one monkey with no hope of aping shakespeare
Standing on a precarious ridge I have the misfortune to be an optimist. It has led to some terrible investments and a few excellent life choices. In the present state of the world I cannot tell you whether the optimists or the pessimists are ahead on points. Here is how
A meditation story from 2014. My first compassion meditation — I'm not sure I did it entirely right. The basic idea is to follow the mantra "may X be well, may X be happy, may X be free from suffering", where X is a variable. At
A confabulation I. Maya's knife came in a wooden box lined with moss. No packing foam, no leaflet in twelve languages. Just the blade, and a single card of handmade paper, and on the card, in letters that had been pressed into it rather than printed on: Æ
Have you ever been asked not to think of an elephant? How did it go? Maybe you tried, failed, and — being competitive — are now googling "how not to think of an elephant." Welcome. You are already thinking about one. But we can fix that. The phrase
A while back I wrote about  Eclipses, equinoxes, and everyday awe — telling the time on Spaceship Earth . That post argued  why  a real-time planet visualization should exist as something you leave running: a clock told by the planet's orientation in space, a daily
In 1650, Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." I now say this to my AI assistant roughly twice a week. Just "cromwell." One word. It
How 4,528 days of meditation led me to build a kinder more joyful life logger. I like weird goals. On my 39th birthday, I decided to stop drinking for a whole year. The main reason was novelty, which is my main reason for doing many things. The health benefits
Monday, 8 April 2024 — Durango, Mexico 12:12:12 CST 24°01'21.1"N 104°40'17.9"W All morning Plaza IV Centenario in Durango has been filled as if for a festival. Earlier, a shockingly youthful shaman led a salute
Testaments as love notes, pranks, institutions — and the occasional drawing‑room mystery. ⚠️ Fair warning - post is ~40% AI slop ⚠️ I wrote my own will recently and afterwards I felt oddly buoyant... more alive, you might even say. It turns out a will isn’
My Obsidian vault is haunted. For years, it was a quiet, orderly place—a digital library of my thoughts, projects, and learnings. It wasn't exactly tidy but it was familiar. Over the last year, a new presence has taken up residence, and it is unsettling. My Obsidian
Not phasers or warp drive, just a world where life is free. When energy is too cheap to meter and the basics of life run as modern commons money will quietly stop gatekeeping dignity. A new electrotech report shows how fast free power is arriving. Let map out the 
A new study in PNAS by V. Canessa-Pollard and colleagues (2025) shows that chants from seven different spiritual traditions share a universal sound signature of calm. Researchers analysed over 200 recordings from around the world and found the same ingredients repeating across cultures + mostly flat, slowly changing pitch + continuous
Did you know that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about actual infinity? Like many people, I was aware of David Foster Wallace because of Infinite Jest . His very long and difficult novel/memoir that is widely admired and rarely read. I had tried and failed myself. Wikipedia classifies it
By: Caspar Addyman Published: August 29, 2025
I was listening to the Tibetan book of the dead as an audiobook. There's some vivid and scary imagery, so I asked ChatGPT to walk me through it. So that I didn't have nightmares, I asked to draw it, as if it were a Pixar movie.