#naming

Asking venture capitalists for investment is a rite of passage for tech founders. This has led to another universal experience: the VC pitching horror story. A massive conversation sharing such stories has taken place all week on X, with the comments both funny and infuriating. We read through them all to find the most interesting ones so you don’t have to. **Key Takeaways** * **VC Conduct is…

The Talking/Feeling Split

When you talk about compassion, you've already stepped "out" of it. You've converted a living experience into information. And information about an emotion is fundamentally different from the emotion itself; the same way a photograph of fire isn't warm. You can be the world's greatest expert on compassion and be completely cold in the room with a suffering person.

What makes different Spinoza's understanding? For Spinoza, to understand something isn't an intellectual act. It's closer to what we might call transformation. You don't understand compassion by accumulating knowledge about it. You understand it when it has actually changed how you perceive and respond to the world. Understanding, in his sense, is something that happens to you and it reorganizes you from the inside.

Spinoza called this moving from the first kind of knowledge (opinions, surface impressions, hearsay) through the second (reason, concepts) to the third being *intuitive knowledge*, where you grasp something directly, not through description of it. So "understanding compassion" in Spinoza's sense means that you don't think about whether to be compassionate. It simply moves through you as a natural response because it has become part of your structure, not part of your vocabulary

Cats are not required to change their name upon joining Wanderingclan, as there are many separate bands who wish to honor their home traditions. Kittypets may keep folk/upright walkers/twoleg names, cats with “phrase” names (ie Sleeps under Berry Bush, Small Bear), or previous clan names – WITH ONE EXCEPTION – because Wanderingclan has no formal leader, any leader holding the -Star suffix will be required to drop it and return to their previous title. If they can retain their 9 lives while doing so, they can, but that’s up to their personal connection to Starclan. This has been expanded to include some kittypets with names/including Star.

Although it is suggested kits born into the clan follow the traditional Prefixkit to Prefixpaw to Prefixsuffix naming and honor system, it is not required within the pan-wandering warrior code. It may be up to particular bands and deputies to formalize any rule set, otherwise it is up to each individual parent to name their kit anything they wish. Deputies hold the right to change names for the reasons of graduation, celebratory or exemplary conduct, or dishonor titles. Cats can also change their own names as they wish, but naming oneself a specialty title would be seen as childish, and would unlikely be recognized by the bands' deputy.