ok I think the new RSS is working now!

https://www.dantasse.com/sedatesnail/index.xml

with full text! because I love you and your RSS reader! (feedbin is good and worth $5/month and I get my email newsletters there too; or feedly is ok and free)

smash that like and subscribe button, as I will plan to just post there from now on.

oh hell the new site's rss isn't working

so I can't say it really moved yet, dang - I'll fix it soon.

I guess I'll clumsily cross post until then; this can't possibly go wrong

my post today:

getting ahead of the writer

04 Mar, 2021

ever have chunks of time that go by and you’re not really sure what all happened?

I keep a log file these days I call “dan log” at work and write down all the things that I did - not really sure why, besides sometimes it feels good to go back and find all the little things I did while I felt like I “didn’t accomplish anything.”

life is a little bit in that “going by in a blur” state right now. a friend mentioned once that sometimes he feels like he’s writing his story and then sometimes he’s living it. I like that framing¹. Imagine that part of you is living life as another part of you is writing it, much like Gromit riding a train while laying down tracks. Right now I kind of feel like I’m getting ahead of the train tracks, or like the writer/tracklayer is on autopilot. It’s not pleasant, but it’s mostly bearable.

(the reason isn’t a mystery: I’m just working on a new project at work. it’s kind of big, it’s a lot of manageable tasks instead of one big unwieldy task, and it’s kind of important and deadliney. I’m not super used to those things, so I spend more time working and it’s stressful.)

Another thing that’s stressful: I got a new keyboard. I think I used to type about 100 wpm. This keyboard is split, columnar, tented, thumb clusters, and all kinds of things that are probably ergonomically good. But that means it’s a learning curve. I think I went down to about 40 wpm and that is so agonizingly slow, I feel like those dreams when you are running but you can’t run. I’m back to about 70 or so now, so that still feels bad but not quite so bad. Epistory was pretty fun; a little cheesy but still the best typing game I’ve played. Typeracer is still fun. typing.io is what I really need: practice with all the colons and brackets and arrow keys; those are still rusty.

legit conflict extra-guilt

One thing I’m learning in the process: a certain kind of feeling about a recurring engagement. Let’s call it “legit conflict extra-guilt.” The way it works is this:

person X invites me to event Y that is kind of an effort for me but I want to be the kind of person who goes to it.
for whatever reason, I legitimately can’t go to the first or second installment of event Y.
I feel a little relief, but I also want to make it clear to them that I’m not skipping event Y because it’s hard or something; I have an actual conflict. Maybe I’ll reach out and tell them.

At this point, I’m feeling Legit Conflict Extra-Guilt. What will inevitably happen if I don’t address it is that I will feel guilty but keep having conflicts, one way or another, and I’ve got to cut my losses. It’s a certain kind of feeling that is both like “nah, I’ll totally make it next time, see, it was a legit conflict” but also “ooh I really don’t have time for this.” Now that I’ve learned this feeling, when it comes up I know that I must admit that I don’t really have time for it right now, I was too greedy in signing up, me grasp exceed grasp, and I’m sorry for that but I will generally not be at event Y.

It’s neat to start to recognize some of the dumb tricks my brain pulls on me!

---

1. I think I’m using it a slightly different way than he meant it. Maybe he reads this; if so, sorry! ↩︎

 

 

here's what I wrote a couple weeks ago:

about despair

18 Feb, 2021

happy month 12 of pandemic to you too

seriously, though: I’m re-forming my relationship to despair, slowly but surely. I think around 22-26 I was restless and bored; 27 was manic so the question didn’t come up, but 28-33 I’ve been more or less orbiting the attractor state of despair. 34, though, I’m out of that orbit! I’m careening all over emotional space. but some recent experiences have left me wondering what my relationship with despair is.

let me define a term. by “despair”, I’m probably not using the right word; the feeling I’m thinking of is more angry. it’s when you start feeling bad about X and respond by saying, well, who cares, X sucks anyway. it feels like a snotty punk rocker, or road rage, or maybe Walt towards the end of Breaking Bad. it’s feeling better never to have been¹.

it’s a pretty coherent view of the world! and whenever I was feeling crummy, I could retreat into “well, the world sucks anyway.” problem is, it feels bad. and … maybe it’s not true? like, the world isn’t inherently bad to be in².

so ok, I think that kind of despair is no longer my default attractor. that rules: it feels hopeful. it also feels like some responsibility: I can’t just say “this sucks and I didn’t ask to be born”; I have to make life worth living.

