malvasia bianca

I’ve been infatuated with The Nature of Order and KonMari for a while, in part for the same reason: their emphasis on direct perception. I spend a lot of time in my head, which leads to over-theorizing and over-analyzing; a question like “does this feel more alive?” or “does this bring me joy?” can cut […]

I’m in the middle of an Octavia Butler reread, and I recently reached the Parable books. Parable of the Sower was, of course, very good: a prompt to think about what it might look like for things to really fall apart, and a book that made me much more uncomfortable this time than it did […]

I’ve been hearing mention of Discord for a little while, but it seemed like it was focused on chat in support of PC games, and I don’t play games on PC. (And, for that matter, I also don’t generally play the sort of games where chat while playing would be useful.) But then we used […]

Three months ago, I removed Tweetbot from my phone: I was spending too much time on Twitter, and getting too caught up in the hour-by-hour drama of politics. And that was definitely the right choice: I spent less time distracted and less time worrying about stuff that I can’t do anything about on the timescale […]

Move Your DNA is the latest book I’ve read in order to try to understand how to move / position my body in a healthy manner, and it’s quite interesting in a way that, I think relates to Kegan’s stages of understanding. Because the main point of the book are that your body, even when […]

After Trump won the election, I was worried that the United States might actually slide into fascism. It’s a little over a year later, and, honestly, I’m still worried about that, but now I have a new worry: that we might have a nuclear war, with both North Korea and the United States launching successful […]

David Chapman has, among other things, been writing about modes of approaching meaning, in a way that’s informed by Robert Kegan’s developmental psychology. He’s written a summary of this recently on one of his blogs, and he discusses it frequently on Meaningness (see e.g. this post and posts it links to), but I thought he […]

A couple of weeks ago, a #WomenBoycottTwitter hashtag showed up on my timeline. It appeared on a Thursday, encouraging people to stay off of Twitter the next day; I haven’t been feeling great about my Twitter usage all year, so I figured I’d use that as an excuse to take a day off and see […]

In Germany, it’s illegal to display Nazi symbols and symbols of similar nationalist parties, and it’s illegal to be a member of such organizations. Which, as an American growing up under the influence of current U.S. free speech law and under the ACLU’s defense of Nazis in the Skokie case, mostly seemed wrong to me. […]

Miranda has had very bad migraines for much of this year. We’re not sure why they’ve gotten so much worse / more frequent this year, and the initial treatments her doctors prescribed were almost completely ineffective, and in some cases may have made some aspects of the situation worse. Eventually, we found a medication which […]

For a few years now, my optometrist has been nudging me to consider either reading glasses or progressive lenses. For my last prescription, he split the difference between reading and distance; that mostly worked fine, but Hamilton convinced us to get season tickets for an SF musical company, I was a cheapskate, our tickets were […]

The day after Trump’s inauguration, a half million women descended upon Washington, D.C to protest, with millions more participating in satellite protests all over the country, even across the world. It was inspiring, and it got attention. And then the Muslim Ban came, and that inpiration led me and many other people across the country […]

I’m not used to people asking me about stuff I’m carrying around, but several of my coworkers have asked me about my AirPods when they’ve seen me wearing them around the office; apparently people are curious about them. So, a report: They replaced my EarPods, which have been totally fine for me: I’m not particularly […]

A couple of months ago, I ran across the paper “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work”, by Phillip Rogaway. It’s a very good paper; I encourage you all to read it, instead of this blog post! But, for those of you who are still here: the question there of the political implications of nominally apolitical […]

As I mentioned before, my back problems started coming back earlier this year; since I’d thought the Gokhale book made sense, I decided to give their course a try. And, fortunately, it’s been working! Or, rather (correlation isn’t causation): I was taking 12 ibuprofen tablets a day in the summer, I’m taking 6 a day […]

When I got my first iPhone, it was easy to hook it up to car audio: there were a bunch of options for 30-pin-to-aux connectors. (Which would also charge your phone, useful both in itself and because most audio and map software has an option to not shut off the screen as long as the […]

The Rocksmith team recently released a (free!) update to Rocksmith 2014 that was substantial enough to deserve a new name: Rocksmith Remastered. It’s the same game, just better: they’ve looked at how people have used it over the last three years, where the rough edges are, how they could modify it to help your learning […]

When I blogged about Trump before the election, I thought he was unlikely to win, though a 1-in-6 chance still scared me. And, well, I’m scared now. So, what new bad event has a 1-in-6 chance of happening now that we add in the fact that Trump is elected? Maybe I’ve been reading too much […]

I’ve started paying more attention recently to what gives me more energy: evaluating experiences, places, even objects on that criterion instead of other criteria. Not necessarily physical energy—I’m as capable of falling asleep in post-lunch meetings as ever—but mental energy, a feeling that I’m building up my reserves for thinking instead of chipping away at […]

As of two weeks before election day, it is looking like we won’t have a fascist as our next president. It’s less of a sure thing than I would like—if you trust FiveThirtyEight’s model, then the odds of a Trump presidency are about the same as the odds of rolling a 6 on a die, […]