glassmaker:

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I really am just out of step asethetically from just about everyone I meet. What am I into right now? William Blake, epic poetry from ancient Mesopotamia, the Hermetica, and medieval music/very old folk. Last month it was the Manhattan Project, John Donne, quantum physics, 50s and 60s sci-fi and Richard Feynman (who I have complicated feelings about). Before that it was Lawrence of Arabia, 60s movies, and 60s jazz. I feel a pressure to hide the things I like, for a number of reasons. I think a lot of the time people assume I’m putting on a front, trying to appear cultured, but that genuinely is not where I’m coming from. I have a tendency to be guarded about this stuff, which comes from a fear of being vulnerable, and that makes the problem worse because it makes it harder to communicate my enthusiasm. I’m rapidly improving at that.

There aren’t a ton things I’m passionate about that I can bond with new people over, because I have very few “grounded” interests or reference points for most people. Though it makes it really exciting when someone is into the same stuff as me (and isn’t an asswipe about it, which, let’s be honest, is the real problem here).

If you kind of squint you might see a constellation in that list, and many are recurring images in my mind. The thing that I get out of most of my interests is just something that’s very off-zeitgeist right now, so it doesn’t tend to show up so much in modern cultural products. The place I’m coming from isn’t compatible with postmodern irony or nihilism, nor with the new sincerity approach to pop culture, nor with embracing industry-produced media. And, I mean, that’s part of the problem too. That I feel completely disconnected from most modern cultural products.

It’s a little lonely and I think this is one of the big things that drives people into grad school. But then I also have this drive to express what I get out of this stuff, and that’s honestly where I get the greatest joy in my life.

A number of people have reblogged this saying they’re the same way, and so am I – both the eclectic out-of-step interests that keep changing, and the discernible constellation.

Sometimes this has been very lonely (esp. when I was younger and more socially incompetent – as a teenager I would hang out in IRC and babble about things no one else there knew or cared about).  Tumblr has been a relatively good space for it, I guess just because I get to make unexpected interest-based connections via reblogging and casual follows.

(via thisblogisnther-deactivated2017)

Life has been colorless lately.  I really want to be done with my thesis, and it’s almost done, but it’s taking a long time ironically because I am too focused on it, unable to stop thinking about it all day, and that makes even less excited to actually sit down and write.  (It’s as if the same background music were playing in my head from waking until sleep, and I was getting tired of it, and then I had to write some long essay about that music)

Makes it hard to read for pleasure, or do other enjoyable activities, or be very creative.  Also creates more cravings for things like alcohol and weed than usual, to get my head out of this space.  Not sure what to do here except to keep reminding myself to satisfice on the thesis, and wait until I’ve managed to finish it

Reading Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” as self-care

nuclearspaceheater:

voximperatoris:

nuclearspaceheater:

Back to Mealsquares as my staple food after trying Soylent. It never caused me the sorts of digestive problems others have had, but I was put off by the following things:

1) It’s not as filling.

2) While I’ve joked before about having a craving for Maruchan Ramen after eating Mealsquares for a while, as if phosphate was a macro-nutrient, this does seem to be an actual problem with Soylent, in that I find extended consumption to result in stronger-than-normal cravings for fast food. In fact, Soylent has less than half the daily recommended sodium if it’s all you eat.

3) That “check for mold under the cap” is considered standard practice by the community even for new bottles of Soylent 2.0. Making safe factory-packaged food and drinks, in at least the sense that it will not contain pathogens, is something that I consider a solved problem. And when the problem is found to have not been solved, as in the Blue Bell listeria recall, it’s a huge deal that warrants a recall, shutdown, and investigation. For a reputable company, at least, and the fact that this is not the case with Soylent is a red flag which I have opted to recognize before I’m hospitalized for food poisoning.

(Although a Mealsquare has in fact sent me to the ER for vomiting blood, I accept blame for that one because I seem to had forgotten that “perishable food” is still a thing that can kill you no matter how safe the food is when it’s packaged, and so despite knowing perfectly well that I had lost track of how many days it had been unrefridgerated for, I thought, “eh, it’s probably fine.”

