Instantly? It’s a somewhat vague term, but magnanimity, having “loftiness of spirit.” To me, it means that when they enter a room they carry a subtle gravity. Their eyes are focused on what and who is around them, taking in each in turn with a clear understanding of what they see but a respect for what they don’t. A trim smile that welcomes greetings and promises warm words in return. They breathe with the calm ease of someone healthy and comfortable in their own skin, and with each step they appear to not just approach their physical destination, but their own personal fulfillment.

I liked Stacy’s Mom when I first heard it, but after listening to more and Fountains of Wayne over the years, it just makes me angry because it’s the only song of theirs anybody knows! I like that most of their music is about everyday moments and emotions, but the only everyday moment people know is the milf one.

And then I start thinking about Bowling for Soup’s cover of Stacy’s Mom, which is by far the worst cover I have ever heard, not because it’s bad in its own right, but because there are no creative decisions taken, nothing to make it their own, they just do nothing with it and on Spotify it has an entire half of the number of plays as the original. The first time I heard the cover, I didn’t realize until the singing started and I thought the voice sounded a little different. And there are people who don’t even realize Bowling for Soup’s “version” is a cover!

You, me, and everyone else are the amalgamations and culminations of our individual life experiences. You don’t have to remember the details for those details to have happened and influenced you at the time.

I understand your concerns after having my first concussion almost two years ago now and unvaccinated covid three years before that. Both affected my cognitive state and speed of thinking/remembering, and I’ve wondered/worried how much weaker my mind may be than it could have been. But ultimately what I tell myself is that I can’t change those things, they’re just another thing that led me to now. All I can do is the best with what I have and trust that it will be enough.

But that’s just living with the doom and gloom. I think you may be surprised at what you do remember but can’t recall unprompted. One time I lost the game (I lost the game, sorry) around a friend of a friend who paused for a moment then exclaimed that it had been 15 or 20 years since he last thought about the game. So for all that time one could think he had forgotten, but as soon as something triggered his memory, it was there. Based on that, I advise that you trust that if you have a relevant memory, it will surface at the time it is relevant. Some level of self-reflection is good, but don’t let the reinforcement of old brain connections in memory stand in the way of forming new ones.

I feel like doing research shouldn’t be an issue for people playing Paradox games, where it takes hours of research in the tooltips just to understand the mechanics.

That said, my research for new Paradox DLC usually consists of hovering over it in the store, ignoring anything with reviews less than mixed, taking interest in those with positive, and reading the first dozen reviews of the mixed ones, and that works well enough.

Honestly pretty relatable. I had a bit of a “you’ll shoot your eye out” moment this summer. I got some flower for the first time in a while (it’s mostly a thc drink culture around me) and was smoking daily. For the next couple weeks the thought kept crossing my mind that maybe I should only smoke every other day to keep my tolerance creep slow and prevent what I call “zombie mode.”

I got to meet one of my favorite youtubers whose first video I had watched was this one “On Weed:” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pcavwJitC4

We talked a little and I asked if he still smokes. His answer? “Yeah, but only every other day.” To hear him echo the exact thing I had been considering internally really got me. I’ve been a lot better about keeping a day or more between getting high, and I have found that it has helped me enjoy being sober more as I have found things to do while sober, and also increased my enjoyment of getting high as I have more time to look forward to it and a lower tolerance that makes it easier to get to the right level.

I highly recommend it.

Okay, after processing everything over the past few days, I think I understand how to shift my understanding of supply and demand. Previously I had thought of supply as “there is this much stuff to sell.” It would be better to view as “it costs X per unit to produce Y units at market.” So increased productivity can means producing more Y for the same X, or in the case of reducing labor like you said producing the same Y for a lower X. Demand can be thought of as “N units can be sold for Z currency each.”

Unless you are in a monopoly, Y will always be a fraction of the N units actually sold, so as long as the Z of the total market is higher than your X to produce a profit is made. This is complicated by scenarios where company A sells their product at a different Z than company B, but this model allows for the changes to the supply side that don’t actually affect the total market Y.

Does that make sense to you?

Well, I guess I’ll just disagree. It very much reads to me as someone looking back and realizing they got everything they had been trying to get “by mistake” when they stopped trying to get it.

I think I can forgive someone using the language of their past self when reflecting upon that past. In the context of the paragraph, I think it’s fair to say that “which worked” means something more along the lines of “and things did get better.” Maybe he could have improved his word choice in that instance, but I don’t think that negates everything else said.

I can already hear you saying “but that’s not what he said, and that was his choice of words.” And to that, I point to one of the key lessons I learned in college philosophy: questions of meaning come before questions of truth. In this case where one short two word sentence does not fit the rest of what he is saying, I think it’s best to ask what they could mean that would fit.

No, over text they might sound similar, but in person it’s easier to see that the difference is between being performative in his niceness as a means to have friends/a girlfriend versus being nice as a means toward being his better self, with friends following naturally from that.

Right, but I’m having some trouble connecting that summation of supply and demand to your implied disconnect between productivity increases and supply. Were you specifically talking about scenarios where there is no space for output to grow, only input to shrink?

