The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts is a fascinating read. Especially section 5 of chapter 5 and chapter 9. I was sitting on my dockraft reading, needing to sop often, look up across the water, and just … think about what was just said. (It occurs to me that anyone seeing an old-ish woman sitting …
September 2025 archive
Sep 07 2025
“… getting exponentially worse …
from Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. 2004 “Scientists do know that there have been temperature upheavals on earth in the past … “But the most important message … is that current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than they have been for 160,000 years. … There …
Sep 05 2025
your brain on psychedelics
How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan – an interesting read, especially, for me, the chapter on the neuroscience of psychedelics “It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.” …
Sep 04 2025
from The Yearbook, Holly Bourne
“The group chat should essentially just have been titled Adam breathed—applaud.” p29 Was anyone else out there the invisible little sister? “The end of childhood — realizing adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” p55 “My future wasn’t something the family ever really discussed. I guess I was supposed to just figure that out …
Sep 03 2025
People Skills: assuming dishonesty
Apparently, I have poor people skills. I’m literal-minded and I take people ‘at face value’, which means that I assume that people mean exactly what they say. Which is to say that having people skills means assuming that people do not mean what they say—i.e., that they are dishonest (or, less likely, linguistically inept). Which …
fiction