That was a bad call.)

While Mealsquares do not reach my preferred form of sustenance (being able to plug into a wall socket), they remain as the undisputed closest thing I’ve found so far that I can tolerate for extended periods.

Not only can I not afford this stuff, it just doesn’t seem appealing at all to me.

Are people in the market for this really suffering from clinically significant nutrient deficits? If not, why not just eat stuff like lentils or beans?

There is a wide enough gap between “good enough to not require medical attention” and “healthy” [citation needed] that I worry about it. Yet, my ability to enjoy any form of food is low enough and the degree to which I consider planning, shopping, and cooking meals to be a hassle is high enough that I really wished someone would just figure out what a dietitian* would call a months worth of healthy food, put all of that into a blender, and compress the result into dystopian Human Feedstock Bars.

(One thing I do like about Soylent is the branding.)

And then they made Mealsquares. With this last order, they seem to have even managed to solve the overcooking issue I complained about before.

*I almost said “nutritionist,” but then I remembered, “dietitian -> dentist. nutritionist -> toothiologist.”

I drank Soylent for a while in 2015-2016 just as a way of “reducing the amount I have to think about food as much as possible” while being driven slightly crazy by grad school, but I was just never really impressed with it as a product.  I don’t really like the taste or texture (and although it can be improved if you add your own flavoring, it’s still not great), plus the nutritional stuff seems to have been done haphazardly.  (There’s the sodium thing you mentioned, plus it doesn’t have enough fiber – they used to have more fiber, but people didn’t like the ingredient they were using for it, so they just dropped it, which seems irresponsible.)

My impression is that there’s this whole world of meal replacement products out there, which has existed long before Soylent, and that Soylent is trying to reinvent the wheel and running into some issues that have already been solved by others.  When I was in England, I drank some of Esther’s Joylent, which just seemed better in every way – tastier, better texture, better nutritional balance (plenty of fiber).  Joylent’s a new product too, but if they can get this stuff right then I imagine others have in the past.

My constraint here is that I’m (non-deathly) allergic to dairy products, which means I can’t have most non-vegan meal replacements.  Joylent is vegan, but it costs an absurd amount to ship it to the US.  Mealsquares aren’t vegan.  I’ve Googled for “vegan meal replacement shakes” because this sounds like the kind of thing someone would have perfected long ago, but everything I can find is some super-health-foody brand that puts all kinds of supplements in that I don’t want (stuff that could interact with meds, for instance).

If anyone has any recommendations for good, vegan meal replacement products, available in the US, that just have basic nutritional stuff and not a cocktail of supplements, let me know!

(The issue I have with stuff like lentils or beans is that no single foodstuff like that is able to be a staple for me on its own – like, if I try to just eat beans for a day, my body will say “please no more of this” before I get enough nutrition – so if I wanted to have a single staple like a meal shake, I’d have to concoct some sort of homemade gruel mixture that works for me and my body specifically, by trial and error.  This probably isn’t actually hard, and is probably a much better and cheaper idea than Soylent, but my-brain-on-grad-school is willing to pay a big premium for absolutely minimizing how much I have to think about anything, so it can have as much time as possible to stress-about-work-without-actually-working :P)

nostalgebraist:

Returning to my graduate thesis (for what is hopefully a brief round of polishing before the whole thing’s over) has put into stark relief how unpleasant grad school was.

Suddenly I’m back to the old (half-forgotten!) daily pattern of accomplishing a few minor things in the first few hours of the day, then spending the rest of the day in an anxiety loop where I plan to do a more substantial task and then worry about how hard it’ll be given how anxious I already am, which makes me more anxious, etc.  Fiddling with code and running endless tests becomes a way to avoid thinking about the bigger picture, because thinking about the bigger picture feels like watching some absurdist play about how there are no longer any clear standards of value in the world.  My desire for alcohol in the evening has increased, just as it immediately decreased when I stopped working on this project earlier in the year.

