-
Perhaps the best affirmation I’ve come across this month is this: “I start every morning with positive intentions.” It’s amazing how much just having a single positive intention to build your day around can lead you to making better decisions about how you should choose to spend your time and energy. Soon as I started…
-
The thought occurred to me one day…maybe the big, tangled knot of the world’s troubles unravels down to something incredibly simple: people just won’t get out of each other’s way. Worse yet, we step on others’ ideas all the time, usually holding a watering can rather than wielding a club. What we mean to prune,…
-
(from my May 3rd, 2026 notes) Unfortunately, Richard Dawkins put out a book called The Claude Delusion and it’s being panned. The argument Dawkins makes in the book: “So my own position is: ‘If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?’” His version of Claude…
-
Music is a magical extension of the human soul. Without it, we’d all just slowly wither away into the unbearable void of silence, or worse, be left alone with our thoughts. With it, however, we have the unparalleled power to transform our minds into a war zone of emotions. Every single performance, even of a…
-
Most of the things rattling around in our heads aren’t real. By “real,” I mean you can’t physically poke at them. Still, real or imagined, we love to give those intangible ideas a physical form. So, what do we do? We find a way to realize them by making these ideas into physical things so…
-
“We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.” – Henri Poincaré This observation by Henri Poincaré — later referenced by Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World — hits harder today than perhaps either man intended. It suggests that delusion isn’t just an error in judgment,…
-
The introduction goes into the math of if we celebrated Christmas every day. It’s obviously meant to be tongue-in-cheek. If I were in a better mood, I’d probably be chuckling. The part about how much room it would take to have free range turkeys for turkey dinners everyday was actually pretty hysterical, though. It goes…
-
“That’s just the way it is…” those are words that “trap you like a bug.” Nana Visitor was dropped from her agency because the heads said that he had to feel she was “f-able.” Who says that to a 60 year old woman? But she didn’t say anything because her manager told her she would…
-
I’ve read four books by Rob Sheffield. Two were excellent (“Turn Around Bright Eyes” about Karaoke and “Love is a Mix Tape” about, well, mixtapes), one was OK (On Bowie), and the one on Taylor Swift (Heartbreak is the National Anthem) was honestly mediocre. I have some notes on Heartbreak is the National Anthem live…
-
From “Poetry and History” This is brilliant: “…it is not the poet’s function to describe what has actually happened, but the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary.” He continues, “The difference is that the one [history] tells of what has…
-
Recently, I thought of writing about all the good things that came out of my decade-plus career working with Search Engine Optimization (SEO.) I often focus on the ill effects when I write about it today, but there are things, especially when it comes to hyper-local and long tail keyword research that are helpful in…
-
While I’ve been sunsetting my interest in competitive Pokemon, the franchise still has that nostalgic pull on me, and Wolfe Glick has always made very interesting videos about strategy and how certain less popular Pokemon can be made to work in a high-competition setting. And yes, he’s talking about what the worst Dragon-type Pokemon is…
-
In this video, RJ of The Flourishing YouTube Channel investigates how local large language models with four billion parameters or fewer [that is, local LLMs like Ollama] handle delusional patterns and hallucinations. He utilizes a series of “oblique strategies” to generate complex, philosophical follow-up questions that push these smaller models to their technical and creative…
-
I remember reading this before and it’s still so true. Here’s what literary agent Noah Lukeman says about an MFA program in creative writing. “Take the $35-50K you’re going to spend ont he degree, buy yourself a good laptop and printer and a bundle of paper, and go off to a cabin and write. At…
-
How the 2012 Red Sox Spent $200 Million On A Dumpster Fire – by Jolly Olive The 2012 Boston Red Sox season is widely regarded as the most embarrassing and toxic year in the franchise’s modern history. Following a massive late-season collapse in 2011, during which GM Theo Epstein also left the organization, the team…
-
“No One Wants Albert Pujols’ Cards… Here’s Why!” – from Scottie B Cards I enjoy Scottie B’s videos because he dives into a lot of data that reveals some very interesting conclusions about the card market for certain baseball players. Albert Pujols is one of the greatest players of all time, with over 700 career…
-
The introduction is called “Surviving Usefulness” which is a fascinating title. It begins with this great quote: “Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin The whole first paragraph is excellent. I’d copy down the whole thing, because I have things to say every…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…