2026-04-06 01:36:00
[Everything between March 15 to April 05, Sunday]
Movies watched: 11 (1 in a cinema hall)Xacuti eaten: 3Currently reading: 18
I have been drinking coffee regularly since I was 17 years old. Before that it was sporadic during 12th grade examination prep days, to assist in staying up later in the night. At 17 and in college, the hostel I stayed in for undergrad used to have large coffee dispensers. I had a 400ml coffee cup, purple and green. That cup was what held my morning coherence. I have not stopped drinking it since.
But I have to say goodbye to it now, for a while, say a month... maybe three... yes three months definitely.1
I have had nearly a year since H.Pylori was last detected and removed from my system and yet it's damage remains. And in my infinite wisdom, I made little to no lifestyle changes. As I am in mourning, I sought some poetry to find some comfort. I came across this wonderful blog about coffee poets of 16th century islam. Here it mentions what a pope said (in 1600) after drinking coffee: Why, this drink of Satan is so delicious, we shall cheat the devil by baptizing it. It would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall make it a truly Christian beverage! Typical.
Here I write in the dead of the night making a pros and cons list.
I might stop having throat issues.
I might try other beverages instead.
I will have the opportunity to try a new morning routine.
I will get a chance to rely on tea.
I will try new places to sit at for leisure time, instead of cafes focused on coffee.
I will learn to put lots of ice in other beverages and make them last.
I might not die of bacteria-brought on complications.
I might die.
All my creative juices might have been the coffee talking and I could lose it all.
I might become a bad person.
I would get irritated easily as I won't have a warm coffee cup to wrap my fingers around.
I will not know where to meet people for socialising.
I might not be fun without caffeine.
I might lose friends if I am boring to be around without caffeine.
What if it is my addiction that is maintains and equilibrium in the universe and losing coffee will lead to a catastrophe?
I would realise I do not need coffee.
I will have to drink tea2.
How will I drive for an hour to a place if I cannot stop in the middle for coffee or carry some in my cup?
Gawd... oh gawd 3... The only way I can see myself get ahead is to be demonic about coffee de-addiction and act like I am against it, spiritually and literally. I will have anti-coffee sermons. I will encourage delusion and harbour suspicion towards anyone who brings up my coffee history. I will never acknowledge I have ever had a sip of coffee and talk about demolishing all coffee establishments. I will make posters for it. I will buy tea merchandise. I will crack tea pun jokes, like tea-shirts, tea-livision, nice tea meet you. I will include anyone around me in my suffering by saying dangerous coffee facts if they drink it around me. I will be vile to coffee and anyone who loves it. I will defini-tealy survive this.
Shit.
I watched 11 movies, and Project Hail Mary in theatre and yeah it was good but it lacked the charm I felt from the book which is to say the book was 100/10 but the movie was 8/10 BUT WHO CARES.
{insert face melting gif}/ Nats
I know I am meant to reflect here on the days behind me but I cannot bring myself to care about what is gone, as I wonder on what is to come. This is how you turn being insufferable into profoundness.↩
Tea? I am to drink tea? What the heck is wrong with me. The difference between a tea and coffee is the former is riding a merry go round and the latter is a rocket ship. I bet I read that somewhere.↩
A cat bit me. The one thing I had was coffee. My car got damaged by some buffoonery. The one thing I had was coffee. I played average pickleball. The one thing I had was coffee. I watched a movie late at night. The one thing I had was coffee. I created nothing of value all of March. The one thing I had was coffee.↩
2026-04-05 00:50:00
Okay, I think I clicked something wrong and deleted previous version of this post but nothing is lost.
Due to the recent incursion in our space - by which I mean a known bigot from Turning Point USA became a host of RPG Blog Carnival this month - we'd like to invite you all to join an effort to counter this by making Gay Beholder Blog Fiesta - a bandwagon type even which will end in about a month! Make posts about your queerest creation on your blogs or websites or wherever you publish your work and tag them #GayBeholderBlogFiesta. Tell us about it, you can find us on Mastodon at tabletop.social or dice.camp or Discord at rainbow OSR or NSR Cauldron servers!
Spread the word around, the more of us the merrier. At the end of the month one of us will gather all the posts and publish them in one place for everyone to see.
2026-04-04 23:47:00
or even a “like and subscribe” era, where everything is shaped for approval. it slowly teaches you to filter yourself: what will people like? what should i say? what should i hide? but trying to be liked by everyone flattens you. be fine with being unlikable. it is freeing.
2026-04-04 19:39:19
After just a couple months, I have already developed the habit of reading the Most Recents from Bear Blog from my mobile phone in between anything. It's gotten to the point where I'm once again opening Safari every hour or so to do it. I recently stopped using private browsing, which makes it even easier. It feels like how I used to use Reddit which I've been off of for at least a year or so. Surfing my YouTube feed has creeped back into the picture too.
I do really like when I read something and jot a couple notes so that I can email the person later, but I don't like the compulsion. With a community as small as Bear Blog, it also feels possible to stay "caught up". That FOMO feels encouraging even though realistically I'm only going to open about 2 out of 20 posts and actually read half of those.
