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add the more recent logs and pigs, half of #1

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---
title: Payload
date: 2013-04-21
techne: :done
episteme: :log
---
Let’s see…
I did a bunch of stuff I don’t properly understand enough yet to talk
about without making an ass of myself, and even though that hasn’t ever
stopped me before, I don’t wanna contribute too much to People Being
Wrong On The Internet if I can help it…
And all other projects won’t have anything meaningful to show off or
talk about for some time to come, and “I read these books; they don’t
suck” posts aren’t very interesting (unless I can at least say something
about them)…
And this situation isn’t gonna change anytime soon, and this is still
primarily a practice log (maybe we should call an ironic purpose a
“telol”?), so even though I have a bunch of drafts, I don’t wanna just
dump my `crazy.txt`[^crazy] here without at least occasionally
balancing it with `not_actually_crazy.txt`.
So, uh, what am I gonna talk about the next few months? Guess I’ll have
to become ultra-productive and cram in some more minor projects.
しい〜〜〜ん
Yeah ok, volume will probably just go down and I’ll try to mention [cool
shit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_trSIBCgF0) and minor projects
until stuff gets interesting again. (Lowered the road dial again for a
while.)
---
Hint: someone scanned Westergaard’s Introduction to Tonal Theory and I
hear it will also appear on the usual sites in a few days. Just fyi.
On a totally unrelated note, I’ve started reading Westergaard’s book and
I’m genuinely impressed. It looks like a proper textbook about a sane
theory with lots of examples and a clear, logical structure throughout.
Haven’t had much time to work on it yet, but it looks very promising.
---
Some drug updates.
- Modafinil: useless as a normal upper, mediocre as a sleep
substitute, great for “fuck deadline can’t afford to sleep fuck
fuck”. The effect during waking hours is not noticeably better than
caffeine for me. If it weren’t so expensive, I’d run a double-blind
test to compare side-effects and get a more precise idea, but so
it’s just not worth it. Will likely keep a small emergency supply on
hand, but otherwise I’ll stick to nicotine and caffeine.
- Nicotine: started to smoke cigarettes again. Not a lot (i.e.
\<40/month), and it’s not really about the nicotine either, which is
almost anti-addictive for me. Despite clear benefits and wanting to
use it regularly, I keep forgetting I have large supplies of
lozenges and go days (and sometimes weeks) without any for no good
reason, and even when I use them, it’s never more than
4mg/day.[^nicotine]
So why smoke? Because I want something destructive - a tiny,
controlled source of it, yes, but to deliberately do something of no
use - no, not enough! - to take an action fully aware that it brings
nothing but harm to myself, is to say, no, I cannot be satisfied; to
say to optimization itself, nothing you can do will ever make me
happy; this is my vote of discord, my dissatisfaction with order -
this one is for decay.
---
I made a [Twitter account for drunken
confessions](https://twitter.com/#!/drunkflax). If I can’t say them to
the person I mean them for, I can at least say them in general just to
have them said, to lower the barrier - a practice round instead of just
sadness. Maybe it’s gone tomorrow, maybe not. Don’t read them. <del>I made
it for you.</del> Take with a grain of salt, placed on the back of your hand
and a slice of lemon; count your shots.
---
I feel like many arguments could be more easily resolved if people more
routinely asked themselves the First Rule of Debugging, i.e. “What are
you trying to do with that?”.
I’ve failed to state that enough in the past (and I’ve added “state what
this is trying to accomplish” to my list of rules to observe in future
writing), so here’s an example for practice.
In Scott’s [wrestling with virtue
ethics](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/10/book-review-after-virtue-or-somebody-here-is-really-confused-and-i-just-hope-its-not-me/)
[^pad], I was reminded how I had always assumed (if not
explicitly, then implicitly in how I write) that my specific problems
with ethics generalize and then how I was somewhat upset how someone
could have the nerve to develop ideas that might work for their
problems, maybe, but not mine!, what sacrilege.
In particular, I have no clue what I want (I feel like I may have some
preferences in forced decisions (i.e. almost all of them), but that’s
far from wanting things for their own sake), so theories about “getting
what I want” are of no use to me (regardless of their validity), but I
know “the kind of person” I don’t want to be
(“[apophatic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology) virtue
ethics”, you say?), but at the same time (and for good reasons I won’t
elaborate on), I don’t trust my own ideas of what “good” is and that
many common heuristics - trust your instincts, use empathy, follow your
heart - are *horrible* advice for me because I’m at least potentially a
Bad Person(tm) and *I will fuck people over* if you’re so stupid to make
me run on instinct, so I don’t just need (meta-)ethics to resolve
conflicts for me, but to even provide (some of?) my values in the first
place.
So any theory that requires me to load it with my values first is
utterly useless to me because [it doesn’t solve any of my actual
problems](http://www.viruscomix.com/page535.html). For example, my
motivation for making locality a requirement for any meta-ethical theory
is that I don’t want to be held responsible - including by abstract
principles - for things I have no possible way of doing right. Or as
Kant is commonly (and uncharacteristically) summarized, “ought implies
can”. I don’t know what “the Good” is, in terms of a specific outcome or
kind of world. There are narratives that shape what I think of as a
“good world”, but these are clearly contingent and very non-mainstream
(currently, anyway[^pol]). A defining feature of any concept is
that there are some things it *isn’t*, some negative examples. But if
“the Good” is just whatever these narratives have led me to think of as
“Good”, then there is no way for me to be *wrong* about
it.[^wrong] The label “Good” is then just an arbitrary
placeholder. I don’t know if “Good” outside this usage has any meaning
either, but *if* so, I want to at least cover my ass. Thus, Moral
Realism That Doesn’t Do Anything.
Interestingly, I *don’t* seem to apply this same thinking to the past.
Even though Bad Shit happened[^close], I’m completely unwilling
to let it go and still consider Things I Literally Have No Longer Any
Causal Control Over[^mol] just as relevant and so a single
negative example can devastate me and *keep on* devastating
me.[^baum] I wonder if I should stop doing that…
[^crazy]:
Actual content of `~/drafts`, my `crazy.txt`:
- start of a manifesto “Against Compassion”
- “I didn’t choose to be a wolf”, a meditation on fursonae
- sketches about “could zombies have saved the Nazi war effort?”
until I got bored doing calculations (includes mostly worked-out
Nazi Zombie campaign setting, incl. sketch of a metaphysics to
make it reasonably coherent)
- a love poem to cheesecake
- “why everything sucks and will never ever get better”, a reading
of some of Luther’s more obscure writing (on hold until I figure
out if everything sucks and will never ever get better or not)
- an incomplete sketch of “Against Imagination”, which keeps on
metastasizing as I add more and more anger to it, but it never
really goes anywhere constructive and I wonder if I’m not just
rewriting the Futurist Manifesto anyway
- “I’m the worst person to talk about politics, but I’m drunk and
I have a pile of manifestos, try stoppin’ me”, an
interdisciplinary attempt of political exploration
- several sketches and attempts of a new critical method I call
Passive-Aggressive Deconstruction
I think it’s obvious why those drafts never go anywhere.
[^nicotine]:
I’m deliberately ignoring e-cigarettes even though they’re cheaper
because I don’t want to accidentally establish a “suck on
cigarettes” habit that might transfer to real cigarettes so I can
always maintain a behavioral separation between “nicotine so my
brain works” and “smoking for emotional reasons”, despite them
sharing some drug effects. The nicotine in cigarettes is still
welcome and I substitute accordingly, but it’s a bit of a pity I
have to smoke strong brands just to remind me of her smell.
<%= image("wishyouwerehere.jpg", "hot ashes for trees") %>
[^pad]:
In particular [this
post](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/virtue-ethics-not-practically-useful-either/)
how virtue ethics is not useful in practice, and this (highly
excerpted) exchange with Vladimir:
> [Vladimir:] If this abstract theory [e.g. utilitarianism] provides
> answers for the extreme and controversial cases, then it should
> provide answers for everyday common cases as well. But here we see
> that these abstract theories are of little use, often providing no
> useful answer or plainly absurd answers, and requiring tortured
> rationalizations and special pleading just to get them to clear
> the bar of ordinary common sense.
