. Humans are animals first. Like all living creatures, the primary role of our brain and body is to map the predictable structure of the world to adaptive patterns of thinking and behaving. These habits of thought, feeling, and action are protective—graceful solutions to an impossibly complex world. But rituals of thought and behaviour by any other name, are ideologies, and we are each riddled with these ways of filtering the world; our own rules of thumb for transforming all this chaos into meaning.

But ideologies are not things we develop, so much as they’re things we are gifted—absorbed from the world and people around us. Rarely do we pick them up and examine them. How could we, when what little attention we have is routinely directed towards the economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror that floods our media streams and away from any form of real connection or meaningful pursuit. And unexamined ideologies are a karstic sort of thing: these pretty landscapes that obscure the sinkholes, caves, and rivers beneath. Better to look where you tread.

So, very simply, this is what btrmt. is about. I gather these ideologies of ours and examine them, so that you can choose the ones that are right for you.

I store webserver access logs for the default time (about 15 days) before they’re purged. The logs collect your IP address, the IP address of the site you came here from (if any), timing, type, and content of HTTP requests on the site, as well as standard ‘user agent’ information (browser, operating system, and platform). This is unfortunately essential—all websites need to do some logging to serve you content and protect against malicious actors. It is, however, GDPR compliant, not least because in the timeframe between when you ask me to remove your data and when I have to have it removed, your data will have already been purged. I’m pretty sure I can reduce the storage time to seven days, but it seems like a hassle, so I won’t unless someone asks. I don’t send any of this information to third parties, and I force HTTPS on the site (which protects the usage of your IP address and other identifiable data in the logging in my webserver from third parties).

There are only two other instances on this website where your data is processed.

This site uses Goatcounter to get a sense of how users find and use my site. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. Check their privacy policy for the most up to date reference regarding the data I collect with it, but the short version is that I gather non-identifiable data only (GDPR compliant), will only remember you for 8 hours (via hashed IP address), and I don’t drop cookies that follow you around the web. If you want, I can blacklist your IP so Goatcounter doesn’t track it. Just email/mail me. Though then, of course, I’ll be storing your IP address in my “don’t track these IP addresses” list, and this is not hashed. Also, your ISP might change your IP address occasionally, and I have no way of knowing that unless you keep me updated.

The newsletter is run on Sendy. I track opens so I can clean my list of inactive users and thus avoid running afoul of all the various spam-related regulatory techniques out there. I track clicks because I do a bit of A/B testing sometimes, but I do this anonymously so I never know who clicked what link. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. However, I do use Google reCaptcha to protect my signup forms on the site here from bots. I have no idea what information that collects about you, but the script is only injected when you click on the email form input and doesn’t stick around after you’re redirected to the confirmation page, so you’re Google-tracked from when you start typing your email in the form to when you click subscribe. Worth noting.

Newsletter Troubleshooting. This is not strictly privacy related, but you need JavaScript enabled to use the signup form, or I can’t inject the reCaptcha script (see above) into the site. So if you’re having trouble signing up, that might be it. You can try enabling it, or just contact me instead and I’ll subscribe you by hand.

If you got directed here because you’re having trouble receiving my emails, then it’s probably because I send mail using Amazon SES and your email server doesn’t like it. Try checking your spam box and/or whitelisting my email: