I would often use both the title and the person’s nickname, but never just the name. So, for example, “Papa Mike” but not “Mike” or “Michael”. It made more sense for grandparents because I had two of each, but I did it for my parents too.

I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there? That same friend told me that at least some of those stores are vanity projects for that same sort of rich person - they want to own the sort of store they think is cool or cute, and they don’t actually need it to turn a profit.

There is an old video game called Lords of Magic in which the Order faction (which is about unified effort towards the greater good) has as its top-level spell “Heroic Demise”. Mechanically the spell gives one unit a big boost to all its stats, but the catch is that at the end of the battle that unit always counts as having been killed.

I was very reluctant to use it when I was a little kid because I didn’t want to kill my own units, but of course the lesson is that units will die anyway and fewer will die in total if you deliberately sacrifice some. Very thematically appropriate…

I refuse to separate out my compost.

In the eyes of anyone who wants to elect pragmatists who don’t tilt at windmills.

I’m not sure why people want him to humiliate Democrats by trying something doomed to failure. Hegseth can’t be impeached successfully unless multiple Republicans support doing so.

So we’re at the “I didn’t do it, but if I did then it isn’t so bad” stage.

My dog loved being under a blanket but he never figured out how to get under it himself so when he wanted to go to bed he would come to me and whine so that I would tuck him in.

Oh I have a whole month left to change everything and turn my entire life around before my birthday. No doubt that will happen.

Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I become able to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.

I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!

I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.

But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? I’m better than most people at geometry. Strange.

December 2021

Bad decisions.

Now.

My life. Not where I wanted to be when turning 40.

Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.

Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman’s voice, but I can’t hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren’t speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying “Clang!”

I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.

This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.

(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)

They grab the hook because they intend to pull you into the water.

I did a double-take too, but she’s wearing skin-colored shorts with a red stripe on them over tights.

Either you choose to persevere against the un-enjoyable-ness, or you don’t.

I find that often my hobbies don’t make me feel “I look forward to doing this” before I start, or even “I am enjoying doing this” once I do. But they do make me feel “I’m happy that I did this” after I’ve made some progress.

(This is a very hard lesson for me to truly internalize.)

I used to work at a company making a physics engine for scientific applications, and our rule was bitwise replicability. The software running with the same inputs on the same hardware had to produce exactly the same output each time unless we did something that we knew would change the output. (Obviously that’s not possible in a game that has player inputs.) So, for example, someone (and by that I mean me) filtered out some zero terms that were being summed up and didn’t bother to run all the tests because they’re zeroes… But (A + 0) + (B + C) != (A + B) + C.

(In my defense, that didn’t take me long to fix once the nightly build integration tests failed. I would usually know better but I must have been having an off day.)

My favorite part of this is that the redistricting would have had no problems in court if the Republicans had simply not talked about their race-related motives in public.

With that said, I don’t have high hopes for the Supreme Court here.

Bing used to be better than Google for a time but it has gotten worse too to the point where I use Google again. Edge is, IMO, unfairly maligned. It’s a perfectly good browser, although Microsoft begging me to use it is quite annoying.

The curve for people who depend on the service seems wrong. I would expect a sharp drop as soon as the service goes out and then gradually a partial recovery as they find other things to do.