Sometimes that’s very hard! Sometimes I feel very run down and I’m not sure how this day can be part of a world that doesn’t suck. Or, how can I argue life is generally ok if right now I want to burn down everything in the world?

I don’t know, but my current hypothesis is: you can visit that despair planet and that’s fine and healthy, as long as you don’t get stuck in it. Take your time there, feel everything fully, and then when it’s all out, move on. If you don’t do that, then you’re restraining yourself from feeling feelings, and that rarely ends well.

---

1. not saying that author is despairing; maybe he only thinks, not feels, better never to have been. ↩︎

2. it’s not inherently good either, it’s just two wolves. ↩︎

    

   
   

blog's moved!

hey friends! This is the last post here at sedatesnail.blogspot.com. find future posts at:

 

https://www.dantasse.com/sedatesnail/

 

there's still a little migration to be done, but I think it's ready enough to go. please update your links (especially if you use RSS; https://www.dantasse.com/sedatesnail/index.xml should work but gosh who knows) and let me know if you have any issues!

why?

- on blogger, this page takes 24 requests! for a couple hundred kb! that's dumb for mostly text. new page: 2 requests for 11kb, and one of those is for the favicon. not that you'll probably notice the difference, but aesthetically this pains me.

- similarly, I have to compose this in google's rich text editor, which insists on putting everything inside <p> tags unless I really fight it. new one: markdown files which become very simple html, just as tim berners-lee intended. again, aesthetics.

- control my own site more etc. yeah it's hosted on netlify now but even if netlify tanks I can at least port it out somewhere a little more easily. (google is proud that you can get your own data from them, and you can and it's great, but this job of porting it definitely took me in the mid tens of hours.)

- oh yeah, speaking of goog, now they track you a little bit less. again again, aesthetics.

- google will probably kill blogger at some point. they're certainly not doing much to maintain it.

 

this was a medium-large pain. most of the pain was:

- learning jekyll, then realizing it took 10 minutes (!) to build the site and therefore is completely unusable, then learning hugo. yeah yeah, I know hugo is "fast", but I thought we were talking like 1 sec vs 5 sec here; nope, it's sub-1-sec vs 10 minutes. I guess my blog is big? (1100 posts) ... it's not that big!

- parsing google's xml. again, they give you your data, but it's in a big xml mess, and I had to find and then endlessly configure someone's script to turn that into markdown files.

- learning hugo. I think I like it okay, but there's a pretty large amount of magic that happens, like magic filenames and you have to know where it's looking for everything. ugh.

more migration details may follow, but they'll be posted there!

my crypto journey so far

First there were the sudokus that you can trade for heroin. So I bought a few tens of dollars worth, not because I wanted heroin, but like, I thought it might be a thing and I was in my techno-optimist days.

 

Then there was the one with a dog on it that funded a Nascar. So I bought a few tens of dollars of that, and pretty promptly lost it, even though the #1 rule of crypto money is don't lose it, but y'know. It wasn't the original heroin sudokus, so no big loss.

