I'm now blogging at Substack. My Substack deliberately avoids sticking to any particular topic or genre. Some of it is reminiscent of Agenty Duck, but I also post my visual art, songs, recipes, and absolutely anything else I feel like. Check it out if you wanna know what I'm up to these days!
I'll begin with some context-setting. If you want to skip to the main event, start at "It's now been about one month." First, a caveat: I did not start with a baseline female endocrine profile when I began taking testosterone. I'd given birth two and a half months earlier, so my most recent memories of what it was like to inhabit a female body were of a postpartum body, and before that a pregnant…
Hey guess what I have a kid now! Yes really. Their name is Cadence, and they were born on June 20th, 2023. It was rad. There's a whole bunch of stuff about it on my website , including a birth story, lots of other writing below that under Q&A, photos, and videos. (If you only click on the "writings" button, you won't see any naked people.) I'm crossposting the birth story here. * The day before…
Man I am so very overdue for this post. I have been working for the past year on a second sequence in the series that started with " Intro to Naturalism ". Intro was about the worldview. This one's called "The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism", and it's the step-by-step how-to. This, like the previous sequence, is over at LessWrong.com. Readers of Agenty Duck will be familiar with most of the things…
I have a chocolate blog! Mostly I just post my tasting notes there, but sometimes I say more stuff too. This time I said a whole bunch of stuff, because I tasted the same chocolate every day for a month and then wrote about the experience. You can read it here . You might like it if you enjoy my writings on phenomenology, perception, and original seeing.
I've written an entire sequence introducing "naturalism", and I've just finished publishing it on LessWrong. You can see the whole thing at this link . Here's the first post: Orientation A note on how to approach this sequence: If you were exactly like me, I would ask you to savor this sequence, not scarf it. I would ask you to approach each of these essays in an expansive, lingering, thoughtful…
I've got an essay up at LessWrong that definitely belongs here as well, but that's where it's all nicely formatted so I'm just gonna link . It's a demo of a naturalism study; Duncan wrote a great essay about "fabricated options", and I did a report on my attempts to learn the thing myself.
1. Read one random sentence of a history textbook and pick out the most mind-numbing phrases. I'll go first. "In 1958, Heinrich Berlin published a detailed analysis of inscriptions on the sarcophagus lid from the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque, identifying the ten figures on the sides of the sarcophagus by their name and glyphs." Most mind-numbing phrases: "In 1958", followed by "Heinrich…
One of the assignments I very often suggest to students of naturalism is "be bored". I'm exaggerating a little when I put it that way. I don't actually mean that painful experiences of weary directionlessness are the goal. The goal of the assignment is to ensure that there are blocks of time in your day-to-day life in which it would be possible for you to be bored. Naturalism is a System 1…
In May and June of 2021, I ran an online nature study course with about two dozen participants. I had three goals: Help people create or deepen a personal connection with nature. Learn how to run month-long online courses with over a dozen participants. Test some hunches about the rationality material I’ve been working on. One of my main hunches was that if you complete this course, you’ll find…
I think the reason I sat on that last post for two years is because I said what I think people are doing wrong, and I said what the right thing to do is , but I didn't actually say how to do the right thing. So now I'm hoping to correct myself, at least a little. First, an object of study: “Early One Summer” by W. S. Merwin (from Migration ) Years from now someone will come upon a layer of birds…
[I wrote this in 2019, and just decided to post it here. Then I made a follow-up post .] Someone observed to me the other day that poetry does not seem to “land” for them the way that it does for me. I want to try naming at least one thing I think poetry lovers (whom I know) are doing differently than people who don’t quite “get” poetry. I’m not sure there is one central thing, but if there is, my…
I struggle a lot with mornings. If I'm not very careful about what I do in the hour or two after I first wake up, I become extremely stressed and anxious. It's as though my mind has to take some time to put itself together into a solid structure, or else it gets obliterated by the first obstacle it encounters. I've been thinking lately about how to design a morning routine that optimizes for…
Starting May 16th, I'm running a nature study course called "Original Seeing With a Focus On Life". In one month of study, we'll become better naturalists. EDIT: This round of the course is all full up! Thank you to everybody who applied. :) Who should enroll? I think you should take this course if you want to build a closer personal relationship with nature. The point of the course is to develop…
Linkpost: I've got a new essay about curiosity and naturalism over at LessWrong !
Great question, thanks for asking! I've been wondering that for a while myself. In short, I think that it’s wonderful, and I’m worried it’s ruining everything. What is free verse? Actually, let’s back up even further. What is “verse”? The English word “verse” comes from the Latin word “versus”, which means “turned around or turned back”. Poetry is written with deliberate line breaks, which usually…
I wrote up my shame processing method. I think it comes from some combination of Max (inspired by NVC maybe?), Anna (mostly indirectly), and a lot of trial and error. I've been using it for a couple of years (in various forms), but I don't have much PCK on it yet. If you'd like to try it out, I'd love for you to report back on how it went! What's up with shame? According to me, shame is for…
What It’s Like While remembering a recent discussion with a friend, I find myself feeling grateful. There’s warmth in my chest. I have an image of watery light radiating out of my upper torso and wrapping around me. My mind flits about across memories of his facial expressions, his posture, the arrangement of the other people in the room. I imagine how he felt as he spoke (self-conscious, a little…
One of the best things I've added to my repertoire of study tools is trying to learn the aesthetic taste of the author. When I feel something in the vicinity of disagreement with X, I write a little essay in which I describe the world from a perspective where X feels good/obvious/beautiful, trying to capture what things taste like at that vantage point. For example, toward the beginning of the…
A friend who is interested in building muscle told me, “I’m curious how you relate to the pain of doing exercise.” I asked them what they meant by “pain” in this case, and they seemed unclear on it. How to relate to discomfort in exercise is a great question, and it’s one of the reasons I’d recommend most people do regular yoga for at least a month before they get serious about weight lifting.…
1. This post will make no sense at all if you don’t know what “Focusing” is. Focusing is a method of making info from squishy automatic cognitive processes accessible to deliberate reasoning processes. Here’s an official brief summary of the full procedure as taught by Gendlin. Here’s a post by Duncan I like a bunch, which describes the Focusing-ish thing he does. 2. Lauren taught a class at an…
Starting last weekend and going until March, I’ll be spending every other weekend in yoga teacher training, learning how to be a yoga instructor. I have a lot of reasons for doing this, one of which is that I would in fact like to teach yoga from time to time. But the reason that really convinced me to finally do it is this: My own yoga practice suggests that yoga relies a lot on original seeing,…
When I was in Indiana, I took dozens of snapshots of a slide. This slide. It was out in a field with a whole collection of elderly playground equipment, and I found it visually interesting. So I did a study of it. In painting, a “study” is a sketch (or multiple sketches) done in preparation for the final painting. It’s an exploration of a subject, with attention to the problems you’ll likely…
Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in turn, took much of what I discuss from Kate McClean, an artist who makes sensory maps of urban environments. But this is certainly my own take, and the instructions as I present them are at times in…
meditate on… What have I gained in the past year? In what ways do I feel augmented compared to the self I remember from this time last year? How do I feel about that? What have I lost in the past year? In what ways am I diminished compared to the self I remember from this time last year? How do I feel about that? What important things do I believe now that I did not believe at this time last year?…