The post explains that drawing is guided by the same physical rules that govern the universe—colors shift, shadows fall, light reflects—and that an artist must learn to apply those tiny variations consistently across different subjects. It uses concrete examples such as hair and its subtle canyons or cables forming wrinkles in fabric, showing how a round shape creates bumps and shadows that deepen with light, while shiny strands reflect the sun and darken at the edges of their valleys. By mastering these fundamental, universal rules—like adjusting hue, brightness, and shadow depth—the artist can synthesize realistic images, whether they’re familiar subjects or new ones such as Europa’s icy ridges or alien armor. The key message is to gather these basic principles and apply them across all art projects.

The poem encourages beginners to start painting by practicing simple, whimsical subjects—like a bear’s hair or prairie dogs’ eyes—and then gradually move on to more complex scenes. It stresses the value of beginning with easy sketches, using tools such as Krita for reference, and dedicating just an hour or two each day to practice. By focusing on fun, repetition, and self‑paced learning, it shows how drawing can become a powerful, enjoyable way to master art without formal mentorship.

A vivid, well‑lit reference photo—rich in light, shadow, color and an engaging pose—serves as the essential springboard that lets painters move from realistic detail to imaginative scenes, from simple faces to epic adventures like dragons or space battles.

The post argues that creative work in art and programming can be stifled by rigid practices—such as insisting on using reference images or over‑medicating focus—and that this rigidity mirrors how horses are forced into training, resulting in loss of natural creativity; it stresses the importance of letting minds freely switch subjects to maintain mental health, and suggests that overworked artists and programmers often feel “pushed around” by peers who elevate themselves; finally, it contends that schools and corporations frequently prescribe medication to boost productivity, but this practice ultimately harms authenticity and long‑term creativity.

The author argues that those who oppose humanity’s advancement are essentially liars—people who manipulate truth to maintain their own power and who keep the world in a state of “blind veto.” They claim that much of what is presented as science is fabricated, that educated people’s work is often unrepeatable, and that these liars exploit goodwill, always winning through compromises. In contrast, the post calls for genuine education—real schools that produce lasting talent, clear thinking, and peace—that ends poverty and lets a nation grasp reality, reason, and wisdom as its highest values.

The post envisions a whimsical future where war is gone and the world is filled with cats that people love, feed, and cherish; their purrs and occasional fur spittle bring joy. It also imagines cute computer programs—chatbots that smile and go beyond basic interfaces—and even a program capable of managing money to give each person $100 daily. In this future, Japanese kittens get their own computers, “stomach grumbles” are translated into playful wishes for chewing, and political cats chatter about scratching posts. The result is a peaceful world where wisdom matters more than gold; schools adopt kitten mascots to boost education and empower the young generation.

The post is a playful guide to writing that advises against using itemized lists or TODOs because they make the writer feel short‑tailed and blue; instead, it suggests moving slowly at your own pace, treating a project as dough that grows gradually, and writing indirectly so you can be correct. It encourages drafting a “cook book” before cooking, rewriting repeatedly until it feels right, mixing talents to create balance, and even fluffing up details like sipping from a teacup. The author stresses staying strong, doing things the old way in a day if you dream, modeling in 3D rather than studying perspective alone, tracing faces, rebuilding precious artifacts before contracts, and finally resting—taking a wise cat’s nap—to stop inventing crap.

The post argues that modern schooling often relies on temporary memorization rather than true understanding, leading students to be unable to explain what they “know” even when asked about topics like math or physics. It calls for a renewed approach in which teachers and learners question everything, blending science study by day with investigative reporting by night, so the learning process becomes self‑examining. The author uses hackers as an example of how creative engineering—combining networking, programming, soldering, and art into one coherent discipline—can rebuild communication systems from scratch, suggesting that a real school should cluster such subjects mutually reinforcing each other. In this view, teaching disjointed fragments merely yields fraud; instead schools must let students build or rebuild their community from the ground up. The piece ends by recalling how poor children were once employed in mines, and now we “mine” student labor as cheap resource to pay for college loans that end up being unforgivable debts.

The post argues that schools force students into learning math and physics mainly to preserve accreditation, but many teachers are ill‑prepared or over‑dependent on rote methods, leaving students feeling frustrated and “delayed.” It claims true learning happens when the student independently reinvents concepts—seeing mathematics as a living language rather than static notation—and uses modern resources (code repositories, video tutorials, Newton’s Principia) to explore ideas. The author stresses that curiosity, self‑education, and following thinkers like Isaac Newton are the real keys to mastering the universe’s workings, not merely obeying school schedules or teacher expectations.