Then there was the free money (Stellar Lumens; I don't even have a cute name for this one). I signed up for Keybase back in the day because I dunno doing PGP things is cool maybe? Keybase is not at all a cryptocurrency thing. Until they decided "we're gonna give all our users some free Stellar Lumens", in an attempt to maybe become a cryptocurrency thing. They started sending free money, and then quickly stopped because obviously if you're sending out free money everyone's gonna sign up, but I got like $100 before then. And despite the fact that printing money causes inflation, it... then went up to $400? ok man

 

Around this time I signed up for Coinbase, the company that wants their employees to be "not political" (obligatory reference), and despite such an odious farce of a position I kept my heroin sudokus and my free money in there and at least I don't forget where I put em. (They also let you answer tedious 30-second quizzes about how Blurpcoin introduces disinstantiated intermediatory trustmongers which you can Stake by exchanging Blurpcoin for Blurptoken. If you do these quizzes they give you $3 in Blurpcoin that you can instantly exchange for *real* fake money like heroin sudokus or nascar dogs.)

But then GME happened and money became a meme again? and I was like, while everyone's laughing about money being fake, I gotta buy more nascar dogs? So I traded all my other fake money for dog fake money and now I'm reading just absolute nonsense posts in comic sans on r/dogecoin and have already made a couple hundred dollars.

To the moon, my friends.

 

how does crypto gambling connect to our world more broadly

Some time ago I read the 3-ladder system of social class in the US. I was recently reintroduced to it by the Michael Scott theory of social class, which I think is just a summary of the Gervais Principle. My even shorter summary: in the US there's the Labor ladder and the Gentry ladder, which we sorta knew (blue-collar vs white-collar), but there's also the Elite ladder, which is not like the Gentry ladder. Elites value power and money, as opposed to the Gentry who value being cultured, smart, and interesting.

Risking money to make money (in a smart way) feels like an Elite thing. Say someone offered you a bet, once, where you risk $10k for a 52% chance at 20k. I think most Elites would do that, no question. I... probably wouldn't. I'd be ok if I lost $10k, but losses loom larger than gains. I think "risking lots of money" is probably a skill that you've got to develop if you're on the Elite ladder at all.

And it's not really valued among Gentry. I can say "ehh I don't have to Play the Game of gambling money to get rich; that's just crass materialism" and a lot of my friends will be like "yep" but an Elite would be like "what? no, if you opt out of learning how to risk money smartly, you're just being dumb."

 

I'm kind of fine with this, the Gentry ladder sounds like it leads to a happier life, I'm so glad I'm a Beta, etc. But in the same way that it's nice to enjoy dancing even if you're not a dancer, maybe it's nice to be able to do this skill even if you aren't gonna do it most of the time. If I lose my hundreds of made-up dollars in stupid cryptocoins, maybe I'm gaining the experience of losing hundreds of dollars.

(also I'm aware how stupid this sounds; watch this post go super-viral and me be the main character on twitter one day :-P

how to buy Dogecoin yourself (if you're as square as me)

This is still difficult and may take a couple days, so start setting it up if you're interested. Buying Bitcoin is pretty easy; sign up for Coinbase (they're big and well known despite their leadership being uh clueless about social impact), verify yourself via a photo of your driver's license and proof of residence and who knows SSN and whatever else (yes I'm aware this might be hypocritical with the privacy side of me), and then buy Bitcoin.

But they don't sell Doge, so you have to go elsewhere. A couple options that have worked for me:

1. Kraken seems to mostly work. Binance.us also seems to mostly work. Both of these are pretty backed up and haven't verified me enough to buy cryptos with cash.

2. set up a Doge wallet somewhere*, then use Changelly to trade one crypto for another. E.g. buy Bitcoin** on Coinbase, then make an order on Changelly to trade Bitcoin for Dogecoin. Give them your Dogecoin address, send them your Bitcoin, then they will send Dogecoin to your Doge address.

 

* A "wallet" is basically an account. You can set one up on some websites, like Binance or Dogechain.info, or you can keep it yourself by installing a Wallet program on your computer or phone. Don't use the "official" Dogecoin wallet by langerhans; it is super slow, like takes a day to do a transaction. Coinomi on my Mac seemed to work all right. I don't know a good phone-based Dogecoin wallet.

I like Binance for now, because if you do keep a wallet on your computer, the money is literally all there; if you uninstall the wallet or reformat your HD or something, your coins are all lost. There are backup ways to get around this, but I'm not used to thinking of money in this way yet***.

