274. Patina of Experience
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Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesAlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, try task paper.
Gopher, Gopher, hello.
MerlinHi, how's it going?
AlexFantastic. How are you?
MerlinGopher, Gopher. No, I'm good. I'm pretty good. groundhog's day yeah oh geez louise oh you took it and turned it that's good yeah that is good yes yes uh it was relatively important to me to be here on time today oh because well i i as i said i apologize that i've been late lately and so i put some extra effort into it now if i put more extra effort into i would be more awake but but i'm flustered because my hot key didn't turn off my fans
and then I had to run around a little bit. Oh, no. Yeah, my hot key. You got to keep it all updated.
AlexDo you need some tea? Do you need a fire break?
MerlinNo, I mean, yes.
AlexYes.
MerlinYes. I need somebody to, I say inject, but I'm not a doctor. I want somebody to inject me with something where I sleep for 30 contiguous days.
Alexah it's like that book the yeah my year of sleep yes it it's a good book did you get to the end
Merlinno no but i i did i got the second sample but um i couldn't even do a week of sleep but uh i uh i saw that title on me like oh because i and i think i'd heard in we talked about this woman i think this author i heard i heard an interview with her that was completely engrossing have you ever heard her i don't know i forget the author's name but have you ever heard her heard her
Alexinterviewed yeah odessa something i don't think i have kind of person people in my family refer
Merlinto somebody like that you say you say they're a pistol she's a pistol that gal gal's a pistol
Alextitle this is a word like fast where i don't know if i don't know in this context whether it's good
Merlinor not oh i'm i'm very interested in words like that um my my linguist boyfriend on wired talks about this sometimes those strange words that mean themselves and the opposite of themselves and vice versa you know what i mean uh now i can't think of any of them um well you
Alexhave been saying cute and it's it's not the opposite of what i think of when someone says
Merlincute. I'm entirely aware that I started using it a lot. It's become very important to me. Yeah.
AlexMan, you're having a word journey.
MerlinIt's not pathologizing. It's not pathologizing. You are pathologizing me a little bit right now. Word journey. What a thing to say about a grown man, a word journey. What does that
Alexmean? What does anything
Merlinmean, Alex? They're all just noises we make with our face. Oh, God. have you ever really looked at your hand have you ever like wondered if like when i see green is it the same green that you see oh according to this article on miriam webster uh the these are called janus words um like your office administrator or the greek god with two faces in the um in the criterion logo uh words that mean themselves and their opposite it uh oh sanction oh uh sanction right sanction can mean okay here's a great one my favorite ah
here it is my favorite oversight um i'm sorry i was late today for me it was an oversight on my part uh also i am chair of the oversight committee people who are making oversights cleave cleave on like cleave you can cleave on to and cleave away right oh oh i don't like this list i i'm trying to find some other ones uh clip uh meanings are actually from two discrete verbs meaning to attach something or to cut off i clipped it off or i clipped it on oh my god fast
yeah alexandra coxson occasionally we can't wax or develops auto auto autonomous meanings talk about going blind take for example which can refer both to moving very quickly, the car moved really fast, and to staying put. He was held fast by the ropes. Like when you lash yourself to the mast. You know what I'm saying?
AlexNo one uses that.
MerlinWell, sure they do. It's a little bit old Tommy. Old Tommy? Old Tommy? Hmm. Old Tommy. Does your relative name Tommy? I do. I do.
AlexI hope it helps. He's my brother, the cancer, former
Merlincancer boy. Old cancer Tom, we called him. we covered a lot of ground and it's still very early we are am i recording yep five minutes i'm clicking on the document uh i did want to try though i did okay i mean i i was i woke up early enough not as early as as i would like and i don't know i don't know what it is but i'm glad
we're doing this new time i think this is going to make me a better person i hope so anyway we
Alexcan also do a later time i am at oh disposal is that another one huh disposal as in remove or disposal as in unremove what i don't know i think i'm using that word wrong um at your disposal
Merlinoh at your disposal i think what that means is you can you like when you say uh uh uh i serve at your pleasure.
AlexAt your disposal. At your free dictionary. Ready and available to help or serve one. Oh.
MerlinBut it sounds like I'm here for you to throw me away.
AlexYeah.
MerlinEvery time I say, I would say sometimes, I like the definition of love that says you care more about other people than yourself. And they say, no, no. That's codependence.
AlexNo, it's not.
MerlinIs that an auto-autonym?
AlexI don't know. well that's a new that sounds like a nft company gross the uh sounds like weststone caleb if you ask me oh no no i don't want to be part of the problem no you are i mean yes i am i just don't
Merlinwant to be i don't want to be oh i see yeah you know that's a good disposition and a nice disposal all to say i you know it's different it's you know it's like derida would say you know the difference you know what i'm saying no like sunt with a sedia yeah that's the whole point yes okay i don't know now he died he died on a crosswalk or did he die on a motorcycle that might have been roll on barth there's a lot there's a lot of french guys in leather jackets who died in the 80s barth is the one who wrote about saracene and pro wrestling right i think so sure yes yes yes
disposal. Words are tricky. Words can be pretty, pretty, pretty tricky. You think I'm having a journey.
AlexThere's a tweet in the show notes.
MerlinOh, I don't know why I put that there. There's no way we can talk about this. I saw this tweet and I instantly thought of you for some reason.
AlexYeah, I don't like that.
MerlinWell, I want to be tall. That's the difference.
AlexWould you like to read this tweet?
MerlinI see. But okay. But you know, to quote my brother-in-law, John, what good can come of this? You know, I was being warned about having a child and particularly a female child. And when we found out we were having a child and he was out, I told you this story. I told you this story. We went to the family. The family threw us a little shower, you know, like a little celebration at a restaurant slash bar. And we hung out and it was nice. and John was waiting outside and John already had a couple drinks a couple
is like a Rhode Island 12 but he was outside
Speaker AI gotta work on that I think I might be having a word
Merlinjourney and we walk up and he goes you gotta be careful Merlin gotta be careful sometimes no good can come of it I was like oh hey John how's it going yeah i because the thing is they get on youtube and they get on the internet and they post things and now there's something there's something there's some things in life where like good
can come of it and then there's some things in life where no good can come of it and i said that makes a lot of sense you suppose i could go in and have a have a drink but uh and i think that's true. I think that's true. As addressed in the currently slightly floundering wisdom document, you know, it's funny when you give people certain kinds of information in the wrong order, they learn a lot, I feel like. And if you say to somebody, let me just, I don't need to find it. There's something along the lines of this particular bit of wisdom. You know, before you
commit to doing something in life, it's useful to ask yourself, what is the best possible outcome that I can conceive of? After I've done this, like if I have blue sky solution, what's the greatest thing that I can imagine happening as a result? And you don't have to do that all the time, but I mean, on the face of it, isn't that kind of like a not terrible thing to ask yourself? Like, you know, I mean, it's a way of trying to model optimism for yourself in some ways and go like, if I if I apply for this job and then you do some second order thinking, if I apply for this job and I get this job, oh, I would get to move to Chicago or blah, blah, blah.
Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, why not ask ourselves, what is is there a great outcome that could come of this? Doesn't seem like pretty straightforward advice. Say yes.
AlexYes. And I think about that in terms of we've talked about this. I told you so. I can't think of a time or place where that would help anybody ever. Or in this case, a tweet about incest telling someone I told you so.
MerlinOh, no, that's terrible. If a given thing you've decided to do goes flawlessly, what's the best possible outcome you can imagine? So this is what you do is switch them up. I'm doing what they call the Socratic method, or I get you to nod along with me. What's the best possible outcome you can imagine? Keep this question in mind before you, say, jump onto a moving car or scream at a baby. now people in life have screamed at babies people in which is really weird to watch i've seen people scream at babies and i'm here to tell you i have never seen at least what i
would perceive to be a truly outstanding result come from that or before you push a poor woman on a plane right or before but jumping on a car and i feel like when you do a mix them up with the order of information it becomes clearer that i think most of us often don't do that maybe
Alexdo you know what i mean yes especially in oh these times these crazy crazy times i think challenging times i don't know i think people people who are optimists they they do that but you as you say optimism optimism and recklessness
Merlinfunction in similar ways they're like what i optimism i was pulling out of my ass because it's early. But it can also just be a form of recklessness where you just do a thing and you haven't really, I don't know, I think different people are trained or raised differently to think about the risk matrix for doing something. Like what is the downside of this not going super well? And like, or like in terms of like football betting, like what's the over under on this? Like all the things being equal, how likely is this to lead to a positive result versus a negative
result and i feel like the cone brothers have made a whole career out of that like the cone brothers in some ways in a very artful way more so than me saying a short paragraph uh think about how many of their movies are about stupid people trying to steal something or stupid people trying to break the law like extreme examples include probably raising arizona definitely burn after reading um fargo like you know blood simple maybe like all of their movies are about heists mostly but there's about something, well in the case of The Big Lebowski
it's a stoner noir but you know what I mean the point is that I want to talk about incest because I know that there's a way that this can turn out great I never know what I'm trying to read
Alexno I think about it in an opposite fashion of what's the absolute worst that can happen and will you survive
Merlina species ending comment now okay i'm not trying to drag this person i just so i never know how to read these things to to my wife because i never know the order i should read them in when somebody's like quote tweeted or screenshotted something.
I'll just begin with the person's quote tweet. Should I not do this? Am I dragging somebody with queer in their
Alexusername? No. No. No. Hard no. Why would that be dragging somebody?
MerlinNo. So somebody on the internet had retweeted this quote tweet. And their comment was Tumblr banning Tumblr banning explicit content was a mistake. And this is the thing that made me think of you as a person on Twitter said, you ever think about how quote, incest is bad because inbreeding leads to deformed children, unquote, is a really ableist.
