This post is a response to a guest post by Nandwich on the Neotenous Barnacle, a blog which sometimes isn’t not about ttrpgs. You can find that post here: https://nandwich.substack.com/p/bad-guys-in-d-and-d-should-chase
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Restaurant Review: The Botanic
Sep. 10th, 2025 05:35 pmSo this is going to be a slightly different blog post to previous ones, since while it is a "what I did on my holiday" post it's going to be about food and not about games. I spent the week of leave I took last week mostly pretty sick but fortunately, I recovered in time to not miss my holiday reservation for the very expensive Botanic Restaurant. Which is good because it's fucking expensive - about $450AUD for one person, including the profoundly ill-named "temperance" non-alcoholic drinks menu that I would in fact describe as the least temperate drink order I've made in my life - and I paid non-refundably in advance.
The Restaurant Botanic is the most expensive and (by reputation) the finest restaurant in the state, and it being in my hometown meant I felt I had to eat here before I could go visit places in other cities of comparable prestige in the future. It's a small-plates type fine dining restaurant located, unsurprisingly, in the centre of the botanic gardens. They make great use of that, since their aesthetic thesis is about using native ingredients. Throughout eating there, they never missed a chance to use a botanical speciality grown in the gardens, and in some cases they used this to make it extremely weird.
Unfortunately, I was eating there alone, since there is a paucity of people in my life at present who think going to half-grand restaurants for the pure gustatory experience on impulse is "worth it" or "a sane use of your money" or "a valid substitute for travelling to Melbourne as a way to spend your holiday budget", and I am at present unclear how one should go about remedying that. I had imagined I'd go for a walk around the gardens before hand, but it turns out that the gardens close half an hour before service opens, so I was limited to birdwatching in the park outside the gardens until it was time for my reservation; I think the guy who they'd left at the gate to let customers in was genuinely shocked that I was a customer of his, since I'd be sitting at a park bench watching birds since before he arrived and he'd tuned my present out. They made the interesting decision of giving you a cup of iced tea (lemon myrtle) at the gate to sip on as you walked from the gate to the restaurant.
The restaurant itself was a pretty small place, and I think I was the only person there who wasn't there as a heterosexual couple between the ages of 30 and 50, out of a pool of no more than twenty people eating there that evening, and between that and the notes I was taking on my phone, I think I presented as a very odd customer. I had a very good view of the kitchen where I was sitting, and spent most of my time on net watching them work.
I won't be breaking down every dish they served me, since there was more than twenty (most a single mouthful and so brief they barely made an impression) and it doesn't seem valuable to do so, but I'll cover some highlights. If you want to hear about this in more detail (or to hear about my opinions on their lighting design) feel free to DM me or leave a comment or something. The meals included a lot of seafood - especially amongst the starters, tartlets of various arcane structural materials and seafood fillings were a common theme, and I found this very unimpressive. These dishes were also very overstimulating from an exposition perspective; so many moving parts being summarised into a dish of a single mouthful, and here's me who isn't even much of a fan of seafood.
The main dishes were better - a dish of corned and smoked emu was the very best thing I ate that night - along with a dish of marron that was served with "bread and butter" in the form of a cubical croissant and nutritional-yeast infused butter and a dish of kangaroo with mushroom (and "kangaroo garum", providing me with a second data-point for an apparent modern fashion for fermented sauces made from various esoteric meats) these mains were the best part of the meal by far. They were each paired with one of the many strange drinks of the "temperance menu", which ranged from the excellent (a cordial of Davidson’s plums, which was extremely tart and aromatic and excellent) to the frankly bizarre (a "dirty margarita" made from the liquid of pickled onions and distilled orange oil that was as weird as that combination sounds).
