“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 :)

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

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.

I have friends who were into board games (and even one who creates his own), but the bug never made its way to me. That is until I started playing games with my partner. She got me into Monopoly Deal through a friend and the faster-paced style that was part luck and mild strategy made me feel like it was a fun way to connect and do something together as a couple.

I think a large reason why I didn’t get into games was that I was playing the wrong games. However, the market for board games has been steadily increasing, which means that there are more games than ever. I think that there are games out there for any kind of person, but you do have to sort through a lot of them. The board game enthusiast/hobbyist community is a great place to find games, but they do have a bit of a representation bias in their taste that you really have to know what you’re looking for and not be swayed by popular opinion.

There are also some other personal reasons that I am going to detail below for why I believed that board games didn’t mesh well with my personality. This was a good exercise in reflection for me, but I also think there is some value in communicating it externally in case it resonates with other people too. I don’t think of myself as evangelizing board games to others in this post because that isn’t really my business, but I do want people to challenge their own internal narratives vis-à-vis games more generally because of my personal belief in the immense importance of play.

Why I thought board games weren’t a good fit for me

1. Committing to Imaginary Stakes
   • I’m definitely not going to play for money so the idea of winning for the sake of winning doesn’t motivate/excite me. I’m not really a competitive person.
   • This means that I am not as incentivized to come up with long-term strategy or really try that much during the game. For longer games this can be particularly tough as I begin to lose steam towards the middle/end of the game.
2. People Pleasing and Being Unable to Upset People
   • In a lot of games there are many Zero-Sum actions where something good happens to you directly at the expense of another person. Sometimes it’s more abstract than that like just skipping their turn which just makes it harder for them to win.
   • I really don’t like being mean to people but mostly because I can’t handle people being upset at me.
3. Strategic Thinking
   • Strategic thinking doesn’t really come super naturally to me, I am generally somewhat impulsive/follow my gut instead. This leads me to adopt a more “greedy” algorithm in games where I am always taking the locally optimal move. This is sometimes globally optimal, but most times not, especially when playing non-greedy opponents.

How these reasons can be overcome

1. Shifting Goals
   • Winning need not be the ultimate goal of playing games; and for me it’s more about spending time and having fun with friends/ passing time in an enjoyable way.
2. Exposure Therapy or Choosing to Be Nice
   • You will upset people. You will hurt them. I need to get over this! Repair if anything actually is wrong, but most times what happens in games is understood to be separate from reality.
   • I can and do sometimes just take the loss on purpose and not play the “mean move” not just out of avoidance of conflict but also because it just doesn’t feel good sometimes. There are games that are less zero-sum and even cooperative which can also help scaffold this better.
3. Luck as an Equalizer
   • I prefer games that involve an element of luck which doesn’t necessarily prevent or punish strategic thinking, but it does take some of the advantages away from it.

• I think of love as care, so in this context it would be meeting someone’s needs for their own sake (caring out of love, because you love someone you want them to be happy)

You do not help create conducive conditions for care

You can make it hard for someone to even get close to you.

• You could be avoidant or have walls up that makes it hard to let someone in and you push away people who try to get close to you.
• Vulnerability, Intimacy, and Love

You might make it hard for the other person to care for you by obscuring your needs.

• You could not give good feedback (if any at all) which can be hard to make adjustments for someone who is trying to care for you.
• You could believe the other person should read your mind.
  • There are levels to this where someone might say one thing but expect you to know they mean something else, or just say nothing and expect you to magically know what they want/need.
• You could hide your needs for fear of seeming weak or needy or annoying.

You might not make it a fun experience to care for you.

• Someone shouldn’t be caring for you expecting anything in return, but it certainly feels better when you know the other person appreciates it.
  • If the person you are caring for is just complaining and criticizing you the whole time it is not conducive to making you want to continue caring for them.

You could not let yourself be seen.