Like IDK, maybe arguing that people with disability shouldn't be born isn't the gotcha people think it is. Giving me much to think about. And then they followed that up with, I think there are some social and power imbalance reasons against incest, especially intergenerational. Big words. But I also feel like I've never seen a sound argument for why siblings and cousins shouldn't be able to date, allow it to date. and for some reason i saw that and then of course that person said tumblr banning explicit content was a mistake and for some reason i sent that to you and now i regret sending it to you i regret
putting it in the doc and i regret having talked about it because nothing about that could turn out well but it did give me much to think about basically wishing i had a sibling so i could fuck you know not not not in a procreative way now the catholic church they frown on that
Alexbecause it's not procreative exactly because it would be ableist but nuns have sex with each other right they're sisters oh i i hope this person is happy in their life and i can almost guarantee that whoever this is does not have siblings or has some stuff going on well i i
Merlinalso and we're probably gonna have to cut all this because i already feel very bad that i i'm being mean to this person who is i think in a i don't know this person i have not looked at their twitter account but i think this is a legit case of i'm just asking the question i don't think so i don't think this person is trying i think this person is thinking out loud which used to be a thing we were allowed to do and try things on and without being yelled at by somebody in san
Speaker Afrancisco but it is it's a little it is a little thought-provoking i'm concerned to even say that
Merlinwe talked about this on text yesterday i think it is actually if i'm being honest with myself why am I so squicked out by the idea of incest so immediately that I found this laughable and if you don't think that's an interesting question you haven't really thought about it
Alexenough I feel like I've been thinking about this for eight years because as I mentioned no oh my god it's not his name I um I know why it makes me upset because it's just the
Merlinidea of uh my siblings no i see as the sister of a brother i feel very strongly about this
Alexjohn syracuse told you not to do that oh god but uh my quote professor in college oh right right
Speaker Ai'm so sorry yes please tell the story please tell the story oh god my and this is the class
Alexwhere i met my future spouse gay history it was literally called gay history i don't know who
Merlinmade that choice but are you fucking kidding me could you be more basic yeah yeah well i think
Alexyou met you met your future spouse in gay history actually actually um that's not true we met at a function for gay people no but i mean not to not to get him in trouble but i know this will get me in trouble i thought he was incredibly obnoxious because he kept talking about buffy the vampire slayer in a very enthusiastic way problematic fave and uh i thought that he was hitting on me
but i was told later that this wasn't the case but i i we actually ended up talking in this class gay history and over uh over notes that we shared and oh god it is it's so basic and that's our uh
Merlinmeet cute but it's also like and listen i don't i don't mean to be the referee here but i will be the old man this is also an instance where we run into difficult difficulty with timelines and pronouns because what we what we're really talking about here i think or thought you know what it's none of my fucking business but it's a it is a cuter and funnier story when it's about two cute lesbians in catholic school it's so much cuter it's so cuter because you know when people don't
know this it sounds like there's some dude hitting on you in jay's week five you know what i mean
Alexby friday everybody my um both my spouse and i are queer no no no you don't need to no you're
Speaker Anot a repo you're not a repo you don't have to show you your commitment you know what someone's
Alexgonna make a poll request and oh god i have poll requests open all the time
MerlinI never know if I, if I want hand stuff, do I ask for push or pull? I never know. People call it a blow job, but that gives you what's called an embolism.
AlexThe, the, the way I remember it is.
MerlinYou don't want an embolism.
AlexA pull request is because you want someone to pull in.
MerlinI don't remember it's the opposite. It's how I remember Genshin and GIF. And they both sound wrong to me.
AlexI keep saying Genshin Impact.
MerlinI say Genshin and Jif privately. I miss pronoun myself. Actually, it's MX pronoun.
AlexYou're right.
Speaker AI just told the story.
MerlinOkay, give it a minute. That's pretty good. MX pronoun? That's funny. MX honorific at your disposal. You had a teacher. You're in gay history class.
AlexI'm in gay history class.
MerlinWith someone or something, some chimera, some class of chimeras.
AlexAt the time, both my future spouse and I were lesbians. But our professor decided to bring up the question. He was literally just asking the question.
MerlinHe's just asking the question. It's academic.
AlexYep. Yep. And this because, you know, we were talking about gay rights in the 80s and specifically in regards to the AIDS epidemic. And he was like, you know, if you think about it, why is there a stigma towards queer children who are siblings? And for a second, we were like, wait, so like like queer kids can't both be gay. It'd be awkward. But then he goes.
MerlinThat's a weird way to put it, because it's sort of like saying, it's tantamount to saying anybody who's ever walked by a gun store has committed gun murder.
Speaker AYep, yep.
MerlinIt's like, well, hang on. I'm like, wait, wait.
AlexBut no, he goes on to clarify. He's like, well, if there's no procreation involved, I don't understand why a brother and a brother or a sister and a sister can't be in a relationship with one another. Right.
MerlinAnd it's a really thought-provoking idea. that off the dome I don't agree with, but I get what they're saying. Why are we so against incest? Let's put our cards on the table. Because when people who are too closely related have a child, that child tends to have a lot of health problems. And I mean, I saw this, you see this all the time. I was watching, I'm so broken inside. I was watching something on the Russian Revolution and learning about the czars and how they, one of the reasons,
the whole reason Rasputin ever got involved with the czar's families because his son had really bad hemophilia yeah guess why i mean you know it's the same as prince philip of spain it's like all those people in paintings who look
Alexlike herman munster it's because they're diddling their cousins you could argue the same as prince andrew sure has something going on he can't sweat maybe maybe i mean he couldn't sweat for a while did it come back i don't know i think i think it just magically came back well he's he's related to god so that's probably how that happened well it was god's idea anyway i mean he served in the
Merlinfalcon islands because he's a hero and that's where he where he was made to not sweat by war oh god but i i think we're starting and i could be wrong here but and and i'm gonna try to say something smart in a minute that's just gonna probably get me in trouble which is fine um but i think if we start with first principles clarice we begin with hey you know it's bad for everybody in our group and this if this is an ableist i apologize i don't mean it that way um i don't mean that in the sense of like somebody with a birth defect shouldn't be born
but i'm saying like if you have one of those those terrible things where like i i i think generally it's a genetic problem right it's a dna problem like you could pull off you could pull off a franklin and eleanor because they were what second third cousins something like that i never remember what that means. I always have to look at the chart before I say this, but, but if you marry, if you've not married, if you intercourse with somebody too close to you and that produces offspring, I think I'm going to pivot here to the smart part, which is like, Oh, it makes,
it makes a very sick kid. And it makes a sick community because if you have a kid who's born because you like your sister and their heart's born on the outside, that's a resource drain on
Alexget ready the tribe. Yep. I mean, that's why you couldn't masturbate because he can't smell the
Merlinseed because you're like you're you're committing the sin of onan and that could be going toward
Alexmaking strong boys that could work in fields and fight war well and that's why i think maybe i'm pathologizing but that is perhaps why you're like maybe i'm just an old man and not thinking about
Merlinthis uh in the right way i think i said i'm old i'm old and stodgy i believe is what i said
AlexAnd I wasn't trying to be good. No, I again, like I actually thought about this a lot because it does. It's I think everyone should ask themselves if you feel really just icky or you think something is gross, you should ask why.
MerlinYeah, like it's like maybe another way to put this. And I'm just speaking for myself. If you agree or not, you should say so. But like, there's certain stuff in life that I think I'm very fine neurotypical. I think I'm, as we used to say, normal in the sense that when this kind of thing happens, everybody except an extremely small minority people tend to have a very negative reaction. Like, for example, I, in my youth and even through to today, I'm very sensitive.
Who else said this? Griffin Newman has this too. I'm very sensitive about things involving eyes. Oh, I'm sorry. Go on. Well, like, for example, like if I watch Munchan Andalus, even though I know that's a cow's eye that gets cut at the opening of Andalusian dog, even though I know that, I still find it very upsetting. Oh. Whenever they cut the eye and it turns into a moon.
AlexI know, I have not seen it, but.
MerlinAmongst my, oh, it's really wild. Amongst my odd compulsions as a kid, one of them was very, very okay let's be honest very specific you ever go to a toy store or a hardware store and they've got those peg boards with the hanging like long hook things on them so you can hang packs of like you know nails or toys or whatever from those you know i'm talking about yeah the little hardware store and you're going to the section with the washers and they got little boxes of washers and they're all hanging from those long metal uh-huh and if you're like me
Alexyou're at home depot and you try to get the right one at the end or i have a rule of three you go to the third one in the back of anything you're buying in a physical store because it probably
Merlinhasn't been picked up i do that even though i'm not a syracuse i do that with books i never take
Alexthe front exactly no you don't want to um and then they fall down i had a deeply compulsive fear
Merlinof being pushed or tripping or otherwise falling forward and one of those going straight into my right eye and i didn't ask for that and i don't even i don't i couldn't tell you i have not had to surpass the number of weird eye things but like i mentioned that as an example what's another one i mean a classic would be for example seeing a snake or seeing a rodent and i think that it's because something something science sauce spray on your science spray at this point i think that's
because there's something really deep in our limbic system that like tells us that something moving quickly on the periphery of our vision will always first of all be a threat it's not a fun birthday surprise party like that's a thing that could kill me so like your your heart racing when you almost get hit by a car you're you know i mean all those kinds of things and i say like like for example a snake or rodent or whatever a roach something where like you have a repulsed a repulsion and fear don't you feel like there's like a lot of those things that almost everybody
Alexyes and who i'm kicking well i people don't like poop well it's like we kick jokes out of the room it's like my feeling about incest you could compare it to someone's feelings of just about being gay it's like why do i feel threatened about it do i that's that's why i think
Merlinyou're smart. I just wanted to, I just wanted to stipulate that just, first of all, can we all agree on cheese that there are certain things where a vast majority of people, again, from a cultural standpoint or a societal standpoint, people in our, roughly our tribe, let's call the United States, we'll have this similar kind of reaction. For example, like people in, um, people in the East, I think particularly Scott Simpson said in Japan, don't drink milk after the age of like 10 they think it's so i don't know this is still true but scott says like said
on you look nice today one time that they think it's so weird to see like a 40 year old man
Alexdrinking milk yeah i have a friend who's really freaked out by just dairy in general they're from
Merlinright but that's now now is that normal is that is that cultural normative or i don't know but the point is that is a shared thing amongst a lot of people in the same way i suspect that in our culture, when you see a snake bear roach, you freak out. Why am I saying this? Because I'm not saying it's quite the same as seeing a snake, but the idea of two specific siblings having specific sex, I'm going to guess has a pretty wide squick factor in America for most people. And you just made the excellent point that I was about to get to. You, you, you, you better put,
no, no, no, you, you put it better than I would, which is okay. Hey, hang on pump the brakes, man. are there other things like that where you notice even a little bit of a getting squicked out where like yeah there are people who are very first time my mom saw two guys standing on the street kissing in the castro she made a noise because that was new to her and it's definitely not her thing let's just say but that made me say to myself well okay am i reacting to this funny tweet tweet funny to me tweet am i reacting to that out of the same impulse that would make my
mom be freaked out by by by two guys and chaps kissing the reason this tweet i think is funny
Alexis the am i'm just asking the question about it and the reason being the the the reply to his own tweet uh intergener the where he says imbalance reasons against incest especially intergenerational and that's where it's like okay let's say that you can bone your brother and have a kid and like there will be no negative no
Merlinfoul you're you you're saying you're saying that that the people who absent some kind of technology and science would not be able to create a child through the traditional way.
