@melissa

internet anthropologist / hacker larp / n=1 experiments in parenting from first principles

[@melissa @melissa]

one time as a kid, my dad told me about some old research he'd read

he said, maybe asian kids are better at math because they just try 50% longer

[@melissa @melissa]

@GarethEllis theoretically carol of the bells

[@melissa @melissa]

@HeinrichKuttler - inadvertently enacted new family tradition last year
- carol of the bells. but some sort of piano jazz ish instrumental interpretation. extended departures from original

[@melissa @melissa]

couldn't find the christmas playlist i was looking for. picked one. something like calm christmas playlist. start making dinner. now i'm almost done with dinner and i'm like, wow. did i oneshot this. this new playlist is so good. so congruent. i go to save it. it's been one song on repeat for like 50 mins

[@melissa @melissa]

@HeinrichKuttler - inadvertently enacted new family tradition last year
- carol of the bells. but some sort of piano jazz ish instrumental interpretation. extended departures from original

[@melissa @melissa]

husband took our child trick or treating and when they got home it was christmas because i'd put up the tree. i only took it down last week after much ridicule from husband, who misses it so much he just said ok fine christmas is now halloween to presidents day

[@melissa @melissa]

@chrislakin obsidian

[@melissa @melissa]

the path to obsidian was direct only in that: i did not want it to lead to obsidian.

i refuse to believe i need anything heavier than textedit. apple notes is a stretch. it's not about being beholden to the apple kingdom. though i do not love that. that's not the thing for me

i'm not a wordcel. i'm a discount shape rotator. i don't get overattached to text. the only way i can put anything down on purpose is by not looking at it.

i quite literally mean not looking at it. when i type with the intention of writing i don't look at the words, i slightly zoom out my eyes and peripherally look down at the keypad like the little letters popping up are strange alien fish swimming through the thick distorted safety glass of an aquarium. does it sound stupid. yes it sounds insane. does it work. also yes.

i work append only. there is no backwards there is only forwards.

when i was like 10 years old i was elite at looking at words i put on screen and not nitpicking them out of existence. it's a pretty hard skill that comes easily to a kid and it must be practiced to keep it. i do not practice it. i decided to be bad at it.

you can choose to be good at something. why can't you choose to be bad at something?

of course it's because people are choosing this all the time. and not admitting it to themselves.

but i admitted it to myself. i had no delusions of grandeur. i knew my notes were going nowhere. so i did not indulge in elaborate knowledge management systems.

i was wrong. maybe. we'll see together. first i'm telling you the ways i was right.

these apps all have a bias toward inaction. they're aspirational.

i don't feel good saying that. it's not pretty.

humans want to make things. it kind of gives me some sort of existential pain. when i think about all the things we do to fool ourselves like we're making a thing instead of just making the thing.

husband was once talking to the child and he pointed to some tall buildings out a window and he said, look. only humans make things. when you get big, you have to make things too.

the child said, like money?

husband said, like money. or big tables made of stone

i'm a capitalist, ok? but we're it.

we are the things that make things.

there's many research papers on how housekeepers have the highest job satisfaction. cleaning is so concrete. it's dirty, bad and then clean, good. the reward function is constant, you see the progress as it happens.

ok. but knowledge workers aren't obsessively cleaning. then why? why are they obsessively cleaning gardening filing normalizing data in knowledge management apps?

there's another research paper on housekeepers. this one's different.

it's about hotel housekeepers. the hotel housekeepers were asked if they get any exercise and all mostly reported no, none. then they told half the housekeepers that, actually, cleaning is exercising and is in fact easily over and above the recommended daily exercising. a month later, that half of the housekeepers now perceived themselves as getting lots of exercise. and, in that same month later, with nothing else changed, their bodies changed. lower weight, lower blood pressure, lower whatever they were measuring. nothing changed except being told their work counts as working out.

ok. where am i going with this? first it proves me right and then it proves me wrong.

i sort of think these apps make us like markdown housekeepers.

