Following up an bizarrely high energy January, February was also pretty great. I moved my personal website to Obsidian Publish, then from OP to a self-hosted Quartz instance on a VPS to host web apps. Hacking on Quartz to make it serve my purposes and turning my post backlog into posts for a new website was pleasantly absorbing, especially since I injured my pelvis during a yoga class. (I thought I was taking it easy – I always do, because I hate taking exercise hard – but joints are delicate right now.) Despite mobility and mild pain issues since, I’ve had a very happy month of writing and coding.
West coast swing dance move randomizer
I wrote a random West Coast Swing move caller for my personal use. It allows the user to fiddle with the frequencies in a transition matrix, which is important because it is semi-impossible or undesirable for certain moves to lead into others in West Coast Swing.
Grading my day
I like getting grades, so I found refining the formula for the Excel function that grades my day to be pretty satisfying.
Transitioning away from focusing on beauty in visual art
I made this painting that hits an interesting spot for me: on a technical level I find it merely fine, but once I was done conveying the visual concept, my brain had an immediate sense of satisfaction and doneness.
In general I seem to be less interested in beauty – I’ve noticed a shift also in the types of art I collect into my “other people’s art that I really like” gallery. The technical and aesthetic quality has gone down over time. I used to collect things that were succeeding on beauty and technical competence. Now I collect things that succeed on being weird/interesting in one way.
An example of something I collected this month vs several years ago:
Alexandra Czierpka - The Rock Rises to Catch the Light of the Sun, 2025
Michael Godfrey - Thunder Light
The inexplicable adult passion for nice end tables
33 weeks into pregnancy, I wondered how I’d explain my passion for end tables (or casserole dishes) to my kid(s). Here’s an attempt:
You have your toys, that you spend a lot of your day playing with, so you care a lot about toys. Your playing is object-oriented. For me, my toys are usually processes, not physical objects – e.g. I find joy in processes that necessitate switching between three devices and a paper notebook while feeding myself and hydrating regularly. So I get excited about a table that supports that process well, because it means the quality of my play is elevated.
The strange dominance of the companionate marriage ideal in ambient music
It’s already kind of weird that our society’s idea of romance and marriage is overwhelmingly western individualism style romantic love (“the companionate marriage ideal”) – a concept that I think was around, but not the norm, in historical times – and this month it struck me as very weird that the companionate marriage ideal is the dominant theme in the pop music you cannot escape when you go out in public.
It’s hard to make a historical comparison since “music, playing everywhere” is a new phenomenon, but my guess is that if you somehow gave the “music everywhere all the time” power to a randomly chosen pre 18th century society, they’d probably play religious music? Or work songs, or epic poems.
So I just wanted to appreciate being in this pretty weird situation, where the public aural sphere is saturated with a theme that would strike most humans throughout time as marginal or alien.
Who would win an all out physical fight, me or the fetus?
35 weeks into pregnancy, I found myself thinking about the curve over time. She started off with no chance, but is surprisingly powerful right now – I can do little that doesn’t harm me just as badly, while she has access to many organs, and her nails are (I believe) delicate but sharp. I’ll regain the unambiguous upper hand upon childbirth, then she’ll slowly win it back in her teens.
Someone also suggested that a baby with the intelligence of an adult and intent to kill could maybe do it by choosing to go breech.
baby_chances
^ 20yo _________
| /
| /^ surprisingly good /
| / | /
------/---|--------------------------------/------------> time
| / | born _____/ 14yo?
| / | ____/ (weaker but more
|__/ |_________________/ warlike spirit)
Media
Severance (Season 1) - 5/10
Has its own review page at Severance (TV).
Speaking of Severance, I enjoyed this blog post on whether you should optimize the experience of your dreaming self.
Mother of Learning (nobody103) - 6/10
A shining exemplar of a genre I found I don’t like very much. I made it 2 books in out of 4 and don’t expect to get further in, but I’m very impressed with the author. I read it because it’s a highly recommended instance of “progression fantasy / zero to hero” stories, and I was coming off the high of reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Mother of Learning is about a student mage who gets caught in a time loop and tries to solve the mystery of what happened to him, and also how to head off an invasion of his country. More so than DCC, Mother of Learning feels like I’m reading an in depth novelization of a good playthrough of an excellent videogame with a huge cast and world. Unfortunately, what I look for most in a series is characterization, and a videogame that is balancing dozens of NPCs is not designed to provide the emotional highs of good characterization.
