141–150 of 232 posts
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The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.
Driving to work doesn't fit with the others--it can be replaced with riding the subway to work. The automotive status quo is tragedy and farce.
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At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…
"But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just ye…
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It's interesting how all the tedious tasks listed are a product of modernity. Vacuuming, driving to work, flossing, doing dishes, etc. I wonder how repetitive life feels for humans who still have to hunt for their food. Not to say that we should shift back to a hunter-gatherer society, but I wonder how much of the mundaneness of life is something we brought on ourselves and not actually an implicit part of existence.
I think I've read several studies that indicate hunter gatherers worked less than agrarian societies. However, agrarian societies are better at producing predictable abundance of food, so they outpace hunters by far. I will admit that hunting is incredibly fun. I do think we lost something as a trade-off when we moved to agrarian/industrial societies.
only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”
And so early states led the way in agriculture in order to collect more taxes.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-th...
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At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…
Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favo…
Always pining for more adventure games that remind me of the Sierra/LucasArts games of my youth. Can we start a thread here of great modern examples? I recently played Machinarium, and enjoyed it a lot. My wife and I played it for many evenings on the couch, and computer games are not her thing at all. I'm finishing up Infamous Machine on my Android phone. It's a fairly silly, small game, but a direct homage to Lucas…
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I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures... I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me. In retrospect maybe that wasn’t true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way thos…
I recall beating most of the levels with just a jetpack.
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At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…
I'm a fan of meditation and mind body awareness. I think that digging a ditch can a quite interesting because, while somewhat repetitive, it also involves variation and the challenge putting your entire body into the activity. Even dish washing or sweeping involves quite a bit of integrating intention and the use of the body. All that said, I don't think you can say this is just a question of attitude. Some activitie…
Actually, this is false. I've been programming for 30 years straight, except for a brief 1 year stint as a data entry operator. I made it my goal to be the best data entry operator they had ever seen. This was for Robert Half/Accountemps, an employment agency that both acts as a headhunter firm for data entry operators and a contracting company that hires out data entry operators. I was able to continuously focus on getting better in such that I could accomplish as much in 4 hours as they're best high-end "professional" data entry operators could do in a day, with similar accuracy metrics. I did this by programming a series of macros to accelerate what I did, and other tricks such as pre-sorting similar items.
While I do agree with your general sentiment to some extent, the best way to deal with undesirable menial tasks is to dig in and push for excellence.
Having enjoyed the article, it also reminded me why I never once finished making a game. Instead of seeing the example code and thinking 'Ah, yes, that code gets something done in a straight-forward way.', I instead think, 'I'm pretty sure I could build a scripting engine and turn most of that code into ajax calls to json files. Of course, I'd then have to build an in-game editor which allowed you to modify the conte…