If You Saw This, You Didn’t, For Future Reference.

Today the sky looked like straight from a van gogh painting

In the forest

“Strangely, treating knowledge as an end in itself reaps the kind of practical rewards that valuing merely instrumental knowledge may struggle to produce.”

- from “How We Lost Our Focus (and why it should scare you)” by Unsolicited advice (https://youtu.be/oxJkj-C4vjs)

Honestly it is my opinion that knowledge and learning and thinking and all that they entail are valuable in and of themselves: that is to say I take the original poster’s idea a step farther and value ‘useless degrees’ even if they are objectively useless from a practical sense. For me knowledge is an end unto itself, valuable because it is and not because of what it might do.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of very valuable math with a lot of practical applications now started out this way: as purely abstract and only valuable in and of itself. So it seems to me that this perspective doesn’t harm applying the concepts in the long term, but actually helps it.

It seems to be the case that by only chasing what is immediately useful we will miss vast amounts of information and thoughts and development that will become useful or even needed later down the line.

My boyfriend @aborigonalguppyrabits and I were discussing cosmere reading order and decided that it was best expressed as a flow chart. The project got a little out of hand. Obviously there’s no right way to read the books, but we thought we’d offer our solution.

i just had a nightmare

One of my favorite parts of The Stormlight Archive, especially The Way of Kings, is how Sanderson introduces this deeply alien landscape to us. He does so mostly by not introducing things specifically, only narrating as if the viewpoint character were looking at normal stuff that everyone sees all the time—which, to them, they are! Sanderson also often uses one-off names for things, like I think he uses the word "chull" before he actually describes one, and leaves you, the reader, to make your assumptions on what those words could mean. Often you assume you're in "rabbits are called 'glips'" territory, where normal things are called by a fantastical name just for flavor.

The reason why I like this is that you get some moments that are... the closest feeling I can compare it to is "dawning horror," when you realize your assumptions are wrong. Like I heard about "songlings," and I assumed, "Ah, yes, birds!" And then I heard about axehounds and I assumed, "Ah, dogs :)"

And then you actually encounter songlings in the text and. Oh. They're cricket-crab things. Uh.

And then Sanderson actually shows you an axehound and it's even worse, it's a crab-dog!

After that you're left sweating. What else is actually crab? Are the horses secretly crabs? They keep mentioning hogs, but we never see a hog described, are they actually crabs??

But the answer is no. They're just pigs. Brilliant.

Shenandoah

Amazing poetry!

It's quiet by the firepit,

The pops and the crackles,

making the conversation.

The flames lick the wood,

the smoke, an annoyance I

try to avoid.

But that's where we connect.

You crack jokes,

(really, really bad jokes)

and I laugh,

because just the sound of

your voice,

your laugh, your smile,

Fills me with joy.

The little things, they

are what I long for,

what I truly want.

I want to know your favorite

color, song, food, car.

I want to know

how you take your coffee,

what you think of berfore bed

what your goals are for life.

But most of all,

I want to see how you see

me.

I catch your gaze across the

fire the light and mirth

in your beautiful eyes

reflecting the devoted falmes.

This is nice.

I smile; you smile back.

My stomach flies away,

Along with my heart, and I think,

Love is quiet, like the firepit.