Ran Prieur

"You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later."

- Mitch Hedberg

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December 30. Interesting Reddit thread: What's a sensation that you're unsure if other people experience?

And a bit more music for the holidays. A reader sends Capac - O Holy Night. I don't think it's a cover, more like a tribute, but this is really good heavy ambient.

And I love this raw and beautiful rendition of Silent Night by Auburn football players.


December 27. Like everyone else, I feel like I'm on vacation this week, so I'll just post some links:

In Japan, Small Children Take the Subway and Run Errands Alone. It's because their culture is built on greater trust, and also greater responsibility toward strangers and shared spaces.

Also from Citylab, The Backlash Against Piped Music. It turns out that more people prefer quiet in public spaces, but businesses are slow to adapt.

Philosophy Needs a New Definition. This is not controversial, but it's a nice argument for a particular case of a general truth: that the academic world is too clean and cautious, and anything really valuable is going to be messy.

The Case Against Reading Everything. The point is, advice for writers is never universally helpful, and even though everyone says to read widely, some writers will do better getting obsessed with one thing. This is also true for other kinds of creative work: Jeff Mangum, when he was doing his best stuff with Neutral Milk Hotel, said that he barely even listened to music other than Robert Wyatt.


December 25. It's funny that I was just writing about the power of intentional badness, because it's time for my Christmas tradition: posting The Abominable O Holy Night. The singer, Steve Mauldin, was consciously imitating mistakes he'd heard from bad singers, and on top of that, no song inspires singers to really let go like O Holy Night. Check out this O Holy Night Metal Cover that Gene posted to the subreddit.

This new subreddit thread has some great comments about how different we all are in levels of perception and skill: some people can see colors 100 times better than other people, and olympic athletes have won gold medals with less than 30 hours of practice.

I have a terrible ear for pitch -- when I started playing guitar as a teenager, I could barely tell that notes a half step apart were even different. But I believe I have a good ear for timbre, for the quality of vibration that makes, say, a trumpet and an electric guitar sound different playing the same note. Talent is when you don't understand why everyone else is bad at something, and I don't understand why no one else can hear that Joanna Newsom does something with her voice on The Milk-Eyed Mender that she has not done on any other recording.

As a listener, for the last five years I've been chasing sounds that are increasingly raw and weird, and in my own creative work, this year I wrote a novel that went so hard into my own personal taste that no one else might ever get it. Will this become more common? Lukey's comment mentions "the frontiers of human potential," and I wonder if the long tail of new technology is encouraging those frontiers to spread in a greater number of more unusual directions.


December 23. I want to take another shot at yesterday's subject, because if you don't read the linked article or read the post carefully, it sounds like I'm talking about jobs, about a world where people live for work that's obviously work.

That's not it at all. It's about a culture where the mindset of work has swallowed every activity, so even if you're unemployed, or on vacation, or playing with your kids, you're still thinking, "What's the right way to do this?" or "How is this an investment in a better future?" or "If I post this on social media, how will people judge me?" Even if an unconditional basic income leads to a 100% leisure utopia, we might still not know how to have fun.

Again, in this comment thread, you can see the tension between creativity that is done for some benefit and feels like a chore, and creativity that's so intrinsically enjoyable that it doesn't have to lead to anything.

As I say in my own comment, that's not easy. Apart from any technical skill, you need the psychological skill of letting go. I've seen this advice for fiction writers: that if you're having trouble getting started, try writing something intentionally bad. It works because objective quality is oppressive, it's about what you should do and not what you feel like doing, and willful badness breaks you from that hold and opens exciting doorways. But then you have to keep going, to stay in that unconstrained mindspace, step after step, without falling down.

That's also the right way to live -- but in life, intentional badness can be severely punished, so it's that much harder to break the hold of always doing the right thing. It seems to be especially hard right now, with both the left and right stacking up rules and punishments, and with the tech world making more paths that start out fun but trap your mind.


December 22. A link from the subreddit, If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? The author argues that total work, a dystopian thought experiment, "is unmistakably close to our own world." We're always doing stuff because it's useful or productive, even play becomes a task, and "there is concomitantly the looming question: Is this the best use of my time?"

