Diary for Wednesday, July 22nd

Woke up at 6AM today, spent a few hours reading A Wizard of Earthsea – very engaging. Then I went back to sleep again.

Spent a lot of time in the park, which was very lively with animals and schoolchildren. Observed some wood pigeons performing some kind of mating ritual; they kind of “charge” at each other, mutually. Very different from the mating ritual of your garden variety feral rock doves, which is a one-sided puffing up and calling by the male.

I’ve been reading ACOUP’s Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders. This really stuck with me:

[…] pre-modern agrarian societies can get into the 30-70 people per square mile range, compared to something like 0.5 person per square mile for hunter-gatherers outside of very resource rich zones and something like around 2-5 per square mile for nomadic pastoralists […]

With numbers like that, it always amazes me there are still hunter-gatherers left!

Reading ACOUP, I usually come away with the same feelings… the past is a miserable place of incomprehensible oppression, something we can mostly remain blissfully ignorant of only because the oppressed masses had no voice, with their plight scarcely deemed mentioning. The future I know not, but the proverbial boot stomping on a human face – forever aptly describes the past.

What also stands out to me is just how mechanical the past is… The systems that worked were varied, but finite. The nature of nature dictates the nature of man, together they dictate fundamental economy, economy dictates civil structure, civil structure dictates the military; but our relation to nature evolves, because our understanding of that nature evolves. To me, this is good news. Our lives are indubitably better than those of our ancestors, by and large. Things surely will keep changing, for better and worse, but historically, more better than worse. Economics, more than anything, forced our ancestors into servitude; but those oppressive systems no longer make economic sense.

I finished the last of Mahoromatic last night. This one probably warrants a more extensive review on its own.

We’ve been following the BassBuzz Beginner to Badass course. I think we’re about ⅓ of the way through? The pace will slow down from here, as the difficulty has risen too much for us to do two lessons a night still. Very satisfied with this course.

Still tired. Between the sleep schedule adjustments, resuming the gym, daily French studies, daily meditation, daily writing… It is a lot, but it feels like it shouldn’t be, for it doesn’t take much time, and so my tiredness feels wrong, as though I am sick. I persevere; patience is a great virtue, I think.

I’ve been adding more cards to my French deck again. Here’s what my setup looks like:

Kagi Translate allows you to give custom natural text instructions, so I told it to include un/une to indicate noun gender.