Going to be compressed for yesterday and today both - this post is about Monday.

Family quite like the chocolate I brought. Different people liked different chocolates but the hazelnut was a bigger winner than I expected and the honeycomb toffee was indeed nostalgic.

They are being surprisingly cool about the hat. Not completely, but at all.

Lots of writing to do. Oh goodness far too much writing to do.

Also biking. So much biking.

So that sure was a week of depression. Kinda wish it hadn't been but that's life.

Got a fair amount of writing done for my paper. That's probably good.

Badly frustrated with my own lack of social skills and anxiety and rootlessness. On my own head again, badly.

Feeling a little better later in the day about social woes.

Hanging out with CRW for the long weekend. He's still here. Good to have him here.

I'm fancy today for no reason.

Docket today: finish writing the objective function piece, write up midpoint report, write a blog post. Maybe also visit an art museum.

Farewell to Tom Lehrer. I'm not a fan of "We Will All Go Together When We Go", however good I find the music she the irreverence. Black comedy just doesn't do that much for me; it just upsets me past a point.

OK OK OK OK thank you XP for having a good research convo with me today. You are excellent.

I feel way better about my research now. I have A Theorem to be pointed at and like half a map to it. Time to light lantern and head off into the woods in search of it.

Thinking about... kind of a lot today? Hard to put it in words though.

Something about social nutrition? About spiritual nutrition?

Something about my damaged sense of research-drive which fact is super scary to me. Mesopredator with an injured leg or digestive issue type of scary.

Something about my p(doom) (ugh) being anywhere from 65% to 87% on any given day, between all the roads to ruin? Most of the probability is even in pretty boring prosaic ones like "hypercapitalist hellscape" or "great power conflict blows up" and not weird "brain in a box in the basement" type shit!

"Cross-Fit Power Grid" I'm sorry what the fuck. (On looking it up: not a literal power grid. Probably.)

Now playing: Neutral Paradise. Love me some reasonably natural-sounding untwelvish music.

Forgot my meds at home. Ended up leaving early. Going to try to get anything done at home after catboy times.

Feeling slightly better about the fact that I should have doubted myself less on how good of a capabilities advancement tool RL is?

I didn't realize how much of a crush I still had on people from the pre-plague times. I look better now, am more agentic now, am more mature now, am better positioned now. I think. I hope.

I underestimated how vital lack of certainty in receiving identical reward between principal and agent was.

Forgot to think much about meeting up with EG over the weekend at the abortive math party. E (different person) actually seems worth hanging around, even if fairly flaky.

Something broken or warped in me around dating and sex, probably? Something else sprained or bruised around research drive and confidence? Worth fixing up, for sure, in both cases. They even feel related.