remember when the video game and film industries realized it would be safer to cannibalize proven IPs and the ratio of sequels/remasters/reboots/remakes/rereleases climbed precipitously in the 21st century? is it just me or are musicians rereleasing the same song across multiple editions of albums just so it has more opportunities to show up on your discovery feed. the algorithm needs to figure out how to punish this fr. i just got recommended a song in my discovery feed that ive already listened to like 50 times in the past week. it didn’t register as the same song because it was on a different edition of the same album (that only differed by a single song, i might add!). music historians are going to have a very hard time organizing the 2020s.
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Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades
political messaging and narrative media encourage us to treat most problems as straightforward when in fact most problems are very challenging dilemmas with uncomfortably slim margins between costs and benefits. even when you accept that most choices incur a cost, there are some personal interventions you can deploy right now that are a relatively low cost with a rather outsized upsidelook, i get it. if the murderer with the axe showed up at your door and asked where your friend is, you don’t wanna tell him, i get it. but in a locker room, the ethical code has gotta be the formulation of universal law. every time you want to do something, ask yourself “wait, would the locker room become completely unusable if everybody did this?” i dont care if your locker room behavior grants you 100 utils and only deducts 1 from me. what i care about is JUSTICE.
want to leave your bag on the space-constrained changing bench and then walk away? remember the formulation of universal law. want to listen to music from your bluetooth speaker in the shower? REMEMBER THE FORMULATION OF UNIVERSAL LAW.
The Cards Your People Play
im a live and let live gym guy, you know? i wont, like, ask you how many sets you have left on the squat rack and then awkwardly hover waiting for you to finish.
but dont you ever let me catch you doing one of these.
Tool Banditry and also a Modest Defense of Echo Chambers
try not to sweat where someones ideas come from. theyre just words we use to capture slippery concepts. the mere invocation of an idea, framework, or vocabulary from a source you dont like is (very often!) not an endorsement of that source or even an enthusiastic acceptance of the sub-claim that specific idea/framework/word captures. rather than being treated as loadbearing evidentiary claims, these concepts can just be useful to pump intuition and guide your audience somewhere else completely unrelated. speaking of completely unrelated: talking with people who already agree with you about most things can get you to the interesting parts faster so "echo chambers" arent ENTIRELY lame and pointless.Requiem for a Prius
surprise! i dont like being victimized by property crimes and being crashed into by people's cars, and every time its happened has made me feel weird. recently my prius got totaled and my moped got stolen and im feeling a sense of cosmic injustice, like the thieves are doing actual spiritual damage to me by messing with my stuff. pathetic, right?Vim and Vigor
you should learn vim.so why does the great war get to be called “world war i” if every important engagement happened in a few tiny slivers of europe and the middle east? seems a little silly when you compare it to the truly global scale of world war ii. go back to calling it “the great war” and call the second one “the world war”, implying there will be no sequel.
my wife has been stuck deep in the postgame of pokemon heartgold for the last week or two, after a short 5-year break from all video games. for the longest time pokemon’s enduring popularity among adults hasn’t made sense to me. i was thinking of it like a linear adventure game, and its a very poor one. it has an uncompelling narrative and really terrible pacing. watching her set goals and make both long and short term plans while navigating the extremely complex interactions of the overworld and battle system made it click. it’s more like a high fidelity simulation with an extreme level of agency, especially in the postgame. the gratification comes from setting and achieving goals. you kind of have to make your own fun, but oh what fun it is. i get it now.
Tremble Before the Mighty S-Curve
all exponential curves are actually s-curves. this has... troubling implications (if we are actually currently near the top of the s-curve)A Glossary of Accidental Social Defections
dont be overconfident dont make isolated demands for rigor dont tease dont psychoanalyze take responsibility for understanding people before you respond to them dont say obviously true crowd pleasing statements dressed up as claims dont nitpick dont stick uncharitable context to statements and likewise dont demand that nobody shall stick the "wrong" context to your statements.Why Do Online Zoomers Enjoy Discussing Aesthetics?
zoomers who spend a lot of time online like talking about aesthetics and categorizing imagery/art/software as belonging to a certain aesthetic. why? probably because those same zoomers have been party to the extremely aesthetically disorienting development of meme culture, which has piqued their interest and sharpened their instincts for how to transformatively participate in a memetic (aka aesthetic) moment.Survivorship By Us
all information that ever reaches you is subject to some level of survivorship bias because information undergoes a darwinian selection process to get to your eyeballs. this means your world model is quite inaccurate, and reading more information won't really make it more accurate unless you are strategic about how acquire this information to purposefully defang the selection pressures. also your own personal experience can give you insights that are useful to your own life and nobody else.the castro/mission balance patch has landed, and there are some welcome changes. the sanchez and market intersection has been nerfed, rendering the left turn strategy entirely unviable. hopefully we’ll finally see more players utilizing 15th for their routing.
there’s always a percentage of people participating in any sport who aren’t there for the love of the game but rather to be seen doing it. for some reason my gut tells me that this percentage is quite high for pool. it’s not a very stimulating game but you look cool and dangerous while you’re playing it.
guys i think i permanently damaged both of my knees by running full tilt down a san francisco hill to get to the post office before it closed. how was evolution able to produce both the mighty frontal cortex and the troublesome ACL?
why do so many moderators on irc act grumpy when people are using their chat platform to chat. im attracted by the elegance of the protocol and driven away by their bad vibes. discord may be full of weirdos but at least they want to connect.
look at my cat
it’s kind of like if twitter only had one user and he was really cool
Defeeding the Web
the core profit model of every free app is selling your attention to advertisers. this has the unfortunate side effect of optimizing to waste massive amounts of your time and make you feel awful but unable to quit. on top of that its increasingly hard to quit the apps simply because they have so successfully become vital knowledge platforms. but there is a way with a little web magic to block all the attention-sucking parts while keeping the knowledge-sharing parts. youre just gonna have to read part 3 to figure out what that means im sorry dude.