For as wordy as I am, I feel ill-equipped to articulate this.  A “boring” decade would be hard for anyone to articulate in full, and the last ten definitely have not been that.  I don’t really want to say “the journey we started ten years ago today,” because it didn’t really start then.  Deciding “Hey, what if I MBTI typed people better than the internet, and had fun writing about it” was already five years into our marriage, which had been way too eventful already by April 2013.

Calise and Justin, Summer 2012

I know it probably seems silly and dramatic to the outside observer, treating what might look on the surface like just another “personality blog” like such a big deal.  Especially when we have no letters certifying expert training, we’ve always been abominably bad at posting consistently, making promises of posts we haven’t fulfilled in a decade, and our web developer and videography skills have always been laughably amateur.  We don’t advertise, we are hideous about replying to messages and emails.

And we haven’t posted a full post on this site since… I don’t even remember and can’t be bothered to go check.  Was it 2018, with INTJ – The Dragon, Stranger Things and the Subtypes post?  Probably.  (Edit: Apparently The Dragon was 2017 and Stranger Things and Subtypes were 2018.  Shows how much I remember, rofl.)  And then it’s just been a bunch of dramatic posts about checking out our other content, elsewhere.

We are kinda dramatic.  Going to get that out of the way right now.  But we’ve gotten so many reactions of people scratching their heads at this little amateurish website getting the reactions it does.

People have said this doofy little website (along with the others connected to it) has changed their lives??  They’ve overcome huge amounts of depression, anxiety, family abuse, and self-deprecation through the tools we’ve provided?  But not only have those internal circumstances been changed, but people have changed jobs, made and visited friends on the other side of the globe, and even moved across the country, and gotten married (or divorced, to my ongoing feels), as a result of relationships, with others and themselves, found through aLBoP.

I’m definitely not going to pretend it’s been all roses, no thorns.  We’ve seen a lot of falling outs amongst our ranks, in friendships, marriages, siblings, one prison sentence, and Justin and I have been called many unsavory things over a decade and more.  There are so many things we’d do differently, if we got another shot at it, although usually not the things people accuse us of doing badly.  The last thing I want to do is paint us over-pretty.

But outside people are always shocked at the impact, whether you think it’s a bad or good impact, that a website and its offshoots can create in people’s lives.  It’s a badly-organized, tangenting mess of bad grammar, too many hyperlinks, a lot of crossdressing references, which could be seen to take itself way too seriously and promises way past its station.  And dramatic, so dramatic!!  How the crap are people reacting this affected by it?

Well, I simultaneously am and am not just as shocked as they are.  Nobody knows better than I do what a silly, dramatic mess I am.  And I both did and didn’t intend for it to be a big thing.  I felt really good starting it, and Justin and I had already been trying (and mostly failing) to help people with the tools we’d gleaned.

What is Smart? – going back to the definitions in the Phase 2 Intro

Later “Phases” of aLBoP are mostly based around tools we had before cognition, that nobody wanted to hear, before.  We’d tried everything we could figure out to share patterns that were helping us grow, personally, and nobody gave a flying crap at that point.  We were humiliated and treated like we were dangerous.

Which, I guess is relatively fair, in a twisted way.  I both did and didn’t know, back then, what loaded topics selfness and growth are.  I both did and didn’t know the effect that people changing would have.

But I was just screwing around.  I had found patterns, writing in literal hair on my bathtub wall, and I wanted to share them because they worked.  I like hearing myself talk.  So typing Hercules was really just goofy.

And yet, we’d already sacrificed basically everything, in the pursuit of helping other people be happy.  You’re welcome to not believe that, but it’s true.  You’re also welcome to think we did it stupidly.  My house wouldn’t have many holes in the ceiling if we’d successfully done it for the money.  So, it’s not like we happened upon a gem; we didn’t.  It’s been 15+ years of much more of an upward battle than I can articulate.

But on April 6th, 2013, when I published the first post to alittlebitofpersonality.blogspot.com… I didn’t think it was going to work!  I was just being me!  It’s not like that had worked super well to-date by the time I was 23.5.  I mean, I like to think I’m charming, but it had motivated very few people to change in my lifetime.

Maybe that’s my conclusion today?  tbh I had no frickin’ clue when I started typing this, in the bathtub as usual.  (Severe skin condition, for anyone who doesn’t know by now.  I was going to say that I’d spend a lot less time naked if it wasn’t for psoriasis, but I don’t feel like I can actually promise that.)  Where was I going…  Oh, right!

I like to say that the most untapped resource on earth is human effort.  And, no, I don’t mean forcing your children to garden for you.  I mean that there is nothing more powerful in the world than a human being putting their own will behind intentionality, and causing something, creating something; changing something.

What stops that force?  Well, many things.  Lack of resources, sure, but as humans we’re all about overcoming things in our way.  Problem solving is one of the most bad-A abilities about humankind, in my opinion.  When properly motivated, we figure crap out.  We’re solution-finding beings.

So what stops us from that motivation, from the hope requisite to find answers?  (No, Docs, I’m not going to change that to “required!”  It’s prettier and gets across my meaning better this way!)  What stops us from using our own manpower to achieve great things?

Blockages.  Emotional gunk.  Our messed up current culture makes it so everyone has baggage, literally everyone, to whatever degree.  And baggage weighs you down, so then you have no frickin’ clue who you are or what you’re capable of, let alone what you want to do with that capacity.  When everywhere you look, everyone is emotionally exhausted, and the culture has drilled into you your entire life that “you can’t do great things,” then how the eff are you supposed to stand up, all alone, and believe you can do anything more than that?

And so often people just can’t. …Not on their own anyway.  It’s hard to observe the Milky Way from inside it, and it’s hard to see the reality of you, on your own.  It’s hard to see your own worth and potential when you feel barraged on every side.

And that is all that every Phase, Stage, Ring, website, and forum of aLBoP has ever been about.  Literally, you want to know the purposes and goals for aLBoP that have managed to affect individuals so completely?

1. Help people discover truth for themselves, with us giving them the tools to find it.
2. Help people grow to become the best version of themselves, because people can only understand, enjoy, and be happy in reality, if they’re freed up to be themselves, and grow to a larger capacity for happiness.
3. Use happy, strong, capable people, who are wise enough to make their own decisions, as a force to take over the world and make it suck less.

Kinda joking on that last one, but kinda not, lol.  The goal, since Justin and I were dating, was in fact to amass more resources to help people.  We were just really tiny then and didn’t realize all the ways we were expecting it to go smoother than it ever did.

But I’m not going to pretend that “world domination” wasn’t always on the agenda… except it’s like if an ancient civilization had tried to take over the world entirely through spreading literacy?  Like if someone’s method of taking over the world was by giving everyone in medieval Europe their own printing press?  Flipping over the status quo of human misery has always been the plan, as much as is possible within our capacity, we’ve just always wanted to do it by enabling people to ask questions, find answers, think for themselves, overcome their own weaknesses… and, y’know, generally don’t be a dick.

From The Four Types of Love, a definite favorite of mine.

I do think that one of the reasons aLBoP has been able to be as powerful in the lives of individuals as it has is because we never say “You’re perfect just the way you are.”  We do say “You are loved just the way you are,” but that’s not the same thing.  You’re working with a great foundation of self.  Now, get up and do better.  Believe you can be worth even more tomorrow, by getting rid of the toxic waste that is eating you inside out.  Find out who you are, love it, and then make it better.  I’ve never been here to tell you who to be, but I am here to help you find who you already are, and to help you figure out who you want to be next.

Individuality is a science.  You can’t just make it up, and there are physics to it, but if you find out how it ticks, you can use that to superpower yourself.  Most powerful force on earth, remember?

If you discover who you are and work out your blockages and weaknesses, nothing is a more powerful force.  Problem solving is in your DNA, but you have to choose to use it.

There’s a lot of opinions in the world about if “everyone is special,” and I think that’s a complicated question.  I believe everyone’s existence matters.  I believe everyone deserves to be loved.  Everyone.  But I also believe that being special is a choice, but not one based on the variety of things people try to base it on.

