Wondering about life, the meaning of the universe, and everything.
You may already be familiar with the mythical Library of Babel, but if you're not then allow me the honor of introducing it to you! The Library of Babel is a short story/thought experiment written by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges . Imagine there's a library that contains every book of 410 pages that could ever be written using the letters of the Latin alphabet. Each book has 410 pages,…
There was once a potato who could not go without eating chips. ‘Oh, what does that make me, Mother? A monster ’? He trembled at the truth of it. ‘Who knows’, said she as she heated the oil in the pan and sharpened her knife. ‘Who knows, little chip’. First off, let me begin by clarifying that this post is not meant to offer any sort of financial advice. Long-term projections for both buying the…
This is not really a wordvomit, but an old post from an old blog of mine that is no more. It was originally published on 2022-10-29 . I've cleaned it up a bit and added a few things, but otherwise the idea and structure are unchanged. I don't know if it has ever happened to you, but while falling asleep, in the hypnagogic state , I sometimes find myself being absolutely and completely sure I'm…
As I mentioned at the end of my last post , I recently found a cache of quotes and poems in my old Google Keep. Among these, I was surprised to see more than one poem written by young me (and many of them are quite good, probably even better than what I would be able to write today)! I want to give these a new home, so every now and then I'll be sharing one of them here. I haven't yet gone through…
To one with a troubled mind, even the sweetest apple will taste rotten. ~ Not sure I've always struggled with multitasking, especially at work. It's so alluring to try to do multiple things at once, more so when whatever I'm doing is slow-going or, in general, I have to wait more than 30 seconds for things to compile. I'm also often prone to that close cousin of multitasking called procrastination…
It's been around five years since I've been working 100% remotely. On one hand, it's nice being at home and not having to commute, but on the other, the lack of community can sometimes be a bit depressing. Seeing people in person, and more importantly stumbling upon them by accident, is something that just can't be faked when working remotely, or at least not with the current processes and culture…
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. ~ Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night) Recently, I've come to realize how easily we humans tend to stagnate as we get older. I see my kids, and all they do is run around doing "as dangerous as possible" things. They constantly put themselves in different and exciting (dangerous) situations. I feel that, for them, being safe…
I've been thinking about playing cards lately. Specifically, the odds of a specific shuffle configuration for the standard 52-card deck. This is actually a well-known thought experiment that professors of combinatorics and probability like to impress their freshman students with, but it’s not any less impressive because of it. The idea is that there's an incomprehensibly huge number of ways you…
“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.” ~ Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) AI-generated art is tricky. I'm of the opinion that it is indeed totally worthless if generated by a mindless, mouth-frothing AI bro, no matter how elaborate or impressive the piece is. However, like all mediums, it does at the same…
Life began in the deepest recesses of the earth. Slowly, with incalculable effort through numberless ages, it pulled itself out of the depths and into the sea, then out of the sea and onto land, and finally reached its apex when it left land behind and moved into the air. A beautiful race of feathered beings developed. They were kind and smart, built their towns on mountainsides, and largely left…
I always feel weird when I'm about to do a "technical post", because it's so different from the sort of thing I usually write about. Which is strange, considering I live immersed in this tech world and AI stuff. ... For a long while now I've wanted to add audio versions of my posts. At first I entertained the idea of reading them myself, but eventually dismissed it because I just didn't have the…
Si quieres cambio verdadero, pues camina distinto. ~ Calle 13 (La Vuelta al Mundo) This is an idea that has been going around in my mind a lot lately. According to what I said in this post , I should already have written about it by now, but I keep putting it off, mostly because I don't feel I've thought enough about it. However, today I decided it's probably time, as I don't think I'll ever get…
Despite my best efforts, I sometimes (always) worry about what others think of my writing. It's definitely been getting better (the more I write here 1 , the less I think about it), but it's still there. This is something I've been wondering about for a long, long time. It comes from way before I even started this blog. Ever since I was little, I've always cared about what others think of me. I…
The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way. ~ Ryokan Well, my plan to write daily during the past week didn't really work at all! I thought I would be able to leverage all that free time and…
I'm sitting at my local airport as I write this. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to be about, so I guess we'll have to find out together. This airport is quite small compared to the usual huge international ones. It is a small country, to be sure, so maybe it's expected. Anyway, usually my flights depart from the "old wing", but today my flight will go out of the "new wing". I'd come by here…
Content warning: thinking about death, how things don't outlast us, the futility of legacy, and what is truly important Yesterday before bed I was thinking about this series, and my mind started playing with the question of "what's the use of it". One of the first things that came into my mind was that I simply enjoy writing it. But the second, which was slightly surprising to realize, was that…
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Last stanza of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" , by John Keats It's commonly said that " great art is the one that makes you feel something", but recently I realized that great art also…
Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. ~ Zhuangzi I've been reflecting a bit on my last post, and especially how I had to keep talking myself into working on it, but my mind just refused to "latch on to the task". I'd been playing Caves of Qud on my Switch for some days, and all I could think about was the game 1 . Last night I realized I frequently go through cycles such as this…
As I sit down to write today, I find my mind is just not in it. I had originally planned to talk about how we tend to "stagnate" as we grow older, but alas, I think that will have to wait until a future post. Today I will talk about what's actually on my mind right now: Caves of Qud . I've really just barely started the game. I've spent no more than a few hours on it and only gone through a…
The more I write in this series the more I ask myself why is it that I'm doing it . Seems like a silly question, but not one I've yet been able to answer satisfactorily. In my initial post I identified my reason as just wanting to pick back up a hobby which in the past had given me a lot of satisfaction. I still think there's some of that but it's also more. I could write posts only once in a…
Beer dulls a memory, brand sets it burning, but wine is the best for a sore heart's yearning. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind For a long while now, ever since my first child was born ~4 years ago, I've struggled with the "morning slump". I frequently wake up and everything just feels... gray. Bleak. Cottonish. Irrelevant, unamusing, unsurprising. On the worst of days it feels like…
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods As some of you may know, a while ago I made my own (pretty minimal and open source ) analytics service called Mochi , mostly because I was curious about how such a thing might be implemented. 1 Lately, I've been…
Some days ago I was playing the excellent " Good Coffee, Great Coffee " on my phone (so wholesome; I sometimes just open it up to have the soundtrack playing in the background), and I eventually found myself in the "sponsors section," where the game allows you to watch "ads" in return for special in-game currency. I didn't care much about the currency itself; I was just watching the ads as a show…
After writing yesterday's post, I kept thinking about how I've actually managed to pull fifty posts out of thin air. I thought maybe sharing my workflow might be useful for others, so that's what I'm planning to do here. Note that this works for me, but that doesn't mean it will work for you, or even that it will work for future me! It's just what I'm doing right now. I've mentioned a couple of…
Ahh, post #50. I've been looking forward to this! In many ways, when I first began this experiment, "fifty" was my initial goal. The plan was to publish a post every day (or almost every day) for fifty days straight, and then re-evaluate how things are going. So far, I think it's been going great! When I first started, I wondered how the hell I would manage to post about fifty different topics. At…
Whenever I want to remind myself of the awesomeness of the universe, I try to remember that trees are pretty much made of air solidified by light. You probably already learned about this when studying photosynthesis in school, but somehow I didn't make the connection (or at least I can't remember). It was only recently that I read somewhere Thich Nhat Hanh saying that a tree is mostly made out of…
Woah, I'm already at post 48. Crazy how fast time flies! To be honest, there's a gray area between around post 17 and post 45. I have no idea what happened, and I have little recollection of what I wrote about. But since post 45, time has been moving really slowly! Maybe it's because I'm expecting #50 too much? I told myself that I would run this experiment till #50 and then give myself the chance…
( ... I'm noticing I'm starting to care about "standards" on these posts. Whenever I check my little green notebook for ideas, I almost always ask myself "but will I be able to write a good enough post about this?" . Standards are not good. Must. Not. Give. In. ... ) I'm writing this post partly as an answer to a post (and an email) from Noahie, in which he goes on to say that people tend to use…
The dragon roars and thrashes and sleeps and does nothing. There's nothing to do , says the maiden, who looks at the dragon with eyes that spell hope and hopelessness. What do you say, dear friend? One last time? One last, glorious jump into the ocean of tears and abandonment and vigor. Dip, deep down, dip, and be reborn anew, stronger and quieter, and of all different shapes and colors, like…
During my last trip to the beach I noticed something that I've always known but never consciously realized: whenever I'm walking around with my youngest (1 y/o), almost everyone I pass smiles at him, and by extension smiles at me. My son is currently starting to walk, so he's extra cute as he bumbles along, holding onto my hand for dear life while at the same time trying to rip my arm to make me…
Soundtrack for today (I couldn't resist the cheesy title 😅) Well, today finally marks the end of my struggle with Azure support to get my account re-enabled. To be fair, they were really helpful and patient with all my questions. It turns out that a deeper look on their side revealed the existence of a crypto miner on one of my servers (😱). I have no idea where it came from, and they wouldn't…
I really need to get better at properly planning these posts. For a while I was writing them early in the morning, but then that got too tiring, so now I'm writing them late at night, usually after everyone has gone to bed, which is also tiring! Perhaps there's a middle way? Perhaps I can take some time in the morning to think/plan what I'll write about (and maybe even come up with some…
Recently I was partaking in one of my favorite pastimes, chilling on Wikipedia, and I came across a really interesting article about bone pointing . Bone pointing is a practice undertaken by certain tribes of central Australia where a shaman-like figure called a kurdaitcha takes the role of executioner, and they kill their quarry with "real life magic". These kurdaitcha, which are also called by…
It's not a surprise to anyone that lately the internet is being flooded with AI-generated stuff, colloquially called AI slop. This has actually been going on for some years now, ever since models became good enough to write decent content (I put it around the release of GPT-4o), but it hasn't been until this past year that the amount of AI slop has positively exploded. I would say it's natural. As…
