#mentalwires

[queenlua]

@mentalwires said: What’s the interpretation of The Hierophant that makes it relevant to engineers? The first few I saw on looking it up seemed incongruous.

it makes more sense if you think of hierophant as the conduit between "the ethereal realm (the world of abstraction, the ineffable, and also arbitrary arcane rules)" and "this mortal coil." just like priests interpret god's will into a form the laity can do something with, us filthy hacker-ly degens have memorized enough of the iso c++ standard to reliably tell mortals when they have Sinned and Angered The Gods and such. same hat really. sometimes the interlocutor between god and man is a priest but sometimes it's also a coyote-like figure

(there's also something to be said for, as much as old-school programmer types tend to be iconoclastic in various aspects of their personal lives, in their work, there's often a pretty intense reverence for tradition! whether it's of the useful variety—"maybe we should use these cool ideas from Ada, which solved this class of problem very elegantly and well way back in the 80s"—or of the more obnoxious/crippling variety, eg "the unix philosophy means actually it's cool and fine to have your tooling based giant horrific walls of command line flags and all software should aspire to this")

i'll admit i came around to this reading after reading Melissa Cynova's Kitchen Table Tarot, but it did resonate a lot with me & it's a fun take on a card that otherwise often feels a little stiff and lifeless lol

[ghostpalmtechnique]

@mentalwires asked

Really? You wouldn't accept, say, a 97% chance of becoming the richest person in the world (~$100B) in exchange for a 3% chance of dying? Seems odd, because surely that adds up to a lower chance of death on net due to the many protective things money can buy you.

I think this is

a) confused about how conditional probabilities work, though I admittedly do not have a strong enough math background to competently explain why.

b) factually incorrect, because as someone who is already in the top 20% of the US for individual income and has good health insurance, the main mortality risks for me are not significantly reduced by becoming fabulously wealthy.

But no, there is literally no amount of money for which I would play a game with a 1-in-36 chance of death.

[tanadrin]

@yavieriel

Eh, this is where as a somewhat monogamous person I'm going to have to disagree. If I consent to a monogamous relationship, then changing the terms of the relationship to non-monogamy is grounds for me to revoke consent. (Honestly to me non-monogamy sounds exhausting, one sexual relationship is more than enough for me.)

as mentalwires pointed out, though, this isn't about declaring the relationship open, it's about saying, "hey, would you be interested in an open relationship?" Which in Redditland is apparently a question someone only asks if they're already a dirty filthy sociopathic cheater who's secretly plotting to emotionally castrate their partner

and while i'm sympathetic to the "one relationship is enough work already" take, there seem to be a lot of monogamous people who think that they need to constantly police their one relationship for evidence of a thing they should just assume to be true (your partner finds other people hot sometimes) or who draw conclusions from the general concept of monogamy i think are entirely unwarranted (your partner occasionally wanting to fuck other people means they never loved you, in fact they hate you, don't respect you, and want to emotionally castrate you).

i realize i'm being a little unfair here--the venn diagram of monogamous people and people who are super fucking anxious about monogamy is not a circle--but enough people are super weird about monogamy that i can't help but think a big chunk of the population would be better served by not holding up sexual exclusivity as the end-all and be-all of romantic relationships.

One of the wildest ideas that bounces around the Reddit relationship advice echo chamber is the idea that merely asking your partner if they would go for an open relationship is perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

This episode of The Simpsons shows us just what an absurd caricature Judged Peter may have been

[etirabys]

mentalwires replied to your post “I thought it would be nice to be able to declare a call graph in the...”

mem will never be free() until the last class is strangled with the entrails of the last process

nice

[dandelionpie]

Okay @mentalwires all I can say is you fucking asked for it. This is

Madeline’s Lengthy and Mostly Very Positive Track-by-Track Review of

Off to the Races

by Jukebox the Ghost

(feel free to follow along at home on your Personal Listening Device; it’s all on Spotify or wherever)

(and I’m not going to follow any formatting rules because this isn’t being graded so fuck it quotes are in italics)

I don’t know if it’s just because I listened to it over and over again, but this album is an album. Friends, there are motifs in this album. There are themes. There’s something that’s not quite a narrative, but a strange awakening to the crises that plague people who have reached a certain stage of human development just beyond the beginning of real adulthood. 

