Art is one of the best things about being alive, and I truly think that there is stuff out there for anyone, it’s just about finding it. Luckily for us, we live in the Internet Information Age where things are way more accessible than ever before. Algorithmic feeds, while they have their problems, also allow really great recommendations, of similar things. Sometimes we want to go beyond what we just like and find things that are completely different and out of our comfort zone. This is where this guide comes in.

Pick something you already love (your seed), and decide right away whether it’s a specific creator or a genre (its seed type). Then pick one dimension/feature of the seed, a single way of relating your seed to other things, and hold it for the whole session. This is your exploration axis. The seed type is important because its about what you’re betting on, a person or a form.

If you like a certain person and you trust their artistic judgement, then you should like most of their works, especially if they have a defined style (Wes Anderson is a great example). Going along a genre/form allows you to find new people to take bets on. I really like exploring Director’s bodies of work. Less so for books though, I tend to go more by genre, but I still of course have my favorite authors.

Exploration Steps:

1. Pick a seed and decide its type, creator or genre, as above.
2. Pick one axis for the session:
   • Audience: ask someone or Google, “if someone liked this, what else should I check out,” or check a “people also enjoyed” feature wherever you’re browsing.
   • Mood/Aesthetic: describe the feeling rather than the category
     • “I want to feel like…”, “I want it to feel/look like…”
   • Movement: for a creator, look up their scene and find peers in it; for a genre, look for what it grew out of or reacted against.
     • Each genre will likely have its own fandom with an agreed upon canon of the best representatives of the genre. It is good to start off with them, but to really gain an appreciation for the movement, you might need to go a bit deeper to things lost to history.
   • Geography: search deliberately into a country or culture you haven’t explored/want to dive deeper into
     • While French and Japanese cinema are not monoliths for example, they do have different feelings and themes associated with them
       • Art is a reflection of culture!
   • Lineage: look at explicit/implicit influences, what is it in response to or a continuation of?
   • Form: ask what else uses the same technique or structure regardless of subject
     • Animation, Black and White, narrative devices, etc.
3. Find three or four neighbors along that axis, whatever strikes your interest.
   • Google, Reddit, TikTok, Letterboxd, Goodreads: there are so many different ways to find things
   • Every Noise At Once for music
4. Engage with them in any kind of way you want to. Try a little bit or all of it and write down what you liked or didn’t like about it.
   • I think going in blind is best, and then looking up things afterwards. It can be important to validate or challenge your viewpoint. Maybe this was the author’s weakest work or you were lacking context to truly understand everything. You can always revisit stuff.
   • I would strongly advise against marking something away as “not for you” but there is so much out there that it can make sense to at least turn your exploration efforts toward something else that might more readily bear fruit.

In Blake Ung’s Doomscroll, “Blake must do whatever the projector says, and the audience has the clicker. Just like on Reels or TikTok, the audience can skip past jokes they don’t like or they can go back to previous slides and make him do it again. Some of it is stand-up, sketch, music, or if you really don’t like any of that, you can make him do pushups for 30 minutes.”

This is one of the most original performances that I’ve ever seen, and I was lucky enough to pay for one of the livestream/recordings of it. There are so many good stand-up bits, comedy songs, and impressions in the show, but what I found most interesting to me was how the show played with the idea of pain. There are, of course, obvious connections to the violence of social media and consumption of it, but I wanted to go beyond just that.

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The show’s slapstick bits’ varied and nuanced portrayals of both feigned pain and actually experienced pain were what immediately stood out most to me. Some varieties included, but were not limited to:

• Flavor/texture (Taste-based)
• Cringe (Humiliation-based)
• Endurance (Fatigue-based)

The longer it goes on, the more painful and potentially funny it is. Callbacks are accumulations of more pain, salt in the wound that make the pain even more pronounced and realized.

However, he’s not even the only person for whom pain is possible. The audience members during the show have the opportunity to be targets of it as well. There is a tension built into a lot of his bits/setups that creates a kind of anticipatory fear and anxiety in the audience, as well as the literal potential for switching targets.

This performance really made me reflect on how commonplace schadenfreude is in our daily lives. America’s Funniest Home Videos, prank shows, and other sites of humiliation are the delight of many. I think this kind of laughter can be fairly morally neutral or even good sometimes ( à la Shoemaker, who introduced me to that idea), but certainly walks the knife’s edge into mockery.

Why do we enjoy seeing people in pain, why do we laugh when we see it? Is it because it causes discomfort in us and we need laughter to bring back up our spirits? Or are we laughing in delight while reveling in the sight and experience of someone else experiencing pain? During this show, it might be both.

There is an implicit contract of consent in Ung’s piece, that he created this system and willingly participates in it, so that the audience members are given moral license to play in that space and torture him. This is an immense exercise in trust and vulnerability, in totally surrendering himself to the audience for their own entertainment.

I don’t know how you’ll be able to see any more of these performances (as I think the show is done and there aren’t any recordings available for on-demand streaming), but I would highly recommend trying to consume it any way that is possible, and as soon as possible!

The next question that we then have to ask if “What makes something funny?” There are a lot of competing theories, but ultimately (to me) what is funny is whatever makes you laugh¹. So really, by evaluating it (subconsciously perhaps) and finding something funny makes it funny. This means that humor may be fundamentally goal-oriented, to make you laugh. But what makes you laugh? Can we measure that? This is where (formal) evals come in.

What are evals and why are they important?

“Evals are, at their core, systematic methods for measuring whether your AI system is doing what you want it to do. They answer questions like: Is the model’s output accurate? Is it consistent? Does it stay within the guardrails you set? Does it degrade when the input changes slightly? Is it getting better or worse as you iterate on your system?”

The Death of Prompt Engineering, And How Evals Are Rising in Its Place by Yahav M

You may already be able to see how they could be helpful, but they become incredibly important in autonomous agentic systems. Evals are necessary for loops, for a system to get to a goal, it must be able to experiment and measure the outcomes of the various things that it tries in order to move closer to achieving its set goal. The creator of OpenClaw, a popular open-source autonomous agent, talking about loops which started discourse™:

The lack of humor evals is not for lack of trying. There is a branch of (computational) linguistics called computational humor that seeks to understand as well as generate humorous content. Maybe its timing or semantic distance. Of course in reality, it’s probably a mixture of a ton of different things, and while I am fascinated by this line of questioning in this sub-field, I do think that it quickly starts to miss the point. To what end is it to generate jokes? To say that we could? Humor is a puzzle, and jokes are little conceptual puzzles unto themselves, so I guess there will always be people who are fascinated by trying to crack them.

Let’s say for the sake of the argument that a formal eval for humor is found and is able to be employed in an agentic loop. What would happen? There would be individual differences in jokes because of temperature causing non-determinism in the outputs, but otherwise I feel like you would start to see certain themes arise. Maybe through frequency of appearance in training data, or by RLHF, without prompting it at the beginning with the skeleton or general premise of a joke, we would land on some kind of statically average joke (maybe a knock-knock joke). Now wouldn’t that be funny?

At the center of this is all is the question “What makes humor fun to consume and participate in?” In Ted Cohen’s book, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, he talks about how jokes by nature require a shared understanding of things in order for them to work, so there is a certain kind of intimacy shared by the joke teller and the joke listener. In David Shoemaker’s book, Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life, he talks about the incredibly important role of interpersonal humor and how we relate to and play with each other. Think about riffing with your buddies or comedically sparring with them.

To participate in humor is perhaps to play with a quirk of human evolution; using language to exploit a quirk of predictive processing. But we do play with non-human agents, like playing fetch with your dog, so who’s to say that it always has to be human-to-human play. What if beyond working with LLMs, we might play with them in the future?² While LLMs right now are too RLHF’d to be an assistant that its humor abilities are constrained by its own professionalism, there is no guarantee that’s what it will be like that forever. What might it look like to you riffed or run bits with/on Claude? Is this good for humanity? Bad? More advanced AI and chatbots opens up novel and unexpected ways of interacting with LLMs, and it is our responsibility as people to think through the potential consequences.

Footnotes

1

2

I need to think more about this and if it is good for humanity or not. I think that if we open up another entire paradigm of interacting with LLMs beyond work (I think that romantic chatbots are still in this work mode of emotional labor and sycophancy) that AI will only become more entrenched in (certain people’s) lives. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is up to other thinkers, but also only time will be able to tell. We are not soothsayers.

Out of the potential “tracks” for the Masters program, I was most drawn to Youth Experience because that is where my most of my experience lies, but I realized that I don’t want to “just” be a youth librarian. I’m interested in educating all kinds of age groups about creating things. Older adults, emerging adults, anyone really who wants to learn something new, it’s about starting a new passion for art and design, for creating things. And think libraries are the best place to do this for a lot of people because they are free and already in the community.