>
> […]
>
> If we actually do start from scratch in our study of ethics and
> make sure to stick to the reality of what human beings are, not to
> metaphysical pies in the sky and sophistries useful only for
> signaling and lawyering, we will end up — or at least have to
> start with — something resembling virtue ethics.
>
> [Scott:] Aside from the things I addressed in my new post, we seem
> to disagree a lot on how bad utilitarian and deontological ethics
> work. As far as I can tell they work about as well as Newtonian
> physics – they get the right result in the overwhelming majority
> of cases, but break down in certain weird edge cases where in fact
> they might still be salvageable.
was the thing that made me throw up my hands and say in a moment of
amused desperation, *surely* you can’t be asserting this! I don’t
have an issue with saying that virtue ethics isn’t really a *theory*
of anything but more a label of a kind of discourse, a way of
*doing* morality instead of thinking *about* morality, and that it
is, to use Skinner’s terminology, still mostly prescientific. Fair
enough.
But to say that utilitarianism (or even better, deontology! The
*simplest*, most straightforward example of deontological reasoning
- don’t deceive - is highly controversial and virtually *nobody*
agrees with it!) works most of the time is.. well, Scott is, to use
Moldbug’s amusing phrase, “[not a blithering
idiot](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html)”,
so I can’t just say, “clearly he just doesn’t know what he’s talking
about”. There must a disagreement not about results (because Scott
is neither ignorant nor in denial), but about *the problem*. With a
disparity this huge, we can’t be looking [at the same
thing](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/861).
One might be tempted to say, “this just proves that some people
think inherently like virtue ethicists and some like utilitarians”,
but that’s just throwing away all possibility of rational discourse
forever, and most importantly, *this isn’t even the case*. (Even if
this were the case, “get out of your weird bubble” would likely be a
more appropriate response, but I’m not convinced this even applies
to Scott, unlike say Kant.)
If I were more the person I want to be, I would now be able to write
an eloquent reply, but alas, the only answer I *am* capable of is a
stare of incredulity (which I hate) or an incoherent angry rant
(which I love). Wanting not to be abusive, I thus experimented with
alternatives and came up with Passive-Aggressive Deconstruction,
which is probably still trollish, but maybe not hostile. (Or at
least amusingly so.)
Essentially, and this is why I haven’t written more than sketches
yet because this is still a lot of work, I just wanted to highlight
by mere quotation how *Scott himself* uses virtue-ethical reasoning
frequently *on his own blog*, and how then, tumblr-style, I could
just add his comment pasted on a fitting `useless_utilitarian.jpg`
after each quote and ask, “Why don’t I see a calculation here?” or
“Why do you think this is a valid form of argument?”, so that after
a sufficiently large number of instances of this, it would at least
be more than an *assertion* of “I can’t believe you’re saying what I
think you’re saying, but I don’t see what else you possible could
mean to say”.
But eh, now that I’ve outlined the general approach, I can’t be
bothered to do it concretely. (\<3)
[^pol]:
I don’t know of any way to discuss these things without either
moving to a very different audience (which I have no interest in) or
attempting an act of bridging a moral divide that is akin to making
a lion speak. Regardless - and I don’t know if that is intentional
or not - I might eventually have to get there if I ever want to go
meta and discuss important figures in [Higher
Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_criticism)
directly and not just their ideas how to read the NT. But I’ve
failed to tell Lutherans that they don’t understand Luther, so I’m
not optimistic about that ever succeeding.
[^wrong]:
To be a bit more accurate, the problem is how the concept is learned
and it basically separates moral subjectivists from moral
relativists. In the subjectivist view, “Good” is the extension of
whatever collection of preferences I happen to hold, while moral
relativists conceive of some distributed concept shared by a
community, like a language.
So for example and by analogy, there is a wrong way to speak French
(even though there is no Standard Written Into The World Itself that
tells us a priori what French “is” and even though boundaries might
be fuzzy) and so it makes sense to say someone can learn French
(because we can provide positive and negative examples). But under
the subjectivist view, that is not the case because only *I* - or
rather, the preferences in my skull - define the concept. As such, I
can *teach* what “Good” means (i.e. *others* can be wrong about it),
but I can’t *learn* it because I already, by construction, embody
it. (This ethical egoism may, as a matter of fact, include the value
of “altruism”, of course - values aren’t justifications.)
[^close]:
Look, Internet, I’m sorry but we aren’t *that* close.
[^mol]:
Well yes, Molinists can change the past, but then they have to
negotiate with God and that doesn’t sound any easier, if you ask me…
[^baum]:
As Baumeister famously argues, “[bad is stronger than
good](http://www.csom.umn.edu/Assets/71516.pdf)”.

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---
title: Walpurgiskater
date: 2013-05-01
techne: :done
episteme: :log
---
> but it’s too late, my friend\
> too late\
> but never mind
>
> all my trials, lord\
> will soon be over
>
> – all my trials (excerpt)
As a simple safety precaution, and even though I don’t have a history of
escalating addictions[^addict], I’m set up a [Beeminder
goal](https://www.beeminder.com/muflax/goals/smoking) to limit my
cigarette use. I mean, the financial budget already keeps it at a
manageable level, but that’s what they all say, isn’t it?
Nonetheless, I did a simple cost comparisons[^patch] for a
certain (fairly representative) Rich European Nation with its
enlightened “heavily tax those who cost you less and who need the stuff
to self-regulate” drug policy:
- decent cigarettes: \~0.25 Euro / 1mg nicotine
- roll your own cigarettes: \~0.10 Euro / 1mg nicotine (all other
tobacco products are somewhere between those two)
- lozenges: \~0.06 Euro / 1mg nicotine (that’s for 4mg lozenges, which
are easy to split in half, but if you want to actually dose 1mg,
you’ll probably have to pay double)
- e-cigarette: well… ok, I’m confused by how much usable nicotine they
really contain, and what realistic costs are (including hardware),
but my best estimate is something like \~0.10 Euro /
1mg[^source] (especially as prices are expected to go up
thanks to upcoming regulations), which surprises me as I thought
they were a lot cheaper. Am I missing something?
I currently don’t have any reasonable way to circumvent those taxes
(Eastern European border, I miss ya), so it seems like I’m not actually
spending a whole lot of premium on cigarettes. Assuming a 4mg/day
maximum (which is a pretty hig upper bound of my current use), I’d have
to pay up to \~7 Eurons/month for the cognitive benefits through
lozenges (which also ignores that I skip days irregularly because I
forget about the stuff, which at least helps keep tolerance down).
If I add, say, 10 cigarettes/week (which is a similarly high long-term
estimate of my current use) and use lozenges otherwise for the same
4mg/day, I’d pay \~9 Eurons/months, not a lot more. (And I love tobacco
smoke and discolorations anyway, so this is a reasonable cost just for
the pleasant experience, but I’m weird that way. Always loved having
smoker friends for their smell, even though I only got interested in the
stuff itself a few years ago.) So once my current supplies run out,
that’s exactly what I intend to switch to.
But why stick with 4mg? Maybe that’s too much, maybe not enough? I need
a better way to quantify what benefits I get from nicotine (in terms of
cognitive enhancement, reduction of *ugh*, regulation of schizotypal
symptoms). So I thought about existing options to get data from:
- I can’t use sleep data because my sleep patterns are very irregular
and my Zeo data is basically worthless. Back when I tracked it
regularly for a few months, I virtually *never* dropped below a ZQ
of 90 and saw many anomalies (catastrophic night with a ZQ \> 120
etc.), and now Zeo’s dead anyway (pbut).
- Comparing “time spent on useful projects” is tricky because there’s
a lot of noise, but it might be workable if I do it for a
sufficiently long period of time and I’m tracking this anyway.
- Anki seems too noisy to evaluate. What would I even measure? Answer
time? Correctness percentage is (on average) held constant by the
scheduling algorithm and it’s tricky to control for difficulty.