we've been told markdown housekeeping is like the intellectual equivalent of working out. or something. whatever. the thing that will lead to what we humans wish for. which is to make things.

but the housekeeping of it all tricks us into thinking that it's the acting on it. that's not the acting on it you want. there's no credit for well manicured note lawns.

the goal of taking notes is to finish an essay. or a short story or a book or a post or whatever it is you're writing towards. you have to do the thing that gets you final credit. you can't just collect notes on 700 things forever.

so we're doing all the housekeeping and none of the making and our bodies of work are not changing.

our aspiration is not housekeeping.

husband is disciplined. i don't even want to talk about how disciplined he is, it makes me sick. discipline is when you do the thing even when you don't want to it and you do it when you said you were going to do it.

i appear disciplined. it's not that i'm not, i am. i do have discipline. but what i have more of is grit. once i get started, i will solve til the death of it. i'm an object in motion that stays in motion. once i get in motion.

this has always been true of me. i've hacked myself in a million ways to surreptitiously siphon off ambient latent motion.

one way i do that is not cleaning up at night. i do the dishwasher, because that's a strict dependency. otherwise i go to sleep. i leave everything undone.

i get up in the morning and i'm immediately accosted. by undoneness. the morning light is harshest to the dog hair on the dark wood floors. there's couch blankets unfolded. throw pillows everywhere. probably some on the floor. probably in all the dog hair.

i do not see all this and think, ugh. i see all of it and i think: wins. look at all these easy fucking wins.

i worked with a founder and i told him this story. he said, holy shit. i do that too.

he said, for him, he sees it like a steve jobs thing. every couch blanket folded or throw pillow chopped is a tiny insignificant dent on the universe to start the day. to get him in motion.

he said, it's his way of waking up and proving to himself he's not in a simulation. now he can go out into the day, and try for making more significant dents.

you see where i was wrong right?

long story not short, i'd been stuck on a problem and i finally disambiguated the one stupid thing i needed to disambiguate and as soon as i pulled the right thread all of it unraveled easily into done.

obsidian became obvious.

sort of.

the reason it worked is not like, i discovered lots of secret gems hidden in my notes. i did not mindmap myself.

the reason is i had a nice mess to clean up. i do daily dated notes in apple notes and it's been 6,986 days since the iphone first shipped.

i used the ais to convert everything to normalize everything to codify everything. now the nice mess was still a mess but more like a nice pile.

i imported it into obsidian, set up a base to track status changes, and told a friend i made a plan to process at least 100 notes at the end of every weekend.

she was like. BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

she said, no way. it'll just take one day with one too many coffees and you'll level it all.

it was saturday and that day of leveling was sunday.

i am totally uninterested in giving advice. i'm allergic to having a message. i'm only going to tell you what i see, now, about myself:

obsidian is a case study in letting the system emerge.

obsidian is the reward. it is not the forcing function. it is the reward for having forced myself to function.

one way i force myself to function in getting something done is to sentence myself to something i want to do less.

it's W34 of 2026 and i'm still writing in W27. i haven't swept anything out of W27, into my system of scratchpads, because every time, as i'm about to do some thankless sweeping, i keep seeing a thing in there. i so do not want to do the sweeping that suddenly that thing, that bad unfinished worthless thing looks good and ready and then i sneak it onto its own page and suddenly i've sat down and written the whole thing.

i sat down to fold some blankets and chop some pillows and now i've written more words in 2 months than i have in 24.

there's good advice from people who give great advice and it says do something for 100 days. i'm saying for me, i should have said fuck it. i did it for at least 6,986 days and i think maybe i only needed to do it for 10.

i overestimated how little motion i need to become an object in motion that stays in motion.

the prescription of time is like the misdirection from the magician. the magic trick is you killing your disgust reflex. you're snuffing out your aversion.

your aversion is to the narcissism of it all. of documenting everything you do and think and read and watch. everything you experience, you must react to, and note and document. it's so important. i'm so important. my opinions are so important. i must be documented. someone's going to find this like leonardo's diaries and they'll see the brilliance.

