august 22 etc
Below you will find part of a larger thing I am writing in an effort to understand how I got to wherever here is. If you want to skip it and head to the links, you do you. The excerpt ends after "keep thinking."
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When I was like eight or nine, I read "consistency is the hobgoblin of lesser minds." That isn't what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote but that's what I read. The actual line, from Emerson's Self-Reliance, is as follows:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
The conclusion I drew from the incorrect line and, later, the correct one, helped set me on a path I would follow all the way to adulthood. This was not a good thing as it turned out.
The way famous quotations and citations get misinterpreted is really interesting, especially because oftentimes misinterpretations lead people to come away believing the literal opposite of what is actually being communicated. I once heard a guy say "a rising tide sinks all boats" and was too stunned to correct him.
Also, a lot of people don't know (or don't want to know) the second halves of famous lines, quotations, aphorisms, or sayings, and in not knowing (or at least not letting on that they know), they tell you everything you need to know about them. Certain people will go hoarse saying things like "it's just a few bad apples" in the context of, say, cops shooting unarmed civilians. They are in essence saying "bad apples" is a thing we say about people sans context. It isn't. The proverb traces back to the literal 1300s (see here, and here) and means what you know it means. And if you don't know what it means, boy howdy are you in for a surprise.
Anyway, back to (or at least towards) my personal experience. Say the lesson or wisdom you acquire by way of a misreading, misunderstanding, or just being taught the wrong thing becomes part of the foundational structure of your life. What happens if you realize your conclusion was wrong? That you misread and misunderstood the point? Do you keep going in that "I'm too far from shore to start again" way or do you stop and reconfigure even though doing so may upend everything? It's a legitimate question with no definitive answer.
If it's not clear, the consistency Emerson was writing about wasn't like, stylistic consistency. His point wasn't "you have to be and think and act and dress differently every day because being the same every day is for normie square losers." His point was that we cannot be so bound to what we thought yesterday that we refuse to change our minds today.
He's advising against intellectual rigidity. He's saying that if you learn something today that affects your thoughts and beliefs and forces you to reconsider and update those thoughts and beliefs, even if that means a total 180, that's cool and probably the point.
He's saying you don't have to be so entrenched in what you have thought that you don't keep thinking.
When I figured out what Emerson actually meant, it ironically set me free from a decades-long path partially built upon misunderstanding what he meant. When I talk about hard-won knowledge and wisdom, as I am wont to do, this is what I'm talking about.
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Also, it's Friday! ICYMI, here are this week's (other) posts:
august 18
august 19
august 20
august 21
Anyway, let's get to the links.
On y va!
🎮🔫 Play DODGE THIS and thank me later.
🤖🤖 Related: DODGE THIS was made with Trickle. (See? I'm not painting all AI products with the same brush.)
🎮☮️ Yesterday I mentioned itch.io without mentioning my favourite part of itch.io, which is that you can buy bundles like this one and this one and get a ton of awesome games (and software, and zines) while also supporting underserved people and worthwhile causes.
⛔⛔ Apparently Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippi due to some new law that definitely isn't some stupid culture war thing.
💦💦 Related: sometimes when I am depressed I read this part of the Wikipedia entry for a certain song and chortle myself back to life.
🎙️🧠 The anthropologist and the psychologist (Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne) from Decoding The Gurus did a podcast about Naval Ravikant, a guy I used to think was very wise (I used to drink a lot). If you don't know who Naval is, feel free to skip the foreplay and start at 7:27.
🇺🇸🇺🇸 I was going to post about the Cracker Barrel fiasco but I thought better of it (and already posted about it on Threads). Google it if you are curious because it's insane.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself. I'm out until Monday.
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