1. Jumpstarted

Our speaker is awfully self-aware for someone who admits to a chronic lack of self-awareness. This song is like the “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” by Tom Waits for a new generation, except instead of tragic it’s just, like…incredibly goofy. It also follows in the footsteps of many other songs (the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” springs to mind), it rehashes a very familiar theme: Young Man sees Young Woman*; young man becomes instantly fixated on an imagined future with her; young man admits that his imaginings are the product of his deranged imagination but, though he fully admits to his own emotionally compromised state in great detail (and your gravity / my depravity / won’t take my advice), he refuses to relinquish the fantasy and face reality, even as he does so in the utterance of the lyrics. Rather, he accepts his eventual heartbreak to be as inescapable as the laws of physics - what goes up must come down, after all, and as foolish as his infatuation seems, it’s even more foolish to try to change something as immutable as that. It’s too ridiculous to be properly sad, but we feel for him all the same.

There’s definitely a gender element happening here. I’ve been that guy, but far more often, to greater and lesser extents, I’ve been that girl. We have this idea in our culture that women are obsessed with love and will throw themselves into relationships with men at the drop of a hat, but I’ve seen it played out far more often the other way. In my (limited! human! biased! don’t @ me!) observation, women may throw themselves into the emotional side of a relationship, but the planning part (this person fulfills everything I want from a spouse/life partner/parent of my anticipated children) and therefore it must be Fate)…well, I haven’t done that since I was about ten. I’ve seen grown-ass men do it on multiple occasions, to me and many of my female friends. So like…make of that what you will.

The song also does that cute thing where it name-drops the title of the album in the lyrics, and I love that.

*the object of the speaker’s affections in this particular song remains mostly ungendered except for one she pronoun in the bridge. If you ignored that one tiny “she” (or changed the gender of the speaker), it would be easy to make this song about a very real and serious problem facing today’s LGBTQ Youth: Queer and Here syndrome**. That is, when you see another person of more-or-less your persuasion and they are around your age, breathing, and moderately attractive, you tend to fall in love with them regardless of actual chemistry or lack thereof. Again: I have been the speaker, and I have been the object.

**EDIT: Ben Thornewill, who wrote the song…might be queer? I can’t find any info either way, except for he helped with a fundraiser for Everyone is Gay one time. Someone with a longer attention span should google this for me.

Enjoying this nonsense? Click below for the rest!

2. Everybody’s Lonely

This track continues the theme of powerlessness in the face of one’s own self-awareness (dragged into another heartbreak / like a moth into a flame) while implicitly making the way for a gentle interrogation of the music industry. Are we programmed for broken romance? Probably, but we’re sure the hell not going to stop singing about it. And we have to admit, it’s more than a little diverting. The singer is having a marvelous time with the vocals for how much he’s complaining, and the track switches up the speed and time signature more than once (there’s some sophisticated musical term I’m failing to call to mind here, but dammit Jim I’m an English major not a music doctor).

The title itself is a simple statement on the nature of humanity, and a somewhat comforting one (to me, anyway). It’s hard, but if everybody’s lonely, then…well, no one is, right? And, of course, the lyrics could also be read (heard?) as a comment on the content of this very album, as well as the greater Jukebox the Ghost canon, which, self-admittedly, mostly concerns either love or drinking too much (and often both). Lampshading? Probably a little, but I think it works.

3. People Go Home

I will admit: I hated this song until I saw the album performed live. It’s just so damned cynical, and at the same time describes a lifestyle (car! boss who wears a watch! wife and children and a house and a dog!) my generation seems to have given up on aspiring to. Because the American Dream is an illusion, etc. But the thing about it is, despite its dour outlook on the life of its subject, the song itself is just so much fun.

The metaphor of the calendar pages being torn off and thrown away would be a bit too cliché in a more serious track, but the irrepressibly catchy beat makes it work somehow. The repetitiveness is really artful - of course it’s repeating itself; it’s a song, but it also evokes the passage of time and the subject’s own mortality (the tick of the clock / and the tick of the clock / mark the moments ’til the ticking stops). And the abrupt end of the song is…well, actually a little unsettling in light of its lyrical content.

Another motif arises: are we becoming who we hate? Is it inevitable that we should do so in growing up? And, again - if there’s nothing we can do about it, should we perhaps make an effort to enjoy the ride?

4. Fred Astaire

First, a confession: this song is primarily for me about the Blupjeans pairing in The Adventure Zone, so like…I’m gonna do my best to ignore that aspect in my analysis but no promises.

I love this song.

