My day in court being cut after coach pointed out that non-gender-related
Diary-like rambling is boring and no one cares
Part of me feels like I should add a paragraph about how I botched the
aftercare by trying on makeup after I realized that my roommate is out of town
and got this painful pimples on my chin? But maybe we can just shove this in
the queue already
If I can so easily dash out bullet points describing what material I want to
cover, converting the bullet points into paragraphs of actual prose shouldn't
be so hard, right? Right?
Obviously, I shouldn't let my pretty attachment the Either/Or title trope
interfere with the actual objective of clearly communicating my ideas! "Why I
Don't Care About Your Feelings" is too easily read as intrinsic callousness,
whereas the text itself makes clear that it's instrumental callousness: it's
precisely _because_ I care about people that I can't let the fact of my caring
be exploited.
I've hired a writing coach. Hopefully she'll help me actually get out the
things I want to say on a reasonable schedule—it'll take dedication and hard
work to get out three+ good posts a week, but it's not delusional.
I still want to work in a sentence or paragraph somewhere about how there are a
_lot_ of "dark" AGPs out there, but it's worth committing this version that at
least reads all the way through which I could publish without dying of
embarrassment.
I don't know if anyone will notice, but I think it's adorable and entirely
on-theme if I abbreviate the first name of male cited authors (when it's not
too distracting in my subjective opinion) but not women.
Style ruling: the definite article at the beginning of the alternative title
should be capitalized even though "Or" is also capitalized. Justification: the
second ("alternative") title should be on equal footing with the first title;
if the second title had been selected as the first title, the definite article
would be capitalized.
continuing to draft "Minimal Viable Product", but ...
Do we really want to pollute _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue
Thought_ with _more_ akrasia-blogging? ("The Blockhead" was bad enough.)
It's been a worthwhile exercise to get the blood in my fingers flowing, but
I can imagine a reader crying out, "So stop _telling_ me that you have so
many important thoughts left to share, and fucking _show_ me!"—and she
wouldn't be wrong. Maybe salvagable for my real-name blog?
The one word "ozy" felt like a reasonable lowercase tag at the time, but I'm
likely going to end up with "Julia Serano" and "Scott Alexander" tags, which
should clearly be capitalized; I should treat Ozy the same.
(At commit time, the development server seems to still be rendering the tag as
lowercase, which is _deeply confusing_ and may need to be debugged later??)
so like, there's _also_ a _far_ more "incriminating" link to my real-name blog
(!) still in there, but I almost think the æsthetic of my ostensible
pseudonymity is better satisfied by leaving it in, as if it were just something
Saotome-Westlake happened to stumble across on the web and remember enough to
link. Remember that story about how the key to breaking the Enigma was that it
never mapped a letter to itself? Let's be smarter than that, sort of
elaborate on epistemic status of "From What I've Tasted of Desire"
This post has gotten a disproportionate amount of attention but justifiably
evokes a lot of "WTF!?"-ness from readers who don't already get where I'm
coming from; maybe strengthen the warning label just a bit
There were at least two bugs in my autoscheduler. Firstly, the git-pull to the
working repo didn't seem to happen for some reason (although it worked when I
invoked the autoscheduler manually). Secondly, the server is on UTC.
Maybe Larry Lessig's minions think they're being cute by publicizing a
"human-readable summary" rather than the actual license, but I think that
phrasing is kind of insulting to lawyers. Plus, the license fulltext page
doesn't have an obnoxious fundraising banner, unlike the "deed" page.
a key subparenthetical qualifier in "Hormones Day 156"
This is not the kind of blog that can be unambiguously "marketed." It's
something that needs to exist, and it's something that should be carefully
promoted to carefully-sliced market segments
A powerful reason for keeping my blog's source in Git, is that I feel less
guilty about making nontrivial edits to already-published posts (which already
have a publication date and often, like this one, are about a particular point
in time): it's clearer that I'm refining my expression rather than trying to
edit the past, when there's an easily-accessible log of what changed and when.
I said "Harvey Mudd" because they have a reputation as a STEM-specialty school,
but Trent and another friend of the blog pointed out that they don't actually
have a graduate program; the other friend suggested CMU as a replacement
respecting the desired prestige ordering.