The most likely way this would manifest would be if I were able to work at a library with a hacker/makerspace. I’m no stranger to STEM education or creating educational tools, but as I get older I feel like STEM was focused on jobs, while something like STEAM was more focused on the idea of creation. I think art, design, and engineering are doing a lot of the same thing through different lenses.

My entire life I have been working in the digital realm of software and only recently have been stepping my toes into creating real, tangible things, and I must say that has been quite addicting. With that being said, I’m so new! I don’t know CAD, have no experience with 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC milling, etc. But that’s okay, I still have time to learn it, but also what if in the makerspace, I am a peer, a collaborator? I don’t always want/need to be the teacher, I want to be someone who provides the time and space for working together with someone to solve a problem. I could learn alongside the other people as they bring in different projects.

With advances in LLMs and MCPs, I could definitely see 3D modeling getting a lot easier with the ability to describe the kinds of changes you want to make to a 3D model in plain language. I’m not suggesting everyone skips learning CAD, but I am a strong proponent of the sentiment that you should never do anything that you don’t want to do. If you want to make something should you have to learn how to 3D model? I think that it would be very helpful to understand what is going on, make small changes yourself, and to understand technical limitations, but I think it depends situation to situation. 3D modeling is of course extremely difficult even for humans, so I do not think that the models are quite there yet, but it is a magical future to be able to use language to change reality. Like literal magic.

Some of these feelings may have or almost certainly will have been felt during the relationship, but it’s only when you start to pull off the rose tinted glasses that you may be seeing more objectively or just in a new light.

You may be angry at how they treated you, but also mad at yourself for allowing that treatment to occur or for undergoing it for so long. You can be mad at yourself for not standing up for yourself while also realizing and understanding that no one should be treated poorly, especially by a loved one.

Maybe you are angry you could just be confused or embarrassed with how you acted and how much of yourself you gave up or compromised. You might not recognize the person that you were in the relationship and that is fine too, but you have to realize that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case and so you should be taking steps to better preserve yourself in relationships.

There is a kind of justice motivation in anger where you want the other person to realize that they have wronged you. You might feel like they weren’t grateful enough in the moment or now about how much sacrifice or effort you put into the relationship in order for the other person to be happy and for the relationship to work.

You might also realize or at least get the impression that the other person didn’t care about you or didn’t care about you as much as you did and that kind of unfairness can feel really bad.

The anger usually isn’t about the fact that sacrifice had to happen at all or in general, but rather that there was asymmetrical sacrifice. Why did i give so much of myself without receiving anything (or that much) in return?

I think that this often happens in women, especially because there’s so much invisible effort; the hermeneutic labor, the domestic labor, the cognitive load. The kind of gender dynamics of you having to parent your partner to teach them how to be a human being or a responsible adult.

I think that this anger should of course be felt, but I don’t know if revenge is the right outlet for the anger? Rather, I think the best thing that you can do is use that as a lesson to better assert your needs and react accordingly if they aren’t being or cannot be met. Being petty or spiteful is a kind of action that happens after you were wronged, but like way after. Instead, we want to shift that righteous anger left so that there is a feedback loop that can directionally improve your relationship. It is a way of being confrontational, but not in the moment. So the skill that has to get developed is having those tough conversations in the moment.

I had a very narrow view of the kind of beer that I wanted to try, but having mostly exhausted that small subspace, I had to go beyond what I was comfortable in and try new ways of consuming beer. For instance, I never used to drink the same beer twice or drink macrobrews. Now I am much less snobby and have learned to appreciate something like a Michelob Ultra Cactus Lime Lager or an NA Mango Cart. Part of it is that I have begun to appreciate beer as a drink of ocassions. If you are at a party maybe the move isn’t an 8% DIPA, but something light like a lager that’s easy to nurse and drink multiple of.

When I first started out as a beer drinker, I was mostly into sours and lightly dipped my toes into IPAs.

With IPAs, I slowly found my way into NEIPAs/Hazys which have since stayed consistent in my beer diet. I like their low bitterness and the hop notes that are common to the style, as opposed to American/West Coast IPAs which are usually far more bitter and have more piney resinous notes. Nowadays I don’t avoid them nearly as much as a I used, and even crave a nice bitter, piney beer every so often, but it is still not what I reach for most days. The biggest change though was that I used to not really like DIPAs and especially not TIPAs, but I would say most of what I drink now are DIPAs (although not really by choice, that’s just what a lot of breweries sell), and I do love to indulge in a good TIPA. TIPAs are just tough because they get to be really sweet and can be quite boozy, so it’s a bit of a toss up of whether or not its delicious or borderline undrinkable for me.

As for sours, I have a sort of love-hate relationship with them because I think some of them have a weird lactic taste from the lactobacillus (I haven’t read about this so I could be completely making this flavor up), but I also think some of the most interesting flavors in beer are in sours. Where else are you gonna find a drink that “emulates Chips, Spicy Mango Salsa, and Margaritas”? I also love a good smoothie sour, not one where it has fruity flavors so they call it a smoothie sour, but one that is really thick and has some real fruit in it, like the Mega Fruit - GS Guava Strawberry from Juicy Brewing or Smuzi: Oops All the (Other) Berries by Sapwood Cellars.

My first love was and always will be IPAs and it will always be a style that I reach for, but I do find myself settling down with a lager every so often as well. And I think that’s totally okay, and will absolutely change over time as well.

To me it reads like hyper trap kawaii metal, where we have the trap metal of early Scarlxrd or ZillaKami mixed with the kawaii metal as popularized by BABYMETAL. It also reminds me a bit of Yameii Online, even if she isn’t using a vocaloid for the singing.

I have to imagine that she is using the internet to find her references and influences in part because she’s pulling nostalgic samples from times that she wasn’t alive for. Monster by Meg and Dia for instance is eight years older than her. It makes me wonder how she discovered all these things and if she is pulling any hyperpop influences as it is something that has been popular on the internet for awhile.

While she is using autotune, it still very much sounds like a 12 year old which isn’t necessarily bad because that literally is the case, but I do find it interesting that some things are just unable to be hidden.

Are the lyrics meaningful? Well not really, but that’s not really the point. At its best, her production feels like a collage of her interests which shows immense artistry in my opinion. I think that collaborating with other artists or producing for other people will truly allow her to develop and shine in the coming years.

I give it four stars.

I think the main takeaway should be that loving your life is not easy, but it is simple.

• To love your life is to love your time.
  • What is life and experience if not the experience of time?
  • How do we experience time? Through space.
    • We are physical beings, not pure thought, we have bodies.
• To love your life is to love the time spent in your space.
  • What takes up your space?
    • Living beings and things!
    • Your family, friends, lovers, co-workers, apartment, city, neighbors, workplace, restaurants, etc.
• To love your life is to love the time spent with the people and things around us.
  • But what do you do with the people and things you love?
    • You do things that you love and the people around you love!
• To love your life is to spend time with or doings things that you and the people around you love.

It sounds so simple right? Well it is, but of course there are many obstacles in the way.

What if I don’t know what I love or what to love?

• You should love what is Good.
  • What is Good? Philosophy has the answers (kinda) for that!
    • This the a central question of the last 2000+ years of philosophy.
• If it isn’t Good but its not Bad, then go with what makes you feel good.
  • If you really like murdering people, I would say that’s Bad, so I wouldn’t want you to feel good doing it. However, if you aren’t really harming anyone/anything, then I say you should pursue what makes you feel good.
• Beauty (art, etc.), games, truth/knowledge, may all be instrinsic Goods, which means that you should pursue them! Or at least think about it.

What if I am not physically close to the people that I love?

• If you can’t bring them to you, go to them.
• If you can’t do either, you will have to form a community near you.

How do this in a world is falling apart and burning?

• I truly don’t know so I leave that as an exercise to me and the reader…

The problem with smaller governments is that the structure emerges very differently is various places and is legally defined in all kinds of unique ways across states and countries. I aim for this list to be generally right, but I think a lot of it is certainly up for debate.

From Smallest to Largest:

1. Commune / Building (Co-Op, Apartment Council, etc.)
   • I really debated about the ordering of these two because they can have more members than each other depending on a couple of different factors.
2. Neighborhood / HoA
3. Municipality
   1. Village
   2. Town
   3. City
4. Township
5. County
6. State
7. Country
8. Political Union (e.g. European Union)
9. World (Has never existed)
   • The UN has no lawmaking power for instance.
   • The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has significant legal authority but lacks independent enforcement power. Its judgments are legally binding on the involved states, yet the court must rely on diplomatic pressure, voluntary compliance, and the UN Security Council for enforcement.

I am sympathetic to the idea that you could have a “government” within a family or partnership within a nested household, but I think that it would be stretching the ordinary usage of the word.

What is the smallest actual unit of government where I live now?

Despite having a V***** mailing address, I don’t actually live in the Town of V*****, it is just a mailing address assigned to me by the USPS since it’s the largest significant place nearby. Where I live is sometimes referred to as M*********, which is a Census-Designated Place, which is also a red herrring. This is because “CDPs are statistical equivalents of incorporated places and represent unincorporated communities that do not have a legally defined boundary or an active, functioning governmental structure” (Census.gov).