I think the author himself is caught in this trap, because his description of the world inside the trap is detailed and spot-on, while his description of the world outside the trap, in the final paragraph, is insipid and unhelpful, as if he's never been there and doesn't know the way. To be fair, it's the hardest problem in modern life. Obviously it starts with letting go of expectations and just doing what feels good in the moment. But that path is also full of traps, and technology keeps creating more of them.

This subject reminds me of a saying from Buddhism: "It takes 20 years to become enlightened -- or if you really push it, 30 years."

Related: a thread on the subreddit, Is anyone here compelled to be creative even if there's no audience? The comments show that even creativity is hard to pull from the realm of work into the realm of fun.


December 19. Another good post by Accountt1234, just cross-posted to the subreddit: Sowing the right seeds.

I'm not in the mood for big ideas this week, so I'll write about some personal stuff. For more than a year I've felt, off and on, like life is an uphill struggle, like I'm washing an endless sink of dirty dishes and can never get in the flow. I thought it might be cannabis withdrawal, but other people who report that symptom have been smoking massive amounts for years, not vaping a thimbleful over three days. And a seven week break this summer didn't fix it.

Now I think it has something to do with dopamine. Since I slashed internet use, I haven't had a bad episode. It's not just that I'm spending less time online -- I'm also trying to notice when I'm about to click a link or a bookmark in anticipation of a reward, and catching myself, and not clicking it.

I'm also trying to move some of my attention from my head to my body. I've never had much "gut" intelligence, and it occurs to me, developing it might be as simple as literally focusing my attention on my gut. So I've been trying that, and I've also been working with a balance board.

The balance board turns out to be a great metaphor for something much harder. I'm working toward following this rule: Never get emotionally invested in anything happening on a screen. So I was watching a football game, and trying to not care which side was winning, and it's exactly like trying not to lean the board on one edge or the other. The funny thing is, sports announcers always keep this balance, but viewers almost never keep it, even though they have the constant example of the announcers.


December 15. For the weekend, some happy links, and like the negative links I posted last week, many of these came from No Tech Magazine.

Non-Electric Hearing Aids Outperform Modern Devices, partly because other people can see the device, so they know to talk more clearly. I wonder if there's a lesson here for other ways that people try to hide their weaknesses. Now I'm imagining walking around with a Subtextotron, which converts subtle hints into clear language, and everyone would be objecting, "That wasn't what I meant!"

The Human Power Plant is a working prototype of an exercise machine that generates and stores hydro-pneumatic energy.

How to Build a City That Doesn't Flood? Turn it Into a Sponge, with stuff like permeable pavement, bioswales, and forest restoration. Related: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Fun reddit thread: You've got exactly 60 seconds to come up with a movie plot, what comes to your mind?

The Ornamental Hermit: A Real Person Paid to Dress like a Druid. With a few changes, like being allowed to trim my nails, this would be my dream job: to hang out in a rustic cabin and entertain guests who expect weirdness.

And a funny video, made to look like one of those pharmaceutical commercials, but it's for Cannabis Delivery.


December 13. On the subreddit a reader just posted something I wrote six years ago, about high-tech artificial worlds and what they contribute to the world that contains them. I started a comment there which I'll expand into today's post: my latest thought is that the internet is the matrix. We're seeing what really happens in the early stages of the creation of a global artificial reality.

Fifteen years ago, the internet was the most amazing thing ever. Since then it has been improved into a clunky mess of addictive traps, annoying distractions, and seductive lies. It's getting harder to use the internet in a way that makes life better, but now it's almost impossible to live without it.

What went wrong? The behavior of any subworld is shaped by the values of the containing world, and human society does not hold up human improvement as its highest goal, or even human happiness. Its highest goal is the leveraging of power into more power. So increasingly that's what the internet is being used for.

This is oddly related to all the sexual assault stuff that's coming out, because that's a reason to seek power, to make powerless people do sexual stuff they'd rather not do. Somewhere someone is thinking, "Damn, if powerful people have to follow the same sex rules as losers now, what's even the point?"

My utopian vision is to shine the light way beyond sexual assault, eventually at everything we don't feel like doing but some authority commands it. When power no longer enables coercion, then it's no longer power as we know it, only responsibility, and only the best people will seek it. (That's how we fix personal power, but institutional power is a harder problem.)