The deserts had their own strange pairings; they themselves were mostly unsurprising combinations of fruit, sugar, cream, and such, but the drinks were quite odd - one, served in a shot-class of cut crystal, was a hot drink made from native herbs and the sour juice of a specific tropical ant that somehow recreated the experience of the common or garden hot honey and lemon exactly, and on that note several other dishes in the desert menu were garnished with ants, a decision which I object to not because I have an issue with eating ants, but because when you garnish your deserts with ants this mostly just gives the impression you don't clean your pantry often enough. Throughout the desert course I was also drinking their "house ice tea", made apparently out of whatever they found in the gardens that smelled nice and wasn't poisonous, cold-steeped together and served in quite a large bottle along with a glass that was entirely full with aromatic herbs and flowers from the same garden. The experience was intense and aromatic and not altogether pleasant; they could stand to work on balance of the base flavouring for their tea if nothing else.
Overall, I think I found the experience more overstimulating than I did exhilarating, and I don't think I'd ever plan to eat there again unless I was doing so with someone who wanted to have this experience themselves (if nothing else, there are still places in this price bracket I've never tried at all, and I get the impression that while their menu varies with the seasons the ideas of it never change). I think they spent too much time and effort working in dozens of native ingredients to every dish, and not enough effort perfecting the balance and intended experience of a given dish. Many times, extremely prestigious ingredients were covered over entirely by a surfeit of mint or cream or other base ingredients. Such is the nature of hyper-seasonal constantly refigured regional menus with more courses than guests or chefs, I suppose. However, I also think this was a really cool experience to have (as a food nerd) and basically recommend the idea of going and seeing what highly prestigious restaurants exist near you for the sake of the experience.
The Restaurant Botanic is the most expensive and (by reputation) the finest restaurant in the state, and it being in my hometown meant I felt I had to eat here before I could go visit places in other cities of comparable prestige in the future. It's a small-plates type fine dining restaurant located, unsurprisingly, in the centre of the botanic gardens. They make great use of that, since their aesthetic thesis is about using native ingredients. Throughout eating there, they never missed a chance to use a botanical speciality grown in the gardens, and in some cases they used this to make it extremely weird.
Unfortunately, I was eating there alone, since there is a paucity of people in my life at present who think going to half-grand restaurants for the pure gustatory experience on impulse is "worth it" or "a sane use of your money" or "a valid substitute for travelling to Melbourne as a way to spend your holiday budget", and I am at present unclear how one should go about remedying that. I had imagined I'd go for a walk around the gardens before hand, but it turns out that the gardens close half an hour before service opens, so I was limited to birdwatching in the park outside the gardens until it was time for my reservation; I think the guy who they'd left at the gate to let customers in was genuinely shocked that I was a customer of his, since I'd be sitting at a park bench watching birds since before he arrived and he'd tuned my present out. They made the interesting decision of giving you a cup of iced tea (lemon myrtle) at the gate to sip on as you walked from the gate to the restaurant.
The restaurant itself was a pretty small place, and I think I was the only person there who wasn't there as a heterosexual couple between the ages of 30 and 50, out of a pool of no more than twenty people eating there that evening, and between that and the notes I was taking on my phone, I think I presented as a very odd customer. I had a very good view of the kitchen where I was sitting, and spent most of my time on net watching them work.
I won't be breaking down every dish they served me, since there was more than twenty (most a single mouthful and so brief they barely made an impression) and it doesn't seem valuable to do so, but I'll cover some highlights. If you want to hear about this in more detail (or to hear about my opinions on their lighting design) feel free to DM me or leave a comment or something. The meals included a lot of seafood - especially amongst the starters, tartlets of various arcane structural materials and seafood fillings were a common theme, and I found this very unimpressive. These dishes were also very overstimulating from an exposition perspective; so many moving parts being summarised into a dish of a single mouthful, and here's me who isn't even much of a fan of seafood.
