zushi's place

Theme spoiler warning: Revolutionary Girl Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of my personal favorite shows, and without spoiling the story content, one of the many interesting ways to read the theme of the show is how it suggests that the predominant thinking in society has been replaced from “kindness towards each other” to the toxic idea that “if you are stronger than others, then you will get your happily ever after”, whether that happily-ever after is through romance, reverting to an environment of idyllic childhood, or some other unfulfilled wish.

Though I have not considered that idea before, some of it resonates pretty deeply with me, I was reminded of this article about how ultra-rich people in the U.S. behave:

One thing Shteyngart noticed after spending time with this crowd was how competitive they were. “They’d compete against one another on their Bloomberg terminals all day and then at the end of the day they would play competitive poker with each other,” he says; this spirit of one-upmanship pervaded even the donations they made to charities. Shteyngart speculates that underneath this competitiveness is a need to seem smarter and more capable than their peers...

Shteyngart also witnessed the hedge funders making the sort of social comparisons that Norton and Harrington described, treating money as a “scorecard.” He remembers one of them saying something along the lines of “We don’t have best-seller lists and book awards. What we have is this—the number at the end of the day.”

It feels like there's this hedonic treadmill of status that people can't help but climb.

Looking at any form of mass media and studying any form of advertisements, it's really hard to escape the messaging that “success will bring you what you want” and that, if you are a girl, “attractiveness will bring you what you want”. While these certainly played a role even among other primate species, I suspect that their importance got severely exaggerated. The unfortunate part is that there may be a feedback loop – the more people are led to believe these things are important, the more people actually consider these things important, and now the chase for success or beauty can be rather suffocating.

Observing all of these phenomena, I definitely feel that this part of Utena's message have real-world applicability.

On the other hand, what about the show's proposed solution to the issue? The show's solution seems to just be “be kind and be genuine”, which, though both are things I try to be intentional about, doesn't feel like the whole answer somehow; though I fully concede that this may be a lack of personal growth in the area, and that the answer is intuitive to a lot of other people.

Somewhere out there, there's another system of emotions and personal values to be solved. Regardless, I really appreciate Utena the show for, among other important things, pointing out important problems like these about modern society.

— Categorized under: #theory, #sociology, #animations

I've been thinking a lot more recently about how different my headspaces are when I slept well versus not. Though now I'm much less irritable on low sleep, there are still pretty significant differences. The biggest one is that I feel like I have cyclothymic disorder when I don't get sleep – sometimes I'm very happy, sometimes I'm very sad. Things will suddenly become either extremely interesting to me or completely uninteresting, depending on the headspace I wake up in.

This is a pretty big problem when trying to choose a consistent life direction. If you sometimes find the same thing at times irresistibly compelling and at times utterly boring, you will likely have trouble getting anything that requires consistent effort. In addition, it makes it extremely difficult to visualize what a sort of “ideal life” would look like – it requires stable observations of my happiness under various scenarios in order to extrapolate.

Now, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,001 reasons in the universe to try to sleep well, but I feel like this is will probably be the overwhelming reason that pushes me above and beyond to try to sleep well consistently.

On a related note, I noticed that a lot of my recent writings have a sort of sad tone to them. That's actually not the case – I'm probably as happy as I've ever been right now, it's just that I'm currently in problem-solving mode, and problems have a tendency to be negative-sounding things.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy, #emotions, #irl

One of the social flaws I have often is coming across as a know-it-all.

For some reason, I seem to need to think and process things on a much higher time period than other people. I estimate that I spend an average 1-2 hours a day just thinking random subjects, and as a result, I have a really strong need to try to formulate those thoughts into words. It gets to the point that whenever a conversation touches on a related subject, I tend to describe all my thoughts on it at once, which comes off as overwhelming and pretty self-centered.

Well, I think it's self-centered anyways – I suspect that vanity can sometimes play a role in me saying too much, too.

How does one go about resolving something like that? An ideal version is to find someone who is very similar in terms of the need to elucidate ideas, and has a lot of similar interests. I'll be on the lookout, though I suspect that it might be hard to come by.

In some other ways, I've come to realize that blogs are a way for me to remove that excess energy too. And blogging more often is likely a good alternative, if I could work out a balance between time-investment and quality of communication.

In the short term, I would say – expect a bit more blog posts to come in in the future.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications

Recently I've been getting a lot better at being productive on less than 8 hours of sleep. But today.... OOF. I didn't prepare enough for sleep, and getting by on 3 hours is tough.

Part of me wonder whether it's reasonable to strive for discipline even with 3 hours of sleep? It seems like something that's anecdotally possible, like if you are a hardcore monk, but only if the day itself was not that intensive.

