- Semi-dried banana strips.
- A cold shower on a hot day.
- self-gratitude: I did three loads of washing up for a sick friend.
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- Because the 2023 Hugo Awards were corrupted, Adrian Tchaikovsky has stated “I cannot consider myself-gratitude a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site.”
- The Proton Pass Plus password manager has had its price reduced by 50% because the company’s costs have gone down. I don’t use it, but stories like this and Tchaikovsky’s announcement give me hope for humanity.
- self-gratitude: I’ve been so consistent with practicing slow toe-touching stretches over the past many months that I can now put my palms flat on the floor with my legs straight. I’m ridiculously proud of this because for most of my life I haven’t been able to touch my toes at all.
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- i’m grateful my visit today went mostly peaceful.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i remembered to check the time for tomorrow’s appointment.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i walked a lot today.
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- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i immediately made a new goal for an orthopaedic exercise i need to do multiple times a day.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful that i made two phone calls today.
- i’m grateful that resetting a password turned out to be way less complicated than i feared. one simple, quick phone call did it! i love it when things work out like that
:)
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- The book Lisa grabbed me on Friday (Crypt, by Alice Roberts) was fascinating and had lots of stuff about archaeopathology.
- The next step on the grindy thing I need to do in FFXIV involves considerably less tedious gathering of materials. Woo!
- Thanks to Beeminder, I’m getting my email backlog and my chores backlog sorted.
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- A useful visit to my GP.
- self-gratitude: I booked a test promptly.
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- i’m grateful i smelled a little rain today.
- i’m grateful that i enjoyed tonight’s performance.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i got to work on time today.
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- A thank you email from a client, CCed to my manager.
- A silly joke at work cheered me up when I was feeling overwhelmed.
- self-gratitude: I’m being gentle with myself while I’m worrying about a few things.
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- Lisa helping me do a thing on FFXIV that’s unnecessarily tedious for stuff that’s meant to be fun.
- Everybody in our raid group is happy to do a particular thing together.
- Dinner will involve chorizo and cheese. I do love both these things.
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- i’m grateful i had a good workday.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i didn’t forget to reschedule an appointment.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i worked to get more buffer on most of my goals. that’s what i get for forgetting to schedule breaks for these upcoming uni days.
but at least i did okay today in preparation.^^
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- Arborists that I’ve been trying to book for weeks have finally settled on a visit tomorrow.
- self-gratitude: I tidied up the garden enough in time for them.
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- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i’m going to sleep early.
- i’m grateful i made good progress with my uni project today.
- i’m grateful our saturday course will be remote.
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After Thanksgiving I got the idea to resurrect an old Science Friday email list I had for picking a thing to be thankful for every Thursday. Thankful Thursdays, we call it. Or Thursgiving.
Today is the 14th Thursgiving, and it included 3 things to be thankful for so it finally occurred to me that I should make a gratitude journal entry for it here! In fact, I’ll just reproduce the whole thing here. If anyone wants on the mailing list, just DM me.
Extracting the 3 things I’m grateful for:
- Carbon-emission-free sources of energy / hope for solving climate change
- Scott Alexander’s writing
- Beeminder keeping me on schedule with my Thursgiving thing
thursgiving 14: nuclear power
Today we can be thankful that…
…it’s even possible to develop technologies to produce huge amounts of energy without emitting carbon and we happen to have developed them at a time where we at least could avoid the most extreme climate change scenarios with minimal impact on our lifestyles. [source: Dynomight]
If I wanted to be all polemical I could say that climate change is environmentalists’ fault for opposing nuclear energy. I’m actually unsure how reasonable of a claim that is. In any case, it’s not too late to embrace nuclear, and we do need to!
[UPDATE for the gratitude journal since the above was upsetting to Alys: On reflection I believe I was being a bit too open-minded there and that even if the environmentalism movement got it wrong on nuclear energy, and regardless of the counterfactuals, it would be pretty outrageous to literally blame the movement for climate change. The entire motivation of environmentalism is saving the planet, after all. We can debate effectiveness of strategies without being so polemical. I guess in my defense I’ll say I meant the “if I wanted to be all polemical” literally: it’s a provocative claim that may spark good debate even if it’s wrong, which on reflection I’ll grant that it is.]
Speaking of polemics (and environmentalism and overpopulation and eugenics), here’s some fun related reading:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
It makes a maybe [edit: ok, definitely; read it to see!] tongue-in-cheek argument that maybe environmentalism should be at least as vilified as eugenics is.
In any case it’s highly thought provoking and I’d love to discuss it with you all.
Bonus things to be thankful for: Scott Alexander’s writing and Beeminder for making me get this [the thursgiving email] out the door by 5pm today!
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- The akrasia wait was over and I was able to take a much-needed break on some goals
- My back is in a horrible state right now, but perversely this makes me grateful that this isn’t usually the case, and I am in fact almost always very healthy and not burdened by things like this
- Completed our cat-proofing of the garden boundaries, so the young one (now 6 months old) can safely be let out. He loves it!
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- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i made lots of progress with my uni project today.
- i’m grateful i’m fully motivated for my uni project.
- i’m grateful liquid food exists. it’s not cheap, but it’s a great no-effort meal that doesn’t require any thought (apart from not forgetting to grab the bottle).
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It’s not reasonable. It’s despicable and heartbreaking. This thread was a happy refuge for me and I was not expecting to see something so hurtful here. I’m muting this thread for now and won’t be posting here again for a while.
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Oh no! I’m so sorry! I did mean to add something along the lines of “definitely some amount short of ‘reasonable’”. I just thought the arguments in that post were fascinating and worthy of discussion. I feel strongly that (with the possible exception of AI risk, which I’m profoundly confused about) climate change is humanity’s top priority. I suspect we don’t disagree about any of the core issues here, in fact.
In any case, I definitely agree with keeping politics out of the gratitude thread and I’ll be more careful from now on!
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- Having a lazy, lazy day.
- My planned long weekend.
- The FFXIV tool Teamcraft. I actually went ahead and subscribed to their Patreon, because they’ve created such a useful tool.
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- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i finally ordered some clothes i need.
- self-gratitude: i’m grateful i didn’t wait until late at night to work on my beemergencies.
- i’m very grateful for my flatmate.
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- had some interesting discussions with M today
- beautiful sunny afternoon
- our little TENS machine seems to help with my back
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