I live in an apartment complex that is owned and managed by a private company, so wouldn’t have something like an HoA, and we don’t have any kind of council or formal power as residents. This is not ideal to me, so I will keep this in mind in the future.

This means that all my local government is managed by the county, F****** County. F****** County is divided into nine “magisterial districts,” which serve as the foundation for electing members to the Board of Supervisors and the School Board. If I am to serve on a county board, authority, commission, or committee (“BAC”), I am supposed to go through my Supervisor. I would still be participating in County government, but I imagine that boards that have limited seats are probably limited to having one or two people per district to ensure fairer representation.

Is it worthwhile to participate in local government?

I think that getting involved in what happens around you is a good idea, to take control and agency of what might happen to you where you live.

I think that where you have access to money, you have power to make change, especially if it is tax revenue. With all that being said, you can be much more direct and/or grassroots with your changemaking. There is of course never enough money to do everything, but I think that it would be an interesting change of pace for me from non-profits, and be more similar to my Student Government days back in university.

I think that I will do volunteering or tech Pro-Bono work to start out with, and then see where that takes me.

“I am now pretty much done with my apartment. There is still some room for improvement, but any work will be minor.”

A Year of Home Updates: 2025

Little did I know…

One night I started to really think about my bedroom after climbing up to my loft bed and wasn’t able to fall asleep. While it started out as frustration of my heart rate spiking whenever I have to climb up to bed, it kind of spiraled into me realizing how much shit I had around my house and in my room.

I dictated a stream of consciousness note and one snippet really stands out to me reading it back, “my house was built for others i need energy boundaries and transitions and to not feel compressed”.

I wanted my apartment, but really my room more specifically, to feel like a sanctuary. I wanted to reclaim my space as somewhere that would regulate my nervous system and inspire me creatively.

In some ways, I feel like I strayed from my own interior design philosophy. I strongly felt like my house was designed for other people (because it was). For the past few years I’ve been really focused on hosting, but so far this year I haven’t hosted a single large event, which means that a lot of the design optimizations of my apartment had no use. Its the equivalent of carrying around dead weight for the possibility that you might need it even if you never reach for it.

• very performative i wanted to be less showy, more practical
• My bookshelves were just as much about signaling qualities about myself as they were storage devices. I had too many books that I was never going to read though and I convinced myself that I wanted to collect books like that to just hoard.

I don’t subscribe to the principles of feng shui necessarily, but I think the ideas of what it gets at with the psychology of design are really important truths to consider.

I wanted to feel grounded: low to the floor, less precarious, less claustrophobic.

• Eliminate visual noise and weight — less things and fewer shelves and other heavy, tall things
  • I had so many different surfaces for display which meant that I had truly accumulated tons of stuff over the years. I also did so for the express reason of decorating which I felt like had served its purpose. These things had no inherent sentimental value to me, just that they had been in my house for so long.
• There were a lot of things that were off balance or leaning which felt precarious and unstable. This instability can make one feel nervous when really your home should soothe your nervous system.
• There are a lot of ingress points where there wasn’t a lot of space to move through when walking by which made you feel compressed and claustrophobic.

To this effect, in my bedroom I:

• Removed a bench
• Removed my papasan chair
• Moved my mattress from the loft bed to the ground
  • I am currently using the loft bed frame almost like a four post bed frame now
• Moved in three bookshelves from dining room
• Removed track mounted shelves
• Got rid of two cheap floor lights and moved in different lamps from the kitchen/dining room
• Moved my laundry basket to the closet
• Removed a vinyl storage cabinet that was being repurposed as a side table/bookshelf
• Moved a coat rack out to the entryway

If you’re thinking, “Wow that’s a lot of stuff”, you’d be right! I think I got slowly used to the idea of having so much stuff in my room that when I took it all out I realized that I felt like I could breathe better and that my room felt way more spacious. I got rid of like five bags of stuff and gave it to the thrift store around the corner.

This remodel really taught me that nothing is truly ever finished and that while you might not be aware of it, things can be radically different after a small change in perspective.

• Technologies that have been used for a while have a higher likelihood of lasting a longer time
• Jekyll (which I use) was first released in 2008. While it does not get a lot of releases, it is still being supported now and I haven’t had any problems.
  • Similarly Hugo was created in 2015 and Eleventy in 2017, both very popular static site generators.
• This is sometimes called “Choose Boring Technology”

Do not assume that linked content will last forever

• Prevent link rot
• I have started using blockquotes and quotes and linking back to original sources, especially with tweets
  • You could also use Quotebacks

Compile into HTML or something that is plain text readable

• The CEO of Obsidian talked a lot about “file over app”
• This site (made with Jekyll) is all Markdown that compiles into HTML so it is readable and portable

Host your own stylesheets, JavaScript, images, and data if you can

• Relying on external services, relies on network connection, and those services existing via corporations
  • I say this using a CDN for my images so I can get screwed there, but for me I wanted fast images not stored in Git so it was a compromise I had to make for my own needs.
• If you want to host things, externally, like in a CDN have some sort of fallback system for local copies
• You should be able to lift and shift your website very easily just in case you need to move hosting services

If thinking like this interests you, definitely check out:

• Permacomputing
• 100 Year Plan | Wordpress

Also posted on IndieNews

We go to restaurants to get things that we wouldn’t be bothered to make at home (or even think about), a point that James Hoffman brings up about cafés versus home coffee brewing. In the age of AI software generation what is too much to make by yourself?

Michelin gourmet dining is heavily intertwined with the idea of avant garde molecular gastronomy. This of course is not all Michelin-starred restaurants, but they do like to highlight innovative cuisine. In this same way, I think that we will start to crave more avant garde software. Software that just works is boring. What about software that delights? That makes you think?

I think traditional discussions of relationships center around the idea of truth and truth-telling as the most important sense of trust in a relationship. While I do think that truth is extremely relevant to trust, I would actually argue that with actions like secret-keeping and lying that the hurt comes more from a rupture in the feeling that your partner has your best interests in mind, rather than the actions per se. I think this because I do not personally believe that lying is inherently wrong, but it depends on the consequences, the harms.

I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t take truth and honesty seriously in a relationship, rather that it should be thought of in terms of best interest. For one, I think that if you posit that truth is the most important sense of trust in a relationship, then I do not think that it follows that you can say that sometimes certain kinds of lies are permissible. I could be wrong of course, but to me intuitively it seems like it should be quite strict, especially since it would be the foundation of the relationship. However, I think that this does not fully capture the reality of relationships and the gray area that lying sometimes inhabits, unlike my proposal of best interests.

Consider the following situation:

Your partner asks you to get ice cream after you’ve eaten dinner, and while you don’t really want to get ice cream, you know that they won’t get ice cream unless you also get ice cream. They will be very happy if you have ice cream together, and slightly disappointed if you don’t. What should you do?

From the scenario, it seems like the right thing is to say that you do want ice cream if you have your partner’s best interest in mind, even if it is a lie. My answer to this problem is straightforward with one caveat: I think that unless your partner explicitly values honesty over everything, you should say that you want to get ice cream with them. Unless someone has a strict view on lying about ice cream, food, desire, etc, then I do not see any harm to your partner/their best interests.

I do think that there is a limit to this idea though. Consider a more extreme example:

Janine was cheated on by her previous partner by the “girl he told you not to worry about”, and as a result she is very wary of opposite sex friends. Her current partner Jim is somewhat close with his co-worker Sheila and has been before Janine and Jim were dating. Janine knows about Sheila and is on guard even though it is strictly platonic between Sheila and Jim. When asked about his day, Jim doesn’t mention Sheila because he knows it would lead to unnecessary conflict that would emotionally elevate both of them and put strain on their otherwise good relationship. Jim thinks that he is acting in Janine’s best interest, but is he?

Jim is trying to consider Janine’s anxiety and try to spare her from it because he knows that she will be unable to let it go until she asks a bunch of increasingly invasive questions about what they did together. Jim obviously messed up, but how he messed up lies on why he thought he was acting in Janine’s best interest. If he was reasonably justified in thinking that he was acting in her best interest, then he isn’t in the wrong for lying necessarily, but instead messed up more because he was mistaken about Janine’s preferences. However, this could be selfish motivations that are cloaked in the idea of sparing Janine’s feelings, in which case Jim would clearly be in the wrong for lying out of convenience for himself.

Let’s consider the following:

Janine eventually finds out that Jim lied about when he was hanging out with Sheila. What is the path forward? If it’s just about truth, what can Jim do to regain trust from Janine? How can she have faith in him?

