Gricean letter of recommendation

You probably don't mean to be here.

[scyllas-revenge]

I made a magnolia tea latte so good I'm having a religious experience at my desk

this is a PSA to go steal some magnolia flowers from your neighbor's yard TODAY

[scyllas-revenge]

For @backwoodsbigfoot and anyone else who's curious:

How to cook stuff with magnolia flowers:

First you want to go out and collect a bunch of magnolia flowers (can be any kind of magnolia, there are lots of varieties and they're all edible. Just don’t pick up crushed petals from the ground, get nice flowers or buds off the tree). Bring them home (they'll start to wilt and turn brown within a few hours) and separate the petals from the middle parts. Wash the petals off in case of bugs/pesticides.

Then make your magnolia syrup:

Make simple syrup (equal parts water and white sugar) in a small pot—you can add extra sugar if you want the syrup thicker. Bring to a boil until the sugar is dissolved, then dump in the magnolia petals. I’d aim for a packed cup of petals per cup of water, but you can use less if you can't steal as many of your neighbor's magnolias without them noticing.

Let that simmer for 20 min or so. The petals will shrivel up and turn brown- that's ok! Then remove it from heat (the longer it simmers the more water will dissolve, again making a thicker syrup) and strain the petals out. Keep the shriveled up petals, bc now they’re all soaked in sugar and taste like flower jam. You can blend them up and add them to cereal or oatmeal or cookie batter or anything else you like. Store them in the fridge or freezer.

Let the syrup (a gold or pale pink color) cool down and put it in the fridge in sealed jars and now you can make MAGNOLIA FLAVORED ANYTHING!!

For a magnolia tea latte I like to brew black tea in a half cup or so of water, then add an ounce of magnolia syrup and top with steamed milk.

I’ve also added magnolia syrup to lemonade, coffee, sparkling water, cocktails, oatmeal, smoothies, and a really lovely gingersnap cookie recipe, and they've all been great! Magnolia tastes mostly like floral ginger, sometimes with a faint aftertaste of cloves.

All the credit from my magnolia adventures goes to blackforager on instagram, who is a plant genius and came up with the magnolia snap cookie recipe I love so much <3 She's also on tiktok I believe, for the Youths

[rightisleftforyou]

slade house: notes to self

I listened on audio, so somewhat less attention and a lot less cross-checking than with a paper book, but still, I’m very impressed with the crescendo of trickery! It’s obvious from the format that you’ll have to raise the stakes, but raising the stakes with information worked really well

Like, to (~twice for me, but presumably at least once for everyone?) reveal so much information that it’s totally plausible as a reader that that’s why we’re hearing about this! Really skillfully done, bravo

And what an incredible move with the skipped sex scene. I love when authors brutally turn all our experiences as readers against us

I listened to The Plot pretty recently too -- a book-long version of this impressive trick, using the boring romantic subplot in which a woman uproots her life for our male protagonist and improves his in every way while he lies to her. Damn that was well done

All that said, I don’t think I’ll read any of the author’s other books. At any rate not the year in the life of a 13yo boy, not the historical romantic epic of a young man, and not the action-packed Good v Evil fantasy novel that about the ‘cosmology’ -- the ending didn’t really leave me wanting more ‘cosmology’. Maaaaybe Cloud Atlas, since the synopsis doesn’t sound bad in any of the above ways, and the structural skill was definitely the best part here

The way the policeman narrated about women, and especially the teenage girl narrator whose Entire Life was about being fat and wanting boys to like her, were definitely points against, though the other 3/5 sections seemed to manage fine without any similar vibes

I’m glad I read it and glad I read it with no prior knowledge of anything, the escalating mystery of a door in an alley was great and I don’t think I would have liked it as much as part of a larger world

[liesonthefloordramatically]

The infamous goulash recipe

IF YOU TOO WOULD LIKE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS QUEER FUTURITY, HERE YOU GO:

Keep reading

[rightisleftforyou]

vagabonds: notes to self

First let’s all acknowledge that Vagabonds’ Earth is a market economy in a way and to an extent that no real-life country is, ever has been, or almost certainly ever will be. There’s no internet, for crying out loud. I mean, technologically there is an internet, it’s set in the future after all, but socially there’s no internet. There’s nothing like blogs, nothing like youtube, nothing like Wikipedia, definitely nothing like AO3. There’s nothing public. It’s nothing like the internet we know and love and I really don’t think we’re in any danger of it. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be anything at all like research universities, which, come on, those aren’t going anywhere, for prestige motives alone. There’s one mention of a library, at which it is explained that nobody goes there. Etc.

Which is all fine in context. The book doesn’t always read like a novel, it’s often more like a dialogue, in the Galileo or Hofstadter tradition – characters are more ideas than people. Planets can do the same.

Of course the first Mars bases will most likely be command economies to the extent that they are economies at all; small communities in harsh environments are I think a natural fit for central planning. Not that that’s exactly how the future history goes down, but on a higher level it makes sense as a point of departure. (I guess there needed to be sufficient market forces on-planet to spark a Literal Rebellion.)

Vagabonds makes the point that markets are not suitable for everything, which is obviously true and I obviously agree, e.g. I’m not going to marry the highest bidder. But that’s a dangerous point to harp on, because at the current margins it kills people. (I have in mind the people waiting for kidney transplants, but as a hotter take, some portion of covid patients qualify too.)

Specifically, the book presents art and science as practiced in irl universities (motte) / all information, intellectual property, knowledge work, etc (bailey) as examples for which markets are disastrous. This is an interesting perspective and I’m glad this book has gotten me to consider it. 

I certainly agree that people will still do many kinds of work once liberated from having to make a living doing so, and I think we can already tell that e.g. writing novels is one of those. 

I’m not especially convinced that all production of knowledge vs all production of goods is the right split there, or that simply trashing the legal concept of intellectual property gets you the desired knowledge/goods split.

Mars seems pretty pleasant. The main problem is socialism isn’t the lack of ‘economic freedom’, it’s the famines. If by authorial fiat there are no famines, well then great, broadly speaking you have a valid societal structure. 

(Not that I’m zero concerned about freedom; ‘married couples get assigned houses, single people have to live in the dorms forever’ is not a good system and suggests a troubling lack of autonomy in general.)

[rightisleftforyou]

Really enjoying the housing policy subplot. As you see above, I noticed the initial world-building mention-in-passing that single people live in the dormitories, and jumped on that as a great example of the intrusive, discriminatory, and nonsensical results you get when you centrally allocate everything. (@socialists pls have MARKETS, give people MONEY, let them decide for themselves what they want and what they value!) So then I felt very vindicated when there was a whole scene about the unfortunate arbitrariness and rigidness of the housing system, and when it became one of the more central points of the youths’ protest. But now the revelation that the last generation of protests was for every family to get a home! The system that both we and our protagonist understood as the background default of the world! (And that because she grew up in the ruling class neighborhood, no less!) As opposed to an earlier system of prestige allocation, itself an outgrowth of earlier genuine scarcity! Really strong work.

I’ve thought of comparing Luoying to Hamlet, and now I can’t unthink it. She’s fundamentally very unsure what to do, in a way that we don’t see a lot in fiction other than in Hamlet -- lastingly unsure, haunted by it, sometimes leaning in some direction or even taking some kind of action but then after mixed results or just random encounters, drifting back to total confusion, moral, epistemic, personal, etc. A major inciting+confusing incident for her is learning that her grandfather, the head of state, killed her parents to maintain his grip on power! It doesn’t get a lot more Hamlet than that!