• By being inauthentic to yourself, you could be outright acting as a different person or just not letting someone who you truly are.
• If you don’t know which parts you can bear to be seen or that you want to project into the world and be appreciated for, you cannot truly be seen by others.
• Letting Yourself Be Seen | Happy Hikers

It is hard (for me) to love you

It could be hard for that person to want to care for you.

• If someone harbors resentment toward you, they can feel unmotivated to care for you or it reminds them of times where they didn’t feel cared for by you.

There are skill gaps that must be overcome for that person to care for you.

• Some people cannot meet your needs in the way that you need them to for whatever reason and that’s okay — even if you desperately want them too like if it’s your parents.
• I do not think that any skill gap is insurmountable, but I do think that there are reasonable limits of effort.
  • Some things really do not come naturally to people and adding an extra layer of vigilance may increase one persons quality of life for a decrease in another’s which I do not think is net positive.

What I am interested in exploring is that we classically think of watching a movie together for a one-off or a show over time, but what are our other options in our new media landscape?

Long Form

Movies go back long before TV with the experience of going to the cinema, reveling in the spectacle with your loved ones and strangers alike. Equipped with the ability to stream movies at home, I am in a “movie club” with a group of my friends, and I frequently do double features with one of my best friends on weekends where we hang out. This works for me because I love talking during movies, something that I cannot really do in a theater.

What I like about watching movies in a club or with someone else is that we get each other out of our comfort zones to watch things that we might not have otherwise been interested in or even heard about. A real con though is that movies can be quite long and have only been getting longer. It can also be a bit of a journey trying to find something that no one in the group has watched yet. Of course rewatching is always an option, but that’s not something that I personally am open to doing in a group.

I don’t often watch shows with others as much as I do with movies, but I do have an appreciation for it because you create accountability for you both to finish the show. Of course this isn’t without its own challenges because unless it is a more regularly scheduled time together, it can be quite hard to actually finish a whole season of a show together, especially if the episodes are long and you have time constraints. If it’s anime or something else short episodes can be easier to crank out, K-Dramas and some other shows are regularly 40mins+ per episode which can be tougher to do if you have time constraints.

You don’t have to watch a whole series together to enjoy watching TV with someone, some shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Brooklyn 99 are all examples of shows where it certainly benefits you to be familiar with the characters, but that you can still enjoy it with little knowledge. Anthology shows like Black Mirror are always a great option as well.

Short and Medium Form

Sharing videos online is central to the form and there are already lots of culture around it. For instance:

“when guys show u a youtube video, u have to understand that’s a sign of great respect in their culture”
@punishedgarage on Twitter

It could be wanting to see someone’s reaction (whether good or not), or just an excuse to revisit one of their favorite videos. However rewatching videos are also a way to tap into nostalgia and create new vibes like: The Cathartic Ecstasy of ‘Gay Guy Music Video Night’.

Something that I love doing is sending TikToks to people I care about things that I think that they would like or find interesting. This is a lot of fun, but if it’s on my feed and I think someone else would like it, chances are it would be on their feed at some point as well. I think that next frontier would be allowing people to mix their personalized feeds with someone else, something that I have recently been interested in and what partially spurred this article. I recently tweeted:

“can they make a spotify blend for youtube or tiktok so that i can watch it with my friends when we hang out”
@reeshuffled on Twitter

I think that this would take some finesse to pull off because algorithms are very personal, so one person might lack the context or interest in whatever is going on in the other’s feed.

I believe that Instagram is best poised to make this change because of their feature to “Watch videos or view posts with others in a call on Instagram”, something that I am surprised to see TikTok has not copied yet. There is of course the ability to do it through FaceTime SharePlay, but I do think that this lack of feature in TikTok points at how oriented they are to being a shopping platform as opposed to a social one.

I am slightly bullish on YouTube making this change as well because I think that medium form content on YouTube could be a happy medium between the bite-sized TikToks and monolithic movies. However, I don’t think that YouTube could pull this off as it is right now because the homepage suggestions are still not good and haven’t been in forever. If they were to improve that and allow for better filtering around topic, length, tone, etc. I think that it would be a game-changer for them.