AlexLike my professor's example of it's just, you know, two gay boys and they like to touch each other's butts. What's the harm? And I would say that maybe in a different world, in a different system, no, a different tribe, maybe it isn't. But the way that most siblings are raised and the way that families, as you said, in America specifically, are structured, that creates a lot of problems for that kid going forward.
And the power imbalance is very similar, I think, to a student.
MerlinWait, but are you still at siblings or did you pivot to intergenerational?
AlexNo, no. Well, no, by intergenerational, I think this guy is...
MerlinBecause that really does feel like another kettle of fish.
AlexExactly.
MerlinNo matter how much you love Peepaw.
AlexNope, nope, nope. Well, yeah. Don't ride the lawnmower. Yeah, you're a 39-year-old teacher. Like, you're 18. Maybe, but maybe you still should. Like, maybe don't do it. Maybe don't do it.
MerlinPeepaw is 84 and I'm 39. We are healthy adults. And Peepaw and I love each other very much.
AlexYeah, the age of consent is 14 in some place.
MerlinIf we made a baby, it would have to be out of, like, pizza or something. Oh, God. Pizza baby. Well, no. My point about this. We decided to adopt.
Speaker APlease respect my dream.
Merlinthis is this is my this is my pizza boy pep pep well
Alexhe's a precious angel now that you have gotten us what are your pizza's pronouns
Merlinwhat now that cut all of this that you want cut any part you want cut that no no no uh because
Alexthis makes me think too about uh just the idea of you you don't get to decide what you are attracted to and in this i bet i genuinely think that incest is probably more prevalent than we think or or no and if but it does not seem like a systematic issue and it doesn't seem like like this person is just asking the question and is not like i would like to fuck my sibling
so if someone were to come forward and be like this is why if you look at it as like a thought problem or uh yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah and i'd be like oh okay incest well and i would be like all right person i tell me how how you identify and like like real talk honestly i'd be like okay how would you identify sure all right you do you that sounds that sounds gross to me but also um you know maybe two people touching boobs is really really nasty to to you but it's not a systematic
thing be and like i if suddenly we were really obsessed with incest it it does feel like uh suddenly people are obsessed with women's sports it's not because they're really into women's
Merlinsports it's oh right and of course with all the the issues of fairness yeah who compete But like also you're mentioning boobs makes me think, take the word fetish, for example. And like fetish, I think of as having a fairly specific meaning, at least traditionally. And there's a couple of things I'm going to say here that I am prepared to be very, very wrong about, to be turned out about by either fetish scholars or biblical scholars. But for example, in a true like classic craft ebbing sense, I wonder if one definition, one functioning definition of fetish is whether or not you feel shameful about it.
You have a thing going on that is central to your probably private or maybe public sexual identity. And that could be that you're really attracted to middle-aged women with long toes. it can get extremely specific but but let's has anybody ever said i have a fetish for boobs i mean yeah you sure could but i think there are a lot of people in various communities that go
what are you talking about that's like calling yourself a chef because you have a salt shake you know what i mean though like what is where does that cross over from being something that lots of people like like does it matter that lots of people do or don't like it right does it does more people doing it make it less weird what if you liked a different toe on
Alexthat middle-aged lady do you know what i mean yes because i the reason i thought this week was funny is because it's like the saying touch grass is ableist like i i mean maybe if you really really think touch grass oh yeah there was a whole hubbub of someone was like stop telling people to touch
Merlingrass that's a list oh oh yeah yeah yeah i thought you meant to like as in touch cloth yeah well oh really oh touching cloth that's not something i've ever heard which sounds like in the biography
Alexof a priest that does it oh see well that's the thing is like if someone becomes an ex-priest and decides that to be in a relationship within an 18 year old boy that he used to like they're not related Alex well exactly it's like okay we're all brothers private situation like I get squicked out when I see straight people and gate like anybody being physically like intimate on the
Merlinstreet for me that's like oh I hate it and then I hate I hate hearing anecdotes about it yeah yeah oh gosh I've said once a very long time ago I don't think of myself as being sex negative the short version is i'm just i'm just your sex negative or more particularly i i'm you talking about your sex negative you know yeah but the other thing then quickly is and this is the one where i'm really prepared to be turned out uh turns out for what is that it is said
that in the uh the in the pentatook in those early books uh you get your exodus your numbers your Deuteronomy and whatnot, especially like in Exodus. I mean, numbers in Deuteronomy, talk about fetish. They got a little bit too much into what the rules are, whereas Exodus at least had a lot of good plots in it. You get your Abraham, you get your Moses, you get your Aaron, you get all that good stuff in Exodus.
AlexI don't like how sincerely I yeah, that is a good take. Go on. Well, I mean,
Merlinthe thing is, it's very it's like nobody ever did a second pass on the first five books, especially so Genesis, Exodus, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Yeah. And like they get more and more in the weeds and but it's my it was explained to me perhaps even when i was a church going lad like well why do they have all these rules hey mister why aren't we allowed to eat shrimp what's the deal with goats the cloven hose and you can tell me whether you've heard this as well like especially a lot of what became what we think of as kosher law came out of hey
guess what we live in the desert and there's a whole lot of shit that's gonna fuck us up and listen maury i know you love shrimp i know you love your shrimp but it's so important you not eat desert shrimp which definitely sounds like a euphemism something because the shrimp are gonna go bad you're gonna get sick okay don't don't get with these goats because and what was good what was the good reason what was the cloven hoof um it i i think it was i don't only eat animals that have a solid hoof and why was that i don't remember oh i think it was um
Alexlike the there was utility chewing their cud they have to they have to choose their well no like a goat can survive in a desert where like a cow couldn't but right but right these are not these
Merlinare not based on some kind of like a magic scroll on like a lot of exodus this is based on some common sense stuff right some common sense things and then of course over time that gets confused and you get stuff like well you can't now you have to have a goyim elevator and we've we've put a string around the whole city of Miami so that you can technically, you know, get away with, with flaunting Sabbath rules, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I just wondered, doesn't it seem like that might be a similar kind of thing where it's like,
Oh boy. Oh boy. I have an omnibus upset the United States message to share, which is, could it be in the same way that the coach says, Maury can't have a shrimp, even though now Maury doesn't live in a desert and the shrimp are mostly safe. is that kind of similar to what this person is saying oh okay oh you're we're gonna whoopee
Alexgoldberg no uh i've had this conversation with uh good rule of thumb is just not to compare anything to the hall which is better not to what good why is everybody talking about them like oh boy oh boy stephen colbert was trying so hard to help her out see i don't go on twitter for
Merlina week and yet it's still you mainly like rss you communicate outward and inward through rss that's mainly how you you mainly send rss's to people yes well and the push and pull commits lately but
Alexuh i like so what you were saying for example like circumcision is in my understanding the same way because it's like we don't want to get sand up in our pp because that will oh is that why i never knew why and which is and there are some people now who are like that is genital
Merlinmutilation all i know is whoever has the one that you don't have it looks weird i'm not gonna i'm not gonna commit to what mine is but i've never not seen the opposite of mine and thought you know it's like elaine bennett says it's got no personality
Alextwo episodes in a row with elaine bennis quotes oh god i love her so much oh man i love her so much well i in i love putty you're having fun upsetting everybody and i my take trying to grow
Merlinbelieve it or not i'm trying to grow i'm trying to grow you can't grow again it says in the document you can't grow without change you can't change without growing and in order to grow you have to open yourself up oh god i hate when people talk about getting out of your comfort zone fuck off i love my comfort zone you piece of shit but i think one's mind should be open to at least the thoughts shouldn't hurt ideally and like you know to be able to turn that over in your head the stronger let's put it this way okay here's some good past this prologue for all of us including
especially me which is like if you tend to have a surprisingly like outsized emotional reaction to something and other people don't have that same emotional reaction that's worth at least looking at yes because like i mean not to say that you should go be like other people but in the sense of like that should at least be a cue or clue to you that there may be more going on there than
Alexfirst you know sort of meets the eye are you trying to pull me away from my pedophile take
Merlinyou're like don't go no sorry please go back go back to that i wish they're not related
Alexwell no you know well i this came to light my my problematic takes came to light with the whole apple c sam stuff that went on because the other yeah i was like over the summer right i believe
Merlini feel like i was in rhode island when that was happening yeah i was pulling old ladies if you know what i mean that's fully committed head talk about forking master uh but working copy
Alexi finally know how working copy or uh works oh god i hope you'll explain it to me well by git i mean oh git this isn't this is really funny to like three people and thank you those three people uh but with you know pedophilia i remember the summer of 20 okay the summer of 2012 i watched a lot of law and order svu and oh yeah that episode was on a couple months ago and madeline
MerlinI couldn't stop because we still remember. We were a little girl.