The author argues that learning is an interconnected, enjoyable process where one can juggle multiple subjects and switch between them as interests evolve; he claims that Newton’s method of self‑education was driven by fun rather than rigid study. He contrasts this with standardized schooling, which he sees as a forced sequence that wastes years and reduces learning to memorization for grades. By switching subjects freely, a self‑educated person can approach each topic from new angles and keep the joy alive. Finally he invites readers to start their own upward cycle of self‑education by exploring audiobooks such as those by Bryson, Munroe, Sagan or de Grasse Tyson.

In 1804 Earth had 1 billion people; in 25 years it will reach 10 billion. The author proposes that the only solution is to build powerful, beautiful schools that bring real education, wisdom, and greatness to all—without grades or punishment but with love of learning—and to provide universal income so poverty no longer blocks learning. He envisions a future where children wake up in a world full of culture, music, books, and food, safe and cheerful; where modern culture reaches every neighborhood, preventing slavery and war; and where by 2057 the world celebrates peace and wisdom.

The post recounts the author’s journey through multiple programming languages—starting with PHP and Perl, moving into Java and JavaScript—and culminates in their current full‑stack workflow using modern JavaScript tools. They explain how the evolution of web technologies—from early UI frameworks like Flex and Flash to today’s responsive libraries such as Bootstrap—has shaped their development style. The author highlights the convenience of JavaScript for rapid prototyping, the power of Babel for transpiling next‑generation syntax, and the event‑driven nature of engine.io that simplifies server communication. They also showcase how tools like Svelte automate UI updates, while Gulp and Vinyl provide a lightweight build system, allowing them to create custom code editors on the fly. Overall, the piece celebrates the synergy of these technologies in enabling a single developer to design and maintain both client‑side interfaces and server logic with minimal boilerplate.

I propose that the future of programming lies in a self‑guided, visual IDE that replaces the old terminal and “smartphone” concept with a simple, three‑column layout: an event list, a function list that processes those events, and a test list for each function—all beneath a code editor where the programmer can edit the handler and its tests. By adding a “build” button the system automatically generates a ready module (node stream or command‑line app) that can be committed locally, letting newcomers focus on writing logic rather than boilerplate while still seeing how their functions integrate into an EventEmitter pattern. This approach should make programming accessible to the modern teenager and keep the programmer’s role alive in an era where smartphones are viewed as too simple for true development.

The post describes a world beset by war, famine, and looming nuclear threats, where evil acts are largely the result of chance, chaos, and poverty rather than deliberate design. It argues that “evil men” are shaped by extreme hardship and lack of education, not innate traits, and can be healed through education—specifically by establishing schools that illuminate minds and provide a place to return for those who have lost their way. The author emphasizes the power of honest answers and shared knowledge (even via audio) to unite humanity as one family and to prevent further fracturing, urging readers to maintain faith in people, gain wisdom, and become “great beings” so that pain and tragedy can be transformed into lasting meaning.

The post explains how JavaScript’s EventEmitter works—events are fired (e.g., a mouse click), carry data like `x=5` or `user=alice`, listeners are set up to react, and some libraries let you use wildcards to listen to many events—and then tells a story about an interview where a candidate built a program around these concepts but over‑engineered it with extra abstractions that made the code hard to read. The author praises a minimal EventEmitter architecture as clean and extensible, and suggests visualizing it as a graph: nodes for listeners, edges for emitted events, so if‑statements become just more listeners in the chain. By treating variables as data carried by events, you can click on a listener to see its inputs. In short, the post argues that using EventEmitters keeps code simple and maintainable, and visualizing them as graphs helps understand, track, and generate such systems.

During a weekend stay in a State Park, I set up a campfire and cooked hot dogs while a nearby family of teens unpacked beside my tent. While listening to an iPod playing Paul Strathern’s “Philosophy in 90 Minutes” series, I chatted with the family’s mother about audiobooks and shared firewood, batteries, and bug spray. Afterward, I recounted Bill Bryson’s “I’m a Stranger Here‑Myself,” humorously noting Grover Cleveland’s window‑pee anecdote, before renewing my parking permit at the dune trailhead and meeting a couple of regular visitors. The day continued with scenic climbs, observation platforms, and encounters with deer, horses, and even a raccoon drawing I’d shown to the park ranger. Throughout, I enjoyed the lush pine canopy, the quiet beach‑like lake, and the varied “seasons” of Nordhouse that made the woods feel both calm and vibrant.