I'd love to make a routine of sitting down to read at the computer, but the additional friction of blogging and reading blogs (which might be better framed as the "lubricated" experience of other platforms making blogging seem slow by comparison) combined with the business of life makes it difficult. I'm writing this as a reaction to the fact that I'm not writing and that I wanted to just write something. I want to be living in the moment and making things. When I'm not, I want to be taking the time to rest instead of compulsively filling downtime that should be restful with digital stimulation.
2026-04-04 01:04:00
My bubble and I have been reading Tanya Klowden and Terry Tao's new state-of-the-union style philosophy paper on AI, Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI. I should probably write a post about it sometime.
In that paper, Tanya and Terry mention this other paper, Roy Wagner's "Mathematical consensus: a research program". I looked it up. It is open access on Springer. I was a bit surprised to have missed this paper, it seems very much my alley.
I read the paper today, and boy was it fun.
One of the distinguishing features of mathematics is the exceptional level of consensus among mathematicians.
That's the first line of the abstract. Which we all internally just know perhaps. But when said like that, it gave me goosebumps. What does this mean philosophically? About the human condition etc. Anyway, if you're into math, you might immediately say, "Formalisation techniques ofc!".
Since a sharp rise in consensus occurs around the turn of the 20th century, it makes sense to explain this consensus by the concurrent formalization of mathematics.
So you'd be right, and it's interesting that formalization has become such a main thing only recently.
There is obviously a lot of history here.
... in earlier European mathematics and other mathematical cultures, consensus about the validity of arguments was substantially weaker or conceived differently than it is today. This means that contemporary consensus about the validity of mathematical proofs should be explained by historical changes in mathematical practice.
He ends the abstract by saying he will explore what actually brought about the contemporary form of mathematical consensus. Nice.
He begins the introduction section with his definition of mathematics, which I find quite beautiful.
It is commonplace to observe that mathematics is the realm of knowledge distinguished by a clear agreement on right and wrong answers.
But then he immediately corrects into the obvious nuance. Mathematicians don't actually agree on truth. They disagree about the axiom of choice and about whether asking if an axiom is "true" even makes sense. What they do agree on is whether a given proof is valid. That's the consensus we are interested in, and it's a much more specific and interesting claim than "math people agree on stuff".
So how do mathematicians reach their consensus? He articulates a dance.
Mathematician P (prover) suggests a proof. Mathematician C (critic) challenges it. The challenge is of the form “I don’t quite see how you justify this statement in the proof”. The answer may draw on a large variety of tools: known theorems, analogies to known similar cases, explication of implicit steps, reference to a diagram, etc. After a while, C may be persuaded that the proof is valid, P may be convinced that it is not, or C will require a re-write of some aspects of the proof. Several iterations may follow, at the end of which, usually (but not always), the prover and critic will reach an agreement concerning the validity of the proof.
There's a twist though.
P: my proof is valid
C: no what about X?
P: see X is actually A, B, C
C: yeah the old proof isn't valid, the new one is a new proof
That's the simple dance. There are ofc more complex dances. The story of the abc conjecture is one such. That thing is still unresolved.
Perhaps the most famous contemporary disagreement about the validity of a proof (again, not entangled with the problem of individuation), is Shinichi Mochizuki’s purported proof from 2012 of the abc conjecture. The majority of the mathematical community finds the proof impenetrable or outright invalid, but a circle of supporters is still convinced. In 2018, the efforts of two critics, Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix, culminated in pointing out a corollary whose proof doesn’t work. Mochizuki, however, claims that they simply misunderstand the corollary (Klarreich 2018). As one commentator put it, Scholze and Stix “appeal to ‘certain radical simplifications’ that seem to get the heart of the matter, but they are also aware that ‘such simplifications [might] strip away all the interesting mathematics that forms the core of Mochizuki’s proof’. … It is this that Mochizuki condemns as illicit, and in his own support, he offers a number of examples that, he claims, lead to incorrect results if so treated. But Mochizuki, in defending himself, again uses some idiosyncratic definitions for common constructions in category theory, while still using standard terminology.”
The paper goes on. The quick paper preview blog post ends here, but I highly recommend giving the paper a read, it is a fun one.
2026-04-04 00:30:00
If you haven't noticed already, I really love creating things that encourage creativity in general, and blogging in particular. A challenge like JulyReply, inspiring blogger stories, or a blogger's toolbox collection.
I think they're great blogging boosters. A push without being pushy. Made just as much for others as for myself.
I'm also a firm believer that personal blogging should feel fun, not demanding.
Write often, preferably daily, but don't feel like every piece of writing needs to be a blog post. At the same time, don't hesitate to publish something because a stupid, lying voice in your head is trying to convince you it's "not good enough".
That balance is the hardest part. Not only when it comes to blogging, and not only in modern times. People were talking about the "middle way" over two thousand years ago.
In an attempt to gently boost blogging in yet another way, I've created a new add-on. Say hello to Bearlytics.
It's a widget that displays writing stats for your last 10 posts. Words written, average words per post, longest post, and a couple of other things. No comparing arrows, no rings to close, and no badges to collect.
Just a fun and simple little thing that hopefully encourages you to blog. And if it doesn't, that's perfectly fine.
Happy blogging!