About
btrmt. is about the ideologies you choose.
About the author
About the author
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. The primary role of the brain is to map the predictable
structure of the world to predictable 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.
Yet, ideologies are things we are gifted---absorbed from the world and people
around us. Rarely do we 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 so, we are left "half awake. Our fires
are damped, our rafts are checked… the human individual lives usually far
within his limits".
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.
Contact me
Contact me
btrmt. and its projects all use the company name BTRMT LIMITED when I'm selling you something, registered in England and Wales (no. 13755561). The registered office and postal address is:
Capital House
61 Amhurst Road
London E81LL UK
And you can contact me there or at dorian(at)btrmt.org.
Legal
Legal
Detail on any product related policies can be found at the associated project page.
Privacy
Privacy
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's all
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 (although then, of course, I'll be storing
it in my "don't track these IP addresses" list).
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.