blockwriter

Trying to reference the value of a cell in another sheet seems to work correctly maybe 50% of the time the first time I try it on Mac.

Keeping a daily diary by hand is a good first step. When you’re reading, look for sentences whose construction surprises you or is otherwise novel. If you can, try to pay attention to how the parts of speech are being used to form the sentence’s structure. Rereading the diary once a month and making line edits will put into mind your own bad habits. In time, an intuitive set of reasoning about how to marry the idea to the structure of the sentence will develop. Continuing to express, articulate, and expand on that reasoning will make the act of writing more enjoyable and the writing itself better.

Sentences should have a quality that makes them individually memorable.

Video game companies start using ai in various tedious parts of the development process. Enough is done the old fashioned way that the result is not immediately obvious. The video game market is saturated with new releases.

Does your son do it freely of his own accord, or only at the behest of one or both of his parents? I would check in with him in ten years as to how sanguine he feels about a rather uncommon rite of hygiene being imposed, or simply encouraged, during his childhood or adolescence for 2+ years.

You can relax in public without the mask as well. There are more pressing moral and social concerns in our day to day lives.

There are a select few agents who specialize in literary fiction. If you start a naive search of literary agents, you will find that their stated interests zero in on books that are of the political moment. The majority of agents are looking for a book, preferably young adult fiction, that focuses on a protected class, of which the author should also be a member. This is not a complaint, but the evident regression to the mean, which is really no more than an acknowledgment of market forces, is available at a glance. Books are no longer commodities whose primary purpose is to be read. Rather, they are meant to capture an upswing of interest in a particular topic, and then become more widely celebrated than widely considered.

The fact is that most works of literary fiction written today are simply not up to snuff. Although there are writers devoted to their vocation, they lack a context in which to work. Literary agents cannot contribute to the process of writing. A kind of grassroots appreciation of the benefits intrinsic to reading and writing literature needs to take place, in my opinion, if we are to produce any great works of literature.

I doubt if there is a process for steeling yourself to the indifference of others. To my mind, you either have a compulsion, a preexisting urge that allows you to be indifferent to outside influence, or else you seek out a pursuit that people do care about. Coming to appreciate the deeper logic behind a reflexive behavior is an important part of being able to see the impulse through despite the indifference of others.

Can you sabotage the company asymmetrically, so that you and your two friends can get it back to 250k a year whereas the troublesome shareholder cannot? Can you vote to direct all profits above cost to a charity, and then offer to buy him out? Can you start a restructuring of the platform itself and then leave it half finished until this other party decides to pursue other scams?

Broadly speaking, I would say my life's work is the intersection of literature and what I call my spiritual mission. When I started writing, I was of the mindset that all of one's life should be dedicated to the task of writing, to the exclusion of happiness, if need be, and my happiness was excluded in practice. Career disappointments and a recognition of my folly put in mind the importance of the context surrounding one's vocation. It is a creative effort to curate the life that is separate from the work of letters. Enduring the psychological crisis that followed these all too predictable disappointments, I realized that I had an abiding belief in the good of engaging with the process of reading, writing, and publishing literature. Over time, I came to see how isolated I was, due partly to my person, but partly, also, to the wider concerns of the world. I wanted to solve the problem of isolation, to the extent that it was in my power to do so, for others, feeling that this, in turn, would make meaning of my personal crisis.

I went about doing so in my own ways, often ineffectually, but still feeling I was on to something, until the pandemic. Although I found that the surgical extraction of the social life I had managed to cultivate, save for my intimates, whom I still saw, meant that I could not write as I had before, I could continue to work on fostering the environment I felt literature and the writers of literature required in order to thrive. To make a long story short, I began investing in a platform that is meant to augment the process of writing and reading. They are simple tools, but they will be part of a coffeeshop environment, which is already under construction, where I hope commerce and literature can be wed to the benefit of the shop's regular patrons.

On July 4th, I could hear the reports from Central Street in Highland Park, which left six dead. I became obsessed with the tragedy of how suddenly and capriciously death can come, especially in relation to one's spiritual mission, which I feel is often left in a state of disorder, in ways big and small. The notion of completing one's spiritual mission in life, or in maintaining one's spiritual mission in a state of completeness, does not seem without our nature, just as the tendency to maintain its disorder does not seem innate to our nature. To develop the theme of literature in the 21st century and our spiritual life will be a matter to which I apply myself throughout life.

It seems only inevitable that ChatGPT will be used to exploit children.

His firm develops multi-unit buildings in Chicago, mostly residential. I think he is just annoyed that the easy money is drying up, and that it hurts his bottom line or business in general. Based on his attitude, though, I'm just amazed that the type of project his firm takes on were so dependent on money being cheap. They also operated a lot on a fixed cost basis, and sudden price increases were not accurately factored into those contracts.

He wants without price stability and cheap money and has neither.

My friend that has been a general contractor for around ten years acts like it's not even worth doing his job anymore now that interest rates are going up.