None of those sound too promising, so I’ve looked into useful short
tests I can run once every day. I want the total test suite to be short
(\<10min) so I don’t get bored, so I’ll stick with these 3 tests for 2
minutes each:
1. [n-back](http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ) accuracy score
I remember vaguely from gwern-sensei’s FAQ that it’s currently
unknown if there’s a significant difference between single and dual
n-back, and because I’m lazy I’ll start with single n-back. I’ll add
sound when I get a [round tuit](http://blog.beeminder.com/tuit/).
2. Answer time on simple arithmetic problems (“3+2=?”)
This is [Seth Roberts](http://blog.sethroberts.net/)’ favorite. Many
data points per day, plausible mechanism, useful skill. What’s not
to like?
3. [Stroop task](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect) answer
time
There have been several studies that have shown that schizophrenics
have significantly increased Stroop latencies, so it seems like a
useful proxy test for schizotypy. The traditional positive/negative
symptom tests (besides applying to most people in a philosophy
department) are way too imprecise, so this will have to do.
I’ve [hacked together a quick
script](https://github.com/muflax/cogatrice) that takes care of the
assignments and tests, added a [simple Beeminder
goal](https://www.beeminder.com/muflax/goals/cogtest) to ensure daily
measurements and I’ll figure out how to analyze the data once I have
some. (It’ll take a bit for them to plateau anyway, so I can still work
out problems in the protocol as they come up.)
There’s of course still the issue of randomization and blinding.
E-cigarettes are relatively easy to blind, but everything else seems
hard (use herbal / low-nicotine tobacco that tastes similar?) to
impossible (find similar mint lozenges?). So I can’t properly control
for placebo, but I can still learn some information about dosage. Next
time I buy new lozenges, I’ll also buy weaker ones because they all look
and taste the same and so I can blind *strength*. Until then and in
addition, I can randomize *scheduling* - I simply randomly do the tests
first and then take the nicotine or the other way around. That still
provides a baseline to compare the intervention with. Lastly, I’ve also
re-instituted my detailed drug log (which I only needed to avoid some
nasty interactions, mostly with MAOIs, which I haven’t taken in some
time) so I can spot potential patterns.
Empiricism!
---
So it seems I’m getting back into statistics and how to read scientific
papers, and hey, I have some old notes but how much can I’ve really
forgotten? Let’s review some simple stuff. What was a p-value again,
Wiki-sama?
> In statistical significance testing the p-value is the probability of
> obtaining a test statistic at least as extreme as the one that was
> actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true. One
> often “rejects the null hypothesis” when the p-value is less than the
> predetermined significance level which is often 0.05 or 0.01,
> indicating that the observed result would be highly unlikely under the
> null hypothesis. Many common statistical tests, such as chi-squared
> tests or Student’s t-test, produce test statistics which can be
> interpreted using p-values.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
[^addict]:
I mean, look at that graph. If being very inconsistent in everything
I do is a superpower, drug use is probably the only area where it
pays off.
[^patch]:
Ignoring patches, which I found really hard to dose, and gum, which
everyone I know who tried to use it had issues with. I also find it
difficult to take absorption rates into account, but the “1mg”
number is my best guess of effective nicotine, taking the numbers on
cigarette boxes at face-value.
It’s also funny how the nicotine content for each product does *not*
generally affect it’s price much (if at all).
[^source]:
Raw nicotine content in the liquid isn’t informative as such because
it ignores the absorption rate (for which I couldn’t find a good
source), other components besides nicotine, and so on. I ultimately
went with the quantity of liquid former smokers typically end up
using, which seems like a more useful proxy. However, even there
good correlations are rarely present and estimates vary a lot. My
(not particularly informed) best guess, based on that one study with
self-medicating schizophrenics and various forums with smokers, is
that one medium-to-high-strength cartridge equals \~6-10 cigarettes.
I did find decent estimates for lozenges (and they fit my personal
experience), so those costs are more reliable.

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---
title: Powerdrills and Bonesaws
date: 2013-05-23
techne: :done
episteme: :log
---
Mostly just practice, which I report for beeminding purposes. Yay?
---
I’ve extended the cognitive tests with a simple questionnaire for some
daily variables and now also track daily mood split into four variables
(energy level, comfortableness, “everything makes sense”-ness, [body
load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_load)) on a scale of
1-5[^scale]. I don’t expect that to yield useful correlations
(with better than retrodictive powers), but it’s trivial to do, so
whatever.
Also, first result: apparently, the more tired I am, the *better* I get
at the Stroop test. Can’t rule out practice effects yet, of course, but
I think ‘m getting a better feel for “cognitive functions are down, I’m
not even bothering to process what this word says”, which makes the
Stroop test much easier. Might be a useful thing to notice in general.
---
I’ve done some work on the next iteration of my language tools (now
renamed to “mavothi”), might have some (unusable as-is unless you’re
muflax, but maybe interesting nonetheless) results soon.
I’ve also done a lot of work on steno, which I’ve now started to
actually practice. Actual practice, guys! I’m becoming functional.
---
I’ve transitioned some archives to
[git-annex](http://git-annex.branchable.com/). For my non-neckbearded
readers, git-annex is basically a system to track archives over multiple
locations (e.g. external drives, remote servers, different laptops) and
automate most of the hassle of having those archives in the first place.
It has a Dropbox-y assistant which I found really awkward to use and
which shredded my configs constantly while I tried to figure out how it
works, so I’m not using it (yet) and do everything via shell commands,
like a man. So my current setup looks like this:
1. There are multiple independent archives, currently `~/books`,
`~/games/install` (install files, mods etc. for vidya gaems)
`~/テレビ` (TV shows and movies) and `~/音` (podcasts, music, etc.),
which contain a lot of big media. I have complete daily
backups[^backups] of most of this stuff, but I’d like to a)
have more backups and b) be able to swap stuff out that I don’t use
much. I regularly re-watch [‘Allo
‘Allo!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Allo_%27Allo!), but there’s
no point in having it on my main machine all the
time[^waste]. Git-annex has this nice feature where you can
`drop` files from one repository and it replaces them with symlinks
so it looks like the file’s still there and you can move it around,
but when you try to access it, it’ll tell you what other repository
(which still has the file) you need to connect so it can get it
back.
2. I have a whole lot of external drives because I tend to update
hardware faster than it breaks, and never throw out old drives (plus
I have several sources who give me their old stuff too), so I’ve now
set them up as “trusted”[^trusted] repositories for the
archives and made sure all files have at least on external copy. I
update these archives whenever my main machine is full and I want to
drop files off it. That way, every file is always in at least two
places and can’t be lost due to drive failure or basic stupidity.
1. My two laptops (see above) used to just sync my whole home directory
via [unison](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), which is
really wasteful and regularly annoys me because their drives are
much smaller (and slower), and because unison isn’t too smart.
git-annex fixes a lot of these issues because now don’t have to copy
*everything*, but can still keep the directory structure synced.
2. I currently manually sync the laptops with a simple shell script
every time I need some data that’s not on the machine, but that
should eventually become (semi-)automatic too.
What I’d like to do later:
1. I’m currently syncing stuff on my phone through Dropbox (mostly
images and audio logs), but once the git-annex android client is a
bit more solid, I hope to use it there too so I don’t have to trust
Dropbox anymore.
2. Get the git-annex assistant running so I don’t have to manually add
and sync files. That’s still rare enough that it doesn’t bother me
much, but allegedly this should already be possible. It just
constantly broke on my setup or was horribly slow, for some reason.
---
A minor belief update.
Back in December[^oldlogs], I wrote:
> If one were to take a fictionalist approach to the [New Testament],
> that is to assume that, excluding maybe a few historical allusions
> here and there, they are works of *fiction* […], then it follows that
> the original scripture is forever lost to us. We may be able to
> reconstruct roughly back to Marcion’s work around 130AD, but no
> further. The evidence has simply been lost to time. One may speculate,
> as RMP and others frequently do, and all kinds of plausible
> explanations might be found, but closure is impossible.
