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Anna is actually talking about making money as an artist, a topic she admits she’s avoided in the past. 9 out of 10 times, Anna says, how we’re conditioned to feel about our careers, the trajectory we’re expected to be on, leads us to working a job we hate, making it immensely difficult to maintain…
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Looking for the best Fantasy Baseball blogs and websites? I’ve compiled a list of the best I’ve found from scouring the internet. This list is completely separate from my other list of “real-life” baseball blogs. While I myself don’t dabble much with fantasy baseball anymore, insights from these websites can still be key to writing…
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In her August 2025 Wild Geese podcast episode, How to Manage Multiple Interests & Actually CREATE Something, Anna Howard of Wild Geese goes into her research process. I find it very interesting that, like me, she sees research as a leisure activity! Anyway, the Sublime app she’s talking about is very interesting. It’s a much…
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Great essay by Anu Atluru on the concept of “Franchise Thinking.” Atulru writes: “Franchise thinking is the tendency to fit everything into ideas that already have names, audiences, and tribal alignment rather than to look for new ones.” The big bold point in this essay: “Too many people are making something already known more known…
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Henry David Thoreau About Wasting Life on Details : “Our life is frittered away by detail.” I believe by this he means details that don’t actually matter, like minutiae and trivia, such as is stuffed into every extra neuron of my poor, rotten brain. On a Deacon’s Personal Effects Being Auctioned Off: “Not long since…
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I’ll be completely honest, I did not finish this book entirely, as I didn’t agree with many of Wendell Berry’s conclusions. However, that being said, there’s plenty of stuff I do find very interesting that deserves highlighting. Several notes from reading just a bit of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America … Some quotes: “One of…
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I will finish this book at some point this year, hopefully. There’s just so much here and I’ve been in a terrible reading slump. I’ve gotten so much from just the introduction, written by Michael C Fisher. “A man of letters knows only a little about some major human concerns, but insists on relating what…
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Along with Gemini, I’ve been developing the Words Above Average metric as an intellectual hygiene filter for online content. We’ve used calculations of lexical density, synthesis score, structural entropy, and durability multiplier, looking for evergreen intellectually stimulating nonfiction content. But I’ve also wanted to create a WAA metric for fiction. How would we adapt the…
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We begin with a Leo Tolstoy quote from 1897. I’ll copy it down in its entirety for reference: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he…
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Source: The Language of Emotions (Animated) by Amy Lyne. I’ve been watching several of Amy Lyne’s videos recently and this is a way I’ve never heard emotions dealt with before. I’m intrigued and wanted to have notes to work from in talking about what I think is a really clever and useful way of considering…
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There’s plenty of articles and free stuff for kids’ education, but what about those of us who got old and began to resemble adults, at least physically? I guess if we missed out on the top bachelor’s degree programs, master’s degree programs, and doctoral degrees, we’re minced meat, aren’t we? Well, no—but it seems that…
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The title essay stays with a great line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s long but it shows why she went nuts at one point in the 70s. The world was an absolute mess. I’m sure it’s going to get worse than that soon enough. This essay really made me think about…
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Didion got the book title from a line of a W.B. Yeats poem. These lines really are poignant today: “Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned,The best…
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Sagan’s final section of Chapter 2 outlines four main reasons for “a concerted effort to convey science.” In other words, why do we need everybody to get into some sort of science? And this line is especially prescient in 2025, “…if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the…
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Some time in July 2025, I was working on building a new neo-Modernist philosophy. This is before I finally shifted my focus to the CRAP framework. But I’m actually a bit disappointed in myself for burying this idea. I’d come up with four pillars to build upon. Yes, I know ‘pillars’ is a common LLM…
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Currently, Arts & Letters Daily set the Gold Standard for the Words Above Average metric, providing us with a “meta-aggregator,” like a radar scanning the current horizon to find the highest-entropy ideas, a superior “Intellectual Hygiene” filter for the present moment. But I wanted to go a bit further and find several more aggregators and…
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Right in the introduction, there’s this: “In any systematic treatise two things are essential: first, there must be some definition of the subject; second, in order of treatment but of greater importance, there must be some indication of the methods by which we may ourselves reach the desired goal.” This whole piece was a response…
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From JA Westenberg on Selfonomics, “Living Next Door to Moloch” “The content industry has stumbled into a coordination failure of brobdingnagian proportions. Everyone produces more content because everyone else produces more content, and the Nash equilibrium of this game is a world where infinite noise competes for zero attention. “We are, collectively, a grinding, screaming…
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Wolfey did post a video about if it’s possible to spend no money at all on Champions. And nothing from past Pokemon games or even free stuff from home. I have some thoughts. https://youtu.be/abXBnl1Cwp8?si=-Yr62SDXkOaKZ_YQ I absolutely agree that Pikachu is the best starter here, because of the Pokemon you get alongside it. But what’s interesting…
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“Elizabeth Taylor” is the second track on Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” record. It’s probably my fifth favorite on the album, partly because it feels a bit more generic pop than most Taylor Swift tracks of recent years. Even while I feel like all this high-gloss and the highly referential nature of this…