I replayed Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines (2004) recently

Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.

Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).

I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.

However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.

This reminds me of the surprisingly effective inflatable frog costume that was in the news recently during protests against ICE

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

I think that power will always be a problem that we need to be mindful of. Even on the small scale, power imbalances can arise and lead to harm if we don’t proactively manage them. I find it useful to think of anarchism as an ongoing process rather than a goal, which means that the task will never be completed.

Regarding democracy, I’ve really enjoyed Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s writings. They propose a sort of radical democracy. I think it’s “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” that I’ve read some of. It’s pretty dense, but I found it rewarding, and it reshaped how I think about democracy. In particular, I was far more pessimistic about the possibility of democracy at all before I read it.

I think the YouTube channel Think That Through was what led me to go read Mouffe and Laclau, if you’re a video enjoying person. It wasthis video on Hegemony

“Communism is less about an end goal, and more about a continuous process”

This is how I think about my own anarchism.

I don’t disagree with you that class distinctions would naturally arise from the systems of production and distribution, but I don’t see that as a problem really. There are some features of human society that feel analogous to gravity, in that they exist as functionally immutable forces that we must learn to navigate around and through. Even if we somehow achieved what we would consider to be a utopia, it’s realistically not going to stay that way — there would inevitably be some event or new development that would disrupt the balance of things. Such change isn’t necessarily bad, especially if we respond to it properly. It is inevitable though, which is why I find it useful to think of it as a process. I can’t remember who I heard this from, but a phrase I like is “my goal isn’t to make anarchism, but to make more anarchists”

I don’t consider myself a communist, but I like your comment because it highlights how much we have in common. A communist society wouldn’t necessarily be non-anarchist, and vice versa.

For now though, I find myself happy to shelve most ideological disputes with communists, because we’re so far away from either an anarchist or communist society that it seems more productive to use our common ground to strive towards a world that both of us would agree is better.

I would interpret “demonizing” something as meaning misrepresenting it in a hyperbolically negative manner that may even involve completely constructed criticism.

I don’t think that highlighting authoritarianism in past social experiments constitutes demonising them. You’re right that there were significant successes in these projects, and also that they weren’t perfect. If we don’t properly acknowledge the ways in which they went wrong, can we really hope to do better in the future?

I don’t see any way in which the people you’re replying to are being at all revisionist.

Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.

It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

That’s not true.

“The capital and largest city of both England and the UK is London; Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast are the national capitals of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

Seconding your thoughts on nonstick and cast iron. I haven’t used other kinds of pans, but I like cast iron enough that I’d consider having at least one of them to be essential.

Getting a good sear is pretty helpful towards avoiding something sticking.

I guess this map doesn’t count Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast as capital cities

In terms of who manufactures chips for RAM, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron have a combined market share of 94%. I don’t know how big of a slice of the pie that Micron is, but it seems we’re down to two (and those two are also investing in AI — for as long as people are buying, anyway)

Damn, that’s insane. I live in the UK, so my exposure to this stuff is mostly either a regular throughline of offhanded jokes about Americans and their guns, and occasionally the news becoming dominated by an especially bad shooting. We’re quite separated from the constant reality of it, because so much of it does just fade into the background, to be highlighted only as statistics

Ignorance isn’t bliss when you’re living in an objectively crazy world. At that point, you either internalise all the craziness and believe it’s in your head, or you look up and recognise that it’s the world that’s nuts. I’d prefer not to live in such a world, but given that I do, I might as well not be in denial about it.

Isn’t there only like, 2 other manufacturers of RAM?

I had a pretty miserable childhood, so I actually weirdly like being an adult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m frequently miserable now, and often drowning under chronic stress that my childhood self couldn’t have even conceived. At least I’m living a life that’s my own now though. It’s amazing what a bit of agency can do to help you cope.

And even though that stress is often borne of things beyond my control, as an adult, I have the opportunity to find other people who are suffering under the same or similar systemic oppressions as I am. Sometimes this can lead to being able to make some small, concrete changes with the system, but most of the time, it just makes me feel less alone. I was a very lonely child, and one of the things that allowed me to break out of that was the freedom of adulthood.