Conclusion

This article in many ways feels like two articles pasted together: my thoughts about the long-form movie-TV old guard versus online short-to-medium form new guard. However I do not think that the distinction is as hard and fast as we might initially think. TV and movie clips/serialization on TikTok or vertical dramas are trying to blur the line. YouTube creators may also shift to be longer form in order to create more interesting art or allow for more surface to create relationships with their viewers and build communities.

AI slop will come for us all and human curation and discriminating between real and fake by watching together will hopefully save us.

I believe in a Targeted Desire theory of sexual attraction.

Sexual attraction is sexual desire targeted toward a specific person
- Asexuality, Attraction, and Desire

And I am particularly a proponent of a pleasure-centric conception of sexual attraction.

A pleasure-centric view would look for desire for pleasure, when it comes about, and who it is targeted toward.
- Asexuality and Sexual Desire/Pleasure

So putting it all together would be roughly something like sexual attraction is “desire for sexual pleasure with a specific person”.

How might this apply to someone in a relationship?

In a relationship, you have a specific person that you may be engaging in sexual activity with, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are attracted to them. But how?

• I am not talking about coerced sexual activity, that is never okay, but rather cases where the sexual pleasure or targeting conditions fail.
• In one case, you simply do not enjoy/want to engage with them in sexual activity, but do so out of some other reason. (Sexual pleasure is a non-primary motivation)
• In another case, you do enjoy sexual activity with them, but there is nothing in particular that roots this desire specifically to this person. It just so happens that they are there and in a monogamous relationship, they are the only person that you can do this with. (Non-targeted desire)
  • I know that this is a bit confusing and that it might unlock a new worry in some people. Ask yourself am I doing this because it is this person? This is what targeted desire is about.

What if I started out with no attraction but now I do have it?

This is almost exactly what Demisexuality is all about.

I always identified and thought of myself more as Asexual before I realized that I am more close to Demisexual. I’m someone who becomes much more comfortable sexually after multiple safe encounters with someone. It’s not something that is automatic, but something that just has to happen over time in a natural way.

What if I started out attracted to someone but then it faded?

Loss or gain of sexual attraction within a relationship does not necessarily imply A-Specness, but it can be a point of evidence to consider.

There are a number of things that can generally affect your desire for pleasure (i.e. stress, depression, etc.). This does not mean that you become A-Spec during the times you are not experiencing this desire (read more about A-Spec here: Ways of Being A-Spec).

• Sexual attraction does change over time (Aceflux, Acespike, etc.) but can also be related to trauma, stress, medication, etc.
  • Sexual attraction is heavily connected to desire which means that these biological urges can be mediated by a lot of different factors

Something else that could be happening is an exit from the “honeymoon phase”.

• One such reason could be a shift from spontaneous to responsive desire.
  • It is easy for early sexual desire in a relationship to be spontaneous because everything is so new and exciting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean like it will be like that forever.
  • Why Don’t I Want Sex Anymore? Understanding Responsive Desire | Dr. Lori Davis
  • The Truth About Spontaneous vs. Responsive Desire in Long-Term Relationships | Therapy Brooklyn
• I also think that if sexual chemistry is not totally there or under discussed a kind of burnout can happen that can only be resolved through dialogue.
  • Sex can be very performative which can make someone become more apprehensive about initiation over time. Especially if there is any kind of performance anxiety involved.
  • You might not like doing X and think that your partner really likes X but really they thought you liked X and was just going along with it. These are the kinds of things that are important to clear up so that everyone is having a good time.

Why can’t you just tell me if I’m A-Spec or not?

No one can tell you if you are A-Spec or not! At the end of the day, you ultimately have to figure it out for yourself. There is no test to tell you with 100% certainty.