I believe specialness is earned, but not by currency, class, popularity or posturing.  (I totally wanted to alliterate, but I think that turned out well.)

I happen to believe that you are as special as your willingness to do hard things, as your willingness to grow and face your weaknesses, even when it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done.  Even when your insides scream out “ENOUGH!”  Even when things seem dark and hopeless, but you push on anyway.  Special is a motive, and it doesn’t come cheap.  You can’t truly imitate it or hack it, as much as people try.  That is the trait I believe makes one truly exceptional.

I’m pretty satisfied, to date, with feeling like I’ve earned being special, but I didn’t start out as anything special.  I wasn’t smarter or anything, I just wanted to know what was real, and was willing to sacrifice to find it out.  That’s all it takes, seriously.

No magic pill.  Finding reality, even when it’s hard.  Being willing to work through your weaknesses even when it sucks, even when those very weaknesses make you bone-shatteringly uncomfortable, about yourself, or about your worldview, or your group, or your knowledge.  It’s not a complicated concept, it’s just really hard in practice.

Why don’t people change the world?  Because they don’t want to change themselves first.  That simple.

I’m not special in any way, except for my willingness to both love myself and want to upgrade who I was at any cost.  And that is the only reason why I’m able to change lives now.  All the tools I’ve discovered, writing I’ve grown practiced at, and problem solving I’ve gotten boss at, all come back to that single trait.  You can’t help people if you’re not willing to change and grow, and be wrong a heckuva lot.

So anyway.  I’m proud.  Has it been a total mess of ten years?  Absolutely.  Would I trade any of the pain, sadness, longing, heartbreak, and embarrassment that me and those who have chosen to come along on this journey have slogged and grown through?  While there’s a lot of things I would choose differently, that’s what growth is all about!  And I absolutely would not trade away a moment of pain, when the majority of my most precious relationships have been gleaned through this website.  And I feel frickin’ huge now, compared to ten years ago, holy crap!

I still can’t believe something worked.  I still can’t believe that little silly me was able to change lives, just by being herself and working to be a better version of that person, every day.

Justin and Calise on the same bridge, 15th Anniversary, January 2023

But you can too.  Changing lives is not an exclusive club.  Being special isn’t an exclusive club.  You just have to want reality, even when it’s hard.  You just have to love yourself enough to keep growing.  You just need the hope to be brave enough to use your human power to solve problems, inside and outside of you.

Is this the kind of thing you write for a ten year anniversary post?  Eh, who the crap knows.  I’m making this up as I go along, and when that doesn’t work, I try again.  Let’s face it, I’ve never lied to you and pretended to be a “professional.”  We don’t really have a motto at aLBoP, but if we did, a major candidate would be “Do what works.”

Desktop background of Gwen and Phil

Hey, if we have to MacGyver tools to save the world out of duct tape, paper clips, and a loofah, that is darn well what we’re going to do.

On that random note, here’s a Weezer song that has become the aLBoP anthem in my mind the past few months.  (I don’t have to disclaim that Weezer doesn’t endorse us and has no crap who we are, right?)  I’ve loved Weezer since early high school and only love them all the more now.  When I first heard this song on the radio, it was like I’d already heard it before?  You guys know what I mean, right?  And then I remembered it a bit later and was listening to it over and over because it’s just so great and catchy and hopeful.  I was planning on putting it in one of my stories, and might still, but I was just feeling so poked by it, like it goes with everything we work towards.  So I enthused about it to aLBoP friends over chat.

… Then, the next day, I was typing another thought about it to the same friends and started typing, “A Little Bit of–” for the song title and was like “my fingers know this motion way too well… it’s like A Little Bit of Personality!!” 

Yes, I’m that much of an oblivious dork, I didn’t notice the similarity to my own branding.  I’m a ditz, it’s fine.

But anyway, take a listen.  It’s really everything that I hope we represent, as the “aLBoP” meta project.

It’s okay to feel lost.  We want to help.  Use the tools; love yourself both for who you are, and who you can become, and it is my hope and my experience that it can change your life and help you climb mountains too.  You don’t have to battle the scary culture keeping you down, by yourself.  A Little Bit of Personality, and all its many branches, are all about loving people, and everything they can be.  About celebrating people, in all their cognitive hues, and how no one can place a ceiling on the you that you can be.

Happy Ten Years, aLBoP!  Let’s keep on climbing.

Much love,

<3 Calise

The post 10 Years appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

Maybe you didn’t think any of that.  Maybe that’s just what I think when I stop posting things and get scared everyone moves on to something newer, sparklier, with better laid out menus and much better grammatical correctness.  (That was supposed to be a case-in-point joke, but maybe that’s technically grammatically correct?  Beats me.)

But you may have wondered where we went, because we get a lot of emails wondering where we went, and we’ve hardly posted any posts on this site in several years.  Not like we were ever in the running for frequent or consistent update awards.

I mean, there’s plenty here to read, because Justin (my INFJ) and I are both quite wordy, to our occasional shame.  And there’s so much content here that isn’t elsewhere, and with so many words, we very much encourage rereading.  But so much is half-shared, half-revealed, and we understand if that’s frustrating.

We certainly haven’t forgotten that none of the FPs and TJs, except for INTJs, have Type Hero posts yet.  (Guys, I’ve had the quotes for all 16 picked since 2013!  It kills me too!! )

Or that I said in a video in 2014 that we’d unveil Facial Typing by the end of the year.  Ha.  Well we’ve talked about it lots of places, and we’ve been using it for Typings since… I don’t remember honestly.  Quite a few years.  It works on everybody, and it just proves more consistent all the time.  Anytime I get imposter syndrome, which is pretty frequently, I look back and I’m like “But wait, people who are now among my very best friends, I was able to predict their deepest fears, and desires from their faces alone, before I knew them at all.”

Like there’s an ENTP(ij) in Brazil that literally sent us a picture of his face, with no words or anything.  Without facial typing, I wouldn’t have guessed ENTP(ij) from the photo or the few interactions we’d had before that point.  Now he’s a great friend and runs our Twitter and makes us crack up all the time, in such an Expectable Reactions way, working like a champ on his Megamind Complex.  (Sorry to pick on you, buddy I won’t mention his name, although he’s likely not to mind.)

Where was I going with that?  I derailed myself.  Oh, where we’ve been.  Basically we didn’t forget or give up on this A Little Bit of Personality site, the cognition site, or “Phase 1” as we affectionately call it.  Nor did we run out of content.  Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.  No sir.

Nor did we stop writing, which is really the intent of this post.

People who haven’t read any of aLBoP Phase 2, or the few posts he’s written here on Phase 1, sometimes don’t know that Justin writes for aLBoP at all.  Some people even think he’s quiet, or doesn’t have a lot to say .  This amuses (and occasionally irks) me.

I mean, it’s fine if people just don’t know.  And a lot of people probably don’t know that he wrote 98% of the COGs.

Sometimes I also get a little moody because whenever people tell us their favorite aLBoP quotes, 99% of those are from the COGs, so most of the time it’s something Justin wrote, not me, and I get dramatic “does my writing even matter and is it any good?!” feels.  But it’s okay, because we’ve developed these many tools that we use on our own feels, on the daily.  Also he really is a phenomenally powerful writer, so I’m really happy when people praise him.  I did all the pictures for the COGs though!  Well, and I was the primary discoverer of the cognition steps, and how that works, etc.  It’s not like I didn’t do plenty for them.  It’s just very obviously his prose.  We tag team good.

But anyone who has read a fraction of “What is Smart?” or any of the Phase 2 intro, or any of the Phase 2/Phase 2-Intro posts knows my boy is eloquent AF, if you’ll pardon the expression.  Also, so much wordier than I am.  And I find tens of thousands of words to elaborate on the deeper, applicable meanings of scary shows and rock bands.

But Justin can talk for literal days about what the 1939 German invasion of Poland has to do with your life right now, or how to know if you’re going into emotional debt and why it’s taking a bigger toll on your life than you realize, or the 4Toi of emotion.

