Tumultuous Capybara

I got better at live conversation,

the scope of what I could think of to say grew, and

I started to feel more secure when leaving ideas incomplete and disagreements unresolved

the constraints of live speech became relieving rather than frustrating, so long as it was with a mind I already had a decent positive dynamic with.

When engaged in conversation, I usually have to reply with whatever thread of thought is most prominent, losing the context for others I think of while listening to the other party.

It’s also why I dislike podcasts as a medium, there’s no time for analysis, to generate ideas and connections; if you’re focused enough to do that while listening, you’d be better off reading a transcript. Granted, this is reflected in the general choice of content as being less involved.

The techno-optimist part of me wants to experiment with optimizing for this, something like a more directly collaborative wiki or memex: being able to annotate ideas had while reading, replying to selections out of content to make it clear it’s a distinct thought, inlining references to posts and replies to compose things together. Unfortunately, I also predict that the features wouldn’t be worth the complexity they add, compared to the simple mechanics of back-and-forth replies.

It would be cool to:

search for recipes given ingredients I already have around at home

automatically handle some common ingredient substitutions

interpolate between different versions of the same recipe

auto-generate grocery lists, especially informed by data about my current kitchen inventory that I wouldn’t care to share with a “privacy invasion as primary business model” online app

Rocket Sauce

“Rocket sauce” is a broad term for any beverage made from ingredients that are individually toxic (or even fatal), but chemically balance out to a relatively-safe form. Frequently, the margin of error is a few milliliters or less. Recipes vary wildly based on available ingredients and the drinker’s biology, but are often drawn from heavy industry and spaceport stocks.

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