"Hey Nostradamus" is the only one if his I've read - kleinbl00 is the one to ask, I think he's read most of them

Reading log for the last 2 weeks, because I was on vacation:

Stalled on reading Middlemarch - up to chapter 16, but haven't read any in the last week.

On vacation I read "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland. Really enjoyed that one.

Started reading "The Stranger in the Lifeboat" by Mitch Albom.

The gist of the book is "dopamine is a reward signal, and anything that gives you dopamine can be addicting."

The advice is basically "just don't do it for 4 weeks. That will prove you're better off without it. Then keep not doing it forever". With a side comment about medically supervised withdrawal for some substances.

I started reading it because I noticed I reach for sweets or scroll social media when I feel crappy about anything, and it feels kinda obsessive and dopamine seeking. I was hoping there would some commentary on how to be normal when so many things online and in society are highly tailored to suck you in and give you a dopamine hit of cat pictures or righteous anger, and get you coming back. But there's really none of that.

I skimmed through "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking" and it's a 40 year old book on cigarettes but it has more useful information about scrolling twitter when you can't sleep than "Dopamine Nation" does

Reading log last week:

Up to chapter 12 of Middlemarch.

Finished Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. There's not nothing in there, but the book is certainly not useful.

https://dirt.fyi/article/2024/03/its-obviously-the-phones

Reading log for last week:

Started Middlemarch

Started Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke - Not sure yet if this one is useful or yelling at clouds.

Read Ulalume by Edgar Allen Poe. I had seen the first stanza a few times but never the whole piece

    The skies they were ashen and sober;
        The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
        The leaves they were withering and sere;
    It was night in the lonesome October
        Of my most immemorial year;

I'm going to write down each week what I read/listen/watch. Mostly so I can look back look back and see what I was interested in thru time, but a little bit as motivation to keep notes, and a little because I miss this place.

1. Claiming past credit for reading Moby-Dick in January. Really enjoyed it this time. A decade ago I listened to it without paying close attention and thought it was meh, with some funny parts. This time I paid a lot better attention, and it came across as a madman telling a story of madness.

2. Read a few chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth last week - read aloud book w/ my wife. Aimed at middle school age but holds up well.

3. Saw a production of the Bonnie and Clyde musical last weekend. It did an excellent job portraying them as real people in a tragedy, who were also monsters. Idealism, passion, despair, fatalism, and refusal to give up.

I didn't know Bonnie wrote poetry, and some of it got published in newspapers. For a while they were popular but it wore off as it became clear they'd try shooting their way out of anything. The musical uses her original poetry. The last verses of her most famous poem:

    They don't think they're too smart or desperate
    they know that the law always wins.
    They've been shot at before;
    but they do not ignore,
    that death is the wages of sin.
    
    Some day they'll go down together
    they'll bury them side by side.
    To few it'll be grief,
    to the law a relief
    but it's death for Bonnie and Clyde.

4) A Wizard of Earthsea. Finished it this week. I had never read any of Le Guin before. It's refreshing to have a YA book that's not about a "chosen one". I guess A instead of The should have been a tip.

Also I haven't read Jung or about Jung but isn't the shadow plotline in the second half straight out of Jung?

Yeah that phrasing really sticks in the mind. I could have sworn I read that article a handful of years ago, but I guess it was last year.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes.

Fits into the whole accelerationism discourse going on

who got knocked up and who can't ever be

The thought I had was "who can't ever be knocked up because infertility"

I would have never posted this if I tried to edit it. Poetry is too foreign a medium and a couple bits are too raw.

Just posting this before I start thinking about it too much

    We few
        Stand in the shed playing dsm roulette, thats you
        but not me i'm just paranoid. Who can't watch horror they're too jumpy
        who likes to 'cause it's worth the laugh.
        Dad watches fireflies alone outside
    We happy few
        grow branches off the grapevine, greencard marriage, feral cousin
        who got knocked up and who can't ever be
        Mom traps an in-law in the kitchen
        New stories and new faces next time
    We band of brothers

Been a strange year but a good year.

I joined a homebrew club and have leaned into the social side of that hobby. I've been playing ping pong again. I've made a much bigger effort to be social in general over the last year because I realized I was damn near reclusive during and after covid. Looking back I have always tended to be less social, but in 2021 i had some bad anxiety and froze up.

Been trying to get back into jogging after a long break to recover from a stress fracture caused by some uneven gait issues, extended by not wanting to do anything (see above). Also doing some beginner yoga. So I'm learning that I don't know how to breath from 2 directions. I'm not about to join a choir and find out from a third direction.

My capacity for doing things or "getting things done" seems to vary wildly, and I'm still learning to notice when and why. Compared to 6 months or a year or 2 years I'm a genius. Compared to pre-covid / pre-anxiety -- not sure. The "hindsight is 50:50" saying seems fitting.

"John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder."

Oh that's not too bad if you can get multiple firings in a session. I was assuming the whole kiln has to cycle up and down like with pottery

You made cloisonne sound approachable until I counted and it's got to be cooked 4 times.

Your mill project has been fun to follow. I knew a guy who made some upgrades to a CNC router he bought but nothing close to the precision and ambition of yours

There's always part of me that's surprised that enameling works at all given the difference in thermal expansion. Though the lower thermal expansion of glass would leave it in compression, so there's that.

I know with pottery finding a glaze chemistry that fits a clay and firing level is empirical or trial and error. Sounds like enameling is similar and the well known artists are guarding their knowledge.

Florida malaria outbreak still going, with local cases now at 7

Lots of cool stuff in that article

To go back to the slime mold, how does it decide?

We know it has memory. It can learn from experience. We know it does make all kinds of decisions if you give it various options of things it can do. The whole thing is a hydraulic computer. We injected little fluorescent beads into the thing. There are flows through the cytoplasm. And the cool thing is that if you have a fork like a “Y,” you see that it just shuts off one branch off, and the stream only goes the other way. It has selective control over each branch point—it’s a synapse, basically.

Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis.

When I say this thing “wants to do XYZ,” I’m not saying it can write poetry about its dreams. It doesn’t necessarily have that kind of second-order metacognition; it doesn’t know what it wants. But it still wants. [...]

I’m sure once we start looking, we’re going to find degrees of agency all over the place.

Oh man I was expecting something lighthearted from aiweirdness, but

What does this mean? Assuming they know of the existence of GPT detectors, a student who uses AI to write or reword their essay is LESS likely to be flagged as a cheater than a student who never used AI at all.