Metablog

I think a lot of Anime series are pretty cool. I even think a few are really cool. And many Japanese movies are very enjoyable. But most Anime? Not so much.

Now, it’s not that the plots aren’t enjoyable, and the animation is generally really good. It’s simply that, for most series, the dubbing is just terrible. (Notable exceptions: most Miyazaki stuff, though even there there’s room for improvement.) Characters almost always have a monotonous cadence, like the translators are trying to fit too much English into each line of dialogue. The phrasing tends to be complex and awkward—stuff that probably sounds OK written on paper, but that sounds weird coming from people’s lips. The monotony is only intermittantly broken, by strange gutteral noises corresponding to some body language completely foreign and nonsensical to Americans.

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Having a minimum wage increases unemployment among the low-skilled. It also makes it more expensive for companies to get low-skill tasks done. But without a minimum wage, our poor would become even more impoverished, and the country would be a pretty terrible place to live. A universal basic income (a policy I support) would alleviate the negative aspects of this associated with poverty, but it wouldn’t really help with the inefficiency concerns. With a UBI, companies would still have to pay more (perhaps 50-100% more) to get low-skill tasks done, because the jobs are generally distasteful, and the marginal utility of the salary to the workers would be much lower. If the UBI were a guarantee, where the government makes up the difference between the basic income line and the person’s salary, the situation for employers would be worse — the guarantee line would form an effective minimum wage higher than itself. If the UBI were independent of the person’s other income, the effective minimum wage would probably be considerably less than the UBI level.

Whether the minimum wage is effective, though a UBI, or actual, it would create incentives for companies to automate, which I think is a Good Thing.

So, I have issues.

I don’t feel affection easily. It’s a trust thing. Not surprisingly, I’m afraid to change it. If I can avoid it, I’d rather not change it by forcing myself into social situations until I start to become more comfortable in them. That’s putting myself in very difficult situations. Setting myself up for having my trust broken, repeatedly. The trust will usually have been misplaced. I think I know enough about trustworthiness to find someone who is very trustworthy, but right now I don’t know enough about people to really do intermediate degrees very well, so putting myself in situations where I’m not sure how close to get, how quickly, and in what ways, is going to be really hard.

Now, sure, I’m going to have to do this eventually. But I think I need something first. I need a person I can trust. Once I have a person I can trust, a person I can feel safe around, I can learn to calibrate my trust in my less intimate relationships without having to worry about even more heartbreak, because when I make mistakes my safe person will help me to heal and rebound in ways that I could never do on my own. I’m just not emotionally able to do that sort of thing.

To do it this way would be so much more comfortable for me. But it sounds like a bad idea, somehow. Unrealistic, maybe? But then, is it unrealistic to hope to find someone who is much the same as me? Someone not interested in a casual friendship, but only a very close one?

I wonder what sort of relationships would fill this sort of role. Would a therapist perform a similar role? I doubt it. One shouldn’t feel affection for a therapist, and I think I need to feel affection toward a person if I’m to be able to feel safe with them. (On the other hand, a therapist might be able to help with some of these issues. How do you pick a good therapist, anyway?)

Would a mentor? Well, it’s conceivable, but usually you imagine mentors being more focused on helping you with one particular (usually professional) aspect of your life.

A platonic friend? Well, physical intimacy, for me, would be absolutely necessary, but I imagine sexual intimacy would be irrelevant, so maybe. But they would, practically, have to be female. I can’t imagine asking a guy friend for a hug.

Commitment? I think I could come to really trust a person that I wouldn’t want to actually marry. There are people who are reliable and loving but who don’t have the interests or intelligence to really captivate me. And I think I would be able to have real relationships with those people. But can there be complete trust between two people outside of a committed, long-term relationshp? I don’t think so. On the other hand, “long-term” doesn’t have to mean “lifetime”. I would really considering doing a 5-year commitment to someone. Possibly expanding that commitment at the end of the first year, and possibly letting it stand at four years.

Damn. That sounds like a really good idea. Much more realistic than marriage.

Now that I think about it, there are plenty of kinds of committed relationships that have nothing to do with marriage. The kind of trust you put in the other members of your squad in the Army or the Marines or something, for instance. Or the kind of trust a child gives a parent.

Huh.

OK, it was so easy to write a plugin as opposed to doing other things that I went ahead and made a plugin to do it.

My category hider plugin allows you to make posts in a selected category (or more than one) display a stub text on the main page of your blog and in your rss feeds. The post still displays in full in your archive pages (but only for the selected category) and on its own page. Of course, tweaking where it gets hidden is trivial.

If you want the category’s posts to be completely absent on the page or in the feed, I doubt a plugin would allow you to do this. If it is possible, it would be a very different plugin. (If you know PHP, on the other hand, the hack is pretty straightforward.)

I’m not going to bother providing a download right now. If you’re interested, comment, and I’ll see about getting together a download for it.

I used to keep a diary. I think it was for about three or four years. Over a thousand entries in the thing. I stopped that when I stopped needing it so much. I stopped it when I realized that no one would ever really like to read it. I mean, even I didn’t like to read it. Just to write it.

But now that I’m not keeping it anymore, now that I have a real, public-oriented blog, I sometimes miss being able to go on and on about personal things without worrying about boring people. So, I wonder if there’s a way to include that sort of thing on my blog without making people who aren’t really interested read them too. I could put the post under a fold (I wish there were a better term for that—I was trying to google it a while back and had a hell of a time finding what I was looking for), so that people had to click on a link from the main page. With a warning above the fold. And that’s all great, except that the whole post would still show up in my RSS feeds. I don’t want to put a password on it—I want it to be publicly available, but only protected from wandering eyes.

