Conformal Pertinence

I'm gonna write about the death of my dad a bit. I'd already said a few words at his wake, but I thought it'd be nice to record some of those thoughts in a more permanent way.

He and I always had a complicated relationship: I'd see so many tendencies within him that I'd had to either fight back, restrain, or modulate in some way for myself, and I couldn't help but feel that his life served mostly as a cautionary tale for me. Nevertheless, it is humbling to reflect on just how much I owe to him.

The memories I highlight of my father all share a common theme: fun. So many events in my life were brightened by my dad's sense of joy and exploration: he made music fun; he made learning about the world fun; he made childhood fun. These recollections serve as just a few examples.

Read more

The quote below is one that I first heard over a decade ago, and one which I've returned to often over the intervening years:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Read more

"In the end, we all become stories."

—Margaret Atwood

After coming across this quote today, I couldn't help but feel a deep resonance with it. For some time now, I've found myself neglecting a part of myself which deeply enjoys putting thoughts into words and organizing them such that they can convey some meaning to others. And it seems that — as I grow older in age — the need to do so has now come to fruition.

Read more

More and more, I find myself coming to the conclusion that modern societies will require a clear and well-defined notion delineating tolerable from intolerable speech. The most recent debacle over the new speech rules in the de-facto "public square" online, a.k.a. Twitter, has only served to highlight this point. Telling people that you support their right to say whatever they'd like is almost surely the road to chaos.

Read more

This project started off as a guilty pleasure: I would relax with coffee in the morning and solve a Wordle puzzle, sometimes sharing my result with a friend afterwards. (But never — EVER — on facebook!)

In the beginning: Habit Forming

However, being the uninspired hack that I am, I began to settle on go-to words that I would repeatedly use to start solving the puzzle, rather than trying new, unique, fresh words each time. And, of course, I found that certain words would stand a better shot at revealing common letters than others.

I also decided that — in the rare event that I would ever solve a Wordle puzzle in one or two attempts — that this would be more an indication of luck, rather than skill. So I committed to always try the same two words, regardless of the outcome of the first guess.

Formed Habit (for better or worse): Always try the words ROUSE and PAINT as the first two guesses.

Read more