The main dishes were better - a dish of corned and smoked emu was the very best thing I ate that night - along with a dish of marron that was served with "bread and butter" in the form of a cubical croissant and nutritional-yeast infused butter and a dish of kangaroo with mushroom (and "kangaroo garum", providing me with a second data-point for an apparent modern fashion for fermented sauces made from various esoteric meats) these mains were the best part of the meal by far. They were each paired with one of the many strange drinks of the "temperance menu", which ranged from the excellent (a cordial of Davidson’s plums, which was extremely tart and aromatic and excellent) to the frankly bizarre (a "dirty margarita" made from the liquid of pickled onions and distilled orange oil that was as weird as that combination sounds).
The deserts had their own strange pairings; they themselves were mostly unsurprising combinations of fruit, sugar, cream, and such, but the drinks were quite odd - one, served in a shot-class of cut crystal, was a hot drink made from native herbs and the sour juice of a specific tropical ant that somehow recreated the experience of the common or garden hot honey and lemon exactly, and on that note several other dishes in the desert menu were garnished with ants, a decision which I object to not because I have an issue with eating ants, but because when you garnish your deserts with ants this mostly just gives the impression you don't clean your pantry often enough. Throughout the desert course I was also drinking their "house ice tea", made apparently out of whatever they found in the gardens that smelled nice and wasn't poisonous, cold-steeped together and served in quite a large bottle along with a glass that was entirely full with aromatic herbs and flowers from the same garden. The experience was intense and aromatic and not altogether pleasant; they could stand to work on balance of the base flavouring for their tea if nothing else.
Overall, I think I found the experience more overstimulating than I did exhilarating, and I don't think I'd ever plan to eat there again unless I was doing so with someone who wanted to have this experience themselves (if nothing else, there are still places in this price bracket I've never tried at all, and I get the impression that while their menu varies with the seasons the ideas of it never change). I think they spent too much time and effort working in dozens of native ingredients to every dish, and not enough effort perfecting the balance and intended experience of a given dish. Many times, extremely prestigious ingredients were covered over entirely by a surfeit of mint or cream or other base ingredients. Such is the nature of hyper-seasonal constantly refigured regional menus with more courses than guests or chefs, I suppose. However, I also think this was a really cool experience to have (as a food nerd) and basically recommend the idea of going and seeing what highly prestigious restaurants exist near you for the sake of the experience.
The King is Dead is Dead!
Aug. 16th, 2025 12:45 pmWhat is the king is dead?
So, I played in another big cool thing, so I figured I'd write another effortpost about how big and cool it was. This time, the thing I played in was a game called "The King is Dead" - a Kriegspiel/Cataphract type game where a medieval succession dispute was handled using a real-time operations simulation engine where every single decision-maker was played by a human.
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So, I played in another big cool thing, so I figured I'd write another effortpost about how big and cool it was. This time, the thing I played in was a game called "The King is Dead" - a Kriegspiel/Cataphract type game where a medieval succession dispute was handled using a real-time operations simulation engine where every single decision-maker was played by a human.
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Concentric 2024
Sep. 9th, 2024 02:55 pmSo, I went to concentric, and then I promised a sufficiently large number of people information about what it was like and I did enough things that I feel like making a blog post on a blog I haven't posted on in two years is the right decision. This blog will have three parts: A summary of all the things I did, a very detailed breakdown of that one 20th level D&D 3.5 oneshot, and finally some rough thoughts about the sort of physical-reality TTRPG community I found here.
So first things first, what things did I do? Go play oneshots, mostly, with some exceptions. Concentric is a board-game con first and a TTRPG con second (TTRPG people were outnumbered 5-10 to one by people playing boardgames; there weren't any trading card or wargame people though, presumably because they have their own perfectly good spaces.). The vast majority of the games on offer were D&D or technically-not-D&D. (I can't remember the exact number and Warhorn doesn't let you view history for games you weren't in, but I'm pretty sure it's something like "40% 5E D&D, 35% other editions of D&D, 20% OSR systems which are technically not D&D but which are D&D in spirit. 5% things which are not OSR or D&D but which are otherwise still D&D-natured (e.g. "Dungeon Kids"), 0% things which are not D&D-natured.") Several people spoke about their desire to play things which are not D&D but there was a clear coordination failure here.