I think it’s the strongest track on this album From the very first bars, it’s psyching you up for something, and the powerful opening vocals do not disappoint. This is an excellent showcase of Ben Thornewill’s raw vocal power.

I’m also a huge sucker for the “man who has landed the partner of his dreams hardly daring to believe his luck” trope (cf: Blupjeans, Jake/Amy from B99, tons of other cute pairings I can’t call to mind just at the moment). There’s something so beautifully pure about watching someone realize how fortunate they are to have someone great in their life. In this case, the speaker seems almost playfully resentful as he wonders at his partner’s inexplicable admiration of him - “what are you even doing with a dork like me?” he seems to ask.

But in the bridge, he contrasts that playful exasperation with a genuine admiration of his beloved’s clarity of insight - when I lose myself / there is no one else / who ever sees through me quite like you, he points out, and something about his tone feels genuinely grateful. So for me, this resonates on a personal level as well - in my life, I’m continually astounded by the people who have seen me at my worst and continue to refrain from telling me I suck.

Well, that was distressingly sincere. Don’t worry; I turn back into a snarky pumpkin in just a sec.

5. Time and I

If previous tracks have hinted at themes of growing up and having way too many feelings about it, this track drives those concepts home with a freaking sledgehammer. I have less trouble with it than “People Go Home,” but it’s still a bit too relatable if you ask me. There’s a deeply sympathetic undercurrent of frustration (try as I might / it ain’t no friend of mine) - this guy’s been making an effort, and he’s announcing a sort of surrender, even as he continues to beg time to slow down for him.

I’m intrigued by we’re not the way we used to be - is he talking to a third party, or to time itself? If the former, the feeling t is one of those universal heartbreaks we all go through at this point. People don’t just change - relationships do too, and that can be even more frustrating and harder to pin down. And if it’s the latter, isn’t there something too beautifully futile about the act of begging an abstract concept to act against its nature?

This whole album is so wonderfully human.

Overall, the lyrics feel a bit weaker than the rest of the album to me, but I love the way it sounds. The vocal tracks in the bridge layer on top of each other one by one in this really evocative way, piano is perfect for a track like this - since it’s both percussive and melodic, it invokes bittersweetness of the inexorable passage of time. Maybe? I dunno, just spitballing here.

6. Diane

I hadn’t actually paid much attention to this track until I saw it performed live and the singer got the audience to sing part of the chorus for him. Neat trick, dude. I still didn’t like the song all that much until I saw @mentalwires​ spin very enthusiastic rope dart to it. Anyway - like many songs by Jukebox the Ghost, it would be downright obnoxious if it weren’t such a jam.

What really grabs me about this song is the line about not being able to focus. Maybe it’s just an ADD thing, and it’s certainly not an original thought - of course you can’t focus, dude, you’re basically worshipping this chick - but it’s true that people we like are distracting, and it is highly inconvenient. And it’s way more fun than most of the other inconvenient things that afflict our little species, so that doesn’t help matters. I relate similarly to I can’t sleep / why even bother, although that probably has more to do with my insomnia than anything else.

Damn I love power pop. 

It’s another self-imposed tragedy — our dude doesn’t know how to let go of the idea of this girl, but how well do they actually know each other? The bridge (You make me feel like I’m alive / you make me feel like I’m the only one) brings home what the speaker’s been hinting at since the start of the track - it’s much more about how he feels than about the person he feels it for.  Sometimes / I don’t even think you know my name could be read two ways - either she knows him but acts like she doesn’t (rude), or they’ve never even actually met.*

All the while, he begs her to tell him her thoughts, but does he actually want to know? And if they haven’t met, then how could she tell him she’s thinking about him at all? How is she even going to hear what he’s saying? Well, of course, she can’t - the classic futility of the pop ballad returns. So much in this song is about being unheard, and that fascinates me.

An observation: Songs in this vein hardly ever give any detail about the ostensible (usually female) subject. This is probably at least a little bit to make it easier for everyone involved to identify with them, but it also makes it clear that the speaker’s love has far more to do with his own hang-ups than with the supposed object of his affections. And doesn’t the way we love say so much about us? Maybe that’s why I’m such a sucker for romance.

*The tertiary Queer and Here interpretation makes itself available yet again. I mean, the whole bit about sweaty palms goes all the way back to Sappho, you guys.**

**Fuck I’m such an English major send help

7. See You Soon

Imma be real with y’all for a sec - I couldn’t handle this song at first. It’s about losing a person, and not even in a way that’s final. It gives me sort of the same feeling as “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (read it; it’s short and will tear your little heart from your chest). In both that poem and this song, the ambiguity of the addressee’s identity makes the loss all the more poignant - is the speaker addressing a lover or a friend? Is it both? And which is worse?

