I list some parenting/socializing scenarios in order of increasing difficulty and misery, and then go on a long tangent about how to guess how badly reproducing will damage your inner individual life.
Last month I designed the best t-shirt I've ever made, for a conference (Manifest) whose shirts I've designed for 3 years now. I went a bit insane for this one – once I saw the glimmer of a really good shirt, I jettisoned the rest of my life for a month to chase it down.
Last week my friends ran an "extreme violent circling" event. They told people to be aggro and tell each other what they really thought and felt about each other. The group promptly fell into acrimony and warfare, which I and some others enjoyed. I wish to repeat this event.
The thing is, I didn’t have anyone in my life to tell me, “Ryland, don’t get into a situationship with the seventy year old woman who shot you into space to die.”.
She showed us the rooms that had once been ours. Some of our fabrics still hung from the walls – she folded them up one by one and gave them back to us. Amma said goodbye to the rooms of my dead sisters, and your mother turned away to let her do it, without even peeking to see if she would steal.
It's interesting to think that my baby invites me to these running and hiding games in part because this childhood play was adaptive for animals at risk of predation.
I recently saw someone online tell an egregious lie about my friend, who met her now-spouse in a somewhat sensational way at an orgy and subsequently had a child with him. This person falsely claimed the friend had gotten pregnant at the orgy (the pregnancy came later, and was planned) and was raising the child alone (they live together and are engaged).
Event notes for my favorite event I've ever run. Put people in new groups of 4-5 for ten minutes, get them to sticker their favorite interlocutors at the end, and shuffle. The most stickered attendees are publicly acclaimed at the end.
It’s hard to write this mistake post, but it should go into my mistakes folder, as it was the most directly expensive mistake of my life (as opposed to indirectly expensive, due to opportunity cost). When I remember the major decision points, my mind tends to flinch off the thought like some jumping insect.
A few weeks ago, I described this personality shift to my husband, saying that it had been the most impactful meta-change I'd experienced. He was positive about it overall, and added, "One thing I worry about is.. well.. you know that famous speech...".
Wisdom about polyamory tends not to accumulate in public. There's a great deal of poly metis locked up in the heads of exactly the people with the discretion and community integration to not share their chain of reasoning.
Two rules. Finish what you pick up. When picking the next task, pick the most aversive one – not the most important one, the most urgent one, but the one that most strongly makes you go, oh please, not that one.
Day 1 (Aug 21 evening) True aim: see if I can get to a point of energy, libido, fitness, subtle masculinization, and clitoral growth that I’m happy with. Proxy aim: get to the upper end (70ng/dl) of natural cis female T levels, or a little higher, into the between zone.
On nights my partner-who-cooks makes food, I do the cleanup, and vice versa. Last night he cooked a meal none of us liked much, which felt fine, but in the process generated an unusual number of dirty dishes, which did not. I simmered about this. On the subsequent morning, my two partners started discussing where to buy lunch from with no acknowledgement of the leftovers.
I moved to Berkeley 3 months ago, and my social network is still crystallizing. I went to a large ACX meetup yesterday and obtained the individual contacts of people I liked. Those contacts are sitting at the top of my chat app, stressing me out a little.
Two books, but best considered as one long book. I devoured the first one but became annoyed and pissy about the second, and took months to finish it. When I hit last few pages, it recontextualized why the hell the story was the way it was, and I grudgingly respected it more.
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.
The one where a catgirl betrays her emperor when he starts nuclear war by fleeing the planet with his disarmed flagship containing tens of thousands of people, who promptly start killing each other.
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.
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. ...
Stephen King novels tend to have very Manichean cosmologies and The Stand is no exception: the survivors of a society-ruining plague have dreams of both an old woman who is clearly Very Good and a man who is A Demon, and have a choice of which one to make their way towards in post-apocalyptic America ...
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 is 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.
Nick Lane’s bet on the location of the origin of life is underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents, where the pH difference can be dramatically different (3-5 points). Life could occur on such a chemical gradient.
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.
"mom, dad, the reason I flout traditional norms and do all this crazy-to-you stuff with bigamy and hormones is that I’ve reached a level of affluence you can't understand. you worked so hard to make sure I could make it in the USA, and I did. this is what making it means.".
"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.
I'm both strongly drawn to and strongly repelled by writing political fiction. I'm drawn to it because avoiding political questions is restricting me in an unpleasant way when I write fiction. I'm repelled by it because I'm afraid of saying things that are incorrect or wrong, because it opens me up to a new intensity of criticism, and because most other people I see writing overtly political fiction make asses of themselves.
The operation the book tries perform on the reader, assuming the reader has preexisting masochistic tendencies they can amplify, is to get 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.