Speaker AWhat did he have?
MerlinHe had to get rescued. It was a very special episode. Even for an SVU, it was a very special episode.
AlexOh, there was recently a very special episode. I guess spoilers for SVU. But now Olivia's son, it turns out he's non-binary. And good for you, Noah.
MerlinOh, on the show?
AlexYeah.
MerlinOn the show?
AlexYeah, yeah. Yeah, no. A kid did not grow up.
MerlinWho about the show?
AlexOh, God.
MerlinWhat? for the show um whoopsie okay okay Goldberg what you have said this many times you can't
Alexpick who you want to fuck or what you want to fuck don't get to decide the the the the nasty
Merlinversion of that which is funnier and truer is um very what I would say is with some care I would say in life for the most part we don't get to choose what we want to fuck yes and I think you can say a nicer nicer way of putting that would be like yeah I'm just I'm really drawn to like as a child i don't think there's a fetish exactly but i can tell you i was very attracted to like the way plastic things looked i really liked the way like big head characters looked i like i like toys i just like the aesthetic of those things you know what i mean and like it's in that way
that was more of i know we don't say preference anymore but these are just things that i like to look at and that probably has something to do with like my aesthetics today and like how i would choose to like arrange something and like you know what i mean just subtle subtle things like how people feel about colors patterns light how we can all be so sensitive to those to those different things i'm literally legalized pedophilia as long as they're not related is that right okay
Alexi'm literally i agree i am literally holding a pokedex toy right now because there are a lot of aesthetics uh that i enjoy about the pokemon franchise but there is not a single let's say you are attracted to children and not a pokedex there but you're like i know that this is bad
Speaker Afor many many reasons there is your first episode of do my friday welcome
Alexthere are no resources for someone who is like i do not want to think this way I do not want to harm anybody what can I do oh you're saying somebody who sees what they do as
MerlinI mean gosh you know I like to say I'm Mr. Show Nambla we're not killers um but like along the lines of I don't like the way that I am and that could be somebody who like smashes ants or somebody who I don't know mutilates cattle or whatever you're saying like well you have this sense of the self-awareness and I just learned the difference between psychosis and psychopathy. And boy, was I ever confused, but you've got, you've got the one where you're detached maybe from other people's feelings, but you still got that. Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about,
but somebody could be about kids or it could be about ants, but something where you go like, I know that this thing I do is harmful and I don't like this about myself. Right. Yes. You can't just show up. You can't just check yourself into the hospital and say, you know,
AlexI'm the doodler or the diddler and yeah they're not gonna be like oh uh-oh and give you some medicine and then let you go even uh I I think now online that like um it's like a non-offender like I I was genuinely a kind of heartbroken because there are anonymous people who are like I do not want to be this person. Someone please help. Totally. And that also came to light again
Merlinwith the CSAM. We don't think that's weird when people feel that way about themselves. Like you say, like, I don't like the way that I look. I don't like the way that I feel. In some cases, there are people who say my body feels foreign to me or this life that I live feels wrong to me. But when somebody can have that sort of like extra little touch of empathy, touch wrong word, have that little scintilla uh sedia of of of empathy for other people but like speaking of pathologizing there are a lot of people in this country that would say well there is a place for you and it's called a jail cell that door is going to swing wide you know that kind of thing
sorry that's my racing arizona impersonation didn't i just tell you not to do that okay then but right that's you can't just go somewhere and again this sounds like god you think about a movie like you ever see m back in the day the peter laurie movie no no no oh man it's a really special very upsetting movie um it's it's very famous for a reason but very young peter laurie and i believe was it a silent god i haven't seen it forever but he's in this movie called m and it's about
you know similar to the things we're discussing here that apparently are so are so um anathema that i will not even name them but anyway it's really good uh like 30s uh german movie and And the point being, you're right. There's not a place to go and do that. And if you think about people who are like, when you hear people like profiler types on Netflix murder shows talk about this, they talk about something starts out as like, there's a certain kind of pattern with certain kinds of killers, where it's a kind of wish fulfillment, but they never, it's also obviously a sexual thing where like, that was not the orgasm they expected, so to speak.
And so they keep murdering and trying to get it right and often perfected or sometimes get sloppy. But there are patterns that the cops look for in this kind of thing. But like if you've done one diddle, you can't just go show up at a clinic and go, I think I might need whatever black child molester methadone.
AlexEven if you don't have even if you haven't at all, like it's even if you haven't acted on it.
MerlinRight. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's pretty wild. if you think about it peter lori huh yeah what was i gonna say about shrimp i guess that's it uh i had another thing but no it's probably just well i can't remember it um yeah i don't know it's just um but i think just to state the obvious i do think there are certain thoughts that we're not even supposed to think or let me put it differently that we are we are raised to feel like well think about i mean how many times did you hear about this in in the big building
you went to on Sundays about say unclean thoughts or about, I mean, didn't you get like a sort of background education in like sins of the heart or I don't know what y'all call it. Yeah. Yep. Impure thoughts. Like what I'm not trying to be jokey about this. I sound like Kristen Chenoweth on Schmigadoon, but like what, what didn't, didn't you have like a course in like, you know, don't, don't pet your neighbors, don't touch yourself and don't even think about boobs.
AlexThat actually Catholics have sort of evolved. I'm trying not to. Like the sort of at least the doctrine now is those impure thoughts like they are caused from they're caused by sin. Sorry, the devil or something inherently evil.
MerlinOriginal sin or your sin?
AlexOriginal sin. Like, it is just inherently inherent that humans are going to have impure thoughts.
MerlinOh, that's just, that's like, if you own a car, it's going to make exhaust.
AlexRight.
MerlinAnd in that case, we are human. We are all guilty of original sin. Ergo, those thoughts are part of your, the consequences, or in some ways, maybe not punishment exactly, but the outcome of the Thetans that we have not evacuated.
AlexYes. And the idea being, as long as you don't act.
MerlinAsk me about my Thetans. See, you call it sin, and it seems like you could build an international empire. You call it phetans, and say you want to drop people out of a 747 into a volcano, and all of a sudden you're the nut.
Alexi i i keep bringing this back to queer people because you know it's it's it's the devil i know oh god uh but there are wow that's good the like they're unfortunately like members of our family that still think that uh matt mutilated himself by having top surgery um and let like okay uh Let's say we're just asking the question.
Like if that were true, let's say both of us are mentally ill for for enjoying one another's company. It doesn't seem to be hurting anybody else. We're not going to the schools.
MerlinBut that's the no, I I I'm going to be very, very brave and bold and say I don't disagree with you at all. But that's what keeps it. Maybe this is a little bit of Jan Vanderhoek's book. We're back to we're back to the trauma.
Alexwait Bessel van der Kolk did I get it I have I don't know they don't the guy in the audiobook reads it like says his name differently multiple times so I don't even know I don't like that at
Merlinall but but like again and not just always beat that particular drum but the trauma thing does matter because the trauma thing as discussed QED on here um part of what's happening in your brain not your limbic system but in your but in that there's the there's the part that's trying to keep you in the tribe and not get you in trouble for saying father johnny touched your ding dong or whatever yep yep and um and i'm just saying here in this case i agree with you nobody's getting hurt but like like i am old enough to remember i want to say it was sodomy laws in
georgia were a big now you would know this you've had gay history but i believe i want to say it was in the 80s that was you know and you know it really was a weird decade even like it was a weird like three-thirds of a decade like every part of it was weird in different ways but there was really an ascendance of this the fear all the stuff on um like you're wrong about like so much of that there's a reason so much that should takes place in the 80s and 90s everything was women's was a fault and everybody was a child molester and there were satan worshipers everywhere and there were
TV ministers, et cetera. So that was all really seriously happening, especially for a kid living in Florida. That was all extremely real. And I want to say it was the late 80s. Late 80s, there was a lot of dust kicked up. I want to say starting around the time of the PMRC and the warning labels on music. Thanks, Tipper. Thanks, Tipper. She was doing what she thought was right. But then we also do get very much into the stuff like Frank Zappa's responses to that. But then you also get into, like I say, the child molesting nursery schools or whatever um but then there was a lot amidst all the aid
stuff there also was a fair amount of just all sorts of um like on the bus gay panic stuff you know uh you know like we can't we still don't let gay people donate blood like that's pretty wild if you think about it but also then there was the what were the other things i want to say oh shit robert maplethorpe there's a whole dust up uh robert maplethorpe suddenly people who never heard of Robert Mapplethorpe had heard of Robert Mapplethorpe and a photograph of a bullwhip in a man's rectum and why did they hear about that because the Jesse Helms's of the world were
very upset that he was getting National Endowment for the Arts funding for his work and whether or not or you take piss Christ by what's his name Serrano but there were all these different things that we're just so concerned about I mean what's the pattern in all of these is that we can either get way more traditional and choke out all of this encroaching shit that's threatening our tribe or we can just let it go by and just give up the idea that this is worth fighting for and doing the right thing so you guys touching boobs in a room no it's not harmful but neither were the guys given given uh given a beach in georgia in the 80s but the tribe needed to go after those people
publicly in a way that is telling that i what what what what what what ill were they trying to solve well it was to be enforced well okay well like how is it all this sudden now there's all these guys that have been jail for 20 years for selling a lid of weed in the 80s and yet i can get edibles and do get edibles delivered to my house in an hour it's like shit changes it's a terrible state but you know but that was a time there was a time when there was just a whole lot of this like oh my God, this is our last chance to defend our walls from the barbarians that are trying to erode and corrupt our culture from all sides.
And everyone agrees.
