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I was reading about tunnel guy from a reddit post (“How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?”) about a girlfriend concerned about her bf’s hobby tunnel digging habits:
TLDR: Boyfriend spends all of his time digging a tunnel, and I'm worried for both his physical and mental health
(Sidenote: “but it looked like the quality severely dropped as the tunnel went further” sounds like a well-practiced tunneler roast.)
A week later she says mission accomplished:
I sat him down when he came home Thursday night and seriously voiced my concerns … he immediately said that he was going to cut the time he spent out there in half … We were going to have a nice, lazy Sunday together, but I could tell that he was getting kind of antsy … so I told him that he could go ahead and go to his tunnel early if he wanted to.
Also, a lot of people were asking why he tunnels, and while I’d asked him before, I asked again, and this was his answer: “It’s just pleasant. When I’m down there, I feel safe and calm, and I’m always happier when I leave than when I went in.”
I mean, it’s like a mole version of a guy who goes fishing right?
Dynomight made a thought-provoking point about how people responded (mostly) kindly to this but might have responded differently if it were a guy smoking weed and playing video games vs living his best mole life:
It’s interesting to speculate: Would people have been equally kind if tunnel man had instead spent his time smoking weed and playing video games? And if not, is that because on some level, they appreciated his demonstration of the human spirit?
This feels intuitive to me, but is there that much of a difference between digging a tunnel or playing minecraft? Do we feel more accepting towards actual digging because it’s unusual, or because it’s with done with real hands, or…?
Maybe it’s because at our core, we like people that do their own thing and are kind of weird and different.
But also, we don’t and bully them.
So it’s complicated.
In high school my dad told me that if I got a mohawk, he’d kick me out of the house. For a hairstyle!
In that moment, he probably just wanted me to be normal and not weird. To not draw attention. To — for gods sake — just look like his friends kids. It’s a shadow side of someone exploring their own individuality: embarrassment for those around them (in this case, a parent).
I think parents get confused because they want a normal kid, but they don’t REALLY, ya know?
But that (probably?) means cultivating and accepting a kid that questions authority instead of making them shut up and say yes sir or no ma’am. It means letting them be weird and try mohawks or wear a wallet chain or be a goth or start a company or dig tunnels where they might die.
And since it feels like a big part of parenting is NOT letting a kid die, it’s a dilemma.
So many parents end up molding towards normality, because it feels better to protect, to shelter, and it’s annoying to have a kid with a mohawk and pushes back on authority or digs tunnels under the house.
Anyway, here’s me doing that:
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I met a fellow BBS nerd
Speaking of weird kids, one of my weirdnesses was being a kid sysop of a BBS.
I’ve met a lot of people in my life. But as an adult, I’ve never met another adult that ran a BBS. That changed this week.
For those that were playing sports in school or having friends or whatever instead obsessing over how to compress your 25mb hard drive using Stacker so you can upgrade to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups without deleting your demoscene folder… a BBS is this sort of proto-internet thing where you could dial into people’s computers using a modem and communicate with others, play games, download warez er files, and send an early version of email using fidonet.
It looked something like this:
I created The Hourglass BBS when I was 11 or so. My grandparents let me use their phone line for it and eventually let me add on a secondary line to their home phone. It was $10 a month which I was able to get through building and selling the occasional computer.
Here is a poster I made for it that I put up around town trying to get users (this must have been post-DOS days when I launched a GUI BBS using Excalibur):
It was an amazing experience — having strangers log into your computer and watch them type commands and do things. I really can’t explain how exhilarating that is. Mostly it was people playing Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD):
Which is kind of funny because it’s sort of what I do now, have websites where people click on things, and I can literally watch them do it, which is creepy but cool.
Anyway, everyone else in my town who had a BBS was like 40 or 50 years old. I went to a meetup once and it was just all these old guys with beards and then this little kid trying to score free software.
But in all the people I’ve met as an adult, including a lot of smart people I’ve hired, I’ve never known any of them to have created a BBS. Probably because most of those people are very old now or dead.
So it was such a shock to talk to someone that had! And he was my age! A friend of mine insisted I meet her husband and we had a chat and he mentioned the BBS thing randomly.
It’s hard to meet friends as adults. It’s hard to really connect, you know? Even in this call, he was picking up his daughter and driving in the car and the phone cut out a lot as reception went bad. We had to call each other back multiple times.
Our call ended with him just suddenly dropping because he walked inside a building.
This is not the way to create deep connection.
Maybe I need to invite him to my BBS.
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Five Quick Hits
🔧 The $5 wrench attack. Every time I think I have impeccable security, I remind myself about this. (It’s also why I like multisig.)
📖 Influential business memos. Why wouldn’t you want to spend your evening reading this?
🦖 The day the dinosaurs died. “I read this whole article” is the ultimate flattery in the age of non-stop 30 second videos, and that’s exactly what I did. Also this is a great example of letting a weird kid be weird:
“His family buried their dead pets in one spot and put the burial markers in another, so that he wouldn’t dig up the corpses; he found them anyway. He froze dead lizards in ice-cube trays, which his mother would discover when she had friends over for iced tea.”
🖼️ AI Image Upscaling with Upscayl. Gen AI is changing the game for upscaling images and this one is free and pretty incredible. The
💥 My stupid noise journey. I read this last night and related so much to obsessing how to block out noisy neighbors which endless torment my brainskull and to preferring clever solutions to obvious ones.
“Gradually it dawned on me that I didn’t understand anything. Not the physics of sound, not how ears and brains perceive it, not how active noise cancellation works, and not even how passive noise blocking works. Nothing.”
“I had a problem. The ultimate solution to my problem was to do the most obvious possible thing. But I convinced myself that wouldn’t work and spent two years trying everything else.”
Thanks for reading,
Josh
PS: Hiding 200 tiny ducks in a house while someone is away is PEAK.