Index on Life can be (a) dream

A little failed experiment

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, dear reader. Allow me to tell you about a failed experiment of mine. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes if you felt inclined towards starting a similar project.

I thought it would be a fun idea to make a new site. My favorite thing! A new site, a new place to write! A new theme to cry over! I got a domain, I came up with a cool name, and then I poured hours into it. I would guess at least over a hundred hours. I finally learned how Hugo worked, too, and I ended up moving this site over to Hugo from how much easier it is to write with.

About

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello there! Welcome to my strange little site. There’s not a coherent theme for anything I write around here, and there probably never will be. It is a place for me to write whatever comes to mind and post whatever I think is of note. I initially made this site as a sort of training ground to help get myself more comfortable sharing my work. That doesn’t scare me so much anymore, but I still want to write.

Art museum!

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is very hard to find good scans of classical art of the Internet. It is very hard to find classical art in general. The least annoying site to navigate, WikiArt, tends to miss several important pieces of even the most popular classical artists, and will frequently upload faded or low quality scans. Navigating through other sites is nightmarish and usually requires inspecting the page to pull the proper image links for downloading. I have seen social media sites modify classical pieces without saying it, adding filters or colorings that weren’t originally there.

Timeline of my reading

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My absolute strongest recommendations have a star in front of them. You probably can see that there are a lot of stars. This is because I drop books like crazy. If I don’t like it, I just won’t read it. So, even if a book doesn’t have a star, it’s probably still good just because I finished it. I also didn’t want to drown you out in stars.

April 2023 - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

A friend loaned me a copy of this book after a break-up. I am a very neurotic person, so I found a lot of benefit in it. It was the first clear explanation I read of how much power I let my emotions have over me, and how much I am crippling myself.

NEET life is coming to a close

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello, my old friends. I don’t usually like including disclaimers in my writing because it immediately diminishes what I have to say before the reader has the chance to judge it for themselves, but I will make an exception this one time to say this: This writing is bad. I have not written well in a long while. Because this is directly related to the content of the article, I believe it is fair game for me to make this disclaimer.

Three days of unemployment

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dear readers and friends that thought I had a single crumb of intelligence: please break yourself free from this illusion. It turns out I am even more stupid than I could have imagined. I put in my two weeks at my current job with nothing lined up. And, when the manager started yelling at us over made up problems, I got tired of it and quit only two days into that. Now I’m coasting on savings until at least July. I guess I am just hoping a job will magically find me. I’m interviewing elsewhere, but I’m not even sure if I’ll stay in this town.

Destruction of the self

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to destroy the self. This is because the self eats everything around it alive. When the self talks to someone, it only thinks of what it wants to say back. When the self hears that someone is doing bad, it thinks of how it felt when it went through the same. How horrible is it for the first reaction to someone else’s misfortune to be what the self thinks of itself in relation to that misfortune, rather than what it can do about their misfortune? The self feeds off of attention and connecting every topic in the world to itself. The lives of others are made meaningless, and the thoughts of the self must be the whole of reality.

Report of being a working adult (it's really bad)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What do you think of work? How strong is your hatred of it? Does work make you want to crawl into a little ball and hide under a desk, or does it just make you a little annoyed in the morning? I am worried that for most people, it gives them the “crawl into a ball” reaction. I personally have that reaction! Or a reaction filled with screaming!

I think I may have started working too soon after college. I had a cozy student job that spoiled me and gave me complete agency, and I tricked myself into believing that it was normal. I would hear other people’s job experiences, and wonder why they didn’t simply switch away. I now realize I was stupid, and that my student job was the exception. I graduated early and worked all through college just to work even more. Why? Why did I rush this so much?

AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone has their own AI post. This is mine. Please treat it well.

My claim is very simple: I do not have anything against the fundamental technology of LLMs, but I have everything against how they are framed and how they are typically used. I think it is insulting that the way LLMs work is not being widely spread to the greater population. Almost everyone understands that LLMs and other AIs train on data and produce output based off of that, but they seem to only have this single sentence of understanding.