And he does.  No joke, I’m thousands of messages behind on group chat conversations he’s had on topics like that.  When he talks, he just goes.  And while I tease him about tangents and getting off topic, because he certainly does that, everything he says is toward something, with something new to add to every single topic I’ve ever heard him talk about.  Yes, I’m bragging.  I’m allowed to do that after being married for 13.5 years and being constantly re-impressed with him.  And no, I’m not going to let him edit this part, even if he’s shy about me saying all this about him. [Justin: SAYS YOU, YOU FOOL! I EDIT! By writing this here]

But none of those thousands and thousands of words he writes regularly are *here*, on Phase 1.  So people just have no clue.  Most of his writing is for Full Phase 2, and while we’re planning to let a bunch more people into Full Phase 2 (I hope before long), and while the awesome people who have applied have waited such a long time for us… still at the moment, it’s hidden to all but a few dozen people.

Likewise, although I am not as fast a writer as Justin, by a long shot (which he’ll “” about me saying, since I get mean to myself), I still write 12-15 thousand words in an average month, I’d estimate.  *They’re just not here.*

Lately, for me, they’re fiction.  But as Justin is fond of saying, “A good story is worth a thousand lectures.”  There’s a reason that Sensing and iNtuition are equal functions, that we all need both of: Concepts are not enough on their own.  Everyone needs Experience.  And sure, we can stumble through life, requiring to have every experience ourselves before we learn and apply things.  Or, we can learn from what other people have been through, be it history or fantasy, as long as those stories mirror reality.  Sci-fi and fantasy don’t “not count,” so long as they reflect all four Types of Information accurately.  In fact, sometimes suspending real life rules, we can find the beautiful universal truths underneath them, seeing sides of things and people that we might not get to otherwise.  We can learn vicariously through situations we might never experience on our own, and that shows us things about others and ourselves that we’d likely not find alone.

Basically, long story short, I’ve been spending the majority of my writing time on the story of a boy with good motives and terrible decisions (no, he’s not an EP, shockingly. Js can make terrible decisions too, believe it or not ), who is forced down a path to discover who his “self” really is, when the whole world, and seemingly circumstances, tell him that selfness is fleeting and changeable.

So, I’m really truly sorry that there haven’t been new cognition posts, to help carry you through a global pandemic, with new heights of domestic violence, uncertainty and hopelessness, that many of us weren’t used to in our lives before that.  Please believe that a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about how many are searching for lights at the ends of tunnels, not new, but certainly not improved by world events the last few years.  And maybe I did write a 20k word post about Hope and Depression, about 3.5 months before the pandemic hit, that you could have/can now go read, to help, I hope… I’m still sorry it wasn’t just cognition tools, and I’m even more sorry if you felt left alone in the cold.

I’m sorry we take a really long time to reply to Typing orders sometimes.  We do really care, both about you having the vulnerability to email us about yourself, and pictures of your face, and that you give us your valuable resources in exchange.  We do really appreciate people paying for typings.  I am going to throw out there that if we were in this for the money, we would be really really stupid to go about it this way.  Like epic levels of stupid and arrogant.  Which we’ve been called, so, just sayin’.  We still do typings, fyi for the people who worry when we take a while to reply.  They’re just not the primary thing we do under the umbrella of “aLBoP.”

My mom had a sweet friend who wanted to buy a t-shirt recently, after I typed her, and I was embarrassed that when I looked, I had the wrong URL for the shirt website.  That’s how long it had been since I had given thought to people buying t-shirts, long enough for Spreadshirt to change how their URLs work.  (And have a data-leak, so I’m sorry if you got an email about needing to change your password and stuff.)  It’s just not the priority right now, at all.  (That being said, if you still want a t-shirt, here’s the updated URL, lol.  I haven’t changed links anywhere else.  I’m fully aware they’re wrong, I just have other things to do.)

It’s not that teaching you about cognition isn’t important.  That’s not why there haven’t been more posts.  It’s not that I hate popularity and money, or milking the easy algorithm of “MBTI” or other topics people *actually search for.*  It’s that we are two individual people, trying to build an undersea city, and Phase 1 sees the spire of the tallest building, and thinks that’s all we have.  I’m sorry if the paint job on the tower is scuffed.  But I’m a little busy building Atlantis with my scuba gear.  Is that an arrogant analogy?  Probably!  But I don’t got time for modesty for the sake of appearances either.

You know how most social apps recommend stuff to you, based on what you’ve already read/watched/listened to?  They have whole apps based on that concept, recommending stuff you’ll like, based on stuff you already like.  It’s like a more surface level version of Sources (of using Perceiving to know who to trust and listen to).  That’s all I’m doing with this post:

“So you like A Little Bit of Personality?  If you like that, you’ll probably like…”

Except in this case, I’m saying if you like this website, because it makes things feel clear, because you can find things here that you’ve never found anywhere else, and they work—not just in theory or concept, but *in practice*—and you want more; if you keep checking back because what we said made the clouds part, and you want to experience that again, then we’ve got more where that came from.  Not right here, not solely about cognition, and some of it gated—never financially, but by a demonstration of applying what we shared to that point—but guys, we have so much more where that came from.

And I’d recommend, on your tour of a much larger aLBoP world, (before the Phase 2 Intro, if you haven’t read that yet) your next stop be A Little Bit of Calise and Barry Anderson: An Unexpected Fairy Tale.  Read the Foo Fighters post about hope, and my silly Sides posts, and consider if you have aspects of your selfness that need some love.  And I have just posted the second chapter of Barry Anderson, my novel that I’m posting one chapter at a time.  (I also just posted the audiobook version of the first chapter, and the “soundtrack” songs that go with the first two chapters, and commentary about them.  Because I’m extra like that.)

It’s about fairies.  And gender.  And selfness.  And becoming the best version of yourself, while still being you—which has always been the entire goal of this website.  Why is that worth taking years away from posting about cognition?  (Even though over 250k words of Barry, so far, are far from all I’ve been doing the last few years, it’s still been my most central project, I’d say.  *Disclaimer*: Two chapters aren’t most of that word count… well, okay, they’re 41k together, but the plot has barely even started by the end of Chapter 2!!  (For scale, the *longest* chapter of Harry Potter is 9,001 words.  I’m so sorry.))

But yeah, let me repeat the question:  Why is a comedy story about fairy godmothers worth leaving people without the help that understanding cognition might provide?  Because, despite my constant argument with myself, Barry Anderson is *not* just a silly, mildly scandalous novel, in a genre that’s basically “Shakespeare Comedy meets 80’s Teen Flick,” although it certainly is all of those things.  Not that I’m doubting the emotional power of Twelfth Night, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Better Off Dead, or Back to the Future, which I study with rapture, from the hands of story lords.  But mine is written with the same purpose as this website.

My first novel, “completed” on my sixteenth birthday, had a few different names over my teen years.  I felt like I had to call it something cool or no one would want to read it.  As a teenager, I didn’t feel like I could just call a story “Ellic.”  It had to be “The Kingdom Chronicles: A Hope for Identity”, with “The Kingdom Chronicles” being the series title, and “A Hope for Identity” being that particular story.  This was later replaced by “The Dallanian Kingdom Chronicles: Ellic’s Story”, which ain’t half bad, so I don’t know if any of that will stay when I rewrite it later.  But most of the time I just call it “Ellic.”

I’ve come to embrace the fact that all my stories are first and foremost character stories, and almost* all of my elevenish active stories are named for the protagonist(s).  So the title is literally one or two protagonist names, or a name that describes the protagonist group.  (*Okay, there are two exceptions.  I forgot those at first, and changed my wording, lol.  But those are named for the central plot-nouns that involve the characters changing.)

But “Barry Anderson: A Hope for Identity” would probably be even more fitting than the title would have been for Ellic (although they’re both sixteen-year-old INFJ(j)s.  Paradoxitype and stuff!  Don’t judge!).  Identity is a humanity battleground, and honestly I’m tired of all arguments on all sides of such issues.  I’m tired of so many of the arguments related to central questions of human nature, being groups of people flinging feces in the dark.