To me it seems like there isn’t much of a path forward in that way. I think fixation on truth leads to unnecessary rumination because you will always be trying to piece things together and catch the other person in a lie. If Jim truly did think that he was acting in Janine’s best interest, this means that he had an incorrect conception of what Janine values and what would harm her. This is then a failure in alignment, whereas failure to tell the truth may be moral. We don’t want to moralize actions in a relationship too much because right or wrong really has no objective measure that matters in a relationship. It happened and we must reckon with it in order to move on but we needn’t adjudicate it.

Truth requires evidence and evidence of truth-telling is burdensome to obtain and maintain. On the other hand, I think that having someone’s best interests in mind is more easily demonstrable. I would recommend for Jim and Janine to have a dialogue where Jim explains why he did what he did, and where Janine explains why that made her feel the way that she feels. While this doesn’t have to happen over one day, I do think that at a certain point both parties should walk away feeling like they understand each other better. If this is not the case, then alignment has not really been achieved. This means that they might be less compatible than they thought, or they have not put enough effort into really trying to step into each other’s shoes.

Jim and Janine may feel temporarily more aligned as a result of their dialogue as a part of the repair process, but the true test is if Jim is able to change his behavior and show that he has better insight into Janine’s best interests. They definitely shouldn’t continue their same behavior of the inciting incident, but depending on their ability to abstract and understand social situations, they may make the same mistakes in slightly different but similiar situations. I think that this can happen as a result of honest efforts, but this does not mean that you have to put up with it if it causes you harm each time it occurs.

A person might have your best interests in mind, but if they lack the skills necessary to do so, I am unsure of what good that does. However, I do not think that this is necessarily a dealbreaker because a relationship is an investment, and you do have the power/ability/right to stick through it and help your partner grow. Of course, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, and there are other reasons that you might want to leave the relationship as well.

Whether or not my model of trust in relationships is ultimately correct, I hope that it can be useful as a lens for understanding relationships, especially in terms of repair. I think that it offers a more concrete understanding of the rupture in the relationship and provides an avenue for repair (the alignment process). There is potential future work in regards to this idea of acting towards best interests like whether or not someone is doing it “for the right reasons” or applying it to the idea of secrets.

I like to think of films through the lens of poetry (importantly different than a film poem). Or maybe its perhaps simpler to say that I prefer films that feel like poetry. Not all films are best understood through this lens, like Marvel movies for example because of their primary focus on entertainment and narrative arcs over thematic messaging (which isn’t to say that there is no thematic content).

How might we judge cinema as poetry? How do we judge poetry?

“Much of the muddle one finds oneself in when theorizing about poetry results from the fact that we look at a poem from two not easily reconcilable perspectives: we demand that the poem be successful by virtue of its form, yet we also find its significance by virtue of what it communicates. A poem is incompetent if its form is flawed; trivial if it fails to make us feel or think more deeply.”

- The Philosophy of Poetry | Issue 114 | Philosophy Now

A good movie then uses its formal elements to make us feel something or think about something in a new way.

What are the formal elements of a movie?

1. Mise-en-scène: everything that appears before the camera within a shot
2. Cinematography: Camera Angles, Camera Distances, Camera Movement
3. Editing: Linking different images
4. Sound: Diegetic and non-diegetic noises/music

- Formal Elements of Film: The Big Four

I love movies that could not be anything else other than a movie. I think Wes Anderson is a great example of a filmmaker who understands and delights in his medium. The visuals, sounds, editing all are in service of curating a particular vibe.

What does a film (try to) communicate?

A film (typically) communicates a story, but I believe more in plot as a thematic delivery mechanism. A story helps keep things consistent; the easier things are to understand, the more you will be engaged with it. Characters don’t need to be developed, all questions cannot or won’t be answered, and that’s okay.

My Personal Taste

I don’t see narrative as the point of film, mostly as a means to an end. I find movies that have “too much plot” feel predictable and not as enjoyable. But just because I don’t like plot that much doesn’t mean that I like slow movies or where nothing happens.

If you are thinking of the movie as a poem, you wouldn’t get mad at a poem for not developing characters or having a coherent plot, but you would be a bit peeved if nothing of import is happening/being said. When I am really looking for something to scratch an itch, it’s for a sensory, intellectually stimulating experience.

For me, a movie is less about what story it tells and more about how it made me feel or what it made me think. A director of mine that I like, but hesitate to call one of my favorites is Yorgos Lanthimos and so I will contrast how I feel about some of his films in these terms of plot and thoughts vs feelings.

• Bugonia (2025) told a good story but it didn’t make me think too much. I did feel sympathy towards some of the characters so it made me feel something at least.
• Poor Things (2023) was stylistically beautiful but I was not interested in the themes that much or what he had to say about them.
• Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) had a relatively simple plot and while I didn’t agree on the necessity of all the parts in the movie, I think it explored an interesting moral situation.

Some others things I look for in movies:

• Slice-of-life/anthologies
  • Perfect Days (2023)
  • Yi Yi (2000)
  • Roy Andersson films
• Surreal and/or absurd
  • Pizza Movie (2026)
  • Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
  • Roy Andersson films
• Explorations of love and connection.
  • The Worst Person in the World (2021), The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
  • It has to be done in an interesting way though. I don’t want a traditional love story. Lost in Translation (2003) tried to be non-traditional but I think it fell into it still, which is why it didn’t resonate as much with me.
• Dialogue-heavy/walk and talk movies
  • The Novelist’s Film (2022), My Dinner with Andre (1981), The End of the Tour (2015), The Before Trilogy, Marjorie Prime (2017)
  • A script like Drive (2011) doesn’t really do it for me because of how minimal/standard it is.

I use my knowledge from my Philosophy degree everyday, and while I would absolutely encourage anyone to take Philosophy classes in university, majoring in Philosophy is not the solution for expanding the market for philosophy. If our goal is to increase the number of philosophically literate people, then people in or going to be in secondary education are still too small of a goal. We certainly need ways to target people earlier in the educational pipeline, but also people who are already outside it.

My proposal is a two-fold approach because I believe that there are two distinct but complementary prongs. There is philosophical thinking which can be applied to anything and then learning philosophy (the field), all done in public and outside of the ivory tower of academia. I know that these are not exactly new ideas, but I wanted to outline my own thoughts on this topic while also trying to articulate where I think my place in all of this is.

Learning and applying philosophical thinking

There is the work of doing philosophy which is fairly agnostic to object of thought; techniques that you could call “The Philosopher’s Toolkit”. I call this “philosophical thinking” and believe that it is something that can be gleaned from reading philosophical literature, but I think it is best imparted on its own to be applied anywhere. While I do state it in my post about philosophical thinking, I do think it bears repeating here that it is not logic that is the primary focus.

With degree programs in the humanities shrinking, partially as a result of decreasing investment, I think that if we could get this into elementary/middle/high education curriculum or something else that it would do good. While the thinking skills are a bit abstract, I do not think it is that high-level/requires that much pre-requisite knowledge.

From a practical standpoint this may need to start as an extracurricular program that is done at a summer camp or after-school program in order to demonstrate results before trying it to integrate into the public education system. Libraries could have a part to play in this or maybe a non-profit organization so that the philosophical education/outreach isn’t just concentrated in more affluent areas.

Reading Philosophy

Philosophy has the slightly undeserved reputation of navel gazing, of being unconnected to real life. There is a grain of truth in this, with some titles reading like: Could the grounds’s grounding the grounded ground the grounded? At the same time, philosophers are at the cutting edge of social thought like: Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? I don’t mean to pass judgement on the utility of either paper examples, there is a time and place for each of them; you just have to know what kind of topics appeal to you.

I would be remiss not to address all the barriers to reading philosophy:

• Where to start?
  • Accessible Philosophy Books
  • I would also recommend looking up syllabi online for Introduction to Philosophy/Ethics/etc to start, Epistemology/Metaphysics if you like the theory side a lot, and then Philosophy of {x} for whatever you might be interested in.
• How to access?
  • PhilPapers, Academia.edu, ResearchGate will sometimes have free copies of papers.
    • Sometimes you can email the authors of the paper and ask nicely and be sent a copy.
  • Piracy 😱
  • YouTube channels like Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, Academy of Ideas, Crash Course are all great resources as well.
• How to contextualize?
  • Philosophy, like most academic disciplines, is very referential and work is in constant conversation with previous work. I do not think that you have to have read the previous/cited works, but more often than not it does help to.

Meeting the culture where it is

One of my personal goals with this blog is to make philosophy more generally palatable. I plan on doing this by finding and celebrating philosophically rich works. It is through people’s engagement with this content that they are able to be exposed to the importance and ubiquity philosophy is in daily life. For example, my essay on The Drama (2026), where I aim to show how philosophy is relevant to people’s everyday actions and the art that they consume which in turn will hopefully lead to them being curious about philosophy.

My most popular article on this site is a list of philosophical concepts referenced in R.F. Kuang’s book Katabasis, which hovers around 70+ Google search clicks a month, so I know the audience is there, if a bit small as of right now. Both this and my essay on The Drama are naturally restricted in their audience because it requires for the most part that the person has also read/seen the piece that it is about. My next big step will be able to write a new piece that is accessible to more people, but for now I am enjoying writing these kinds of “bridge” pieces.