>
> […]
>
> And so I realized, I needed not a new proclamation of the message, but
> an entirely different work, one capable of reflecting the true author
> of confusion. I considered merging all traditions into one gospel, or
> using elaborate annotation (even footnotes to footnotes), but then I
> thought, ideally the text would be a dialog between all those strands,
> would give the Marcionite, the Simonian and the Gnostic their first
> fair hearing, and so we really need more gospels written from these
> perspectives, including the Devil’s own version that they read down in
> Hell, but even that would not be sufficient, not even to replicate the
> delightful state of interwoven connections I see in the text, for
> nothing short of all of the tradition would be capable of representing
> the tradition.
>
> […]
>
> But can the text be made *simpler*, without breaking it? After all,
> the canonical NT is already reduced, lacking several gospels, epistles
> and so on. Yet, it seems to me that these reductions don’t necessarily
> simplify the *content* of the text. All ideas are still present, they
> just aren’t as close to the surface. And this does not have to
> interfere with the interpretation of scripture. After all, the 19th
> century Dutch and German radicals managed to reconstruct many aspects
> before most of these alternative text had been found! They predicted
> the Gnostic texts in great detail and were entirely right.
I still expected that there wasn’t a single source of origin (or linear
sequence of origins) for the core NT, that like modern mediums, the
authors were telling stories of their own invention with no real
connections between them, until decades (and sometimes, centuries) later
various churches would try to integrate them into one tradition (with
the well-known result that for every assertion in the NT, there is also
a counter-assertion that contradicts it). This would make a successful
reconstruction essentially impossible because there simple isn’t a
coherent shared thread.
I no longer think that’s necessarily true. I’m not sure that there *is*
a single source of origin (and if so, that it is knowable) either, but
due to a lot of recent reading I’ve done, particularly on the Gospel of
John and its possible (more-or-less) Marcionite origin, there now is a
budding live hypothesis in my head that would make sense of all the
texts and their origin, that answers virtually all important questions
about the NT, and that postulates just such a single origin (of Simon
-\> Marcionite hermeneutics -\> Catholic hijacking). Funnily enough,
that is still in line with my judgment that whatever scripture may have
existed before Marcion is lost to us; I just didn’t expect Marcionites
to be *that* influential for our canon.
I will discuss all of that in detail in due time, but I’m only about 20%
done with all the necessary skills I’ll have to learn (including several
languages) and books I’ll have to read (thankfully all in languages I
know), so this is obviously speculative play still, but the mere
*possibility* of a such a hypothesis and the fact that it can be
directly verified with the evidence we do have, is dazzling.
There are two vectors that I still find deeply puzzling and possibly
beyond our reach - where did the Buddhists get their ideas from, and
what’s up with Simon?
Christian Lindtner claims (and unfortunately I don’t have the skills yet
to even fully comprehend his theory) that the core NT texts are based on
Buddhist sources (which Christian scribes could easily have had access
to thanks to Ashoka), but then we have to trace the underlying ideas
back to India, and there we will likely lose them. Recent research makes
me increasingly skeptical that *any* of the Jewish texts meaningfully
predates the Hellenistic Period (and many not even Christianity!). The
case for Greek priority of the Pentateuch (and a Hebrew translation
second!) seems stronger every year, and even if we “merely” have to
declare pre-Septuagint developments as forever unknowable, that should
equally make us skeptical of Buddhist stories before, say, the
Visuddhimagga.
It would be much easier for my ideas if instead Buddhism took at least
its mythological narratives *from* Christianity (and then historicized
them way in the past), but that’s not a good criterion for truth. :) And
if it is the other way around (which is certainly plausible), then we
have to explain, independently, how the Buddhists got started. The
connection still deeply confuses me, and I follow Lindtner’s suggestion
that I’ll have to learn Sanskrit to adequately understand this
eventually.
The other origin, Simon, is equally mysterious because we simply don’t
have many crucial sources anymore. RMP makes a decent case that at least
his Great Proclamation has been more-or-less completely preserved, but
much of it reads like typical Gnostic gibberish. I feel increasingly
comfortable with various Marcionite writings and their interpretation,
but what’s the deal with Simon? I currently have no idea.
I feel sorry for anyone who wants to start a Post-Simonian Church.
Luckily, I’m merely trying to start the Post-Marcionite one, and that
seems very much doable. Marcion, Appeles, Valentinus, Basilides and
others will be slandered no longer, and one face of “Paul” will be
reconstructed once again. But Simon? Who knows. We might have to fall
back on channeling after all.
Luther, in his [Commentary on
Genesis](http://archive.org/stream/LutherOnTheCreationACriticalAndDevotionalCommentaryOnGenesis1-3/LutherGenesis1-3#page/n17/mode/1up),
writes:
> Therefore it is far the safest not to be too curious and inquiring in
> these subjects [i.e. hermeneutics], because they are placed above our
> human capacity. For how can we understand that order which God himself
> establishes and approves? Yes, reason must here be put to shame, for
> what is order in the eyes of God we judge to be confusion of order.
> Thus the stars seem to us to be arranged thoughtlessly in wild
> disorder in that the bright ones are scattered among those more
> obscure, and the lesser among the greater. Who would judge this to be
> order? And yet it is the most perfect harmony, so constituted by the
> all-wise mind itself. In like manner we judge other matters. It seems
> confusing that our Elbe and all rivers flow to the sea in an irregular
> winding course. Such disorder there seems to be also among trees, yes,
> between man and wife, where it appears there is no order. But all this
> only proves that God is a God of order and that his judgment as to
> order is quite different than ours.
We might find ourselves one day, discovering Eris legible all along, in
the setup for Creation’s final pun…
[^scale]:
Meaning of the scale for the variables, with 2-4 as the typical
range:
- energy level:
1. “can’t get up”
2. “ugh”
3. “functional”
4. “movement is light, doing stuff is easy”
5. “mania”
- comfortableness:
1. “paranoia”
2. “anxiety”
3. “people are nice”
4. “feelings are awesome”
5. “[Overly Attached
Girlfriend](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend)”
- “everything makes sense”-ness:
1. “nihilism”
2. “knowing stuff is too hard”
3. “the world makes sense”
4. “everything according to plan”
5. “[horse\_ebooks](https://twitter.com/Horse_ebooks/status/326479048945594368)”
- body load:
1. “Nurgle”
2. “nausea”
3. “some stomach cramps”
4. “Ibuprofen”
5. “dissociation”
[^backups]:
I use a [custom rsync
script](https://github.com/muflax/scripts/blob/master/rbs) to copy
everything to a RAID-mirrored backup drive. Daily backups go 1 week
back, plus there’s an additional monthly version for the last 3
months. I used to have significantly more past versions (monthly
backups back to 2010, 2 weeks of daily backups). The main idea was
that I wanted to have a safeguard against deleting a file and then,
a week later, noticing I actually still wanted it (which happened
way too often). Nowadays, I have most of these things in git
repositories and spread over multiple locations, so restoring
arbitrary past versions is no problem, and I’m far less
trigger-happy with deletions in general. The old backups used up a
lot of space, so I reduced my backup horizon to 1 week (daily) / 3
months (monthly), although I still have one offsite drive with all
the old versions (because I only update that every few months).
I might eventually replace some of that with git-annex too, or
something like it, but I’m nowhere near comfortable enough with it
to trust it with my core backups.
[^waste]:
Unfortunately, the `.git` directory itself tends to use up quite a
bit of space. For example, my `~/books` directory, which has
basically all my read-only documents in it, is \~70GB large and has
\~35k files. The `.git` right after adding the files was already
\~400M (after doing a `git gc`). However, size tends to depend
almost exclusively on the number of files, so I did some
restructuring and packed some stuff up, and reduced my number of
files to \~8k, and now got only \~160M of `.git` and adding new
files is reasonably fast (\<20 seconds on the slowest machine). (And
to be fair, part of that is git’s fault, not git-annex’.)