I find reading and my daily speech to be intimately connected. I would invest more time in reading florid writing.

The documentary did mention the problem H&H faced when the price of coffee began to rise beyond a nickel a cup. It mentioned changes in the fast food industry, too, but I glommed onto the influence of the suburbs.

Nice, one hundred more settlements of this size and we can buy our parking meters back. You developers better found some more Ubers.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch...

HBO Max has a documentary about the Automat, which was once America's largest chain restaurant. You could put in coins and receive food from small automated doors and spigots at the Automat. Its downfall came with expansion of the suburbs, as there were fewer people remaining in the city center after work. The present crisis of city centers seems similar. I'm not sure if the relevance of city centers has basically been downhill since the first half of the 20th century, or if this phenomenon is cyclical. Give it a watch.

It’s endocrine awareness day on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816861)

Seems that way to me as well. The appeal of increasing metrics in the short term is far more appealing to a profit-minded organization than the invention of increasingly useful tools to augment the process of reading, writing, and distributing writing.

I picked up grains from a farm in Dwight, Illinois that makes very limited use of herbicides and pesticides (it seems like oats are all but impossible to grow economically without some use of a weed killing agent). The farmer made the transition for his health and the health of his kids, because he was intuiting that certain health problems were the result of agricultural chemicals. I was struck, walking in their corn field, by the abundance of insects and weeds, and the absence of these quantities in standard ag corn fields struck me as alarming.

If any of the reports about Bankman-Fried's drug use are true, that might help explain his behavior.

I make use of Substack for posting literary fiction. I've been noticing feature creep on Substack. I appreciate that there is an impetus to drive reader interest by continually improving, but it seems all but impossible that they will get this exactly right for my purposes. Substack, it seems to me, was never optimized for fiction, which is understandable, because news and similarly transitory content is where they likely see the most engagement. I'm not hopeful that any subsequent improvement to the app will circle back and address my issues with the platform elegantly.

This will go away eventually.

I will say that I would be in favor of a blanket ban on clothes made with synthetic fibers. An exception could be made for winter jackets, wetsuits, and the like, but I welcome sartorial tyranny.

Are glass and metal actually superior? Is more carbon produced transporting heavier glass and metal? Tax everything that is inconvenient, and I’m not sure if anything is affordable.

This is the kind of writing I might be interested in putting out on my site, substack, and in print. See my about section.

Reportedly, Madigan sent Pritzker some kind of note with the names of all the governors that have come and gone while he remained speaker.

Madigan is the Darth Vader of Illinois politics. He was speaker of the Illinois House from 97' until 21', when another scandal involving ComEd, if I recall correctly, finally forced him to resign. His other hustle is lowering the property tax rate of insiders - http://www.madigetz.com. Illinois politics is filled with the most ludicrously corrupt characters you can find. One interesting case from my neck of the woods is the Stephens family of Rosemont, who are, nominally, Republicans, but work with downstate Democrats to pass red light camera legislation, after receiving bribes from the companies that stand to gain - https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2020/10/18/21516422/re....

Rosemont is one of the weirdest places I've ever encountered. It's essentially family-run for-profit operation that caters to the corporate clientele of O'Hare airport.

They are axiomatic in that Kafka's worlds are frequently built upon a set of conditions, and the development is contingent upon how these conditions interact, whereas other writers often depart from pre-established rules because they become cumbersome, or they introduce new ones as a matter of convenience. Kafka, in a story like The Burrow, seems to be in search of a complete system that becomes fully expressed by virtue of an exhaustive exploration of its potential, in accordance with its own stipulations. It develops like a drop of ink in a glass of water. Due also to a desire not to retread ground, as he criticizes Dickens of doing, this may be why much of his work went unfinished.

By involution, I mean that Kafka's stories, to a greater extent than just about any other writer, forestall the influence of "outside" forces. His worlds do not rely on historical context, and his characters hardly, if ever, propose a new and narrative-changing idea from whole clothe, although the conclusions they draw are often strange, novel, and sudden. Kafka's land surveyor in The Castle is always circling back to the fact that he is a land surveyor as the basis for his behavior, even though he never actually fulfills or comes close to fulfilling his vocational imperative.

I always recommend Reiner Stach's three volume biography of Kafka to people. The author does a great job of looking into the literature as much as he looks into the life.

For me, my mental state feels less like burnout, and more like recovering from a traumatic physiological event, like a major surgery. My ability to be creative was suddenly cut off by the social effects of the response to the pandemic. I limped through the interceding years, but when I review work from just before the pandemic, I find that it is more nuanced, better developed, and more meaningful than the work I do at present. My creative powers were weakened, and I have to take a long view on recuperation.

To me, Kafka’s work is particularly axiomatic. It has an internal logic and tends toward involution. I could see how this would appeal to technically minded people, whereas Dickens, or Austen, authors whose work tends to be discursive, might seem boring or without basis.