#draft amnesty day

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

A thing about parenting is that there are a lot of behaviors that you want to encourage your future adult to have that are SO HARD TO HANDLE in children.

[anonymusbosch]

don't have time for an effortpost on the matter but it seems kind of silly to say that

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

My dad is obsessed with words that are only used with a negating prefix. When someone asks how the weather is, he’ll respond — like Jeeves — with “clement”. If you ask how he’s doing when things are going well, he’ll say he’s “gruntled”.

The obsession is contagious. I just asked my spouse if he was combobulated.

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

“I think that when someone is smart but not kind that you’ll find a lot of weaknesses around their understanding of human interaction. That they’ve decided that human interaction is not worthy of systematic analysis and exploration — because people who do invest in the analysis will almost always strive to be kind. If someone won’t, their social models will be bad and their predictions will be unreliable, which diminishes the overall utility of their analysis.”

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Nature Conservancy keeps calling me about their Trillion Tree project and I get to troll the poor person on the other end of the phone.

- is that “Trillion” with a “T”? T for Tango? Trillion?

- where?

- no like WHERE?

- maybe you could give me a “continents and ecosystems” level overview of WHERE?

- OK no I understand. Maybe a like. Overview of how you determine which sites to plant on?

- Do you have any information on how you choose where to plant?

- that’s fine I understand you don’t have any specifics on location. No I checked the website already. Yeah. Where are you getting the trees? Saplings or seeds? How are you picking the genotypes? How are you sorting them? What’s your labor force? Your funding source? Oh my gosh an answer! Sure but like how are you paying fair wages if people like me are your funding source? Are you paying a living wage? How are you obtaining rights to plant? How are you maintaining the plantings?

- This honestly doesn’t seem very well thought out? Am I missing something?

- Hey I’m gonna go but I hope you have a great day.

- <as I hang up> “Christ, remind me to cancel that donation.”

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

We were at an event and someone was selling a stupid toy and obviously my mom bought five because it was a rational economic decision. She gave them to my child and my cousin’s kids and a friend and then saw a random child looking at them avariciously and gave him one as well.

“Look at that!” said his mom, “I told you to wish for it really hard and it would happen, and it did! You manifested that!”

[anonymusbosch]

"what's your dream job?" "i do not dream of labor" ok well i dream of a hundred labors. how many selves i could be!! in how many worlds!! in the world where climate change is reversed: oh I would love to be the architect of beautiful public housing projects. and I am curious about the work of the linesworkers on power lines and the people who work on failed wind turbines. if we had housing and abundance of resources worldwide: i would like to try ecological restoration projects. in a world more closely adjacent to our own: I would try heading operations of a small power plant. and try being a civil engineer to improve infrastructure. and a teacher: literacy, science, math, english. a handyperson. it's so hard not to walk through life looking at how to give people better lives without being tempted by every branch, isn't it? without feeling constrained by the most urgent or tractable problem to solve? don't you dream of a better world? and your participation in it?

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Sketch out a thing where someone in not-affluent place has been invited to affluent place but is skeptical because of propaganda. They’re being showed a movie from affluent place and keep rewinding the dungeon torture scene and everyone is like “hey we don’t. Support dungeon torture. That’s not a real issue”

But in reality they’re watching the lil rats with smooth fur and fat little bellies. Even the rats are fat and healthy here, how bad can it be?