For instance, four people extract 1 ton of raw material in a day. A new machine means it only takes two people to extract that same 1 ton, but the size of the material patch stays the same so you can still only operate the one machine rather than using all four people to operate two machines. Thus increasing productivity without increasing “supply?”

How would that not be part of supply? If productivity doubles and is rolled out across the board, wouldn’t supply double as well? I mean, the total work being done would probably drop such that the supply isn’t actually doubled, but if supply was the constraint before then wouldn’t it settle somewhere between that doubled amount and the original, directly translating that increased productivity into increased supply?

• Decorating. That’s fair and relatable. The only stuff on my walls are what I got from my dad over the years.
• Style. If you wear clothes, you have a style. You don’t need to constantly buy new clothes to give a modicum of thought to how you present yourself.
• Just do things. I don’t know where you live but the zoos around me are free. Walking through a park is also free and something. I went to a gamer meetup a couple months ago that was free. If you look for them, there are options that don’t involve spending money but can be rewarding.
• Challenge yourself to do something. My challenge to my self each week is to write for 15 minutes. It’s great, gets my mind stretching a little thinking the new thoughts I’m putting to paper. Why would I stress about that the other 99% of the week? You can be happy with where you are while still wanting to better yourself.
• Get out of your shell. I take it you don’t like the society you live in. Fair bet is there are ways you think it could be better. Do you think those changes will materialize while you sit at home? Get out and meet people. If they want you to do something imperialist tell them no, that’s against your values. If they stop talking to you get out of your shell to meet other people. If they keep talking to you then you’re one step closer to building a society you actually want to live in.

I’ve been wanting to for a few years now as the service gets worse (where is my playlist radio?) but have been complacent. This is the last thing to push me over my limit. I’ll be transferring my decade-worth of playlists this weekend.

Having seen the movie, I think it’s actually a decent setup for the plot. The crux of the conflict is that programs can only exist in the real world for 29 minutes before dissolving, and the good mega corporation and bad mega corporation want the “permanence code.”

This time limit adds tension to the real world scenes in a pretty compelling way, because the good guys only need to escape capture for that half hour before gaining some respite. This is reinforced by the moments of viewing the world through the programs’ eyes, which always include the countdown to how much longer they have. There were times I thought “oh they only have a couple minutes” without stretching my suspension of disbelief beyond what’s required to watch a movie where flesh and blood can be digitized by a laser.

It also allows more interplay between the real and digital world that I felt was lacking in the older movies. Those ones call the digitized humans “users,” but it never feels like they are that different when they are in the console rather than at it. This movie has a lot of scenes that cut between the bad guy sitting at his desk typing in commands and the programs in the grid of his computer hearing them as orders and treating him with reverence appropriate to a machine. There’s a hacking scene where you see the programs from one server grid break through the literal firewalls and cut through antivirus programs that does a good job feeling like an abstraction of what is happening in the real world scenes.

All that said, I went to this movie for the soundtrack and pretty visuals, and while the light bikes and such in the real world did look cool, they would have looked a lot cooler in the digital world. There’s one action scene that is, and it is the coolest part of the movie.

I thought it was fine. I was surprised to find the stakes were interesting since I was just there for the visuals and the soundtrack. The visuals were cool, especially in 3D, but I only really noticed the soundtrack a few times. The jet ski scene was probably the coolest part of the movie.

Well, add one to the tally, what are those?

Ater freshman year of college I learned there was a local brand of chocolate milk that is the bees knees. I started drinking a gallon or two a week, it was a problem, but I was also experimenting with weed for the first time and it was so good.

After a few months my buddy told me he had this stuff called DMT that you smoke through a meth pipe he had acquired for the purpose. So I sat down and as I leaned back from the hit and reality morphed I shut my eyes.

The world was technicolor, composed of rings and rectangles moving toward and past me. There he was, the figure, a cross between Slender Man and Truth from Full Metal Alchemist, a blank white face except for the big grin. He radiated pure love, and as we looked at each other a cascade of similar figures swirled round the periphery, filling me with a sense of love, acceptance, and belonging like I had never experienced.

It was during this time that the voice came close to my ear and spoke to me, clear and purposeful: “Hey, lay off the chocolate milk.”

It was so obvious that I immediately responded back with a thought, “Oh yeah, thanks!”

I continued to float through bliss for another minute or so before fading back to reality, and just like that my chocolate milk intake dropped to once every month or two.

The flash drive I used to install it finally died several months ago and I haven’t bothered to get a new one yet.

It’s not super creative but I named my mom’s network “The Internet” so when she asks for help with getting online I can ask if she’s tried connecting to The Internet.

“Most people think ___.” No, unless you’re citing a statistic or roughly quantifying how many anecdotes you’ve heard agreeing with you to support that statement (both of which rarely happen), that’s just your opinion wrapped up in language to avoid actually justifying it.

Additionally, even if most people think something, I don’t care what most people think. In my experience what most people think vs what the best thing to think is are often not aligned.