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.
scyy.fi/wcs-movecaller should go to a static web app, but in case it’s down, here’s the full HTML that you can paste into a text editor and open in your browser. This is a program 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 ...
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.
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.
Cursed current! It flung me in the path of a jet of hot water exiting an underwater vent. The proteins on the hot-facing side of my cell wall denatured and cracked, and my lipid cell wall loosened for a fraction of a second.
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.
Credit to my friend Jenn, who wrote about half the cards. After I published the event idea on my website but before I actually ran it for the first time some years later, she ran it for her meetup in Waterloo and answered a bunch of my questions about it when I was gathering up the courage to run it for a conference.
I collect nosy questions for “nosy, inappropriate questions” social games. This is a full list (as of March 2025). If you want them in filtered web app form, you should go to scyy.fi/q. If you like this, see also: Askhole.
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. ...
As someone who doesn’t have fun easily with other people, I’ve had to be creative and figure out events that do anything to my deadened social circuits. I like events that are weird, or mentally challenging, or nominally do something useful.
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.
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 ...