(What OSR games were people playing? Old School Essentials, mostly, which hardly counts, and beyond that, something which the GM just described as "Castlevania", something whose name was something like "legends in the mist" and while it wasn't played, multiple people talked about how much they liked Shadowdark.)
To finish up with some thoughts about the experience overall, mainly about the social experience of being here: Going to cons to make friends works at all, which is nice. I left with several people's phone numbers.Now I just need to figure out how to convert that into actual interactions or friendships, help. But I felt really out of place at this con; the demographics skewed much older than me, I felt like very much like the median person there was a married couple ten or thirty years older than me. It was also surreal to go to a con which hasn't run since the before times, seeing the same cast of organisers and people who I don't know but do recognise floating around the place, all five years older. Also, I've spent enough time in my little bubble that I've forgotten viscerally how extensively I am a weirdo; maybe this just wasn't the space for it, but I'm very used to - having transcended the dichotomy that goes "there are two types of games: D&D, and games which are lighter and more story-focused than D&D, like WOD and the Index Card RPG." The people I talked to today did not seem to have done that. They also seemed, collectively, very resigned to the idea that they would mostly play TTRPGs with people who did not much want to play TTRPGs and who definitely did not particularly want to play any particular TTRPG they liked (this is, presumably, selection bias).
I am so intensely grateful I live in the world where Shadowrun isn't an impossible myth, where people play tactical TTRPGs other than 4e, where Exalted and Jenna Moran are things people have heard of at all, where there are mystery games with mystery mechanics, where people actually form intentions about game design, and not the world they live in. I'd still love the hobby if I was in their boots, but. It'd be worse. I still wanna be friends with them, though! They seem like cool and interesting people on their own merits, and their home campaigns seem just as cool and interesting, and I'm sure I'm doing wrong by many of them by painting them with this brush based on minutes or hours of talking and playing with them. But the contrast has reminded me why and how much I love the people I play, write, and talk with regularly (that is to say, you, the target audience of this post).
So first things first, what things did I do? Go play oneshots, mostly, with some exceptions. Concentric is a board-game con first and a TTRPG con second (TTRPG people were outnumbered 5-10 to one by people playing boardgames; there weren't any trading card or wargame people though, presumably because they have their own perfectly good spaces.). The vast majority of the games on offer were D&D or technically-not-D&D. (I can't remember the exact number and Warhorn doesn't let you view history for games you weren't in, but I'm pretty sure it's something like "40% 5E D&D, 35% other editions of D&D, 20% OSR systems which are technically not D&D but which are D&D in spirit. 5% things which are not OSR or D&D but which are otherwise still D&D-natured (e.g. "Dungeon Kids"), 0% things which are not D&D-natured.") Several people spoke about their desire to play things which are not D&D but there was a clear coordination failure here.
(What OSR games were people playing? Old School Essentials, mostly, which hardly counts, and beyond that, something which the GM just described as "Castlevania", something whose name was something like "legends in the mist" and while it wasn't played, multiple people talked about how much they liked Shadowdark.)
My actual schedule:
Friday Evening: Con opening. No game scheduled (There were a bunch of coordination failures here I'll gloss over). Instead, I wandered around failing to noticed anyone I knew and eventually spent much of the evening in a play-test of a star-trek-pastiche asymmetric 4x deckbuilder boardgame, which was neat except for how the victory conditions were fundamentally flawed (Specifically, to my eye, in the vast majority of situations the game comes down to the shared victory of a three-player coalition, or the loss of a two-player coalition to a different two-player coalition. Note that these aren't flexible coalitions; the rules mandate which factions can coalition with which other ones so if you're sitting down as the legally-not-klingons your only possible victory condition is to convince the legally-not-ferengi player that he has better odds allying with you than with the two other players). Had fun, won't be keeping an eye on this game.