So my heuristic for now is that git-annex adds \~1% overhead of the
total archive size to every repository, which is still worth it most
of the time (because you can distribute stuff and space is
reasonably cheap), but it sucks a little.
[^trusted]:
git-annex has 4 trust levels:
- trusted: files are assumed unchanged since the last time we saw
the repository
- semitrusted: files count towards required redundancy, but we
have to check first if they’re still there
- untrusted: location is tracked, but we never expect data to
still exist
- dead: data is gone
“trusted” makes sense for backup drives that never change on their
own and are only updated in one direction, “semitrusted” is the
level for my different machines that might have independent changes
that need to be merged, and “untrusted” covers drives that are known
to be failing and aren’t dead yet.
[^oldlogs]:
Old logs are currently unavailable due to some restructuring. Might
take some days/weeks/lives.

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---
title: Bel-Marduk
date: 2013-06-04
techne: :done
episteme: :log
---
(Wait what? words? I need to write about stuff we did? *Again*? Didn’t I
just… oh well. Fetch me the logs, I’ll docum.. wait, it says there I
mostly did Japanese grammar practice, which I can’t meaningfully talk
about yet, loads of boring-to-talk-about [deliberate
practice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_%28learning_method%29#Deliberate_practice),
and work, which I bet I’m not even allowed to talk about because we
pretend we’re relevant to the industry? Ok, so can I post a manifesto
then? I have a draft and need to get some of this anger out of… no? What
about metaphys.. also no?
Listen, Mister. I know you had the best of intentions with this “write
about stuff you did because you like explaining stuff, which helps you
actually do stuff”, but we have some better tools now, if you haven’t
noticed, and while this works well for conceptual stuff, most skills are
actually pretty hard to talk about in a meaningful way and learning them
doesn’t really leave neat piles of notes that can be trivially converted
into posts, so now you’re making me do *extra* work here. Can’t we go
back to “deconstruct texts” and stuff? That’s at least
fun.[^back]
Yes I know the rules, I *wrote* them, but even Kant would agree that
some rules can be broken somet.. ok yes he wouldn’t, but you know what I
mean! Look, your paranoia isn’t helping me either! You’re so worried
about distant effects of your actions, you’re not letting me talk about
topics before you’re sure they’re fully under your control, but you’re
still making me adhere to rules that were written under the assumptions
that just documenting whatever happens is way awesome, so don’t you see
the problem here? A lesson? What lesson could you possibly try to teach
me here?
“Sources of validation”?
I see. Yeah that’s really clever of you. So if I don’t break the rule,
I’ll have to find *something* to write about even though I don’t have
anything ready yet. Yeah, I get how this extra work is great for your
complicated plans. But if I just break it? What th.. whoa, that’s a big
graph. That’s *all* conn.. even th.. whoa. Sheesh man, you’re quite the
magician, you know that? Yes I know I joked about how I’m doing acausal
magic when I wrote the rules. I didn’t expect you *meant* that bit! So
if I don’t follow the rules, all.. *that*.. collapses? Well, that’s a
pretty [double bind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind) you set
up there. Listen,
[Watzlawick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Watzlawick)’s books
weren’t *instructions* how to mess people up. I don’t care that it
works! Don’t
[melon](http://www.koanicsoul.com/blog/2012/06/27/how-to-manifest-whatever-you-want/)
me! There are nicer ways to get what you want. I hate when you cloud
your incentives with magic talk and convoluted narratives. What do you
mean that’s the point?
So it’s actually a triple bind? For all three possible modes of response
- [loser, clueless,
sociopath](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/) - you’ve
set up a demand that transparently subverts it, and is in conflict with
the other two modes. The loser narrative is unbelievable because I can
see the strings, the clueless reward is nonsense because I see you
printing that toy money, the sociopath power doesn’t work because I’m
afraid what using it will do to me. If I use any option anyway, you
still win, and if I transcend their limitations, you also win.
You’re quite the evil fuck, you know that?
…
…so what now?)
---
What’s the saying? If you don’t know what to do, go meta. So I’ll just
document one of my recent Beeminding changes.
Starting on 2013-02-28, I redesigned several things: I’ve started to
switch from open-ended time-based goals to finite task-based goals,
broken my big “do useful stuff” goal into smaller sub-goals, and begun
to add percentile feedback.
I explained some of the goal organization [over on
Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/beeminder/comments/1e2duf/muflaxs_beeminder/c9wcevw),
relevant quote:
> I used to just track “productive hours / day” so I don’t sit on my ass
> too much, but I started to substitute more fun projects for everything
> else, so I recently broke that up into various independent groups of
> goals: “science”, “guitar”, “code”, “polyglottery” and “job” (ugh). I
> still track the total too, but that’s more of a nuclear option (with
> the big 90\$ pledge) and I haven’t settled on a good daily goal yet.
> If I’m too harsh on any one goal, it’s more likely I just decide it’s
> not worth it and fail even though I still have plenty of time to meet
> it.
I’ve toned down some of the time-based goals because I found “do stuff
for 20 minutes” not very motivating. There’s no sense of progress and “4
hours” looks so large, I often didn’t even try to tackle it even when I
had plenty of time left. Instead, I’ve begun to convert everything into
a TODO list using org-mode. So for example, I’ve just turned every
chapter / unit of a textbook into one todo item, which feels much more
actionable and is done. (Also wrote [a simple
script](https://github.com/muflax/scripts/blob/master/beeminder/beeminder_org_todo.rb)
that updates Beeminder goals accordingly.[^org])
So far this seems to be more productive, but I’ve not been doing it for
very long. I tried a simple Bayesian comparison of a before/after
dataset, mostly to figure out how R work. I just wanted to use
[BEST](http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/BEST/), but the normality of
“useful hours/day” turned out very low, meaning the data doesn’t seem to
fit a normal distribution very well. After looking at a basic histogram:
<%= image("fume_histogram.png", "Fume Histogram") %>
I saw why. While this looks reasonably Poisson-y, I still don’t
understand the underlying assumptions and methods very well, so even
though I could hack together a simple version of “I put numbers into
this magic box and look at these funny graphs it gave me!”, that
wouldn’t be particularly useful.
However, I just plugged my “total useful hours / day” into a simple
Beeminder “weight gain” graph (so that I can track (and then raise) my
fluctuating average), and you can still see two improvements (the first
time I broke stuff down at the end of March, and the second slope when I
transitioned to tasks):
<%= image("fumeavg_graph.png", "Fume Average Graph") %>
(Note that this is zoomed in and cuts off some \>6h outliers. The points
are “total useful time” for each day as logged with my time-tracking
tool, the thin line is a (slightly lagging) average.)
I’m also trying to use this graph and a simple percentile number in
[fume](https://github.com/muflax/fume) to implement [Seth’s percentile
feedback](http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/05/01/percentile-feedback-and-productivity/),
so instead of just seeing “I did 1.2 hours of useful stuff today”, I
also see how good that is compared to the last week.
I’m not sure yet if it actually works in terms of increasing my
productive time (not enough data), but at least it’s more motivating and
I’ve made significant progress on several projects due to the tiny todos
that feel more like “one more turn” instead of “fix ALL the things!”.
---
I got annoyed with Dropbox mangling my data and so thought, hey my
`~/spoiler` directory (i.e. all my notes, todo lists and drafts) is
already a (huge) git repository with auto-commit, so I could just use
some git solution to sync that between machines. Then all the stuff in
Dropbox is either read-only (public shares) or written by only one
machine ever (phone -\> desktop) and I won’t have sync issues anymore.
Shouldn’t be hard, right?
What I considered:
1. Use git-annex. Long-term that’s fine, but currently the assistant
ignores the `.gitignore` (wtf?!) and I’m beginning to develop a
deep-seated hatred against all Haskell
programmers.[^haskell]
2. Sparkleshare is, quote, “an Open Source collaboration and sharing
tool that is designed to keep things simple and to stay out of your
way”. It’s also written in C\#. Good joke. Is funny. I laugh.
