Creativity - 32

The more I spend time learning and reading, the more sure I become that creativity is the most important thing that schools can foster in kids. Morals, a desire to learn, critical thinking, and information evaluation (i.e. discerning between biased and least biased information, sorting out truth and valuable insight from noise, etc.) are close behind, but I believe that creativity is more important; most virtues are (in my opinion) far more effectively instilled in kids in the home rather than t...
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Back in School - 31

I returned to school in-person yesterday. It's a hell of a lot better than online school, even if it means that it's more work to get there. My school has done a very good job with taking precautions, so I feel comfortable while I'm there, and getting to see my classmates for the first time in-person is a great experience. I didn't realize how much I missed in-person school till I returned; it's impressive how quickly I managed to adjust to the online experience. ...
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Death (I) - 30

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” ― La Rochefoucauld To look death in the eyes is to face the fact that one day I will not matter. This is incredibly frustrating to me. It is a fact that I do not have the courage to open myself to, nor the enlightenment to accept. I desperately want to have some semblance of permanence, to be remembered, to matter, and the prospect of death ensures that none of that will happen. Not just the prospect of my individual death, or that of h...
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Making the Algorithm Work for Me - 29

My sister, an avid TikTok user, sent me a video yesterday teaching people about decentralized cloud storage. I prefer self-hosting, but of course e2ee, decentralized file storage is awesome. I'd never seen a serious implementation of it before - I'd never looked - but this video linked to three different ones: SpiderOak, Arweave, and Storj. Considering how cool these platforms are, I figured I'd try to get more resources in that same manor, so I've decided to re-download social media and force t...
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Why do I do what I do? - 28

I wish that there was a way to pause my life for a while, just put everything on hold and just have some time to think. There are a lot of ideas, thoughts, emotions, opinions, and desires floating around my head, and they push me in the general direction of where I think I want to go. It's a 'general' direction for two reasons: first, because it is a literally general direction - I want to be able to have lots of varied skills and use them all - and secondly because it's a very broad idea. I thi...
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"Relax" - 27

I always find it funny when people see someone being aggressive or angry and they decide to say "Relax" or "Calm down". It seems obvious that those things are only going to make the person that is aggressive/angry more so than they already are, yet it's sort of the default response I hear (though I don't really spend a lot of time around angry people myself, so my opinion may not be representative of the general population). I don't think I've seen a single instance in which things don't go down...
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Meditation - 26

There is no reason that I don't meditate. I went on a 60-day meditation streak and it made me happy. Everyone says it's a good thing for your mind, health, creativity, you name it. I'm just not doing it right now. I'll probably start next week, when my new habits kick in: I'm setting a diet and eating schedule, implementing a time blocking system, practicing various prosocial behaviors, etc. etc. I'll write something about it - hopefully - when I get further into it. The general gist of my pre...
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Misrepresented Views - 25

I feel like I keep misrepresenting my views to people. Not just internet strangers, but to people I actually know really well and who understand me. I defended an ideology that I don't agree with in front of my mother, not because I think it's a good one to follow, but because I thought the criticisms that a guy in a video we were watching together was giving weren't valid. I feel like I seemed closed-minded, rather than just, I don't know, critically thinking. A similar thing happened a few da...
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Consummmmiinnnnnggg - 24

Despite the fact that I've had no social media apps on my phone for a while (something like 6-12 months, it's been too long to remember), I still manage to fall into the trap of Near-Unconscious Consumption, the same way that I did back when I did have them. I think that I was breaking the wrong habit. I pick up my phone absentmindedly and (despite my 27-character passcode that I only have because I think it's funny) start consummmmiinnnnnggg. That's the habit I now have to break; though the in...
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Time Blocking Intro - 23

I think I need rigid structure to keep myself on task, and since no one is there to keep me on task, I need to do it myself. Time blocking seems like a good way to do that: forcing myself to follow a schedule and do certain work during certain times will make me more productive and probably feel more rested, since deliberate rest is always more fulfilling than unintentional breaks (also known as time wasting). I've set out a skeleton schedule for myself, and will continue to update it across th...
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;) - 22

