Going to DC for a family weekend tomorrow. However, my wife started the flu or something similar yesterday. We had relatively cheap tickets to see Hamilton last night, but had to give them away. :/ Here's hoping. Forever Labs has been keeping me plenty busy. We've finally resolved that a consumer banking service doesn't benefit from spending time and money on peripherally-related R&D. We've been told so since Y Combinator, but always resisted it. Our YC partner called our plan a houseboat: a shitty house and a shitty boat. As a result, we are spinning out an R&D company, and FL is going to have a stake in it. I'm going to be heading up that company. I'll still be CSO for Forever Labs, and my goal is to use the cells that I've banked. That's why this whole thing started. It's just that until Forever Labs is a household name, we aren't spending FL resources wisely working towards something else. We have a saying that "YC is always right." I can't tell you how many times they have been. I guess when you launch a few hundred companies each year, you start to pick up on things.
I've been through several decades of startups and VC money, in my lifetime, and even worked for the Seattle version of YC called TechStars. There is an incisiveness that investors have, isn't there? "That's not your business... why are you doing that?" Erm... uh... because... it ... seemed right? Or something? "Spin it off into a new company, affiliated with the existing one. It's a good idea too. Just not in the same box as your first Good Idea. Here's more money, and the phone number for my friend who invests in these other types of businesses you are spinning off..." It can be head-spinning. But amazing. Friends of mine had a site that sold... I dunno... some sort of Web 2.0 shit, or whatever. I don't actually remember what their product was, but it was web-based. Then they developed some tools to measure how their site was working. Admin tools on the back end. In an investor meeting, they were demonstrating the effectiveness of their pipeline - how people were finding them, going through the purchase process, etc. - and the investors said, "Hang on... wait a minute... what's that tool you are using to show those numbers?" It took a minute, but they realized the investors liked their BACK END more than their product! PIVOT. And they became the first company to provide truly viable tools for measuring SaaS success. (I think they were bought and integrated into SEOmoz, eventually.) Life is weird. And a helluva ride. Enjoy it!
Wait. Hamilton is still showing? In New York? Where's the best site to buy tickets?
We're passing through Detroit when we're next in the US in a few weeks. This is excellent to know. Thanks everyone.
That could be awesome. Recommend any bars? I'll work out what dates we're going to be there.
For Detroit Itself I'd recommend starting at Grand Trunk for architecture and beers. Also Ready Player One is a barcade near there too that is pretty fun.
I've been seeing a girl. I noticed an imbalance: I was getting to really like her and I wasn't feeling the same from her. The imbalance was driving me crazy, and the craziness alarmed me. We'd only been on four dates but trivial stuff, like her not texting me as much as I wanted her to, was throwing me for a massive loop. I looked into it and started journaling. I was able to articulate the feelings concisely enough that I had some terms worth googling: "why do I need constant reassurance," "relationship anxiety" etc. Boom. There's a whole way of framing this that I'd never heard of before. I have what some people call an anxious-preoccupied attachment style. Have you ever had the erie feeling of someone you've never met writing out your thoughts? The upside was that the process was the clearest instance in my life of self-awareness generating equanimity and calm. Naming the "complex" mollified its hold over me, at least the worst of it on Monday. The only downsides to this knowledge are that 1) I still don't really know the source. They say it's likely from childhood, but I perceive my childhood as having been mostly nurturing and full of love. Nothing clearly jumps out at me. And 2) the solution is squishy. It's essentially the strong form of love thyself first. Quiet the critic in your head. Know that I'm worthy already. Question to pubski: Have you, or anyone you know, progressed clearly from a state of persistent low-to-no-self-worth to a state of steady, high self-regard? I've heard about or read that in the abstract this is possible. But no really talks about having made the progress themselves. Do tell.