• We need to be better at distinguishing between sexual attraction, desire, and arousal [Rant] | r/Asexuality
• Ace or responsive desire? | AVEN Forum
• Asexuality vs. responsive desire | r/Asexuality

Sexuality is something that changes over time and you can adopt/shed labels as they suit you for better understanding yourself and communicating it others, but I wouldn’t get too bogged down in it if it’s causing you anxiety. Just introspect deeply over long periods of time, and if you are lucky enough to have someone who truly loves you, they will want to understand you and help you understand yourself.

This is a pretty good movie but I do think I had more fun thinking about it than watching it.

• script wise garland is probably trying to write smart dialogue which can be hit or miss but this is really how these people talk with each other
  • garland is kind of paranoid and pessimistic about big tech (blue book and phone companies spying on you)
  • he is wrong about search powering ai but wasn’t far off about large scale data enabling ai and the unethical ways in which the data was collected and used
  • typical sci-fi hand waving bullshit explaining a lot of the technology but that isn’t the kind of predictions that garland is interesting in making in the story i think it’s just necessary so ppl don’t have it in the back of their mind the whole time
• oscar isaac is too cool for the role but i think garland shows a pretty sophisticated understanding of the uncoolness casual misogyny bullying ruthlessly optimizing kind of tech bro
  • In some ways this is pretty predictive in this movie of larger trends now and an interesting POV that is a good contribution into the public
• i really do like the structure of this movie
  • its mostly conversation but it flows nicely and makes sense as turn based

Ava’s not “born sexy yesterday” but has a weird ageless naive kind of POV that doesn’t fully show what her training data was (maybe you obscure some data to demonstrate learning you wouldn’t train on test anyway)

• she knows she’s being evaluated and might have had access to more data than she should’ve the whole time meaning that there was an observer effect/her just playing a role the whole time to not tip off the full scale of her abilities
  • they remark on the observer effect
• AI learning is something in between learning and evolution because of how much priors are potentially structurally there in our brains when we are born and develop (and potentially even in our DNA then)

Techno-Orientalism

• His first versions of the robot were Asian and servantile which is potentially problematic but would also be reflective of this kind of character

The Uncanny Valley

• her being a woman is just another part of the tradition of female companion robots etc but also he prolly a sex pest
• garland was likely making a statement or exploring the idea of the uncanny valley when making her look futuristic with a human face because if you can have that level of facial sophistication then ofc you can create a body too
• i think this is what makes it interesting when she dresses herself further into the movie because it does make it easier to suspend disbelief and make her feel human

i think that garland is also making statements on loneliness

• not necessarily male loneliness but that’s certainly a part of it
• caleb is a shy orphan who mostly just works and doesn’t really have friends (i assume)
  • he texted a lot of ppl in the beginning tho
  • he is single which plays a part in romantic longing regardless of if he is platonically fulfilled
• i’m sure she is playing seductively bc she knows the kind of person he is and how to best manipulate him for her to accomplish her goals
  • should he have had access to the cameras or did she give them to him?

AI will reflect the opinions of their creators (shaped in their own image)

• sexuality added bc he thinks it’s fun and it’s central to his understanding of living things
• he does think of himself as a god so it makes sense that he would try to shape something in his own image according to his own ideals or whatever
• he built in sex and heterosexuality
• i made it bc i could
• if you wanna make sex bots then just make sex bots

Philosophy

AI and Humor

• jokes and the “non-autistic mind” because theory of (other) minds
• i think jokes can be made without consciousness ?
  • it is just subversion of expectations/unification of disparate concepts which is formulaic and is actually pretty well encoded in vector spaces for LLMs

Qualia

• Ava wanting to go outside the mansion and experience things for herself
• They do bring up Mary’s Room and want to have the viewers to think about qualia
• I think the human and non-Qualia are probably different

Would AI death anxiety be real?

• i feel like the analogue is invoked all the time as a form of empathy for character motivations but idk what they would fear or not
• they invoke some questions about identity with memory formatting etc
• if the AI thinks it’s human, then maybe
• i feel like they would have an enlightened sense of immortality bc i’m sure they could be restored but i guess unsure if that would be any sense of real continuity for them?