December 11. Continuing on the subject of antisocial media, we're all in a war for attention, and I've been seeing it from the perspective of a content creator: there are all these abstract messages, competing for views from disconnected eyes. Readers remind me of the view from the other side: those eyes are people with social needs. We have a biological expectation of sitting around a campfire with friends and family, and the attention you get from other people is what makes you feel valuable and real.

The digital campfire seems much improved. You can share more exciting stuff, faster, to more people, anywhere. But this bandwidth is bottlenecked by the same human biology. The dizzying spectacle becomes the new baseline, and we're no happier. The medium is infested with parasitic robots, so less human attention gets through to actual humans, who have some sense of the quantity of attention they're getting, but no sense of the quality.

Even if you get face to face with people, you're competing with their phones -- and they're competing with yours -- because what's on the phone really is more interesting.

I'm not sure how we'll get out of this trap as a society, but as an individual, you get out of it through a commitment to going into boredom and out the other side. I just read this in an email: "It's crazy that when I am not on my computer, I find myself doing creative projects out of boredom. I think that's how it is supposed to work!"

And another line from my weed journal: "When you burn out looking for beauty in beautiful things, look for beauty in ugly things."


December 8. When I was in high school and college, back in the 1980's, I don't think I even once heard the words "social anxiety". I mean it existed, but it wasn't enough of a problem that ordinary people gave it a name. Now it's everywhere, and I don't think it's limited to the millennial generation, because I've got it too, and worse than when I was younger. So where does it come from?

Yesterday, cog-boosted by cannabis, I wrote this: "Does the internet cause anxiety by normalizing a socially easier simworld?" In more words: The internet is an unprecedented global artificial world (I call it Internesia) in which social behavior has looser rules and less serious consequences than the world of modern society. If you're at a job interview, or at a party, or even just going to the store, the rules are tighter and the stakes are higher than when you're goofing off anonymously in some comment thread.

So what happens to someone who spends more time on the internet than out in society? The easier world becomes the new baseline, and what used to be the normal world now feels difficult and frightening. As the social internet grows, this happens to more and more people.

Notice that I haven't used the word "real", because even before computers our world was already unreal. If we avoid social interaction for being difficult and frightening, then why do we embrace the danger of something like rock climbing? Because it's a better fit for our bodies and minds than the nightmare of modernity. It used to be rare for teenagers to cut themselves, and now it's almost normal, because the pain of our culture has wandered so far from human nature that the pain of drawing blood feels comforting. It's a cliche now that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, but I think the guy who really nailed it was Kafka.

Anyway, I'm so serious about this that I've decided to slash my internet time, especially Reddit, which might reduce my posting.


December 6. It's been a while since I posted a bunch of links about what's wrong with the world. This article from the Guardian has a lot more about last week's subject: 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. There's some good stuff about how the atmosphere of competing for scarce attention has made politics shallower and more impulsive. Also, I trimmed this bit from the original URL: "?CMP=share_btn_fb"

Related: an abstract of a scientific article, The influence of the number of toys in the environment on toddlers' play. Unsurprisingly, "an abundance of toys present reduced quality of toddlers' play," and "fewer toys at once may help toddlers to focus better and play more creatively." Obviously this is also true for adults.

Another long one from the Guardian, sent by a reader, From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over. It covers the whole 20th century, and ten years ago my take would have been, "Look at all the ways that evil corporations have tried to trick their workers." Now I'm thinking, look at all the ways that well-meaning humans have tried to make a better world, but it remains impossible in a social mechanism that puts profit first.

From Reddit, a good rant against suburbs, arguing that bad urban design has poisoned American culture and politics.

The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired. Instead of reducing energy consumption, cities are burning the same amount of energy to create more light pollution.

Related, and written with spirit: Bitcoin = Death Processors. The rules for generating bitcoins make it increasingly difficult and expensive, proportional to computers getting more powerful, so that more and more real resources go into something completely imaginary and useless. It reminds me of one of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books, where Earth's first humans used leaves as currency, and then to make their value meaningful, they burned the forests.