Saturday Morning: Tomb of Horrors! Specifically, this was a watered-down classic Tomb of Horrors run in OD&Dish. There were a lot of players new to D&D somewhy? The specific watering-down was that nearly every instance of "you die" in the original dungeon was replaced with "you take 1d6 damage". This was a good rate of damage relative to rate of things which inflicted it for our 7thish level party. We got a decent way in but ran out of time. I haven't actually played or read Tomb of Horrors before this, and it was interesting. I think it was a pretty good instance of a trap dungeon, I see where the classics come from, but it just ... had so many secret doors. I guess the point of the secret doors is to demand that you actually physically touch and explore the space in character rather than just ghosting through without touching anything. But they were tedious and easy to lock yourself out of having explored a space, even with the GM running more-generous-than-raw secret door finding rules. (one check per room in which there is obviously a secret door, rather than one check per 5ft space investigated). Bring your 10ft pole, and also I told you so for everyone who mocked me for crawling through a tunnel with a conspicuous poisoned arrow dispensing mechanism who got shot with a poison arrow.
Saturday Afternoon: The 20th level 3.5 game. I will analyse this in detail, but it has solidly convinced me that I and people in general are right about the general problems with 3.x/pathfinder has when people don't respond to it in the various good ways that all my online friends have. 3.5 has too many skills; even a dedicated skill monkey was missing essential interaction skills by accident. The fighter and the rogue only matter to give the GM something to melee attack when he's softballing us. 3.5 Delanda Est; if you want to know more, let me tell you more about Fallen Tower. I enjoyed being a wizard a lot (like so much), and I enjoyed the format as a con game (bring endgame characters to a merciless* encounter with the endboss of someone's campaign) but this was not redemptive of the mechanical flaws inherent to 3.5.
*The encounter gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance that reminds me of myself running 3.5 in 2018. "I am the GM and I love the rules so I'm making a ruthlessly optimised boss fight, but also I need to deliberately misplay it a bit because otherwise it'd partywipe"
Sunday Morning: Got there late because I didn't have a oneshot played, wandered around seeing the sights. Played a small fanmade pokemon cardgame with a friend I ran into. Bought some books for my dad. Etc.
Sunday Afternoon: Old School Essentials oneshot - GM was running a "sampler" type oneshot of his home game which he'd clearly put a lot of effort into worldbuilding-wise and also presumably in other respects. Collection of adventurers in town to hunt down falling meteors of chaos-energy. Like a collection of dumbasses, we collectively made PCs who couldn't actually use chaos-energy-metal weapons despite them being the main form of magic item in the region (see: fame for meteors of the stuff). This was a completely unforced error on our parts (I for example, just picked the patron which best fitted with my character concept without thinking about this). We rescued some slaves, the guy sitting next to me made some very uncomfortable jokes about the slavers "enjoying the spoils of war" and then we collectively TPKd in a completely unforced fight with some ghouls who were sitting on the meteor we wanted. Ghouls are fucking nasty, especially when they have numerical superiority, never forget that. We were a terrible party with regard to decision making and I'm pretty glad we got what we deserved for our mistakes; conventions and oneshots are a good time for it.
To finish up with some thoughts about the experience overall, mainly about the social experience of being here: Going to cons to make friends works at all, which is nice. I left with several people's phone numbers.
I am so intensely grateful I live in the world where Shadowrun isn't an impossible myth, where people play tactical TTRPGs other than 4e, where Exalted and Jenna Moran are things people have heard of at all, where there are mystery games with mystery mechanics, where people actually form intentions about game design, and not the world they live in. I'd still love the hobby if I was in their boots, but. It'd be worse. I still wanna be friends with them, though! They seem like cool and interesting people on their own merits, and their home campaigns seem just as cool and interesting, and I'm sure I'm doing wrong by many of them by painting them with this brush based on minutes or hours of talking and playing with them. But the contrast has reminded me why and how much I love the people I play, write, and talk with regularly (that is to say, you, the target audience of this post).