AlexWell, and it's God, you you really are circling it back because it goes back to like, OK, what's the what good can come of this? When you were living in a desert, not much good could come of someone putting a dick in a butt, no matter, regardless of gender, because then people aren't going to procreate, you know, again, spilling the seed. And then that gets twisted into, oh, evil, bad.
Like, they just wanted to make it through the desert.
MerlinBut also the idea that it's important to highlight that this whole idea of having one or possibly two sweet precious angels in your life that you plan out. And I know this is nothing that's new to learned people, but it's important to say. Like today, a family like ours feels very much in control of saying, yeah, we definitely we would like I mean, we'll be OK if we have zero kids. We would like one kid or two kids. Right. Like that's totally up to us. And we have so many resources for keeping that journey between the rails, either of like on the one hand, hey, I don't want 12 kids, but I also don't want zero kids.
and if you just think about what goes into all the things that are involved especially in the last 50 years of history of science and technology and law that allow us do you follow what i mean though like that is totally our pick to decide what whether any of that stuff at any point we own every part of that stack which is a very new idea um i've heard some people say well of course people say the Beatles invented sexual intercourse in 1964. I've heard that the two of the major
epochs of change in what we think of as youth and teenage years, well, the later ones, the 50s, which is when kids had spending money that like they never had before. They had autonomy to do kid things that they'd never had before. But I think if you go further back, I have at least heard people say that the whole idea of a teenager meaning anything except a person in this range of
Alexyears goes back roughly to i want to say like the colonial war wait really that seems way too early
Merlinthe idea what i'm trying to get at is in 2007 we were in a position to say we're going to have a sweet precious angel we get to name it we get to dress it we get to do all this stuff we get to shower it with kisses. That's a pretty, that's a pretty new idea compared to half of my kids are going to die before the age of 10. And I have a very big farm and Merlin's not saying this to be mean. Merlin is saying this because this is just how it was. You, when we were still doing it,
of course, everybody, everybody agrees. Agriculture is the biggest mistake in human history, but like we, that's ruined everything. But once you had subsistence agriculture, people, most of America used to farm. And then eventually most of America was involved in the farming industry. But it used to be that everybody was a farmer except for a few people, because that's how you would stay alive. And if you had a bad crop of beans that year, you died. If half your kids died from cholera, sorry, no beans this year. So I'm not trying to say the kids were worthless, but that whole idea of like each one of these is a special precious angel.
my my grandmother had i want to say two of her siblings die in the in the in the uh right before world war ii or sorry world war one rather but you follow what i'm saying i got just this whole idea of like you know there are people who would like to again to use our word of the day to cleave to a much older idea of the value of life and it's a much different idea of what you're allowed to and expected to control. We get to decide how many kisses we give to our precious angel,
but I'm going to mostly stay out of the way with that kid's decisions in life. Whereas other people might say, my kid gets zero kisses, but I have a very clear idea of what they will be doing until the day they die, which is they will be out in that field where I'm working, where we're all going to die. Because that's what we do. We farm till we die. That's what we do. And I cannot afford inter-gender boob touching if it's going to do anything to hurt my beans. I just can't do it.
AlexWell, not just your beans, but your other sweet, precious angels who made it to toddlerhood. I don't know.
MerlinEustace of all my sons, I feel I despise you the least. No kidding.
Speaker APoor Eustace. he just wants to dance challenge
Merlinchallenge this week is mine that is to try task paper and also you're dropping a lot of get get uh talk in this it sounds like you're getting too
AlexOh, I mean, not really. I'm just interested in, I mean, I never really learned. I'm interested. I, you know, as a person with a vagina, I never did a lot of pushing. But no, I never.
MerlinGet this thing out of me. Boing.
AlexSee, see, I am yucking. I am yucking someone's that is not my yum it's someone else's I find it yuck I don't I find it yuck
MerlinI'm sorry I don't know why I asked you that we're already off topic hey did you try task paper and what did you think
AlexI think task paper is fine but Merlin what is task paper
Merlinwell you know we can keep this short
AlexBut no one else lets you talk about task paper, and I want you to talk about task paper.
MerlinOh, I told one Dan Benjamin, I told him on Tuesday I'm taking two things off his plate because it's always two plates with me. I'm taking task paper off his plate and putting it on yours, and I have already taken VS Code and get off his plate and put it on Squidward's, although you're welcome to sup off his plate as well.
AlexOh, is this the one with the porn? I see that was a yuck. to me so i peaced out of that episode um yeah definitely not a productivity podcast episode
Merlinsorry i don't know there's a lot of spilling seed in productivity uh i brought it up last week on the after show where i uh i again i felt very imbued i felt like howard beal in uh network i think i had a messianic week last week i made a big messianic um but um i brought it up with you because i was talking about what i find appealing about task paper in particular. And again, it's not that I'm here to advocate for task paper, especially to the exclusion of other things. I'm just using it as a sort of a guide, a jumping off point to say like
on the one hand, like this approach to task management really suits my life and my brain, my brain style and my lifestyle right now. But also it is, yes, partly to say, well, one way to find out if this might be for you is to try these kinds of things. Here's enough to at least get you started at the most basic level you can think of task paper as a syntax it's a plain you get a plain text format for a file and the basic idea and you you could even do this in dumb text you could do this you could do this in the 40s and it would still work and the idea is it's
really only there's basically four types of things in a task paper document you got projects tasks tags and notes and without getting too deep in the weeds those just depend on how the lines begin and mostly are they indented, you know, not actually indented, the invention is not required except for folding. A lot of the functionality of what you do with TaskPaper then comes out of the app that you're using, the app in which you're doing TaskPaper. And the way that I put it, that might be frustrating to John Gruber,
Jesse Grosjean or anybody else is that I think of TaskPaper as being Markdown for my to-do list. Like in the same sense that Markdown is a very is a to me still a brilliant subset of things that you would do in html how can i make that even faster except for john ziracusa even faster to do that's html like that can turn into html or from html right like i don't i use h1 a lot more than acronym for example we're back to that
uh photoshop problem right there's a handful of things like and i just just spoiler alert i use ul's unordered lists about a thousand times more than anything else that's the main thing i do in markdown is unordered lists but you don't have to call them that because all that is it's either an asterisk or a dash and a space and now it's a list item well guess what our buddy task paper a dash and a space and then some typing it's a task that is the titular task and you're in the paper and so um anyway i just thought it'd be interesting for you to try i didn't know if it
be right for what you do. The way that I will hopefully save this in your estimation or in your eyes is always remember at any point when you're feeling overwhelmed by your system or parts of your system at any point, even if you're just getting ready to pack for a weekend trip, always remember test paper is always there to just be basically a piece of paper for today, which is so powerful. It's just that I've made that piece of paper about my life a day at a time. But yeah, test paper. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. This is not going to be useful to anybody. It's not done. Daylight, dollar short.
It'll be in notes, but on GitHub, I put together a tiny little
Alexpackage. You did?
MerlinIt's already in notes. I'm going to flip through my package. Did you see I started writing an introduction I didn't finish?
AlexYeah. Well, oh, I thought I also just didn't finish reading it.
MerlinI did the read me. I looked at the read. It's a lot of work to do these things and have it make sense. Part of my job used to be writing documentation and writing blah blah text. And I found it so difficult but in a really useful way. Like you really, because like part of our approach was probably a name for this, probably some school of development, but we got eventually got to the point where we're like writing documentation while the stuff was being developed. You know, the idea being that like, we're not just, yeah, you could take this finished thing at the end,
but is there a way that we could be documenting it as we go? Almost the way like in Web 2.0, you start with the API before the website. Anyway, I find it very invigorating to have to do that, but it's difficult for me. Blah, blah, text and documentation are hard. Anyway, that's up on GitHub. You can grab my configuration files if you want. Just give you basics to get started. You can grab a style sheet that's not very good, but you can have that. A sample document, similar to what Alex was talking about last week. And then eventually, maybe I'll write an introduction for it.
AlexIt is very good. What is good? What a wonderful sentence.
MerlinWhat is good? I'll tell you what is good. What's good? To drive your enemy before you to hear the lamentations of their women? You've never seen the movie Conan?
AlexNo, no.
MerlinJames Earl Jones. His name is Thulsa Dune. Oh, really? Which is one of the great names.
AlexOh, that is really good.
MerlinLorna Dune is a kind of cookie. Brigadoon is a Scottish city. Schmigadoon is an Apple TV show that looks like it had a budget of almost $40.
AlexOh, no. Is that the musical one? I was on...
MerlinYeah, I've tried it twice. I'm glad people like it It feels like it's something I should like It has Kristen Chenoweth Speaking of I hope you're happy Am I right Have you ever tried Defying Gravity Be honest Have you tried Defying Gravity
AlexDig Dig
MerlinWhen you meet the wizard The
AlexThe reason I wanted
Speaker AYou're going to be popular
AlexThe reason I wanted to try task paper is because about like a week and a half ago i lost my mind oh no i like to say i mislaid my mind i mean i i i i know it's here somewhere i leave it about um often so this wasn't
Merlina new thing it's like it's like you're uh like you're readers right you're reading glasses you're
Alexalways leaving them leaving them places like like in the movie uh hook where one of the adults lost
Merlinboys has lost his literal marbles just so you know in this episode you did just say it's like in hook where one of the adult lost boys it sounds like he lost some boys does anyone see my boys
AlexPeter Pan
MerlinSmee, where are my boys?
