Say that your acquaintance declines an invitation to dinner, saying they're booked that night. You made a great fool of yourself around them last week, so you wonder if they're free but are pretending not to be. Due to their repulsion. You know the friend is busy every third night on average...
I think this novel fails pretty fundamentally because it chose the wrong focus, the wrong narrator. Which poses an interesting challenge – of writing the right novel.
I hit a wall with my current novel’s outline last week and fell into a depressive episode for a few days. It seemed unsurprising – when I’m writing at a good clip I’m perhaps hypomanic. When my baby was having a scream day, I cheerfully bounced and debugged her, typing in between squalling.
I was once unambiguously addicted to weed. When I was partying a lot, I questioned whether I was addicted to alcohol as well. I concluded no, but that conclusion seems worth explaining right now, as I taper off Ritalin. These three have been "problems" in different ways, so it's interesting to articulate how.
In the immoderate (so we say) planet of Tymek, the stages of adulthood are two. In the first, one sets out to conquer the world. One overextends oneself, takes on ventures that fail, and makes reckless public promises, including oaths for marriages that will detonate in demoniac divorces.
Kirkwood gaps are where we see a dearth of asteroids with orbital periods in resonance with Jupiter. In resonance means that the asteroid’s orbital period is a simple ratio of Jupiter’s — like 2:1, 3:1, 5:2. As they line up with Jupiter more often in similar ways, the strong repeated tugs that nudge it out of that orbit.
This simple algorithm is only applicable if you are the kind of person who gets distracted from bringing in the groceries by seeing a piece of trash you could pick up on the way, and you only realize hours later that you never finished bringing in all the groceries. ...
Would I rather have a small shot at emitting what is in me – what is great within me – or would I rather be well known and liked? This was a very difficult question. You might think this an obviously false dichotomy, since being great will let you be known and liked.
The author talks more about weekend retreats, large conferences, or peace talks than about the smaller events I want to run to communitybuild. I've decided to dash this review off anyway, because designing events is so important that it's valuable to summarize major principles.
Stuffing in more life into your life by lucid dreaming, chasing novelty, and practice mindfulness (I guess) seem meaningfully as good as increasing literal lifespan.
In practice doesn't seem to work, but (not) reading or reviewing what a past timeslice of me wrote or photographed seems like the only hold my future self has over my past.
I recently went to a bookstore with my partner to read romance/YA book blurbs + first pages to discuss (and often laugh at) them. If someone watched me do this, it wouldn’t be obvious how much respect I have for these authors. (The envy might be more palpable.) With some exceptions, to have completed and posted at all puts them in my mind far above me.
Circling suspends many social rules in favor of honesty, but it not a consequence free zone. In my experience, people are pretty conservative. On a scale of 0 to 10, where total honesty is 10 and the normal social level is 4, circling seems to produce 6.
A Thceyn birthing takes the inverse shape of ours. A new Thceyn forms as a thin, flexible membrane around the Thceyn world. Micrometers thick at first, it grows until it strains to hold the world in and the pressure hurts its taut, flattened organs. Its birthing organ starts spiraling into the world-barrier.
April was my first full month with a baby. I put up a pretty good fight for my creative/intellectual life, and I think at least half won it. The real casualty was faffing and social media time (which I’m not much sorry for) and post quality and organization (which I am).
(affectionately, to baby) I'm going to protect and nurture you until one day you can hurt my feelings more accurately than practically anyone else can.
A quarter baked hypothesis as to why most non WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) cultures seem not to have 'mind to mind' parent/child relationships.
I used to have more ideation than follow-through in my early twenties. Now that I'm older, the ratio has flipped, and we can achieve intertemporal symbiosis.
People used to have kids regardless of whether they wanted them; now there is selection for wanting children, which is correlated with being loving parents.
A pretty terrible experience. Writing about it in large part to get it out of the way and move on with my life, in small part because some events are darkly funny.
Microwaving veggies. Highly reactive poly people will tend to have highly reactive metamours. Decision market on whether my friend will have a partner conditional on moving to various cities.
It was fine. Obviously I wasn’t enjoying this, but it was an unobjectionable way to exist for a while. Then I finished and was immediately "handed by reality" another request, this time a GET. "Am I.. *am I a web server*?" I thought, horror setting in.
I do not think I have the moral fortitude to be a good person if I were a doctor, a cop, a teacher, a judge, or a prison guard. These all fall under a category I think of as "jobs that make you evil", and the commonality of these jobs is that...
Why set up a universe where everyone takes this bizarre-to-us premise as granted, that severed individuals are different people whom we can treat badly? The only way it makes sense to me is as a metaphor for open individualism.
