2025-06-13 08:00:00
Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent --
It's not enough to breathe -- my gluttonous heart wants to impose its imagination on Earth and all its inhabitants.
I want freedom, money, affection, play, power, validation, fulfillment, etc.
Of course I already have these things, but enough never seems enough.
These desires manifest themselves as an endless backlog of ideas and projects.
My backlog grows; my lifespan dwindles. I feel powerless against this trickle of time. When my optimism hits its limits, I mourn so many stillborn dreams -- breaking my back to bury impossible futures.
I want to want fewer futures, but I'm often too weak to put possibilities out of their misery. I'm learning to let go, but maybe letting go takes a lifetime.
My brain came pre-installed with Human OS; loss aversion will squander CPU until I install security patches (e.g. Taoism, Zen, stocism).
But I think I'm allergic to enlightenment. Meditation is difficult, quiet is boring, courage is scary, desire is addicting, etc.
"Dream themes" are my spiritual duct-tape. When desire outpaces optimism, I distill my projects into metaprojects [sic].
Most humans lack the resources to pursue megaprojects. Those who wage one-man wars-of-attrition guarantee failure.
A metaproject is an itch which scratches many itches.
So many bites. Scratching harder, clawing at skin, fighting flesh -- loss is inevitable under these conditions. Ignore that immediate irritation and erect a mosquito net. If your net works, it'll crowd with friends, finally finding relief from similar itches.
Metaprojects agglomerate. Your nets' threads tend to tangle together into an anti-mosquito tapestry. In those chaotic quilting patterns, you develop vocabulary to describe/distinguish distinct itches.
Your ultimate metaproject is precisely you and inevitably whoever you choose to become. It never feels that way. It feels like you're building an OS, learning Mandarin, writing another novella -- no, no -- you're writing an autobiography with blood.
2025-06-06 08:00:00
by Alan Watts
There is an old christian phrase -- Crux medicina mundi -- the Cross, the medicine of the world -- a phrase which is rather remarkable in that it suggests that religion is a medicine rather than a diet. The difference is, of course, that medicine is something to be taken occasionally -- like penicillin -- whereas a diet is regular food. Perhaps this analogy cannot be pressed too far, since there are medicines like insulin which some people have to take all the time. But there is a point to the analogy -- a point expressed in another Latin saying, not at all Christian, since its author was Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (Too much religion is apt to encourage evil). I am not thinking so much of the exploitation of the poor by a corrupt priesthood, or of the obvious evils of zealotry and fanaticism. I am thinking, rather, of the old Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine which is like a raft for crossing a river. When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.
There is something here which applies not only to the mere handful of people who might be said to have reached the opposite shore, but to most of us. To carry out the metaphor a little: if you are going to cross the river, you must make haste, for if you dally on the raft, the current will carry you downstream, and out to the ocean -- and then you will be stuck on the raft forever. And it is so easy to get stuck -- on the raft, on religion, on psychotherapy, on philosophy. To use another Buddhist simile: The doctrine is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. Too many of us, I fear, suck the pointing finger of religion for comfort, instead of looking where it points.
Now it seems to me that what the finger of religion points at is something not at all religious. Religion, with all its apparatus of ideas and practices, is altogether a pointing -- and it does not point at itself. It doesn’t point at God, either, for the notion of God is part and parcel of religion. I might say that what religion points at is reality, except that this merely puts a philosophical notion in place of a religious one. And I can think of a dozen other substitutes for God or reality. I could say that it points at one’s true Self, at the eternal Now, at the nonverbal world, at the infinite and ineffable -- but really none of this is very helpful. It’s just putting one finger in place of another. When Joshu asked his teacher Nansen, "What is the Tao, the Way?" Nansen replied, "Your everyday mind is the Tao."
But this doesn’t help, either, for as soon as I try to understand what is meant by my everyday mind, and then try to latch on to it, I am just sucking another finger. But why does this difficulty arise? If someone actually points his finger at the moon, I have no difficulty in turning and looking at the moon. But the thing at which these religious and philosophical fingers are pointing seems to be invisible, so that when I turn to look there is nothing there, and I am forced to go back to the finger to see whether I understood its direction correctly. And sure enough, I find time and time again that I made no mistake about its direction -- but for all this I simply cannot see what it’s pointing at.