And she’s so much better than Hamlet. Hamlet’s dilemma is so unsympathetic and weird and annoying -- ‘should I murder someone, you know, for revenge, a well-known good idea, oh but wait, he’s praying right now, this casts me ever deeper into the throes of this impossible choice’ -- please, shut up, kill him or don’t, or at LEAST consider some better arguments for or against. But Luoying is deeply unsure about bigger concerns -- what shape society should be, what shape it even is or can be, what made it so, what is or should be the place of one person (or family, though she hasn’t quite had that thought) in shaping it. MUCH better questions, much better prompts for uncertainty and caution, yet also for action and change. I wouldn’t say she approaches it especially well, but the predicament and the considerations are important and interesting and sympathetic, relatable even, if you run in certain circles. 

[rightisleftforyou]

vagabonds: notes to self

First let’s all acknowledge that Vagabonds’ Earth is a market economy in a way and to an extent that no real-life country is, ever has been, or almost certainly ever will be. There’s no internet, for crying out loud. I mean, technologically there is an internet, it’s set in the future after all, but socially there’s no internet. There’s nothing like blogs, nothing like youtube, nothing like Wikipedia, definitely nothing like AO3. There’s nothing public. It’s nothing like the internet we know and love and I really don’t think we’re in any danger of it. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be anything at all like research universities, which, come on, those aren’t going anywhere, for prestige motives alone. There’s one mention of a library, at which it is explained that nobody goes there. Etc.

Which is all fine in context. The book doesn’t always read like a novel, it’s often more like a dialogue, in the Galileo or Hofstadter tradition -- characters are more ideas than people. Planets can do the same.

Of course the first Mars bases will most likely be command economies to the extent that they are economies at all; small communities in harsh environments are I think a natural fit for central planning. Not that that’s exactly how the future history goes down, but on a higher level it makes sense as a point of departure. (I guess there needed to be sufficient market forces on-planet to spark a Literal Rebellion.)

Vagabonds makes the point that markets are not suitable for everything, which is obviously true and I obviously agree, e.g. I’m not going to marry the highest bidder. But that’s a dangerous point to harp on, because at the current margins it kills people. (I have in mind the people waiting for kidney transplants, but as a hotter take, some portion of covid patients qualify too.)

Specifically, the book presents art and science as practiced in irl universities (motte) / all information, intellectual property, knowledge work, etc (bailey) as examples for which markets are disastrous. This is an interesting perspective and I’m glad this book has gotten me to consider it. 

I certainly agree that people will still do many kinds of work once liberated from having to make a living doing so, and I think we can already tell that e.g. writing novels is one of those. 

I’m not especially convinced that all production of knowledge vs all production of goods is the right split there, or that simply trashing the legal concept of intellectual property gets you the desired knowledge/goods split.

Mars seems pretty pleasant. The main problem is socialism isn’t the lack of ‘economic freedom’, it’s the famines. If by authorial fiat there are no famines, well then great, broadly speaking you have a valid societal structure. 

(Not that I’m zero concerned about freedom; ‘married couples get assigned houses, single people have to live in the dorms forever’ is not a good system and suggests a troubling lack of autonomy in general.)

[rightisleftforyou]

contrapoints on jkr: notes to self

So far, I feel like the point is to convince me that jkr is doing bigotry, but not by convincing me that she is doing something different than I thought she was doing, just by convincing me that what she is doing should be called bigotry. Sure, okay, that’s a fine way to use that word. Ssss…so?

The whole literary criticism approach to understanding political discussion: enh, I dunno. I think it’s interesting, and I often enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem, well, helpful. Or like, it’s helpful only for understanding What’s Going On In Those Crazy People’s Heads and/or What Effect Is This Having On The Weak-Minded Masses. Which, okay, now that I write it out, those seem like valuable contributions. But it’s notably not helpful for like… figuring out what’s true in the world, what our ethics should be, and how those two collide i.e. what should we ever in fact do, including meta-level concerns like what should our discourse norms be. 

