Notebook| Joe Cecil
In short: Because as soon as one's focused on getting, which is the exact reason one would enter a dating "market" space in the first place, one tends also to notice and emphasize not having. Then one feels bad about that, and in your misery one| Joe Cecil
I did an exercise recently over two consecutive days, a Wednesday and Thursday, where I wrote down experiences I might like to have on a date. I ended up with a little over 5 notebook pages (perhaps A5 paper size?) of ideas. Later in the week, I ended up journaling| Joe Cecil
I just upgraded my Ghost install to v6 on Ubuntu, and it took some problem-solving. I tried upgrading my Ghost install from v5 to v6, but my Node version was too old. I needed to install nvm under the ghost user. I did this a "bad but official" way: # First,| Joe Cecil
It's not that I am drawn to something that isn't real, or isn't realistic, or might not happen. The same way that everything dies, everything was born. Everything that is, wasn't, until it was. And screw the odds. It's the way that when I have a fantasy, I avoid looking| Joe Cecil
(for straight dating, anyway, and ignoring the problem of cheaters among other things) When people set out to pursue romance, they usually do it by putting their "best selves forward." That is: Their most generally appealing selves, not their most strongly appealing selves. That means hiding everything about| Joe Cecil
They say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and that applies to listening, too. Be careful who you listen to. Truth matters, and it's not the only thing that matters. It's not the same as wisdom. To me, wisdom means taking the truth| Joe Cecil
I recently reread large chunks of Models (previously), and what struck me is that (A) there are a lot of ideas worth trying, and (B) to make effective use of all that, I need some way to resurface those ideas over time. Realistically, there's no way to incorporate| Joe Cecil
Some people are hard to love in the sense that they do not believe or accept love when it is offered. I've known people like this and I know other people report similar experiences. They are (in Visa's sense) wretched, down bad, not forever but at| Joe Cecil
There's a line early in Pema Chödron's Living Beautifully that stuck out to me where she says (citing a neuroscientist) that emotions naturally last only a few seconds — that (as I understood it) we prolong emotions by our own choice. That rings true| Joe Cecil
It amazes me how much of my life is downstream of reading a Harry Potter fanfiction for the lulz on a whim when I was fourteen. I had been decidedly Christian; I became an atheist because of that fanfiction, first briefly then lastingly. I had been raised conservative, and at| Joe Cecil
I spoke to a lady recently who wanted to start a country bar. I thought that sounded like a pretty cool ambition, and I said so. I found it attractive — maybe the more so because she was willing to admit it out loud, when she might be subject to| Joe Cecil
(*and Twitterlikes [Mastodon, BlueSky, Substack Notes], and also a Discord that I'm in...) For fun/entertainment. To get news on e.g. DELTARUNE via Toby Fox's BlueSky, and on what Jon Simms is up to lately. To see random cat videos and similar things. Selected book| Joe Cecil
I have long felt vaguely that, hey, it would sure be nice if I talked to people more, aren't people interesting, yadda yadda — to live friendlier. I find people fascinating. It seems obvious that talking to people more would be positive expected value. It seems obvious that| Joe Cecil
I found myself needing to come up with research questions this week about a dataset we're collecting at work. We have a bunch of survey data we collected for an ongoing research project, and a report some of my coworkers wrote that analyzes the data and presents their findings to| Joe Cecil
Zan Perrion's The Alabaster Girl is an odd genre of book. It is a book about women from a man's perspective written mainly, I think, for men. It is classed on Amazon as literary fiction, and describes itself as a novel, and it isn't either of those. It is not| Joe Cecil
Yesterday I listened to a Zan Perrion recording. I like listening to Zan. I don't agree with everything he says, and a lot of it I think is better taken metaphorically than literally. But his talks are great food for thought about the kind of guy I want to be,| Joe Cecil