Came across a Charles Tew video where Yaron Brook negatively comments on Tew and Tew responds. Around the 12 minute mark, Tew says that the Ayn Rand Institute has a negative attitude towards idealistic young people who want to be independent intellectuals. Their attitude is "Who are you? You're not

Some thoughts on Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt Book 1) (a fantasy book about a Dark Elf named Drizzt who is morally different than most other Dark Elves due to being decent/compassionate/kind.) Dark Elf society basically says that if you get away with destroying an enemy Dark Elf

From Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt Book 1) (a fantasy series about a Dark Elf named Drizzt who is morally different than most other Dark Elves) “He does not belong;’ Masoj replied grimly. “After six months by his side, I feel I know him less now than I ever did.

I’m liking Understanding Objectivism a lot and finding it useful for thinking about and dealing with my own issues. I’m planning on working my way through the book and continuing to write blog posts about it. I jumped ahead towards the end for my first couple of series

I’ve been trying to write at least 1500 words a day. I’ve managed to keep that up for about 3 weeks, which means I’ve written over 30,000 words in the past 3 weeks. That’s a lot for me. 🙂

There’s a Twitter thread about celebrities “aging well” that has various blatant math errors. Even if you assume they didn’t mean exactly 25 years ago, there are issues, because some of the comparisons are off by more than 1 year, e.g.: The errors were blatant enough that

Say that U = Adam is Ugly D = Adam is Dumb In a sentence of sentence logic: ∼(D&U) This means that it is NOT the case that Adam is BOTH dumb AND ugly. He COULD be either one, but not BOTH at the same time. It rules out the

The Witcher Season 2 was worse than I would have believed had I not watched it first hand myself. They did so many weird and bad things. Some examples (these involve show and book spoilers): Yennefer is a mage and because of that she can’t have kids, but she

Spam from my Disqus comments is getting published to the RSS feed I’m making from the comments using Zapier. Disqus seems to be correctly flagging the comments as spam, but they’re getting published anyways. I turned comment moderation on to see if that helps. I don’t want

From this book. This is one where if you take the wrong approach, like I initially started to do, it seems like it’s gonna be super hard, but then if you flip things around and tackle it from a different angle, it becomes pretty easy. That’s what I

I customized my Ghost Blog’s favicon. I thought to do this because I was reading a post on Elliot Temple’s Critical Fallibilism site, and I also had a couple of tabs open for my own blog, and I couldn’t tell at a glance which tabs corresponded to

I like Apple’s Fitness+ app/service. I tried a few different things but particularly liked the functional strength workouts. I found the very guided workouts to be quite useful as a beginner. Going through an entire workout with someone and watching them do the exercises from different angles gives

I think that one advantage of writing dialogs is that it removes some potential triggers of wanting to engage in a social performance from a communication. What I mean is that if you’re talking to someone else, you might have some automated behaviors regarding wanting to appear like a

Archimedes is a nifty Markdown editor that supports writing math in LaTeX quickly and has an integrated preview window for viewing LaTeX. It also is specifically set up to make entering LaTeX easy. Some examples of this easy of entering LaTeX: 1) after you type $$ to indicate that you want

I have been writing dialogues lately. I find it easier to write large amounts of writing in dialogue form than in other styles of writing. I was thinking about why this might be the case. I came up with two reasons. One is a fancier point, and one is more

Mistakes that we’ve already made in the past can’t be unmade. You can learn from them, and try to avoid making the same mistake twice, and try to make amends for them, but you can’t get an actual do-over. People often beat themselves up for mistakes made

I had been sending out each blog post as a separate email. Since I’m planning on posting more frequently now, I think that will get annoying for people. So I’m planning on sending more infrequent updates with links to posts (frequency TBD based on how much I post)

Clicking on the title of my microblog entries will take you to an individual page for them now. This is for the purpose of being able to link specific microblogs and enable comments. To get this to work, I had to do two things. First, my microblog entries weren't having

This blog has 3 different RSS feeds (main blog, micro blog, comments). Details are at the bottom of the about page.

I added a microblog section to my blog. You can see the hbs file I made to implement it here. I don't fully understand it ... it's a bit of a copy-paste job that incorporates some advice from Ghost discussion forums, but it seems to work. I also added some lines

From Chapter Eight of William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (footnotes omitted) SOMETHING ELSE we can do during our Stoic meditations is judge our progress as Stoics. There are several indicators by which we can measure this progress. For one