⚠️ This post contains massive spoilers for The Drama (2026). I warned you!

Introduction

I believe what makes this case so interesting to me and to other people is that the screenplay touches so many big issues in moral philosophy, with some going back at least as far as Ancient Greek Philosophy.

I think that the scenario didn’t have to be about school shootings, but I think in the cultural zeitgeist it makes sense as a provocative choice. I imagine its shock value and moral intuition basis was at the maximum optimal ratio. I think Borgli’s trying to be polarizing, but I’m not sure if that’s to disseminate a moral message or just to generate buzz around the narrative.

To make it perfectly clear, I do not condone school shootings. Killing innocent people or even out of “retribution” is not something I approve of or encourage. I don’t think the film or this essay is downplaying the immense tragedy of school shootings. I am most interested in pulling apart the entanglement of moral issues presented in this narrative, especially in regards to how it may be received by audiences and why. I think the central question is: to what extent can we blame or hold Emma responsible for her moral wrong and is it possible to move past it?

The Importance of Moral Intuitions

In my Philosophy of Space and Time class in undergrad I wrote a paper called Theoretical Virtues of Major Theories of Time about how intuition preservation was a theoretical virtue on why we might prefer certain theories of time over others. I think that this easily extends to other non-falsifiable contexts because something like theories of time or morality are philosophically fraught subfields where truth becomes hard to find and/or discern.

It is important to understand and internalize that moral intuitions are not moral truths. People’s ordinary moral statements may be something akin to moral judgments (if you hold something like Quasi-realism), which means that your moral intuitions are how you interact with the moral world and moral concepts. The difference in moral intuitions amongst people will do much to explain the varying reactions to this film and its contents.

Personal Motivations and Moral Decision-Making

I think that a major theme of this movie was empathy and a lot of the film’s premise lives and dies by how much you sympathize with Emma. Having her be played by Zendaya, an attractive mixed race woman, I think helps a lot. School shootings are statistically white and male, so if it were Charlie who had planned a school shooting people would be less surprised and less sympathetic overall.

However, I think another major contributor is something that was explored in this paper, The Halo Effect Revisited: Unpacking the Influence of Attractiveness on Trustworthiness by Doniaeeziba et al. The Halo Effect of attractiveness is well-studied in plenty of other types of effects, which should really not come as a surprise to anybody since we live in a lookist society. You may or may not like Zendaya the actor and Emma the character for a variety of reasons, which makes you want to (not) trust her and believe that she is (not) a good person.

The following are different moral intuitions that I think will cause people to weigh Emma’s circumstances differently:

(Righteous) Revenge as Justification: Emma was being bullied and the film shows some examples, but they don’t seem that bad (Charlie says as much in the movie as well).

• Plenty of other people get bullied and do not plan school shootings.
• Even if you are bullied, the response is not proportional. While bullying is not okay, it seems clear to me that people do not deserve to die because of it. There should be some kind of correctional intervention (restorative circles or something).

The Moral Agency of Young People: As a young person, does she truly understand what it is like to take someone’s life? The ripple effects through the community of her school if she had gone through with her plan? Emma is in middle school when this is happening, and her age pays a large part in complicating the account of moral blame. She is at the age where she has developed autonomous morality (à la Piaget). At the same time, she is still young and impressionable and potentially unable to fully consider her actions and consequences from an objective viewpoint.

Systems-Thinking: No choice is made in a vacuum and Emma isn’t solely to blame for her actions.

• Parents (responsible gun keeping, checking in with your child, monitoring their internet usage)
• School admin (monitoring bullying, school security)
• Other students who were bullying her

This isn’t to excuse her actions, she is still the person who initiated action. But it does raise larger questions about how responsible people are for actions under a system. I would recommend reading The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility by Galen Strawson (even though it is about free will) to understand how sticky of an issue this really is. This isn’t to say that we should give up the project of moral responsibility, there are plenty of responses of that paper, but I mention it to demonstrate that we can’t take our ordinary moral intuitions for granted or as fact.

Emma mentions that she had a morbid fascination with the aesthetics of school shooters. It seemed like she had a lot of unsupervised internet access, so it’s likely she could have undergone a radicalization of sorts.

• “Several past studies have found that media reports of suicides and homicides appear to subsequently increase the incidence of similar events in the community, apparently due to the coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts.” (Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings by Towers et al.)

Actions & Consequences

I believe that there are two sorts of levels of actions that are happening that are morally interesting and relevant to the narrative drive of the movie. The primary action which is the planning of the school shooting and the secondary action which is the disclosure. There are particular moral dimensions of both actions that make them philosophically interesting, and perhaps most importantly, a bit more up for debate/interpretation among people.

Primary

Planning a school shooting and committing a school shooting, at least to my mind, feel like different things. She didn’t go through with it, but should she be held just as responsible as someone who did? I actually couldn’t really find that much in the philosophical literature, so I had to turn to law for some of these questions. In The Difference of Differential Punishment by Saad Al-Obaidi, he argues that in the eyes of the law it is perhaps the case that a person who actually executes a murder is guilty of both attempted murder and murder. So at least in case of punishment, the person who has followed through is more guilty. However, Al-Obaidi concedes that attempted murderers and murderers may be equally morally blameworthy and there can sometimes be (un-)luck at play.

I think the main conditional here is whether or not she actually intended to carry out her plan (would have actually done it). If she truly meant to carry it out then I think she is just as morally blameworthy as someone who does carry it out. However, I do not think that she truly meant to carry it out. We know what the film says, and it’s that she was ready and someone else “beat her to it” but I think there’s still some uncertainty if she would have followed through or not. My personal interpretation was that the small moment of reflection upon hearing the news snapped her out of her childish fantasy and made her confront reality (and make her not go though with her plan). Of course, our own sympathies will cause us to interpret and project onto Emma our viewpoints about what she did or would have done.

In the film Emma’s actions are juxtaposed against her “friend” Rachel who locked a boy in a closet and then got scared and ran away (what exactly happened afterward we don’t really know). Rachel’s actions caused real consequences (harm), while Emma’s did not. However Emma had deliberate premeditation (with a consistent disregard for life) whereas Rachel at worst has some mean-spirited callousness.

How do we weigh Rachel’s actual actions and potential consequences with Emma’s purely potential consequences? I think that this is more of a thought experiment than anything that would produce interesting discourse, but I will leave it to you to decide. If you are interested in these kinds of things I think you might find the following concepts interesting: Moral Luck & Hedonistic Calculus.

Secondary

Some of the outrage from Charlie seemed to be less about the content, but the fact that anything was withheld (also the bad timing of course). Is there a moral obligation to disclose? Was Charlie wronged by Emma not mentioning it to him before?

I think that people in a relationship have their right to secrets, and that secrets in and of themselves aren’t lying, but I do think that there is a very fine line between secrets and lying by omission. I think the intuition about secrets and lying is important, but I think the crux of this issue is whether or not you think knowing her secret has changed Charlie’s understanding of her moral character. He has learned something new about her which does cause some recontextualization, but maybe just in the sense of better understanding her personal history rather than a total character upheaval.

Much of the discussion in the philosophy of consent is centered around the idea of dealbreakers; things that if true/present, would cause the person to not give their consent. In Jennifer Matey’s paper, Sexual Consent and Lying About One’s Self, she talks about the importance of not lying about moral character beyond dealbreakers when it comes to sexual consent, something that I certainly think can be extended toward marital consent. She argues that moral character is so fundamental to identity it isn’t just like a dealbreaker, it would be like consenting with a completely different person, one where consent does not just carry over or stay valid.

A further complication of this is that if someone knows in their heart that they have changed, do they need to say anything? In some ways this information is distracting if Emma has changed enough for it to not longer be relevant. But how do we/can we know that Emma has changed? Does her past have no bearing on the present? Can those things just go away? I don’t know if there is a way to know for certain, which is an important aspect of this film. I think it is through the idea of love and trust in another person that we can make a leap of faith.

On Moving Forward

Atonement

Was Emma becoming an anti-gun activist inauthentic? I don’t think so at least. She may have done it because she felt guilty at first, but she found herself a morally good outlet. She found friends and likely a community to fit into, which would have helped her from feeling less ostracized. I think she probably benefitted from confronting the darkest parts of herself and came out as a better person because of it; her character seems to be confrontational and inclined toward justice.

With all that being said, I don’t think she was completely at peace with what she had done (understandably so). She became incredibly nervous with the idea of people knowing, judging her, and talking about it behind her back. From a social ruin standpoint, I think that this makes sense, but it could also be a sense of lingering guilt that would perhaps best be solved through therapy or something similar.

