Various Happenstances of Seth

August 71, 2006

   That's right, August 71st. I told myself I was going to post something here for every month, so here's one for August. As you might have guessed, the book has been keeping me pretty busy. And as you might have guessed if you know me, I've been playing a lot of games. Time keeps on slipping, slipping... it's like I'm caught in a Time Spiral.

   But progress seems to be made in the small places. The big things remain the same, things like my day job that I attend faithfully, my house which hasn't fallen down yet, and the books I should write that mock and torment me.* Big things naturally don't move as much, because they're bigger. Moving bigger things takes more effort, and if you don't believe me, try sumo wrestling. Little things, however, can be leveraged somewhat more easily, and often it's the little things that determine whether a day falls into the good or bad column.

   By good or bad, I don't mean morally, although a few recent discussions about morality have actually put days into the good column for me. Someone asked me whether in a no-prize tournament with an uneven number of players, it would be moral to give the bye to the drunk player, since that player presumably would have fun even during a bye, while others might not. I responded that it depended on your conception of happiness, whether you viewed happiness as a relative measure or simply a baseline threshhold that needed to be crossed for each person. Sure, you could also boil it down to consequentialist versus absolutist morality, but I'd already had a good conversation on consequentialist versus absolutist morality earlier this month**, so I wanted a different set of opposed philosophical viewpoints to play with.

   And speaking of opposed viewpoints, and wacky segues, I'm still having a fantastic time producing the Leth&Sex News with Lex. We've been keeping up the podcast every week, and regardless of whether we have the same stories, or whether we can manage to connect them, we keep each other entertained. Maybe if you subscribe for free, we can entertain you too. All it costs is a little time.

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*Perhaps I'll write a new book about how much I hate all those other ones that mock me. I've even got the perfect title: "To Kill A Mocking Book"

**At least, if you're willing to call today August 71st, it was earlier this month. Conversely, it could still be this month if you say the conversation took place on September negative 40-somethingth. But why you'd ever want to say something like that, I don't know.

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