Antimotive to create

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is one of my core beliefs that you cannot be truly happy without some sort of creative output. From what I can tell, this sentiment is widely shared. However, I think “you should start a project!” is thrown around as a careless blind remedy to whatever problems a person has. Because, many times over when I talk to someone, they start telling me what they want to make freely! Clearly, something is stopping them. Clearly something is stopping me, too, or else I wouldn’t have managed to get off my ass during my unemployment period to write this.

Sammy, meet Vanny

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:30:00 +0000

When Agatha got home, her eyes were filled with tears. Her body moved as slowly as lead, and she couldn’t tell if it was from moving so little all day or from her despair. She felt the need to move around just a little, and wandered over to the patio door, to the kitchen, and back to the patio. She teared up more, and ran away from the patio before someone saw her crying through it. She ached so much that the pain of violently pulling and tugging her boots off so aggressively didn’t bother her. If anything, her face twisted into a bitter smile during her most aggressive tug.

Motive to create, part two

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:30:00 +0000

“Wait!”, you may be asking me! “Why are you writing a follow up to something that you wrote this very day? Why not just merge it into one?” Well, it’s very shrimple. I ate chocolate chips directly out of the bag in between this and the last post, and I now feel like a new person. The tone is totally different, so it just has to be split up.

There is a single project that I was able to focus on for longer than a month: the time I tried to make a game. It is the only time I believed in what I was making for a prolonged period of time. I have serious motivation and focus issues exactly because I have no faith in what I want to make or in my skills. But the game was wonderful! I believed in it with all my heart! And it’s because it was a bit different than anything else I tried to make before. Lots of programming projects fell through because I found something that did what I wanted to make, but better. Lots of stories or write ups would get deleted after a day because I didn’t see any use in it for others, or I just didn’t like how it was made.

Motive to create

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I think I want to write fiction, but most of my writing is definitely not fiction. I seem to enjoy more technical things, like deep psychology self-studies and even work documentation, as disgusting as it is. I guess it doesn’t always have to be technical. Also, book commentary and personal notes are surprisingly fun to write. I liked writing mini reviews for Confession, The Bell Jar, and Neurosis and Human Growth quite a bit. I obviously enjoy journaling, too, or else I wouldn’t have journaled over forty thousand words in a year.

Cat got your job?

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am laying on a mat on the floor. There is a cat on my foot, and a laptop on my lap. From my miserable spot on the floor, I can see that the AC is clearly coming off the wall and that the top corners of the paint are cracking. My stomach feels tense and tight, and I’m fairly sure I started tearing up an hour ago.

Yesterday, I laid under the blankets in bed as a cat sat on my chest. My laptop balanced awkwardly on my legs, and I heard a guy moaning through the ceiling. I thought I was just pretending to cry for dramatic effect at first, but I started crying and hyperventilating for real ten minutes later.

Love is never dead

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Love is never dead until you call it so. You must believe the opposite, no matter how difficult it is. Imagine a shivering, scrawny street cat that seems doomed to die. If you think that it has no chance to live and let it be, then it will almost certainly die. If you take it home despite the odds and nurture it, you’ll find that the same scrawny cat will spend the next 10 years purring in your lap every night.

Confession

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Confession is a short book by Leo Tolstoy explaining his search of meaning, God, and faith (in that exact order). It was written ten years after finishing War and Peace, and two years after finishing Anna Karenina. I will be quoting from David Patterson’s translation. I would recommend his translation if you would like to read this as well. The first section will explain the whole plot of the book, but I will leave out the most important metaphors and dreams. This is an attempt to bully you into reading the book. If, at any point, this looks interesting to you, stop reading my summary and go read the book instead! The second section will explain my personal takeaways. You can skip to it if you’ve read the book before.

A reason to be (a website)

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have constantly wanted a website ever since I understood what a website was. My first site must have been started when I was around 11 years old, and has been entirely lost to time. It was about as bad as you’d expect, but at least I had fun. The site name was something about me being a procrastinator, and I’m fairly sure there was purple and pink all over the whole thing. The only post I really remember writing was one about the overuse of “actually”, where I wrote it about 20 times over in three paragraphs to really nail my point in. My mom was my biggest fan. Thank you, mom. The second site was just a bad Wordpress site started two years later meant to tell silly stories that I didn’t want to forget. I still have a deep hatred of Wordpress from that.