Regardless, an interesting finding today was that I can be ok productive even with 3 hours of sleep, as long as it doesn't require much conscious thinking or willpower. Things like doing the dishes, process incoming mail, etc...

On the other hand, I do find myself getting sucked into pleasant distractions. Things that may be a bit productive or feel really nice, but doesn't seem to contribute much after the fact. Daydreaming, for example. These are actually a lot of fun, but perhaps not so much where there's work to be done.

The to start planning the end of the day during the morning...

(Addendum: one of the other inconveniences of inconsistent sleep is inconsistent headspaces on awaking. It's quite difficult to get a clear sense of what I like and how I feel about certain things when they are actually pretty dependent on how much sleep I got.)

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Categorized under: #irl

I was recently chatting with a friend who follows the philosophy of radical kindness, the idea of which is to be “unconditionally kind to everyone, regardless of whether you know them, how they treat you, and how they react to you being kind”. She mentioned the idea only in passing, but the phrase made a pretty strong impression on me.

Having been a recipient of that sort of kindness when I was in a vulnerable place, and seeing the person enact this sort of kindness towards people who she know can be about-faced, there's something about it that felt really powerful. The vast majority of kindness I see (and enact) are of the type towards people I know, towards people I like, and towards people who reciprocate. Seeing something cut so squarely against this assumption of people feels like I'm witnessing some alien phenomena. Though the way it makes you feel, as a recipient, is as human as one could possibly imagine.

Is it possible for me to be unconditionally kind all the time? I think it's possible that I lack the energy for it, or maybe I don't have the temperament for it. But I would at least like to give it a shot, and if it can't be all the time, then at least it's made the world a better place.

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Categorized under: #philosophy

Recently finished learning “Dirtmouth” from Hollow Knight on the piano.

During the learning process, I was happy to see that my speed at understanding and memorizing sheet music has improved. This piece took only perhaps half as long as similar-complexity pieces I memorized earlier.

The piece itself was quite lovely. The structure felt very poetic, kind of reminiscent of a Chopin Nocturne. I really look forward to see more of the composer Christopher Larkin's work, and I'm afraid that this recording didn't do it 100% justice quite yet.

This is my first attempt at doing a visual recording of playing the piano, it felt kind of nice, although very nerve-wracking as well. I have to say, the Hollow Knight plush that came as a prop for the video turned out to be quite cute :)

The piano version was arranged by the pianist Laurence Manning. It was a fun one to play.

— Categorized under: #pianoperformance, #piano, #music

One of the interesting things I've noticed from effective friends and coworkers is that they tend to form unusually clear understanding of things they work on.

This is not to stay that most people don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of things they work on, but it seems... different with people who are very effective. Most people (including me) tend to operate on a lot of fuzzy knowledge – where the mental models are often vague because we haven't bothered to truly connect them to something we understand. To me, it seems that very effective people make those connections.

As an example, in my day-to-day work I am often adjacent to a certain technology called COM. However, my understanding of COM is still quite weak, and I think this is the case for the vast majority of junior developers. Most senior developers seem to have a good understanding of COM, however, I don't think that is because they've been around COM longer and incidentally picked up on it – I think they are at the senior level partially because they have a solid understanding of related technologies. And I don't necessarily think that they took much more time and energy to try to understand these technologies, though they easily could have done that too. I think a lot of it comes down to good habits when incorporating new knowledge, such that new knowledge are connected to very close to something that they truly understand.

What does it mean to truly understand something? At least for me, in the areas of concrete knowledge, it means to be able to understand and explain how something works (and ideally why it works this way) down to a fundamental level. Everyone has at least some sort of ground level knowledge, kind of like “2 + 2 = 4”, but how much of their understand of the world are connected to that ground level is dependent on the person.

What trips me up very often is that no fire alarms go off in my head when I get new knowledge that's not grounded. Perhaps this was evolutionarily good – it wouldn't do much for primate humans to obsess over random phenomena when survival itself was challenging. In practice though, I don't really like how I can't explain how a lightbulb works, or that sometimes I read a book thinking that I understood it only to have the knowledge be pretty useless when I try to apply them.

The type of confusion/fog when I don't really understand something, and the type of satisfaction I feel when I really understand something, are feelings that I'm trying to get better at recognizing now. I think there will be a decent amount of upfront trouble to implement something like this, but it's better than the frustration that almost always come from the lack of understanding. Besides, it's just nice to be on solid ground, or know that the bridges you walk on have strong foundations.