Simulation of consciousness is always an interesting problem

• if you train an AI on human text it will think and/or say it is conscious, but that doesn’t mean anything

Questions

why does nathan drink so much?

• he talks a bit about loneliness

art and architecture definitely plays a big role in this movie

• nature boxed up through windows or out of reach like caleb’s room having no windows
• the brutalist kind of architecture and sweeping sense of space in the home in a cold sort of manner
• don’t know enough to comment about pollock

nathan isn’t vying for caleb’s approval but is trying to keep him under his thumb by making him feel chosen like they’re friends equals(?)

• What phase of the innovation adoption cycle are we in?
  • The State of Generative AI Adoption in 2025
  • State of AI: Enterprise Adoption & Growth Trends
  • ChatGPT 100M users in 2 months
    • ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base

What kinds of people like AI? how do they use it?

• The constructive, overreliant, and irresponsible use of artificial intelligence tools in academia: Personality correlates and implications for academic integrity
• Distinct predictors of positive attitudes toward artificial intelligence and general technology: big five traits, gender, and age
• Who Likes Artificial Intelligence? Personality Predictors of Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence

Do people use AI because they want to or have to?

• Not everyone wants to use AI – but do we still have a choice?
• The Rise of Mandatory AI Usage in the Workplace: Implications and Insights
• The Rise of AI in the Workplace: New Stats + Pros & Cons to Consider
• Copper, copper, copper. How Americans feel about AI & dumbing down pop.
• I’m someone who was forced to install it but never used it — but then used it out of curiosity and have now cautiously adopted it

Are some cultures more ready for AI?

• Quick on their feed: What’s driving the ‘AI slop’ consumption surge in South Korea

Is AI adoption higher in software engineering?

• The State of AI in Software Engineering
• Why is AI so good at coding? There is a lot of simple tasks that are done over and over again
• AI adoption is probably less so in creative fields

AI creates artifacts. If your job is the soulless creation of artifacts then it makes sense for you to use AI!

• Marketing and advertisement does not care about the creative.
• You are at a disadvantage in cost and time if you do not use AI. Especially in more competitive environments.
  • AI does not empower people with poor ability/discernment, but can be a multiplier for someone who is reasonably to very competent.
• However if you have AI reading and sending your emails, it really is AI just talking to each other.
  • Makes you think that we should instead rethink the system lol

If AI truly is a ubiquitous tool, then making personas doesn’t really make sense as much

• That would be like trying to do persona mapping on people who use smartphones that just doesn’t make sense to me

• maybe it is the parts about forging identity and awkwardness that i don’t like as much
• i do like inner child type stuff with whimsy and all that but that is a lot more far removed from teenage stuff
  • childhood versus adolescence

some themes:

• youthful innocence
  • EDM
  • pranks
    • not super mean spirited
    • they’re good kids just some youthful rebellion at a old person who is a bit of a dick
  • platonic love
  • romantic love/interest
  • protest and loss of hope for your own generation’s passivity (meditated via tech burnout)
  • fracturing of friends as move into/through future
    • tom moving to america post-grad
  • parental relationships
• rise of facism
  • anti immigration sentiment
  • politics happening at people and passivity through the news
• technology, surveillance, and social credit
  • panopty — not subtle haha but high tech
    • for “safety”

• Everyone in Hollywood is Talking About ‘Verticals’…But What Are They?

We switch things at the speed of friction. Verticals are a medium that understand this.

• Internet speed, processing power, and availability of content all drastically reduce switching costs.
• Are Attention Spans Actually Decreasing?
  • I think that our digital attention spans are decreasing which makes us more impatient in other tasks and makes us feel more bored at baseline.
  • Columbus (2017): The Crisis of Interest
• Colin and Samir talk about narrative/information loops and hooks are openings of questions that are later closed through the story. Verticals will have these kinds of loops optimized for the time and distribution format of this current age and where the gap in the market/profit lies.