Changelog

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

September 29, 2026

More changes! I am putting this thing live today, yippeee!

Finished a new post that will come up with the new site
Finished redoing basically all my old styling. This took so long.
Slightly tweaked the appearance of the posts page
There is now an about page. Wow!
Cleaned up links page (I sometimes had the link first and sometimes had the description first. It bothered me.)
Added an “other” section for links so everything has a place for now. Not sure where to put this in the future. I kinda don’t like having this page.
There’s some hover effects on links and other stuff now.
The RSS feed automatically updates. Thank fucking god. This was part of the Hugo transition, but I just want to say it explicitly because I would just not bother updating it if it was for anything else besides a main post.

I have many things to do later. Mobile? What’s that? I’ve barely even checked. One of my cat dividers isn’t centered yet, and I want to check a few other things too that I forgot off the top of my head, but this will do for now.

Cool things from cool people!

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other personal websites

Short stories

“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” by Dostoevsky
“The Door in the Wall” by H. G. Wells
“The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges
“Lena” by qntm
“Made for You” by Stallman
“Coding Machines” by Kesteloot

Research work

Articles

The Ghosts in the Machine - Spotify’s low-royalty background musicians
Modern “Freedom” Means Being a Slave to Impulses
Give Me a Sign: What Signals Commitment? - A psychology researcher’s well-sourced signs of commitment
Asymmetrical Commitment in Unmarried Relationships - Another post on marriage asymmetry by the same researcher
https://slidingvsdeciding.blogspot.com/2016/03/practice-makes-perfect-or-not.html - Another post about quantity of previous partners by the same researcher
The Coddling of the American Mind - How colleges reinforce anxiety in their students
I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead.
Character Amnesia in China
How Amazon makes everything you buy more expensive, no matter where you buy it

Hard to categorize stragglers

An Omnipresence in Wired - Lain artbook
Certain religious works by Tolstoy
DER MOND - Evangelion artbook
My favorite OS textbook
Minecraft End Poem
The Arm Manga Guide to the Mali GPU
Cowsay but ponies. I AM NOT A BRONY, I JUST THINK IT’S FUNNY.
Screen Art: HP 9845C Demo

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Company Shitlist

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

(HEY, IF YOU’RE HERE, THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. YOU WOULDN’T BE PEEKING, WOULD YOU? :>)

There are lots of troublesome companies. Many attempts have been made to list and detail unethical companies, but this list is most influenced by Richard Stallman’s intensely detailed lists of unethical practices of companies, as well as Louis Rossmann’s hardware-focused Consumer Rights Wiki.

The goal of this list is to give you a brief overview of the concerning practices of a company when they relate to unethical, negligent, or exploitative uses of technology, and to give you sources to learn more. It is not meant to be detailed, but it does aim to hit the most important points of why a company may be unethical.

What's cool is...

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You are cool!

I don’t know you, and I can still say that! It would be rude of me to insincerely flatter you by calling you attentive, or thoughtful, or kind, or intelligent, or anything like that at all. Really, it’d be the most disingenuine thing I can do. All I need to know about you to call you cool is that you are human. You are cool just because you exist. You don’t need to do anything specific to be cool!

Index on Life can be (a) dream

A little failed experiment

About

Art museum!

Timeline of my reading

April 2023 - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

NEET life is coming to a close

Three days of unemployment

Destruction of the self

Report of being a working adult (it's really bad)

AI, AI, AI, AI, AI!

Antimotive to create

Sammy, meet Vanny

Motive to create, part two

Motive to create

Cat got your job?

Love is never dead

Confession

A reason to be (a website)

Changelog

September 29, 2026

Cool things from cool people!

Other personal websites

Short stories

Research work

Articles

Hard to categorize stragglers

Other links of note

Search

The Company Shitlist

What's cool is...