3. dvcs-autosync is similar, but “takes a more minimalistic approach”.
Which includes no documentation, limited directory awareness and,
best of all, *requires a central repository*. It has *“distributed”
in its fucking name*. Who’d be so dement.. oh, guy uses Arch Linux.
I’m now convinced every Archer is clinically insane.[^arch]
So there isn’t any good tool yet. Well, I could turn one of those
(probably dvcs-autosync) into something usable, but ain’t nobody got
time for that. So it’s back to my cronjob’d commit-and-pull-everything
solution until git-annex’ assistant stops sucking. (Nonetheless, I still
put “use dvcs-autosync to auto-commit based on inotify and insta-push
via git hook” on my todo, in case I *do* got time for that.)
Sigh.
---
You know what’s really annoying? Hair feedback time.
So I wanna do this totally awesome undercut thingie[^hipster],
but it will take me months, if not a full year until some parts have
grown enough that I can pull it off, and until then I can’t do
*shit*.[^drunk] I just practice a bit by doing regular
maintenance, but how am I supposed to level up my self-sustaining
fabulousness if I can make maybe 1-2 big decisions *per year* and
mistakes might require rollbacks so large, you gonna have to wait months
just to *repeat* them?
On the plus side, while I was going through
[http://fuckyeahundercuts.tumblr.com](http://fuckyeahundercuts.tumblr.com),
I felt - for the first time in my life - a sense of fear of being
outdated, that by the time this “just long enough to poke me in the eye”
mess has grown into something that can unambiguously blow in the wind
and has enough surface area for a dozen Hello Kitty hair bows, that by
then fashion will have moved on and I’ll look so wannabe 90’s, I might
as well buy a fedora.
Then I remember no one cares and I go back to Pinterest.
---
A mini-review of the newest [Crusader Kings
II](http://www.crusaderkings.com/) DLC, [The Old
Gods](http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/crusader-kings-ii-the-old-gods).
It adds a new start in 867, the year Rurik decided that Russian brides
are just the best and he’s gonna grab himself some in
Novgorod[^rape], and more importantly, before the spread of
Christianity into the East. I’ve always wanted to play before the
*Ostsiedlung*, so I just jumped right into Lusatia and decided that
minority status isn’t good enough for us
[Sorbs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs), we’re gonna carve
ourselves a kingdom in the midst of Vikings, Poles, invading nomads, and
worst of all, Bavarians.
The new raid mechanics are a beautiful addition. At first, I was just
assembling little hunting parties from time to time because I thought
that it was my duty as a Pagan to pillage, but by picking vulnerable
Christian provinces too busy with bigger assholes than me, I had quickly
transformed my fiscal policy into “whatever the Christians can’t
defend”. Greater Poland acting up because it thinks it should own
Silesia? Better “borrow” some money from the cities to the south.
Vikings landed again? Let’s make it Nürnberg’s problem and buy some
mercenaries with their gold. Once I realized I can finance the majority
of my armies with ransom money, I couldn’t help but start blasting Death
Metal and cheer the burning of churches. The Christians might worship a
pathetic god, but at least their coffers come back from the dead year
after year, ready for another harvest.
The fascinating thing is how this high lasted for some time until some
even bigger Pagan decided I would make a nice addition to their
ever-growing list of vassals, and I realized I ain’t got no Divine Right
of Kings, I just got a big axe, and after the last succession crisis of
6 sons (did I mention those concubines?), I was exhausted and without
friends, and maybe all those saints I gladly turned into martyrs
might’ve been on to something and I should’ve taken up the Axe of the
Apostles instead. But even though the March of Progress might be against
me, and even though stability and order win in the long run and I got
neither, at least for a few decades I was feared by all and when death
inevitably comes, I won’t have any regrets.
My sons, though, are fucked.
<%= image("yolo.jpg", "#yolo") %>
[^back]:
But seriously, I don’t always like to shoe-horn fragments, cool
links and “omg they didn’t just write that” parts into logs. I know
people use their FB or G+ for that, but I don’t like either site
(because at least one of them is probably run by actual soul-eating
vampires).
I wonder if I should start a tumblr. While I don’t have angry
opinions about gender yet, I am confused about my personal identity,
sexuality, hair style and species. I would like to regularly reblog
[sassy
pugs](https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/390eb27ac775f1db1a416ca9172c28aa/tumblr_mnqtmuomAa1r8hf8lo1_400.gif)
and summarize complex arguments with a reaction.gif, but I’m not
sure if I’m ready to become a 15-year-old girl full-time.
There needs to be a place that is kinda in-between FB and tumblr. A
fumblr, if you will.
[^org]:
Beeminder has native Trello integration, which is probably a good
alternative if you’re not already familiar with org-mode. Still,
Trello doesn’t have nested items and can’t be used offline, so
that’s somewhat annoying.
[^haskell]:
Seriously, Haskell has a worse dependency hell than the ARM code I
maintain *which still uses gcc 2.95*. Oh, I need to update a minor
library from `x.y.3` to `x.y.4`? *Every single Haskell program ever*
on my machine is now broken. I hate academics.
[^arch]:
Sometimes I feel like ranting about Arch, but then I remember
*pacman doesn’t even have versioned packages* and I don’t think any
more needs to be said about it. At least the
[suckless](http://suckless.org/) guys make great trolls and
occasionally write cool projects. Arch just seems to rot the mind
with cargo cult minimalism.
[^hipster]:
Look, I have strong opinions about the metaphysics and epistemology
of 19th century Dutch theologians. It’s pretty much mandatory that I
either look like Skrillex or an 80’s bum. Which isn’t mutually
exclusive, fortunately.
[^drunk]:
I expect to get drunk sometime this week, do it anyway, freak out,
complain on Twitter, then love my decisiveness and use the
experience as yet another guilt token later, admonishing myself why
I can’t be as awesome as I used to be. That’s how I usually get
stuff done I have issues about.
[^rape]:
As [mrout on
Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/CrusaderKings/comments/1f9519/the_concubine_system_is_awesome/ca7zp8l)
said, “Hey Japan! This is how you do a rape game without being weird
about it.”.

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---
title: Hamiltonian
date: 2013-08-21
techne: :done
episteme: :log
---
<%= youtube("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI2GauQ1eiU") %>
Hey, internet! So a lot of stuff’s been happening. As I alluded to in
some off-hand comments here and there, I’ve been busy transitioning into
adulthood, or whatever passes as that for me anyway. (I’ve internally
just begun to call it Chapter 1, and everything before now Prologue,
because I’m stupid like that.[^stupid])
This process is still ongoing, but instead of waiting for another 2
months or so and then recapping, I thought I could just get back to
writing now, while stuff’s still happening. Crazy idea, I know!
I am, in a certain sense, done with my CS degree, and as you can tell by
that weaselly phrase, I mean that I’ve dropped out instead of continuing
that torturous phase of my past for yet another year. The only real
reason I even started the degree was because I didn’t have any other
idea what else to do, and was using it to cheaply buy time. That worked
out reasonably well - in total, I got half a decade out of it, and grew
enough in the process (and met the right people, and ideas) that I now
think it was absolutely the right decision. Maybe there would’ve been
better alternatives (if so, I still don’t know what they would’ve been,
beyond a “don’t take so long to stop being lame” reminder that’s
probably only applicable with hindsight), but regardless, well done,
past-me, It wasn’t fancy or heroic, but it worked just fine.
Still, it took me probably a good year to actually make the decision to
drop out after I knew I wasn’t gonna continue this path and had begun to
see an alternative. Sometimes more legible options appear stronger just
because they are legible. A degree is of fairly straightforward value -
you can easily look up income statistics and job requirements, compare
it to the time investment of college, there ya go - and any part that
isn’t easy to quantify gets thrown out of the evaluation. Like for
example, despising virtually all options it opens up, not having much
use for it on the paths I *do* like, and continuing now that I have
actually found said real options would just be a waste of time.
You are now allowed to shun me based on my lack of academic credentials.
