Oh, no wonder no one else was there. It's May 8, not May 1.

For various reasons, I cannot make open threads anymore, ever again.

An early version of Suicide Rock.

(BTW, anyone played Adventure Story by Matt Roszak? Later levels feature a monster that made me think of Suicide Rock.)

I'm moving to Los Angeles. I leave on the 21st. If anyone along this or another route wants to give me a shower and bed for a night, it will soon be your chance to do so!

By the way, I am Grognor. I created this account because I didn't want to get karma for posting open threads or the monthly rationality quotes threads.

An untitled Christmas poem, in the style of Dr. Seuss, by Yvain.

Congratulations to Vladimir Nesov for passing Anna Salamon in karma and making it to the top contributors, all time list.

Why I am a deathist, for those who can't understand the mentality:

Because the thought that someday I will die is a -liberating- thought for me. First you must understand who I was, however - in my youth I was absolutely terrified of a permanent injury of any sort. (When I realized, truly realized, I'd been circumcised, it was mildly traumatizing.) This extends to the mental as well as the physical.

The realization, later, that I would die - wasn't a horrifying thought. It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except death. It freed me to take risks, and even to engage in permanent modification of myself, both physical and mental.

Death let me live.

So I don't have a sour grapes attitude towards death. I believe that death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity.

The "horizon event" may be important, however. I certainly would prefer not to die tomorrow. And tomorrow, I would not want to die on that day's morrow. This may well stretch into infinity. Death has become the sole permanent injury; to be avoided, as previously I avoided all other permanent injury, but necessary, in order to invalidate all other such fears.

This does not imply, however, that today I should prefer never to die at all. I am running on corrupted hardware, and I balance one corruption against another. Until such time as living with mistakes forever is rendered irrelevant, or ceases to be an object of abject terror for me, death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity, necessary to my ability to deal with the world.

(The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it. I suspect an actual debilitating injury would be sufficient to overcome my fears, but that is hardly an experiment I would like to deliberately run.)

Speak to me of being able to replace arms and legs, lungs and heart, to repair a damaged brain, and those parts of the brain we sometime refer to as the heart - speak to me of clinical immortality by component pieces, and that I can fathom and accept and support. Speak to me of conquering death, however, and you lose me. Because I don't desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing.

Can you think of an example of Kant using this form of argumentation?

PSA: If you want there to be a new Stupid Questions Open Thread, make it yourself! There is not and never has been a rule against this. I consider the "how often to make them" question unanswered, but a good interim answer is, "whenever someone feels like making one".

(Also, my computer broke, and so I posted this from a Wii, which is incapable of using the article editor. If someone could kindly edit "the sentence" into the post.)