The bads of ads Oct 14, 2020

In London at the start of the year, perhaps there was more advertising than there usually is in my life, because I found its presence disgusting and upsetting. Could I not use public transport without having my mind intruded upon continually by trite performative questions?

Sometimes I fantasize about a future where stealing someone’s attention to suggest for the fourteenth time that they watch your awful-looking play is rightly looked upon as akin to picking their pocket.

Stepping back, advertising is widely found to be a distasteful activity. But I think it is helpful to distinguish the different unpleasant flavors potentially involved (and often not involved—there is good advertising):

Todo rocks Oct 13, 2020

Among people, I tend far toward liking to organize things, to make detailed plans, to conceive of my actions as within some sensical framework, etc. I appreciate that all this might be bad, but it is at least very compelling to me.

Among people with these kinds of traits, my guess is that I am unusual in how often when typing something into a todo list or writing it on a whiteboard, I vaguely wish that the task instead involved moving around a bunch of rocks, possibly organized into little heaps.

After having this fantasy a few times, I got some rocks. Here are a few of the more public ones.

200,000 hours Oct 12, 2020

I have never been an enthusiastic bed-goer, because I like life. But a nice thing about going to bed is that you can be confident that you are doing roughly the best thing. At noon, the smallness of the chance that your chosen task is really among the best ways to spend your precious moments in this world might be discouraging or oppressive. Perhaps you would only have to be a tiny bit smarter or think a bit longer to be able to recognize that this is the wrong way and that you could be doing much better. But at 4am, sleeping is probably pretty close to the most valuable thing.

War as a carefully honed coordination failure Oct 11, 2020

Today I watched some YouTube videos about the World Wars, and in particular how the first one came about. It did seem like a sequence of plausible sounding steps that led to a giant war. But there is an abstract level at which I still feel confused. Which is one where initially there are basically a very large number of humans who each very much don’t want to die presumably, most of whom have very little reason to kill almost any of the others. Then somehow this all turns into everyone putting huge amounts of effort in and risking their lives to kill each other. It is as if you told me that you had a barn full of soaking wet hay, and it turned into a big bonfire.

I suppose the natural explanation is that there are rulers, or in more game theoretic terms to match the incentive-level of my confusion:

Heavenly hellfire Oct 10, 2020

Today I read about ancient history instead of doing work. Which got me thinking about Santorini.

If you see blue-domed chapels with whitewashed walls perched idyllically over the Aegean sea, there is a good chance you’ve got yourself (a picture of) Santorini.

The mystery of the fall of the Bronze Age Oct 09, 2020

This evening my boyfriend and I decided we would like to learn about the fall of the Bronze Age. Really he wanted to learn about the World Wars or the rise of communism, but I pointed out that to understand WWI you probably want to know what was going on just before it, and that I would be willing to only ride this slippery slope as far as the Bronze Age, and that the Bronze Age collapse was pretty interesting. Admittedly I also wanted to learn about a period of history that had at most one of carnage and photography.

Punishment for forgotten norms Oct 08, 2020

I watched some of the vice-presidential debate tonight, in an act of uncharacteristic attention to politics. Which is to say, it’s not a kind of game I am familiar with the finer details of. Early on, one of the debaters was given two minutes to answer what sounded like an easy question, and proceeded to just openly and brazenly not answer it and instead talk about how bad the other party was for nearly the whole time in such an overt fashion that I felt embarrassed for them. They answered at the end, technically but not very informatively.

Pastoral meanings Oct 07, 2020

Shall we read a poem? Just one?

Or we could finish reading that George Saunders essay?

We finished it-‘Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.’ Remember?