Do you want to know who you are?  Are you tired of other people defining that, badly?  Does aLBoP help you feel like you can find your forever-self, while not capping anything about who that person can be?  Well have I got the story for you!

It’s not a children’s story, despite having a lot of fairies, tutus, glitter and rhymes.  You could play a drinking game with the number of mammary euphemisms there are (some of which I’m exceedingly proud of).  But it’s got heart; a lot of raw, exposed, vulnerable heart.  And I think that’s what the world needs right now, along with themes about choice, change, plans, hope, and “the jewel of each soul.”

So, I guess, TL;DR: We’ve been gone because we were prioritizing other parts of aLBoP, never because we didn’t care, or gave up.  And I’m sharing one of my novels, and it’s fun and you should, like, totally read it!  It has the same objectives as this website, so if you’re into that kinda thing, then it’ll be your jam.

Although if you really didn’t read this because this post was too long, this probably won’t be your favorite website ever, heads-up.  You probably won’t like our other websites, sorry.  You can be excused.

Anyway, I realized I never said over here that I had posted any of my fiction, so sorry if anyone wanted to read it and just didn’t know!  Hey, if you would, comment below about how you see when we update, so I can try and use those methods more.

Not just saying, really true:
<3 Much love,
Calise

The post Sorry, Not Sorry (Where We’ve Been and Novel!) appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

Hello my neglected, yet not-forgotten loves .  I’m not going to roll around in sackcloth and ashes about how long it’s been, nor am I going to make promises that I might not be able to fulfill.  I do however have a thing for you. It’s a post!

Most of you might not know that I started a personal site last year, A Little Bit of Calise (or aLBoCal, because “aLBoC” sounded dumb).  As my self-titled aLBoP spinoff, its purpose was never to replace aLBoP, by any means, but to be both a place I could blab about me-related, personal topics, and as an on-ramp to aLBoP, where people can get a taste of what we offer over here without feeling overwhelmed by jargon.  The hope is also that new people, who might not be interested in mainstream personality typing might find it, while Googling other topics.

But it’s still aLBoPy writing (because, hello, that’s still what I care about day-to-day, and let’s face it, it’s not like I don’t talk about myself plenty over here ).

And almost all the posts up to now (which isn’t many) involve the Four Sides of Calise, which are a silly, ongoing thought experiment, helping me to explore myself.  And if that’s not cognition related, I don’t know what is.

The Data geek, the people-loving Obs glitter-pop princess, the Paradoxitype Greek goddess, and the oh-so-edge succubus– QUEEN OF MEGAMIND COMPLEX! *Ahem*

But really why I’m talking about it now, is because I just posted a post over there called Learn to Fly: My Thoughts on Depression, Hope, and Silliness, through Enjoying Foo Fighters (because apparently I hate writing titles that search engine optimization want anything to do with).  But it’s basically a half-step between aLBoP and aLBoCal.  It started as a silly post talking about music I was getting rapidly obsessed with, and ended up being a reflection on rising from the ashes of our lives, by looking at how the band Foo Fighters rose from the ashes of Nirvana.  There’s bits here and there about cognitive types and how they affected people’s choices, like cognitive cameos, if you will.

But it’s about my exploration of where hope comes from, if silliness is disrespectful when people are hurting, and why fakery hurts people.  It’s about people doing people things .  So if that’s what you come here for in the first place, then I think you’ll love aLBoCal, and this post.

…there’s also a lot of cross dressing.  Do you have any clue how often the Foo Fighters cross dress?  Omigosh it’s so often guys!

So please give it a try.  It took a whole lotta love.  If you’re an aLBoPer, I think you’ll love it.

<3 Much love,
Calise

Here’s a taste of Learn to Fly: My Thoughts on Depression, Hope, and Silliness, through Enjoying Foo Fighters…

When I started writing this post, I was really struggling with why this was worth talking about.  You may have clicked on this post because of the serious topics mentioned in the header, but that’s not why I started writing this.  Like most things in my life, this little project started as a result of me enjoying people to a silly degree.  There’s a lot of silly stuff in this post; there’s stick figures, there’s looking at how the Four Sides of Calise enjoy music (from my angsty gothic succubus side to my lollipop-glitter princess side), there’s a lot of me going googly over how much I love men (in and out of women’s clothing), there’s a lot of 90s/00s nostalgia, and me watching music/concert videos way too closely.

And I started writing all that silly, basically because it wouldn’t leave me alone; my passion rarely will.  But I was seriously just screwing around.  I pictured the brief stick figure comic at the end of this post and thought I’d just preface it by how much I’ve come to love this music lately.  Honestly I was just having fun talking.  But as I was trying to quick-finish this post over a weekend (pfffft, when am I going to learn that I suck at brevity?!?) I was just struggling on repeat with why the &@%$= writing this mattered.

Like seriously, why the zombie (we’re making that an expletive now, roll with it) should anyone care that someone named Calise likes certain types of rock music, or gets really excited about the facial expressions someone makes while playing the drums??  And even more than that, why would anyone want to read something blissfully dancing around in silliness while the world just sucks right now?

Most of the people I know are having a “hard year.”  I literally cannot enumerate the number of people I care about who have or are currently struggling with heavy bouts of depression or anxiety.  And the number of times this year alone I’ve heard phrases akin to “I thought we’d be together forever,” as I’ve seen relationships come to an abrupt and heart-wrenching end.  People are in serious stomach-plunging freefall right now.

So who am I to be happy??

Read the full post here

The post aLBoCal, and a Post about Depression, Hope, and Foo Fighters appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

The first of which I’m especially excited about and will be ongoing; it’s an aLBoP Glossary, aka aLBoPGloss!  So that when you want to read up on any specific tool or concept on aLBoP, you can go read its individualized page for a brief (ish, I mean c’mon, this is still aLBoP we’re talking about ) summary of it.  There will also be related links to other pages, so you can know where to go to learn more about that, or similar topics.

Finding information in the very lengthy posts on aLBoP has still been one of our weaker points, so I hope this will help in a fun and informative way.  There’s just a few posts up there so far, but they’re bite-sized enough for me that I hope to have fun posting more, often.

Here’s a link to the Glossary homepage.  I may be super proud of learning to make those snazzy “spoiler” drop downs.  So far I’ve only posted The Importance of Definitions, Cognition, and The Power of First Steps.  That last one is my favorite.  I wrote it today in the bathtub.  If you or anyone you know wants to understand how cognition and aLBoP’s approach to it can have practical applicability in your life, check out that glossary post.

But I have also been making infographics on the Four Types of Information that I just wasn’t able to write up pages for in time, so those should be coming soon.

I’m considering having aLBoP Patrons vote on which glossary posts you’d like to see sooner.  So Patreonees, tell me if you think that’d be fun, and be thinking of glossary pages you’d find useful.  They don’t have to be limited to the list already on the aLBoPGloss page.

Which brings me to the other treat.  (I’m playing on the whole Halloween “Trick or Treat” thing if that was unclear.  Sooooo witty, I know ) Well, it’s a fairly apologetic treat.  Sorry if anyone is allergic to apologies.

But while my aim, starting last month, was 3 wallpapers a month, unsurprisingly that didn’t happen this month.  I’m a perfectionist and an idiot.  I spent an entire evening on the one wallpaper I made and will share with you in a sec here, and never found time to make two more.  So the whole “3 a month” thing might have to be rethought?  I don’t know.  I’m rolling with it month-to-month and at the moment I’m just glad I made one and I think it’s really pretty.

Here’s the link to the open-to-everyone Patreon post with the download links

Therefore, I’m making it free for all, because colors and I think this quote from Type Specializations is one everyone could use.  I hope that’s okay, Patreon ppls.  I don’t expect anyone to have a problem with me sharing the Patreon $5-and-up reward with everyone, but technically you have a right to have a problem with it, so thanks for being cool and understanding.

