@Horrrflmlvr
Poets are young.
Novelists are old

Had dinner at a fancy restaurant tonight with friends to celebrate the wife's birthday.
I gestured across the tablecloth and felt a sharp pain in my pinky finger.

I then picked out what I thought was a glass shard. Then blood started to flow.

I fixed that fast.

We tracked down the shard.

It was a salt crystal.

Salt.

Life can be funny.

@MrGoat
I once drove over 30 miles of frogs, at night, migrating over a highway in South Dakota. I felt sick to my stomach when I found out what I had just done.

Gov. Jessie Ventura sure beat up on JD Vance on CNN! Solid arguments against his statements.

About 500 young people have gathered to do a bike ride together. Cold day by the SF bay today. A rapper organized it. They are now heading to his boba shop on the other side of town!

@th3j35t3r
I told @Render not to touch that button!

JD Vance, aka Vladimir Futon
(Just seen on X)
#VladimirFuton

@HiRISE
Very cool!
Definitely not a dead planet!

@HiRISE Are we seeing the cloud still floating above the trail, or the dust settled to the ground?

Another insight:
The Bible is a story.
This establishes a lot of beliefs.
There is plenty of irrationality in that story.
But that doesn't matter. The concepts are made tangible and abstraction is not required to understand the story. That's why it is so effective at convincing so many with such irrationality.

Imagine a world where journalists are replaced by robots that continually follow and pester politicians and the powerful with insightful questions, realtime fact-checking and unassailable arguments 24x7. And with empathy.

I'm not advocating for this.

But, it I can imagine this happening, it could probably happen.

Time for journalists to be proactive and own this creative destruction. Or else they will continue to be victimized by this trend.

Some people cannot work their thoughts abstractly.

Empathy requires some level of abstraction. Projecting yourself into someone else's situation is an abstract exercise.

The use of "story" is a way of compensating for an inability to use abstract concepts to make sense out of a situation.

These people are also highly prone to transactional ethics. 1:1 assessment. No concept of downstream consequences. That's why they are so comfortable arguing for horrible things.

I'm starting to understand that at the core of "belief" is a "story".
Without a story it's hard to establish belief.
Rationality requires abstraction. Concepts are independent of any story.
X + Y = Z is not a story.

My idea-leap: Trump supporters are highly susceptible to stories despite their irrationality. "Crime is up and all immigrants are evil because one woman was killed by an immigrant".

A story.

The data (abstract concept) says otherwise. That doesn't sink in. It never will

I'm getting to the point of complete disgust at the Gaza protestors.

Binary thinking.

If they think Trump is going to save the Gazans then there is no middle ground because they can't comprehend what is happening.

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1821339301806010481

Wife came home.
A slice of cake was waiting for her.
Fruit and sprinkles and a candle.
And, I made this AI art for her.
She's in a better mood now.

@LnzyHou
No other option.
I just scheduled a recurring calendar reminder to "Make Breakfast for the Wife!"

Wife's birthday today.
I baked a cake (I don't bake).
Dinner plans later.
Walked to the store to get the card.

Woke up in my usual dumb-as-a-rock condition. Even more-so because she insisted on staying up to watch the Kamala-Walz rally.

Forgot to make her breakfast with the cake.

I'm now in the dog house.

Our future VP.

It's OK to not know "why".

Sometimes the reason needs time to manifest.

And, knowing "why" doesn't always return control to you.

The journey towards revenge or justice may result in a less happy life.

The most beneficial reason to know "why" is to either keep it from happening again (because you don't want it), or to make it happen again (because you want it). Neither has any impact on why it happened in the first case.

Kamalamentum
will beat
Don-Old
in
Rowevember!