85 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
85 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
[1]taylor.town [2]about [3]now [4]spam [5]rss
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Stinky Gifts From Your Idea Kitty
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To attract ideas, carry a notebook.
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Suddenly, armed with blank paper, your mind sends details to your attention.
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□ note: eating fiber and/or vinegar before carbs can smooth glucose/
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fructose spikes
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□ note: explore the lives/works of Grothendieck and Mochizuki
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□ note: "Determine value apart from price, progress apart from activity,
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wealth apart from size." -- Munger
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□ note: add to reading list: Urban Waterfront Promenades by Macdonald
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[6]90% of those ideas are crap. Your mind became a friendly neighborhood cat,
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delivering dead animals to your doorstep. Thank you for your kind gifts, kitty
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-- all these delicate carcasses are so nasty and yet so generous. But your true
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challenge is that 10% of the time, they're taxidermy squirrels stuffed with
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sand and sapphires.
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Your mind will never improve at finding good ideas; that cat will always
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deliver 90% crap. What changes is you. You somehow teach yourself to sort and
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salvage. You learn to forgive yourself faster, to bury the dead, and to pay
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proper respect to Nature's harsh whims. You name this new feeling "intuition"
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and "taste" and sometimes "luck".
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This phenomenon manifested when I [7]started writing regularly. My hunches
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found a nest. My curiosity grew legs. My mind made miles of piles and infinite
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files for whatever these mountains of words will one day become.
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□ essay: tactical procrastination
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□ essay: temporal type theory
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□ essay: gender penmanship gap?
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□ project: suitcase shaped like a pencil roll; lies flat with many
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pockets
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□ note: explore dungeon synth
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□ essay: licklider's "olivers"
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After years of isolating myself, I [8]tried a new platform. It's been
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delightful. I've rekindled old friendships, found new communities, and spread
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lots of laughter.
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But as soon I created that profile, my cat changed its patterns. More ideas.
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Smaller ideas. Save this. Share that.
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□ post: writing prompt: in Cool Runnings 2, the Jamaican bobsled team…
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□ post: is a train a hypoloop?
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□ essay: John Dewey's cool schools
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□ post: mosquito net jacket
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□ post: corporate sabotage: covertly replace the coffee with decaf beans
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and watch productivity suffer
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□ post: pic of mom's sad cabbage sandwich
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□ post: fennel soda
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□ essay: ethics of anteaters in Zoboomafoo
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□ post: John Harvey Kellog was a cereal entrepreneur.
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These ideas are still ~90% crap, but my intuition cannot yet appraise its new
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deliveries.
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My dendrites grow so stiff with age; I'm afraid I'll learn kitty's new tricks
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too slowly this time. Only fools forget that cats have more lives than we poor
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mortals.
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I so deeply want all that community -- all that belonging. But I can't afford
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more change. I'll try to visit as often as my old cat allows. Meanwhile, feel
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free to [9]write me a letter. I'll be here, wherever this is.
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Before I depart, I'll leave you with a powerful spell: a substrate (e.g.
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notebook, blog, profile, etc) summons its works (e.g. notes, essays, comments,
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etc). This is real magic. Try it at home.
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References:
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[1] https://taylor.town/
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[2] https://taylor.town/about
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[3] https://taylor.town/now
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[4] https://newsletter.taylor.town/
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[5] https://taylor.town/feed.xml
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[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
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[7] https://taylor.town/
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[8] https://bsky.app/profile/taylor.town
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[9] https://taylor.town/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#b5ddd0d9d9daf5c1d4ccd9dac79bc1dac2db
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