All this is equally exasperating for the person who is doing the pointing, for he wants to show me something which, to him, is so obvious that one would think any fool could see it. He must feel as we all feel when trying to explain to a thick-headed child that two times zero is zero and not two, or some other perfectly simple little fact. And there is something even more exasperating than this. I am sure that many of you may, for a fleeting moment, have had one clear glimpse of what the finger was pointing at -- a glimpse in which you shared the pointer’s astonishment that you had never seen it before, in which you saw the whole thing so plainly that you knew you could never forget it… and then you lost it. After this, there may be a tormenting nostalgia that goes on for years. How to find the way back, back to the door in the wall that no longer seems to be there, back to the turning which led into paradise -- which wasn’t on the map, which you saw for sure right here. But now there is nothing. It is like trying to trace someone with whom you fell in love at first sight, and then lost touch; and you go back to the original place of meeting again and again, trying in vain to pick up the threads.
If I may put it in a way which is horribly cumbersome and inadequate, that fleeting glimpse is the perception that, suddenly, some very ordinary moment of your ordinary everyday life, lived by your very ordinary self, just as it is and just as you are -- that this immediate here-and-now is perfect and self-sufficient beyond any possibility of description. You know that there is nothing to desire or seek for -- that no techniques, no spiritual apparatus of belief or discipline is necessary, no system of philosophy or religion. The goal is here. It is this present experience, just as it is. That, obviously, is what the finger was pointing at. But the next moment, as you look again, the instant in which you are living is as ordinary as ever, though the finger still points right at it.
However, this irritatingly elusive quality of the vision to which the finger points has an extremely simple explanation, an explanation which has to do with what I said at the beginning about getting rid of the raft when you have crossed the river, about taking religion as a medicine but not as a diet. For purposes of understanding this point, we must take the raft as representing the ideas or words or other symbols whereby a religion or a philosophy expresses itself, whereby it points at the moon of reality. As soon as you have understood the words in their plain and straightforward sense, you have already used the raft. You have reached the opposite bank of the river. All that remains now is to do what the words say -- to drop the raft and go walking on the dry land. And to do this, you must drop the raft. In other words, you cannot, at this stage, think about religion and practice it at the same time. To see the moon, you must forget the pointing finger, and simply look at the moon.
This is why all the great Asian philosophies begin with the practice of concentration, that is, of attentive looking. It is as if to say, "If you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. But this needs a certain kind of concentration, because reality is not symbols, it is not words and thoughts, it is not reflections and fantasies. Therefore to see it clearly, your mind must be free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies of memory." To this we are probably apt to reply, "Fine, but this is easier said than done." There always seems to be a problem about translating words into action, and this problem seems to be peculiarly acute when it comes to the so-called spiritual life. Faced with this problem, we back up and start to busy ourselves with a lot of discussion about methods, techniques, and other aids to concentration. But it should be simple enough to see that this is nothing but procrastination and postponement. You cannot, at the same time, concentrate and think about concentrating. It sounds almost silly to say it, but the only way to concentrate is to concentrate. In actually doing it, the idea of doing it disappears -- and this is the same thing as saying that religion disappears when it becomes real and effective.
Now a great deal of the talk about the difficulty of action, or the difficulty of concentration, is sheer nonsense. If we are sitting down together at a meal, and I say to you, "Please pass the salt" -- you just do it, and there is no difficulty about it. You do not stop to consider the right method. You do not trouble yourself with the problem of how, when you have picked the saltshaker up, you are going to be able to concentrate on it long enough to bring it to my end of the table. Now there is absolutely no difference between this and concentrating the mind’s attention to see into the nature of reality. If you can concentrate the mind for two seconds, you can do it for two minutes, and if you can do it for two minutes, you can do it for two hours. Of course, if you want to make this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about timing yourself. Instead of concentrating, you begin to think about whether you are concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer you are going to keep it up. All this is totally off the point. Concentrate for one second. If, at the end of this time, your mind has wandered off, concentrate for another second, and then another. Nobody ever has to concentrate for more than one second -- this one. This is why it is quite literally off the point to time yourself, to compete with yourself, and to bother about your progress and success in the art. It’s simply the old story of making a difficult job easy by taking it one step at a time.
There is, perhaps, another difficulty -- and this is that in the state of concentration, of clear unwavering attention, one has no self -- that is, no self-consciousness. This is because the so-called self is a construct of words and memories, of fantasies which have no existence in immediate reality. The block or stoppage which so many of us feel between words and action, between symbol and reality is actually a case of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it. We want to enjoy ourselves, and fear that if we forget ourselves there will be no enjoyment -- an entertainment without anyone present to be entertained. This is why self-consciousness is a constant inhibition of creative action, a kind of chronic self-frustration, such that civilizations which suffer from an overdose of it go raving mad, invent atom bombs and blow themselves up. Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.
This is all really a case of our own proverb, "a watched pot never boils." For if you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating. Real concentration is therefore a rather curious and seemingly paradoxical state, since it is at once the maximum of consciousness and the minimum of ego-feeling, which somewhat gives the lie to those systems of Western psychology which identify the conscious principle with the ego. Similarly, it is the maximum of mental activity or efficiency, and the minimum of mental purposiveness, since one cannot simultaneously concentrate and expect a result from concentration.