Forgetting

A lot of Emma’s primary response to people knowing her secret is to try to change the subject/stop the conversation and insist that we forget about it. She repeatedly refers back to the concept of “starting over” which implies a clean slate wherein everything else is just forgotten. Some things may be best forgotten, but I don’t think you can ever just ask someone to just drop something or forget it, especially as a first line of action.

Also what does it mean to forget something on purpose? To pretend that it doesn’t exist? I think that it does imply a kind of letting go, but to me that seems like a more un-critical way of asking for forgiveness. I am of the camp that without memory there can be no accountability or sense of moral progression.

However, I am not one to impose my moral thinking onto how someone should live their life if it isn’t hurting anyone. I think that the ending suggests that Emma is willing to forgive and forget Charlie for his brief lapse in fidelity, and so in this way at least she holds herself to the same standards that she does with others. I don’t think that she’s doing it in the “two wrongs make a right” kind of way, but that love can sometimes make us more willing to overlook certain things (for better or for worse). This is Emma’s personal philosophy and whether or not you agree with it is your own prerogative.

Acceptance

There is acceptance without forgiveness, or really a sense of being settled with the information. I think that this is something that comes up a lot with people who have escaped the alt-right pipeline. If that someone later enters a leftist space, especially one that is full of queer and/or BIPOC, some people might be understandably unsettled. You don’t have to be alright with it or even interact with them as a matter of personal preference, but I also do not think that these people are beyond forgiveness.

Everyone will react to certain information differently because of personal experience, intuitions, etc, and I don’t think that you should ever try to change how someone else feels about something or is reacting to something. I do think that the scrutability of motivations as a narrative is a large blocker; the easier it is to understand something, the easier it is to accept it.

Conclusion

As you could probably tell from this essay, I really enjoyed this film and all the delicious moral dilemmas it served up. I haven’t seen much discourse around the movie, and I do not think that I will be seeking it out because I think there will be certain types of common critiques that strip away the moral nuance. A common type is moral smugness where people feel prideful of their adherence to high their arbitrary standards and scoff at those who fail to meet them. This is something that gets frequently attributed to leftists; and while leftists rightfully catch flack over this because of leftist infighting, I think it’s actually a larger phenomenon of (miserable) online commenters who want to dunk on people and there just happens to be a large online leftist contingency.

I would be really curious to see people’s religions and political affiliations and if that has any effect on their reactions to the messaging of the movie. For instance:

• Prison abolitionists and left-leaning people may be more sympathetic to a message/idea of empathy and rehabilitation/reconciliation.
• Non-hellfire Christians would also likely feel an inclination toward forgiveness because she lost her path but was able to find it again.
• Conservatives are more cut and dry about moral thinking usually so I feel like they would feel quite strongly about punishment as well. Only 17% of Republicans said that they oppose capital punishment for example.
  • Political Affiliation and the Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center

However, at the end of the day, this is all my opinion! I tried to rely on philosophical literature as much as possible, but I also added my own spin on a lot of these things. I don’t pretend to have all of these things figured out, and none of philosophy or artistic interpretation is cut and dry.

I always thought it was a bit cheesy on LinkedIn when people would say “For my next adventure…” when talking about moving to a new company. However, as I start to plan out what my future might look like, I do really find it to be a beautiful (and useful) metaphor to think about.

While I do not love work, I do want to reclaim it for myself since I will certainly be at it for 30+ more years. I currently work in tech as a Full-Stack Data Engineer and have been doing so for the past almost four years after going to school for Computer Science and Philosophy. Before working in tech, I had wanted to be a Software Engineer since I was in middle school. While I still love programming, AI-prompted changes to the industry as well as the administrative/BAU tasks of Software Engineering have begun to wear me down a little bit.

A benefit that my employer provides is that they pay up to $5,250 annually toward education expenses which does not count as taxable income. While in college I briefly flirted with the idea of doing a PhD (as many academically-enamored naive youth do), but ultimately decided against it because I didn’t really have a good enough reason to do it versus entering industry. But recently, partly on a whim (that had been stewing for two years in the back of my mind), I applied to one (1) graduate program. And I got in! Starting this fall I will be enrolled in an online Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program while I continue working.

I’ve always loved libraries and have been captivated by books and reading my entire life. I think being a librarian would be a really cool way to be involved in my community and have a tangible positive social impact.

I love libraries and have much respect for librarians, my grandmother was a school librarian for over forty years. In middle school, I was friends with our school librarian, Ms. McNabb. Whenever the school media center got new books, she would always tell me about them and ask me if I had read them before, to which many times I would respond, “Yes” very sheepishly. My high school librarian didn’t really like me that much because I would always hang out in the library with my friends and we would eat in there sometimes. - Libraries And Starting My Own?

It will take me about three years of taking two courses a semester to finish the program and a lot could change in that time. There is AI, government funding to public institutions like schools and libraries, and a million other things that could happen. Even if I don’t (get to) become a librarian, I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to further my education and learn about something that has such an outsized impact on my life. When I left undergrad, graduate school was no longer on my radar, so I am excited about this adventure (see: sidequest-maxxing), and to see what paths it opens up for life to take me :)

This book was historically grounding feminist issues and debates but also showing how they show up in modernity. We now have the data to look back on what has resulted from the various waves of feminism. This doesn’t purport to solve them, but she does weigh in and offer her own opinion, but more often tees up questions for others to further develop outside of this work.

Most of these notes are taken directly from the text whether or not indicated by quotes. I had little to add to this because of how prescient Srinivasan seems to be about how people might receive her argumentation. If I thought I had something to add, she would address it later on in the essay, sometimes on the next line.

The Conspiracy Against Men

• False sexual assault accusations are quite rare and anxieties about them are anxieties about the law
  • “There is no general conspiracy against men. But there is a conspiracy against certain classes of men.”
• Actual consequences and application of (false) sexual assault accusations follow time-worn patterns — against poor men of color
  • Things like who we even see as victims comes into play
• If a social movement only focuses on one shared dimension then it will create an assimilationist politic that benefits the members who are the least oppressed
• The tension between sexualized stereotypes of certain men and women of color make it hard for women to speak up against members of their own communities
• The rules haven’t really changed on men; they are just being held to a kind of bare minimum standard
• How should the law punish offenders? Is online social vigilantism ethical or good? Good for now? Good as a replacement? A retaking of power?
  • “What consequences should follow?”
  • Is the law the right tool? Lest we repeat the sins of our past
• Legal proceedings often have to deal with the grey area of consent and become sex bureaucracies
  • Consent is not a solved philosophical problem and some argue it is not the right tool at all for the challenge
  • Patriarchy creates conditions and internalizations that create certain kinds of sex that can undermine consent

Talking to My Students About Porn

• Porn as a world-maker
  • Perpetuates objectification, sets standards, actualizes subordination of women
• Anti-porn feminists may have been right all along, just too early
• Internet porn mediating sex and sexual expectations in Gen Z (maybe millennial) and onward
• “Porn as a virtual training ground for male sexual aggression. Is it true?”
  • Yes, and no; slippery slope — more suggestible people will take more radical action, but it also operates through a normalization/expectation-setting dynamic that is more behind the scenes, like objectification or rougher sex acts
  • This seems like a very tough correlation versus causation research obstacle
• Much of it is an education problem
• Porn has no formal authority, but it does if you believe in it
  • “Second-wave feminists, and other people, sometimes put too much power in it and have too little faith in their ability to resist it” (paraphrased)
• Obscenity legislation usually does more harm than good, especially to sex workers
  • It also starts to legislate what sex should look like
  • Is porn free speech? How could it be regulated if it is or isn’t?
• Better porn can help with representation and combating stereotypes, but how will that reach people when they are sexually developing?
• Porn normalizes but may do nothing to develop “sexual imagination,” which aims to go beyond mere sexual representation that is being consumed
  • What kind of sexual education could be given to instill this?