I hope this isn’t just “what confronting something serious and difficult” is like for me.  But I’ve had other challenges that don’t make me feel like this; the first time I remember this distinct thing was when I was a research assistant after college, which – hmmm – was the first time I did “real” academic research (as opposed to my undergrad thesis, where I just did a project I thought was cool and didn’t expect to publish any results or otherwise interact with academia).  So probably(/hopefully) I just hate doing academic research.

There are probably a number of distinct reasons why I hate doing academic research, and I’ve obsessed over one possibility or another from time to time, but here is one that crystalized for me after writing the OP:

In academia, it’s not just that the value of what you are doing is uncertain.  It is uncertain, because you’re doing research and by definition no one knows for sure what the outcome will be.  But that in itself I might be able to live with: negative results are still results, and there’s nothing shameful about saying “this seemed like it might work; we tried it; it didn’t, for these reasons; now you know.”

It’s not just that the value is uncertain, but that you’re working alongside many people – many of them incredibly smart and successful – doing things of likewise uncertain valueand that, in merely doing your research, you are implicitly claiming that your inherently-uncertain project is a relatively good bet among all conceivable such projects, or at least all the ones currently in play.  You are implicitly saying that the direction you have chosen is a shrewd direction, not just from your personal perspective, but from the perspective of the entire vast many-tentacled apparatus of Science*.

The boundaries of “what your field knows” are wide, twisting coastlines you can’t honestly claim to know in full, and at every point on this coast, just offshore, there are innumerable new experiments that could be done, new directions that could be tried.  Only a finite number of them will be tried (in the next year, say), and in many cases – when applying for grants, say, or competing for publication in a journal – you are fighting in a zero-sum competition to make your direction one of those few.  Even when the finite pie isn’t as visible – when giving talks, say – you’re still presenting your little in-progress expedition not just as one interesting on its own terms, but one (as it were) advantageous to the whole nation.

In actuality, you only have a vague mental map of the island nation and its coast, with most of the detail concentrated on the little area you call home, and the real reason you’re setting out from the local port is because it’s local and you know and like the waters.  But you have no option except to play ball with the whole national community of explorers.  You may not especially care about Admiral Bigwig’s exploits off the other end of the coast, but like it or not, Admiral Bigwig’s contributions to the national interest will be ranked against yours.  You will be asked why Her Majesty should send resources to your backwater, specifically, of all the ports on the island, and suddenly every port on the island is your business.

Supposedly it’s possible to avoid this by specializing in a small enough subfield, but I’ve never actually had that experience.  After all, people in different subfields can still effectively do the same things, and often they do.  If you’re in a small enough pond, you then have to worry that the size of that pond might shrink to zero as it is revealed to be just a shallow murky subset of something bigger and cooler.

Research is inherently combative, “political,” involved with everyone else’s business.

This kind of thing isn’t unique to academia, and indeed it may not be possible to avoid it entirely.  Job applications, say, are a bit like this (although “contributing to a company” is easier to get a mental handle on than “contributing to a scientific field”).

I get the impression that the startup world is a lot like this, which means I should be very careful about getting involved in it.  In the broadest terms, I don’t want to be in an organization where everyone’s working their asses off but no one quite knows what “the product” is or why it’s any good.

*(focusing on science here just because that is the kind of academic work I have experience in)

Returning to my graduate thesis (for what is hopefully a brief round of polishing before the whole thing’s over) has put into stark relief how unpleasant grad school was.

Suddenly I’m back to the old (half-forgotten!) daily pattern of accomplishing a few minor things in the first few hours of the day, then spending the rest of the day in an anxiety loop where I plan to do a more substantial task and then worry about how hard it’ll be given how anxious I already am, which makes me more anxious, etc.  Fiddling with code and running endless tests becomes a way to avoid thinking about the bigger picture, because thinking about the bigger picture feels like watching some absurdist play about how there are no longer any clear standards of value in the world.  My desire for alcohol in the evening has increased, just as it immediately decreased when I stopped working on this project earlier in the year.

I hope this isn’t just “what confronting something serious and difficult” is like for me.  But I’ve had other challenges that don’t make me feel like this; the first time I remember this distinct thing was when I was a research assistant after college, which – hmmm – was the first time I did “real” academic research (as opposed to my undergrad thesis, where I just did a project I thought was cool and didn’t expect to publish any results or otherwise interact with academia).  So probably(/hopefully) I just hate doing academic research.