You are a good and valuable person. You deserve better than an unequal relationship. Find a person who feels a hardcore 'Fuck YES' when they get a message from my boy 'boots. Maybe that's this girl and she struggles to communicate it. Regarding your question - I think its fair to say I have come up from a pretty low place when it comes to self regard. It's a work in progress but so is everything else. For me the change manifests in action more than feeling. I treat myself and my time and wellbeing as valuable and precious. Examples: When my (hard to manage) family wants to change plans, ask me to drop things unexpectedly, otherwise ask something unreasonable, I say 'No." now. Not rudely, not with venom. Just "No, that day/time doesn't work for me. Ask me with more than one hour of notice next time" I was asked to sing/play guitar at an upcoming event for my in-laws church. Firm "No thanks, I dont feel I could sincerely engage with the spirit of the event." I could go into a rant and talk about how I sing and practice music for my own enjoyment, but that wont cause anything good or positive to happen. I know that to be true of myself and living that truth is freeing. -------------------------- I don't think anyone should live in a constant state of anything, let alone high self regard. It would be deeply inhuman to only ever feel good and certain about yourself. That's not a praise of doubt, but of the value of the variety of human experience.
I’ve spent like 5 years trying to decide on the source of my absolute shit ability to form attachments and honestly some days I’m still not convinced. On one hand I think it’s all been worth it to understand myself better, but on the other it’s more important to acknowledge and accept who you are so you can deal with it going forward. Don’t dwell on not knowing what the cause is, but don’t be surprised if it hits you like a brick wall if you decide to work on this either. I have a friend who’s similar to you, for them it seems like having a very emotionally intuitive mother but distant father has left them feeling their emotions with no idea how to process it. You could be completely different though. Normally by moving forward that stuff becomes clear. Progressing “clearly” isn’t really a thing in my experience, you’ll just work on yourself for a while and then one day realize something you’re doing would have made you more anxious a year ago. Then you might get knocked down again but that’s okay because you know that you’re capable of overcoming it. That’s normally how I get through rough patches now, telling myself I’ve done this before so I can do it again and just hoping life doesn’t knock me down too much that it stops feeling worth the effort. I think that’s a high self esteem thought. I like reading books and I can point to a few things my therapist have had me do that helped like jotting down my feelings through out the day to becomes more aware but you’ll likely have to just find what works for you over time with trial and error. Just make sure to remember nothing that doesn’t work was a waste of time, it gets you closer to understanding what will work. This wasn’t the most positive addition but I think managing expectations is important. It’ll take time and if you’re the kind of person who likes clear objectives or progress plans you won’t want to stick with it. Do it anyways.
Hmm, it still feels like I'm sort of on that path, but now that I think about it my self worth has been pretty reasonable for quite a while now. So I guess I can talk about what's worked for me. For context, about a year ago my doctor diagnosed me with severe anxiety and moderate depression and I'd consider that to be the point where things started turning around Full disclosure, on top of all this I'm also on cipralex, which probably helps a lot but is more for managing anxiety than anything else. The biggest thing for me has been a combination of meditating every morning and journaling before bed every night. Meditation helps me set my mindset for the day — not even something as solid as an intention, just get myself more mindful of myself — and journaling lets me look back on my day and really pick out what felt good and what didn't. Over time this has helped me figure out what's important in my life and what I can stop worrying about, and that's helped me let go of a lot of ideas I was judging myself by but don't really care about in the long run. I'm also very prone to getting stuck in my own head, and both of those keep me from dwelling on dumb stuff, which overall helps me remember that I'm pretty alright on the whole. I've also been getting more into minimalism and simple living concepts. Nothing too extreme, just identifying what in my life's important to me and reducing everything that isn't. My home feels much homier after decluttering and really working to make sure that when I look around I actually like what I see. Plus I've started doing some things like doing dishes by hand every night instead of running the dishwasher once a week or so, which I weirdly enjoy more since it means my dishes are always clean and I've done it myself so I know they're cleaned well. Sounds like a pain in the ass, but I've actually been enjoying it. A lot of the other stuff is actually just little self-improvement actions, now that I think about it. I've got a budget so I'm always saving money. I'm cooking for myself more and eating healthier and trying to work more vegetarian meals into my diet. I'm reading more, which is something that's always been important to me but I've neglected for years. I've gotten more outdoorsy, biking to work and hiking for fun and sitting in parks on nice days. I actually make my bed when I get up in the morning. Just minor things that make you feel better about yourself and your environment. Just do things that you think will make your life better and be mindful of why it's making your life better. Easier said than done, of course, but typing it out on the internet is usually the easy part of a task.
