New subject, still reality creation. On a recommendation from the subreddit, I bought a physical copy of the book Top 10 Games You Can Play in Your Head, by Yourself. It seems to be a goofy daydreaming manual, for kids, from the late 1980s, when really it's a potent adult spirituality book from 2019. From the introduction:

One of the many tasks required of you throughout this book is fragmenting your mind to create opposing selves within yourself. This is not as daunting as it may sound. You do it every day. Consider that you shape shift as you walk though the halls of your school, shifting from child to scholar to athlete to hungry beast as the bell tolls.

Or, if you are an adult who attempts to function as a cog in the blood-soaked machine we call the American Dream, consider how you swallow your own soul as you daily enter the factory where you go to die, piece by piece, five for every seven days.

Perhaps you have heard this spoken in other ways. The id and the ego and the superego; the conscious and the subconscious; the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. You may not know it, but that impulsive voice in your head -- the one that tells you to throw rocks out your bedroom window at cars passing by -- is one of the many fragments of your own personality and one that will be a great ally in the games to come.

Dr. Miyawaki's prescription involves intense soil restoration and planting many native flora close together. Multiple layers are sown - from shrub to canopy - in a dense arrangement of about three to five plantings per square meter. The plants compete for resources as they race toward the sun, while underground bacteria and fungal communities thrive. Where a natural forest could take at least a century to mature, Miyawaki forests take just a few decades, proponents say.

Finding Hope In The Dark Power Of Fungus is about using fungi to clean toxic sites. It's working well in the laboratory, but they haven't quite figured out how to make it work on a large scale.

Why Bumblebees Love Cats and Other Beautiful Relationships. Related: Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?

It requires a sense of "self" that's not just your stream of experience, but a third person view of who you supposedly are, and a preoccupation with the status or significance of that self, in competition with the not-self, such you can score points by setting apart the self and the not-self, and by bringing the not-self down.

What's the difference between a graffiti artist and a graffiti tagger? The artist is thinking, "I'm going to create something beautiful and maybe people will look at it and feel good." The tagger is thinking, "Read my name, bitch!" Nobody has to think like that. It's like a disease that possesses people. When I see an evil person, I try to remind myself that inside is a good person who let themselves be hijacked. You can't get mad at the good person inside, nor can you get mad at the evil behavior, which is as mindless as a hiccup.

Strong towns has been talking for 10+ years about how urban sprawl creates massive infrastructure liabilities that low density development doesn't generate the tax base to support. The only reason cities have stayed solvent is due to new investment from continuous growth, which has allowed them to kick the can down the road for decades. But cities can't grow forever. Once the population levels off the house of cards comes crashing down. The pandemic was just the catalyst for this in some major cities, but it will eventually happen everywhere if we keep building our cities the way we do.

Cory Doctorow is Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it. More precisely, he won't sell it on Amazon because they require DRM, and I wouldn't either. "When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform."

Carrot Problems starts with a story from WWII, when the RAF covered up their new onboard radar, by saying the pilots could see better from eating lots of carrots.

Once you look for Carrot Problems, you see them everywhere. Essentially, any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.... Most business biographies become useless once you realise that they're Carrot Problemmed. For this reason, Carrot Problems greatly increase the value of being an insider.

Finally, with recent controversy about what elite colleges can look at, to decide who gets in, this argument is refreshing: Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists. Specifically, the practice of dividing society into future winners and non-winners is harmful, especially when it's done so early in life.