I assume if I’m only able to put out one a month, after this I’ll just give them to the $5-and-up people.  But Patreon rewards need a revamp anyway so…

BUT NOT TODAY!  For today is Halloween and you have glossary pages to check out!

Thank you for your wonderfulness, my lovelies!

Much love as always,

<3 Calise

OH, ps:  I struggled to convert both this month and last months’ wallpapers for phone, because I couldn’t find a clear answer online about phone wallpaper dimensions.  If you guys want to tell me the sizes of other wallpapers you use, or sizes you’d like, etc., let me know and I’ll be happy to convert them for phone!

The post October Updates, including Glossary! appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

Here’s a preview of September’s free wallpaper!  This one was an idea from the amazing Mariana, who said basically “There’s one pic of Gwen and Phil looking bad a**.” so I added a couple of modifications to the original picture, and here they are!

I would like to imagine this is aLBoP’s tagline: Making definitions look good.  Although I’m pretty sure Gwen and Phil are cooler than me. I’m kind of okay with this.

Get the full-size versions here, in two sizes, again totally free and you don’t have to sign in or anything.

For our $5+ patrons, there are two more!  Quotes from The Four Types of Love and The People of Stranger Things.  Here are the watermarked versions:

The badly repeated aLBoP logo won’t be on the actual ones lol, I just wanted you guys to be able to see the overall preview.  Here’s the $5+ patron-only link for those.  So fancy!

I’m hoping in the months coming to get all our rewards in shape and update them to what you guys want, so if you were considering becoming an aLBoP supporter, it’s a good time.

Let me know what wallpapers you guys want next!  Quotes, stick figures, weird pics of me and Justin, whatever you guys want!  As always, if I use your idea, you’ll receive that wallpaper, even if you’re not Patreon-ing atm, so let me know what you’d like to have as your background!

Oh and let me know if you guys would use phone backgrounds!  I was going to do it for this month, but they’re a little more effort, sizing-wise and everything, so I didn’t want to bother unless I know you guys actually want them.

And as another Patreon housekeeping thing, on our next Thank You vid, I’m planning on adding the list of patrons to the end of the video, but if you’re a patron and you don’t want your first name listed, let me know privately the pseudonym you want, or if you just don’t want to be listed at all.  I want to give due credit, but not if you don’t want me to!

Okay, I think that’s it for now.  If you use a wallpaper, send me screenies!  I’d love to see!! Thank you for all you guys do, especially if you are or have Patreon-ed, but even if you haven’t or can’t.  Support in general means the world to us and I never know what I’d do without you guys.

Much love,
<3 Calise

The post 3 September Wallpapers (one for anyone!) appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

Sure, I’m proud of the breakthroughs we’ve had in understanding human cognition and quantifying the world via basic dichotomies, but that isn’t why I wouldn’t trade these last five years for literally anything.

I can’t tell you what the *people* of aLBoP mean to me, those I’ve met through my silly little collection of stick figures and thought-vomit. The people of aLBoP don’t claim perfection, they claim something better: a desire to be more, to learn more and to understand more. They’re intelligent, caring, and love to think for themselves and add to the things we’ve discovered.

I couldn’t ask for better “readers” or better friends. I use readers snarkily, as people who love aLBoP have become so much more than that.

Thank you to everyone, whether you’ve stuck around for 5 years, as slow as we’ve posted sometimes, or if you just found aLBoP last week.

aLBoP is for you. Every word I write, every stick I make, every person I type, I picture your reactions and how it’ll hopefully make you laugh, make you smile, make you think and hopefully help you feel a little bit closer to being the you you’ve always known was in you.

Love you for realz.
<3 Calise (and Justin)

The post 5 Years appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

Hoping to do the entire Super Simple Series in this whiteboard format eventually, so subscribe to the aLBoP YouTube channel so you see when we post more!  Oh, and because I know there will be confusion (which makes sense as I am the stick figure maven), but while I (Calise) am doing the voiceover for this video, it’s Justin doing the drawing.

Much love, as always! <3

Calise and Justin

The post What is Personality?? New Intro Video appeared first on A Little Bit of Personality.

All this led to the complex set of algorithms which is Google Search to be very confused as to what was important on aLBoP.  When you Googled aLBoP or A Little Bit of Personality, suddenly it was trying to give search results of random image links and obscure posts, instead of things people really wanted to find, such as Type Specializations, the Super Simple Series or Type Heroes.

It also didn’t help that we were working on other aspects of aLBoP and life in general, so posting has been a slow game all year.  As I understand it, Google prioritizes frequent posting, as well as Google+ shares (nepotism ? lol), neither of which were in our favor anymore.

But this also meant that non-aLBoP links, especially from popular sites, suddenly came up much earlier in search results.  One in particular, with the most click-bait-y subject line ever, notably rose to the first page of search results right away: a forum thread with the subject line “A Little Bit of Personality Blog: Is it a scam or did I overreact?”

Well if the promise of a scam won’t get people to listen to you, I don’t know what will.  Talk about the most buzzwordy word possible lol.

Ha, which just now when I Googled to be sure I was quoting the name of the thread correctly, I saw something relieving which I didn’t know, but I’ll talk about that in a minute here.

So I have never clicked on this link, I’m pretty sure. As soon as we were live again on WordPress, I was trying to make sure that Google had our sitemap, working on our SEO, etc., so I believe I saw that link there as early as January 2017.  And seeing it there immediately upset me, not gonna lie.  But I wanted to listen to the immortal words of Taylor Swift and shake it off.  Plus I had way too many other things to worry about, not the least of which was continuing to be sure my links went where they said.  And I also knew that reading people lying about me would just upset me and keep me from getting things done.  So I went on with life and working on content like INTJ – The Dragon, which came out in February.

But apparently a lot of my aLBoP friends, (people who we’ve met through their long-time reading and loving of the site, but have become so very much more than just readers, as so many of you have ?) had seen this link too, and several of them were even more upset than I was about it.  They checked it out on their own and then came and told me about who had posted on the “scam” thread and what they had said.

As soon as Justin and I heard what the original poster of the thread had said, we were immediately like “Oh, him.” ?

Now before I go briefly into what this guy’s “grievances” were, let me tell you what I was relieved to see this afternoon while writing.  When I Googled “a little bit of personality” and saw this link there, not actually clicking on it (it’s gross enough to smell a pile of poop, I don’t want to put my hand in it), it says under the link:

“Oct 2, 2015 – 10 posts – 4 authors” [emphasis added]

*Whew* when my friends were describing what was on there to me, I thought it was like pages and pages of all these people saying how much I suck! ?  To know that it’s just four people, two of which I know who they are and knew that they were like that before they even had anything to complain about, is incredibly relieving.

Okay, so four people. I don’t know who two of them are because I haven’t actually read the thread, although it’s likely I would know them too.

Most of the people who get really angry about aLBoP are ones who liked us at first, often even people who vied heavily for our attention initially, until we say something that offends them, or more often their worldview, and then they hate us with the burning passion of suns and must tell anyone who will listen.  Although I don’t think there is a single one of those people who we didn’t get a red flag in our minds at their first email, “watch out, this is one of those kinds of people” no matter how positive they were toward us at first.  Observing people is our job, after all.

Person 1

So with this particular guy, the one who started the “scam” thread, *sigh* I knew from his first email “ah, one of those.”

He bought a typing + personal chat package from the store, sometime around then in 2015.  We don’t actually carry personal chat time anymore, because it was taking way too much time and we were getting behind. We actually *still* have some out that we sold but haven’t done.  We will either go ahead and do those ones at some point, or refund their money.  But I know there were several really cool people who ordered them near the end, so I would really like to fulfill those at some point here, rather than refunding them.

Anyway, we don’t carry them anymore because they had gotten really stressful and after we had a forum, which we’ll talk more about later, we thought people can get their questions answered there anyway, answer each other’s questions, etc.