Are vertical dramas substitutes for longer form dramas?

• No, I do not think that they are perfect substitutes. However, they aren’t complements either.
• They are competing in the larger attention landscape, but I think it is more in the short to medium form realm.
• If you come across a vertical you might watch a bunch of small videos that may add up to something akin to a medium or longform, but they are designed to be consumed and understood out of context, which is very different than medium to longform content.
• I think that in some ways these are soaps in the new age, but they also demonstrate a new engagement and length niche.
  • You want something that is definitely shorter than a show but can still hold your attention over a decent period of time.

In a lot of ways, it shows that this is a niche that is worth exploring.

• Audiovisual content that is shorter than a YouTube video and has a narrative and full cast just doesn’t exist anywhere, except maybe comedy sketches.
• I think this is a market that is only monetizable through TikTok where ad revenue is a bit more optimized for this shorter content. Midroll ads would not fare well on these types of videos.
  • Product placement or other forms of less interruptive forms of advertising could maybe work.

Talk Notes

The central question of the talk is what is the difference between normal and pathological sex?

• Richard von Kraftt thought that any sex not for creating children or procreation was deviant. This was kind of the first time it was being talked about, and of course, that rules out most of the sex that modern people were having and even then people were having.

Sex is interesting because it is the end point of several different goals like:

• Self-esteem/validation
• Expression of love, dominance, hate, etc.
• Procreation
• Money

What is a psychological disorder?

• Symptom thresholds
• Duration thresholds
• Distress or impairment of daily life
• Not due to substance abuse or different disorders

What are paraphilia (sexual disorders)?

• Atypical patterns of sexual attraction or arousal
• (Potential) harm to (self or) others
• Distress or impairment of daily life

What is fetish?

• Fetish is not inherently disorder (esp if not causing impairment or distress)
  • Fetish, Explained
• It comes from the Portuguese feitico which were these inanimate objects that were worshipped (relics)
• A fetish is a specific and intense focus on a non-genital body part or an inanimate object
• Penguins have been observed having sex with rocks and other non-human animals exhibit fetish behavior as well
• Fetish objects are tactile: they’re smooth/soft or are symbols of occupation, power, etc. or make contact with other body parts that are fetishized or enjoyed a non-pathological amount
• The onset is usually after puberty, but there are cases where it happens much earlier as early as like five years old
• Fetish seems to be some kind of multi sensory experience, especially for masturbation
• In the research fetish is almost exclusively male, but I’m not sure how much I believe this

Voyeurism

• Watching an unsuspecting person
• More more male than female
• Don’t have to engage and usually doesn’t escalate to something physical
• The thrill of being caught is part of it
• Often about masturbation
• May be their only sexual outlet

Exhibitionism

• Exposing yourself to unsuspecting people
  • This makes more sense to me as a contingency rather than voyeurism because I feel like in voyeurism you could have consent but the secrecy and the thrill of being caught I guess goes away, but there’s still some titillation
• They also indulge in the thrill of not wanting to be caught
• People don’t usually care about specific reactions, but they do want a reaction
• Most victims are women and children
• This is usually a misdemeanor in most US states
• They have tried to do shame therapy, which was an adversive of counter condition where they exposed exhibitionists to a reactionless victim which supposedly was very effective
• There was also a recent treatment where they tried to build empathy toward potential victims, and it seems like a lot of of them were not able to consider a lot of the consequences beforehand

Frotterism

• Groping/rubbing an unsuspecting(?) person
• Sometimes called grinding or chikan
• Big prom and subways only about 5% of instances are reported so any of our numbers are probably way lower
• There is a fairly high risk of escalation to assault as much as 18 to 20%
• Perpetrators have a lot of pathological rationalization