December 4. No ideas today, so here are three old Ask Reddit threads on the same subject. This fascinates me because I have low intuitive intelligence and I'm envious.

Have you ever had a gut feeling that something was bad so you left, only to find out that something bad actually did happen?

Have you ever had a "something isn't right" feeling, and you were right?

What's the craziest gut feeling you have ever had that actually became true?


December 1. Drugs and music for the weekend. Brazil Is Giving Prisoners Ayahuasca as Part of Rehabilitation.

I meant to post this a long time ago and forgot: What Science Says To Do If Your Loved One Has An Opioid Addiction.

With music, as a general rule, back in the classic rock era the good stuff was popular, and in this century the good stuff is obscure. But there are exceptions. From 1971, with 44k YouTube views, Exuma - 22nd Century. From 1975, with 14k views, Big Star - Kangaroo. And from 1968, with under 3000 views between this and another video, The Turtles - Can't You Hear The Cows?

And three great somewhat popular songs, all from 2006: Band of Horses - The Funeral, and The Black Angels - Young Men Dead, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Cheated Hearts.


November 29. Continuing from Monday, in the context of technologies that tempt us to do things that are bad for us, there's always a voice that says, "Well, people just need to exercise better self-control." The interview has a great answer: "That kind of rhetoric implicitly grants the idea that it's okay for technology to be adversarial against us."

In the Terminator movies, Skynet is a global networked AI hostile to humanity. Now imagine if a human said, "It's okay for Skynet to try to kill us; we just have to try harder to not be killed, and if you fail, it's your own fault." But that's exactly what people are saying about an actual global computer network that seeks to control human behavior, on levels we're not aware of, for its own benefit. Not only has the hostile AI taken over -- a lot of people are taking its side against their fellow humans. And their advice is to suppress your biological impulses and maximize future utility like a machine algorithm.

Now, I happen to have really good self-control. That's how I got a 3.96 GPA in high school (back when 4.0 was the max) even though I hated most of the work. I would have crushed the marshmallow test. But it's a terrible way to live, constantly forcing myself through pain for some promised reward that either disappoints or doesn't come at all. I used to imagine I'd be rich and get to control other people. But it turns out, people don't like being controlled and they'll think you're evil for doing it -- unless you're a global network of Skinner boxes, in which case they'll blame themselves.

Here's a reverse marshmallow test, that tests human societies: If every kid always eats the marshmallow, if every person does exactly what they feel like all the time, how well does it work out for them? In a perfect human environment, no self-control is necessary; always doing what feels good is a realistic strategy for a happy life. Of course that ceiling can never quite be reached. But it's what we must aim for: to make our built environment work with us and not against us. And by that measure, our world is a tragic failure.


November 28. Breaking my normal MWF posting schedule because I want to continue yesterday's subject tomorrow, but there's good stuff today on the subreddit.

Iron_dwarf has an original rumination titled The Campfire of the Future, about storytelling and other forms of representation. I would add that storytelling is also being changed by the long tail, where there's more stuff with smaller audiences, and the internet enables a small audience to be spread all over the world.

Sexbots are coming. I don't have a problem with this. Old-fashioned sex will never die out, because it will take on a fashionable aura of primal chaos as digisex becomes more common. Sexbots will just add another dimension to sex, like what's happened with chess computers.

Accountt1234 has been writing some good stuff lately, including this thoughtful post on demographics and biotech, Not the future you signed up for.

Finally, The World's Strongest Pot Product Is for Sale in Seattle. "The crystal-like rocks look almost like meth, but they're 100 percent THC." The article goes on to speculate that all major cannabis components might eventually be isolated so we could all make custom blends.


November 27. Great interview on Nautilus, Social Media Is a Denial-of-Service Attack on Your Mind. It's about how we're overwhelmed with information competing for our attention. My favorite bit, condensed:

Most of the systems in society still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn't protect freedom of attention. There wasn't anything obstructing people's attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information. Now it's the opposite.

Now what we need is information filtering. But filtering for the long-term benefit of information consumers is not only difficult -- it's hard to even know if it's being done right. So the dominant filtering systems feed on our impulses. Their goal is to get clicks, to get money from advertisers, to win a bigger slice of the predatory filtering market, with indifference to the social effects.

