2026-05-20 02:57:00
Language has the power to shape how we think about all kinds of things.
You see this criticism come up with mainstream news outlets (including purportedly liberal & leftist outlets) and how they frame their headlines - often in a way that minimizes U.S. cruelty and paints other countries as the bad guys, as the instigators.
It also comes up in gender analysis, with a great deal of english words being "man"-something like "man hours" or "mailman" or many other things.
Well, I've grown pretty uncomfortable with the way we talk about animals, and how the language we use helps build this idea of them as lesser, as something to be controlled, to be "domesticated" because these animals are "wild".
You might consider alternative terms like "undomesticated" animals, but this is no better - it frames them in reference to our control over them. Similarly, we often use "People of Color" instead of "non-white" now, so that we're not describing others in relation to whiteness.
I refer to "wild" animals as "free" animals now - because fundamentally that's what they are. I believe animals feel things, have some degree of will, are capable of suffering, and are capable of experiencing positive things too.
When we regard animals as "free", we begin to shed this deeply-ingrained notion that they are merely biological machines for us to do with as we please. A machine (bio or not) is never "free" because it has no will, but it can be "wild" if you do not have control over it. Consider a nuclear reactor that is malfunctioning and beginning a meltdown. The reactor isn't "free" to do as it pleases, but it is indeed "wild".
When we regard animals as "free" or "captive" we begin to see them as independent life, deserving of freedom. We recognize their capacity to feel, to suffer, and to express will.
When we do this, we value them as creatures with whom we share the earth, and we begin building compassion for these creatures we have long discounted and disrespected.
2026-05-20 02:40:00
A Republican Facebook page posted a list of violent acts committed by the left. Some of them I accept (assassination attempts on trump and kirk) even if the reality of it is more complicated. And then they include BLM protests. And a litany of other things.
Their conclusion is that SPLC hasn't labeled any leftist groups as hate groups, and they should have because look the left is so violent and hateful.
Of course, the post does not mention any political violence from the right. Nor does it mention political violence committed by our country, by the U.S.A. Government.
And I'm thinking about how this post, if you believe what it's saying, then it really looks like there's this organized violence from the political left that's not being taken seriously (or is being intentionally ignored) by the mainstream media (i.e. "leftwing" media).
And I'm thinking there's no way the people actually posting this - the leadership (or their media managers, i suppose) - actually believe the worldview they're presenting. Like surely they know better, they know about the violence on the right, they support it, and they're playing us.
But what if they're just stupid? (or misinformed) Our leadership. What if your leadership is stupid? Could they be? If they are, it's much more likely they believe some bullshit and are perpetuating it because they believe it. I assume to be in power they must be somewhat smart. But WHY WOULD I THINK THAT.
And if they're not in power because of smarts, then why are they in power? Because. That's why.
P.S. I drafted this post on April 26, thought i wanted to work on it more ... and am publishing it unnchanged now (though i did add bc thats why at the end).
2026-05-13 08:22:00
I was oblivious to the roguelike genre until I was staying at my bestie's one night and saw her playing Slay The Spire. I then stayed up til 4am playing it on her switch, got STS and have played many MANY roguelike games since then looking for similar fun.
Most of these games start off really strong. A lot of them have a unique mechanic they introduce. There's a set of cards and/or relics and/or enemies and you do a few playthroughs getting to know how the game works and figuring out how to win.
During this time, you're contemplating strategies and making interesting decisions, not sure which option is going to end up better for you. But it takes only a few hours, maybe 2-5 and you basically have the game solved. It offers different characters with unique abilities or unique relics and unlocks more dice/cards/etc.
This process is really fun, discovering new things and figuring out strategies, and making interesting decisions. But most games fall apart after the initial discovery period. There is little replayability. You figure out a dominant strategy and you rarely ever have to make meaningful adjustments to it.
Or another problem. Consider Decktamer. In an odd way it is one of my all time favorites but also one of my biggest letdowns and I'm not sure I even like playing it.
Decktamer is a deckbuilder type of game, but all of the cards are creatures with different abilities. You fight and kill or "tame" enemy creatures to bring them onto your team. The core concept is awesome, and the early rounds are pretty fun. The later rounds less so. But the real problem, and the one other games share is is it's lack of a meaningful progression system.
Slay The Spire has four distinct characters, and each has its own distinct set of cards. Every single one is extremely well-balanced, leaning toward high difficulty. So progressing from one character to the next is meaningful, opening up completely different playstyles, even though every character sees the same monsters, events, and mostly the same relics. It helps that each characer has several sub-playstyles to choose from, like The Silent who can be Poison or Shivs, a range in-between, or genuinely focusing on neither of her most distinctive features.
And then Slay also has TWENTY ascension levels for every single character. It is arguably too many. But the difficulty increases on each ascension are felt, and manageable. Ascension 20 is a beast, though. I have over 700 hours in Slay The Spire to beat every character on Ascension 20 without savescumming. Its nuts. I did it WITH savescumming after about 600 hours lol.