AlexYou quoted a movie from 1931 People have seen Hook and I believe my arch nemesis
Merlinword journey Oh, you're saying that Hook is about a child murderer? No I
Alexlost my mind since I had too many lists
MerlinIf you want Tink to live, you're going to have to clap Everyone clap you know laurie why are you in this movie in black and white i'm here i'm here for father the st bernard i love her falla no follow is uh franklin roosevelt's dog was franklin
Alexroosevelt's dog mary dale and a roosevelt's dog i haven't made the noise so much in a
Merlinin in many many years but you were a good sport and you tried it it's not going to be an upheaval to your whole system but did you notice anything interesting about
Alexas we say trying task paper i it is it has already been a big upheaval to my system my uh qualm with it i guess was was just it uh it's really lightweight but there's no mobile app
Merlinfor i mean which is why i still get so much jazz from my pals for having editorial sitting in the
Alexdock of my phone sitting in the dock of my phone and and it like if if you have this as sort of a legacy thing then it totally makes sense uh so i used tasks paper but tasks paper wow i used it and i just didn't uh i ended up using it less even in the like first two days because it was on my
Merlinlaptop and i didn't want to go to my laptop well as long as we're here let me ask and this is not I'm not chiding and I'm not asking you to, you know, there's that thing that happens. We've talked about, which is if there's something that's beloved by all the people you love and respect and you silently aren't that into it, there will come a day when you have to defend why you're not into the thing. I'm trying not to do that here, or I'm not trying to do that here. I thought you liked to ask people. No, but, and so is it, was it an instance of, I, again, I tend to think about things.
I think about like kitchen tools. Like I don't think there's that many people in life that are anti, sieve there are almost definitely people who are not many people who are anti-knife they might be anti-knife violence but they don't want knives removed from every kitchen in the world because actually we do really need them even if you have a commercial grade meat slicer like eric roberts in um in gray's anatomy what a terrible season do you not operate in a commercial grade meat slicer yeah um you still need a knife and it's it's something where like if i were coming at the
reason i say this seemingly um random thing is like if i came at you and just said oh hey look i've got these knives i think you really need to use you might be like well i don't actually even cook that much it would be crazy for me to keep bugging you about that is it a case of the things that you need this for are better someplace else probably at least because of the existing system like where did it fall short i know i know part of the answer must be that this is by design not a do-it-all automated iOS system.
That's part of it, right? This must really feel like you're just... It's like me using VI. Like, I'll go over here and use it for a while to learn it. But, like, that's the only way that I'm ever going to open this is because I'm just... I have a curiosity.
AlexIt... Right. Well, it is really kind of a piece of paper. And the it was just more so that the specific like syntax. Great. But there's oh, God, I'm I'm sorry, Electron. But I've been I I actually just made a big old task paper of my life. And you did did the GTD basically with task.
MerlinOh, gosh, that's a lot to ask that little guy. uh well because then you got to start doing hierarchies and you got to start sorting and i think task paper really works best as like maybe two levels and almost definitely items that will fit all the way on screen if it's really long i mean for myself anyway that would
Alexbe a lot to try and manage with this little guy but i well and that was sort of the uh issue non-issue and i i got david and alan would be upset actually since it wasn't true gtd because it was just a a brain dump and then putting the things into the relative projects and anything that it's like i need to slash want to do this but it's not i i don't need a reminder
Merlinfor it. Yeah, because there's a lot of stuff that seems critically important or enjoyable to the way that you work. And I'll couple off the dome, is you really do like doing stuff on iOS. And although there is, there's a past called, there's an app called TaskMator, there might still be one called Test Paper, but like they ain't good. And I've had data loss with some of them. But you're right. I mean, like on the one hand, it's great that you can open any text file and just use it, but that does then limit the functionality of what you can use.
But the other part of this seems to me, like you love iOS, you are also very into, it sounds slight to call it automation, but you seem very interested in figuring out enough about how you work and how you'd like to work that you can introduce automation in canny places. Like I see you still doing the thing where you add items to the challenge document. And like, again, this is not really super conducive to that. And in fact, the thing that I find valuable about task paper might be precisely the thing that makes it feel like a toy to you, which is I like the way that I think of it, again, as a pocket rather than an attic.
I'm very attracted to this thing where like, I did mention this last week, but if I can't do it in task paper, I don't want to do it because I've decided this is the map for my territory. I don't need an incredibly detailed life-size map of California in order to, I'm not saying you're saying that, but like in my case, I just want a thumbnail sketch that keeps things in motion and where I'm not going to be storing stuff up. But with that said, you know, where this might end up being useful, if you're ever curious, again,
And I find it very useful, for example, like me going, okay, my office is a little messier than I would like. How would I feel good? What would make me feel good about changing my office? And that's where I get into something much closer. Remember we talked last week about outlining and markdown and how you, at least for people like you and me, I think we disappear into this tab, return, tab, and you just like you go into the zone. And I'm thinking, I'm brainstorming, but also just using the very lightest of structures.
In markdown, I'm creating structure as I write, and I'm moving things around. I got those key commands, moving the lines up and down. And that very much becomes the map and the territory with my brain, I guess, being the territory. But if you have to do something like say, oh, man, this weekend, I really want to clean the house. Talk about natural planning. It's so great to just be able to go clean house, colon, return tab, kitchen cleanup, colon, whatever, right? And that makes it so easy. And with the folding inside of the Mac app, that two that's really stand out, house cleanup or office cleanup. And also, like I said, travel list for packing. I found it extremely useful to have a, I think it never goes deeper than two levels, right? I've got general sections, maybe three levels, but I've got general sections for when I travel, the week before I leave, the day we leave.
and then you know generic sort of packing which is all the big part of the list and then things to do after we come back uh and things to remember for next time and i reuse that and add to that each time and it builds up this patina of experience where i learn more each time that i do it title oh oh that's good you should capture that please um do you know i'm saying in the sense of like well a week before i leave who cares well aren't there things you're gonna need before you leave especially when you got a baby and it's like well we want to make sure that we've you know
obviously things like diapers but also things like snacks for the plane do you want do you need to like bring extra wrapping paper because it's christmas like think about make yourself think about all of that before it's too late and like one of the most basic ones sorry is like is there any shit i need to get from amazon that has to arrive before we leave well let's just say the obvious. It's really smart, I feel, to think about that before you leave. If that occurs to you after you've left, you failed. The whole point is the list is there to jog your memory about stuff you
should know better this time. And then on the day of, right, this is the funny one, you'll remember, RIP to our cat. So that's stuff like turn down the water heater, check that the windows are locked, open all the doors find the cat it's always the last task is find the cat because don't leave the cat in a closet for eight days and that really helps me do we have our passports well or our you know our ids are plane tickets well then you do my old trick i think it might have my friend phil every single person in the group holds their plane ticket or passport to their forehead everybody
looks at each other and you say i agree that we all have a passport now let's go if you do that with concert tickets you'll never show up at a concert with no tickets again that's one where you might find it useful i'm sorry i talked so much i get excited about this
Alexstuff no i well and i i almost interrupted except uh no no no no no i agree with everything you were saying my only you're so busy drowning me and i breathed i'm so sorry no i was it's it is what we were talking about before i just i am using a slightly different type like i'm using a spork and uh like the thing that i loved about task paper was the that you can collapse
everything because i already have those running that outline menu is pretty powerful and like
Merlinonce you get the outline menu the outline menu at first you open you're like wait what are all these options this is wild like collapse all collapse this level what are some of these expand items, expand items completely, collapse items, collapse items completely. But once you learn those key commands, it's so fast to fold and unfold. And forgive me for talking down to y'all. If you don't know, folding is just this extremely powerful idea, you know, comes from coding and any kind of outlining. But if you've got at different levels, you get a little show collapse arrow that lets you decide how much of
something you want to see. And like, this is so handy, for example, in HTML, we're like, there's times where all I really want to do is look at the head header and the footer like and if I turn off everything inside of html body that makes it so much easier especially when you've got stuff like you know bracket pairing all that kind of stuff and this is a very simple implementation that won't get in your way you might never even notice that there's a little dot that you can
Alexclick on to do this in the gui it's too small I don't oh I agree it's I would like bigger drag targets i'd like to have giant giant drag targets for this which you can do in a spoilers you can do in obsidian so that's mostly i basically did task paper in obsidian we might need to do
Merlininteresting we might need to do obsidian again because i i'm still paying for all the things
Alexand it sounds like you're pretty gay bones for it i'm well i'm gay i'm gay for that and uh drafts like drafts is where well i'm probably just going to throw all of it into obsidian i want
Merlinsomebody to just make everything for me in drafts and give it to me i just get i get caught up in the whole making of things in drafts because my all my alarm but if i'd had this app 15 years ago i'd be living in a different world just where i am now i'm like as much as i love drafts there's so much i need to do to get it to what i need it to do i'm like oh i'll go play with rosemary's um you know task paper thing or i'll go play with uh you know a thought asylums like seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams but like i just get in and i look at it like oh man i just
i just want someone to make this for me and give it to me i really i need to just not get involved
Alexin the making of this but you love that you're young no no no no well okay i was in i i am into it to a certain point but the whole mind losing was i had all of my projects in such a they were all sequential and did not need to be like i've got oh and this gets us back to your whole like i want to get out of hierarchies and lists thing yes i will not and the i didn't like um how i had
ordered everything and just pulled serendipity out of my entire day and so now really i just have like i feel like a robot a little bit not in a good way yeah i that's the thing i really enjoy usually mostly being a robot uh but unfortunately there's still a little bit of humanity uh up in there so this provides as long as you can still feel that you're really doomed yeah i know you'll always be a victim of the flesh god damn it but the so i uh was still having the problem though
of like i literally can't like it's still in task paper like just visually it's still a list and even like with everything collapsed and i'm like i don't how can i can i make it so there's like uh like a like almost like a mind map and you can sort of but it like i just want to this
Merlinis the wrong week for this for no other reason than this is the week you're trying to get away
Alexfrom exactly what this thing is good at well no it's it's good at it or what i want really it did what I wanted except with its simplicity, but...
MerlinWell, for example, whereas OmniFocus is, I think, I don't know if they still publicly on main say this, OmniFocus was designed to do GTD. It started out as being called kinkless GTD. It was for doing GTD. And whether or not there was a point where I think for business development reasons, they all agreed and shook hands and said, okay, yeah, I'm not sure who paid whom what, But David Allen said for a while, yes, OmniFocus, I'm on board.
