Here’s what’s going on Chez Moi :

1. The Ten Can Challenge is underway. I bought my ten cans of stuff at Sav-On Ironwood last night. Caught some amazingly good deals, so the whole shebang only cost me $15. I got some soups, some baked beans, some flakes of turkey, and a couple of cans of Heinz Spaghetti. That last one was a mistake, I now realize, because it’s just more carbs. And I sure as hell don’t need more carbs in my diet. So I won’t be getting those again. Plus, I am eating one of the cans now, for lunch, and honestly the flavour isn’t great. The sauce tastes more like tomato soup than real actual spaghetti sauce, and the noodles are a lot thicker than real spaghetti to boot. So, no big loss
2. In Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) news, I was delighted to discover that once I completed both the Northern Elseweyr and Southern Elseweyr plotline, a third plotline opened up where I get to go to an island called Dragonhold, which I am led to believe holds dragons. Crazy. There was no guarantee that anything in particular would happen when I did the two Elseweyr plotlines, so I am stoked that something did. Made all the effort I put it doing the Southern Elseweyr again with my current character worth it. Really looking forward to the new plotline.
3. In other video game related news, my friend Windchaser gifted me a game called The Legend Of Heroes : Trails In The Sky, and as you might expect with a name like that, it’s a JRPG. Not a genre I am super into, but she loves the game and so for her, I will give the game a real shot. I tried it a bit this morning, but I was super sleepy at the time so it doesn’t really count. My sleepy impression was that it was so very slow, as I go through the introduction and tutorial bits, and that this might be a bit of a slog compared to ESO. But I will do it for her.
4. Mood-wise. I have been doing okay. Not great, but not depressed either, except for the occasional moment, so not bad overall. Having a game that I can play for any amount of time and not get bored like ESO helps, as sad as that is. At least I stay busy with something that takes a fair bit of mental effort. Not ideal, but at least I am doing something I enjoy.
5. Not super pleased with how my experiment with writing in my “grumpy old guy” voice in last night’s blog entry turned out. But what the hell, it was an experiment. In retrospect, fixating on stupidity was a bad idea. Too limiting, and despite my attempt to write relatably, I think it still comes across as elitist. Oh well, I learned a lot in the writing of it, and that voice is still very much a work in progress, so it was still well worth doing.

And that’s the latest update from this thing I pretend is a life.

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A Flaw In Our Programming

Here’s a conversation I have had more than once :

Them : “Where do you want to eat?”

Me : “How about this buffet place?”

Them : “Hmmm…. nah, I’m not hungry enough for buffet. ”

Me : “But it’s the exact same price as getting a regular meal at a restaurant plus you get to choose from dozens of dishes and can have as much or as little as you want of any of them for no extra charge. “

(SFX : Wind blowing over tundra )^[1]

Them : Nope. Still not hungry enough for buffet.

To me, my case for buffet is perfectly logical and sensible and if I were a more ignorant and clueless kind of nerd (it’s possible), I might declare the other person to be illogical and unreasonable and stupid.

But no. I get it. To them, the price for dinner is X dollars for Y amount of food. It doesn’t matter (or even register) to them that in this case, they are setting Y at a value that is much higher than it is for non-buffet restaurants. The ratio of X to Y remains the same,. so to them, there is no conflict.

What is missing (from my point of view) is the ability to think numerically and compare values. To me, getting much more for the same amount of money is obviously superior. It’s a no-brainer.

But that’s because I’m a mental mutant who thinks numerically when the majority of people do not. It’s a subject I have pondered many times since I first tried to figure out why math was so hard for some people when I was in elementary school.

Because it’s clearly not the arithmetic. If you graduated from grade 4, you know how to do the arithmetic. So it had to be something more fundamental than that.

Eventually, I decided that there was math, and then there was thinking numerically, and it’s the second one that gives people trouble.

It’s like the difference between knowing a language and thinking in that language. I can think in math. At least half of the human race cannot, or at the very least, has a very hard time doing it.

No judgment. There are plenty of things others find easy that I find extremely hard.

Like learning motor skills.

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Holy crap, I totally forgot that I had not quite finished this entry, and here it is, 7 am the next day. Guess this one’s going to be late.

Oh well. Excrement occurs. I get it right like 360 days of the year. I suppose I could hack the posting date and pretend like I did it on time, but meh.

I am too lazy to bother with such foolishness.

I will talk to you nice people…. well, today, technically.