I had a long phone call after a bunch of frustrating text messages. That was supremely helpful. That led to an in-person conversation that was honest. I told her all the above, and it didn't scare her away. We have more plans to see each other. Honesty, as ever, is the best policy. That and in-person conversations.
Progress is tedious, arduous, and doubly so if you try to do it entirely on your own. It's taken me the better part of the last decade to go from a sense of worth of, like, sub-zero to a solid 8. For me, progress was based on a few pillars: 1) Gain perspective. Does it make sense that you feel the way you do? I sometimes have the tendency to go from 'small setback' to 'this will never work and doom shall befall upon me' for no reason. It's really hard to see something like that when you're too close to the fire. Good friends can be your emotional fact-checker. Great friends can do that and also steer you in the right direction. Find great friends. 2) Focus on what you have, not what you lack. Focus on actions, not just on feelings. You're still dating. She's replying to you, and it's probably a good conversation at that. She may be busy, she may have stuff going on, she may be someone who needs more time than you do to commit. You don't know. Stick to what you do know. 3) Put yourself out there. Do things despite the feeling that it might fail miserably. Despite your 'spidey sense' being on red alert. Despite your insecurity telling you that you're not good enough, not worthy. Take the (perceived) risk and brace for impact. You'll find out that most of the time, things go better than you feared. And on the off chance that bad things do happen, it's almost always reversible to a large degree. 4) Let the chips fall where they may. Be your weird, wonderful, worthy self. If other people don't like it, you have some reason to reflect on that, but you have no reason to destroy what makes you you. I regret the times I caved to others to please them. I don't regret the times I stood up for myself, for my values and my beliefs.
I've been doing some leather working in my spare time. I made myself a new wallet and a card holder. They're not amazing but they're the nicest ones I've made so far. I still have more leather on the piece they were cut from so I'll have to think of other things to make. I've also been working on rounding out that album I've been making for about a year now. It really only needs a bit more. This was a track that I made some time back. It was drifting towards the reject pile until one day I revisited it and just liked it a lot for some reason. It's kind of a boilerplate synthwavey track, also kind of not. Also I read Sandkings the other day and really enjoyed it. I’ll have to pick up some more stuff from the library to read. I also have the next Dune book sitting unread on my table.
Nothing significant, I've mostly been nitpicking wording. First one was about a rule that said you have to deliver doctor's notes related to your absence within the two weeks of the beginning of your "continuous period of absence" (best translation I could make), which is plain stupid and impossible for people who are, say, sick for more than two weeks. Of course, while nobody with half a brain used it as written, administrators relished in it, and that's enough for me to care. This one was actually elevated from departmental to uni-wide status because it appeared almost everywhere independently. Background for it is at best speculative, though. Both second and third were about the allocation of hours and courses (and payment for what goes above your 180/300 ETCS quotas) having some generous loopholes. I like to think I took such a massive advantage it was enough for uni to care, but that's just me having boring dreams.
YW. At present I am mostly surrounded by people who feel powerless, impotent, paralyzed and ineffectual. People who act based on the belief that they are unable to make any appreciable change in their environment. You are capable of making changes. You are a capable person and I know that I'm not the only one who appreciates that about you.
I will be presenting a paper for discussion at this year’s Academy of Management conference on effects of organizational inclusion on conflict and organizational silence. Never been to a conference like this, so I hope I do ok. Hopefully I can publish the paper somewhere after revision and even more hopefully, that will put me in a better position for PhD programs.
