Movies
- Spider-Man: No Way Home
- James Bond: No Time to Die
- Inside
- The Dawn Wall
- Happiest Season
- The Sound of Metal
- Driveways
- In and of Itself
- Our Friend
Books
- Will // Will Smith
- The Three-Body Problem // Liu Cixin
- Woke Racism // John McWhorter
New Music
- Inside // Bo Burnham
- Saosin // Saosin
- Chuck // Sum 41
- Duality // Duke Dumont
- POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR // Bring Me the Horizon
- Constellations // August Burns Red
- Greatest Hits // Waterparks
- Donda // Kanye West
Old Music
- Origin of Symmetry // Muse
- From Here to Infirmary // Alkaline Trio
New Songs
- Mr. November // Bartees Strange
- No Reason // Sum 41
- Still Waiting // Sum 41
- Come to Life // Kanye West
- Kingslayer // Bring Me the Horizon
- Numb // Waterparks
- Scavengers // Thrice
- No Way Back Just Through // Trivium
- Hollywood Sucks // Kenny Hoopla
- Goodbye // Bo Burnham
- The Final Episode // Asking Alexandria
- It’s Far Better to Learn // Saosin
- Save Tonight + Wake Me Up // ortoPilot
- Give it Up // Knife Party
- Immaterial // Sophie
- All My Friends // Creeper
- The Power // Duke Dumont
- Break Law // Dog Blood
- Can You Feel My Heart (Remix) // Bring Me the Horizon
- OK OK pt 2 // Kanye West
Old Songs
- Sorry About That // Alkaline Trio
- Soma // Smashing Pumpkins
- Into the Mouth of Hell We March // Trivium
- Citizen Erased // Muse
- Stickin In My Eye // NOFX
- Two Words // Kanye West
- The Animal and The Machine // Strung Out
Ideas
- The necessity of both other people and of looking forward
- hope’s power is destructive in taking us out of this here moment, but sometimes this here moment is maybe worth destroying.
- People are always an option. Sitting with someone is something in a way that sitting alone never can be.
- Suffering is infinitely more bearable when you know the expiration date.
- Here’s a new diet: be less bored. I’m becoming convinced that a significant factor in overeating is having minimal opportunity costs. “I forgot to eat,” was only ever uttered by a person with stuff going on.
- Got into a great writing flow. Easy prompt: treat joke questions w/ the utmost seriousness.
- Soberly acknowledge that clean, consistent “happiness” doesn’t exist. There are lulls within great days. Two, 10, 22 days in a row will blend together and rapidly be forgotten. You’ll think you’ve discovered the activity that really does it for you, only to find it boring a week later. This is all unavoidable and no cause for alarm. Once one accepts this texture of reality, a necessary resetting is possible.
- Now, I want you to switch “bad” with “normal.” It’s tempting to think that gratitude for grand moments is the key to the reset. It’s not. The key, in fact, is to remove the negative affect of “normal” days, because it’s “normal” days where much of life will be lived.
- Nearing the conclusion of a life period, the extreme reactions are to wish it would end, or to wish that it would never end. Lurking beneath either desire is usually some form of regret, since endings have a way of focusing attention on what should have, could have, would have been done if we knew then what we know now.
- Your truth is true but not necessarily TRUE.
- This conundrum is best resolved through two forms of honesty. The first is self-honesty, which begins with an awareness of your biases. Are you usually too hard or too easy on yourself? Are you more likely to blame yourself or blame others? Are you more likely to catastrophize or toss on rose-colored glasses? If you are paying decent attention to yourself, you should be able to find patterns in these non-fixed answers.
- This is not about how we’re all lacking attention now; this is about how ever more of our attention is devoted to the news. Yes, the maximum-outrage bent of social media plays a role. Still, if the news was only delivered in prosaic terms, the problem of thinking wayyyyy too much about politics would exist so long as looking at a phone was more interesting than doing nothing. And just about anything can surpass doing nothing.
- If you think you don’t care about credit, try living with someone who lacks a memory. The rhythm of do something nice = credibility gain is immediately snapped and you’ll be forced to witness how much of your own esteem was a product of that tried and true formula.
- The thing about hitting the bottom is that outsiders view it much differently than insiders. You are convinced your friend will finally change her ways because of a terrible episode last weekend. How could she not? This was so clearly the nadir. But your friend doesn’t see it that way because, of course, if she was seeing the world clearly she never would have been so close to a nadir in the first place.
- But when everything is so quickly funneled into a grand narrative, the evaluation of the thing itself becomes stupidly shallow. Narratives work to broadly and simply explain patterns, not to actually explain what’s truly going on in a given situation since life never has, never will conform to narratives’ simplicities. And the more you capitulate to narrative-based thinking, the more you will think you have it all figured out when quite the opposite is true.
Changed My Mind About
- Telling the truth isn’t the obviously correct behavior when short-term negative consequences are significant
- Most people have +/-20 multipliers that overwhelm all else – the equivalent of a one-issue voter. This helps explains fervent loyalty or hatred of, well, anything. You think Judger A is in denial about Bob when it’s simply that Bob hit a positive multiplier in Judger A that does not exist in you. The exasperated conversation where Judger B tries to convince Judger A stays so hopelessly exasperated because both parties are dimly aware that multipliers are at play. I just like him; It’s not that bad; I agree with you, but I don’t want to write him off. This is less than satisfactory when you come to a conversation with a +/-20 multiplier. And even though everyone’s multipliers are a bit different, it doesn’t feel like they should be. How does everyone not rate cheating at -20? The mistake here is thinking that multipliers are subject to rationality in the same way that the positive or negative sign in front of them is. If someone has something slightly positive, you can get it negative with persuasion, but you’re unlikely to push it deeply negative without bestowing that person with your experience since it is personal experience that usually powers extreme multipliers. Likewise, it was probably not cold rationality alone that got you to +/-20, so an honest self-evaluation wouldn’t conclude that you are smart in a way this unmovable opponent is not. That which is deeply held in oneself and rarely held in others always produces an extreme multiplier.
- If you can sharpen your media criticism from “untrustworthy” to “untrustworthy for x,y,z reasons and on a,b,c topics,” you’ll be in a powerful position to sort the news appropriately while also enhancing your critical thinking skills.
- Renting is often better than buying
- Compare unrecoverable costs (taxes, maintenance, interest, opportunity costs), not mortgage vs. rent.
- Land, not buildings, go up in value
- Take home price *5%/12. If you can rent for less than that figure, do it.
- That there may be more to discover, but only in the way that there is more to discover in a city you’ve resided in your entire life. Which is to say, harvesting is now preferable to searching. The shift to harvesting remains true regardless of the weather: it’s the understanding and commitment to this fruit as the best you will do that makes the fruit the best it can be.