May TV and movies: highlight was definitely Sword of the Stranger movie (also Kaiji, Champloo, Civil War)

Kaiji S1 — rewatched for first time in many years, I forgot the plot moves soooo slowwww but it’s such a great premise and the real bright spot imo is the s2 storyline where he’s in the prison work camp (degenerate gambler but he stands up for losers but he himself is kinda a loser but he’s a real genius at spotting scams but he still makes idiotic life decisions)

Samurai Champloo — also rewatched for first time in years after seeing it recommended on YT; music + style + art are better than I remembered; but story was worse — too many side quests, not enough character growth / change, not enough progress towards a rather mediocre main storyline

Sword of the Stranger (2007 movie) — the best thing I’ve watched in months; amazing that it came out almost 20 years ago; great characters, great relationships, fast moving plot, fun historical elements but it’s kinda sad that so few Japanese anime have any nuanced depiction of Chinese whatsoever (though I suppose the same can be said for Chinese media depiction of Japanese)

Monsters by Gareth Edwards (2010) — creative low-budget flick; District 9 vibes; good editing, tension, cinematography, acting; but wanted monsters and scares and got very little of either

Civil War by Alex Garland (in theater) —- disturbing premise, with powerful cinematic moments; similar cast and vibes to his other work (eg, Devs, Annihilation, Ex Machina), including the emo soundtrack and melodramatic segues

Garouden (Netflix) — Baki-lite, I’d rate it 5/10 at best but honestly I watch any and every pvp fighting anime (including the BEST EVER Hajime no Ippo and Kengan Ashura); subpar on animation, fight technicals, character dev, plot, but at least the protag fights a giant malevolent bear…

Garouden

Health and fitness learnings for May: a 10 minute walk after a meal can reduce glucose response by 30-35%

Stop Eating All Day (and snacking your kids): Most Americans eat 11 times over a 15-hour period – this is stressful for the body; the body needs time for insulin and glucose to come down

The frequency of aerobic bouts seemed to be more important for their association with health outcomes than the overall duration of daily activity. Concordantly, recent research suggests that short bouts of physical activity can have a strong health-promoting effect

“Watching the news is how you stay on top of other people’s agendas. Taking a walk is how you stay on top of yours.” — Johnny Uzan

https://x.com/ChrisMasterjohn/status/1791625562466779494 — Creatine is needed to spread the impact of mitochondrial ATP production throughout the cell, including in the nucleus, where it is needed for DNA duplication, gene expression, and DNA repair.

10m walk after meal can reduce glucose response by 30-35% (source)

As basic as this sounds, full exhalations are seldom practiced. Most of us engage only a small fraction of our total lung capacity with each breath, requiring us to do more and get less. One of the first steps in healthy breathing is to extend these breaths, to move the diaphragm up and down a bit more, and to get air out of us before taking a new one in.

Meditation (mean rating = 5.8), bright lights in the morning (5), cold shower (4.7), and masturbation abstinence (4.1) also got impressive to pretty good ratings.

Side sleeping allow better glymphatic drainage. especially right side

Spermidine has most significant documented lifespan extension
-studied in naked molerats — don’t age because they produce enormous amounts of spermidine
-most naturally found in: beans; lettuce; wheat germ

This argues that ED and CVD are different manifestations of a systemic arterial damage and, due to the smaller diameter of penile arteries, ED occurs earlier than IHD, stroke or peripheral artery disease (PAD) with an equal extent of artery damage

Previous updates:

Excerpts from Slack founder’s essay “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” (adding to Personal Bible)

He wrote the essay to align and hype Slack employees pre-launch. Nuggets on user behavior, business strategy, and startup life.

Source: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

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The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.

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Or, they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities (e.g., sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps). It lets them think big and potentially be big.

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My favorite recent example is Lululemon: when they started, there was not a large market for yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories. They sold yoga like crazy: helping people find yoga studios near their homes, hosting free classes, sponsorships and scholarships, local ambassadors and training, etc. And as a result, they sold just under $1.4 billion worth of yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories in their most recent fiscal year.

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A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.

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It is very difficult to approach Slack with beginner’s mind. But we have to, all of us, and we have to do it every day, over and over and polish every rough edge off until this product is as smooth as lacquered mahogany.

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That’s it, thanks for reading.

Excerpts from “Acceleration of Addictiveness” by Paul Graham (adding to Personal Bible)

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

All below are copied verbatim:

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Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work

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Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook

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Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

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As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings

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We’ll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it

Excerpts from “Why Everything is Becoming a Game”: “We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs”

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-everything-is-becoming-a-game

All below are copied verbatim:

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Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

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We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs. Pigeons don’t care much about respect, but for us it’s a primary reinforcer, to such an extent that we can be made to desire arbitrary sounds that become associated with it, like praise and applause.

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Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave off this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, and chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy.

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Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.

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We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the new foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximize their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokemon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.

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On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.

On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to arrest or injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.

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First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones

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Second: choose hard games over easy ones

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Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones

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Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a rewar

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Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.