I peer pressure many of my friends into using adblockers and other tech stuff that gives them more agency.

Something that I’m especially chuffed with is that a I actually caused a friend to switch to open source software for scientific research. She’s doing a psychology PhD was getting frustrated with the online experiment setup on the no-code experiment builder she had been advised to use. The platform didn’t allow her to input the experiment parameters she needed and she was complaining to me, and so I had a gander at it, out of curiosity.

I expected there’d be some documentation showing how to use the experiment builder, but there was nothing I could find. Everywhere I looked, there were just more sales pitches. It seems that my friend was only using it because the university had a license for it.

I exclaimed that the lack of documentation and features was ridiculous, given that there’s almost certainly an open source equivalent that does more, is free, and almost certainly better documented. I said that flippantly, but then went and researched that. I showed her a few different options and she ended up going for one called PsychoPy.

As one might be able to gather from the name, that’s not a no-code experiment builder, but rather one that uses Python. However, for my friend, this was a feature, not a bug; although she didn’t already know Python, she was keen to learn — “what’s a PhD for if not to learn how to do actual science?”.

I found it quite affirming because I don’t know if she would have had this thought if not for me. I’m very much a jack of all trades, master of none, due to having many different interests and being spread relatively thin between them. I’m a better programmer than the majority of scientists in my field that I’ve known, but probably worse than most people who actually write code for their jobs. However, gaining expertise in the more computery (and in some cases, philosophical) side of science makes me feel like I’ve “diluted” my scientific expertise compared to my peers. It’s nice that this problem was one at the intersection of my knowledge areas.

If you look at screens a lot, you might be doing the wrong kind of blinks.

I learned this when I had to be seen at the dry eye clinic, but there’s two kinds of blinks you can do. When your eyes get overly dry or you get something in your eye, the way that you blink is more deliberate or forceful. You can tell if you’re doing this kind of active blink by gently placing your fingertip in the top outer corner of your eye socket, and seeing if you can feel movement there when you blink.

The position for each person is slightly different, so just try different positions for your fingertip and do deliberately strong (but not too forceful) blinks until you can feel the muscles underneath moving. It’s quite subtle. For me, the location is just below the bone of my eye socket, directly up from the outer corner of my eye.

The other kind of blink is more passive, and is what the vast majority of your blinks should be, and people who use screens a lot tend to not do enough of these because they keep their eyes open for too long while using a computer, drying out their eyes and necessitating those big blinks I described above. The small blinks are important because they stimulate the lipid secreting glands in your eyelid rim, which can lead to dry eyes.

Put your fingertip at the corner of your eye like I described above, and this time, try shutting your eyes gently and slowly, as if you’re trying to stay awake but you’re unable to stop yourself from drifting off. If you’re doing it right, you shouldn’t feel muscular movement as you blink. You might need to finetune your fingertip position by a few millimetres, because if you’re too far out, you won’t feel muscular movement even if you’re blinking wrong. Once you’ve got the feel of how to discern between the two kinds of blinks, then you can see if you can do the passive blinks but at normal speed, as if you’re just a normal person and not sitting there with your finger on your eyes feeling silly.

I find that I’m way less likely to get dry eyes if I make sure that I occasionally do “sets” of passive blinks when I’m taking breaks from screens. I do like 20 of the normal speed passive blinks, and then 10-20 passive blinks that take longer, with my eyes remaining closed for a second or so after each one. I’ve found that now that I have the knack of it and don’t need to feel with my fingers whether I’m doing it right, it can sometimes be a fun way to fill the time.

Edit: this will not give you more muscley eyes, but is an actually useful skill to build if you are someone who has unknowingly built a habit of blinking in the bad way

I was going to edit my original comment to add this on, but that wouldn’t have notified you, so here’s an additional comment.

I was just reading Alyssa Battistoni’s book “Freedom Beyond the Free Gift” and there was a line that reminded me of you, and my response to you because of how effectively it distilled my entire thesis into one, guiding question.

“What must we do to make freedom possible on a damaged planet?”