I recently had a frustrating experience with the contractor in charge of renovating the house we’re moving into next month. I asked him whether the date for a several thousand dollar appliances delivery was still good, and he failed to inform me until the truck was out for delivery that no one was at the house.
Grading my day with a spreadsheet formula. The weirdness of a very modern romance ideal being the main theme of ambient pop music. Severance (the TV show) is about open individualism.
This is a simple web app that calls out semi-random West Coast Swing moves so that you can decouple practicing "choosing the next move on the fly" and "executing the move".
(I actually use Google Sheets because I use web apps whenever possible, but I said Excel for legibility and terseness.) Since 2018, I’ve been logging some subset of my mood (single figure, min avg max, morning afternoon evening) energy depression/anxiety irritability productivity in an attempt ...
My attention was caught by this thing Gwern said when he was interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel: I have learned far more from editing Wikipedia than I learned from any of my school or college training. Everything I learned about writing I learned by editing Wikipedia.
Full disclosure: I didn’t like this book very much, because there were 10-15 pages out of several hundred that I found relevant or interesting, and I resented marching through so much book. However, the parts I did get were useful. I also liked that the author is not someone who himself struggles much with PB: I almost hesitate to tell you that I keep my desk clean and organized, that I rarely strain to meet deadlines, that I am almost never stymied in my work.
6/10 overall. My rating for the first book was 9, and my rating for the seventh was 3. So it goes. The series is ongoing – I think there are about 3 books left. the good Fun. Hits all the good progression fantasy buttons – character solving puzzles, hacking his game, getting stronger until he’s one of the biggest players around.
I found myself at a location without a phone, and introduced my boyfriend to Chopsticks, a game I played in elementary school in Korea. (It appears to be Japanese in origin.) It’s a simple game, and I napkin-calculated it could have at most* 450 states.
For a long time I didn’t rest effectively. I spent much of my time either in long periods of deep focus, or be a zombie (i.e. play games or mindlessly scroll social media). I greatly preferred the former to the latter so I’d constantly be scheming to enter deep focus.
When I’m dealing with the discomfort of touching a stranger, I can glimpse a state of being where I no longer find it uncomfortable. Some fundamental, usually-unnoticed tension between me and the rest of the human species will be gone. I see it would feel slightly better to be without this tension, and the process of exercising power over myself to change would be enormously satisfying.
Hey, look at ATP synthase with me for a second. It’s literally a molecular rotary motor with a crank shaft, embedded in a membrane holding a proton reservoir. (In eukaryotes like us, that membrane is the inner mitochondrial membrane; in prokaryotes it’s usually the inner membrane of the cell.
A 1-hour event where you complain about how little fun you’re having at a multi-day festival. I ran this around noon of day 3 of a 4 day festival. [5m of mingling / trickling in – make it clear that the circle will start at X:05] [Get everyone in a circle] You probably have some sort of mental sensation or physical sensation that is different when you say something that’s very true, as opposed to not quite right or outright false.
I collect questions for "nosy, inappropriate questions" social games. This is a full list (as of March 2025). Who in your life is your literary foil? How do you act around an unattainable crush? How large of a clone community could you have before it fell apart due to frictions you had with yourself?
"My usual mental motion of looking at criticism is to, like, sidle grudgingly into steelmanning it. But what if I turned the receptiveness dial all the way to max? Can I do that? He's telling me stuff I need to hear, so what if I tried to think of it as a super valuable gift?".
My introduction to courtly love was reading a Diana Wynne Jones novella (The True State of Affairs) that made no sense unless you know what courtly love is. After crawling confusedly through ancient Livejournal reviews to piece together what the story had been about, I took away that it was a weird medieval knight thing where you talk a lot of guff to a (married) woman without ever expecting it to turn into more than what it is.
In the radioactive mantle of a nameless planet dwelled the kahaldans, who lived in an air bubble in the rock and coated its inner surface with glowing farms of fungi. They enjoyed making new kinds of sounds and naming things, and would have named their planet but for their total ignorance of what a planet was.
The operation the book tries perform on the reader, assuming the reader has preexisting masochistic tendencies they can amplify, is to getting them to reframe as pleasure the most uncomfortable moments of their lives.
Joseph Tainter’s explanation for why complex societies collapse in one sentence: the collapse of a society is a response to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Tainter uses ‘complexity’ pretty loosely. He’s referring to a broad set of things that include agriculture, fuel extraction, scientific research, education, and sociopolitical complexity.
If your mother experienced a famine while you were a third trimester fetus, this messes up your metabolic programming and increases your risk for metabolic diseases – in ways that can cascade down to your own children epigenetically. During their occupation of Holland in 1944, the German administration placed an embargo on food transports to punish the locals for a railway strike.