If by strategies you mean something that can taken off the shelf and used in workshop settings, then no, unfortunately I'm not at that stage. If we're talking in terms of practice, then yes. Organizational silence (the type I'm referring to is acquiescent silence, NOT prosocial silence) is effectively a conflict avoidant move. Long story short: silence is reduced and inclusion is increased when group members can productively engage in conflict. This is supported and perpetuated by all levels of leadership as an active, ongoing process that must be achieved again and again. Yes, this is a result of my research, but this is somewhat preliminary as my sample size is limited. No link yet, though I'm happy to send you a copy of the paper I submitted!
I took my wife and 80% of my children on a short vacation this week. It was a very nice getaway - all still in Colorado (except for about ten minutes in New Mexico). There were sand dunes, a ropes course, an arcade, the highest suspension bridge in the country, some funnel cakes, swimming, and delicious food. South-Central Colorado is a beautiful place that occupies a corner of my heart. and my kid drove a bunch
When you go through 20 years of Wristwatch Annuals as a meditative exercise you pick up on things you wouldn't otherwise. Like the fact that Hublot was an also-ran with nothing really to say for itself until they hired Jean-Claude Biver in 2005, at which point they say "we hope for great things from Jean-Claude, fresh from Swatch" and then in 2006, instead of 24 models of assorted forgettable shapelessness they run six.fucking.versions.of.the.Big Bang. And just like that, they were Hublot. I wouldn't wear a Big Bang. But as of 2018 Hublot's 450 employees make 40,000 watches a year, none of them selling for less than $15k. And that, my friends, is the power of design and the power of marketing. And you can read articles about shit like that. It's another thing to track the footprints in the snow.
Swatch, alphabetically, is Blancpain, Breguet, Glasshutte Original, Jaquet Droz, Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, Tissot, Union Glasshutte and Harry Winston. It's worth noting that of that mess, only Longines, Mido, Omega, Rado, Tissot and Harry Winston have anything to do with the companies they're named after. Blancpain, Breguet, Glasshutte Original, Jacquet Droz and Union were all reconstituted out of whole cloth in the past 30 years. But yeah. Swatch also owns ETA which means they're the heartbeat of a preposterous number of watch brands. What I find hilarious is the Omega boutique in downtown Seattle is now "Tourbillon Boutique" and while they carry Swatch, they don't carry Tissot because "tissot is a down-market brand" and I pointed to a glass case and said "that's a thirty dollar Swatch" and the tedious stuffed suit wrinkled his face up and went Because really, if you're manning the counter of a Swatch boutique in a Fairmont in Seattle you may think you're all that? ...but you're not. I've developed a general affection for Baume & Mercier (est. 1830, Richemont) and Universal Geneve (b. 1894 d. 2008, sort of the "Tudor" to Patek Philippe's "Rolex") because the Capeland Chrono is a lovely piece of Valjoux 7750 for not a lot of money (depending on the year) and because Universal Geneve managed to get weird without getting ugly and that, in all my studies, is a rare thing indeed.
The 2824 is in absolutely goddamn everything. I recently had to dissuade a friend from buying a watch since the "upgraded swiss movement" was a 2824.. It was a $200 option on top of a $1000 watch. I can't for the life of me remember what the brand was, I'll ask him next time I see him. That's a gorgeous Universal Geneve you linked. I love watching your journey through watchmaking and design.
