To Imane, pt 87

A weird dream that I will describe, even though it's not interesting. I was a homeless person who sneaked or snuck into your house either to talk to your or just wanting somewhere to sleep. Several normal people were already there. I saw you waking up on a couch but did not try to talk to you. People discussed kicking me out but I claimed that I would leave if you wanted me to. I pretended to sleep so that would people would not disturb me; someone poked my face and pushed my upper lip down to try to show that I was awake, but found that doing so made my face look cuter and inoffensive and was therefore ineffective in convincing other people that I should be kicked out. Through a window I saw you doing a photoshoot, in which you did various poses, but I was not impressed.

Maybe I left on my own volition; after being outside, I somehow ended up in a restaurant. I looked for evidence that the food was free, until I finally spotted some prices which showed that it was not free. Someone accused me of having eaten their food of like fried beans, which clearly had been eaten by someone. I asked what the person who had eaten their food looked like, and they said it was a person wearing a pink shirt, and I pointed out that I was not wearing a pink shirt. I was going to mention that in the duffel bag I was carrying was a pink shirt (in real life I do have a faded pink shirt, that says United States Army Est (star) 1775 and has a 24-cm tear under one arm that renders it unusable) but the conversation never got to that point. They were saying something to me that I don't remember, because I got distracted by the fact that they were using sign language. I tried to point out that I didn't know sign language and they started to explain what the word sign meant, or something.

I wouldn't have woken up if I didn't have something to say, which was this:

I wonder, if you can invent things to make yourself happy, can you invent things to make yourself unhappy too... how often does this happen?

How often do we remember it?

China

"You saved me and took care of me. You helped me make my body and you wanted to kill me. I'll remember all of that."

【FULL | Eng Sub】上古魔尊重回三界，与菜鸟花仙意外换身，一段啼笑皆非的旷世“奇”恋来咯！《苍兰诀》EP1-24 合集【欢迎订阅 爱奇艺动漫站】

To Imane, pt 85

Some boring polls that no one will ever make because they're boring (unless they're so generic that they've already been made, like the last question). The second question feels like it might be similar to a poll or question I already asked or suggested. There might have been another question before the third question which I forgot while trying to write down three questions at once. The topic is people reaching conclusions from limited information.

Poll: Is it expected that Greta Thunberg would fail in her efforts to prevent climate change because she is acting contrary to the interests of evil rich people?

Poll: Does it benefit a typical person to believe that it's worth expending effort to try to fix problems in the world?

Poll: Do you think you have a good understanding from watching fiction of how extremely smart people who don't have typical 'smart person' jobs act and what their values are, despite your limited real-life contact with extremely smart people?

Poll: Do you think society rewards you for being confident?

To Imane, pt 84

"Smart people can make conclusions from limited information."

Trying to make this post as uninteresting as possible. A movie that was playing (The Parent Trap) reminded me of how, probably in late 2005, I asked Mei if her ears were pierced, and she said they were. This was completely unrelated to how in 2007, I wanted to send some earrings to Mei's older sister, but was unable to as Mei wouldn't provide an address, and so several months later I ended up buying similarly-priced earrings for my Japanese language teacher (who is Chinese).

Mei was probably able to infer that I was prepared to act like it was better if her ears were not pierced, if that had been her response. If she had asked questions about me, it could have had a similar outcome.

I don't have any memories of noticing someone's earrings in real life. I do remember noticing when someone was wearing false eyelashes, in late 2012, as well as the time when I noticed that someone had green eyes, also in 2012.

When I made this post about a hypothetical situation, I was thinking about situations like the one shown in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, when the main character asks his wife if she loves him, and she is evasive until concluding that perhaps she does.

Supernormal stimuli: just as birds cannot control what they perceive to be the ideal egg, humans cannot control what they instinctively think of as the best of several possibilities.

If this post fails to be uninteresting, I ask that you not share this idea.