Dinosaur do-gooders, trying to "raise awareness", only add noise to the cacophony and increase our paralysis.

Into this wasteland steps an old-time villain, now doing something useful: information filtering with a political agenda. If you lack the resources to do your own filtering, why not turn to someone you basically agree with, and let them do it for you? It can't be worse than the nihilism of clickbait.

We are already in a postapocalypse world. Unbridled operant conditioning is turning people into zombies, while information-filtering warlords offer security against the famine of meaninglessness. I'm trying to stay independent, like Mad Max, but it's getting harder.


November 24. For the holiday weekend, some personal stuff. I haven't done much on Picbreeder lately, but this one totally looks like the Mona Lisa on acid.

Not that I've actually tripped on acid. I've tried two different true psychedelics now, and neither one gave me the kind of experience that most people report at similar doses. On cannabis, though I might forget what I was just thinking, I can still plunge ahead, riding introspection and imagination like a surfer. But on one supposedly stronger drug, I just flounder in a somewhat pleasant delirium, and on another, I can't get inside my head at all. I'm tempted to hammer my brain with a larger dose, but I think it's better to be gentle, so next time I'll try a microdose on top of cannabis.

My most transcendent experiences have been from music -- typically music that sounds bad to most people. On my favorite songs page, I've just updated the top playlist after rediscovering Carousel, a 1992 song by the New Zealand band The Garbage and the Flowers. Leigh Ann says it sounds like an ethereal homeless woman, and now it holds the center among nine songs so weird that the median number of YouTube views is under 2500.


November 22. I have a few Thanksgiving-related recipes on my old misc page. One I haven't added yet, for homemade eggnog: 6 eggs, 3 cups milk, 2 cups whipping cream, 1½ cups spiced rum, ½ cup sugar, and nutmeg and vanilla to taste. It's best to separate the eggs, whip the whites, and put them in at the end.

Also, there's a new subreddit that is collecting all the links from battleforthenet.com about why it's bad that we're about to lose net neutrality. People are talking like the ISP's are evil, but they're just puppets of a deeper mistake that has existed in every human culture except for some low-tech tribes: that it is acceptable to leverage power into more power.

If we lose net neutrality, it will make the internet more frustrating for me as a consumer, but it will not effect me as a content producer, because this site is pure web 1.0 with a tiny bandwidth. I don't know of any other website that doesn't run any scripts.


November 20. Last week a reader sent this quote from the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma: "Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path." It struck me as strange, because out of context, if someone asked me if it's better to be moved or unmoved by joy, I would say it's better to be moved. So in what metaphorical context is it better to be unmoved?

I don't want to have a discussion about what Bodhihdharma actually meant. All I know is, that quote gave me this idea:

If you're up in a hot air balloon, you don't feel any wind, because whatever wind there is, also moves the balloon that carries you. Now imagine there are two kinds of wind. If your balloon moves with the wind of joy, then you never feel joy, but you do feel the wind of pain. And if your balloon moves with the wind of pain, then you don't feel pain, but you do feel joy.

I don't know how to translate this metaphor into practical advice, beyond what I wrote last week: to define every bad thing that happens as the new baseline, and to feel gratitude for every good thing that happens, and do these moves with increasing consistency and quickness. Also, this whole subject sounds a lot like Stoicism.

Two unrelated psychology links: The Fine Art of Not Being Offended, by remembering that other people's actions are about them and not you.

And a reddit thread, What is the most toxic aspect of your personality?


November 16. From this comment thread about yesterday's post, I most relate to these condensed bits of comments from TheAnarchitect:

Everyone thinks they're immune to anxiety until it gets them. I used to even be able to handle a major trauma here and there without breaking a sweat. Then I got hit with two extreme traumas back to back, and since then, my resistance to daily traumas is gone. What I find funny is that from an outside perspective, I might even seem more resilient.

When I see people who have the same attitude I had before the trauma, I worry. It's like seeing a kid on a highwire. Oh, baby, I know it looks so easy, and everytime you've tripped you've caught yourself. But you don't know how far down it is.

