personal - lesser daemon (Page 3)

30

Jan

Some Things I Believe

I spent a while today working on adding animations to a Jupyter notebook in anticipation of writing a follow-up to yesterday's post, but in a self-own I will never stop repeating I forgot to push them to git and I don't want to spend another two hours rewriting the same code. I'll write that up eventually, but for today, I have been thinking a lot about what people believe and why they believe it. Obviously, the various ghouls and goblins currently in control of America are a big factor in that, as are their feckless opposition who appear to believe

4 min read

20

Jan

Now Is Usually A Bad Time

For the 2,922nd day in a row, it's the stupidest day in American history. I am spending the day addressing save the dates for my wedding and slow-cooking some short rib. It feels strange to be going about my usual business during world-historical moments, but since "weeks where decades happen" have been happening with an alarming regularity for quite some time, it seems like the only thing to do.

In retrospect this was a pretty bad week to decide to give Bluesky a shot. I used Skybridge to import my old follows from Twitter (which was a pretty smooth

3 min read

19

Jan

Hierarchy Of Needs

As I attempt to re-orient my internal compass towards prioritizing my mental and physical well-being and close relationships, I've been thinking a lot about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's been a popular meme format for the last few years, but it may shock you to learn that it's an actual psychological theory from the 50s!

This is far from a rigorous scientific concept, and Maslow himself was kind of a weird asshole - he came up with the pyramid by studying "self-actualizing" people, believing that studying struggling people could be of no use:

"The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and

4 min read

16

Jan

In Search Of A Second Brain

For most of the past decade, I have been pretty good about keeping notes. This is maybe the one thing I can consistently take pride in: no matter what else I'm dealing with, I tend to keep a journal and write things down. The format this takes over the years, however, has changed a lot.

A timeline of my private and public note-taking practice.

A brief summary: up until I started grad school in 2018, I kept my journal, to-do lists, writing drafts, and so on in Microsoft OneNote, taking paper notes in the context of classes because I felt

5 min read