The Right to Sex / Coda: The Politics of Desire

• Anti-sex feminism can undermine women’s agency, which seems counterintuitive, but at the same time they are right to talk about how patriarchy shapes sex
• Women (and men) have sexual desire and that should just be taken at its face in some ways
  • At the same time we should question what shapes desire
• No one is entitled to sex, but at the same time there are forces that deem certain classes more unworthy of sex, and this does not seem egalitarian
• Responding to sexual marginalization with entitlement versus empowerment
• How can we change our desires — in an emancipatory way instead of a disciplinary one?
  • It is a structural problem and we cannot discount that when we encourage personal action, but at the same time we shouldn’t let that be an obstacle to personal action
• There seems to be a fine line between moral thinking and so-called moralism — it somehow crosses a boundary — and so we want to engage in political critique without slipping into misogynistic logic or moral authoritarianism, as Srinivasan states
• How are we to treat the loneliness of incels? It certainly points at something important, but when it mixes with privilege and misogyny, bad things happen

On Not Sleeping With Your Students

• The kind of amorous feelings that can arise from the student-teacher relationship are most likely some sort of Freudian transference
• A good teacher would call out or redirect this transference and focus on teaching
  • Focusing on or thinking of your students in that way seems to detract from your ability to be a good teacher
• The teacher has a kind of epistemic power over the student, which furthers the power differential in a way that’s different from simply noting they’re both adults
• Furthermore, a male teacher should be held responsible because he has failed to not take advantage of female socialization under patriarchy
  • To teach under patriarchy and to proceed as you might in normal life is to fail to treat your female students on equal terms with the male ones
• Sexual harassment harms women by enforcing their subordinate roles
• Compared to therapists, teachers don’t really get any training in the idea of transference at all — and in the US especially, teachers at the collegiate level don’t really get any pedagogical training at all
• Srinivasan somewhat offhandedly asks if there’s anything distinctive about the teacher-therapist relationship — and yes, there is some kind of vulnerability gap in these relationships. It’s closer to Nightingale syndrome-type transference. But if she means to ask whether there’s any quality that makes them so different they can’t be compared, I don’t think so. It’s actually a pretty good analogy, though not a perfect one
• Even without sexual harassment, there is a certain kind of harm done to the female student that is akin to sexual discrimination: she is, in some ways, denied education on the basis of her sex, because after engaging in a relationship, she isn’t able to receive all the educational benefits in the same way as other students
  • In a lot of ways, any kind of sexual orientation means that you are treating different sexes differently, unless you are bisexual — which is less on the basis of sex, but should still count as discrimination in some way
  • Instead it is about treatment that reproduces inequality
• What can be changed with law versus social change, and what will changes in law do to reproduce equality?
  • Well-meaning legislation can still be abused

Sex, Carceralism, and Capitalism

• Some feminists do have power, and it seems strange to deny it
• Prostitution and harm reduction
  • At the symbolic level, it certainly feels very gendered and reminiscent of power dynamics
  • Criminalization actually makes the job more dangerous
• An inclusive feminist politic certainly cares about the experiences and thoughts of sex workers
• Criminalization may stem partly from a desire to punish patriarchal men, but this sometimes comes at the expense of the welfare of sex workers
• Some might argue that abolition of sex work makes workers worse off now but sets up for the future
  • However, it does seem naïve to believe that we can abolish sex work
  • The harm reduction parallel is similar to abortion: material conditions still require it, but criminalization just makes it more dangerous
• It is fascinating that it all comes down to labor conversations — trying to make it recognized as work — and how that dovetails into refusal, value, protection, and regulation
  • But can sex work be compared to the wages-for-housework movement? Does it just reinforce stereotypes?
  • “Any reform may be emptied of its revolutionary significance and reabsorbed by capitalism”
• There was a carceral turn in feminism, maybe co-opted by privileged women talking about bringing women into the global economy, which starts to become more capitalist and more participatory in the system — which does not allow for true liberation

This is my second Andersson film, my first being A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, which I liked, but not as much as this. For one, I liked the recurring characters in this film better, but also I think there was less focus on humor which helped the tone. As Ehrlich said in his review, it is Andersson’s “least funny and most tender movie”.

As it says in the movie’s description, this film is about the daily life big and small happy and sad. There’s stories of:

• losing faith
• having a crush
• going to doctor
• having bad dream
• going to a restaurant
• someone busking in the subway
• girls dancing to music
• a man trying to conquer the world and realizing he would fail
• a man begging for his life

I think this film really focuses on the way we treat each other:

• the crucifixion (a dream by a christian man, a priest losing his faith)
  • the wife reaction - empathy but not really understanding
  • the doctor reaction - empathy but also wanting money
• There are many times in this film where people don’t really listen to each other. They want to ignore what others are saying because it inconveniences them; or they are just in their own world.
  • “what should i do now that i’ve lost my faith?”
  • “i don’t know what i want”
  • “isn’t it quite fantastic?”
• Which ties in on a larger theme of focus and attention:
  • the couple on the bench not looking at each other
  • the man pouring wine
  • the woman who cannot feel shame look out the window
  • a man who forms a crush on the girl watering the plants

It also focuses on how life/the world treats us, especially in tragedy. Although in this film tragedy is dispensed and treated very casually, almost matter-of-factly.

• man getting crucified in his dream
• busker who stepped on landmine
• parents at their veteran son’s grave
• ruined city
• doctor not trying to help the priest

It is also about how love motivates us: both in good and bad.

• man killing daughter
• husband assaulting wife
• parents at the grave
• a couple floating
• lots of couples in general
• a man and daughter going to a birthday party in the rain

Not Strictly Philosophy:

• Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller: Philosophy of Evolution
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: Philosophy of Food, Ethics
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande: Philsophy of Death and Aging, Ethics
• The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center Rhaina Cohen: Philosophy of Love, Ethics
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt: Moral Psychology, Ethics
• Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen: Philosophy of Sexuality

Philosophy:

• Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James: Moral Psychology, Ethics
• What Love Is: And What It Could Be by Carrie Jenkins: Philosophy of Love, Ethics
• The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad by Emily Thomas: Philosophy of Travel, Ethics
• The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan: Philosophy of Sex, Feminist Theory, Ethics, Philosophy of Law
• Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning by Carrie Jenkins: Philosophy of Love, Ethics
• The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits: Philosophy of Games, Ethics
• Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan J. Brison: Philosophy of Trauma, Metaphysics, Ethics

I added SimpleJekyllSearch in early 2024 which I modified to add search excerpts. However over time I realized that didn’t want search results to be its own element, I wanted search to filter the garden cards in real time. This was on my backlog for a long time because I had no real idea on how to implement it and it wasn’t like it needed to be done right away. This is how it almost took me two years to implement this vision (2024-04-11 - 2026-03-29). And it’s still not done! I will continue to tweak it probably for as long as I have this site, but in the meantime, I am very happy with where search is right now.

By adding post type and tag filtering in mid-to-late 2024 and iterating on it over almost two years, I slowly refactored the code and added more interactivity. I think this strong base of functions in my codebase put be in a good position to utilize an LLM to help me. This task was also a good candidate for outsourcing to AI for me because it was a result that I wanted, but one that I wasn’t necessarily excited to think about and implement. It took some prompting, but otherwise I was generally impressed by Claude’s ability to stick to my coding standards and implement the search filtering. There are some implementation quirks but nothing that would impede by ability to debug the code later if I find any bugs or want to extend or modify the implementation somehow.

The post filtering logic was far simpler than I would have thought, really it was just another .filter() call and a new .sort() call.

const filteredPosts = posts
    .filter(post =>
        globalFilters.types.length === 0 || 
        globalFilters.types.includes(post.type)
    )
    .filter(post =>
        globalFilters.tags.length === 0 ||
        post.tags
            .map(x => x.toLowerCase())
            .some(tag => globalFilters.tags.includes(tag))
    )
    .filter(post => {
        if (!query) return true;
        return (
            post.title.toLowerCase().includes(query)       ||
            post.description.toLowerCase().includes(query) ||
            post.tags.some(t => t.toLowerCase().includes(query)) ||
            post.content.toLowerCase().includes(query)
        );
    })
    .sort((a, b) => {
        if (globalSortMode === "relevance" && query) {
            const diff = scorePost(b, query) - scorePost(a, query);
            return diff !== 0 ? diff : b.date - a.date;
        }
        return b.date - a.date;
    });

The scoring scheme was something that Claude did entirely itself; I had no input and I may tweak it in the future, but it seems good enough for now.

/**
 * Score a post against the search query for relevance sorting.
 *
 * Tiers:
 *   Title exact match          +1000
 *   Title starts with query    +500
 *   Title contains query       +200  (per occurrence)
 *   Tag exact match            +150  (per tag)
 *   Tag contains query         +75   (per tag)
 *   Description contains query +40   (per occurrence)
 *   Content contains query     +10   (per occurrence, capped at +100)
 */
function scorePost(post, query) {
    if (!query) return 0;

    const q  = query.toLowerCase();
    const re = new RegExp(escapeRegex(q), "g");
    let score = 0;

    const title = post.title.toLowerCase();
    if (title === q)               
        score += 1000;
    else if (title.startsWith(q)) 
        score += 500;

    score += ((title.match(re) || []).length) * 200;

    post.tags.forEach(tag => {
        const t = tag.toLowerCase();
        if (t === q)
            score += 150;
        else if (t.includes(q)) 
            score += 75;
    });

    score += ((post.description.toLowerCase().match(re) || []).length) * 40;
    score += Math.min(((post.content.toLowerCase().match(re) || []).length) * 10, 100);

    return score;
}

I also wanted to display matched text in title, type, or tags as well, not just in post content via the excerpt. This was something that wasn’t present in SimpleJekyllSearch and that I had no idea how to implement in my own code. What Claude ended up doing was generating highlighted HTML via RegEx string replacement and dropping that in where there were matches. For example:

const tagSpan = createElement(p, "span", {
    class: "badge bg-secondary me-1 text-start",
    innerHTML: query
        ? highlight(titleCase(tag), query)
        : escapeHtml(titleCase(tag)),
    style: "cursor: pointer; text-wrap: auto;",
    title: `Filter to ${tag} posts`,
    onclick: () => toggleFilter("tags", tag)
});

Looking at it now, I feel silly for thinking it was such a large task, but it’s partially because of all my tags changes that I did over time. I also let it torture me on my TODO list because I didn’t have any implementation ideas in my head and would not sit down to think about how implementation might be done.