I fucking hate the ;) face. I see it used everywhere on the internet, especially on tech forums, and it hurts me every time I see it. It's such a condescending, irritating thing, especially when the person using it is wrong. I'm not sure whether the people that use it are trying to be condescending or whether they're genuinely just tone deaf and think it's a friendly thing to end your comment with. I have a close friend who uses it constantly, both during (friendly) debates in group chats and d...
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Programming - 21

I want to learn to program well. Not only do I feel cool when things are working, but knowing languages like Python and JS is actually functionally useful. I just wish I had a better use case for it - I've learned a lot of bash and general conceptual compsci knowledge since I actually use it. The same cannot be said for other languages. Someonce said that "you'll only learn things if they are relevant, so make them relevant". Every time I think of the phrase I can give another example of it be...
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Filler - 20

This post is, as the title says, a filler post. I'm exhausted and working on the Firefox Focus and Relinquishing Control sequels, so I'm not really going to write anything today. That said, I did practice a lot of narrative writing. That can be my writing for the day, since I wrote... holy shit, 15k words tonight. Yeah, that's good enough. See you tomorrow. ...
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Chess - 19

Chess is cool. I like the game, like to watch it, like to read about it... but I hate playing it. I just don't enjoy it, and that's probably because I suck at it. I've read the first few chapters (so far) of David Epstein's Range, and it's been helpful in understanding chess as it is. Epstein explains that there are two types of learning environments, as theorized by psychologists Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman: "Kind" environments and "Wicked" learning environments. The distinction between th...
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Debate - 18

Everyone likes to debate, right? It's an innate human characteristic, I think. Debate plays into the human desire for outrage - the same thing that has made twitter so successful, I'd endeavor - and that coveted feeling of self-righteousness and correctness, however toxic it may be. Debate tends to be something that we use to make ourselves feel good about our own views, or in the case of politicians make the base feel good about its candidate, so it's natural that it's not very effective at cha...
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Slipping Away - 17

Free time always feels like it's slipping away from me and being wasted, no matter how productive I am on any given day. I tend to focus heavily on certain activities or experiences in my life, so I'll often forget anything that wasn't important at the time: for example, I was doing applications over last winter and my cat was sick. I was on a ski trip. Other than that, I don't really remember much about the winter of 2019. I want to figure out how to make myself feel like I'm in control of my...
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Subconscious Intentional Ignorance - 16

There are certain basic elements of human life that we must ignore in order to function normally. Humans, being mortal and not omnipotent, are by nature impermanent and insignificant. No one will leave this world without experiencing loss, conflict, weakness, and of course eventually death. In order to function normally, without being overpowered by grief, fear, etc., we must subconsciously ignore these things. Historically, those listed above have not been the only things that we have to accep...
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Cluttered - 15

For the past week, my room and phone - two major parts of what I refer to as my living spaces - have been cluttered. I managed to reach 500 tabs, the maximum tabs allowed in safari, because I haven't managed to iron out my flow for bookmarking and effectively organizing resources. My phone (as referenced in Clean - 5 below) has way too many applications on it, though I have been working in that. Most notably, though, has been my room. After opening up and sorting through some bins of stuff that ...
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Relinquishing Control - 14

When trying to enforce (upon myself) new habits and behaviors, I've always acted as though I have a choice in doing them. That's natural, since I do: I am able to make the decision to do or not to do something. This results often in me making the wrong choice. I want to try a little experiment. What if, instead of the mentality of I am making a choice to do this, I tell myself that I am not in control? It seems a little weird, of course. It would be interesting, though, to see how I react menta...
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Standard Language - 13

Language is strange and incredible. We, as humans, somehow managed to create thousands of unique languages, with massive amounts of variance, somewhere along the line. It's something of an obstacle, nowadays, since globalization and global multilingualism don't pair that well, but it is nonetheless cool as hell. We should make a new one. The first few steps don't sound that difficult; gather a few language experts from around the world, develop a new language that is easy to learn and simple, ...
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Apple, Apps, and Ecosystems - 12

