Basement Whatever
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Category: Post
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In my (extremely biased) opinion, the most stylish people on earth work at Fluevog.1 Unlike, say, Aritzia, you can walk into a store and never predict how the employees are going to be dressed. It’s a brand that celebrates individuality to the point where you’re allowed to wear whatever you want, as long as the…
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One of Diablo 4’s most significant technical changes is its fully connected overworld. Instead of isolated zones, players move through environments that update continuously. Enemy density, weather changes, public events and world boss timers are all managed through cloud coordination. As clients request updates, servers adjust local states to reflect global conditions. The setup reduces…
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While you can always twist reality to soothe your ego, iron, with its uncompromising physical reality, won’t support your self-deception. It doesn’t give a shit how you feel. As Rollins wrote, two hundred pounds “is always two hundred pounds,” regardless of whether you slept well, had a breakup, want to lift, or want the weight…
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when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I…
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Reading Wikipedia articles from other countries is a good way to escape local bias, because other countries lack the incentives to prop up narratives. French Wikipedia paints the American Revolution as a violent and treasonous riot that started when Britain required the colonies to pay for their own defense: The American Revolution is a period of political changes after…
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The comic book writer Grant Morrison understood that if you get to tell a Superman story, you’ve been entrusted with global symbols of justice and kindness and goodness which are important to people. He understood this power, and when he had the opportunity to write Superman, he bucked every existing trend (and his own ouevre),…
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As Scott Adams says, our brains were not built to understand reality, our brains evolved for reproduction. Human brains don’t innately understand statistics and are designed for storytelling. People with widely different views (a Catholic and a Buddhist, say) can hang out together with no problem. In short, we don’t have a strong model on…
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I’ve come to accept that we all live in information bubbles, that it’s hard to pierce those bubbles, and that it’s helpful when we get a chance to see outside our realities. But unfortunately, piercing through what we know is often a very painful experience. One obstacle is that people get judgmental about people not…
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Balaji Srinivasan outlines his ten predictions on the future and current state of AI in this article. Among his predictions, he states that AI isn’t taking jobs as much as allowing people to take on any job. I’ve seen this directly in my experiments at Heartwizard Games, where I’m leveraging AI to create engaging stories…
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In his essay “How I Read,” Rob Anderson offers advice on reading better and more deeply, which it’s important because “You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow.” How does…
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You should write, not because it makes you rich or brings you site traffic. You should write because it enriches you. When you write, you generate questions, you pursue interesting curiosities, and you engage with that information. This process makes you a different person: That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write.…
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Grognardia argues that nerd subcultures, which used to be hard to access, have been transformed into brands to be marketed and have thus lost their nerd appeal: Nerd subcultures were once genuinely weird – offputting, insular, and proudly obscure. They were difficult to access and defiantly uncool and that very inaccessibility acted as a crucible,…
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It wasn’t Erol Otis (he designed the cover). It was John Dee, who came from a comics background and thus drew lean, muscular heroes and heroines. And as this article points out, he drew halflings really well: Jeff liked to show Halflings in actions other than picking pockets or running scared. His Halflings were fighters…
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History tells us that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw a woman down the stairs in a fit of anger that his thinking was interrupted when she insisted on talking in the hallway outside his door. The story is used repeatedly to help us understand Schopenhauer’s character. The problem is, it’s not true. So how did…
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Daniel Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, a foundational text about the various ways humans make decisions. This post summarizes a few of his strategies for improving thinking. One stood out, because I think it would apply to better hiring decisions: Delay Your Intuition: At 22, Kahneman redesigned the Israeli army’s interview system. The old…
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If you’re unaware, there’s a new conspiracy theory moving around the Internet that Roy Jay, an eccentric 1980s comedian, never existed. According to the theory, our memories have been manipulated by AI, so that we believe his existence, making it a deliberate Mandela effect. This is not true, but the longer, more interesting answer is…
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Lots of reasons, but the biggest one is that being around people and dealing with their various hang ups is part of being human, and we forget that at our own peril. But also because when you smile at the world, the world smiles back. The author chose to become kind after a lifetime of…
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The author thinks we could eventually move away from screens completely, which would be welcome relief to parents, internet addicts and office workers alike. The shift will be due to advances in computing which remove the screen entirely. Increasingly, I envision a world without phones or tablets or computers. A world defined by a more…
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What if the kids are alright? considering all the content i consume about society’s rapid decline, it’s consistently disorienting to put the phone down, step outside, and look at how little has changed since my childhood. And more: we have spent roughly equal amounts of time letting strangers on the internet tell us what the…
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