Test paper, I feel like, was very much not designed for that. Because as I said, with those advanced searches and saved searches, you can kind of slap together a lot of OmniFocus-like things that support GTD. Especially things like, let's say, for example, a waiting on context that's functional. Meaning a start date that's functional. Stuff that you hide and show, these multiple window views. but I also feel like that is very much that's like experimenting with needle drugs like you are really you need to walk if you do too much of that stuff you need to walk away and go to a
different app because you're going to drive yourself fucking crazy trying to do all of that powerful stuff in a text document unless that makes you happy but like there are better apps things there's a lot of people love things these days I haven't looked at it in years but things sounds like it's really matured and become a thing that people enjoy using but it doesn't get in the way whereas but but but also like dude i mean i don't want to get ahead of ourselves but do you feel like at this point you're do you like what's the direction you're going with obsidian
in addressing these goals we've talked about yes because it's you're done but you feel like you're getting further along with getting out of this hierarchy and dearth of serendipity yeah i i
Alexhaven't i've barely been on twitter all week i couldn't help it though this morning i'm almost off it totally at this point yeah this the uh the whole well i don't know the whole music grift um the crypto music stuff uh i i don't know andy bio tweet and then everybody else tweeted about it and
Merlinit was a little bit delicious oh this is the thing where people are claiming nfts for people's stuff
Alexincluding people like we know oh yeah the um there was this company that like scraped spotify of every song, like every just even like audiobooks and we're like hey, you can, we're going to mint these and we're going to sell these. Which is like, and I
Merlinstill, I'm very, very, I'm not proud to say, but I will say I still refuse to learn what NFTs mean. But is that sort of the equivalent of saying, hey look, we don't own this, but we'd be happy to sell you a receipt of this. Isn't that kind of what we're doing with an NFT?
Alexoh yes and no um if you are interested in nfts i no longer want to know that uh because oh god i i i asked the question i was just asking the question i feel like crypto keeps you up at
Merlinnight i'll call things crypto what about web 3 are we excited it was called web 3 oh god it literally
Alexi literally give myself uh headaches because i i don't like it um everybody though if you're interested watch line goes up it's it's uh very good or i'll put what is line goes up uh alex and where would i find that it's a documentary on youtube and uh hooray it's it's free and if you want to know what my feelings about why this is bad that uh is great crypto or nfts or what so
Merlinuh both um all of the above oh my god i was so that guy the other night because i found myself i this is just so you know just to be very clear this is not a person that i want to be But I did find myself explaining, Merlin-splaining, Merlin-mansplaining to my lady friend that there is an important difference between blockchain, cryptocurrency, and say Bitcoin versus Dogecoin or whatever. But that does not change the fact that as interesting as blockchain is, and you know what, let's find this for notes.
Glenn Fleischman on the talk show probably 35 years ago was the first time I ever started to feel like I might be able to understand blockchain and Bitcoin. It's a very, you know, Glenn's great at this stuff. Very lucid explanation. But, you know, the blockchain is fascinating and has its uses. Having that be the basis for a currency may not be the greatest idea unless you want to die with a polar bear.
AlexOr trying to turn. digital art into make it make it scarce but but isn't that true though i mean like we're talking
Merlinabout different and now add to that mix now i guess i'm gonna finally have to learn what okay line goes up i see a monkey face there's a face of a monkey line goes up the problem with nfts by folding ideas yeah okay cool i will check this out we will put it in notes it um and i'll put
Alexthe article by edward oswego jr that is a shorter version if you don't want to watch an hour and a half documentary and if you don't two hours and 18 minutes booyah oh was it is it too yeah it's uh
Merlinit's really good though it's got monkeys yeah that's the nft monkey that i see in memes about
Alexmonkey mean that's the yeah oh god well this was uh i went on a i think what is it in pitch perfect
Merlinyeah i think it's in pitch perfect any kind of which would say make good choices
Alexbut uh yeah i i did the thing of i just wanted to under oh god this is a side tangent i i wanted to do the thing of i just want to try to understand why people are into nfts just like my joe rogan journey a couple years ago of like i just want to know why because it was one of those things where I felt like it was disgusting and it just repulsed me and NFTs like repulse me.
And I'm trying to I tried to figure out why. And the answer was, all right, we just our values are unfortunately not aligned at all. Well, unfortunately is a generous word, but it's like, yeah, your values and the values
Merlinof people that are involved in NFTs, you mean?
AlexYeah, yeah. Crypto, I mean, it just, I will continue to be open-minded, but I feel like I know enough about non-fungible tokens and the ecosystem around it to just continue to, it makes me want to puke. Um, not like, like if you individually are now rich from an NFT, like good on you, but please stop. Uh, okay. But lists, uh, basically I was like, oh, test papers.
Yes, this is perfect. It's getting me away from the really, really powerful OmniFocus stuff, but giving me just enough with those filters.
MerlinOmniFocus can be a pretty hungry beast. I do feel like it really wants you to do a lot of stuff. And at the times in my life or career, whatever you want to call it, there's been times when that's been like just about a lifesaver.
Speaker ARight.
MerlinBut then other times it's a lot of beasts to feed. Suddenly I feel like I have a lot of pet rabbits and they're all extremely sensitive.
AlexThis is the first time in literally a decade that OmniFocus has not worked for me.
MerlinAnd again, just so I know, are we still talking about your program? We're talking about getting away with the serendipity part. Yes. That when you use the app properly, and we all love that app, when we're using it properly, you do feel like somebody's draining your serendipity.
AlexAnd, well, not the someone being me, or at least right now, because I am essentially reworking how I work because all of my jobs have become very, very different. and the only issue really I had with Task Paper was the collapsing it or folding it is too hard because the touch target is just so
small. It's so small.
MerlinYou're the key command, you monster.
AlexNo, but that's, well, okay. Then here is the thing though. The key commands require a it to be sequential i need to move down or up which it sounds bonkers you cannot keep this okay
Merlini'm gonna i'm gonna cut to the chase also we're running very long i'm gonna cut to the chase here fucking alex will you in a way that honors your life and privacy will you is there any way you could show me what the fuck you're talking about by showing it to me in obsidian like here's here's where i brought back my my good friend serendipity and and kismet and they're kissing is there a way that you could show us uh me and the listeners that in a way that you'd be comfortable with
Alexin fact you can find it on well not right now uh when you uh when the show is published it will be on github and if not everyone can shame me um but so what happened like that i think you like that
Merlinwell uh i think you enjoy the attention and and you internalize the shame and i do do beat beat me
AlexUm, okay. So the, or not beat me off, but, uh, honestly, all I needed, I was like, I just want to randomize the things that should be done, but I do not need to do them at this moment. And there, uh, Kathy introduced a friend of the show, Mrs. Soup. Uh, was like, oh, Hey, someone in the discord, um, lateral, I, I, their thing, their blog is called lateral productivity. I'll put it in notes, but they just have this thing called Dyson doing, which they have a numbered list.
Sure. It doesn't lose suction. And if a number, they're like, okay, so in order to get things done, what I do is list all the things that I, that I am doing. And then I roll a D20 and, or however many, and that, whatever it lands on, that is what I do. So I have been, I just have.
MerlinYou have a 5% chance of it being any item from this list. Well, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But you're doing some kind of dice. You're doing a DM thing to derive a number. You're introducing entropy. And you're having a little fun. Dice are fun.
AlexWell, I'm not literally doing that. I just have my list from Obsidian go into a shortcut, and it just spits out a random task. And then I'm like, I shall do that now. And I want to make it.
MerlinAnd when you tick it off, it gets ticked off in Obsidian.
AlexOh, well, I am just like, ah, that thing, I will do the thing. And then I tick it off in Obsidian because I immediately do it. That's the idea is each of these things. I guess this is a little GTD-ish. But each item, each task, it should be like, what, either five minutes or less or you immediately get into it. like um and but the thing i was running into was a lot of the um stuff for my jobby job it will require a link to something or an attachment or whatever um and for my uh like setting up uh when
we were setting up our tv and now well i need to change some you know in syracuse we're talking about this on rectifs it was a very good episode um like i need to change out some hdmi cables
Merlinso i they're killing him that was that the one was that the one we talked about uh qd oleds yes that was the most recent one i'm excited for the visual well coming up tomorrow we've got john's body update no yay the body and oh body and appliance update yeah but uh for that i i want
Alexto open up the manual right away so i want to you know have it linked to the manual which is um in when I was, you know, dumping all of the, I hate that. Why? I was putting together all of the bullshit I need to do. I was like, all right, if I'm going to do the big brain dump, I want to immediately, like, I guess it is a little bit of a review. Like if I am going to put it on a piece
Merlinof paper. Well, yeah. I mean, it sounds like you're, you're, you don't want to have to go. I mean, there's a reason when we do mow the lawn, there's a reason we do it in rows so that we can see where we've already neatly mowed. I mean, maybe that's not related, but it seems that what you're saying here is like, I shouldn't have to go through this six times. If I know I can drag a manual onto this and have it be associated with this task, why wouldn't I do it now?
AlexRight. And it's, it's just, you know, the, the deep link is there and then, oh, cool. The mail is there too. And then, um, now my switch and, um, and Apple TV are hooked up to, um, to the real TV. Oh, I love my TV. I love my TV. I see it every night. I see it every fucking night.
MerlinOh man. I love my TV. I don't regret. I regret nothing.