To Imane, pt 83

I hope this doesn't count as something interesting.

Poll: "Around the world, X% of people are suffering symptoms that would qualify as depression. What do you think would happen to this percentage if the global unemployment rate were halved, wars stopped happening, and we finally did something about climate change?"

X would increase by a lot

X would increase slightly

X would stay the same

X would decrease slightly

X would decrease by a lot

I thought of another poll as well, but if I say more, it might increase the probability that what I say could be seen as interesting.

To Imane, pt 82

Yesterday I did a search for, "I shall not say or do anything interesting until Imane shares the idea". I don't consider this post to be interesting.

Greta posted a video on Instagram of Alaa Salah encouraging a crowd to protest against Sudan's government in 2019. She also posted a Story of the film Strejkarna. Letterboxd lists Greta in the cast of the film.

Yesterday I had started reading the book, The Ogre Downstairs, randomly selected from my third-oldest sister's book collection. I had believed it to be the book that is actually titled Archer's Goon until I had read over a page of it. I stopped reading it when I got to page 52, which I will just quote in its entirety up to the relevant passage as I have nothing better to do:

as he showed them in, laughed too and made the same sort of jokes in reply. Caspar stared rather because he had hardly ever seen Douglas laugh before, and because Douglas had changed his clothes and looked just as grown up as his friends.

"Coffee and so on set out on the kitchen table, Douglas," said Sally.

"Thanks," Douglas replied, obviously too busy showing his friends into the dining room to hear what Sally had said.

The Ogre was standing in the doorway of the sitting room with the grim look that he usually reserved for Johnny or Caspar. "I'm beginning to regret this already," he said. "Where did Douglas get those awful clothes?"

"I got them for him," said Sally, a trifle guiltily. "He seemed to have grown out of everything else."

"Are they fashionable or something?" asked the Ogre.

"Very," said Sally.

"I feared as much," said the Ogre, and went and turned the television on.

Since the Ogre was clearly in his stormiest mood, Caspar dared not do anything but sit quietly over a map of South America, trying to decide on a Geography project. The Ogre gave him several irritated looks, but he said nothing. The television produced the Ogre's favourite kind of programme for him — the kind in which Officials and Ministers explained that the country was in a considerable state of crisis, but that they were doing this, that and the other thing to cure it. Caspar bit back several yawns of boredom and wondered how his mother could stand it.

To Imane, pt 81

Looks like I lied or was wrong again.

I was thinking about how my mum doesn't watch anything I consider interesting. Part of the reason some people watch videos that aren't just entertainment is so they have more things to talk about with other people. Videos that explain things about the real world have more potential to help people to solve problems.

So I thought of the question, "Generally speaking, do you think that problems in the world are your responsibility?"

But this question is only interesting because of disagreement and misunderstandings. So a better question is this:

What percentage of people do you think would answer yes to this question: "Generally speaking, do you think that problems in the world are your responsibility?"

There's definitely some bias. People who think the question is important enough to answer, or important enough to share and therefore get more people to answer it, are people who think more than average. People who can't read won't even be on the platform on which it's asked. But it's still a question on which there might be a polar division in responses, instead of a normal-type distribution with a single peak.

The question is slightly ambiguous, by not saying "people on this platform". Some people might implicitly include that in the question and anticipate a bias for the platform. But if there is real disagreement about how people would answer the question, I think this wording can still detect it.

Somewhat similar to the poll in pt 44.

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Update 13 May 2026, 19:43

For the record, my guess is 20% would say yes.

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Update 13 May 2026, 21:47

Has nothing to do with the above, but by making it an update I can pretend that I'm not saying it, because it doesn't reduce the visibility of the poll suggestion.