The painful wisdom imparted by the passage of time is another motif that keeps coming up in this album. Our dude used to get mad at the small things, and he’s realized what’s actually important, but like every lesson learned the hard way, it’s too late to apply it to the situation in question. And perhaps he never would’ve come to that revelation without the accompanying loss, but that doesn’t make it any less excruciating.

Remember when your life felt like it would be never-ending - if you enjoy the particular kind of masochism brought about by that sentiment, I’d encourage you to check out “I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers. Not to get too philosophical, but grown-ups have this thing where they lecture kids about how they think they’re immortal. And we don’t believe it when we’re kids, at least I didn’t - I wasn’t particularly inclined to take dumb risks, or so I thought. But (dammit) somewhere, we actually do realize that life isn’t permanent, that the place we grew up isn’t the entire world, and that there’s so much of that world that we’ll simply never experience. Wondering how a relationship could have gone differently is more than just a painful (and arguably necessary) experience - it also calls to mind all the different directions our lives could take, and forces us to watch as all those paths converge into one.

It’s another special mid-20s crisis - by that age, we’ve had a few close friendships and relationships, and we’ve experienced the end of some of them. And after that end, we have to change, both as a result of the loss and - you guessed it - the unstoppable, unbending passage of time. If I say it enough it might come true, the speaker says as he leads into the final repetition of the chorus, and we get the sense that he almost believes it. Is it denial, willful self-delusion, or genuine hope?

8. Boring

This is the track that really got me thinking about this album. If “People Go Home” stands on a soapbox wagging its finger at The American Dream™, this song drunkenly embraces it in a bar a few hours later. And, like “People Go Home,” I sort of hated it until I noticed what a great time Tommy Siegel was having with it.

We begin with the inexorability of time again - the seasons are changing / but my world always stays the same. Of course, the use of “lame” to describe undesirability is crummy for obvious reasons, but it also reads as delightfully teenage - our friend is desperately clinging to whatever vestiges of youth remain to him. There’s also a charmingly youthful tendency to exaggerate - I guess they’ll procreate until they die / everyone is boring / everything is lame / everybody thinks they’re not the same could have come straight from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old in the back of a car on a family road trip.

What I love love love love about this song is how smoothly the speaker seems to come around over the course of it. He begins with a distressing observation: all my friends are having kids / but nobody’s sure why. And by the end of the song, he’s worked out exactly why. He’s a little ashamed to say that he’s figured out just what the big deal is. And he’s going through some internal conflict, but that doesn’t mean he’s got to be shy about how he feels.

After wondering for a minute how he got this way (I webmd myself but somehow nothing’s ever wrong has to be one of the most #relatable lyrics I’ve ever heard), he smoothly switches from lambasting the Nuclear Family™ to flattering his addressee:

Baby let’s get boring

Let’s get old and lame

Let’s get a house and kids and change your name

‘ cause I don’t think you’re boring

I don’t think you’re lame

Let’s get a house and summer up in Maine

(kind of a lazy rhyme there at the end, but still sorta cute)

While he acknowledges his frustration with his desire to become that which he most detests, he also acknowledges that the alternative is much worse: I’d rather rot in hell / than watch you become someone lame with someone else.* And yeah, growing up resolves a lot of exciting questions into formulaic predictability, but if you find someone to share it with who’s interesting, you can enjoy it anyway. It’s either a cute little bit of poetry or the most adorably fumbling marriage proposal in the history of time.

We could be so boring, he promises his intended, and he sounds, well, sort of excited about it. Because if everybody else thinks they’re not the same, he asks, why should we bother pretending? It’s not important if we’re actually boring. It’s that I don’t think you are. And I think I agree  - the most important parts of any relationship only matter to the people in it.

I’m not sure what he’s doing to that guitar at the end there, but he sure is doing it.

*There’s another reading that he’s settling but I’ll go with the optimistic one thank you.

9. Simple as 1 2 3

I found this to be sort of a weird tone shift, but the more I listen to it, the better it fits. The lyrics are all about how you can’t fall in love without taking chances - a played-out theme that still meshes beautifully with this track’s youthful simplicity. When I saw this performed live, the singer literally counted on his fingers while he sang and played the piano, and it managed to be incredibly charming. Or maybe it was just his pretty pretty eyes.

