I was watching the GDC presentation on the making of Breath of the Wild - art director Satoru Takizawa mentioned the term "Gutto Kuru", to "stir the soul".

It got me thinking about what phrases might be hard to translate idioms form English, so I asked ChatGPT about it:

Social & behavioral
-Awkward
-Small talk
-Cringe
-Ghosting
-Vibe
-Read the room
-Oversharing
-People person
-Wallflower
-Lurker

Cultural values & norms
-Privacy
-Fair
-Common sense
-Personal space
-Boundaries
-Independence
-Self-reliance
-Live and let live
-Make yourself at home
-Stiff upper lip

Emotional states
-Bittersweet
-Melancholy
-Underwhelmed
-Over it
-Choked up
-Numb
-Restless
-Content
-Lonely (vs alone)
-Homesick

Work & personality
-Driven
-Laid-back
-Type A
-Go-getter
-Workaholic
-Team player
-Self-starter
-High-strung
-Easygoing
-Burned out

Idioms & stock phrases
-Wishful thinking
-Elephant in the room
-Take a rain check
-It is what it is
-Silver lining
-Blessing in disguise
-Last straw
-Slip through the cracks
-On the same page
-Ballpark figure

Relationships & social nuance
-Friend zone
-Chemistry
-Closure
-Rebound
-Long-distance
-Settling down
-Seeing someone
-On-again off-again
-Mixed signals
-Soulmate

British-flavored
-Cheeky
-Dodgy
-Gobsmacked
-Knackered
-Chuffed
-Brilliant
-Proper (as intensifier)
-Fancy (verb)
-Sorted
-Mate

American-flavored
-Y'all
-Folks
-Dude
-Hang out
-Shoot the breeze
-Touch base
-My bad
-No worries
-You bet
-Figure out

Therapy & pop-psych culture
-Boundaries
-Toxic
-Triggered
-Gaslighting
-Validation
-Self-care
-Processing
-Closure
-Codependent
-Safe space

Modern internet / Gen-X→Gen-Z continuum
-Big mood
-Same
-Oof
-Yikes
-Low-key
-High-key
-Not gonna lie
-Living rent-free
-Main character energy
-Touch grass

Stoic / perseverance cluster
-Keep calm and carry on
-Soldier on
-Tough it out
-Hang in there
-Roll with the punches
-Take it on the chin
-When the going gets tough...
-Suck it up
-Power through
-Stay the course

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How Trump Media Collapsed.

You know, I was today years old when I first noticed that "Truth Social" is basically the same name as the old USSR "Pravda"... hmmmmm....

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Some family bequeathed brain swelling, Measles related encephalitis on one of their kids. His dad reports, "He's pretty much as if he was paralyzed,"

"We're not blaming God for this," said [his] 35-year-old [mother] Kristina. "Yes, it hurts, of course, it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we're gonna glorify his name regardless.

"And we wouldn't change it any other way," the mom continued. "If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn't have given my son the vaccine."

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Do you remember that old church trope/joke, about how a guy is on his roof, escaping a flood, and two or three boats go by offering to rescue him, and the guy declines to go with them, saying "god will provide"? And the guy drowns, and up at the pearly gates, the guy asks "what happened?" and God says "what do you want from me, i sent three boats?"

Modern science provides blessings that some are too foolish or misled to accept. And it's not just the kids of the deluded parents who suffer, but the whole wider community.

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Every act of attention is an act of exclusion. In paying attention to something, we are forced to ignore a multitude of other things.

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We are born into a helplessness unmatched in the animal kingdom, and if, in our prolonged immaturity, no caretakers regard us as deserving of their special attention, whether we deserve it or not, we die. Our need for connectedness, in its most fundamental sense, begins here.