Funny enough, it actually takes less LOC to do search this way because we don’t have to use SJS anymore, which was a some library code and a bit of customization of top of it. SJS isn’t even maintained anymore so that was also a potential issue. In this way, we actually reduced complexity a little bit! The code for the digital garden is still a mess, but it gets the job done and that’s good enough for me right now.

• “Having a place to say “something feels weird … can you help me figure this out?” at any time feels deeply useful, particularly for the “somethings” that feel itchy but not yet important” (Cosleuth by Robin Sloan)
  • Your other friends, co-workers, etc don’t have your context or are busy with their own work that having a broadly learned chat partner always around gives you a low friction way to bounce ideas around and iterate
• AI sycophancy can drive you away from people who criticize you (@spns.tv)
  • Could it make you less immune to being challenged by others? Increasing defensiveness, etc.
• This overall can drive more isolation which in turn makes you rely on the chat platform even more
  • Engagement-maxxing is built into these platforms

AI and the human desire to be special

• “i think something in the divine awaits me for resisting”
  • i don’t want to be like other people
  • i am smarter/better/more capable than other people
  • i am more moral than other people
• All in all I think there is a kind of moral smugness in a lot of anti-AI sentiment, which they do have some justification for.
• “the ai will never be as smart as humans”
  • so what?
  • are what you always using all of your effort and intelligence? the law of large numbers and statistics can’t approximate doing the same thing over again with slight parameters tweaked?
  • we are smart but not as smart as we like to think

AI, Toil, and Willingness

• AI can take the toil and dirty work away from you
• this increases my willingness to take on work
• it does also unblock some tasks like reading PDFs
  • it is so hard to do this programmatically, but there is a lot of bureaucratic data trapped in these kinds of files
  • if there are tons of PDFs you don’t want a person doing all that repetitive, mind-numbing work

Shipping Speed with AI

• So where are all the AI apps?
• Taste and well-defined roadmaps are the most important part because if implementation costs go down then what becomes more important is what to implement
• There also has to be safeguards against the torrent of slop
  • There are some people who may have too much trust in AI agents and become “slop cannons”
    • i won’t even call it AI brain rot but rather an acceleration of the Dunning Kruger effect like people will overestimate their own ability and underestimate their stupidity via AI
  • People and understanding of AI output then becomes the bottleneck

The structure and aesthetic of my site has largely stayed the same, I’ve just had a deepening and broadening of some content featured.

• I updated my digital garden a lot more to make exploring it easier (better searching, filtering, etc.).
• I added more anthologies and added more data collections
• I added a games section which features some small games that I created awhile back
• I published my most popular post (not an article technically): Philosophical Concepts Mentioned in R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis

Other Reflections:

• 50 Posts
• 100 Posts

Post Milestone Statistics

101st: Celebrating 100 Articles and Essays (2025-01-09)

150th: Types of Board Games I’m Looking For (2026-03-22)

Elapsed Time from 101st - 150th Post: 438 days (~1 years and 2.5 months)

• Elapsed Time from 51st - 100th Post: It is 406 days (A little over one year and one month)
• Elapsed Time from 1st - 50th Post: 572 days (~1.5 years)

49 articles and 1 essay: Being (W)Asian (2025-03-31)

• The essay also was my most personal topic! It also took forever to write: around a 1 year and 3 months. I was working on it on and off of course.
• I do want to write more essays but they just take so much longer and my mind is typically in article mode.

I’ve only published 12 things in general in 2026, so I’ve definitely slowed down. Usually the first few months are my most productive times.

The tags do surprise me a little bit but only because it doesn’t capture all the stubs that I write because if I am thinking about something its not always complete thoughts that would make a good article, but I still want to get it all out on paper.

In February of 2025 I began my first non-monogamous relationship with a partner. My friends were also entering and leaving relationships or otherwise experiencing various growing pains so I spent a good portion of the year thinking about relationships, love, monogamy, etc.

Some of My Favorite Newer Articles

This list is a lot longer than in my prior reflections, but I think I have a found a lot more of a stride so I am able to be more proud of more of the articles that I write. I also think that I was pretty varied in these last fifty posts which means a bit less inter-comparison which allows more of them to shine in their own right.

1. Cocktail Mixer Event: A cocktail mixer event where you mix cocktails with “random” ingredients with the other guests!
2. Polyamory Acts on More Than Just Romance: I think that the greatest benefit of non-monogamy is not just increased romance in your life, but increased potential for closeness with all types of relationships.
3. Why Do People Stay In Bad Relationships?: Exploring the microeconomics/behavioral economics of staying in a bad relationship.
4. Asexuality and Sexual Desire/Pleasure: In this article, I argue for a more pleasure-centric understanding of asexuality as a way to make introspection and identification easier.
5. Mutual Support in Friendship: Discussing a conception of mutual support in friendship as an analog to mutual aid in community.
6. Teasing, Play, and Flirtation: Developing an actual definition of flirting and linking it to teasing/play.
7. Visualizing Lifting Progression: Analyzing and comparing my lifting progress for three of my lifts: Leg Extension, Preacher Curl, and Lateral Raise.
8. The Emotionality Gap in Relationships: An underdiscussed potential gap that can be felt in relationships, especially heterosexual ones.
9. Riffing is Human Nature: A look into an underappreciated pastime: What is riffing? How do you do it? Why do we do it?
10. Compatibility, Meeting Needs, and ENM: Within the paradigm of non-monogamy, how can we know if we are compatible with someone/when
11. Vulnerability, Intimacy, and Love: My take on how vulnerability creates intimacy, which is the key part of love.

I am a bit of a board game newbie who is looking to get more into games. I’ve mostly been enjoying from the playing together aspect of it, but also I really appreciate the fact that it is an analog hobby so I can take a break from looking at screens.

My Game Catalog is here if you are curious about the games that I already own. I haven’t tried a lot of the various types of games. I don’t really know what trick taking or engine building really is despite having played a game or two with those mechanics.

I am treating this post like this: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, so if anyone has any recommendations if you find this post please email me at hi [at] reeswrites [dot] com (obfuscated to make it harder for bots to email me)!

Player Interaction and Gameplay

In some ways I’m looking for board games that don’t require too much strategic thinking and are not too competitive.

• Luck is one way I’ve seen balancing against strategic play, and while I don’t want things to feel too arbitrary or random, I am open to it.
• I don’t need the game to be cooperative, but I don’t really want it to be too adversarial either.
  • I don’t want games that breed too much player adversity. Zero sum actions especially can make me feel bad because my gain is directly at the expense of another player.

I play most of my board games with two players, but I do like games that hit the 2-4/6 range because it’s fun to play games where the dynamics change a bit depending on the number of players.

Creativity in Curation vs Generation

These notes are more applicable to party games but I would say that is a large amount of the games that I have since it allows more people to be able to play together with less complexity of instruction.

For awhile I described it as “random word access”, but I think I was struggling to articulate this more broad concept of curation/rearrangement versus generation. For example, I really struggle with Wordle (not a board game, but still a good example) because randomly accessing words in my brain (generation) just does not work in an efficient manner; I just completely blank when I’m playing. I can brute force it a bit when I get close to the word, but the early stages of the game is tough. Like in Wordle, generation is usually constrained, some conditions make it easier, some harder. I think that the constraint of five letter words in the NYT dictionary makes it tougher.

In general, I find curation and rearrangement is easier because you have everything provided for you versus ex-nihilo (from nothing) generation. Here are some examples of games/mechanics that are in order of easiest to hardest for me:

• Cards Against Humanity/Apples to Apples/What Do You Meme?
  • Cards to answer prompt (curation)
• Poetic Injustice
  • Word bank to assemble to answer prompt (rearranging)
• Poetry for Neanderthals/Codenames
  • Hidden word w/ certain communication allowed (constrained generation)
• Charades/Pictionary
  • Skill based
  • You have a communication constraint but otherwise relatively free
• Quiplash
  • You can basically say anything to get a laugh
• There’s a game where two people say random letters where one represents the first letter of a word and the second represents the last letter and then the players have to be the first one to say a word that matches these parameters
  • “Random” generation really gets to me.

I don’t mind some difficulty for thinking through clues to give people or other words and such because it can be a lot of fun to have a Eureka moment or be particularly creative, but I definitely get performance anxiety, especially when I’m playing with people that I might not know very well. It also uses more brainpower, so if I am particularly tired that day I usually won’t want to expend more cognitive energy on a game where I have to use my brain more.