I don’t mind - destroying academia is on my todo list, and regular
reminders why it has to go probably help.
---
So did I mention I actually [started a tumblr](http://muflax.tumblr.com)
for random snippets and stuff? I’m still not sure if I’m gonna use it or
anything, but nice pictures keep popping up, and maybe I end up writing
a few short thingies over there. So far I’ve mostly been reblogging
[Homestuck](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6) ships.
Like I said over there, I’d like to eventually talk more coherently (and
not just meta, but also directly) about ships, and art, and related
things (, and the Oxford Comma), but I’m still not quite feeling it, so
maybe it’s just not the right time, or I don’t have enough interesting
things to say, or whatever. We’ll see. Anyway, it exists now.
Look, a pug!
---
So instead of being a productive member of society, I was mostly busy
with <del>building additional pylons</del> figuring out how to money, keeping
Mother Bureaucracy updated and working on moving in together with my
[moirail](http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Quadrants)
[^moirail][^otp][^language][^footnotes]
somewhere in the UK, which will happen in about 2 months when my
contract at the university runs out and I can leave the country.
(This might be a good opportunity to point out how
[Homestuck](http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6) has one of the saner
models of romance and gender, and that this is one of countless benefits
trolls bring to any story they touch.[^trolls] It also
highlights by analogy some silliness in the conventional human model by
showing similar silliness in the troll model. While some trolls insist
that *ideal* relationships divide nicely into the Four Quadrants, it’s
clear that in most cases this isn’t the case and it’s much fuzzier, even
though the quadrants still represent some important components, so wiser
trolls would realize that and take a more reasonable stance and oppose a
system that tries to enforce restrictive norms (which, for all we know,
they *do* - troll society and history is… complicated, as it should be).
But in contrast to that, trolls *already* have a much better position on
gender than the humans, who do the same essentialist “two ideal
categories” crap trolls do with the quadrants.
So there.)
On a completely unrelated note, I just want to note how weird it is that
“yay I’m happy” posts can cause some seriously bad side-effects, and
that I remember being personally pissed off by them in the past,
thinking something along the lines of, “well good for YOU that you’re
happy, I’m still a lonely mess”, and so even though saying (and feeling)
these things is very important, I still feel uncomfortable talking about
it, and so will abstain from any more details for now. Compassionate
community norms are *hard*, and I wanna at least think about them some
more.[^sharing]
Regardless, actually moving (especially to a different country) means I
had to adapt some of my setups.
I won’t be able to bring my guitar with me for now, but might be able to
fly it over next year or so. I’m kinda glad I opted for gear that is
fairly mobile, so transport should be fairly easy once I don’t also have
to bring all my *other* stuff with me. I’m still committed to the frugal
ideal that everything you own should comfortably fit into one car at
most (or you end up limiting your freedom too much), so it’s mostly the
amp that’s causing trouble (and it’s still primarily monetary concerns
that I didn’t pick an even smaller one, which oddly enough cost *more*;
if things go as they usually do, I’ll eventually just build my own).
I’ve also gotten rid of my old PC setup. I used to have one
Frankensteinian desktop machine that I cheaply turned into a decent-ish
gaming rig, but I’ve long intended to retire it. I also had two old-ish
laptops, and loads of small drives for backups and stuff. The desktop
was kinda the central machine and everything else synced with it. I now
switched to one fancy 13-inch MacBook (still running Gentoo, after some
headaches), kept my
[keyboard](http://www.diatec.co.jp/en/det.php?prod_c=763) and mouse for
work that requires them, and put the two large 1.5TB drives from my
desktop (which mirror each other) into a portable NAS. My total space
capacity went down a bit that way, and I lost the ability to play some
high-end games (for now), but meh. (I still kept the old netbook for
some additional mobility though, but it’s semi-retired.)
That simplifies my synchronization and backup needs somewhat. All
small-ish things are automatically copied to various online places. Each
laptop does a daily backup to the NAS, which also stores most of the big
media via git-annex. The NAS runs a custom Debian, so it’s also a server
for all kinds of minor things, including Nethack. Every time I get my
hands on any other drive I copy as much data onto it as I can fit
(because why not; I just put my old drives in a box at my parents’ - no
reason to throw them out), but that’s now gonna be a maybe-once-a-year
event. (Also, git-annex on an SSD is finally fast enough to be fully
usable.)
I was afraid that losing my two big monitors would hurt the most, but
because I spend most of my time in a text editor or browser anyway, it’s
actually not a big deal. Workspaces work just as well as additional
monitors, and 13 inches is plenty. The only thing that’s a pain is if I
still had to use Eclipse for Java work, but screw that - I’m finally in
pure Ruby and Haskell nirvana. (I wouldn’t *reject* more monitors if I
had them available, but I’m not gonna try to carry any around with me
either.) And finally, not having a “central” machine I can’t move means
I can now easily snuggle up next to someone and still code, regardless
where said person happens to be. That’s *so* much more important than
screen size.
I still feel kinda sentimental about a “cabin in the woods” setup with
lots of ancient hardware that runs some custom setup where you wrote
half the tools (as I used to run for the last few years, and would like
to have again some time), so having just one main machine (and one
server-in-a-box) is kinda weird.
Guess I’m a nomad now.
---
Hahaha, oh man. Do you guys remember how over a year ago, I made a List
Of All My Problems? It was like 260 items long and I thought, yeah,
that’s probably *it* - some issues might’ve been vague, sure, and others
irrelevant, but I didn’t think I’d have forgotten anything important.
Who doesn’t know what their Main Issues are, right?
I recently looked at this list again and it’s *ridiculous*. It’s not
just incredibly petty sometimes, many things that have deeply bothered
me for years and are reason enough to plunge me into suicidality
whenever they seem unfixable aren’t even on there!
It’s liberating when radical agnosticism shifts from not knowing most
answers to not even being sure about the questions. If I don’t even know
what my real problems are, how can I possibly be upset about them?
(Also basically everything important on that list has been fixed by
now.)
---
So what’s next?
Step 1, the prototype: teach a complex skill and make it no longer hard.
After considering various options in detail[^options], we’ve
decided to start with German for English speakers. Because we’re still
developing the courses and improving our teaching skills (well, learning
from scratch based on ancient scrolls, really), we’re gonna spend a few
months solely on that and in-person testing, and then Disturb The Peace.
So if you wanna learn German For Reals Without All The Tedium And Crap
(or just wanna meet up with me and talk whatever (I’m totes sociable now
(when I’m not a paranoid ball of anxiety (but I now have a superweapon
against that (it’s not nested parentheses (just in case you
wondered)))))), and you’re somewhere in the UK, just leave a comment or
[contact me](/contact/) in any way you want, and I’ll put you on The
List and try to make stuff happen as soon as I’m able. (Once the thing
has been sufficiently tested, there will be an automated, and more
importantly, online version, of course. Can’t change the world with just
one meager town and face-to-face interaction, but direct feedback makes
early development so much easier, so yeah.)
(Step 2-10 are left unmentioned to maintain the Unspoken Plan Guarantee.
Things will become clearer eventually.)
---
Regardless, that means the next few months are completely filled up by
logistics, development and being amazed how I can continue to fall even
more in love every day. Some of that might eventually get better, some
might not, but I don’t expect too much writing to happen for a while,
unless I find a way to harvest the power of smooching to produce some
wicked posts. (I’ve also lost parts of my writing urges for various
reasons[^reasons], some likely permanently so, but these things
come and go. I’ve had quiet years and hypergraphic years before.)
In terms of kinda-planned drafts, I’ve begun to write down my way too
elaborate Jesus RPG campaign. I’ve given up on ever running it and just
want it out of my head. I’m about 4k words in, might actually finish the
thing soon enough, maybe start posting it in small-ish installments once
I’ve sketched out the whole post structure.
So overall, I think it’s a good idea to just declare Mission
Accomplished for the daily logs. I’ve done my first crazy miracle and
I’m busy working on the next. This site is now officially “whenever,
whatever”, as long as its kinda coherent. The rest goes to the tumblr.