One of the interesting side effects of going at the industry bottom-up is you develop new perspectives. One of which is that the "watch-o-sphere" is utterly and completely full of shit. Literally everything you see on aBlogToWatch or Monochrome is unsubstantiated garbage, opinion represented as fact, speculation parading as gospel truth. The first inkling of this was when the whole of Instagram torch'n'pitchforked the CODE Without paying the barest lipservice to the fact that the consumer press had done the exact same thing to the Royal Oak and the Nautilus. I have four years' worth of Wristwatch Annuals ingested. Now granted - the latest I've got is 2006. But I've got the movement of every single wristwatch every single company of note wanted to advertise and the ETA 2892 is far more popular than the 2824, and the Valjoux 7750/7751/7753/7754 is more popular than the 2892. Bell & Ross, that storied brand for adventurers that are made by Sinn and have heritage dating all the way back to 1997, charged an extra $1400 for a synthetic sapphire crystal in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Fuckers were selling a $2200 watch with a plastic crystal or for $3400 you could buy the same damn watch only it came with a $22 corundum crystal. And that's $22 to me. RETAIL. An 11 3/4''' Seagull is $20 at retail. An 11 1/2''' Miyota is $54 at retail. An 11 1/2''' ETA 2824 is $239 at retail. $200 upsell on the ETA is basically a pass-through cost. They're not making a dime on it.
Holy hell you aren't kidding. I'm extremely casual with watch news and research so I've somewhat just taken those blogs at their word. But the CODEs, goddamn. They look like something I could buy at Macy's... and that one is $70k. Huh, I didn't know ETA's were that expensive. At the same time, if you're buying a watch over $1k, I feel that a movement of ETA quality should be the bare minimum.
One of the points made by Michel Chevalier is that with fragrances, you can't test-market shit: you launch it onto the market and hope for the best. Which, really, works out because if 97% of the marketplace thinks your cologne smells like skunkshit but 3% think it's ambrosia, you're a success. You need 3% of the market to love your shit and the rest of the world can fuck right off. That's a Bulgari Assioma (or "assaroma" as a buddy calls it). It's... divisive. But considering the biggest buyers of wristwatches in Europe are Italian men, Bulgari has been successfully selling many variations of the Assioma for twelve years. I get the CODE hate. It doesn't look like a Royal Oak. It looks "generic" compared to a Royal Oak, which has been 70% of what Audemars has sold for 40 years. But at some point Audemars had to go "errrrrm that design is 40 years old" and do something else. And the CODE has a new font, it has a 3D case, it's got an aventurine dial and it's got a clean look. That's a Chronoswiss Opus. It's a very nice skeletonized chronograph. Chronoswiss has been selling them at a moderate pace for maybe 20 years. They sell new for between $15k and $50k and they're impressive. But That's an MB&F LM Perpetual. You're going to pay at least $125k for it. Thing is? The case on that CODE looks an awful lot like the Romain Gaulthier Logical One a buddy of mine is about to buy. I'm pretty sure the LG1 was made by APRP, AP's "skunk works" where they manufacture as an OEM for all these little tweaky brands. And the fact that Audemars has been making other peoples' tweaky brands for 20 years leads me to believe that they've got a better thumb on the pulse of where the market's going than, say, Patek. Yeah the design language is vaguely reminiscent of the cheap stuff in some ways. But I'll bet they sell a lot of them. And I'll bet everyone shuts the fuck up by next year. And I'll bet the blog-o-sphere will have no memory of how insanely they hated on that watch by the time it's been out for five years. It's the best version of that watch, and that watch is gonna sell great.
It's a bit fascinating to watch you go down the rabbit hole around building a luxury watch brand from learning the raw skills necessary to understand and build the ins and outs of a watch to learning luxury branding while researching the whole history behind watchs and doing market research. I'm impressed by your discipline to apply the "do not half-ass anything" mantra.
Music: I've been plagued by ear worms lately, and they're coming to me at the most random times when I'm working. By the very nature of the phenomena, they're catchy songs from Sam Cooke's Saturday Night to Glenn Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy to Gorillaz' Clint Eastwood, the last of which is only stuck in my head because I was telling a younger coworker about Deltron 3030 and I'm pretty much completely certain that Clint Eastwood was my first exposure to Del as an artist. Wordlessness: Speaking of weird brain stuff, all week I was thinking about stuff that was worth posting to Pubski, but now that I'm here, I can't remember any of them. That's weird man.
