This page is still a draft!

About this site

I might drop anything that I think is interesting, but a lot of the time it will lean towards health of some sort - physical, mental, and spiritual - because that’s what I think is the most broadly useful stuff to know about. I’m hoping everyone will eventually be able to find something useful here, but when I write these posts, the specific mistakes they’re meant to correct are usually my own.

About Me

I’m just some guy, y’know?

Things I like

• Backpacking
• Dancing
• Mysterious strangers bearing quests

Things I’m afraid of

• Losing the ability to use my hands

Favorite animals

• Dolphins
• Bears
• Pigeons
• Dogs
• Bees
• Humans :)

Things I want to see more of

• Messages in bottles
• Friendly, ambitious nerds
• Friends I keep meaning to get together with but inexplicably keep postponing calling/texting

A challenge for you

Invent a new dance move. Show it to a stranger.

Lineage

I’m nominally a Buddhist. I don’t really have a “good introduction to Buddhism” book, but I think The Other Shore is fairly approachable and gives the flavor fairly well. Some of the practices I’ve found useful are:

• “Standard” samatha meditation (example: The Mind Illuminated)
• Somatic descent and other embodied practices
• Fire kasina
• Global wayfinding meditation
• Core transformation (note: this doesn’t claim to be a Buddhist practice, but it’s similar in spirit to, eg, feeding your demons and also IFS therapy)

I don’t want to put myself in too many boxes here, so instead I’ll just drop some more books/ideas that have dramatically influenced the way I think. As with anything I reference, I don’t necessarily agree with all or even most of the ideas here, they’ve just been permanently impactful for one reason or another. There are a number of books I love that aren’t on this list because I either don’t find myself using ideas from them every day or don’t know if they’ll stick with me yet.

Books

• The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
• Inadequate Equilibria (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
• Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (Tara Isabella Burton)
• The Gervais Principle (Venkatesh Rao)

Ideas/Models

• Goodhart’s Law
• The VIEW paradigm from Art of Accomplishment
• Legiblity (cf Seeing Like a State)

Bookshelf

Under construction - the plan is for this to be a list of books that I’ve read and would wholeheartedly recommend