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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The cynicism of reality;

    the full spectrum of self awareness;

    the layers upon layers of conflicting correct perspectives;

    an understanding of the duality of order and chaos;

    the crippling nature of battling a skilled Platonic sophist;

    unmasking sadism;

    the constant internal revisionism of curiosity and self growth;

    the abstractions of the philosopher must come at a cost, and one must ask what is the price of thought.



  • I don’t think it is truly possible to lack an opinion. Indifference is the opposite of caring, and therefore the opposite of both love and hate at the same time. Indifference is an acceptable state of mind, but it is still an opinion. I will postulate, as silly as it is in extreme abstraction, that the opposite of opinion is only possible in death. Existence itself implies a state of awareness and opinion on abstracted levels of consciousness.




  • Always tread the high ground. You do not need to make any statements or push any sentimental or ideological perspective.

    If you are into it, read The God Emperor of Dune for a great example of exploring complexity of characters and how to tackle the subject.

    Leto II is extremely dominant and authoritarian to he point of instability and terrorism and yet at the same time he is also the most altruistic and kind person in the Dune universe. Duncan is the lover ladies man and ideologue but also foolish and impulsive. Siona is a strong women and on of the main characters and yet there is not even the slightest hint of some feminist agenda even though this was written in the 1960’s to 1970’s. Hwi is a beautiful smart woman with depth that is torn between the love of two men. Nayla is a shallow but likable soldier with remarkable loyalty. She is part of an all women’s army called The Fish Speakers. There is even a passage where this army goes out of control and rapes men. This is the only element of the book that I felt like it was clearly delineating Frank Herbert’s stance that the women in this book were in fact a ideological choice and more than just great character building. Yet still, nothing about this was forceful, it was simply amusing in breaking preconceptions of my reality. I highly recommend the read.



  • If you have the features, learn how the timer system of your appliances works. My family has never figured them out and screws stuff up regularly because of inattention. I'm disabled and I know better than to trust myself. I set timers to start and stop stuff that is cooking in the oven. If I want something hot at a special time, I just set a delay timer that turns on my settings and then has a stop timer. If there is absolutely any doubt that a dish in the oven may leak, I place a pan on another lower rack to catch absolutely anything that might potentially leak. I tend to cook 2 weeks worth of food at one time in the oven and just arrange all the stuff so that the potential leaks are onto other safe stuff.

    I also do not bother with recipes. Most ovens have terrible temperature controllers, so times and settings are largely useless in reality. My secret is to start with boring but edible food. In reality, you likely do not eat some great variety of foods. Fundamentally it is the same 2-4 meats (sorry vegans), bread, and some veggies. So I started by filling a large glass casserole pan with green beans, broccoli, and cauliflower, a second pan I fill with corn on the cob, a third I do a bed of sliced onion and a meat on top with seasoning, and I finally have a covered glass bowl for cooking two cups of rice. I eat this steamed rice for 2 days before making homemade fried rice. Well made fried rice will easily last the remainder of 2 weeks. The meal is mostly rice, with some veggies and a few ounces of meat. This is my only full meal each day. I cook that on whatever my oven calls 450° F for 1 h 20m. It does not require any oil or anything else. While it is edible like this, the last trick is to make a sauce with half a jar of mayo, about a quarter of the jar filled with the best teriyaki sauce you can find, and a small amount of sriracha sauce to taste. This sauce can be further improved slightly with any small amounts of savory sauces from pickling or fermentation or in more simple terms, the juices from a jar of whole olives, peppers, old alcohol, left over pan glazing stock, etc., or like Worcestershire or soy sauce if you have trouble with these abstractions.

    Form a boring baseline of food, then start tuning this baseline to make it better over time. If you limit yourself to this kind of repetition, you’ll eat much more consistently healthy, but also you’ll really learn how to cook using abstracted information and a deeper understanding of your available tools.