Related reading: understanding – nabeelqu

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Categories: #thinking, #psychology

Went to a few art meetups in recent weeks to work on my pieces in an accountable way. Since I'm learning a lot of new concepts for a piece, the progress on the work has been painstakingly slow. For the past few weeks, the work has changed very little on the surface.

Naturally, this got me pretty self-conscious. Maybe I come off as slow, perfectionist, lazy, or bad? Like most people, I have a natural tendency to want to show myself as being “good” at something, so I definitely feel some internal conflicts during these sessions.

Thinking about it, I don't think there's any way to avoid coming off as inefficient when practicing. 99% of time I'm in the process of learning something, it had looked pretty bad out outside perspectives. It goes not only for creative endeavors, but banal things like biking, driving, and cooking as well.

I think the right way to practice on most things will by default look bad, so the choice is really to either:

• Hang out and learn, but look bad (ignore looking good)
• Hang out and not learn, but look good (ignore learning)
• Don't hang out (ignore social motivation)

When put that way, the correct choice is pretty obvious – swallow my pride, and start practicing ugly.

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Addendum: many people criticize media for romanticizing the idea of a genius who gets it right on the first try. While I think media is partly to blame for this, I can't help but feel that we are intrinsically drawn to the idea of a genius. It is the platonic ideal of “talent”, and just like all platonic ideals, it's something we are easily endeared to.

— Categorized under: #art, #learning

From every productivity strategy I've tried (and I've tried quite a few!), the most useful productive strategies have been by far to increase startup friction for things I don't want to do, and decrease startup friction on things I want to do.

I used to spend more time than I would like on Twitter. To change that, I intentionally made my password some random string that I don't write down, and log out after each browsing session. This way, I have to go through the painful password recovery process each time I want to log in. Eventually I don't log in to Twitter anymore.

Recently I picked up piano again after a 1-year hiatus, and it has replaced a lot of rote gaming as something I do for break. The impetus has been moving the digital piano from the living room to my next to my computer, directly next to where I work. This way, the piano is by me for about 8-12 hours a day. This actually didn't work for a few months and I got as far as unplugging the piano, intending to move it back, but eventually worked out nicely.

What surprises me a lot is how far you can take this strategy. It's almost always further than you expect it to be able to, both in the types of habits you can apply it to, and the complexity of obstacles you can set up to make it harder to do unproductive things. My Facebook account requires me to log in to a second email account, which is needed to log in to a third email account, to be able to log in. My phone has a byzantine process that I have to go through to unlock access to news sites. And in a classic fashion, I don't have candy in the house (and often throw them away if I get a batch somehow). This kind of thing often requires a one-time investment to eradicate habits that eat up just as much time every day.

And there's something about utilizing opportunities when I have willpower to control my behaviors when I am low on willpower that is quite neat and appealing to me. Although I've had successes as well with effortful productivity tricks (say GTD), after some significant recent successes I think I should just default to this strategy whenever possible. The process can get to be incredibly hacky (like having 3 emails accounts), but the results are almost always impeccable.

— Categorized under: #workflow, #productivity

A few months ago, I saw a piece of fanart that I still think about every now and then.

The piece is a reimagined promotion material for a horror movie called Midsommar. I haven't seen the movie yet, and generally am not a fan of horror movies, however the poster made a strong impression that felt difficult to forget.

Here are the promotional pieces (trigger warning: stylized blood): link

From what I can see of other promotional materials, the movie combines a general flowery pastorical aesthetic with some sort of horror. It feels reminiscent of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring – the juxtaposition of flowery spring celebration with a brutal theme gives off a really strong sense of creepiness and contrast. It undeniably has a unique sense of aesthetics to it.

This makes me think – what about the juxtaposition really creates a sense of lasting appeal? In Blade Runner, the combination of high-tech holographic displays combined with dark, gritty neighborhoods created a classic aesthetic that's influential to this day, and spawned sub-genres of aesthetics like lo-fi. In Vaporwave, it is a juxtaposition of vintage computer graphics, Grecian busts, and mall/campy commercial icons. What lends these combinations enduring popularity, whilst just combining two unrelated things I can think of (say beach ball and the moon) doesn't seem to generate that sort of appeal?

To be sure, this is something that I don't know the answer to yet. If I did, I'm sure that I can make the things I make incredibly compelling. On the other hand, it's possible that the question is so complex (e.g. What makes certain music good? What makes certain books good?) that I won't reach a conclusive answer at all. Nevertheless, I feel the need to phrase the question clearly, if only to spell out an incredibly interesting question, and to serve as the beginning point of answering something like it.

— Categorized under: #film, #art