Archive • Aether Mug • Buttondown

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

Aether Mug - A List of Introspective Descriptions

September 27, 2024

Please contribute your own!

Aether Mug - The Odysseus Black Box

September 20, 2024

Curiosity as the drive to be changed by the world

Aether Mug - Close Reading of a Modern Japanese Vignette

September 12, 2024

Things you can see by looking over a local's shoulder.

Aether Mug - You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life

September 5, 2024

On some Damned Good Books

Aether Mug - Boxed

August 30, 2024

Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

Aether Mug - Blimp Blues

August 22, 2024

I mean, don't you want it too?

Aether Mug - A Black-Box View of Life

August 15, 2024

We are meant to tinker.

Aether Mug - In Japanese You Need a Dictionary to Count Things

On Josuushi and questionable language approaches

Aether Mug - New Aphantasia Article on Nautilus

Rotating things without seeing the things.

Aether Mug - Seamanship of Life

Aye, pass that razor hither, me hearty!