My primary laptop is a Windows computer. My phone is an iPhone. After using this system for years, I've come to appreciate the ability to sync outside of the built-in Apple ecosystem. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an app with a sync feature that I can't use - at no fault to the developers, two platforms is already hard enough - or how quietly annoying it is to discover that there's a mac app but no windows versions. At least it forced me to use more open-source software. Anyway, I j...
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A strange mix - 11

Writing motivation tends to go in a generally repetitive pattern: get excited about doing it and write a very long post, crash and write a short post, then recover and write a medium post. The length of the long posts fluctuate too. 1400-word pseudo-essays mixed with 100-word shower thought-sort of things make for a blog that looks kinda funny. As you can probably tell, I'm in a period of waning motivation. I'm currently working on various side projects, including getting my Zettelkasten into ...
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The Moon - 10

The moon is a strange thing. We don't think about it very often, but when we do recognize it for what it is, it's really fucking weird: a massive sphere of solid rock, metal, and regolith, floating out in space and spinning endlessly around the earth. There's little interesting geology, (effectively) no atmosphere, just dust, craters, and moon-mountains, as far as the eye can see. Not only that, there's a side of the moon that never comes into our view from earth, since the moon spins as it orbi...
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Near-Unconscious Consumption - 9

Near-Unconscious consumption is the name I've (just) given to that state of just consuming, not thinking about what you're doing, not really thinking all that much about the content, just sort of floating on the breeze that what ever you're consuming is blowing at you. I notice it the most on the internet. It's one of the (many) reasons why I've left social media almost entirely: I couldn't, without unreasonable effort, consistently avoid falling into this state. (When it's me against a recomm...
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Subjective man in an objective world 😔 - 8

Though I'm almost never active there, I occasionally return to Twitter just to see what's happening. What I see there scares me. Using the power of the internet and by exploiting the minds of people who aren't great at figuring out what factual sources look like, multiple huge groups of users on the platform have been entrapped in various narratives by various charismatic figures or organizations, and are at the point of flat-out denying reality. '''''''Alternative news''''''' sources push the...
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Firefox Focus (Part 1) - 7

I started using Firefox Focus today. I initially discovered it probably a year-year and a half ago when I began looking for browser alternatives (to whatever I was using at the time, I don't remember) on my phone. I've always enjoyed downloading and testing new apps, for better or for worse (see Clean - 5 down below), and when I tried Focus out for the first time, it was a strange experience. I found myself liking the app's aesthetics, and was excited for its built-in content blockers - I didn...
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Let's Change How We Think About Teaching - 6

Brace yourself, because this one is long as hell and has way less editing than I wish I could do. I'm honestly not sure if what I say here is coherent but I'm getting my thoughts down and that's what matters to me currently. Once I eventually link this identity back to my main one, I can thoroughly rewrite this and throw it up on my actual, personal site. I apologize in advance if what I write here sounds like the faux-philosophical ramblings of a twelve year old, or if a badly-written descripti...
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Clean - 5

Keeping shit clean is hard, sometimes agonizingly so. Despite my consistent motivation to keep my living spaces (physical and digital) organized, things always manage to spiral out of control. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, and sometimes only hours, but the ultimate result remains unchanged. I'm almost absolutely certain that the problem is the sheer amount of stuff that I keep around, a large part of which is stuff that I don't often use but keep for that one use case or for sentimental valu...
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The Learning Paradox - 4

Getting started learning something completely new is difficult, with few exceptions. It's hard to dedicate yourself to a new activity or subject. It's hard to find the time, it's hard to find the motivation to do something that you're not very good at, but most of all, it's hard to know what you need to know and where you need to look to learn it. I'm calling that last one "the learning paradox" since (1) it is sort-of paradoxical and (2) it makes for a good title. It is a serious problem thou...
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Stop Asking Me About My Usernames - 3

Listed's servers must be located in a different timezone than mine, since it's December 16th for me and the published post says December 17th. Oh well. #100days still stands. Usernames are, strangely, one of my favorite parts of the internet. The creativity, individuality, and childlike "coolness" involved in their creation makes for a fun creation process. Seeing the results of a search term, sticking words into translation programs, finding words related to one another, adopting character pat...
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