I’ve taken a hiatus from here for a long while. There’s something about getting offline and injecting yourself with real world experiences that satisfies your search for clarity. Of course I still have questions but I’ve crossed off the goals from my college years and began a new path. It’s one I’m excited for and that’s reinvigorating after some tough life experience. I’ve taken my psychology degree and done more to better take care of myself than just about anything else. Practicing positivity has become a serious endeavor. A world of possibilities opens up when you throw off the chains of “realism” as I used to call it.
Have been working my way around Meditations Book 7 as discussed last week but with finishing a book that is due back to the library soon and reading Sandkings for Sci-fi club, I hadn't made a whole lot of progress. So tonight I sat down and worked on 7.1 and something was bothering me about the use of the word "transient" in the line: So I looked up transient and there is the commonly-used definition of "passing in and out of existence quickly," but also a second definition, "affecting something or producing results beyond itself." Reading the same passage in another translation seems to confirm that he meant the "short-lived" kind of transience, but this got me thinking about things that can be both kind of transient; short-lived and having affects beyond themselves.Familiar, transient.
This is a book that once I read it, I have pretty much kept on my nightstand or in my bag, as I keep going back to it. A note on versions, as there are many out there: I’ve picked up two different English translations now and they are different from each other in interesting ways. The Hays translation (Modern Library) is a little more “plain English” and is my favorite of the two, the Penguin Classic (Hammond translation) is a bit more poetic, which I don’t like as much but it is fun to compare the versions. I do like the indexes in the back of the Penguin version.
FWIW the Greek just says "short-lived," and doesn't have any connotations of "effects beyond themselves." The word used is ὀλιγοχρόνιος, which is a compound of ὀλίγος (few in number) and χρόνος (time). If you like Meditations, I think it's also worth reading what Nietzsche has to say about the Stoics for a little contrary perspective.
This is one of the things about translations. While it’s wonderful to have access to perspectives from across cultures and times, it can be difficult to know if you are getting a correct reading if you’re not able to work in the original language. That’s one of the nice things about having the two versions, I can use them to clarify against each other sometimes.
There may be some overlap in placed, but he has some pretty sharp criticism for them in Beyond Good and Evil:In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature--even on nature--and incorporate them in her; you demand that she should be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image--as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourself so long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourself--Stoicism is self-tyranny--nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic--a piece of nature?
Sure, but he's not criticizing stoic ethics there, he's doing the same thing he did when he pointed out that Socrates was ugly. Nietzsche was after an ethics without some external grounding, because god was dead and there was nothing that could serve as a ground, so he criticized the foundations of ethical systems of the past, but that didn't stop him from rolling with the parts he liked. If there can be no foundation for any ethics, knocking the stool out from under one doesn't make it less valid than any other.
Yeah, but again that's why I said he ended up getting to the same place(s), but my point was that he didn't get there because of the Stoics.
What kb said. So far I got nothing out of my physics B.Sc (masters in a few months, though), but I can't recall a single person I know with a B.Eng who didn't get at least OK-ish job on that diploma alone. In the meantime, here: I wrote my book recommendations for someone with engineering background (or just an enthusiast who isn't afraid of maths) to get up to speed with parts of modern physics. Hopefully, you'll get some mileage out of it. Good luck! :)
Engineering for the undergrad because it's well-respected and will give you a sense of what you like and what you don't, then if you still love Physics go get a masters in it because an undergrad in Physics won't give you nearly as many opportunities but a Masters will give you options. It's gonna be four and a half years of story problems. I warn you. Make as many liberal arts friends as you can before you specialize because theirs are the social connections that will keep you alive. But you will emerge from the crucible battle-hardened and ready to take on the world.
I have just been informed that my short story submission to Kill Your Darlings was rejected. It was a pretty niche genre and very geographically specific, so finding a new journal to publish it in is going to be difficult.