It’s not literally this but it’s heading in the direction of like… ‘pretty great how we already know everything and have all the correct opinions and the main thing we have left to do is speculate about what kind of hateful idiot would ever disagree with us. oh yeah and work on ever-better detection tools for sniffing out people tainted by Wrong opinions so we can punish them’

I guess this is where it really shows that I was (internet-)raised by rationalists. Like… showing that a person uses the same literary style as Bad People bears approximately zero resemblance to refuting or even arguing with what that person is saying. Charity, in the conversational sense, is not about feeling bad for billionaires, it’s about being able to have good, meaningful, productive conversations about important things. If someone says they have the interests of trans kids at heart, great, show them why that means they should support them transitioning. (Or just don’t engage, of course! Always allowed!) That’s a better conversation in every way than the one where you try to convince them that actually they hate trans kids. 

I (obviously?) agree that jkr is wrong about what’s best for trans kids; depending on how exactly money and fame translate into power, maybe dangerously wrong. I think we should try to deal with that better than we are, because, well, many people are wrong about many things. I guess you can try just getting rid of all of them if that’s really what you want, but uh

[rightisleftforyou]

aha, dissolving the question, operationalizing ideological debates with questions about reality, THAT’s more like it, much happier now, love you Natalie

[rightisleftforyou]

contrapoints on jkr: notes to self

So far, I feel like the point is to convince me that jkr is doing bigotry, but not by convincing me that she is doing something different than I thought she was doing, just by convincing me that what she is doing should be called bigotry. Sure, okay, that’s a fine way to use that word. Ssss...so?

The whole literary criticism approach to understanding political discussion: enh, I dunno. I think it’s interesting, and I often enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem, well, helpful. Or like, it’s helpful only for understanding What’s Going On In Those Crazy People’s Heads and/or What Effect Is This Having On The Weak-Minded Masses. Which, okay, now that I write it out, those seem like valuable contributions. But it’s notably not helpful for like... figuring out what’s true in the world, what our ethics should be, and how those two collide i.e. what should we ever in fact do, including meta-level concerns like what should our discourse norms be. 

It’s not literally this but it’s heading in the direction of like... ‘pretty great how we already know everything and have all the correct opinions and the main thing we have left to do is speculate about what kind of hateful idiot would ever disagree with us. oh yeah and work on ever-better detection tools for sniffing out people tainted by Wrong opinions so we can punish them’

I guess this is where it really shows that I was (internet-)raised by rationalists. Like... showing that a person uses the same literary style as Bad People bears approximately zero resemblance to refuting or even arguing with what that person is saying. Charity, in the conversational sense, is not about feeling bad for billionaires, it’s about being able to have good, meaningful, productive conversations about important things. If someone says they have the interests of trans kids at heart, great, show them why that means they should support them transitioning. (Or just don’t engage, of course! Always allowed!) That’s a better conversation in every way than the one where you try to convince them that actually they hate trans kids. 

I (obviously?) agree that jkr is wrong about what’s best for trans kids; depending on how exactly money and fame translate into power, maybe dangerously wrong. I think we should try to deal with that better than we are, because, well, many people are wrong about many things. I guess you can try just getting rid of all of them if that’s really what you want, but uh

[rightisleftforyou]

capitalism: notes to self

In general, I’m really not a fan of the thought process that starts with wanting people to have things (good! possibly the best!), and proceeds to legal mandates that anyone who interacts with the people must give them the things (bad! very bad!). Just give people things, unconditionally, without creating perverse incentives.

In general, if people are in bad situations, I pretty much always think that we need to give them better options. Forbidding the bad situations is a way way worse approach, often literally net negative.

In general, I disagree with the whole worldview in which rich people, companies, etc, are the villains we need to defeat. The real problems, which we all face together, are scarcity, death, etc, and to fight them we need wealth. Since ~capitalism~ is the best way we’ve found so far to create wealth, it is our best ally yet, though by no means a perfect one. 

Individual regulations about e.g. allowable labor conditions pretty much just have to be evaluated on their merits, there is no royal road here. I think that my side tends to ignore important market-related points on the merits and demerits here, but that is a contributing concern not an overriding one; some labor regulations are just good. See John Stuart Mill. 

Also IQ is real, and it’s generically okay to do weird and low-status things, and freedom and prosperity are good... but I know, I can’t expect my friends to agree with me on everything

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