but i realized that all of that is true. it is a narcissistic pursuit but i've come to appreciate that the narcissist's narcissistic pursuits have great value.

it kills me to write this. i think the narcissism is actually healthy.

is there some more flattering way to say it? i don't know if i had a healthy enough amount of narcissism. the narcissistic outputting bestows you the benefit of having a minimum critical mass of your own material to work with.

that's why duration of time did not matter. the only part that mattered is i did not allow myself to put other people's shit in there. the impulse to save other people's work is my aversion to narcissism. i did not let myself save links and quotes. i told myself if i need them i'll find them again.

i must process it. that does not mean i process it like it's some expensive cut of steak. i am not coveting and salting and tenderizing and dry aging and searing. i am processing. i process it like it's sausage. i let it be poor quality and floppy and gross like a raw hot dog is. it's fine that i'm repulsed by what i put down. but i must put it down.

the point is i made a mess but it's my mess and the reward is i got to take the mess and move it into obsidian and clean it. now i have a mess that's mine and it's all mine, gloriously mine. i am not stewarding some fan garden of other people's makings. it's my shit. it has existential weight.

bearing existential weight is what it means to make something

[@melissa @melissa]

scarlett johansson messed up. short sighted. she could have been the voice of humans. we struggled to think. who else could it even be

[@melissa @melissa]

@Renaissance_Man camp. early and often

[@melissa @melissa]

the boy children yearn for the competition. we put the child in sports camp over winter break. after the first day, i asked him how it went. it's dinnertime. he's exhausted. he kind of half closed his eyes and slow smiled and sighed deeply all at once. he didn't have the words

[@melissa @melissa]

one of the elementary schools i went to made the whole grade do like three days on a ship. we slept in racks and got assigned mandatory jobs. mine was standing night watch. i froze to death on deck every night from 2AM to 6AM and it was the best day of my life

[Bones @FrailSkeleton]

Business idea: child jail. You drop them off for like a half day when they’ve been really bad. They have to wear the striped clothes& sit in cells, maybe break some rocks. Bread& water only for snacks

[@melissa @melissa]

@specialbeefbowl the bad food is seared into memory

[@melissa @melissa]

@soyrizotacos tragic

[@melissa @melissa]

@exfatloss inverting it, is there a worse voice than marge

[@melissa @melissa]

husband: scarjo fucked up. she could have been the voice of humans

me: like the platonic ideal of female human voice

husband: no. she could have been the voice of all humans

me: ok sure but who would be the ideal male voice. keanu?

husband: hmm

me: the patrick bateman guy is good

husband: i don't even know what his voice sounds like. he's actually such a good actor that he just becomes different people in every fucking movie

me: ed norton is pretty consistent

husband: ed norton is really really good. yeah. that man is really good. he's really likable. he's in everything. he's very likable. he's a serial killer a lot

me: aren't those things correlated. what about the guy, the one who is married to what's her face. one of the ryans

husband: gosling? no. doesn't work

me: johnathan rhys meyers? or boromir?

husband: huh. boromir, yeah. sean bean. that's a good one. "one does not simply walk into mordor". sean bean's a very good one

me: snape. or the guy who killed himself

husband: you have to be more specific

me: uh. three names. white hair. blonde hair. whatever. talented mr ripley

husband: philip seymour hoffman. no. he's too mad. he also does lots of voices. he like becomes a different person. he definitely has a distinctive voice. but i think you'd be terrified listening to philip seymour hoffman explain everything to you. it's too much. it's too ripley

me: so the joker dude is off the table

husband: same. different person every movie. he's also dead. you've put up three dead guys

me: seems like they'll be more agreeable to ai. what about the guy in match point

husband: that's jonathan rhys meyers again. i think that's a pretty good selection

me: johnny depp. pirate voice

husband: johnny depp is pretty good. but no. you gotta think about his voice from the trial

me: the trial?