(no subject)
Jul. 28th, 2022 12:39 pm Me: Thinks fondly about how much I like all my special burger techniques and how favourably they compare to the work of the people I think of as steak cultists.
Me: How am I different from them?
Me: Well, my techniques *work* for one.
Me: I'm a member of *The Esoteric Order of the Burger.* Thank you very much.
Me: How am I different from them?
Me: Well, my techniques *work* for one.
Me: I'm a member of *The Esoteric Order of the Burger.* Thank you very much.
My honours thesis is submitted! Finally! I think it's a really good product, all things considered, well written and comprehensive and saying useful things, though apparently I use pronouns appallingly by all accounts.
... now off to sleep, I have to leave for a practical worth 8% of my term grade for another class in 7 hours.
... now off to sleep, I have to leave for a practical worth 8% of my term grade for another class in 7 hours.
I have mailed off the draft of my thesis to all the people who should have opinions on that before I submit it! Now I get some time off, and by time off I mean "Time to pick up all the pieces of things which were dropped while I dealt with my thesis". Yay? But still, I think things will be better.
(no subject)
Aug. 30th, 2021 01:42 pmMade eggplant parmigiana, per the serious eats recipe for such (https://www.seriouseats.com/italian-style-eggplant-parmesan-melanzane-alla-parmigiana-recipe). Came out very greasy, like, "frying these eggplants soaked up like half a pint of oil" greasy. Should have been less of a coward, I think; twice as much oil at a higher temperature would have produced much less greasy food (but managing large amounts of hot oil is stressful, and temperature management is hard). Took the leftovers and fried them, spooning off the excess grease, and added cumin and chilli and an egg to make breakfast! Was tasty, still too greasy. Overall, good food, except for the thing where it was very very oily.
Specifically, I'm confused about insurance companies: People keep talking like coercing insurance companies into covering more health costs and more routine health costs in particular as a good thing in the context of the American health system trashfire. Why? They're for-profit companies, so if regulations demand they spend more money per contract, their only plausible response is to raise the cost of offering that contract? And maybe there's some tangled web of them being obliged to offer contracts to people or employers being obliged to pay for them that diffuses that cost off into the aether but *surely* this checks out to you paying more money or being paid less money because your employer is spending their budget for keeping you around on keeping you properly ensured?
... also there's a market for insurance on objects which are smaller than the amount of money in your savings account, so like, I guess one of the answers here is "some large percentage of the population just does not grok the transition that insurance is?
(like the actual answer is public healthcare and I guess that also checks out in notional increased taxes again to the exact same tune of some amount of diffused extra cost, but it's 99% less legible and less accountable if you pass it through a dozen capitalists on the way to you rather than through a government budget-line saying "we spend X million dollars on giving people free dentistry" or whatever?)
... apparently this blog is about finance now, IDK how that happened
... also there's a market for insurance on objects which are smaller than the amount of money in your savings account, so like, I guess one of the answers here is "some large percentage of the population just does not grok the transition that insurance is?
(like the actual answer is public healthcare and I guess that also checks out in notional increased taxes again to the exact same tune of some amount of diffused extra cost, but it's 99% less legible and less accountable if you pass it through a dozen capitalists on the way to you rather than through a government budget-line saying "we spend X million dollars on giving people free dentistry" or whatever?)
... apparently this blog is about finance now, IDK how that happened
(no subject)
Jul. 29th, 2021 08:02 pm I've been listening back to some back issues of the podcast of cortex (Episode 15 I think) while playing Minecraft, mostly for lack of better podcasts to listen to, and it was full of really poorly reasoned considerations about adblocker morality. So now I am going to lay out for the benefit of myself (because you all will try to correct me if I'm wrong) and maybe also other people, the set of obvious ways that exist to fund your website on the internet.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
(no subject)
Jul. 22nd, 2021 01:24 pm Bloomberg sure seem determined to ensure that I cannot read money stuff, aren't they. Well, I guess they want me to pay for it, but the adblocker/anti-adblocker war has escalated to the point where that's no longer legible to me! Also I'm inclined to just not consume media I cannot consume, rather than pay money for. There are writers I will pay a monthly subscription to read the monthly output of, but this guy is not one of them.