At least 90% of the time when losing a Slay run, I can point to several instances where I made a wrong choice that led me to my demise. You do get utterly fucked by RNG every once in awhile, but even then there's still usually something you could have theoretically done better.
Decktamer ... ugh ... When I first got it, there were like 5 difficulty levels. You had to beat Normal to get Hard & Hard to get Expert, etc. That was cool - not every game needs 20 freaking difficulties lol. So I'm working on Normal when they drop an update, add a bunch of "half" difficulties (like 4.5) and now we have like 8 difficulties. But they're all available all the time.
So any difficulty progression now has to be self-imposed. I want my games to give me challenges to beat. If you give me all the difficulties, the only challenge is beat the hardest difficulty, so I have one and only one thing to do, so I either give up when it's too hard or I beat it and don't wanna play any more because all the good challenges are done.
And no, I can't just start on a lower difficulty & work my way up - it just doesn't feel the same.
A lot of games (including Decktamer, maybe?) have other challenges available, in a 'Challenges' menu. And for some reason they always fall flat for me. They just don't generally seem interesting, and I think it's because they call for basically the same playstyle as the normal difficulties, or they just don't make decision-making more interesting.
So yeah, I like ascending up the difficulty ladder.
Decktamer also fails to provide different characters. There are no characters. Different starting creatures do give a very different feel to a run, but there is no progression, no new challenges, just options.
It is a remarkable and disappointing the number of roguelikes that have these basic problems. Not every game can or should be Slay The Spire. Some games are cheapo little $5-$10 games that you play for 3 or 4 hours, have some fun, and walk away feeling good.
But there are a great deal of roguelike games that seemingly aim to be Slay The Spire with a unique twist. They do an extremely good job with the core concept, have excellent gameplay mechanics, and clearly took a lot of work and love.
But then they fail to tie everything together in a meaningful way. They slap on different "characters". They throw in a ton of relics, or make other shallow changes, leaving me wanting meaningful challenges.
2026-05-08 11:53:00
I've lived with depression/anxiety/whatever for years, many of them untreated. Five or so years ago, I started therapy and have been in it most weeks since then, except for one lapse after getting booted from one office for insurance reasons.
Over the last ~2.5 years, I've done no kind of regular work, and my priority has been on keeping myself balanced and well. Most of that time has required a great deal of leisure, rest, tv, video games, friend time, and support (both material and social). I've also made an effort to exercise more and eat healthier.
I've been on an upward trajectory for awhile, but in the last two or three months there's been a seismic shift in my general sense of wellbeing and my ability to do ... things.
I credit this to the years of work at improving my mental (and recently physical) health. But meditation was a huge step for me in terms of treatment. I asked my therapist about getting social support for meditation & so we started doing a guided one at the end of our sessions.
That translated into me meditating at home, on my own - something I wasn't able to make regular previously. And I can basically see a straight line from meditation to a significant amount of improvement in my wellbeing and ability.
And this newfound wellness has been extremely enlightening. Like I knew I felt bad before, but it's really easy to lose sight of how bad you feel once it becomes your normal. But being able to clean the kitchen without being in pain felt like magic. (psychic pain, like physical but its intangible, not in the body)
And then recently I'm burnt out. I pushed myself past my limits for several weeks now - due mostly to life's very real external demands, things that called for my effort.
It's just a very stark contrast between the good-feeling and the bad-feeling. The normal Reed who's in no pain versus the depressed Reed who's in constant pain. Right now I'm getting an almost pleasant mix of the two, but less of the me who feels good. That other one's more familiar though.
And sadly, the meditation (and also yoga) have not been getting daily attention these past few weeks. And weed has. It's not good, nor is it permanent.
2026-05-01 02:27:00
I got a new computer (hand-me-down from bestie) and got my Windows setup for gaming & casual use. And now I'm ready to start installing Linux and setting up dual boot. For many years, I ran Fedora -Not sure why but I did rather like it. But eventually I switched back to Linux Mint because it is the defacto casual build, plus I thought it would have better games compatibility than Fedora.
And so here I am today, wondering: Should I get Mint or Fedora?
And this is a terrible problem for an operating system to have. Nobody's thinking deeply about "Which Windows should I get?" You just get the latest Windows, or mayyybe the 2nd most recent version. Either way, its just not a very complicated choice.
Which brings me to this idea. I don't think trying to build one mega distro makes any sense - it just wouldn't fit with the nature of the linux community.
But we could have a single Unified Linux Installer. I care very little about the specific decisions and very much about the ease of the process.