(Dungeon Crawler Carl also has dozens of NPCs – but it has a main character who’s emotionally unstable, a secondary protagonist he has a semi-complicated relationship with, a mostly-offscreen ex who generates quite a lot of character tension. Good enough for me!)
Links
How to change my mind on twitter
I saw this interesting trio of posts:
A: Climate change hysteria has almost completely ruined nature documentaries. They were once lyrical and beautiful and made you feel a kinship to the animal kingdom. Now YOU are the villain and there’s no hope and everything is horrible and broken
B, the top reply when I read A: facts don’t care about your feelings
C, a quote tweet: This is how the scientists involved actually feel. They curate a narrow window of untouched wilderness for the cameras, but if they didn’t say anything about what is outside the camera frame, they would feel like they are lying and complicit.
When I read A, I thought something like, “Yep, I also dislike this.” When I read B, I felt dislike towards the commenter, and had absolutely no change to my original emotion (of sympathizing with A’s sentiment). When I read C, the vague dislike of the phenomenon A described melted away entirely.
I watch / think about nature documentaries rarely, so it literally just hadn’t occurred to me that most people involved in nature documentaries will converge onto feeling despair because the job brings them in contact with habitat destruction 1000x more than the average person.
If I’d explicitly asked myself “why do you think documentaries take that tone, why is this so universal now” , I think I’d have said “initial selection for activism?… oh! also the documenting process itself will cause feelings that will leak into the film.” But I never asked!
I find this interesting because this was a phenomenon I wasn’t invested in, but had a slight negative feeling about, and I saw in quick succession one response that entrenched that negative feeling (even though the person probably wanted the opposite), then one that dissolved it.
Decibel light change
Another person on twitter made something I dream of intermittently, which is a light that changes color when the noise level in the room goes above a certain threshold. Here’s their explanation of how they did it:
I have LifX smart bulbs, which have an API for over-LAN interaction so I just made a python script that finds all of my smart bulbs on startup, takes a custom decibel threshold, and then monitors my laptop mic at that threshold. Got Claude help for code details, <1hr fiddle
A video of the light in action is upthread.
Gwern interview
This interview with Gwern (prolific independent researcher):
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/gwern-branwen
Gwern’s description of cutting his teeth on editing Wikipedia as a teen made me consider a factor explaining why today’s scientists are less productive today than in the early 1900s – the more adequate a civilization, the harder it is for a promising young mind to practice solving real problems.
I was also fascinated by his description of two old thinkers who saw technological acceleration in their time and came to the conclusion that they must live in Nightfall world where technological acceleration happens all the time (surely the time I’m in now can’t be exceptional!) but is lost periodically as civilization is destroyed.
The 21st century is actually very weird qua technological optimum because it lets us do things like examine core samples and such to know for sure that where we are, no society has been before.
I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton’s time and going, “Wow, there’s something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We’re making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we’re doing is we’re rediscovering the old stuff.”
That’s Newton’s explanation for technological acceleration. We can’t actually have any kind of real technological acceleration. It must be because the world gets destroyed periodically and we just can’t see past the last reset.
It turns out even Lucretius, around 1,700 years before that, is writing the same argument. “Look at all these wonderful innovations and arts and sciences that we Romans have compiled together in the Roman empire! This is amazing, but it can’t actually be a recent acceleration in technology. Could that be real? No, that’s crazy. Obviously, the world was recently destroyed.”
I also liked the following ending note from him enough that I, well, made this website about it. (I already had a personal pure HTML/JS/CSS website hosted on a VPS, but I didn’t update it often due to the multi-minute process of adding/updating posts.)
I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”
I’d also been accreting thoughts, observations, and questions unusually hard in the past month, so it was the right impetus at the right time
Belphegor’s prime
is the palindromic prime number 1000000000000066600000000000001. From wikipedia:
Belphegor is one of the Seven Princes of Hell; specifically, “the demon of inventiveness”.[1] The number itself contains superstitious elements that have given it its name: the number 666 at the heart of Belphegor’s prime is widely associated as being the number of the beast, used in symbolism to represent one of the creatures in the apocalypse or, more commonly, the devil. This number is surrounded on either side by thirteen zeroes and is 31 digits in length (thirteen reversed)