Reading your first couple of paragraphs I was going to ask if you have ADHD, because they’re very relatable and I definitely attribute it largely to that. Practice and having a “system” for writing helps me a lot too

It could be ADHD. It could also be anxiety disorder. I was a history major in college, so I had a ton of papers to write. My anxiety made if extremely difficult to write anything. Like you, I’d write it out, delete, rewrite, delete etc. It was awful. At the time, I would actually start drinking to the point of being slightly inebriated. I found I could actually write better at that point, because the alcohol shut down that anxiety (and if I am honest, it made me give less of a fuck about what my professors would think of my writing). Obviously, not a great solution, but it was good short term and I always got good grades on my papers. Now that I am better medicated for my anxiety, I imagine it wouldn’t be so bad to write a paper now. Trouble is, my job really doesn’t require me to write much lol.

It is a sport. You read the recipe and visualize yourself making it. All the while thinking about how to manage time. Repeat that several times before starting. Then prep everything Chops veggies, measure spices, get oven hot, boil water. Whatever. Just have all that going.

Idk there’s sometimes value in having quantities in decreasing order so you aren’t changing measuring devices constantly and for the sake of minimizing clean up.

For me at least, I like to have everything out and ready to go. My wife writes her recipes as inline directions with NO separation and it’s super annoying when you skim it and find “oh shit, I don’t have any peanuts at all in the house.”

The visualization is less about the ingredient quantities and more about the process I think. I DO find it annoying when you’re using the same ingredient two or three times and they’re is no giant, bold HEY DUMMY DONT PUT ALL THE FLOUR IN THE BOWL RESERVE SOME kind of message.

When I write a recipe for myself I do two columns, ingredients on the left and instructions on the right ordered by logical subsections like “peanut sauce”, and “the roast”. I put recipes on index cards, and also like you suggest, across the very top of the card I always write 3 things: 1. Name, 2. Total cooking surstion, and 3. Grill or oven temperature. So I guess we have more or less the same opinion in retrospect!

Fantastic music

that’s fascinating and DIDN’T HELP AT ALL HOLY SHIT.

it’s like saying “oh you don’t understand basic physics? here watch Einstein explain his most complex concepts”

Is this like, “I didn’t know you were mad” or “I didn’t realize I was supposed to tip my hairdresser” or “I didn’t realize they’d turn off our electricity if zi didn’t pay the bill”? The first is pretty complicated, but the second two are various flavors of “proactive research is part of maturity”.

Have you looked into spaced repetition / Anki for the memorization already?

My issue with language learning is that I hate illogical and inefficient systems, and sadly languages have so much organically accumulated bullshit in them, that I get too frustrated to continue 😅 (Yea I know, I should try Esperanto, but even that has genders.)

Try Language Transfer . A natural method of learning a language, the best I’ve ever seen.

It’s also free!

In a nod to the OP, there is also a short course on music theory.

It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.

In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.

But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.

A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.

I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.

Add in a psychedelic experience or two, and it becomes impossible not to recognize how ridiculous it all is.

Can be done without them, of course, but psychedelics can blast you right to that position, for better or worse.

and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic.

I encounter this when chatting with a family member and she mentions that she “loves animals” and who “couldn’t hurt a fly” while also being an omnivore. She feels sorry for the animals when she thinks of industrial farming, but does her best to never think about it. When this topic comes up, I don’t say anything (we’ve been through the topic in the past), but she sees the impatience with her bullshit on my face, and gets flustered by the fact that someone doesn’t consider this cognitive dissonance normal.

There is a difference between being narcissistic and craving validation. It’s completely normal to want validation, feel needed, wanted and appreciated.

It’s very sad that every human need has been turned into a subscription based service.

Yeah I also have autism

Take it as a call to develop deep, authentic relationships with those people who are willing to let their guard down with you.

You don’t have to fully integrate, I guess. As in, people don’t have to be your intellectual/ideological peers or see things as clearly, but you can still enjoy their company. If anything, it’s your moral responsibility to guide them and elucidate them when needed because, well, who else is gonna do it? They can’t do it for themselves, else they wouldn’t be posting a million selfies or doing whatever other nonsense they’re up to after their PFC has developed sufficiently. You’re gonna have to lead the blind to water, you don’t want them to die of thirst, right? The way is important too, because you don’t want them to see you as an annoying, moralising, “no fun allowed” kinda guy, they’ll just run away from you… but with the right approach you can be the somewhat wise unc/paternal figure of your group.

Beware though, people WILL call you asking for guidance on your days off and it’ll be up to you to define the limits of your relationships so you don’t end up moving to a cabin in the woods disconnected from everything, but it is definitely rewarding and very prosocial.

start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic

Humans are narcissistic and selfish because over the millenia the ones that were selfish outcompeted the ones that weren’t. It’s totally natural to be selfish. Some are just better at hiding it than others.