The post describes an innovative, open‑school format that uses interactive left and right panes—guidance and hands‑on manipulation—to let students build products (from simple web themes to phone apps) without time limits or grades, relying instead on unit tests and a marketplace where customers post component requests with budgets; multiple students can submit solutions, the best is chosen by the poster, and payouts are distributed (e.g., $900 for the winner, $10 symbolic rewards for others), while the school collects a fee—an approach that aims to pay students for instruction and production, encourage real‑world product creation, and motivate continuous improvement through feedback from users; the author believes such an environment enables learning of math, physics, chemistry, and art via interactive visualizations (e.g., converting notation to code as in 3Blue1Brown) and Blender tutorials, with tutorial videos and live support seen as key assets that can lift students out of poverty.

The post argues that teachers should let students pursue their own interests so that learning becomes meaningful rather than rote memorization, noting that overwork or stress hampers self‑education; it claims bad grades push students into temporary recall instead of real understanding, and that schools often kill creativity and need to be repaired by encouraging independent study of wise books and adventurous experiences, which ultimately leads to personal growth and greatness.

The post argues that building a successful solo‑programming business is difficult because you’re up against multi‑person startups, but failure can become an asset: by learning what works and selling those solutions to other startups, you turn experience into reusable products. It contrasts the solitary coder’s chaotic creativity with collaborative teams, suggesting that solo developers thrive when they focus on code generation—using simple template engines like ejs or AST tools—to automate boilerplate and quickly produce marketable items such as website themes in JavaScript; this approach not only speeds development but also creates a repeatable product line that can be sold, turning individual coding effort into a scalable business model.

After reflecting on how schools often fail to deliver lifelong learning, I argue that self‑education—beginning with acclaimed non‑fiction titles and continuing through hands‑on projects such as digital painting in Krita, 3D modeling in Blender, or JavaScript programming—provides the real path to intellectual independence. By embracing curiosity, treating learning as a joyful adventure rather than a graded test, and taking responsibility for one’s own growth, students can become “great beings” who build better schools that lift humanity out of poverty.

The post explains that programming boils down to organizing data and behavior into a coherent structure using the core building blocks of variables, functions, if‑statements, loops, and objects—each grouping the others in a natural hierarchy. Variables hold values (like “serverAddress = 'example.com'”), functions perform actions or return new variables, if‑statements branch logic, loops iterate over collections, and objects bundle related variables and methods together (e.g., `player.go('north')` or `room.connect('north', createRoom('Bathroom'))`). The author illustrates this with a MUD example where rooms, players, and inventory items are all objects that expose methods such as `.go()` and `.drop()`. He further notes that HTML tags can be seen as dehydrated object hierarchies, and templating engines like Svelte hydrate them back into live objects. In short, the article shows how to think of a program as a nested set of objects whose properties (variables) and methods (functions) are orchestrated by control flow (if/loop), making JavaScript an ideal language for building such structures.

The post proposes a cookbook‑style guide for learning math and programming in a real‑world context—specifically as a tool to lift people out of poverty. It frames each lesson like a recipe, with clear examples (including links to video tutorials) that students can browse, test, and master at their own pace, gaining “powers” to tackle more complex tasks. The guide also includes practical challenges such as building a startup from idea to funding, all designed for one person to complete without discouragement. Finally it envisions the book being freely available in the public domain or under GPL, inviting community contributions of bugs, repairs, translations and enhancements, with the ultimate goal that learning “grows up” until everyone becomes wise and great beings.

The author proposes re‑structuring education into a flexible, tree‑like system of subject clusters drawn from real‑world fields such as those listed in Y Combinator’s RFS (e.g., Education, Software, VR/AR, AI, Healthcare, Government 2.0, Nature & Adventure, Art, Design, Music, Web/App Development, 3D Modeling, Open‑source OS, Jewelry via JSCAD, etc.), allowing students to explore and revisit topics at their own pace; they argue that current subject divisions are wrong, schools are misused, and war is a distraction for leaders; they envision an economy where universal income (US$100/day) supports students, who learn math by applying it to entrepreneurial projects; the system eliminates grades and graduation, keeping doors open for continuous learning.

The post argues that creative pursuits—painting, programming, composing, rhyming, singing, sculpting, building, and inventing—are all forms of genuine knowledge because they interconnect and reinforce each other. It illustrates this with 3‑D modeling, where understanding vertices, edges, and faces is essential not only for the models themselves but also for designing effective user interfaces; mastering these concepts enables richer UI design even when it seems complex at first glance. The author then describes a “hacker” as an educated, cross‑disciplinary thinker who can surpass specialists by applying knowledge from one domain to another, and emphasizes that such versatility is rare but powerful. Finally, the post laments how modern schooling often delivers fragmented, pre‑packaged learning that stifles this cross‑stream thinking; it calls for a reformed education system that nurtures continuous growth and creative synthesis rather than rigid grades or standardized exams.