** Actually I had better luck using Stellar Lumens for this, weirdly; transactions took minutes instead of hours. Probably other less-popular coins would also be easier.

*** This makes me think of new rituals; we've grown accustomed to "forgot password" links and stuff, but like with crypto wallets, there is no "forgot password" link. Somehow we need to make it super clear that "this is a password you better not forget ever." People are trying this, but it's hard. (there is more value to rituals than UI ease of use, but that's a longer topic for another time.)

reacting to posts by various internet nerds

"nerd" being of course entirely unjudgmental; I like some of these nerds and dislike others

seeing like a state

I keep meaning to, but I still haven't read this book. but this SSC review is pretty fun to read. similarly, this about warrens vs plazas. when you start seeing it, you see it everywhere: top down wants plazas, bottom up wants warrens. (when you work with computers, you want plazas: your data, your code, everything. but your data comes in in warrens. this is often what we mean by "data cleaning.")

speaking of states, ok, politics:

podcast with guest david shor

- measurement is really hard

- mostly super-engaged super-lefty people work on campaigns, while more centrist (for the US) people vote

- *sigh* I hear people on twitter gripe that we should go for big important ideas (m4a, defund the police, etc) but the more I hear from people who know politics it sounds like those are less successful because of what Shor talks about, which is a bummer because we really need most of the far left's big ideas. (again, this is "USA far left", which would get us in line with European centrists)

- side side gripe: I agree that ACAB is a terrible slogan if you wanna convert white people - they'll all think about the one cop they know and "that C isn't AB!" and "abolish the police" sounds radical too, sure. but how is "defund the police" so controversial? like, ... that could literally mean shrink the police by 99% or 1%. "centrists", seriously, if that's too radical for you, give me a slogan that means "maybe we should consider thinking about changing something please." or do you really not wanna consider changing anything please?

about meritocracy: obviously it's broken now. is it even worth striving for?

Callard argues that "achievement" (where we judge people) is different from "weight management" or "mental health" (where we don't judge people) because in weight/mental health, you can only screw up. If you're average, you're good; if you're off average in any direction, you're bad. Meanwhile, with achievement, if you're average, you're fine; if you're under average, that's bad; but you can be way over average and that'd be awesome.

 

I disagree with this premise. In mental health, you can also be average, below average, or way above average. Some people have ... just really great mental health. They're not just getting by, they're really flourishing and have extra love left over for everyone around them. And with weight - well, that's one narrow slice of "physical health", and it's not fair to compare a narrow thing like weight with a broad thing like "achievement." And in physical health, you have people who are average, people who are below average, and the LeBrons of the world who are just super fit.

 

Well... regardless, she ends up at a conclusion that I think I agree with: we should reward people for their triumphs and not blame people for their failures. This sounds great. The one question I have is: can we do that? As we celebrate wins, do we not also implicitly anti-celebrate the losses? I think she agrees that this is a big challenge.

techno-optimism

I am unimpressed! covid is like... sorta a techno-optimist success story, because we did a vaccine in a year. but that's because "make a vaccine" fits into a category that we're very good at: executing on a well-defined technological problem (that we've been sort of preparing for). everything else covid-related, we are botching pretty miserably. Most of the rest of the techno-solutions are like... not actually solving our big problems (lab meat, self-driving cars, VR), or not actually working (fusion, "AI" whatever that is). and the necessary ideas that are not "tech lab solving tech problem" (like Yglesias's "government guarantees to buy electric cars" or even just "immigrants are good") are political, and therefore stalled forever by our f'ed-up federal government.

meta-post

I'm not sure if doing this kind of post is serving me. I like collecting links and having a record of things I've thought at various times, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. I spend a couple hours collecting stuff I've read and it's kind of tiring, not a lot of fun, and I don't think I have any deep thoughts that are worth sharing.

best of twitter 2020

how to sum up this year? as usual, I maintain that twitter is good at one thing, and that is dumb jokes, and we have had plenty of time to scroll it this year, so it seems about right. here are some of the bests of 2020ish:

