How to Be Disgustingly Educated
The disgustingly educated are not “know-it-alls.” They’re “want-to-know-it-alls.” They collect questions like souvenirs and chase answers like lovers. Google should be tired of you.
🔗theebookclubx.substack.com/p/how-to-…
I may have broken my website somehow so I’m not sure when today’s post will be going up. If you’re reading this the good news is my website isn’t all broken. Just partly broken.
Project Midnight = Rayne
I worked on Project Midnight last night. The writing itself is terrible and I’m unlikely to keep any of it, but I did gain some clarity.
Mostly, I realized that:
Zoara = Azure
Alyra = Aeryn
I intended for this to be a prequel to a story I started twenty years ago, but I think I’ve come upon the missing pieces of what I was originally trying to create in the first place.
What if this isn’t meant to be a prequel at all? What if Project Midnight has been Rayne all along? Once I started thinking of it that way a lot of plot points I’d been struggling with started to make sense. And I think – I think – I’ve got this now.
Weekend Gaming Update
I managed to make enough gold in MoP classic to buy myself a WoW Token. Way easier to make 11K in classic than 300K in retail right now, though I guess it’ll depend how many people keep playing classic. I also played a bit of the new retail patch, but I think I’m having more fun questing through MoP.
I’ll likely return to New World before the October content drop. But for now I’m having fun being zen in Pandaria.
I’ve enjoyed doing laundry lately, and not in a productive, getting things done kind of way. In a “this is really fun” kind of way.
It’s weird and it won’t last but I’ll enjoy all the clean clothes in the meantime.
Einstein Didn’t Say That: How Viral Misquotes Evolve and Replicate
As Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Except there’s no evidence that he said or wrote those words. The earliest evidence for this quote comes from a 1981 newspaper article reporting on an Al-Anon meeting. That’s more than a quarter century after the acclaimed physicist’s death.
🔗bigthink.com/high-cult…
So when I said I was going to post here every day in August I guess what I meant is that I will post here at least 31 times in August.
Happy to report that my blogging adventures have inspired at least one person to start blogging (livejournaling) again. My new goal in life is to get all my friends to start/resume blogging. Join the revolution.
I spent all of yesterday playing Mists of Pandaria Classic and I have no regrets. WoW Classic is very relaxing for some reason. But as soon as I got to Pandaria on my newly-boosted level 85 Orc Warlock, I realized I had to turn around and go back to the old world to level my gathering professions. I don’t miss that part.
I watched some of Dark Winds S3 while flying around gathering ore. Today I might listen to some podcasts. See? Relaxing. I’ll either listen to Astonishing Legends or And That’s Why We Drink. Probably the latter.
My bulk order of socks arrived and I took out all the other socks in the drawer, stored them away in a safe location (far away from the laundry vortex) and replaced them with the new socks.
I suppose this isn’t so much defeating the laundry gnomes as it is resigning myself to paying them sock taxes every once in a while, but at least I don’t have to waste time pairing socks since they’re all the same.
I finally got around to ordering ALL the socks. They should arrive tomorrow.
The sock gnomes may have won the battle, but they won’t win the war!
Study Reveals the Shocking Amount of Plastic We Breathe in Every Day
According to a new study, humans can inhale more than 70,000 microplastic particles each day in an indoor environment – far more than previously thought. Worse still, most of them are small enough to penetrate deep into our lungs.
🔗www.sciencealert.com/study-rev…
The Midnight Letter
It’s been my goal since the start of the year to eventually (one day, maybe) launch a physical newsletter. You know, something that arrives in the mail, as opposed to something delivered to the inbox. Yesterday I purchased themidnightletter.com domain, just to have it. It might start out as a newsletter for Project: Midnight. I haven’t quite decided yet.
Within Project: Midnight (temporary title), the Midnight Letter is part of a bigger plot. I have this in my story bible so far:
The Tomb of an Ancient Egyptian Prince Was Just Discovered — With a Pink Granite False Door
Archaeologists carrying out excavations at Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis recently made a discovery that offers new insights into the royal lineages of Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The tomb of Prince Userefre, the son of the pharaoh Userkaf, has been unearthed along with a false door made of rare pink granite.
🔗allthatsinteresting.com/prince-us…
Ideal Number of Daily Steps Isn’t as Many as We’ve Been Told
This latest research paper looked across a broad spectrum – not just whether people died, but heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, depression and even falls. The results tell a fascinating story. Even tiny increases matter. Jump from 2,000 to 4,000 steps daily and your death risk drops by 36%. That’s a substantial improvement.
🔗www.sciencealert.com/ideal-num…
I’m convinced there’s some kind of vortex in or near my dryer that opens up during loads and sucks up socks and wool balls. I’m down to one wool ball. I also don’t have a single pair of matching socks anymore. How does this happen? Is it a curse? Is there some kind of portal in my laundry room? Have the underwear gnomes expanded their business ventures?
I have questions.
Caution: Wet Paint
Been in the mood to play around with CSS so both my main site and my micro.blog got a fresh coat of paint. Happy so far though I’ll probably keep playing around with it because it’s fun. Watch your step.
Renewed one of my WoW subscriptions since it’s Comp Stomp week and I still haven’t gotten that mount from Tazavesh. For my second account I bought an overpriced WoW token for 333K gold (ouch) but I’ll leave it in my bags for now. I might let the second account expire, so I’m currently going character by character making sure there’s nothing in the mailbox. Though knowing myself I’ll probably wind up posting auctions anyway. Need to make back those 333K somehow (sob).
Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future
As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are “really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism.
They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”
- Played around with the CSS after pointing my highlights feed to micro.blog instead of Notion
- Gave highlights and notes a different look to differentiate between the two
- Added an RSS page
The Audience Effect
Our brains evolved to care deeply about social status. When we sense we’re being observed, our neural networks shift into “performance mode,” prioritizing social approval over personal preferences. The regions associated with intrinsic motivation quiet down while areas processing social feedback light up.
This neurological shift explains why an audience changes our decision-making. We start choosing safer options, more impressive goals, more socially acceptable paths.