who got knocked up and who can't ever be

The thought I had was "who can't ever be knocked up because infertility"

I would have never posted this if I tried to edit it. Poetry is too foreign a medium and a couple bits are too raw.

Just posting this before I start thinking about it too much

    We few
        Stand in the shed playing dsm roulette, thats you
        but not me i'm just paranoid. Who can't watch horror they're too jumpy
        who likes to 'cause it's worth the laugh.
        Dad watches fireflies alone outside
    We happy few
        grow branches off the grapevine, greencard marriage, feral cousin
        who got knocked up and who can't ever be
        Mom traps an in-law in the kitchen
        New stories and new faces next time
    We band of brothers

Been a strange year but a good year.

I joined a homebrew club and have leaned into the social side of that hobby. I've been playing ping pong again. I've made a much bigger effort to be social in general over the last year because I realized I was damn near reclusive during and after covid. Looking back I have always tended to be less social, but in 2021 i had some bad anxiety and froze up.

Been trying to get back into jogging after a long break to recover from a stress fracture caused by some uneven gait issues, extended by not wanting to do anything (see above). Also doing some beginner yoga. So I'm learning that I don't know how to breath from 2 directions. I'm not about to join a choir and find out from a third direction.

My capacity for doing things or "getting things done" seems to vary wildly, and I'm still learning to notice when and why. Compared to 6 months or a year or 2 years I'm a genius. Compared to pre-covid / pre-anxiety -- not sure. The "hindsight is 50:50" saying seems fitting.

"John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder."

Oh that's not too bad if you can get multiple firings in a session. I was assuming the whole kiln has to cycle up and down like with pottery

You made cloisonne sound approachable until I counted and it's got to be cooked 4 times.

Your mill project has been fun to follow. I knew a guy who made some upgrades to a CNC router he bought but nothing close to the precision and ambition of yours

There's always part of me that's surprised that enameling works at all given the difference in thermal expansion. Though the lower thermal expansion of glass would leave it in compression, so there's that.

I know with pottery finding a glaze chemistry that fits a clay and firing level is empirical or trial and error. Sounds like enameling is similar and the well known artists are guarding their knowledge.

Florida malaria outbreak still going, with local cases now at 7

Lots of cool stuff in that article

To go back to the slime mold, how does it decide?

We know it has memory. It can learn from experience. We know it does make all kinds of decisions if you give it various options of things it can do. The whole thing is a hydraulic computer. We injected little fluorescent beads into the thing. There are flows through the cytoplasm. And the cool thing is that if you have a fork like a “Y,” you see that it just shuts off one branch off, and the stream only goes the other way. It has selective control over each branch point—it’s a synapse, basically.

Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis.

When I say this thing “wants to do XYZ,” I’m not saying it can write poetry about its dreams. It doesn’t necessarily have that kind of second-order metacognition; it doesn’t know what it wants. But it still wants. [...]

I’m sure once we start looking, we’re going to find degrees of agency all over the place.

Oh man I was expecting something lighthearted from aiweirdness, but

What does this mean? Assuming they know of the existence of GPT detectors, a student who uses AI to write or reword their essay is LESS likely to be flagged as a cheater than a student who never used AI at all.

From the Airbnbs I've stayed at the last few years it seems the days of a nice Airbnb for cheaper than a hotel are long gone. Though also I've noticed more hotels being run down and dingey than I remember from years ago

When we still book Airbnbs it's when having a full kitchen outweighs the bizarre decorating choices and 'somebody's uncle stays here when it's not booked' vibes.

Weird phase. Feels like I've gotten more done and stalled out on more things in the last six months than in years.

Had both our old cars failing at the same time in April. Getting it done: got one repaired and bought a replacement for the other. Stalled: sale price of the car we don't need will be about double with ~2 weekends of work but I haven't touched it in a month.

Was offered an old fishtank and stand, cleaned it up, re-painted the stand, have some plants and little fish and it's been going steady for 2 months now. Stalled: haven't painted the cabinet door for the stand, it's just been sitting next to it the whole time.

Got ahead of the heat and planted a garden a couple weeks before the last frost day. Had to cover it with tarps one night for a frost, but it's been doing great. Been giving away tomatoes. It's kind of a chaos garden and I haven't weeded it as much as I should but I don't care. I'm not giving myself crap about that tonight.

Joined a homebrew club last fall. It's been great. Buncha beer nerds and brewing nerds stand around and talk.

Been trying to make some changes with mental health and anxiety. Have been journaling a bunch and that's actually been helping. Even got a recommendation for a counselor. Stalled: have not yet set up a first appointment though.

Going on vacation to the beach in a week.

That looks like a fantastic trip.

I did a pretty sweet 450° faceflop off that diving board because 12' is higher than I realized.

That's good, it's bad luck to be superstitious. I learned that In middle school,,🤪🥴

Jonathan Haidt is the one who wrote The Righteous Mind which has been discussed here. That book has an interesting viewpoint that I find useful to remember in some Thanksgiving conversations, but Haidt doesn't do much useful with it in the book.

In his about page:

But the transformation of society in the 2010s was not caused by anxious college students. They were simply the “canaries in the coal mine” — the first generation to have moved their social lives onto social media platforms. As soon as they did so, around 2012, an epidemic of mental illness began.

There's a number of places that statement could lead, but he skips over the "transformation of society" part as far as I can tell. His policy proposals are to change the "Must be 13+ to register" checkbox to 16 and he wants Congress to make Facebook give him access to data for research.

I think he's found a real issue. I don't think he has a useful idea of what to do about it though.

Also from his about page:

We showed how this anxious new generation arrived on campus and demanded new norms, procedures, and bureaucratic responses that are incompatible with the older truth-seeking culture of universities.

University are so much rosier when we forget about the arms race of tuition and student loans and credentialism.

That sounds painful. I've mostly had to deal with vocabulary-only versions of these from an engineering manager who never had enough buy in from other departments to make major changes.