We’ve never been especially timely with Typings, but we do always get to them.  I don’t remember how timely we were fulfilling this guy’s order. We do them in big batches, usually, where we sit down and type a bunch of people at once, oldest order first.  So if we took a while to get back to him it wasn’t at all because he was a less pleasant customer, because the time we take has nothing to do with that.  So if you have to wait a while for your Typing, it’s not because we don’t like you, lol <3 (If we’re ever taking too long, you *can* send us a polite email and ask if we can go ahead and get on it.  But we always do get to it and we always feel really bad making people wait.)

Oddly, I vaguely remember doing this guy’s really fast anyway, so I don’t think that was part of the problem. We may have been like “this guy is a live wire, we shouldn’t let his sit too long.”  We do occasionally do that.

Anyway, if I understand correctly, his main reasoning in calling us a “scam” is that the following happened:

1)  He ordered a typing + a video chat.

2)  We felt immediately “eh” about him, but fulfilled his typing order in a normal and polite fashion.

• I think it was his condescending attitude toward people in general in his first email that seemed like #badsign to me.

3)  He was displeased with the type we gave him.  We have a post about this.

• No matter how consistent and repeatable the results are, no matter how many people are over the moon about our typing of them, no matter how many people are repeat typing-customers because they see how it all lines up over and over again in real life; there are so many people who are set on the type or set of types they want to be a part of, and therefore who dislike the type we give them.  But the way we Facial Type is a science, with consistent data-sets that have proven universally consistent thousands of times, holding up over time and experience.  We can’t go changing the answer because somebody gets his panties in a wad.
• There are also plenty of people who are personally threatened by the idea of Facial Typing at all, or just very uncomfortable about it.  You are welcome to feel however you want on the topic.  But I don’t understand why people order from us if they feel that way.
• It’s like someone coming across town to tell you he thinks your house is ugly.  I feel like “… Okay, thanks?  Then don’t look at it and get off my lawn.”  The internet is a big place and no one is making you stay here.  Honestly there’s probably a more fitting analogy with someone who hates seafood yelling at Red Lobster or someone buying an orange and getting mad that it’s not an apple, but eh, I like the lawn one.

4)  We don’t give refunds on Typings we have fulfilled.  We never have, and say so very clearly on the Type Me page, which has all the instructions. That page didn’t exist in its current version at the time, but we have always listed that on pages describing the Typing process.

• The effort and our typing results are what is being paid for, and people who get snotty about their results take far *more* effort than people who are happy with them.  That’s not to say you are required to be happy, but that even if you are not, our time and our results have still been given to you, so we can’t just refund that.  If you don’t trust our scientific process and our definitions, then that is completely your prerogative.  But if that’s the case, then please don’t order a typing and waste our time, as well as yours.

5)  He also applied to the, at the time, brand new Phase 2, via a separate self-invite system.

• Okay, the thing to know about all our websites is that they are 100% free, always are, always have been, always will be.  We currently have—*counts*—4 websites.  They all have free admission and no subscription fees or anything of that nature.  The only things we charge money for as part of aLBoP are specific services and merchandise. That used to include video chats, which as I said we don’t offer anymore, and now includes Personalized Typings and, hopefully in the future, merchandise such as t-shirts (you can buy t-shirts here, but I really want to make more designs and figure out a better system for producing them), patches or whatever other physical or digital items you guys might want to buy.  We do not have any premium content, if the definition of “premium” is content you pay for.
• All other funds from aLBoP come to us via Patreon where people can support our content, which helps us produce more of it, or via Love for aLBoP, one-time donations in the aLBoP shop.  (Everyone has been remarkably patient as I haven’t been great at giving out everyone’s Patreon rewards, such as the monthly desktop wallpaper for $5+ people, etc. But I really am excited to do that and plan to do it sooooon.  Not one person has said anything about it yet, I just feel really bad because your support means so much to me. <3)
• HOWEVER, we do have content that is restricted to people we have given access. Like I said, we have 4 websites, of which this is the first; Phase 1 as we call it. Yes, this is a blatant reference to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Phase 2 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Why, yes, we are giant nerds.  Here, have a picture of stick figure Phil Coulson with his gun from Avengers, if you haven’t seen it on the Phase 2 Intro site.

• But while we do gate these websites–the Phase 2 Intro behind a self-invite you can use right now if you want (it’ll open up in a new tab so you don’t have to lose your spot here <3), and Phase 2 gated behind applying and us getting to know you—ALL of them are free.  Let me repeat that: none of our websites cost any money.  (The fourth site only has a few people on it so far and it’s still under construction anyway, but it’ll have a similar kind of gating.)  These websites are provided free of charge, including our time spent on the Phase 2 forum, where we give lots of personal help and advice.  We don’t even have ADS on any of the websites!!!! (Although we are considering adding them to our videos, because we find that less invasive.)

6)  Where was I?  Oh yeah, he had applied for Phase 2, but then we were busy and hadn’t gotten to adding people to the new Phase 2, back before the process was automated.

7)  He sent an annoying displeased email.  I could pull up said email now to remember the details (I never delete aLBoP emails from anyone, which is why my Gmail storage is exploding), but I really really don’t want to.

• But I recall that he was firstly, really whiny about his typing.  I don’t remember if he actually said he couldn’t be an F, like we had typed him, or if that was just the impression we got from his email, which is a very common tale, especially with people who hold onto the internet’s definition of Feeler.  Men typed as Fs and women typed as Ts have been trends in our grumpiest clientele, because people believe that Feeler means soft like mush and Thinker means Vulcan, and people equate those to feminine and masculine traits, respectively, which is frankly pretty dumb.  Although I can only blame people so much for wanting certain types, when the internet deems some types so wildly more worthwhile than others.  However, how people react when they’re disappointed says a lot about them.
• The second thing that really got our eyes rolling about his email was his attitude that because he had given us money, he owned our time.  Money seemed like his main card to play, which makes all the more sense why he made money the focus of his thread title, calling us a scam.  Anyway, it was a very “but you have to do what I say, I paid you,” attitude.
• But if you’re not sure on my character judgment of him, go ahead and look at the thread.  I haven’t read it, but if he doesn’t come off whiny and like someone who feels like money makes him entitled, then I will eat my hat. Well, I won’t, but it’s the only idiom I could think of.  But if you don’t agree then you won’t agree, and that’ll be the end of it, but at least I will have left the opinion up to you.

8)  So we saw from his email, which wasn’t a surprise from his original email, that we didn’t want to waste time and energy having a personal chat with him.  We also didn’t want him on the brand new forum, which as a private, free forum was our prerogative.

9)  So I sent him an email telling him that we would refund the chat money because we didn’t want to talk to him more and that he was the first person banned from the forum, which was true.

• I think we only actually banned… 2.5 people ever.  I say 2.5 because we officially banned 2 people from ever entering the original site, and were close to banning another, but he quit before we could fire him, so to speak.
• Was I especially nice in this email reply?  No. I wasn’t trying to be.  I wanted to really let him know why we didn’t want to deal with him anymore, and frankly he was a buttmunch.  Again, you can go look at the thread if you want to verify his buttmunch-itude.

10)  WE REFUNDED HIS VIDEO CHAT.

• Again, like I said in point 5… No… 4, we don’t give out refunds for typings. We had fulfilled that part of the deal, so we kept our $15 dollars (I know, huge quantities of money being exchanged ), but refunded him the $10 for the video chat we didn’t give him.  He was our first refund; we had to figure out how to do it on the website.

11)  I think he probably replied again, angrily, but I was super done with it.

12)  Shortly after (we launched Phase 2 on September 15 and he wasn’t in the first several batches of applications, so he probably rage posted pretty quickly), he started that thread.

• Apparently his reading comprehension was limited enough that he thought paying for a video chat was paying for Phase 2…I guess… Even though you would have to read the Phase 2 announcement page from the time to even apply… idk. I’ll give him the limited benefit of the doubt that he was more stupid than flat-out lying… Stupid isn’t a nice word, it implies mental limitations and implies that if other people missed information, I think they’re stupid too, which I don’t.  “Making the decision to be willfully idiotic” is a much more fitting term.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was being willfully idiotic, rather than flat-out lying.