I've written a lot about social collapse, but now I'm thinking about something like identity collapse. You develop a personality, a set of habits, that gets you through life, and it's probably more than half subconscious, learned when you were very young, and hard to change. But then some key component changes -- it could be something in you, or something in the world, or your role in the world. And gradually, or suddenly, your whole way of being no longer works.

When this happens to a society, or to an individual, and they don't flame out in destruction but fall into a deep slump, we use the same word: depression. The whole system becomes disjointed and ineffective, and recovery is a long process of rebuilding a working system from scratch.

I'm thinking about people who are blind from birth, and then their eyes get fixed. You'd think they'd be happy, but normally they become depressed, because they still can't see. It takes years to learn to interpret the light on the retina as a three dimensional world, and they have to learn this as an adult, where normal people learned it as babies with highly flexible brains. Meanwhile, now that they've become aware of that maddening world, they can't ignore it.


November 15. Today I want to write about self-improvement. For a lot of skills, it seems like there are two kinds of people: those who understand the skill on such an intuitive level that they can't explain it, and those who don't understand it intuitively, and will never get it unless it's explained carefully. For example, I didn't learn to throw with my wrist until I was 30 and someone gave me explicit instruction. My athletic IQ is so low that I never would have figured that out on my own, and yet there are four year olds who pick it up without even thinking about it.

Back in January I wrote, "my point of emphasis for 2017 is micro-scale toughness." I'm not sure that I'm any better at it, but at least I can explain it better. Somewhere I read about a guy who was out in a sea kayak off Alaska when a storm hit. At one point a wave raised him high enough to see deadly waves dense to the horizon, and he thought, this is it, I'm going to die. But he refocused, and rode out the storm by repeatedly turning to face every wave that came at him, one wave at a time.

This is what life does to us every day. The difference is, modern society is pretty good at keeping us from dying, so when waves hit us sideways, we just get more and more traumatized.

Another metaphor: if you're a professional shortstop, and someone suddenly throws a baseball at you, it doesn't matter if you're at a funeral, on the toilet, anywhere, you're going to catch it, because you've practiced that move ten thousand times. If you fail to catch it, it will smack you in the face, and then you're weaker against the next ball.

Buddhism, in my meagre understanding, says to deal with pain by being fully aware of it as it arises, and then letting it go. To me that feels too passive. You have to see the pain coming, and go out and engage it with focused attention the moment that it hits.

I wonder if the main difference between happy and unhappy people is reaction time. But these are skills we can practice: to define every bad thing that happens as the new baseline, and to feel gratitude for every good thing that happens, and do these moves with increasing consistency and quickness.


On a tangent, when I try to think of examples of life's relentless tiny pains, I notice something. You miss a traffic light, your phone rings, that web page doesn't load, you forgot to pay that bill. These are all technological pains that did not exist in our ancestral environment. I fear a car crash, not because of the physical injury, but because I'll have to deal with insurance and repairs and other duties that are hellscapes of unexpected complications.

The blunder of modernity is to replace threats we understand, that can kill us, with threats we don't understand, that keep us alive to suffer.


November 13. If you want to keep up on all the sexual abuse stuff that's coming out, there's a new subreddit, The Weinstein Effect. I like Louis CK's apology because he understands that the core issue is power. One thing the accusations have in common, is that if someone in a lower position tried the same shit on someone in a higher position, they would be fired.

We imagine these people are bad because they crossed the line between consent and coercion. But when almost the entire world is under authoritarian culture, where it's normal for some people to tell other people what to do, where it's normal for us to do what we're told even if we don't feel like it, then the line between consent and coercion is crossed so often that it almost doesn't exist. (Or, it's only carefully enforced in certain sensitive contexts.)

Once a culture has crossed the line into normalization of hierarchy, it's a constant temptation to cross the next line, between using a position of power for the good of the whole, and using it selfishly. And once that line has been crossed, it's tempting for selfish use of power to veer into sex acts.

I like to think, in a few thousand years, human culture will be so much improved that one person having any power over another will be a scandal.





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Posts will stay on this page about a month, and then mostly drop off the edge. A reader has set up an independent archive that saves the page every day or so. I've archived the best stuff, and they're all linked from the old stuff page. Below are the newest archives:

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