It’s going to be okay.
Myers-Biggs
Is astrology for the pseudo-scientifically inclined.
“It’s not my fault; I’m an INT-J!”
Oh, sod off. Go back to Pisces-ville and your healing crystals.
USPTO
The US Patent and Trademark Office website is complete feces.
Exponential Idle: The Logistics Function
The fastest way to manual the LM after publishing is to turn C2 cut off. Select the tree lines by ‘Buy All’, tap the [-] box next to C2. Then set purchase amount to max. The number of levels of upgrade you can afford will go up by one or two, pause, and then rush up by a lot. After that it will pause again and go up by a few. A few might be from 200 to 220 or 150 to 165. Buy immediately after that little jump. Wait again. Keep doing that until it doesn’t really jump any more. At that point, usually when tau_5 is 90% of peak or so, turn autobuy back on.
Names
One of the reasons Tolkien’s work was so popular was the way he named everything. The names themselves were fantastic, but the mere fact they were named at all mattered.
Gandalf burned through staves, but his sword, Glamdring the Foe Hammer, is what sticks.
Engineering
The problem with engineering is that before you know how to do something, it’s sorcery. It’s an inscrutable mystery, hidden by ancient lore, and inconceivable to all humankind.
After you know how to do something, it’s so obvious you can’t figure out what the problem was in the first place.
Dark Age Fantasy
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant reached the apex of ego-centric, dark age fantasy. While Thomas Covenant wasn’t as vile as Elric, didn’t cause the death-count of Corwin, the Land was more about him than any of the others.
That’s really what that spin on the genre was. Stories purely about one character, and not about anyone else.
Books
Reading about stories has got to be the worst thing for writing.
Reading
King Horn to learn what’s the matter with England.
Thought Experiment 2
I used to have a dog. I’d like to get one again, but my current living arrangement precludes it. My dog, Honey, was a good dog. He was not, however, a bright dog.
Honey could never understand that why we went to the vet. The notion of it escaped him. I’m not sure if dogs can comprehend ‘why’ at all, but I certainly know he didn’t understand the why of a vet. It was simply beyond his mind.
Why did he go to the vet? Because it was the best thing for him we, the humans, his loving family, could arrange. Within our abilities, in many cases, the best thing for Honey was going to the vet sometimes.
I speak not of humans as gods, but rather humans as dogs. The future was unknowable and incomprehensible to him. There was no way he could peer through it. And between him and this ineffable future was suffering in the form of the vet. Of course they were wonderful people, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t like the vet!
Humans have things we cannot understand. Why is there suffering in the world? Why are things so bad? Why can’t we see what happens on the other side of death? But like the ineffable future, all of us come to death. All dogs go forward in time. And the mere fact that Honey couldn’t comprehend it was a reflection of his own limitations, not the hateful nature of his family taking him to get his toe-nails clipped.
So is the cognitive dissonance of trying to reconcile a harsh, suffering filled world with a kind, loving God the same kind of myopia, limited by our own cognitive demesne? Is there a way forward that we just don’t understand? Honey never considered that the future might exist and that he didn’t know something. Those questions were beyond him as a dog. Likewise, we can’t imagine the questions we can’t imagine, but we can imagine that such questions could exist. Humility may be a key to unlock cognitive dissonance.
All that smacks of sophistry to me, but Honey looked at me with love and betrayal when he had to get his toenails clipped. I miss that dog.