Three things coming out next month!

(quick update – 4 min read)

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Hi all! This Patreon was un-paused on April 1st, because I am back from a 16-month-long burnout hiatus!

Shockingly, this past month was actually really good –– not just re: "work productivity", but overall human flourishing. I'm currently traveling, seeing friends I haven't seen in 3 years, spontaneously trying new stuff, reading challenging books, playing Patrick's Parabox, and (after a rapid antigen test) going to a party where everyone cosplayed being a 90's kid again.

I mentioned before the pandemic that my life-work-style was unsustainable –– then during the pandemic, my mental health tanked hard (and, yes, I know I got off relatively easy) –– but now that I'm back, I need to commit to not screwing myself over again.

(“stop hitting yourself, why are you hitting yourself?“ ~love, your anxiety)

So, what's happening with my public work for at least the next year: I'm going to work a lot less, on more frequently-released but way smaller & less polished projects.

Working less, to be with friends & lovers more, and savor the pains & joys of being alive. None of that is shareable online #content, so just take my word for it that I'm (finally) trying to treat myself as an ends-in-oneself, not just a means to an ends.

comic title: Self-Worth Based Mostly On Contribution To Humanity
panel 1: "I want to be useful"
panel 2: [feels used]
panel 3: "oh no"

(also, for frick's sake, we live in the future, didn't Kaynes predict in the 1930's that we'd all have 15-hour workweeks by now?)

More frequent but smaller projects, so I can make more "small bets". Something something convex tinkering, 1/N strategy. "More but smaller" also has a direct human-flourishing benefit for me: I love learning & making art, and a quicker iteration loop lets me explore more.

Concretely, here's three small projects that are likely [80% chance] to all come out next month, May 2022!

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Nutshell: Make Expandable Explanations

(Other than recursive "expandable" explanations, you can also embed explanations from other websites & authors. And because Nutshell doesn't need a special format (it just uses headers & paragraphs) you can even embed writings from before Nutshell was made! I also recently added Wikipedia & Simple Wikipedia integration – if no explanation exists & you don't want to write one, just link to (Simple)Wikipedia and Nutshell can pull it.)

After teasing about this for 2 years, it's finally feature-complete and almost ready to ship! All that's left to do is some cross-browser testing, and edit website words.

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A Mini-Talk I Gave To Some Stanford Grad Students

There's so many powerful ideas that need to be understood, but I am not – as they say in the biz – "scaleable". So in the future, I'd like to explain more on how to explain. Teach how to teach. Distill how to distill.

So last week, I gave a mini-talk that shared a few time-tested tricks/heuristics I use over and over again, to explain make complex ideas accessible. It's a ~20 minute talk, titled, How To Explain Things Real Good, and will be public next month!

Also, I now get to namedrop "I gave a talk at Stanford". (yes, credentialism is bad etc, but hey, gotta namedrop before the bubble pops)

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Blogging With Mini-Interactives

This isn't a single, standalone "project", but I'll be revamping my blog so I can make quick posts with mini-interactives in of them. Because 8 years later, interactives still have a high investment-barrier, so I want to explore what a casual "blog that just happens to have interactives" might look like.

These interactive components might include:

• Nutshell's "expandable explanations", so I can explain advanced topics yet still be accessible to beginners, since readers can just click "expand" on topics they don't know about.
• Orbit's "spaced repetition" prompts, to make long-term memory a choice, and avoid this problem:

And maaaaaybe I'll finally get around to learning how to use Observable, Geogebra, Idyll, and related tools. Coz seriously, I need to get over my own Not Invented Here problem, and just use the tools already in the ecosystem because that's how you foster an ecosystem, duh, Nicky.

(And yes I still have yet to publicly post that Functional Decision Theory explainer. Will do that, with Orbit!)

. . .

And that's my quick update! Now if you excuse me, it's time to get back to spending quality time with friends I haven't seen in too long, followed by being stuck on this one dang level of Patrick's Parabox.

Happy Spring Allergy Season! 🌸

~ Nicky Case