Archive • Aether Mug • Buttondown

Aether Mug - Steinbeck on Teleology

November 6, 2025

None of it is important or all of it is

Aether Mug - Process World, Object-Oriented Mind

October 30, 2025

How programmers' struggles are everyone's mental struggles

Aether Mug - 26 Easy Steps to Taming Your Smartphone Addiction

October 23, 2025

Aether Mug - Visualizing Framings

October 17, 2025

A stolen attempt

Aether Mug - Strive as It Might

October 9, 2025

The eyeball'll never see the color of its iris. The hand will never scratch its back. The skull will never kiss its nape. The clock will never measure its...

Aether Mug - Shake Up Your Boundaries

October 2, 2025

Six assorted examples

Aether Mug - What's the Deal With Counterfeit People?

September 24, 2025

I asked a counterfeit person about it

Aether Mug - Hi No Youjin

September 18, 2025

On quaint devices for time-travel

Aether Mug - Claude Sonnet Is Teaching Me English

September 4, 2025

Today, even a lazy after-thought can become a useful project

Aether Mug - There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking and There Is Thinking

August 28, 2025

Should we anthropomorphize LLMs?

Aether Mug - Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate

August 21, 2025

A quick reference

Aether Mug - Do You Remember What You Read?

Why I never skip a Readwise day

Aether Mug - A Pocket-Size Checklist of Thinking Errors

All the ways your framings and models can lead you astray

Aether Mug - New article on Nautilus Magazine

"How Optimists Are Alike"

Aether Mug - Is It Bad to Have a Parrot Speak for You?

Retro sci-fi stories and how they can help with Reddit rants

Aether Mug - Human Stigmergy

The world is my task list

Aether Mug - How to Organize Your Thoughts with a Simple Bullet List

and a good text editor

Aether Mug - Water Lilies, Water Lilies Everywhere

Patterns are anti-randomness and thought is made of pattern-stuff

Aether Mug - Are We Losing Control?

A nitpick and a fable about the world getting more complex than ever

Aether Mug - I Like the Sound of How You Look at Me

Japanese gitaigo are nuggets of mundane joy

Aether Mug - I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine

What reminiscing is like without mental imagery

Aether Mug - I'll Take a Short Blogging Break

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. —Seneca, Epistolae, LXXI., 3. TL;DR Aether Mug is taking a short holiday next week,...

Aether Mug - Determinate Self-Sabotage, or Obsessive Connoisseurship?

On the quandaries of kodawari

Aether Mug - Replaced

What happened when I let an LLM pretend to be me

Aether Mug - Meditations on the Color of Pee

The synthetic origins of what we consider normal

Aether Mug - What if Gratitude Was Built Into the Grammar?

Another Japanese marvel

Aether Mug - Case Study: Is There a Strange Culture War Over AI Art?

Studying a thought process

Aether Mug - Breathing Through Your Belly Button

Take a look at reality for a minute

Aether Mug - Vibe Check UX

Design proposal for the no-brainer social media feature all non-animals deserve

Aether Mug - An Aphantasic's Observations on the Imagination of Shapes

Log entry of a scientific test subject

Aether Mug - Interview on People and Blogs

A Small Web meeting place

Aether Mug - Living in a Real World, Acting in Imaginary Ones

On our Virtual Physics and Tunnel Vision

Aether Mug - Matsuri's Grown-Up World

February 27, 2025

"The difficulty level will increase even more with the new season."

Aether Mug - Rationality Fails at the Edge

February 21, 2025

Assumption-digging as ritual

Aether Mug - Whatever a Man or Woman Was Able to Accomplish Before, You Can Accomplish, Too

February 13, 2025

A play over milkshakes

Aether Mug - Year One

February 6, 2025

On trying to be "The Invisible Elephant Guy" after one year of Aether Mug

Aether Mug - We Need a Sense of Systemic Perspective

January 31, 2025

The farther away a situation is from us socially, like a different industry or culture or community, the more puzzling and irrational and crazy—and sometimes...

Aether Mug - Primitive Atlas of Glass Circuits

January 23, 2025

Aren't we all air converters?

Aether Mug - The Luxurious Pain of Using My Time

January 9, 2025

Possibly just me coming out as a lucky optimist

Aether Mug - A Kanji Always Pays Her Debts

December 12, 2024

In defense of steep learning curve

Aether Mug - See the Living Loops

December 6, 2024

Some control comes for free

Aether Mug - My Head as a Lake

November 28, 2024

Thinking about aphantasia since long before aphantasia was a thing

Aether Mug - A Framing and Model About Framings and Models

November 21, 2024

Some basic metacognition tools

Aether Mug - Presenting Visual Koans

November 15, 2024

An experiment in mind wandering

Aether Mug - Ten Books That Transformed Me

November 7, 2024

Some non-recommendations of Damned Good Books, with due apologies

Aether Mug - New Plankton Valhalla Essay!

October 31, 2024

A meta-cross-post

Aether Mug - Normality and Surprise in an Image-Free Mind

October 25, 2024

On discovering aphantasia and talking about it

Aether Mug - Ballistic Moments of Weightlessness

October 18, 2024

On purpose and its temporary suspension

Aether Mug - Reading Blood Meridian with Aphantasia

October 11, 2024

What it feels like

Aether Mug - Philosophy Is the Battle Against the Bad Framing Kraken

October 4, 2024

In the hallowed Aether Mug tradition of strained metaphors