When you feel your pulse / knock you over like an animal is so simple but so vivid and I’m not sure this is going anywhere; I just wanted to point it out.

The second verse,

So take a risk

and find a little love

hidden where you didn’t see it

‘cause the time you have is all the time you’ve got

briefly brings it back to the existential crisis that dominates most of this album, but it’s somehow much more optimistic with this new spin - life is short, so you might as well give the whole falling in love thing a whirl. And if it goes badly, hey, there’s always Track 7.

Lyrically, the bridge doesn’t do a whole lot, but I like how it just sort of sits there building on itself - it increases the tension, like, well, the moment of waiting in a corner before going over to talk to someone - and when the musical track drops out to leave only the singer’s voice, it’s like the strange silence that seems to accompany a difficult utterance, and okay, I’m definitely reading way too much into this. Whatever. Death of the author.

10. Colorful

So this is gonna get pretty sentimental, because that is the sort of track this is, and for that I halfheartedly apologize. In an album full of glibness and cynicism, this song stands out relatively devoid of artifice or dire warnings of death.

This song, to me, is about being an artist, and an aggressively happy one at that. I dunno if you’ve seen my art, but, well, it’s downright obnoxious. I mean - Wanna feel like a light in a dark place? Why yes, as a matter of fact; where do I sign. And For the lovers and the broken-hearted feels almost like a call to action - it’s important to bring out the beauty of the world for the people who want to revel in it and for the ones who might be too sad to notice it. All that stuff about trying to paint the world in a new way is probably meant to be a metaphor, but I like taking it literally. It makes me feel better about how I’ve chosen to spend the vast majority of my free time, dammit.

And while this track is pretty repetitive, it forms a perfect conclusion to an album that’s just as much about the ways we talk about romance as the romance itself. It’s one more frame to fit around the first two, if you like.

The bridge is a blatant and transparent excuse to show off Thornewill’s vocal range, for which I can hardly blame him. That man sings like a god.

Bonus Notes:

Stay the Night (single)

I know this one didn’t make it onto the album but I fucking love it. It’s so catchy, and I love that it doesn’t sound like “Pretty Woman” or “Come on Eileen” - I don’t feel like the guy is being coercive or weird. Sure, he’s lamenting that he can’t sleep with the object of his affections, but it’s very much a lament of circumstance - he can’t stay the night because they don’t have time, or they’ve got work in the morning, or it’s only their first date and they’re taking things slow, and you get the sense that he understands from the second verse - I’m singing Journey on the highway / I’m still believing; I’m still believing / that I’ll wake up beside you one day - it almost feels like a reassurance.

It also brings home a lot of themes that come up later in Off to the Races. We’re not getting any younger, and yeah, we might as well have fun with it. But again - I’m not getting a “To His Coy Mistress” vibe here. It’s feels much more along the lines of “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Perhaps it’s just the evolving sexual mores of our society, or perhaps it’s that the speaker spends absolutely no time convincing his date - he simply states the obvious. It’s that universal thrill of something starting, and I am, as they say, here for it.

Anyway that was approximately 2.73 million times longer than I meant it to be. I guess I like talking about poetry? Who could have predicted this? (Really, I actually had a lot of fun with this, so if you liked it, let me know and maybe I’ll do it again sometime. Although, fair warning, it is liable to be about Fall Out Boy.)

[eightyonekilograms]

mentalwires: Is this a right-wing-coded term? Searching for it (on either Google or Kagi) turns up a bunch of Trumpy blogs and not much else.

It's originally a term from public choice theory, so I would say no. If it gets used by right-wing blogs more often these days, I'd say that's because the left is, at the moment, more likely to be the one using institutional control and shame mobs to effect a culture of fear and self-censorship, but that's purely a contingent thing based on current circumstances; it can (and probably will) swing the other way soon enough. I'd argue the entire Sexual Revolution was a preference cascade against the hypocrisy of conservative ethics, for example.

The phrase of the day that suddenly everyone is learning all at once is "preference cascade".

[audible-smiles]

mentalwires replied to your post: In 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted an...

I just want Jimmy Carter to live to see it

amen

[moralitybog]

Resolutions

--Meditate 3-4 times a week. Ideally daily.

--Try to write every week

--try and get my ass to Blue Cone every week

--less Facebook, more real books

--proactively spend time with people I think are cool, even if I think they are too old/young/smart/attractive/rich to hang out with me.