A Beginner mode could literally give you a single option for your distro, let's say Mint or Ubuntu or Fedora Desktop - it does not matter. The Desktop Environment also doesn't matter. The important part is: A beginner does not have to make any technical decisions when starting with Linux. They'll still pick their username, maybe go through a customization step for desktop colors & other stuff like that. Maybe there's also a screen to pick which software to install initially (userland things like Libreoffice and Gimp and Discord)
An 'Advanced' mode could then give you the majority of options most people would want. Offer you the major distro choices, you pick one, and then it offers you the major Desktop Environment choices and you pick one of those. Maybe there's some more advanced configuration options available beyond the 'Beginner' mode.
And an 'Expert' mode would ... i don't know. You get the point. Some proper Linux nerds could figure out what goes into 'Expert'.
I will say - all versions of the Unified Installer should give you the options to go into advanced settings on any of the screens - like do you need custom partitioning for a dual boot? Or, whatever else.
And Gaming really needs an explicit step in this install process. A screen to select which game stores you want to install (Steam, Epic, etc) and game-related software like Discord and OBS. The entire ecosystem around gaming on Linux & running Windows software on Linux is just ... too freaking messy, too freaking technical, and it really needs smoothed out with a Gaming UI. But gaming is a talk for another day.
2026-04-26 02:06:00
There's not a lot to say about this book (I lie, look at this post length!). It is short, a very quick read if you're a reader. I do have some criticisms which I'll discuss because I enjoy being critical.
Mitch reconnects with his former professor Morrie, who is dying from ALS, and they discuss the meaning of life.
I recommend this book. It makes you think about life and what's meaningful. It encourages meaningful and thoughtful reflection. It advocates for goodness, for love, for kindness.
I might have read this book in high school, but then I definitely read it in my early 20s. I believe it hit me fairly differently now than it did back then. Back then I had a much less developed perspective on the challenges and meaning of life, so this book took the role of a wise guru who knows what's right. Now, it strikes me as just a man, who's speaking about his own life, his own experiences, his own sense of meaning - even if much of the language is presented as a teaching lesson to be taken as truth.
On this reading, it was definitely a reflective experience, a lot of nodding along, some criticism of things I didn't have the breadth to criticize a decade ago, and just a slightly stressful experience for reasons I don't totally understand. Any kind of non-fiction or serious book tends to cause me stress, which sucks because I quite like learning things, but I don't like being uneasy.
I have one major criticism of this book, and one more minor one.
The major one, which I've already touched on. The book is written in a prescriptive way: Morrie knows what's important in life, listen to him and take his lessons as your truth.
This tone shines brightly early in the book when Mitch is discussing the OJ Simpson trial and celebrity gossip magazines. The idea put forward by Morrie and by Mitch is that the OJ Simpson trial is not meaningful. That people are wasting their time by spending hours and hours watching the trial, something that has no bearing on their personal lives. The idea is that they should instead be spending this time on "meaningful" things like spending time with loved ones and pursuing passions (but not to the detriment of connecting with people you love).
The prescriptive nature of this perspective is bothersome to me. I watch Olexa, a YouTube content creator who plays Roguelike games. He has like a 15 episode series on Mewgenics so far, and I love watching it. I don't find it meaningful. Its not helping me connect with others. I'm not wanting a parasocial relationship. Its not helping me in my life.
But I like it. I want it to be part of my life, because I just simply enjoy it.
Morrie & Mitch's prescriptive perspective just doesn't acknowledge the reality that ... different people have different tastes and we don't all want our lives to take the same shape.
This is a major criticism I have, but it doesn't de-value the book for me at all. It doesn't keep me from appreciating the reflection encouraged by the book. It doesn't stop me from thinking about what's meaningful to me. It is something I was entirely unaware of when I read it a decade ago.
And a minor (or less major) criticism.
Morrie is extremely privileged. He has a wealth of people who love him, a wife who cares for him, money (or health insurance benefits) for medicine, for modifications to his home (which he owns, I believe), for special furniture, for a hospice nurse, for all the things that make dying better. He is also an accomplished sociology professor, and gets a spotlight on national TV (3-episode miniseries).
He speaks a fair bit about how materialistic our culture is, which I do agree with. And he talks about the issues with pursuing your career to unreasonable ends. I generally agree with his perspective here too. The criticism is really about the fact that his life worked out very well for him economically. He wasn't rich, but he was well-off. He lived well and had the wealth to be cared for in his final days as he didn't work. He also loved his job and from my understanding did give a lot to it, working until about 6 months before he died, even though he was already getting much sicker.
The TLDR is that he was successful in the material things, which gave him the privilege of not caring about material things. I don't think this is cause to dismiss his perspective, and I think his perspective is extremely valuable and worth considering.
I just think it's good to keep in mind the context of his life.
And my big mental reframing of this book was significant for me. As I already said - a decade ago, I accepted this a wise figure giving prescriptive advice. Now, I see it as a story about a man (or two men because the book is about Mitch as much as it is about Morrie) who is sharing what's meaningful to him. No matter the language used, this is still merely one man's story (Morrie's story) about what's important to him, and another man's interpretation (Mitch's interpretation) of that story.