I could start another blog, but that’s excessive, and it would dilute my readership anyway. What would be ideal, I guess, would be to have a separate section of the blog. A category that doesn’t show up in the main feed or the front page. Or maybe an author that gets a separate directory. Maybe another wordpress install? I’d rather avoid that if I can, but it’s one possibility. Maybe I should look up a “main page & feed” hack that lets me make certain posts less visible.

UPDATE: OK, so it was easier to write my own plugin. Here.

I’ve never liked IM (instant messaging). I’ve never formed a friendship over it. I’ve never advanced existing friendships over it. Now, I’ve found it pretty useful, sure. It helps me keep in touch with coworkers and existing friends.

But I’ve always been so nervous when using IM. Perhaps not as bad as this, but I always worry so much about missing important cues. Does the person really want to talk to me, or are they responding out of politeness? What does it mean when the person doesn’t initiate conversations? How often is often enough, and how often isn’t? I always end up feeling neglected by the people I chat with, or pushy for talking so much, or like I’m holding up all the effort in the conversation. Now, according to some, this makes me paranoid. But am I, really? Well, probably.

I enjoy writing on this blog. I started it to have an outlet for my many, diverse, half-baked and even sometimes fully-baked ideas. Now, a lot of what I enjoy about it is the idea of people reading and enjoying what I write. So when I write, I aim for a pretty wide audience. When I explain technical things, I try to provide a background. I try to include neat metaphors, and a bit of humor, and a lively and fresh cadence. I try to make my writing fully engage the attention of the reader, and to teach them new things and share with them the excitement that I obtain from my ideas. If I fail in that goal, it’s not for a lack of trying.

I think this blog is, more than anything, a place for me to try to make beautiful things. Good writing, on whatever subject. Good software, to the extent that I get any software finished and polished enough to publish. Good ideas and arguments. Beauty is in quality.

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And how to live with them

In the last apartment I lived in, I had a few neighbors who like to play music. The music they liked to play had repetitive bass parts. When music passes through walls, the only part that makes it is the bass part. Thus, the part I heard was repetetive and annoying. (I don’t think they were even playing it that loud—the apartments just had thin walls.)

Of course, I talked to them about it, but it didn’t really fix the problem. So I just had to live with it. Until, one day, I figured out how to cover up that annoying sound, using white noise. Now, when neighbors play annoying music, I don’t have to listen to it for a second. The noise I play is not loud, not at all distracting, and while it’s worse than silence, compared to the annoyance of a neighbor’s bass beat, it’s a huge relief. Instructions below.

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A quote that is often attributed to Ben Franklin goes something like this: “The definition of insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results.”

Ben Franklin? Really? It’s kind of awkwardly phrased for a writer like him. The definition of insanity? Wow. Someone call the DSM committee.

And the phrase is pretty current. How sad. How cliche. And how inane.

Insanity can be many things, but expecting different results after doing the same action twice is not one of them. For instance, is it insane to keep asking your partner or roommate to pick up their socks when they forget? (Not if they’re willing to try to remember, and they just need to be reminded.) Is it insane to change an option in a program a second time, when the first time it didn’t seem to take effect? (No, programs are buggy and people make mistakes navigating through menus.)

Usually, people use it to condemn those who seem to be unwilling to pay attention to history and learn from it. There are so many better phrases to use for this. Please, please don’t use this one.

Addressed to the owner of Amygdala. In response to this comments thread.

If you want me to speculate about why you don’t have more commenters, Gary, I can. (And if you don’t, well, you can stop reading now.) You write very a lot of very long pieces. Many people don’t like to read blogs that have over a certain number of average words a day, because it takes too much time to keep up with it all. (Many of these people don’t read very fast.) You could consider splitting your blog into different blogs for different purposes. Political posts on one blog, sci fi and comics posts on another. Something like that. That way people won’t have to make the effort to skip posts they’re not interested in, (and believe me when I say that this has a huge effect—most people don’t have good filtering skills, and will stop reading a blog regularly sooner than skip uninteresting posts) because you’ll already have done that. You could consider cutting down on the word count. Editing posts down more, making them more pithy.

In many posts, you’re basically quoting other people. Quotes necessarily involve a switch in voice and style and context, and so reading them is much harder than reading a single voice throughout a post. The more quotes you include, the harder your posts are to read.

Your posts tend to be “expert” type posts. They show that you have a really large amount of knowledge about what you write about. They often require a certain amount of knowledge about those topics to understand and enjoy. People who don’t feel as knowledgable as they think you see yourself will almost never comment on this type of post. (If they think they know as much as you, but think that you think you know more, they won’t comment.) People who don’t want to make the mental effort to parse large numbers of details in order to understand your posts well enough to comment on them (even if they would be able to, and would have something to say) won’t do so. (This is the reason my blog doesn’t get many comments.)

Your writing isn’t very entertaining. A lot of it is just cursory comments on stuff that you’ve read. A lot of the value you provide is in linking to the stuff in the first place, and while that’s quite valuable, it’s not something that draws a big following, or a lot of comments. (In fact, I imagine more blog owners read you than do people who only comment, since you’re a good content filter to use for material for others.) But most of what people like in blogs is commentary—opinion, argumentation, conversation. Your writing lacks color, stylistic variety, metaphor, and narrative flow that engages the reader. (Yes, that is essential to good non-fiction.)

To the extent that people are drawn to blogs because of the owner’s persona, yours stinks. When you refer to your personal life, it’s always in a negative or apologetic way. This repels people. When you provide people insights into your life, they should always be calculated to endear people to you.

Oh, and you require registration for comments.

That probably covers most of it.