A movie review site where all reviewers are required to answer the following two questions about everything they review, as checkboxes:

1) People who like this show are dumb

2) Dumb people will like this show

The use of "dumb" to imprecisely mean "stupid" is deliberate. Because people can criticize this meaning, it vaguely suggests that the person using it could be stupid. This can make an insult more insulting: if a stupid person thinks you're stupid, many people think it means you really must be stupid. But it can also serve as a hidden element of like facetiousness. With these questions, someone could check the box for #2, while leaving #1 unchecked. #1 could be seen as recommending that people not watch the show, while #2 could be seen as recommending that certain viewers should watch the show. What would it mean if both boxes are unchecked, but a review still says that a show is not worth watching?

— The example of #1 that I was thinking about was "we've seen this show a million times before", implying that people who don't recognize the story are ignorant i.e. dumb. No one wants to look dumb. But if that's what a reviewer is implying, why not make it explicit, with the checkboxes?

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Update 13 May 2026, 23:02

Note that a review site that asks those questions would be hard to implement right now. People are too sensitive to being described as 'dumb', or of acting in a way that seems to discriminate between smart and dumb people at all, due to their fear of igniting a war between them. This is because of their awareness of the hidden problem.

No one created the poll I suggested about problems that affect stupid people. Maybe no one was interested in creating a poll that I described no matter what the topic was, because I could have used it as evidence that they knew of this idea. Or maybe there could have been someone who might have been willing to create a poll, but not that poll, because they were afraid that most people would say No to that poll (leading to a division, just like those questions on a review site could). The red and blue buttons questions could be seen as testing sort of the same thing: lots of people explained their choice of the blue button as that "some people would press the blue button, so every good person should push it." Basically, "you should help people even if they're stupid", and the majority of people chose this button, in the original scenario where it didn't require climbing a 300-meter hill to reach it.

But that's not the reason for this update. In the unpublished pt 80, I mentioned the spammy emails I got in 2014 or whatever, which eventually stopped after I stopped going online for a long enough time that emails could potentially have been deleted from my spam folder before I could rescue them.

Suppose that this happened: Mei was responsible for the emails. Mei somehow knew that I was no longer saving them, and felt that she no longer had to send them. Due to her inability to interact with me, she became interested in someone else and started a relationship with them. Even though her starting college at age 13 or 14, as well as her getting Rank 14 on a rogue though world PvP in WoW, suggests that she's smart, and she took kendo (Japanese swordsmanship) and was apparently not injured when the dog that killed her cat also attacked her, she could have ended up in a relationship with someone who harmed her and eventually killed her.

Even though this possibility exists, I don't regret not going online long enough to have possibly caused the cessation of the spammy emails I got. If Mei still cares about me, it doesn't benefit me in any way. The moral standard that I suggested in 2012 was that it's immoral to benefit from association with someone who hasn't shared this idea, and I have no reason to think that Mei shared it, so if I don't benefit from anything she does, it's consistent with the moral standard. Better if she was in a relationship with someone else. Since I don't know anything about her life, and have no way to ascertain her real-life identity (her last name), it's reasonable for me to assume that it's also possible she hasn't been in a relationship with anyone else, but I won't know unless people use this idea. To the extent that a romantic attachment could deter attachments to other people, as suggested by the song used in World of Warcraft- Here Without You that I've linked before (where is superscaling resolution, YouTube?! Is it not enabled by default for inactive accounts or is it just not being used for most videos on the platform?), this uncertainty becomes a cost to me. I note that in the series Futmalls, other characters seem to view a male character more positively when they see that he doesn't want to continue living after his wife dies, but they still attempt to save his life even if it means taking unreasonable risks to do so.

I'm writing this because 13 minutes into a 43-minute video, I got the vp9 dropped segment bug on YouTube. I would be fine if I never got this bug again. If this bug is caused by deliberate interference, if it never happened again that could have a similar result to what I suggest could have happened after I stopped getting spammy emails.

If me writing this update to this post ends up harming me, then it's consistent with the moral standard that I suggested, of not benefiting from someone who hasn't shared this idea.