This is an empathy exercise, but don’t worry: you’re gonna get to hate someone along the way if you want to. Or if you love them, that’s okay too. The exercise doesn’t hinge on your hatred of them. Okay, so bring to mind someone you really had a problem with in the past. A school bully or something. Let’s add some...

I’ve been reading 1960s news (my grandpa saved a bunch of news yearbooks) as an alternative to internet and so far the most striking—and this goes for other books I’ve lead from fifties through nineties was that it was from a world of hope, a world that could change. Yeah, there were doomy pockets like the 1962 Cuba...

I’ve asked for climate change to permeate every story in news media but oh wow, what a monkey’s paw. What I wanted …was that all the thing we humans do that are greenhouse reckless are called out. For example, whenever there’s a beef subsidy or like a sale on beef, they should have called out how bad that is. How...

Here’s an idea for an original board game about 160000 samurai fighting it out. Each samurai is roughly the size of a lentil. Hideyori’s samurai are made of wood and Tokugawa’s samurai are made out of metal. The metal pieces should not be magnets themselves but magnets should attract them to more easily separate the...

Here’s an idea for an original board game about 160000 samurai fighting it out. Each samurai is roughly the size of a lentil. Hideyori’s samurai are made of wood and Tokugawa’s samurai are made out of metal. The metal pieces should not be magnets themselves but magnets should attract them to more easily separate the...

Paper Magic is notoriously untimeable with its ten APNAP windows per turn, plus two more APNAP widows for every spell or ability, including for triggered abilities. That’s why this is a variant. For the kitchen table. Not Comp REL. First, some terms Slam Gently and carefully press your side of the chess clock so...

But you know the right wing has one idea: rich get richer. In their backyard grows three cherry trees. One is called freedom. One is called tradition. One is called hate. These threes have nothing in common. These trees do not get along. But as the right wing craft their policies in order to get voters,...

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that a commensurate carbon tax would have to be infinite or larger than infinite (and that rationing is a better solution). Here’s the situation. I’ll use Sweden as the example just to get numbers but similar applies to all lands and realms. Our plan was to go from 21 Mt CO2e in...

On the NES version of Clu-Clu Land, Bubbles goes to a rave between levels as the background screen rapidly cycles. That might’ve looked okay on CRT but does not look good on OLED or LCD. Clu-Clu Land is my favorite game but I never heard of it back in the day (go figure; we played Devil World, Ice Climber, Little...

If I get back on the GTD wagon there’s a lesson I want to take with me and really hammer home. When I’m off GTD the bad thing that happens is that I get an idea for an essay or something and I have to go do it right away because there’s no “bookmark” for it so I get driven by the latest and loudest. Fun, but it...

Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the...

Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this: Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126. Repairing the step will cost $10. The time-discounting economics say...