--Stop thinking about Eros

Goals (definitely aiming high here):

--get a job that puts me on a slightly better road for what I actually want to do

--finish Udacity nano-degree by March 30th

--get a capsule wardrobe going

--show some of my art as a guest artist at Blue Cone

--try and do some independent research on animal welfare and/or homelessness, and share it with others

[nostalgebraist]

Hey Rob: I was reading a couple of your recent long posts, and just felt compelled to say that you are a *brilliant* essayist. If your essays weren't somewhat limited in audience by being about tempest-in-a-teapot topics I'd probably be telling you to start publishing them -- but I thoroughly enjoy them anyway, even if I haven't been following the subject matter.

Thank you!

It might be cool to try to publish something, but there tend to be a number of things standing in the way, like the one you mentioned in this particular case.  (I’m also trying to finish my dissertation this year and ought to be channeling as much spare energy as possible into that.)  Maybe someday.

[transgenderer]

@mentalwires said: Good lord, how much did you take?

i took 1.5 a standard blotter dose because i thought my SSRIs would make it less potent. my other friend who's on them took the same dose and seemed to have a normal trip. i had a pretty similar experience on shrooms, i thought i was in a time loop twice and also lost most of my memory of the trip. i think i have some sort of strange reaction to psychedelics. gonna try a half dose next time (if there is a next time :( the place i got them from just stopped shipping to america and i cant find anywhere else that will ship here. might need to find a meatspace dealer)

trip report: first couple hours of LSD i just had really pleasant visual effects but after that i thought there was nothing in the world except my shrimp and my apartment and if i went outside i would just end up back inside, like my apartment was nested inside my shrimp aquarium. i was trying to figure out what was going on and thought maybe me and my friends were actually shrimp and this was like. a shrimp dream. also i tried to read tumblr posts and thought that man and woman and big and small were shrimp delusions. i kept asking my friends if there were things other than shrimp. and listing numbers. or just saying 0 and 1. an old man told me he had seen a bear near here a year ago which is i think around when i started to derealize (note these ememories are not chronologically otrdered)/ when my friends left for a while (apparetnyl i said i ddint want to go) i thought i had made them up. the creaking from above me and the buzz of my aquarium pump felt hellish. i thought i had made up my friends and i was a sort of a god being made of sequences of numbers. my faint memories of my measure theory class were reintperepted as me understanding my own existence as a subset of the space of seqeunces of numbers. my memories of being a strange person were understood in terms of measure 0 things being interesting and nonzero measure things being boring but rare. i decided my memories of the concept of work and parents were an interpetaiton of the time i spent as a shrimp god, where i crafted dreams for myself and then forgot everything and hallucinated being a person

[skluug]

@mentalwires

nope! totally out of the blue, it was a fun morning

some good shit in today’s Slow Boring

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

one of the main reasons i would like to work again is

because i’m in grad school and its like this endless marathon in which you are running but you are running against the clock, running for no reason, inching along by falling over and/or climbing

when you just have this one piece of paper in the world and you’re trying to get it done as quickly as possible, which will get you on to more interesting things, but which will also make it harder to keep your place in this endless race

if you are in grad school and you are working and you do not love it, work more, don’t work less.

if you are in grad school and you are working and you do not love it, quit.

if you are in grad school and you are working and you do not love it, rest.

there is no more reason to work in grad school.

[and on a less fucked-up note, the good side of this is that your boss will get to see you every day, so there is no *point* to the grubby little shit work.  When they ask “why are you stopping,” your boss will say: “because I want you to know I am aware of the effort,” and they’ll get the funny reply “well, i’m not stopping because i’m still getting my effort!”]

some things in life are sacred and some things are not. 

[tekaihau]

Can I just express my appreciation for that entire series of symbol-posts? I'm getting a vicarious glowy feeling, here.

It is entirely my pleasure!  I feel like I don't get to tell the people I care about that I do in fact care about them enough...

And yay for glowy feelings!  They seem appropriate this time of year

[dandelionpie]

@mentalwires you’re very sweet is what you are <3

[audible-smiles]

Actual answer to the "near-infinite narratives" post: long-term memory has no size (or duration) limit, as far as anybody knows. The limiting steps are memory formation and retrieval, which are *heavily* determined by connections with other knowledge. Characters are memorable because we know a lot about people, stories are memorable because they have lots of internal connections and a narrative flow - a story that was disjointed or made no sense would be harder to remember.