Full disclosure for those who know me well. I’ll sometimes start with a provocative statement and all the reasons I know I shouldn’t do something only to arrive at: “but YOLO here we go anyway!” This time, I think, that’s not the destination. This isn’t me secretly explaining why I’m going to start a MUD in the Year of our Holy Gashapon, 2026. Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly. But First, I Digress I like people.
Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. — Pope Leo XIV
“We like imperfection in others, but expect perfection in ourselves.”
I’m going to start living on minimum wage. Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment. — Conor Barnes In the beginning God created a budget There’s basically two parts to a budget.
One sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been, in order of preference. 🇳🇴 Oslo, Norway Perfection. 🇳🇴 Kristiansand, Norway Feels like walking through a storybook about mice that run a bookstore. 🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany I will spend the rest of my life angry that nowhere in the US has public transit this good. 🇱🇹 Klaipeda, Lithuania Purchased a book of soviet propaganda art from a woman who spoke almost no English, 10/10, no notes.
Oslo is, without a doubt, my favorite country in all of Europe. It manages to feel expansive without feeling big. Cozy but not confined. The people were, without exception, warm, kind, and welcoming in a way that many other European countries were not. It’s the kind of place I’d like to imagine I could aspire to live in, and perhaps some day be worthy of. Downtown Oslo Vigelund Sculpture Park
Not gonna lie, when I find someone who’s weirder than me in the ways I want to be weird I get a little jealous but like in a crush-y way? Like let’s be friends, but also enemies. Frenemies. I will make you soup and steal your soul and you will fill my house with spiders and we’ll be besties.
Operating at the very top of the game, for any value of game, necessitates a single-minded devotion to the exclusion of all other interests or hobbies.
The reason most of the people who are the best at something love doing it is because it’s to the exclusion of all else.
Me: “You’re Darmok, I’m Jalad, and together we are at Tanagra.”
Ash: “What? Oh, Star Wars.”
As far as I can tell this is Alton Brown’s journey: “No pasta.” Live and Let Diet, Good Eats S13:E13 “No white foods.” To the media at some point? I can’t find a direct reference, but AB mentions having said it in later episodes. “No white foods but Cauliflower’s good actually.” The Caul of the Flower, Good Eats S14:E21 “No white starch.” Various web sources, approximately 2015. Given that, I think he probably does intend to include most starchy potatoes, although I’d guess the problem has more to do with the way most potatoes are served and not the potato itself.
I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet.
The way I make sense of the world is to talk about it, at length, with anyone who’ll listen. Which frequently means the people closest to me are stuck listening to me as I work out any complicated long-poll decision making process.
“Is this a problem you have to solve, or can the world solve it for you later?”
— Adam Savage
In competitive video games you should expect a 50% win rate. About half the time the other team will be better than you, half the time they won’t. You’re operating at the razor’s edge of your skill level. Today I realized that’s likely true in every other part of life as well.
Language is hard. Communication is harder. When someone receives a communication, they interpret it through their own understanding and world view and the message that’s ultimately received may bear only a passing resemblance to the one that was intended. Ideally, we’re all working to get better at communicating what we actually intend, since the burden is on the communicator to be understood, not the receiver to interpret. With this in mind, I’m writing this as something of a preemptive “disambiguation” of some terms I intend to use in future blog posts with two intentions in mind:
I’m about to say something you might find shocking, so before I do I want to make two things clear: This isn’t a complaint post. The purpose is not to vent. I actually consider this a positive and optimistic thought process. Okay. Ready? I don’t like Hawaii I’ll wait a moment for the outrage to subside. Nothing at all against the residents or people. I’ve traveled a lot and my experience is that people, broadly, are kind and welcoming.
Watching A Goofy Movie as a kid: it’s about a parent learning to understand his son.
Watching A Goofy Movie now: it’s about a family learning to understand each other.
My dream used to be to have no clocks in the house. To be fully untethered from needing to know what time it was. Probably achievable up to a point. Now that I’ve got all these mechanical clocks I really appreciate them from a different perspective. Time is just the beat of life, the ticking never stops. The numbers and meaning we assign them are arbitrary.