13)  I thankfully haven’t heard from him since and hope he finds happiness despite his buttmunchiness. Totally a word.

Anyway, you can have any opinion you want about my choices in responding to him, but since he had no purchase that wasn’t either fulfilled or refunded, he has zero claim to a scam.  Although, you know, I’m really rolling in his fifteen bucks.  *Evil laugh*

Person 2

The other person who I know wrote on the “scam” thread, got upset in the very earliest days of the forum. It was a lot of drama in a short period of time that happened… ? two years ago today! [At time of writing, which was the middle of September.]  Holy crap, I didn’t know that when I started writing.  Happy anniversary to drama ?.

There was a lot of drama in those early days of the forum as we were attempting to establish an atmosphere different than so many forums and so much of the internet.  This other person wasn’t the only one involved at the time, but since other people didn’t feel the need to run my name through the mud, I don’t feel the need to address their personal issues with aLBoP.

This woman was INFP and I’m referring to her by her type since I have no intention to be petty enough to share her name.  That doesn’t mean I think all INFPs are that way *obviously,* it’s just easier than saying “woman” on repeat, because that’s weird.

But, as I’m sure she talked about on the thread in question, she thought we were harsh and mean on our forum in a way that she deemed “never called for.”  She was referring to one particular forum post of mine.  Here’s what happened, from my perspective:

If you are unfamiliar with cognitive typing, you will need to know that ESTPs like to poke for reactions.  It’s how they interact with the world, which is a good thing.  And because motives and character judgment is their primary Type of Information, it really really matters to them what people are really like. They hate fakeness, perhaps most of all the EPs, and attempt to cut through the crap of pretension (wow I had no idea that was spelled with an s instead of a t, interesting), or fake nicety, by catching people off guard and seeing how they react.  Reactions are an EP’s bread and butter, after all.

So since very early aLBoP, there was this ESTP.  Great way to start a story lol. And he had been all over the internet and in real life, and had seen people being crappy on repeat, so he was used to that as the norm rather than the exception. We can all relate with that.

So when he found aLBoP he immediately began his routine “poking for legitimacy” like a 19th century miner biting a gold coin lol.  But because of the crappy he had experienced, he was used to having to poke oftenly and fairly hard to see what was really inside someone.

But when he first began poking at aLBoP, I didn’t know this backstory.  I just saw that the same guy was commenting on *every* new post, and giving me pokie lip on each one lol.  He would comment things on each post, trying to get a reaction, commenting about how I said this or that, or on what he’d read elsewhere that disagreed.  And at first I was just like “>:( leave me aloooone! If you don’t like the posts, why are you here??”

But that was the thing, he kept staying around.  I didn’t get it.  I felt like his comments meant he didn’t like the posts, so why didn’t he just move on?  And the comments were getting more positive over time, usually just with something pokie at the end or something.  And he ordered a typing from us and I was like “What???  Well, I guess he does trust us some… Huh…”  That was before Facial Typing, but when I realized his type it just made all the sense.  (I have obviously since seen his face and it was spot on what we predicted, for the record.  Take that people who try and pretend this isn’t a science ?.  When it can accurately predict what people will look like before we see their faces.)  And he had really been open about himself in his typing emails (of which there were several, telling us about himself, which is so adorably ESTP lol ? <3), and I was already liking him a lot more already.  And then he posted pokie comments on the Spartan, being skeptical and I’d feel grumpy about him again, but as much as I wasn’t a fan of the way he was poking, feeling like “how many times are you going to have to poke me before you’ll believe I’m legit? :P”, I did still really like him and care about him, and was starting to appreciate his bold, frank, poking sense of humor.

But this back and forth dance of poking and a surprising growing loyalty we saw from him about aLBoP, was at an interesting place right before we launched Phase 2.  I remember he had left a really sweet comment on SS:P2 (which isn’t there anymore because we moved, remember?) and I was feeling really supported and happy about him.  And yet because of this history, and the fact that I was aware the poking was still strong with him, lol, Justin and I were nervous about him as we came up to launching Phase 2.  I remember three individuals that we were worried about with it and this ESTP was one of them. But like I said, we liked him too, so Justin and I had high hopes about the whole situation as we launched.

Now, if you haven’t read what is now the Phase 2 Intro, and don’t know about what kind of content we have over there, it’s not only more in depth than what we have here on Phase 1, it’s about understanding yourself in a very core way, even deeper inside than cognition even, which is why we didn’t want it to be drive-by internet bait.  It’s not secret, but we think it’s pretty special, and we wanted to foster an environment of reading-comprehension and self-examination, for this information that is intended to help individuals grow, for people who want to do that. Like I said, it’s pretty special to us, and we’ve had immensely special experiences seeing it work in the lives of others as well as ourselves <3.

But because of the crap he’d experienced, and because most of the time Motives aren’t treated as a valid Type of Information, even after all the times he’d poked us, this ESTP felt very wary as he came onto Phase 2 and began reading the new information.  It was all new stuff and lifted the ceiling on his own potential, making him worried he was going to be judged unfairly for things he didn’t know yet (I hope that’s a fair assessment of his feelings at the time).  And so he sort of acted out about it.  From what he said later, he skimmed the Intro, feeling grumpy about it from the very beginning of the information, and went to the fresh new forum even more wary than he had started.

He read the forum rules, which we had written purposely open-ended, talking about attitudes that weren’t acceptable on the aLBoP forum, and referenced content from the Intro in showing how those attitudes would be identified.  Having been treated unfairly other places for doing the “wrong” action (his last step and mine), and I think feeling grumpy about the new information being referenced again, like he was expected to know everything right away or, like I said, be judged unfairly, our ESTP’s first forum post was a criticism of the forum rules, saying they were too open ended and wouldn’t work.  I remember in one of his posts in this conversation, he said that other forums’ rules were better and said it would be better to be like every other forum, which was the opposite of what we were aiming for.

Justin replied very nicely to him, explaining that he wasn’t expected to know everything yet, and to just relax and settle in, trying to encourage him to get comfortable and let us worry about whether or not we could reasonably make it better than other forums.

(I swear, I don’t know why people consistently treat Justin like he’s going to be the intense, harsh one. 9 times out of 10 *I* play bad cop, not him.  Which people don’t expect from me because I’m adorable and smiley, lol, and the unsuspected nature of it works in my favor.)

But our ESTP (running out of ways to say that) was still feeling upset from the Intro, and didn’t want to be soothed about the topic, still arguing about it being unfair.  I think some others might have talked too at that point?  Don’t remember.  But it was a particular “won’t let this go” thing iirc.

And we were working so hard on the atmosphere of this baby forum.  Justin and I were getting about 2 hrs of sleep a night, trying to help the forum feel like a safe place where people could actually talk about things, and this was the last thing it needed.  And I was so done with this ESTP’s mood and attitude at that moment.  He was being so stubborn (which I lovingly joke ST stands for sometimes, lol <3) and obstinate, and I decided “no more!”

I sat down and wrote a reply post that was intended to smack him upside the head, hard, and say “Stop it!  I think you can be better than this!  Are you going to prove me wrong?!”  It was an intense post, not gonna lie. I actually remember very little about it besides my calculated fury and the fact that I quoted XKCD.  And I said he wasn’t allowed to say “I didn’t do any specific actions wrong, you can’t call me on my bad attitude and intentions.”  Oh and I may have said he was acting like a “dick” at some point ?… Yeah, apologies, that is a phrase I use, not actually on Phase 1 before this point.  It’s just so concise and jerk is just not strong enough sometimes!!  Is it bad that it’s a little bit funny looking back at how intense I got, since it’s been very resolved on that front since?  Like I’m kind of embarrassed that I am that intense of a person.  You know, as if someone took a picture of my battle face and I’m looking back at it now like ? “That’s what I look like angry, huh?”