The only way to enter into this state is precipitately -- without delay or hesitation, just to do it. This is why I ordinarily avoid discussion of all the various kinds of Asian meditation techniques, such as Yoga. For I am inclined to feel that for most Westerners, these are not aids but obstacles to concentration. It is not unaffected and natural for us to assume the lotus posture and go through all sorts of spiritual gymnastics. So many Westerners who do this kind of thing are so self-conscious about it, so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all. For the same reason, I am rather leery of too much Zen -- especially when it means importing all the purely incidental apparatus of Zen from Japan, all the strictly technical formalities, and all the endless and pointless discussion about who has or hasn’t attained satori, or about how many koans one has solved, or how many hours a day one sits in zazen, or meditation. This sort of thing is not Zen or Yoga; it is just a fad, just religiosity, and is precisely self-consciousness and affectation rather than unselfconsciousness and naturalness. If, however, you can really do the thing itself -- that is, if you can learn to wake up and concentrate at the drop of a hat -- you can take or leave the trimmings as you will. For the fear of exoticism should not prevent us from enjoying the really beautiful things which Asian culture has to offer -- Chinese painting, Japanese architecture, Indian philosophy, and all the rest. But the point is that we cannot really enter into the spirit of these things at all unless, in the first place, we can acquire the special kind of relaxed concentration and clear-sightedness which is essential for their proper appreciation.
Of themselves, they will not give us that capacity -- which is something innate. If you have to import it from Asia, you do not have it at all. Therefore, the important thing is simply to begin -- anywhere, wherever you are. If you happen to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. In Zen, they call this having a leaky mind -- like an old barrel with open seams which cannot contain itself.
Well, I think this is enough medicine for tonight. So let’s put the bottle away, and go out and look at the moon.
April 17, 1955
2025-06-04 08:00:00
They tell us that something is waiting for us on The Other Side, that death may be a pilgrimage and not a destination, that the afterlife is a warm awakening after the fretful dream of life.
The joke wasn't always about a suicidal bird.
By 1847, it had become a well-known anti-joke. Instead of a typical punchline, the chicken joke purposefully delivers a disappointing resolution.
In 1899, Henry H. Bliss was struck by a taxicab -- the first recorded car casualty in the US.
Before cars, people used vehicles called "horses". The non-LIDAR autopilot was ahead of its time, but the market was never going to accept 1HP and a 30-mile range. This is why Americans distrust European imports.
The US made more cars, faster cars, heavier cars; one could maim/kill oneself by stepping into oncoming traffic. All high-speed roads became portals to The Other Side.
Songs like Hit Me With Your Car and Crash the Car derive humor from such safety violations.
Any arbitrary animal could've crossed the road, but we coincidentally chose the "chicken" -- an enduring symbol of cowardice.
The way that they did and to grin like lions
Upon the pikes o’ th’ hunters. Then began
A stop i’ th’ chaser, a retire; anon
A rout, confusion thick. Forthwith they fly
Chickens the way which they ⌜stooped⌝ eagles; slaves
The strides ⌜they⌝ victors made; and now our cowards,
Like fragments in hard voyages, became-- Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1623)
In games of chicken, players demonstrate courage by yielding later than other players. Game theorists model such payoff matrices like this:
| Swerve | Stay | |
|---|---|---|
| Swerve | 0, 0 | -1, +1 |
| Stay | +1, -1 | -∞, -∞ |
This game normally has three Nash equilibria (i.e. stable strategies): (1) always chicken, (2) never chicken, or (3) match your opponent's stochastic strategy.
But not all chicken games are symmetric. When a lone man challenges armored vehicles, it feels callous to cram life into a lopsided payoff matrix.
The chicken joke is an anti-joke that morphed into an actual joke, but we've induced jamais vu. Over and over again, humans teach the new humans that pointlessness is the point.
But when we search for meaning in the seemingly meaningless, we discover motor vehicles, mathematics, misery, metahumor -- much more than a mere joke. Pulling that fraying string in your underpants, you find that the entire universe unfurls and, against all odds, everything remains connected.
Chinese authorities largely ignored Taylor Swift's T.S. 1989, which unintentionally memorialized the Tienneman Square (TS) 1989 incident.
Those hoodies were likely made in China and conceived in the United States -- Taylor Swift's US propaganda outsourced to Chinese sweat shops, then resold to US consumers to fuel Chinese propaganda, and then sensationalized/compressed into clickbait for US media outlets to advertise more McNuggets (which are ostensibly chicken).