However there is also a simple social aspect to including yourself in photos. It’s a clear visceral way to say “I was here”. A photo without your face does not have capture the “you” part of that statement. Social interaction is not just an exchanging of ideas, it’s also about building relationships, and for that to happen, the “you” part of the equation is vital.

To be fair I rarely include myself in photos, but for the same reason I am also less integrated into my social circles.

I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.

I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.

Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.

Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅

I never got why I shouldn’t just jumble up pitches any way that sounds ok to me. Ultimately I decided that I’ll spend my life composing music, deliberately ignoring harmony theory as material …

Well, we have a word for jumbling them up however you feel like: jazz 🙃

Okay, more serious response, at the end of the day it is all about having it sound good. No one’s going to question why you did things a certain way, if it sounds good.

I try to see it more as a shortcut for making things sound good. It’s just a set of known-good strategies that you can apply, if you feel like it.
Like a tube with premixed color. Yes, you can mix your own color, and many times it is necessary to get it just right, but sometimes you just know that a few dots of khaki are what you want.

but other than that I never got why I shouldn’t just jumble up pitches any way that sounds ok to me.

Well the beauty of music is that you can do exactly this and it’s fine.

Pretty much all “music theory” is Western-dominated anyway and far from all-encompassing.

There was a really good YouTube video about this a few years back, by I think Adam Neely. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Edit: here’s the link - “Music Theory and White Supremacy”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr3quGh7pJA

Very good video.

One thing this reminded me of is Bootsy Collins explaining funk. How when you’re playing bass you put the root on the one. https://youtu.be/H2MMuNkCLZY

The time signature is about emphasis, and there are common ones. I’ve bolded and italicized big and small emphases on the beat numbers.

Common time: 1 2 3 4 , 1 2 3 4 ,… example peter gunn theme

Cut time: 1 2, 1 2, … example stars and stripes forever

Waltz: 1 2 3, 1 2 3, … example the blue danube

6/8: 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1 2 3 4 5 6,… example the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald

5/4: 1 2 3 4 5, 1 2 3 4 5,… example Mission Impossible theme

Some time signatures are very similar, like waltz and 6/8, the difference is where the emphasis is placed. Waltz has just one big, emphasis placed on the one, where 6/8 is also groups of three, but has a big emphasis on the 1 and a smaller emphasis on the 4th beat. An alternate way to count in 6/8 time is 1 2 3, 2 2 3; 1 2 3, 2 2 3;… which emphasizes how 6/8 time feels like two groupings of three, within one bar, with the biggest emphasis on the one.

This is the basic version – composers will play with expectations and add their own accents on top, etc., so you won’t always hear the emphasis as I described. Reasonable people might even disagree about whether a piece of music is better described by one time signature or another, because they can be so similar.

I was in band growing up and i also couldn’t explain time signatures even though i was able to read music and play them; it is something you learn without necessarily being able to verbalize, since it is about how the music feels, based on subtle emphasis.

I give you those “screwy things”. Somebody stripped the fifth beats from Brubeck’s magnum opus, and made the most waltz sounding 4 I’ve ever heard.

Take Four

You could write in triplets in 4/4.

For most of my life I slept like a log for eight hours straight and basically never had dreams. Then recently-ish I botched my day routine beyond repair and discovered that I do dream when in light sleep, namely when falling asleep again after having woken up. Combined with drinking too much alcohol sometimes, this gives me shittiest completely absurd dreams of no value, just confusion and a very unpleasant feeling. Even when a dream is nice, I then wake up remembering I have my daily grind to look forward to. I’ll much rather go back to no dreams.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Interesting that a few of the notable known people with it identified are authors. I’m not super familiar with them, but I wonder if it leads to writing more detailed descriptions which can help their written works be more memorable.

Reads like you have aphantasia

Try trackers, in particular Renoise (it’s free to use as a demo, without exporting, though there are workarounds for that). At the first glance, it’s a spreadsheet where you place samples playing notes. In practice, it works great for people like me who can barely tell what different notes sound like, much less feel intervals and stuff. You just put your samples such that you get the rhythm you want, and don’t forget to twiddle the effects because they make a big difference. Of course, this works best for dancey electronic music.

I can relate, I’m an avid listener to music. I’ve tried playing guitar and piano but I cannot manifest it somehow.

Music theory ditto. I usually love nerdy mathy content but somehow music theory finds no place to, well… resonate in my brain.

Do you find music not amusing, or just can’t “sync up” with others’ peoples opinions of it?

Also helpful to know where it’s appropriate to take a breath on a wind instrument if it’s not marked.

