Slutcon retrospective – I volunteered for Slutcon, a weekend conference that provided a structured environment for straight men to try a variety of flirting strategies on female volunteers. (October 2025)
Notes on the implementation of general intelligence – The most interesting nonfiction book I read in the past year was Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence, which is a big picture synthesis on how intelligence is implemented by biology and modern AIs. I wrote a 6000 word summary. (August 2025)
Anki deck for emergencies – I found that spaced repetition was the wrong tool for most of my learning problems – except for high-urgency high-impact emergencies. (July 2025)
Some purple paintings:
West coast swing randomized move caller – a web tool that semi-randomly chooses the next move and calls it out, allowing the beginner lead to decouple choosing the next move on the fly and executing on that decision. The entire transition matrix is exposed, so moves and transitions are highly customizable. (Feb 2025)
Worldbirth – A very short story about a species whose life cycle begins by giving birth to the world. (May 2025)
My (rough) hospital birth – and a compilation of short posts about my baby, 30 days into parenthood. (April 2025)
Managing marijuana addiction with a spreadsheet – After many cycles of throwing away all my weed and paraphernalia, in 2020 I delegated the decision to a dynamically adjusting meditation goal. This worked so well that I consider myself no longer addicted, five years in.
Conflict improv – event outline for my most popular event, a social game where attendees play out preset conflicts with preset strategies. (June 2024)
A Malthusian fable – a short story starring a sapient mitotic species, with a smidgen of lateral gene transfer related sexual drama. Based on Robin Hanson’s essay This is the Dreamtime. (October 2023)
List of weird nosy questions – I’ve compiled several hundred of them for various intrusive question social games I run at festivals.
Media reviews, ranging from serious ones on economic models of civilizational collapse (2021 ACX book review contest finalist) to tongue in cheek ones claiming that the TV show Severance is metaphysically about open individualism.
Breakup ceremony script – I wrote one for a painful breakup where there was significant mutual investment at the time we separated. I strongly endorse having done this. (December 2023)
About me
- In theory, you can follow this website via rss.
- My backstory.
- I live in Berkeley, CA. I’m skittish and busy, but every once in a while I meet someone I click with so well I want to talk every week. Usually this is a woman with centrist or all-over-the-map politics who writes a lot of something and likes social analysis. If you live near me and suspect this might be you, you can email me at [email protected] with your writing profile – whether that’s a fanfiction account, a book review livejournal, a twitter, or a regular blog.