Went to YouTube expecting there to be an existing compilation of best starfighter launcher sequences. Wasn't. Looking for such sequences, most of the clips I could find (see below) were much shorter/less epic than I remembered. Faulty memory or just didn't find the good ones?
Hammerhead launch (Space: Above and Beyond):
Starfury launch (Babylon 5):
Viper launch (Battlestar Galactica):
X-Wing launch (Star Wars: X-Wing):
TIE Bomber launch (Star Wars: TIE Fighter):
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I think there are probably a lot of people who tried ChatGPT a little bit in the beginning and then bounced off, or read all the articles about how LLMs hallucinate all the time and reasonably figured they didn't want to use them. But AI chatbots have gotten a lot better.
My definite favorite is Claude ( ). (That website offers a few different models; the "Sonnet" version is the best, though requires a paid subscription if you want to talk to it in any regularity.) Here are some of the ways I've used it recently:claude.ai
1) Tell it "here's an essay that I started writing" and give it what I have so far. It will comment with ideas, possible other directions, and connections to related things. I talk to it and also tell it about other ideas I want to work into the essay, but haven't written yet.
Have been grinding these types of exercises for two weeks now
(It makes metaphysical claims about "energy" but I think it's mundane psychological and physical processes instead and the thing works anyway)
This is the closest that I've gotten to having "pleasure on demand"
A gentle touch feels pleasant and it turns out that an imagined gentle touch is pleasant, too
As it starts becoming practiced enough that I can access some of it at will, the consequence is a feeling of relaxation and widespread positive feelings in my body
Right now I'm lightly imagining that I'm stroking my cheeks, and I feel my jaw relaxing in response
It's not very _intense_ pleasure but it feels invigorating
I'm often low-energy in the mornings and doing this helps get some (non-mystical) energy moving with minimal effort
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure but is unable to predict what action they would approve of.
The writer is a Jungian therapist, so he attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I think it can be broader.
I feel like that has some intuitive truth to it, in that when I don't care about anyone's opinion (or if nobody ever finds out) then it's much easier to just pick one action and commit to it even if it might go badly.
1000 hours of formal recorded meditation since January 18, 2018.
Doesn't include: probably a similar amount of unrecorded semi-formal meditation, a hard to estimate but significant amount of "off-the-couch" practice, practice I did after 2009 before starting to use this app.
(Note that this screenshot has been slightly edited, since for some reason the "average per day" number it actually shows me is twice what it should be; the correct amount is 33.1 minutes [I couldn't be bothered with editing that last digit].)
Several people asked about the effects
It's a difficult question. I'm sure my mind is significantly different now than before, but effects come gradually so it's hard to remember how things were before. (I have a history of forgetting even huge changes: kajsotala.fi/2015/08/change… )
I was feeling rushed this morning. It wasn't that I had any real urgency, but I want to get a reasonable amount of work done today, and I'd been having a slow start for the day.
Besides work things, there were also several personal things that I needed to get done, and I was feeling an acute ugh that argh I need to do that and I need to do this and why didn't I do anything yesterday and now I'm going to feel rushed for the rest of the week again.
Then I remembered that the feeling of urgency isn't a fact about the world, it's a fact about my own mind.