There's nothing humorous about suicidal chickens, nor traffic fatalities, nor game theory, nor Tienneman Square, nor Taylor Swift. But it's funny if you think about it.
2025-05-27 08:00:00
If my mom wanted good art on her fridge, she could've purchased reprints of works by Vermeer, Lichtenstein, Wyeth, etc. But she didn't want good art -- she wanted my art.
Somebody with good taste could've made my website, but then it wouldn't be mine.
To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.
That's okay. Your "mine" is not my "mine".
Some folks run self-hosted websites on solar power. Others share wisdom on Substack. This guy posts manufacturing deep-dives to YouTube. Gwern does whatever this is.
It's an itch -- a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you.
I am not compelled to bake bread, nor provision servers, nor build chips. Yet that itch pervades, and it pulls me toward humor and systems and life and software and structure. And when emotion becomes unbearable, it erupts out of me: fiction, HTML/CSS, crappy robots, sad songs, and so on.
My website is my website.
In the past, I just wanted simplicity and friendliness: remove noise, boost contrast, flatten menu depth, boring HTML, reduce CSS, avoid JS, etc.
My website looked like this:
But things started going sour when I decided to occupy as much horizontal space as possible.
The plan was simple: slap flex-wrap on a ul. Unfortunately, text wraps too.
It was unclear where one link ended and the other began. Some folks read
inline and others perceive inline-block.
More whitespace? Yikes. Borders around each link? No way. Dots between the links? Yuck.
So let's vary the links! The chaos you see on my homepage comes from a few simple rules:
li:nth-child(4n + 0) { transform: rotate(1deg); }
li:nth-child(4n + 1) { transform: rotate(-0.6deg); }
li:nth-child(4n + 2) { transform: rotate(0.5deg); }
li:nth-child(4n + 3) { transform: rotate(-0.75deg); }
li:nth-child(6n + 0) { font-family: Times; }
li:nth-child(6n + 1) { font-family: Helvetica; }
li:nth-child(6n + 2) { font-family: Georgia; }
li:nth-child(6n + 3) { font-family: Times; }
li:nth-child(6n + 4) { font-family: Arial; }
li:nth-child(6n + 5) { font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; }I originally chose coprime integers for more variation, but I rather liked the subtle repetition in this pattern.
I love minimalism and hate sterility. I sprinkled three additional surprises to evoke a "used bookstore" feeling:
li:nth-child(5n + 2) { font-weight: 100; }
li:nth-child(7n + 2) { letter-spacing: -1px; }
li:nth-child(41n + 31) { transform: rotate(181deg); }The web remains an interactive medium. I wanted my site to react to cursor movement without JS; this CSS produced a pleasant "touching grass" feeling:
li:nth-child(2n + 0):hover { transform: rotate(-2deg); }
li:nth-child(2n + 1):hover { transform: rotate(2deg); }Okay, now it reacts to cursor movements, but I also wanted to exaggerate that scrolling feeling without scrolljacking. Simple textured backgrounds make a webpage feel more like a page. So I synthesized texture with css-doodle:
svg {
viewBox: .5 .5 10 10;
fill: #000;
circle*1000 {
cx, cy: @r(10), @r(10);
r: @r(.005, .01);
}
}So many little dots. In light mode, they become dust on paper. In dark mode, they're stars in the sky.
Today, my site looks like this:
Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it's my website and I'm perpetually becoming somebody else.
You'll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing -- whatever it is -- will come alive again and again.
2025-05-04 08:00:00
I can't live near friends right now, but I can synthesize some propinquity.
iOS's Find My enables friends/family to track my location in real-time. As somebody who hates notifications and SMS, this tech is godsend. My wife knows which coffee shop I'm at, my friends know exactly how much traffic I'm stuck in, etc.
I sacrifice my own privacy for convenience, but I never expect others to do the same. All my friends/family should feel entitled to privacy. There is no shame in unrequited location sharing.
Unlike read receipts, I do not expect the social norms on location-tracking to change any time soon. Most of the benefits of live location are conferred to the sharer rather than the receiver.
I don't want to bother people whenever I fly from SEA to SFO/LAX/etc. I want friends to know when I land, and I want friends to join my festivities.
You cannot count on others to check your location, nor to be available for your flights/fancies. Deeper relationships demand effort/planning/coordination. This isn't a replacement for real plans -- it's a backup for happy accidents.
Luckily, Find My can also notify them when you're near their 'hood.
This tech becomes extra valuable as you accumulate friends across Earth. You'll find that it's the biggest small world after all, filled with familiar faces in far-away places.
Don't leave serendipity to chance.
2025-05-02 08:00:00
Read my full sad-money mouth emoji proposal and/or submit your own idea.