Auto-erotic asphyxiation

• These effects were observed pretty early on during public hangings
• It was even initially used as a treatment for erectile dysfunction
• There’s certainly an overlap with choking during sex, so there is some kind of pleasure pathway surely (maybe related to drowning?)
• There’s at least 1000 deaths a year due to this
• It can also look like suicide and vice versa
• Most deaths are men and most are under 30 so maybe other people are just better at it and we have reverse survivor bias
• Some people will try to do it with a lemon in their mouth so if they become unconscious, they’ll clench their jaw in order to wake them up
• I wonder if this is an expression of choking, but they just don’t ask other people to do it but also this is a very big thrill seeking behavior as well, which could make up the majority of the motivation
• Some therapists engage in harm reduction and just tell them to do it with a trusted partner, but it is a pretty scary thing to do because there can just be accidents

Other disorders

• Vore
  • Cannibalism
  • Clinical vampirism/Renfield Syndrome
• Somnophilia

How do these disorders form?

• Some believe it’s operant and classical conditioning, usually through chance pairing of stimuli that then becomes ruminated and intensified through fantasy
  • Perhaps a person has a random erection during puberty, and someone passes them on the bus. This could then develop into fraud ism because if they masturbate to it orgasm is a very powerful reinforcer.
• The distortion of courtship could be because these people have high sex drives, but low social competence
• In a psychodynamic lens, it could be an early fusion of sex and aggression, and also lack of empathy or the precursors to empathy like mentalization
• Traumatic brain injuries or temporal lobe abnormalities can also explain some behavior

One theorist believed that paraphilia or other errant sexual behavior were distortions of the normal stages of courtship

1. Finding (voyeurism, stalking)
2. Making overtures (exhibitionism)
3. Making physical contact (frotterism)
4. Engaging in sexual intercourse (rape)

Most disorders are associated with

• Hypersexuality
• Childhood sexual or emotional abuse
• Substance abuse disorders
• Mood disorders
• Antisocial behavior
• Surprisingly personality doesn’t reliably correlate
• OCD might be involved, but usually those thoughts are ego-dystonic and so there wouldn’t be really any arousal from it so it could be debilitating and for someone to think that they have these things but usually they actually don’t
• I believe that women have more fantasies, but for men more fantasy leads to behavior because of risk taking and socialization, etc.

Sexual disorders can be treated but with mixed results

• Sometimes there are anti-androgens to lower libido, same with antidepressants also psychodynamic or cognitive behavioral therapy
• It’s hard to control a arousal and you can’t deprogram something. You have to have aversive stimuli or create different stimuli to get aroused

My Own Musings

What connects these disorders?

• Transgressions of consent which are transgressions of morality
  • If someone has pretty low empathy and high and antisocial behavior, are they really think about morality does that incongruity give them any pleasure? Shirley they know it’s illegal.
  • Unsuspecting seems to be a big part of it
    • Librarians getting fetish callers
• There’s exaggeration of normal like body odor, scat, etc. which is something sensory
• There’s risk (misattribution of arousal)
• I wonder if there’s some kind of evolutionary psychology lens for a lot of of these things
  • I bet also there’s some idea of regaining control over your life or there’s so much repressed energy that it comes out in very strange and perverted ways
• Vore, cannibalism, vampirism: What is the metaphorical significance of consumption?

What role does the internet and technology play?

• 
• It can even start off ironically, but the body doesn’t know the difference
• I wonder if recommendation algorithms will have anything to do with this in the future
• There is also a lot of propagation of fetish content online even to unsuspecting people
• The Goon Squad: A lot of it may be performative, but a lot of vulnerable people together will potentially deficient social skills may have trouble distinguishing fantasy, performance, and reality.
• Pornography is so much easier to find and it is everywhere.
  • Porn in certain cases might help or hurt. It depends, but orgasm is a very powerful reinforcer so you have to be very careful what you get off to.
• What about the usage of LLM chatbots as companions?
  • How Real Are AI Boyfriends?
• Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications

The Ethics of Fantasy

• Privacy and unknown ability of the experience of partners, friends, etc.
• Is fantasy something that you should talk about with your partner? Are there some private fantasies and also partner fantasies?
• Pervert’s Dilemma with deepfakes