AlexNeither. I, oh, this is, see, we're going long. There's too much, but what I am, what I am doing is literally now just, uh, I do have things in, I do not have things. I have tasks in, um, reminders and those are the recurring tasks that we talked about. Yeah. Yeah. Which is,
Merlinwhich it's really oddly well suited for in a lot of ways. And it's just, to me, reminders is just annoying enough to use. It's exactly annoying enough. Like I don't like using reminders. Best thing I've done in the last two months is make key commands and key. Well, I've talked about this on Syracuse, but I have key commands for command option shift R, command option shift N, which mean that when I'm in Safari, it just makes it so fast to create a reminder and have it be associated with that page. i find that incredibly helpful like wait what oh so like if you're on your mac and you hit the
share arrow and then you click on reminder whatever page you're on is populated as the link for that so if there's a thing you want to do later on the web you know that's just the fastest way i know of to do that or creating a note or adding to a note is very like over the holidays when we were picking out you know tv shows and movies to watch as a family uh it was really handy command option shift n uh again keyboard maestro and that um just throws oh okay
Alexthat's what i was all right i was like wait that's not i'm doing it it's not working no you
Merlingotta make it make it it's a really basic it's a really basic one how do you know okay but like even if you're not doing strict gtd one concept in gtd that i imagine you still observe because i don't know how you don't you know there's the two views of your work you can look at it through projects or through contacts is the way he puts it put put differently um doing your dyson um what how are you able to say uh what things are due today for jobby job how are you able to say
Alexwhat are things only that i can do at house how does that work here is well this is why right now OmniFocus isn't good for me. Nothing that needs to be done outside of my house is requires anything more than reminders. Like I could get into the weeds and do like kitchen, desk. And I literally had that like kitchen, desk, bed, couch. And so the reminder serves as the reminder.
Merlinwhen the reminder goes off it makes a bloop you know to do it and that's because you spend a lot of time at home that's that is your default sort of if you like context that is yes i do not have
Alexcontext and uh tags any more like i i just i do not need them right now i can't even tell you how
Merlinoften if i didn't have an office i would i would hardly use them at all uh office and house are my most used errands probably after that and that i mean but that's to me that's valuable because then again using saved searches and etc i can say show me everything that's not done that can be done at the office and the most fiddly i get with that is as you saw i have a section called house to office office the house because a lot of way i have to do is take this to there there to here that kind of thing but i agree with you i mean i think did and and we've we've kidded not kidded
about the shit i used to do where i had at house used to be when i was first in the gtd this is not david allen's fault this is all my fault but and inside of at house i had like at office instead of office i had at desk inside of desk and it's like wait a minute is that is each one of those really like a unique thing when is there a time that you how often do you need to see just at desk like how is i mean is it really that i mean maybe sometimes i'll indulge myself a little bit by saying like chores or like the garage because that is like a whole thing that involves
two flights of stairs but no i mean that's again though with one reason just in not defense but one reason i do love all of this is it can be a very sort of on the fly thing a lot of times all i want to do is just it's like almost like you i got trash cans come up so often in my life but like as long as the trash gets in the can you're good if you could throw it from across the room and make a three-pointer that's great if you're just going to do a layup into the garbage can right next to you that's fine but that's basically how you need to be thinking about this stuff i know that's not very fun or sexy, but like, you know, like I say, it's, it's like I say with, you know,
organizing your emails, like, like alphabetizing and recycling, like how quick can you get all of this stuff done? Like, how do you get to where you're in a groove of like getting this stuff done and making the three pointers, but then also, as you say, having the opportunity of serendipity, which I think can mean lots of things, including like, what's something beneficial that I wouldn't
Alexrealize if I was just the slave of lists all day yeah I have a question for you because I just realized I think all of my contexts are just locate like literally like locations and as in geotags like if I you know um when I had like in and I used to have this in OmniFocus but now with reminders like when I leave it just tells me the things that need to happen like it's a uh remind me tomorrow to go to Walgreens.
MerlinAnd when you enter this geofenced area, you get a reminder to do the thing. Yeah.
AlexYeah. So, and because the things I do are so simple and there's so few places that for me right now, for me, that works, but it only works because I can shout those things into the air. And that's why I don't really like task paper because I can't, I didn't have an inbox just to throw something.
MerlinThat makes sense. That totally makes sense. I don't know if David Allen would agree with this. I don't frankly care, but if you're talking about whether you call it tags, whether you call it context, whatever you call it, whatever you call it, and you can feel free to disregard my thought on this, but I am going to give you my thought on this. And it's going to be very unsatisfying. A context should represent a nearly unique opportunity or limitation.
And in some cases, Cause like I could say a unique, but like a nearly unique, like sometimes you need stuff from a drug store, but there are drug store sections inside of the grocery store. So like, I don't think it's insane to have a subcontact. If you're in, if you're doing OmniFocus, why not utilize it? You can have something be, if you put something, that means if you put something under drug store, it will show up at drug store or it will show up at grocery store. I don't think that's insane. Why does it have to be nearly unique? Well, it would be nice to say it's got to be unique. What's an example of a unique opportunity
or a unique limitation? A unique limitation is my wife is in the room and I can talk to her. That's why the important people in your life can and should be contexts. And in my understanding of GTV, like Matt is a context. You can't talk to Matt when Matt's not there unless you've got telepathy. But what do we also mean by, so that's a, that's a unique limitation, a unique opportunity is I'm going to be in Walnut Creek for the weekend. And that's the only time for two years
that I'll get to go to this comic book store. That's not critically important, but it's all important if you care about your life, like writing it down and making sure it's something you can review on a regular basis is not a terrible idea. I think I'm talking myself back into GTD. But to me, a nearly unique opportunity or limitation is the way to think of it. And the nearly unique part, I think, can end up being the most interesting and leads me to things like for myself, I did learn I'm not getting a lot of value over even needing to think about whether this goes in
printer house desk or office like even the the just barely existent cognitive load of having to pass through that unnecessary filter it's just stupid it's just at house at house there's at office there's at errands and do I need more sophistication than that no but if I do I got places I can do it like reminders, like OmniFocus, right? I mean, does that make sense? Like if you
find yourself, and again, and I'm not criticizing here, but like the whole like starting with a mental dump and doing that with a huge document, you know, that OmniFocus being in my bones part, and this is again, not OmniFocus, not GTD's problem, but it's an attractive nuisance because I'm going to want to feed the machine. I'm going to want to go like give, bring lunch to the Rancor all day long of like, ooh, ooh, ooh, thing to do. Is this a project? Project, where does this go? Ba-da-ba-da-ba. Instead, just go like, what do I need to do to be done today? I need to do this. I need to do that.
I need to call the hardware store about these two foot by four foot covers for my thing. Do you really need to do that? No, actually, I don't. I don't think I'll take it off today. It doesn't matter one way or another. That's me. Everybody's different. But like, I do love, when we talk about serendipity or whatever, I do just also love the idea that there's room for humanity in a system where you're not trying to become a robot. because we're really not there.
AlexThat's something that, like, as you're saying, those are all things that I used to do, but my worlds, both pandemic-wise and jobby-job-wise, now I suddenly have agency, but also I suddenly am like, maybe I should do things that involve leaving my apartment more, but I don't know. That'll happen eventually. that's i'll drag you out of there when you're dead well and if i cover with cats and newspaper
let's say i have something that like um like today i um or rather this is i've created my own deadline to pay you in quinn today so that is oh thank you i love money that's so nice of you thank you but that is so that is like one thing in which it shows up at at the top it's very
Merlinimportant that you do that i would put that in omni focus flag it three flags make it bigger
Alexchange your style sheet make it real real real big well no that's the thing i literally do that well yeah just say pay merlin and quinn time alone the no no that's that's the thing is if though if that is up there saying pay me first is what i'm saying okay then that's then that is a thing that
Merlindid you see on their youtube channel the header on their youtube channel says cut that cut that
Alexcut that yes it's very it's very good um but as uh oh god what was a oh man and it goes in and so paying paying paying us but that goes in obsidian no um or i'm sorry yes but it is with it's it's technically to do list like the only reason i'm using obsidian is just it is like the wrapper to make it work better with my mind but what is most important okay so much i now know so much less
Merlinthat I knew one minute ago. Okay, I'll show. What the fuck? You gotta show it to me.
AlexAll right, all right.
MerlinNo, I'm imagining it being like some kind of like French cave drawings. Like I'm trying to imagine how you not have a list of things that are in lines.
AlexI do, but the way I choose what to do is like a role of a digital die. Except for those no more than three things that I must, must do. And those are the recurring, those are the recurring tasks or something that is, if it is a one-off.
MerlinYou can get a new to-do and do to make sure you do the thing you need to do. No, no, no, no. I will put these. By the way, it's pronounced the Taoist. But if you make a new to-dao and then you go in and you have a do item about what to do, shoo-be-do-be-doo.
Do you know what I'm saying?
AlexNo, I don't. I like the if I have more things that I need to finish by the end of the day, then something has gone wrong. Because realistically, it's like each of those things is so critical that probably will always take longer than I think it will. like yelling at a chase, not more like pleading or the it's like today.
I need to shovel the driveway by 3 PM or Matt has nowhere to park to get home.
MerlinOh, I see. I see. I see. Okay.
AlexSo, and, and, or rather I need to start at 3 PM because, and if it,
Merlinyou need to move some stuff around. Well, no, you need to like thread a needle, right? We're talking about snow here.
AlexMm-hmm.
Merlinum because like there's accumulation of snow but you also can't do it i'm guessing you can't do it too early because then it'll snow more and undo your efforts yep which is why 3 p.m is the start
Alexdate and yes that is not a project because i had a project which of preparing for the for the snow
Merlinbe careful a lot of a lot of older people have heart attacks when they're shoveling be careful
Alexout there i i really hope i don't um but the especially because all the emergency rooms are filled um but yeah but but i don't want to say obviously but in like gtd that is not um you know like take care of the storm that is one specific thing like uh that is separate from the time i got the shovel separate from the time i got the salts and separate from the time i put the air tags on the shovel and the salts because i always forget where they are but now i don't because they
Merlingo bleep bloop um i'm gonna keep an eye on you alex this is sounding a lot like some phases i've been through i'm getting away from it right i just i became like the i became like the the productivity otaku like i would just like force myself into into like a chamber with headphones like malcolm like um like uh you know clockwork orange eye openers just don't get don't get too crazy is what i'm asking you don't say crazy anymore it sounds don't get too diverse
don't fuck your sister yeah i mean unless but if you had her fixed first and it really if you have a sister please like bob barker says haven't spayed or neutered