There are plenty of musings on how to write better stories. I’m more of a reader than a writer, so that advice is rarely relevant to me. As a reader, what does matter to me is how to write better comments, especially for the stories I enjoy. How do I express what I feel while reading a story? What’s worth expressing? How can I be honest about both the good and the bad parts without hurting the author’s motivation to write? This is the other half of a writing community like ours,

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This is my third time trying to write this post. The previous two times, I failed to find a way to write about this well, so I'll instead write about it badly.

I started trying to understand algebraic geometry (very) recently, and I bumped into what's called the Nullstellensatz. I haven't understood it yet, but there's a slice of the intuition that I found fascinating.

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I think this one stands on its own, so I'm just going to list it out bluntly.

• Broadly, love seems like the desire for someone or something to have a place (or a bigger place) in the world. I thought of this one some time ago while writing about cutie marks.
• Sometimes it's also a thing that inspires creative activity. This one came up during a panel recently.

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When I think back on the things that changed my life, they tend to be either epiphanies or shocks. The former, often new perspectives on things that have always been a part of my life. The latter, an unexpected job, a car crash, and echoes I never thought I’d hear. This post is about a thing that, for me, made a mockery of the line between the two.

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In vision and hearing, the objects we work most directly with aren't the things our eyes and ears pick up. Our eyes pick up photons, and our ears pressure waves, yet our conscious mind are not quite built to work with photons and pressure waves. What actually matters, the end form of our senses, are the compositions. They're things like shapes, patterns, and words, and these things don't accurately retain information about their source. The objects you see reflect your sense of photons, but you

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An ability to learn important things from anyone. Let’s investigate!

When I first realized that I was too dumb to accomplish my goals, I decided to write out everything I thought I understood. On the first night, I probably wrote about 10 pages of crap, and I committed to adding more things to the document every night until I felt it was reasonably complete.

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Recently, my mind has been on questions of persona. What constitutes a persona? How do you decompose one into its pieces? How do you put the pieces back together? How does a persona grow over the course of a life? How do people apply their intuition for personas to things that aren't people? How powerful can that intuition be? The list goes on. I think it’s worth trying to get answers to these questions even if they take a long, long time. I don’t have the answers, but I thought I’d share my

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I’ve been thinking recently about what kinds of mathematical models could possibly be suitable for describing consciousness, and I noticed that intuitions for darkness, not brightness, lend themselves more naturally to studies.

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I’ve spent some time meditating on cutie marks as specifications, and I’ve learned… too much. My brain is still refactoring. The short version is that there’s a close relationship between sub-specifications and sub-systems. A lot of things follow from that simple statement. Too many things...

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I spend a lot of time thinking about cutie marks, and I get that that’s a little weird. Something about the concept feels idyllic, yet somehow within grasp. Cutie marks are emblematic of The Thing I feel is missing in our world of squishy humans, and the lack of them somehow feels like it’s at the root of every other important problem. No matter what the problem, it could have been solved if only the right person had found their cutie mark.

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