…
Man, [being an adult](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ) is
*awesome*.
[^stupid]:
This is stupid for several reasons:
- it smushes everything before now into one Prologue, when really
there are multiple clear “everything changed forever” events
during that time (e.g. first anime, first time taking Ayahuasca,
first website (on a shittier version of Geocities, no less)) and
there’s no overarching unified progression during the whole
thing (like, Batman loses his parents in his prologue - what one
critical thing happened to me, exactly?)
- it places great emotional importance on events that haven’t even
unfolded yet, like I have secret insights into God’s Narrative
or sumthin’
- it uses linear narratives, not
[shandified](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0) ones
(who’s to say I won’t *return* to Chapter 1 at some later
point?)
- it implicitly assumes one arc has one theme, or at most several
exactly parallel ones; in other words, whatever Chapter 1 is
about *ends* with Chapter 1, and if some other stuff happens
during that time, it either has to end there too, or it must
just not be what my life is really about
- it strongly suggest there must chapters after it, thus
undermining my ability to Fix Everything Forever Like I’m Made
Out Of Pure Fixeverythingium
- and seriously, “1”? you can’t even name it something cool, like
The One With The Robot Snake?
[^moirail]:
Don’t know what a moirail is? [Read the
link](http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/Quadrants). While the
concept strongly overlaps with “bros” and similar things, these tend
to not get the romantic component of it, or imply weird ideas like
how this kind of relationship is inherently asexual (fuck no),
partially I suspect because just mainstream romance/sexuality
discourse is retarded, so I’m declaring a Special Snowflake
Exception for “moirail”, as it seems easier to repair these
misconceptions in a troll-originated concept, than to get [bros to
finally suck
cock](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeIAmA/comments/1j3uo9/explain_the_term_bromance_like_you_are_a_deeply/)
and not feel guilty about it.
Incidentally, the pronunciation of “moirail” is delightfully trolly.
Personally, I use “meow-rail” for normal use, and “mwah-rail” (with
implied kissing) when flirting.
[^otp]:
I’d also like to note that even though this establishes a canon (and
muflax-endorsed) \<\> and \<3 dual-ship of muflax+Owen (and I’d
argue in favor of OTP here), this only expresses my (and Owen’s, and
arguably the universe’s author’s) opinion, and is no reason to
abandon other ships or your personal headcanon. I oppose any central
authority on these matters, even if it might happen to agree with
me.
(I also find it really weird to use two different types of names,
but I wanna be consistent about only using “muflax” for now, even
though using my first name would allow for an S+O=SO pun, but then I
hate the “SO” term, so nevermind…)
I’ve only dabbled in o8\< (mostly by not-always-intentionally
trolling certain people by acting as a proxy for mindfucky ideas by
other (crazier) people, and so leading them to write wonderful “the
fuck is this stuff even about?! I never knew about X until last
week, and now I’ve realized I’ve hated it MY ENTIRE LIFE!” posts; I
noticed I’m doing this when friends in 6th grade told me I was the
one who introduced them to kink, somehow), and I’m totally lacking
in \<3\<. I mean, I kinda hate
[Polycarp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarp) but not quite
enough, and if the [alveolar
trill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_trill) were a person,
I’d wanna have angry hatesex with it so hard, but I’m not sure that
counts.
So the most promising shipping research topic is probably who my
arch-nemesis is gonna be. Somehow I mostly get into fights with
concepts, not people.
[^language]:
Also, I’m *really* unhappy with established terms to talk about
“person who I love, like, THIIIIS much”. Like (girl|boy)friend? Fuck
that. “partner”? Like, the government gets to call ‘em “partner” if
it wants, and I find it kinda adorable what weirdly formal language
it comes up with, but it’s not really a very affectionate label, is
it? Seriously, all options are either super-formal, horrible or real
silly. (I’m *never* gonna use “SO”. This is too stupid even for me.)
I’d be ok with “lover” if it didn’t have this connotation that it
isn’t a serious thing, or “mate” if Australians hadn’t ruined it. So
for now until I find a term (neologic if necessary) I’m happy with,
I expect to mood-swing through “partner”, “moirail”, “love” (and I
really wanna use “hon”, but then I’m tempted to practice a Southern
accent all day and never get anything else done), and whatever else
feels slightly less awkward that day.
Man, /language/, amirite?
[^footnotes]:
That’s a lot of footnotes for one word! It’s as if there’s a
correlation with how important the topic is to me, or the thing it
refers to…
[^trolls]:
Seeker, wear the [troll
hide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask), learn [the
signs of the
dakinis](http://buddhism-for-vampires.com/dakinis-karma-mudra) and
wander into the [Bohemian
forest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulin_Rouge!), where you will
find a [four-headed statue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perun)
proclaiming Beauty, Freedom, Truth and Love, which grants liberation
to all who know the magic song. A servant of [Grandma
Bonylegs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga) once sung it to
me, but I can never quite [keep it in my
head](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvFpJBJSPRA)…
[^sharing]:
Part of my writing philosophy has always been “write what I actually
wanna read more of”, and so I’m pissed at myself that I *don’t*
share a lot more here, cause this is exactly what I’d love to read
about, and so not doing it is a concession to lameness itself. But
I’m also paranoid about various perverse incentives and
substitutions (i.e. writing more about the thing than actually doing
the thing, or in this case, person (BOOM FLAWLESS INNUENDO)), and so
for now I’m gonna be mostly silent while I think it through.
The other problem is that *this stuff is hard to write about*. It’s
weird how “this is not a *real* medium” is one of those statements
that *incredibly* piss me off, like every time someone says “games
aren’t art” or “but you can’t trust someone over *text*” (aside from
the retarded conceptions of “art” and “trust” that underlie this
nonsense), and so *not being able to write about something* because
I just wouldn’t know how is a deep moral failure for me, and when I
find myself thinking “I can’t write about that, who would want to
read that?!, and anyway, I don’t even know how to english it to
begin with”, I feel like I’m Failing At Life, and everything that
matters *at all* gets betrayed because of some stupid sense of
boundaries or expectations.
So I gotta figure something out, and beat this old narrative machine
into a decent enough approximation of half my feels. Just gimme some
time to adjust.
[^options]:
Also considered, among other things:
- different places, most importantly Canada (but their bureaucracy
tries to cockblock me as hard as it can while still claiming
they want valuable immigration with a straight face), and Berlin
(not ideal for the skill set we currently have, but I’d still
like to re-visit at some point in the near future, maybe in the
form of some grand Europe Tour)
- different language, primarily French (possibly the next one),
Japanese (would love to do it next, but I really want either
more teaching experience or a fluent speaker to work with first,
so it had to wait) and English (not enough resources right now)
- math and physics up to undergraduate level or so (much harder to
get a properly incentivized audience, but real high up on the
list and long-term mandatory (and I like everything about it,
including teaching it), but not the right thing to bootstrap
with)
- different timeline / “business model” / major reordering of The
Plan (long story, but tl;dr: everything else is predictably
stupid-in-retrospect, and so doesn’t make sense)
[^reasons]:
Various reasons:
- much lower need for outside approval, and actively working on
lowering it even more; [Arline’s
Mantra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_People_Think%3F)
“What Do *You* Care What Other People Think?” helps a lot to
clarify and work through these issues, but kills ranty blogs
dead
- after some discussions with
[David](http://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think) and Owen,
I’m pretty strongly in the “most philosophy (i.e. the stuff I
talked about a lot) has only negative value by removing
misconceptions” camp now, so the only interesting stuff for me
is foundational stuff that directly leads to engineering stuff,
and so I find myself only reading Skinner, Mill and similar
folks, if even that
- too sane; I kinda have a tendency to get worked up about stupid
shit (in entertaining ways, at least, but still) when I don’t
have a calming influence in my life; have that now, feel much
less crazy (except in a good way)
- speaking of Feynman and craziness, you gotta *do* crazy shit
occasionally so you can later *talk about it*; currently in that
phase

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