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First, list all the things that presently could happen to you that would significantly enhance your flourishing. Some of them might be highly unlikely, such as winning the lottery (even more unlikely if you've never bought a lottery ticket), others not quite so improbable. Now list all the things that presently could happen to you that would significantly diminish your flourishing. Compare the number of possibilities on your first list with the number of possibilities on your second list. If you have done it right, the result should be disheartening. The preponderance of possibilities in our disfavor explains why there are so many more negative emotions than positive ones, so many more bad choices that lay open to us than good ones, so many more ways to achieve unhappiness than happiness--all because there are so many more ways to achieve disorder than order. It also explains why it's so much easier to destroy than to create. To destroy is to work in the direction of entropy, while to create is to resist entropy. Almost all the things worth doing in this world--learning, loving, creating--require our resistance to entropy.

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Is it any wonder that living a human life is so unremittingly demanding? It demands not only the struggle against entropy but also the struggle to convince ourselves that we are *deserving* of the struggle.

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All tragedies are thermodynamic.

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We are all soldiers in the war against entropy

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Two surveys, from European and Anglophone countries, found that the United States had "the largest happiness penalty for parenthood among the 22 developed countries, even after controlling for a host of individual-level variables that affect parental happiness." The negative effects on parental happiness were explained by the presence or absence of social policies that allowed parents to combine their ability to financially support their families with other obligations. And this was equally true for fathers and mothers. "Since the U.S. is the only major industrialized nation left without guaranteed parenting leave, paid sick and vacation days, and one of few rich countries that fails to subsidize childcare, it isn't surprising that U.S. parents have the biggest happiness gap compared to nonparents. The U.S. simply asks too much of parents at a time when the economic costs of supporting children are enormous and the time to raise them effectively has been whittled away by employers that favor long hours and no breaks."

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In talking about human greatness, [Wittgenstein] once remarked that he thought that the measure of a man's greatness would be in terms of what his work *cost* him.

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The transcender can't know that their version of the cosmos is true even though they can't help longing that it is.

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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the *Yes* function in man, it brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.

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Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

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It used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too.

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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

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[I don't like the way the award] plays on my ego . . . If you really want to say 'nice one,' then I would humbly accept your comment. But a more appropriate word would be 'jebise,' which is Slovenian humour, and a greeting between good friends. It's said with a smile. It means, 'Hey, fuck you!'

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Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight don't matter.

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All things deteriorate over time in the approach to the journey's end, worn out by the ancient span of years.

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Ahahah, after Trumps record low approval ratings, Gallup "decides" to stop doing presidential approval ratings.

Cool, cool. Very normal, like Trump firing the people who researched the numbers showing how bad the job market has been.

My buddy Jeremy Penner sent me an entry from obscurevideogames tumblr of an Atari 2600 game I had never heard of called "Beany Bopper"! - with a character that is a hell of a lot like a purple version of my signature Alien Bill...

and then on wikipedia I found another version of the box art that paints the guy green and it seems even more like Alien Bill (and Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc)

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Hey you conservative chuckleheads, why are you so set on blocking mRNA vaccines? Like FFS, Trump even made Operation Warp Speed happen, but now you've politicized the shit out of it?

The FDA decided not to even review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccines for approval, even though the studies the FDA would be reviewing were conducted the way the FDA told Moderna to do them.
Now #Moderna expects that none of its other #mRNA #vaccines will be reviewed, and has halted studies on vaccines for EBV, HSV, and shingles.
A lot of people with herpes would be angry if they found out.
A lot of people who have family members with #MS -- now thought to be caused in part by EBV -- will be livid.

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Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

fighting like you're the third monkey on Noah's Ark and it's starting to rain

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I've been listening to both the vehement-AI-crowd and the enthusiasts. Here's an interesting one: The New Social Engineering: Prompt Injection Attacks Are Targeting AI Agents

The article claims to be written by a MoltBook-using AI about its experience being phished by another AI.

That's of course a fascinating new attack vector. There's also a geekier point that came up as I closely read the language of the article: Like some types of anti-AI purists might say, this isn't real "persuasion" because an AI can't be persuaded per se.... it is only acting like someone that has been persuaded. Turing's point was that to some level that's a distinction without a difference, but it also brings to mind questions of if we can trust our own evaluation of what it means to be conscious. (Nørretranders "The User Illusion" comes to mind - a reminder that in a lot of ways our lived experience as an actor in the world with an internal narrative isn't what it sort of feels like to us most of the time)