... With all that's going on in Minnesota I don't much feel like writing about anything other than that, but at the same time there's already so much stuff out there and written much more eloquently than I ever could. So for a while I'll try to pretend everything is "normal". Still, please be safe ... Hey, we're already at post #40 since I started this new "word vomits" series. I keep calling them…
Enjoy the show; there's only going to be one function. After it is done, the walls will be torn down, everything destroyed. The land purged of any sign, ready to house a theater that might come. The actors will all leave, far away go, to theaters of their own. Each will forget the role they played. Each will forget they're in a theater at all. Each will forget. But there is one that sees and…
Only one man in a thousand is boring, and he's interesting because he's a man in a thousand. ~ Harold Nicolson ... I live in a tropical country where we're blessed with abundant fruit all year round. In my house we always have a "hand of bananas" hanging in the kitchen, and it's exactly bananas that I want to talk about. I sometimes have the privilege of traveling abroad, and whenever I do I'm…
Today we'll talk about a lightweight topic: the meaning of life. I'm writing this as my submission for the January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival . What is the meaning of life? I would imagine many posts will make the joke that the actual answer is absolutely and undisputedly the number 42 , and they might not be that wrong at that. But first... Perhaps landing on a definitive answer for the "meaning" of…
Recently I went out camping , and one thing I kept thinking of is "your pee carries something of yourself with it, so what happens with that something when you pee outdoors"? Of course, here "pee" is a stand-in for any human activity, as we can't help but leave traces of ourselves wherever we go. But for the sake of scatological humor, let's go with "pee" as the case in point for the rest of this…
Today I was lucky enough to stumble on a beautiful poem by Hafez (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) called "With That Moon Language". ... Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me." Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each…
I don't know why, but it feels like ages since I last wrote my post! I missed yesterday (and the 15th) because I spent most of the day driving back from our camping trip. Maybe skipping those two days threw my schedule up in the air? Today I haven't been thinking about the day's post as much as usual, which seems to support that hypothesis. Maybe. Or maybe I've just been busy doing other stuff.…
The dark lady stands as gatekeeper and guide to the dark pool. "Come, jump into the water", she says as she extends her hand to you. Pale flesh of moonlight draped in shadow. "Come, jump, jump. JUMP!" As I write this I'm again lying in my tent. Everything is the same as yesterday except for the fact that it's not raining today (well, raining less), and there's a lot more people around. Yesterday I…
The tree, the moon, all here, and yet gone so soon. A water droplet, falling, its end clear, but for the moment containing everything that is, in perfect harmony, everything reflected according to its nature. As it falls it wonders, "who is the droplet"? (hint: you are) As I write this I'm lying in a camping tent with my sleeping son right next to me. It's currently 9 pm. This weekend we came on a…
Earlier today I was going through one of my notebooks and, to my surprise, it's full of interesting stuff! Most of it is just journal-like, but I found a couple of neat ideas for stories and some "poems" (more phrases than anything) that I thought would be fun to share here. I'll post a few today and maybe a few more tomorrow. The truth hides in the beats between lightning and thunder. Yesterday a…
Whoop! We're at post 30. How time flies. I have to be honest that I don't remember many of the posts I wrote at the beginning, but still they seem to come to my mind when I need them, so perhaps it doesn't matter? ... Today I'm typing from an old, unused Android tablet I had lying around. I actually left it in the US more than a year ago, on my last work trip there, but thankfully a cousin of my…
Like many (most?), I grew up thinking-actually being absolutely certain-that when you shave your hair or beard it grows back thicker. After all, the evidence was right there, no? I would shave my hair, and then hard stubble would start growing, tougher than my usually soft hair. When my beard started coming out, I kept shaving it because I wanted it to grow fuller. And from my point of view, it…
Well, yesterday I skipped posting; it's the first day I’ve skipped since starting this new challenge , but I do have a good reason: We had a party for my mother-in-law's 70th birthday! There was a lot of preparation to do and kids to take care of, so I didn't really end up having time to myself until it was quite late, around 11 pm. I was actually going to write something since I wasn't yet that…
How interesting it is that we humans tend to anthropomorphize 1 everything! Throughout history (and in current times), there are plenty of records of people who talk to trees and rivers and pretty much everything else in their environment. We usually think of that as silly, but remember that in our modern times , there are quite a lot of people who talk to machines! If you think about it, there…
Writing daily is fun. It's a chance for me to sort through my thoughts and bring to the surface things floating on top of my "pool of thoughts" that I hadn't consciously acknowledged. Much of what I talk about is "writing itself", as that's what I'm doing right in the moment. But sometimes it also provides an excuse for me to look into interesting stuff, like whether "fishes" is a proper word or…
Today I'm halfway to my interim goal of 50 wordvomits (with the actual goal being a hundred), and as I write more of these I realize that something that kept me back from posting in the past was the fear of spamming people, the fear that writing anything but a "great" post would worsen my "signal/noise" ratio. I think the first time I heard about this concept was in one of Roy Tang's posts where…