... or maybe they just broke their site somehow, who really can tell.
... or maybe they just broke their site somehow, who really can tell.
(no subject)
Jul. 14th, 2021 04:10 pm Vaccination get!
(it's the one with the almost-certainly-not-a-risk-but-I-had-to-spend-ten-minutes-confirming-I-understood-that-to-a-doctor blood clots, though)
... also I seem to have picked up a streak of deep anxiety about interfacing with medical bureaucracy, presumably re: Norway, which is annoying but not unsurprising.
(it's the one with the almost-certainly-not-a-risk-but-I-had-to-spend-ten-minutes-confirming-I-understood-that-to-a-doctor blood clots, though)
... also I seem to have picked up a streak of deep anxiety about interfacing with medical bureaucracy, presumably re: Norway, which is annoying but not unsurprising.
Hmm, would people be interested if I tried posting recipes here? My mother way saying I should be writing down the stuff I'm cooking so I don't forget, and also I'd like feedback and suggestions and talking-about-cooking with people who aren't me. If only so I know how much salt to leave out when I'm cooking for someone who isn't me. It would probably be a pain because Writing is hard but IDK, it seems possible and would be helpful for me, probably.
(no subject)
May. 31st, 2021 01:47 amProduct: "This product is funded by people like you, donate now!"
Me: Well I think they're unlike me in at least one vital respect *closes tab*
(... this is not actually true across as assessed over all products, since I ever do give money to the people making free applications or fiction that I consider of particularly high quality and non-fungibility, but it's not a *common* thing and I don't do it in response to begging messages at the end of installation processes)
Me: Well I think they're unlike me in at least one vital respect *closes tab*
(... this is not actually true across as assessed over all products, since I ever do give money to the people making free applications or fiction that I consider of particularly high quality and non-fungibility, but it's not a *common* thing and I don't do it in response to begging messages at the end of installation processes)
(no subject)
May. 15th, 2021 04:44 pm ... I may have spent most of a week locked out of this account because I moved to a new laptop and have been doing stuff other than try and dig up my password. Well, I'm back now? Now with extremely shiny dell gaming laptop!
(moving to a new laptop and with it a new browser (vivaldi, btw, it's proving pretty neat but I haven't stress-tested it yet) locked me out of so many things. It's like having all of the tendrils of my self into useful programs and such cut off. Well, less painful than that but a distinct sense of being smaller and lesser and wounded and grasping at broken interfaces.)
(moving to a new laptop and with it a new browser (vivaldi, btw, it's proving pretty neat but I haven't stress-tested it yet) locked me out of so many things. It's like having all of the tendrils of my self into useful programs and such cut off. Well, less painful than that but a distinct sense of being smaller and lesser and wounded and grasping at broken interfaces.)
(no subject)
May. 3rd, 2021 02:50 pmI think I've fucked up my discord usage somewhere. It's becoming more and more the social media thing of just being an attention-sink, hundreds of people and conversations to track and track and track and not at all like, something I can participate in. I don't really know what to do about that. Probably the answer is "Acknowledge I can't follow all these goings-ons and drop out of a some communities where my presence is only tenuous entirely" but I do so hate that.
... I feel in general like I've gotten bad at having good conversations in the past months. Maybe since during norway? Not sure. Still, socializing feels like a lot of obligation and grind to many different people rather than like, doing cool things with the people I like best. I'm reminded of that one SCC post about finding your tribe and the advantages of that over friendship by just finding the ten coolest people and trying to be friends with them but I feel pulled between a dozen tribes and don't like any of them as tribes, rather than as places where cool people I consider friends are. IDK. I don't really know what to do. Try and talk to people, I guess. I think these are issues I've always had but I've felt unrewarded WRT them lately. Maybe it's an illusion of some form, and interesting things are still happening to me but the shape of my thoughts it wrong for me to see it. Still, there feels like a problem, and that needs a solution. Ideas/Insights welcome.