For a time in my teenage years I was obsessed with video game journalist Jeremy Parish’s website (at that time called toastyfrog.com), and last night I suddenly got curious whether any of the really snide reviews he wrote were on the internet archive, specifically his review of Xenosaga Episode I, which was perhaps the snidest (IIRC he later deleted it, calling it “a joyless exercise in hatred”)

Indeed, there it was

This kind of writing really impressed me when I was 14 or so, and it’s funny to look back on it in retrospect.  I think I was so impressed because Parish would write dismissively about cultural works I was impressed with, in this tone that suggested he was a Serious, Cultured Adult who just happened to be stopping by to note how inferior my kind of art was.  It suggested that there were whole worlds of art beyond Japanese RPGs – which, well, there were, but at the same time, it’s very easy for me to see now how Parish was puffing himself up.  He has a sense of what good taste is, or is supposed to be, but his pool of references comes almost entirely from video games, comics and anime, even though he’s so critical of those forms, so he’s much handier with negative examples than positive ones (” … resemble nothing so much as forgettable, second-string bit villains from Outlaw Star, ” “Xenosaga is about as literary as an issue The Fantastic Four,” etc.)

And he’s clearly trying to ape a certain kind of snotty film critic writing, like Anthony Lane’s reviews of blockbusters, but at least Anthony Lane watches things other than blockbusters, y’know?

I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone else, although I guess it’s a nice internet culture time capsule (I don’t think people can get away with being this crudely elitist anymore, we’re on way more levels of irony now and so on)

argumate:

nostalgebraist:

It occurs to me that I’ve never actually articulated my own personal relationship to the kind of “creepy male nerds” etc. discourse (and discourse about that discourse) that @unknought refers to here

My own personal relationship to the “creepy male nerds are bad, entitled, w/e” sort of stuff is that it used to make me feel awful and full of despair whenever I encountered it, and now it doesn’t, and the main thing that has changed is that I’ve become … well, uh, cooler.  This, in itself, then makes me uncomfortable and I’m not sure what conclusion to draw about it

Cut for personal “who cares” stuff

Keep reading

seems very similar to Aaronson’s experience? “I was terrified of asking out girls and then I matured and got cooler and got to know some and it went okay”.

The difference is that Aaronson’s experience (recounted [in]famously here) involved moral fear on his own part, fear that he’d be doing something gravely wrong.  I didn’t have moral reasons (feminist or otherwise) for not asking women out, I just had my own supposedly pragmatic reasons, and then when I would encounter certain feminist opinions I would think “yeah it sounds like we’re talking about the same thing, and you’re saying it’d be bad morally and not just pragmatically, okay then.”

(via argumate)

It occurs to me that I’ve never actually articulated my own personal relationship to the kind of “creepy male nerds” etc. discourse (and discourse about that discourse) that @unknought refers to here

My own personal relationship to the “creepy male nerds are bad, entitled, w/e” sort of stuff is that it used to make me feel awful and full of despair whenever I encountered it, and now it doesn’t, and the main thing that has changed is that I’ve become … well, uh, cooler.  This, in itself, then makes me uncomfortable and I’m not sure what conclusion to draw about it

Cut for personal “who cares” stuff

Keep reading

Does anyone else do the thing where they get obsessed with (and/or frustrated over) some particular debate or “discourse,” and then specifically obsess over perceived … symmetries or ironies in it?

Like, group A is better at practicing what group B preaches and vice versa, or person A and person B have very similar personalities and are doing a very similar thing despite between on different sides, that kind of thing

There’s the feeling things won’t be right or complete until that observation is generally acknowledged, that without it it’s like a joke without a punchline, or a joke only you get, and you want to make sure that’s because other people can see the humor too and it’s not just you being crazy

I think the Sandifer review posts were the height of this for me, and I really ran with it and produced some posts I like, but that was also when I realized I had a problem with this and started to back off from things that induce this response