Lorxus Does Budget Inkhaven Again: 04/15~04/21

Lorxus
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:08:11 GMT

I'm doing Budget Inkhaven again! (I didn't realize last time that "Halfhaven" also meant specifically shooting for half-length posts, too.) I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the third of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

15. Seven-ish Flavors of Curiosity From My Culture

I'll say more about this in a later post, but where this Earth mostly classes emotions by only valence (positive/pleasant vs negative/unpleasant) and arousal (high vs low energy), my culture recognizes a third major category of classification - temporality...

The class of emotions which are future-oriented, relatively low-arousal, and varied in valence, we call Curiosity; we may distinguish it from future-oriented, relatively high-arousal, and varied-valence emotions, which we call Futurity or just Nerves. Within that category, we recognize seven major secondary emotions, as I describe below; we consider them every bit as importantly different from each other as you consider resentment different from rage.

16. Measurable Cognitive Factors Contributing to General Intelligence

Intelligence! A famously hard thing to pin down and operationalize. The part where people often assign it some kind of moral or valuative dimension - in both directions - and then allocate universally vital resources based on who seems to have it and who doesn't makes that even harder.... We believe in the mythical g in this blog, in a directionally-correct sense if not more so. That said, aspiring skull-measurers need not apply, because we also believe in a larger intra-ethnic variation than inter-ethnic and also the humble author is mixed-race. (That's hybrid vigor for you.)

Notably, this kind of incredibly lopsided spread is not at all what most human minds look like, and this seems suggestive of why LLMs can seem so smart in many notable ways and yet so terribly lacking in others. I think that this makes my ontological frame a promising one, if only to build on, for understanding the nature of intelligence and cognition.

17. The Clustering Theory of Gender Specification and Enumeration

I have this theory of gender, built on some obvious-seeming observations and frankly sorta facile charts as started to make the rounds on the internet circa 2014. Then I thought about it, and elaborated it.

18. Factual Truth, Mythic Truth

But all I can do as your humble author is illuminate and navigate; I cannot take mercy on you should you falter. That's not up to me. I've given you the best map I can; look for deep blue light blazed into the trees on your way.

19. Eigenfruit Pie

This feels extremely achievable, if I try hard, believe in myself, overcome my skill issues, do a bunch of experimentation and gradient ascent, and spend a bunch of money on fruit...

But if sixspice buns are warm spice against the chill of winter, breakfast-time and snacks, pure decadence, and a known quantity (cinnabon-style cinnamon rolls) with the good put in and then some and then some more; then eigenfruit pie will be the rich bounty of summer fruits, dinner and other mealtimes, very nearly a hearty meal in and of itself (so much fruit! practically healthy!), and the abstraction and instantiation of an entire class of desserts (fruit pies). I am under no delusion that it will be easy.

20. Two Gods of Trade (A Treatise)

Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale...

One such [God] is Kofusachi (Chaotic Good), god of abundance, prosperity, discovery... and merchants. Why does the setting need two entire gods of merchantry?

21. Jangajji (장아찌), in the Northern Style

This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant.

Discuss