... I feel in general like I've gotten bad at having good conversations in the past months. Maybe since during norway? Not sure. Still, socializing feels like a lot of obligation and grind to many different people rather than like, doing cool things with the people I like best. I'm reminded of that one SCC post about finding your tribe and the advantages of that over friendship by just finding the ten coolest people and trying to be friends with them but I feel pulled between a dozen tribes and don't like any of them as tribes, rather than as places where cool people I consider friends are. IDK. I don't really know what to do. Try and talk to people, I guess. I think these are issues I've always had but I've felt unrewarded WRT them lately. Maybe it's an illusion of some form, and interesting things are still happening to me but the shape of my thoughts it wrong for me to see it. Still, there feels like a problem, and that needs a solution. Ideas/Insights welcome.
(no subject)
Apr. 19th, 2021 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway at some point in the fairly-distant past (and also much more recently, but the tabs sat idle in one of my backlogs for a good long time) recommended to me to read The Prepared for advice regarding prepping stuff (which is to the extent of my inexperienced judgement in these matters a pretty good site, but that's not the point of this post), and they mentioned an image of the successful prepper as someone who disappears alone into the woods and survives by themselves with maybe a dog (they mentioned this idea to reject it, to be fair, and I agree with their reasoning from the practicalities) and just .... why would you want that? It seems so ... pointless. A life lived without other people and without a legacy, leaving, at best, a bunch of animal corpses and an empty hut behind you? I can understand the desire to learn those skills to prove you have them or to survive periods of time between [something] and reconnecting with greater civilization, or because you want to work as a trapper or something but to just ... leave into the wilderness and never come back and maybe know that that's because there's nothing to come back to, that just seems ... awful. Intolerable. Maybe if you loved it out there, maybe if that was genuinely your best life living alone in the wilderness, you could extract some utils from that but to just survive? without a plan for rebuilding with others? Without being a part of the great work of civilization? What? How would you like, motivate yourself? How would you achieve goals? I guess you could ... try and terraform a bit of forest into a nicer bit of forest? But mostly you could just ... spend however many years between now and (either old age or bad luck or both) results in your death and then be a corpse that took a few decades longer to go than the rest of the body of work that is our civilization. (... I think what this says is pointing to the fact that my utility function can be crudely approximated by "[maximize number of interesting things read over lifetime] + [leave a lasting legacy of meaningful change and good things into the world] + [some amount of abiding by regular human imperatives of nice sensations, avoiding pain, socializing, sex drive, etc, to the extent that these things aren't ego-dystonic or instrumental as part of the structure of the infrastructure I find myself in]". That's not actually true but it's instructively false? But I think whatever your utility function, the low-hanging fruit of human mediocrity and the force multiplying powers of human civilization make it really easy to extract massive amounts of utility from relatively little effort unless your goals are very internally oriented?)
(no subject)
Apr. 13th, 2021 01:27 pmDiscovering a new weather forecast on your phone is an interesting experience. We have "heavy dust", and indeed the dust is in fact heavy. This is wonderful, and by wonderful I mean "it's going to rain tonight and paint everything pale pink, maybe". I am very concerned. We were using that topsoil dammit.
(no subject)
Apr. 7th, 2021 10:40 amYou know sometimes I think about the fact that if I went back in time there would be good reasons why I couldn't implement the vast majority of the technological improvements common to such memes and would immediately get myself killed for heresy if I tried to pass myself off as an academic but I do in fact have the design of the good beehive that wasn't invented until really late and which is a massive improvement memorized and that just requires passable carpentry in terms of tech-base and I don't really know how to feel about that.
