New post
I watched Her, which I have not seen before. I found it mid. It's sort of intimate in a way I find annoying. I dislike him, and Her and all his friends. Mostly, much worse than I expected it to be.
tomasbjartur
I will be posting daily here for InkHaven. I will post longer things on my substack, hopefully once a week. Of my old posts, this is the most popular by...
Latest posts
Contra My Own Doomerism
It seems worthwhile to try to argue against my own doomerism. What arguments for doom were most compelling to me when I first became a doomer? I could only see two futures and they both looked dire: One was a sort of generalized Hansonian Malthusian vision of a post-human future and the other a classic Bostromian singleton subject to classic Bostromian alignment arguments. My Malthusian doom…
You
As amusing as it is to make fun of Rand, abnegation of the type she points at is a big problem and it is a huge reason people end up depowering. Some EAs try to gaslight themselves into having a false model of their own preferences, through what looks a lot like emotional blackmail. Those who can maintain life as approximate utilitarians are often low-empathy number-go-uppers or extremely high…
In Case of Emergency
He looks not through the window, save for once with the casual disdain of a conqueror, knowing always the real beauty is in the means of this victory over nature. This machine wrought by the will of Man, aluminium limned with lightning and smelted in Promethean fire. Seats lined not with base leather but that beautiful pleather - even the flesh of animals obsoleted by the genius of a great man.…
BVL9G5
My bros and I are looksmaxers. Or we were. Now we are something far more. It started with BVL9G5, a Chinese peptide that reopens growth plates, transforming the "height-pill" from black to white. I was 5'6 when I first injected it. In three months I was 6'2. I became a chad, for being short was my only fault. And yet, there were others out there taller than me. I doubled my dose. By the end of the…
Unaddressed Letters to Some I Met Along The Way
I learned from you the importance of topology. Formerly, I thought topology was created so MIT students could make hilarious jokes about being unable to distinguish a bagel from a coffee cup. You taught me it was developed for literary theory - particularly for the analysis of the works of Ted Chiang, and of all his works The Tower of Babylon most of all. My reading of The Tower of Babylon was…
Goldfish
"This," she said, "is my goldfish. She is my best friend right now." "Your best friend?" I said. "Yes," she said. "Even better than Bianca Becker who fished out your shoes when Anne Baker stole them from your locker and threw them into the swimming pool?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Even better than Marvin Booker, who drove you to the hospital each day when your mother got sick," I said. "Yes," she…
Ontological Ardor
The reader contemplates perfection. The reader defines God as perfection. Further, the reader concludes that non-existence is an imperfection. That is, to not exist would be less perfect than to exist. God is perfect. Being perfect, he must exist. This logic disabuses the reader of the confused, atheistic notions they were inculcated with in their childhood. A student of perfection and of recent…
MAID and Canadian Thanksgiving
Yesterday, I was in conversation with an American and two-thirds of those French people capable of rational thought. We sat in a booth in Light Haven's kitchen and the topic of Thanksgiving came up. I knew only of the Canadian Thanksgiving, but I was told there is an American holiday of the same name. I detailed some aspects of our quaint, northern tradition and was surprised to learn how ignorant…
With Adjustable Chef's Tool Drawer
The author lies in darkness, his hand on keys. Fingers tapping away. Lacking ideas, he does what one does in this situation. He goes meta. He writes about the story he is now writing. This is clever because it is self aware and absurd and no one has ever done it before. The very fact that he jokes about this is also self aware and meta and therefore hilarious. He congratulates himself on this. He…