 

toots other people made that I love:

- the circular circular (god I'm still in awe of this one)

- wisemind (memes of the year)

- I sent youse two to whack that guy

- doctor doctor, gimme the news

- ganfield

- king's hand

- AI memes

- tell me why

- trump speech. joke: 5/10, execution 10/10

- "mother!" with david byrne songs

- gpt3 words

- jimi halloween

 

and because I'm vain, my toots that I'm proud of:

- the Big Challenges series

- Pagliacci footprints

- facebook core value or bruce willis movie

- I'm sorry Ms. Pac-Man (actually a reddit comment)

- alexander haroldhill

- the Kabpaulah and the mystery of Ron Sean

- up all night to bitbucket

- I am a free

- famous karls

- cartoonist retirement

expertise, football, covid, uh, wisemind

Expertise For Sale

Noe Valley still barely has a video store. Of course Netflix is basically putting them out of business. But that's a shame, because "loaning you the newest Avengers DVD" is only half their business, if that; half of it is recommending movies and having hard-to-find stuff. I want to pay people for the 2nd part, though; I want to give them $5 to just tell me what movie to watch.

This bartender started doing this on https://cocktailsforendtimes.com/. Tell her what you have and the kinds of things you like, and she sends you recipes using them. This requires pretty deep knowledge of drinks! I am happy to pay her for this. This is great.

 

Speaking of expertise, I would still pay for regular, customized, sports run-downs so I can keep up with a couple teams in like 5 min/week. Especially if they had a bit of:

Football for nerds

Scorigami, scoring just one point

y'all nerds: if you wanna Get Into Sports in order to talk with friends, family, SOs, whatever, read everything by Jon Bois. Including 17776 and 20020. (ok those won't help you talk sports. but they're great.) I wish I could talk more about the Browns and the Indians and college football and stuff when I see family, which brings us to:

Covid and travel worries

Actually, side note: I've seen very little actual advice about what to do if you get Covid. Here's a thread; bookmarking this for later, just in case.

 

Covid and travel worries: I feel like despite how much I evangelize Microcovid, I'm the only one I know who actually uses it. A lot of friends have canceled holiday trips. And that's great; collective risk reduction is cool. But I think it's a little out of proportion; your individual trip to see 2 family members at Christmas, say, can be pretty low risk. Ok, ok, I'm not gonna tell anyone I know how to weigh risks for them; I guess I'm just feeling defensive because I feel like I'm the only one still planning on traveling. I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of "still drinking water at restaurants in a drought", because your water glass is not the main thing causing a drought anyway. But I guess I'm still thinking about it because I'm afraid of getting called out! which leads to:

"Calling people in"

this has ... just always been a good idea? problem is, most people who are "against cancel culture" are ass-clowns. (indeed; I fear that y'know Ben Sh*piro is gonna link this article too and then I'm agreeing with ass-clowns!) this is because "cancel culture" means everything from canceling some kid who misspoke once, to canceling bill cosby, and of course some of these are bad and some are good. maybe I'll continue to steer clear of any conversation involving the words "cancel", "woke", "sjw", etc; usually the people on the "woke" side are right; yes there's a crummy edge where people don't realize that they're delighting in yelling at people for not being woke enough and not furthering justice and that's a real thing that should be fixed BUT the bigger problem here is our society is so unjust; this is exhausting, I need a dose of:

Gen-Z absurdity

I think there's something to this tweet. 2020 is messed up enough as a secure-enough 30-something; I can't imagine if I were growing up or trying to make my way in the world right now. This goofy-ass humor would totally resonate.

An example: #wisemind is the best thing on twitter 6 months ago. this is poetry. if there were a pulitzer for tweets it should go to dril; if there were one for memes I'd give it to jay dragon.

It's easy to look at this and see it as Dadaist post-war nihilism, but I don't think this is? Or at least, not in a bad way? It's flowering creativity, world-building using the tools we have available.