median poke

diff --git a/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md b/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md
index 8aeaeb5..23c0d16 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md
+++ b/content/drafts/another-me-i-havent-met.md
@@ -12,15 +12,11 @@ What makes the exercise challenging is the craft of portraying the medianworld a
 
 Rather, your medianworld is a real human Society that would spit out something very much like you at the center of the distribution: for everything that makes you weird _here_, half the population of your medianworld is even more so. The worldbuilding problem is: how would that _actually_ happen, given different initial conditions, but the same underlying laws of economics, sociology, psychology, _&c._? How would the macro-level features of Society shake out, were a Society to supervene on that population?
 
-The trope may have been intended as a [comforting escape fantasy for weird people tired of grating against the insanities of our world](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession)—you can pretend to be "from" someplace else, perhaps [deposited here by some fantastical portal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai), and missing your home.
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-But when I contemplate this exercise for myself, I'm instead struck by the extent to which such a fictive "home" is _necessarily_ a chimera—a scintillating but ultimately untrue thought. All of my memories, all of my life projects, actually took place _here_, in this United States of this Earth in this early twenty-first century, where I _am_ kind of weird along several dimensions, and my existence doesn't make sense outside of that context. To posit a self-consistent world in which my underlying traits are normal, a _lot_ of things would have to change; although many of the changes would be appealing, the overall outcome would have to be a strange and somewhat alien Society—somewhere I could happily assimilate with time, probably; somewhere I wish my world would imitate in some aspects, assuredly; but not a _home_ for current-me.
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-And if I'm not at home _here_, either, well—who said all problems were solvable?
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-My medianworld has various names for complicated political reasons (compare [Myanmar/Burma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Myanmar), or [Kyiv/Kiev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev)): most often known by the [exonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym) Zackistan, it is also sometimes called Westlake (the convention used in this post), or less commonly, Carrietopia.
+The country sometimes called Westlake is also known by a few other names for complicated political reasons (compare [Myanmar/Burma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Myanmar), or [Kyiv/Kiev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev)): most often by the [exonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym) Zackistan, and less commonly as Carrietopia.
+
+Due to a population bottleneck about 700 years ago, Westlakers have a very distinctive national character, 
 
 [underlying traits: ideologically-drivenness, need for transparency, general craziness, autogynephilia]