when i’m in a good mood i find extremely dumb things funny, like just repeating the word “bnuuy” to myself (it’s still funny i just checked). also recently i’ve found myself doing silly voices or straight up quoting lines from old cartoons. yesterday it was “return the slab”
i would like to get really good at impressions i think. i probably won’t put in the time but it would be nice to have
this shit is just permanently seared into my mind might as well use it i guess
i've written a lot of stuff implicitly and explicitly critical of (bay area) rationality and the (bay area) rationalists on here so to balance that out karmically here's a thread of stuff about rationality and the rationalists that i appreciate
1. my first rationality workshop taught me that it's possible for me to think about and solve my problems. idk if this sounds really basic or what but it was a totally new idea to me at the time (fresh out of college) and an important foundation for everything else later
2. rationality and the more serious rationalists have a deep respect for Truth that i've always really appreciated. that's maybe one of the things that drew me to them the most, even if we probably disagree in a lot of ways about what "Truth" means and how to search for it
once you've got custom twitter searches set up you'll also want to learn a few of twitter's search operators. these are weirdly poorly documented (the documentation i found has ones i don't think work anymore) but here are the ones i personally use to search tweets faster
1. from:username searches tweets from a user, that's how the custom searches for my own tweets and visa's tweets above work. to:username searches tweets to that user. you can combine them to look for a specific interaction if you remember who was involved. example:
2. min_faves:N restricts searches to tweets with at least N likes. at least that's the theory; in practice it doesn't seem to be exactly N, idk what's going on with that. use this to find popular tweets or at least filter out unpopular ones. example:
i love chrome custom search engines and i want you guys to love them too. below is a quick custom search engine tutorial and then some examples of custom search engines that i use a lot
currently you find custom search engines by going to settings -> search engines -> manage search engines. then you can add custom ones by writing down appropriate keywords and URLs, which will usually end in something like "?q=%s"; the %s is the search term
then you type the keyword into the URL bar and then type the search term. like this:
did you know brit marling from the OA is a real person and you can just look up interviews of her talking about shit like why she left goldman sachs whenever you want it's nuts. she talks pretty much the way you'd expect her to having only watched the OA
2:57: "i was also just sad. y'know? like i would go home from work and sometimes just cry. and it wasn't just, like, a few tears, it was the kind of existential crying that like -
it was heartbreak."
"i was heartbroken that - you brought this up earlier, the idea of like,
when does a kid lose their imagination?
when do they let go of that wild unbridled thing
and become the broken-in horse?
that was the moment for me."
a friend sent me this clip of andrew garfield talking about his vocal training and i liked it so much i am going to transcribe what he's saying, lightly cleaned up, so you can all read it (but please just listen to the clip)
"well, it's vulnerable. going back to the vulnerability conversation, i found it to be... another chamber of my self, that i didn't know was there, that i was pretty scared to know existed."
"i had a great teacher, a great woman called liz kaplan, who basically does what you do, what you just said. it's not about imitating, it's not about being a singer, it's about unveiling *your voice*. how your soul is expressed through your voice."