Which isn’t to say that I rage posted.  I don’t rage post.  Case in point, how the thread that sparked this whole post is now over two years old, and I began writing this post over a month ago.  I am meticulous and thorough and attempt to predict the reactions my words and choices will evoke, as is my one-true-mental-love as an ENTP.

I stayed up all night writing that post, trying to imagine how he would reply to different parts and trying not to let him wiggle out of it, and yet wanting to give him the opportunity to do better if he wanted to.

I am a very passionate person, I’ll give you that for sure.  People and things mean more to me than I can ever say, often against my will.  But that means while I get really truly incensed about plenty of topics, I will never write an angry message to someone if I have no hope of getting through to them.  Like this post for example; there’s a reason it isn’t addressed to the people over on that thread.  I have hopes of actually communicating with very many of *you,* however I won’t try and communicate with them.  I don’t have any hope that that would do squat.

Ask Justin’s brother, also ETP, sometime about the intense face-slap email I sent him, ? he’s definitely never forgotten it.  But I would never have sent it if I didn’t respect him and his ability to apply things and desire to grow.  (He replied epically to it, btw.)  If I ever get truly angry with you, and let you know it, know that I respect you enough to believe it’ll make a difference to address the issue with you.

ETPs need to be poked as much as poke (saying that is going to get me into trouble with people lovingly poking me, heh), and I wanted to poke this ESTP hard enough to get a reaction of change, and I poked as hard as I felt he personally needed, based on knowing him personally and knowing his cognition.

But the INFP woman in question immediately replied informing us that you never ever ever (need a bunch more evers) speak to someone that way!  She said we were mean and rash and harsh and she would have no part in it!  And for the record, she was definitely not the only one concerned.

The post I wrote *was* in fact harsh, but it was not a knee-jerk reaction.  It was a calculated move decided upon, based on love for the person I was talking to, and the hope that snapping him out of the way he was acting would induce him to be *more*, which I hoped he could be.

And if you consider “lovingly harsh” to be an oxymoron—if you believe that there could never be a situation where harshness would be the appropriate reaction in order to get through to someone you care about—then this may not be the place for you, especially the later Phases of aLBoP.  aLBoP is a place for adults to come of age, and attitudes that say “you always deal with people this way or that way” are, frankly, childish and therefore wouldn’t fit in with the atmosphere of aLBoP’s later Phases.

We deal with people on a case by case basis, not by one-size-fits-all rules, and this was actually what I thought would be most effective.  And to be honest, it worked.  He immediately stopped in his tracks and said “I’m sorry, what can I do differently?”  Honestly, his reaction was much more epic and adult than I expected it to be, but I did anticipate that the best way to handle an ESTP acting that way, was to shock him to get his attention, and stop him in his tracks.

But this INFP woman didn’t care whether or not it worked.  She was all too pleased to be indignant.  She told the forum (if I remember correctly) that she was leaving, and also emailed to chastise us again, and to tell us she was leaving.  We emailed her a short but polite “sorry you feel that way” email, but tbh were pretty pleased to see her go.  (Now when I say “polite,” I actually mean polite.  I don’t consider my harsh post in question to be polite, for example, but it wasn’t intended to be polite.)

She was actually one that we *did* have a video chat with before we even launched Phase 2 (you guys see why I didn’t want to carry them in the store anymore?), after we had typed her.  And while we made it very pleasant and answered all the questions she had, to her stated satisfaction, Justin and I both could tell there was something about aLBoP that made her very uncomfortable.  He and I discussed afterward, “that was good… right?” “yeah, but we had to make it good.”  I could go into the ins and outs of what made her uncomfortable, things having to do with her Type Angst, blah blah blah, but that just seems petty at this point.  Interestingly, I talked about her in What if I’m not the Type I Thought I Was and referred to her as a “cool INFP.”

I was being nice.

I will say, disappointingly, that there has definitely been an FP trend among the people who have been the least cool about aLBoP.  I mean, I know soooo many cool FPs, and I suspect we get more of them, quantity-wise, since their Type Specs are all about the meaning that they can get out of Individuals and Situations <3 and I think and hope that aLBoP is right down that alley.  But when an unhealthy FP feels like we’re a threat to their own personal meaning, ? watch out!  We’ve especially had a lot of ESFP and ENFP guys (more often guys than girls, interestingly) who have approached us as “nice guys” with obvious warning signs, that when they ended up showing their true colors were anything but nice.  I won’t go into tales of the one who wouldn’t stop emailing me in all-caps not-so-nice words, or the one who spammed comments about how ENTPs didn’t have feelings.  I don’t make character judgments flippantly, especially negative ones.  And unfortunately, my spotting of warning signs has proved depressingly accurate, as individuals have demonstrated with later actions.

But in a twist of couldn’t-get-more-ironic, the reason I decided to write this post was because Justin was chatting with the very ESTP she had said I was abominably too hard on.  He’s been one of our biggest supporters ever since, both in having our backs with emotional support and sharing aLBoP, and he’s been ridiculously generous on Patreon (I hope it’s okay to share that, I never know what is couth when it comes to talking about money and donations ).

Lol, when he found out about people discussing him on that thread he was like “Hey, they’re talking about me!  That’s pretty cool.” ? ROFL, could he *be* any more ESTP?!  Idec, I love you, you are seriously amazing and I can learn a lot from how you let stuff roll off of you!! <3

But he had a friend whom he’d been telling about aLBoP, and the friend saw the “scam” link and got wary, so I felt like it was finally time to address this.  I have better things to do than tell people on the internet that they’re wrong, but when it’s deterring other people who are looking for aLBoP, then that’s something I need to try and fix.

*Whew* sorry this has been so long!

But I don’t want you guys to worry that this has delayed posting at all.  The only major posts this year have been The Dragon, like I said, and the Four Types of Love, both of which I am ridiculously proud of, although I have been worried sick about not posting more, especially since you guys have earned it with Patreon all year; don’t think I’ve forgotten it!!

But the reasons we have been gone so much are somewhat other aspects of aLBoP, working on later “Phase” stuff, especially training people who want to help us help all of you guys more, but also working on our own personal situation as well.

In June I was offered a part-time job by an INTJ friend of mine that I really respect, at his business, and I felt like it was the perfect time.  (For the record, he doesn’t know I’ve typed him shhh ?)  And while I’m really enjoying it and I think it’s benefitting aLBoP, I felt fairly overwhelmed and anxious the first few weeks, so that took a lot of my attention at first.  But really, there’s been plenty of other aspects going on with us working things out to establish ourselves for the long haul.

Which, for the record, the part-time job is in financial planning, so I had to have a background check for it, which I passed, so I guess the FBI doesn’t believe I’m a danger to people’s money if that helps with the whole “scam” thing lol… Unless that’s a ruse and they’re watching me *right now.* O_O  Considering that I’m writing this from the bathtub, that would be super pervy.

However, apparently I have very little fingerprints left, I guess from my skin condition, so I am considering a life of crime.  If anyone has any suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.

Anyway, I have two short Super Simple posts almost done, working on a new format for shorter posts and faster posting, so I hope to get those out to you guys ASAP.  I will make up for all the months I’ve missed, I swear!!  Thank you guys for your patience as always.  And for your trust of us as a source.  I can’t tell you how much it means to me those times when people are impugning our character (which thankfully seems to be happening less and less these days), to know you beloved readers are out there; knowing that you know us, love us and have our backs.  I couldn’t ask for a better audience or better friends. <3

My hope in clearing this up is to just soothe people’s worries and hopefully overcome misleading search results so that new people can find aLBoP every day, and hopefully feel like who they are and the way they think naturally is worthwhile and wanted.

Much love,
<3 Calise

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Thank you guys for everything you do! aLBoP is made worthwhile by you guys, and we seriously couldn’t ask for better friends than the ones we’ve found through this amazing journey

See the original video here.

Music credits:
Locally Sourced – Jason Farnham
Sunny – Bensound.com
Dance – Bensound.com
Pop Danthology 2012 – Daniel Kim
Funny Song – Bensound.com
Ukelele – Bensound.com
Clap and Yell – Bensound.com

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