husband: yeah the amber heard trial

me: oh the trial i watched. i thought maybe 'the trial' was a movie i didn't know. he was very good at the trial

husband: johnny depp is pretty good

me: maybe men will be more reasonable about lending their voice

husband: maybe morgan freeman

me: he did google maps. or maybe it was waze

husband: what? really? i didn't know. he does his voice for a million things. the thing is, most people that do voices, specifically, are too extra. you couldn't listen to it. like, yeah, here's all these people that are great at voices. they're too high strung

me: like anne hathaway

*does anne hathaway manic laugh*

husband: yeah no way. ah fuck. you know who would be really good. chris pratt.

me: the one in the murder prosecutor trial tv show? mini series. defending jacob

husband: no that's chris evans

me: the chris in hurt locker?

husband: what? there are no chrises in hurt locker. that's jeremy renner

me: whatever. all the chrises are super high in likability. the problem is all these people are anti ai. maybe the girl who's currently married to ashton kutcher

husband: i don't know who is currently married to ashton kutcher

me: the russian

husband: mila kunis? yeah. she's kind of scarjo-ish. she's kind of likable

me: it's hard to believe none of these people will say yes. eventually the chinese ais will just upload the voices to their models and then everyone will have it. we can try to do things to make them stop and maybe it'll officially stop but it won't stop. scarjo should have said yes

husband: the best voice is scarjo. basically the most successful female actress of all time, by any metric that fucking matters, realistically. it's all marvel women

me: the only movies that ever made money

husband: exactly. she's the highest grossing and has a shitton of fucking awards and has been in a lot of the best movies ever made. she completely owns lost in translation. she basically is, by any metric that fucking matters, to me, the greatest female actress of all time. i don't know how you'd have a better career than scarjo

me: she could change her mind about the ais. she should change her mind about the ais. that's how scarjo would have an even better career than scarjo

husband: it's hard to think who else. i think you need someone that's just like, kind of casual. maximizing relatability. really, the correlation is very clear to me. i mean, basically you want star power. that's actually what it comes down to

[@melissa @melissa]

@YossarianLocker jonathan pine ai on the other hand

[@melissa @melissa]

pine ends up winning BECAUSE in his old life HE IS NOT AN ASSET

it's pine's charisma, and kind of sheer dumb luck, that he happens to have a trump card in his network on the ground back in cairo

it's totally unknowable to roper that an arab spring terror cell could foil him

[@melissa @melissa]

@YossarianLocker oh. how could we have forgotten tom hiddleston

[@melissa @melissa]

a friend calls, i pick up without saying hello and he starts talking without saying hi. he opens with, my brother's here, you're on speaker, so that he can hear you lambast me. then he monologues, sums up our contention for his brother. i say, "yes that's totally fake and gay". the brother is clearly only half paying attention. because i hear him go, wait what model of claude is that

[@melissa @melissa]

@Tyler_Menzer yes

[@melissa @melissa]

basically none of the hits were legal text. all input was first diffed and culled against FY21, so legal text, unless it was novel, didn't get fed in. i have heard legal text often returns false positives. but out of the 44K words that flagged ai positive, there was only one single false positive hit on legal text

[@melissa @melissa]

i pangrammed the s&p 500

[@melissa @melissa]

actually come to think of it

[@melissa @melissa]

apparently not everyone has ships in their backyards

[@melissa @melissa]

@mononaut exactly

[@melissa @melissa]

*reads draft*

me: to the extent where i disincluded it

husband: just say exclude

me: disinclude is a real word

claude: disinclude is a nonstandard, rare word in the english language

husband: WHERE IS THE BAR WHERE THAT IS JUST NOT A WORD. ARE WE BASICALLY WILLING TO SAY THAT ANY LATIN PREFIX PLUS ANY WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS A REAL WORD

[@melissa @melissa]

*asks claude another word*

husband: no. you can do better. there are many more ""rare"" words you use