Double Slit:

The word “measure” or “observe” carries a lot if confusion when people talk about the double slit experiment, as if it wasn’t one of the most important aspects in physics.
Imagine that at first you’re kicking a ball at a wall at random. Now you put a goalkeeper between you and the wall, he catches the ball and looks at it and then throws it at where he thinks it would have gone if he wouldn’t have caught it. Those are two entirely different scenarios. Same thing goes for the double slit experiment. A non-measuring and measuring setup are completely different, it just seems like magic because you can jump between them with a flip of a switch.
At the atomic scale it is impossible to measure something without the probe interacting and altering the object you are measuring. Imagine if instead of weighing a car to get it’s mass, your have to smash another car into it and calculate the mass from the impact energy. I know it dumb, but that’s essentially the best we can do when it comes to particle physics.
Also in a world where cameras are omnipresent, we are used to take snapshots of reality. But that’s now something you can simply do at atomic scale. You can’t take a photograph of a photon mid air.
Additionally, imagine if I give you two sets of images of a car going along a road.
The first set shows it has travel fairly far between the first and second image taken. You also know the time that passed between the images. Now it is trivial to calculate the average velocity of the car. But if I ask you about the position of the car some time between the first and second image, the best you could do is guess, since you don’t know whether the car might have speed up or slowed down during that time. The second set of images shows the car at almost the same spot, the time between the images is also much much smaller. So small in fact that even the precision of your stopwatch starts to matter. Now you could count the pixel differences and still figure out how much the cat has moved and its average velocity, but it will be much less precise than the first set. But, if I where to ask you about the cars position between the images, you could tell me very precisely where the car was, since it’s velocity couldn’t fluctuate a lot in such a small time frame and distance. That’s in essence the uncertainty principle, you either now the position or the velocity of a particle precisely. Of course you still can’t take a snapshot of a particle. But to figure out the cars position you could also force it to stop briefly or put off-ramps along the road, and by checkout which one it took, you can figure out where it was at that point in time. This is essentially what we do with particles. We confine the particle in it’s position/path to figure out whether it went through one slit or the other and therefore give it a defined trajectory through our method of measurement. That’s really all the magic, you can’t check without interacting and intercating changes the outcome at those scales.

Quantum Computing:
Before we had our normal bit based computer we had analog computers. First mechanical systems then electrical. They operated on either speeds, forces, positions, friction, etc for mechanical ones and voltages, currents and charges for electrical. Calculations hat to be represented with physical components, where each module was a calculation step. The good thing is, the calculation was essentially instantaneous, the bad thing was they were hard to manufacture, had to be calibrated and once setup for compute, they they were hard to alter. But when it comes to things like derivatives and integrals they are hard to beat. For example current is just the time derivative of the charge. So you if set up a computer to measure charge at the input and current the output, you can instantly calculate derivatives of very complicated formulae.

Then, along came Turing and showed that not only can numbers be represented as a binary number sytems, but also that addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations can be executed through a series of not-and (NAND) operations on those binary numbers. This was good enough for 99% of our problems since we now had a component that was easy to manufacture en masse and almost every mathematical computation could be done to an acceptable level of precision given enough time. But one thing that classical computer suck at is randomness, since whole point of bit based computers was that you don’t have to deal with random fluctuations in your electrical components like with analog computers. We don’t want to measure 1 - 5 ± 0.1 Volts, we want a clear threshold for a 0 and a 1 for our systems to work reliably.
That’s where quantum computers come in. Their bits have an undefined state which can be resented mathematical and is especially useful in calculations where probability is involved. Then, just like with the double slit experiment you “measure” or interact with them to lock in their properties and get your result. Its hard to imagine but there are simply areas of mathematics where working with probabilistic states instead of numbers is necessary.
Think of it as 3 separate areas of mathematics:

Analog computing - > Algebra and Analysis Bit based computing - > Discrete Mathematics Quantum computing - > Stochastic and Crytograpy

Stochastic is generally a hard to understand topic, so quantum computing isn’t far removed in comprehension. That’s why quantum computers also won’t replace classic bit based computing, since they do not do discrete mathematics any better, it’s just that classic computers really are that much worse at probability calculations hence the claims how much faster quantum computing is (in those very specific areas)

Well, quantum mechanics and quantum computing in general are very complex, and there are big parts of the field that nobody understands.

But double slit experiment is often depicted misleadingly made to seem a lot more magical than it is. The simplified explanation is that light moves as a wave and interacts like a particle.

The experiment sends light through one photon at a time. If the light travels through a single slit, it will form a wave pattern with one big peak. If there are two slits, the photon’s wave travels through both and moves like you would see waves of water do, making an interference pattern where the ripples coming from each slit collide. The weird part is that when you try to measure the photon as it passes through the slits, the only way you can observe it is by intetacting with it (so it interacts like a particle). It then then produces the patterns you would get with it passing through only one slit or the other, without the interference created by going through both.

I quote Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist:

There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, (Einstein) because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, “But how can it be like that?” which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. But nature is not classical, dammit, the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of man.

Nobody understands and I think it’s fine to be suspicious of people who say they do.