    I do this with everything. I occasionally make some cookies that just go in the oven. The whole preheating your oven thing is just an attempt to make recipes transferable. The controls on your oven are likely way off and the control algorithm or temperature switches are extremely inconsistent. People do not make these appliance purchases in general while shopping for these features. Therefore these corners are cut in most hardware. I just ate the same cookies enough to know exactly how long they cook for with my favorite properties. I cook them for 22 minutes at 475° F from a cold start. I can put that on a start and end timer and have hot cookies any time I want. If there is a high probability that I will not be present or available when they are done, 20 minutes at 450 will produce good results if they remain in the oven as it cools down.

    Using the timers means you can never forget something in a way that is catastrophic. I don’t recommended running an oven unsupervised, but you can take precautions to enable failsafes like pan under pan setups.








  • People are a product of their environment and opportunities. Genetics have nothing to do with hierarchy and display. Wealth is the dumbest and most primitive form of display that fundamentally harms and kills millions of people, enabling humans with the least ethics to peacock around. This is the behavior of subsentient unevolved imbeciles, like if publishing a scientific paper involved a gladiator death match fight with and rival publishing author. Wealth as hierarchical display is barbaric stupidity. If any alien civilization were to exist in some childish fantasy universe and somehow find us in time and space, wealth hierarchy would be seen as a primary reason why humans are if no regard as nothing more than primitive farm animals or parasites as they are unable to transcend to full sentient behavior as a species capable of acting in the best interest of all. Humans are nothing more that sentient cosplay that constantly devolve into sadistic murder orgies of war over meaningless distinction and sadistic torment over the fundamental needs of other humans at every level from relationships to neighborhood, community, region, continent, and world.

    The answer is applied game theory in the present. Doing right for everyone, and systematically dismantling systems of exploitation.

    Wealth hierarchy will end in a violent and tumultuous way within the next century once the first successful resource acquisition of a M-type astroid in near Earth orbit is achieved. Japan is leading that effort in the present. There is more resource wealth in a single M-type astroid than all of the Earth based resources accessed in the Holocene. That will make wealth as it is now totally irrelevant. The future is in space after we make that transition. At that point, the biggest limitation is cyclical elemental balance and heat budget. The primitive concept of wealth becomes nonsensical and totally irrelevant. Deep gravity wells and planetary differentiation due to gravitational separation are the real creators of human scarcity.

    Wealth only buys connections and opportunities. It has nothing to do with merit. Multi generation wealth is a massive hindrance to humanity as it removes any connection between merit and achievement and acts as a barrier to humans of real merit. This is why you are fundamentally only a product of your environment and opportunities. Promoting true merit is healthy for humanity, however anyone that is born into wealth has proven nothing and is a destructive obstacle of progress and achievements. These are the indications of corruption exploitation and a failed system when such individuals lead. Intelligence is not genetic. You do not know of the great things Einstein’s parents or children discovered. No community produces better. No gene pool is superior. We are a reflection of the opportunities we have. Most people have very few if any opportunities in life. The rich can fail countless times and still try again and again. This is meaningless and harmful as it concentrates power and opportunity amongst the incompetent and incapable.



  • You know that nature programs saying “complex social hierarchy?” It is part of that. Everything we do is part of it. There are multiple forms of hierarchical display. Our primary form is the insane use of the means for fundamental survival, aka wealth. This is a very primitive and barbaric form of display. Academia and visual media arts use reputation as a form of hierarchy; sports use meritorious achievement. We are only animals determining class and rank. No one living can opt out because ostracization is still a class and rank, as is simple survival.

    Writing about a very hard science fiction future pushed me into this space. Particularly, what are the implications of post scarcity if one completely discounts the argument that, ‘it is an idealist utopian fantasy,’ and tries to address the real complexity of humanity.





  • The longest I ever did it was 5 weeks straight working 12 hour nights too. Everyone thought I’d quit, but I ran circles around them.

    Everyone basically gets way less productive, especially with any physically strenuous activity. It’s like you/your body knows full recovery is not an option. You don’t get more done, you’re just there when shit hits the fan.

    I personally adjusted just fine. It is no different than slavery. All labor is technically wage slavery. I owned my own business before and after that job. Owning your own business is no different. The line between your life and your business is irrelevant when it is your own business, especially if you have employees.