2. I moved recently and I'm living with some wonderful housemates in the center of Helsinki where pretty much anything is within a walking distance.
3. I just ate some blueberries mmm they were tasty blueberries.
4. I have this generally pleasant feeling in my body right now. Nice to just sit here and enjoy the experience of being a physical being.
5. Joined a new Slack yesterday and a friend who I haven't really seen or spoken with in about 9 years was there and said hi and that was nice. <3
6. Also yesterday, I was playing Monster Train and then I got an Overgorger early on and then threw a Multistrike and Minor Refraction on it and then had two opportunities to copy it near the end and as you might guess the final battle was just a walk in the park.
7. Had a crossdisciplinary Zoom call talking about a possible project with some cool people. At first I thought I wouldn't have anything useful to say, but then I did say things and it felt like I actually contributed and the others seemed like they felt like I contributed too.
8. Having ~everything within a walking distance includes having these within a walking distance. Om nom.
9. After an extended break of basically only doing walking for exercise, have now done squats and pushups for three days in a row.
10. Just sent some messages, one of which I'd been procrastinating on for a week and one of which I'd been procrastinating on for a month.
11. Went to the kitchen to get some tea and chatted with housemate who was there and had some nice news about his own life. Spontaneous unplanned social interaction. <3
12. I just re-read a paper that I wrote in 2012. After it was published I was super-self-critical and was super-unhappy with it, but now eight years later I'm like "that's not bad for a first paper, good job young Kaj".
13. AI Dungeon added an optional feature that turns it into a choose your own adventure, with the AI generating four options for you to choose from. It's amusing in true AID fashion, such as being creative but randomly forgetting that the genre was supposed to be fantasy.
14. The Virtual World secret project from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was mentioned and I could still recite the first two sentences of the associated Yang quote from the top of my head, every word exactly correct. civilization.fandom.com/wiki/The_Virtu…
15. I sent this image to someone a few days ago and now they got back to me and reacted with a "<3 <3 <3" and clearly liked it
18. I'm exchanging messages with my mom right now, for a long time our communication felt kinda superficial and not that frequent but now we talk psychology and emotions and stuff. <3 mom.
19. I feel like my attitude towards my dad is easier and more relaxed these days, than it used to be. Found it easier to discuss emotional stuff with him too, the last time we met.
20. Another Monster Train win, I actually don't win at Covenant 25 very often so this was nice.
21. Our landlord is nice, we sent him a message about a broken thing and he dealt with it quickly, a repairman will be arriving tomorrow.
22. My housemate has cleaned the kitchen counter, it's literally shiny.
23. I'm usually pretty indifferent about clothes but I like this cardigan, it makes me actively happy to wear it.
24. The freezer door repairman came and fixed our freezer door, it took him like 10 minutes.
25. About to do some co-working with a friend.
26. Still have time to meditate before doing the co-working mentioned in the previous tweet.
27. Still have time to drink my tea before doing the meditation mentioned in my previous tweet.
28. Co-working yesterday went well! Felt like I got a lot done.
29. And there's more co-working today!
30. I slept past my alarm but that was okay since my friend had a slow morning too.
31. My head was pretty itchy but then I washed my hair and ahh it was non-itchy and clean and pure
32. Took a hot bath. Haven't had many hot baths since I moved to live on my own, a previous apartment did have a bathtub but it kept getting dirty so I didn't like using it. But my current place doesn't have that problem, now felt as nice as it did when I was a teenager.
33. Something potentially stressful may be coming up but I'm surprisingly unstressed about it. I'll deal with it when it actually happens. Think that a few of years ago, I'd have been a nervous wreck about this way beforehand.
34. Have some chewing gum. It's nice to chew on.
35. Cool air from the window also feels nice.
36. I just feel generally good right now. For no particular reason that I can tell, but I'm not complaining.
37. Was going to do some writing, went to read a seemingly unrelated paper instead. Felt kind of like procrastination, but then the paper turned out to look directly useful for the thing I was originally intending to write.
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.