Wouldn’t suit me: I’d turn rapidly to murder I think. But there are more ways of being wired weird than mine.

I wonder what the prevalence of autism is among sex workers. I would have assumed low because of sensory issues etc but a) some of us are wired weird in ways that might actually help in some scenarios, and b) the working patterns might be relatively congenial

> Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator.

Is such a good sentence

The final boss is being able to endure the company of Toby Young

自掘坑墓 you might say, or perhaps 自毀長城

Debated with myself whether to make it "I have not finished, Charlie Brown".

I think it *has* to be

Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable
Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly
Among carnage the most delicate souls
Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus, Charlie Brown’.

I feel the centre left lost an important part of its soul the minute Gordon Brown let himself be browbeaten into apologising to that bigoted woman

which is not something that could ever be said of the TESCREAL crowd, alas

I have had a few episodes of sleep paralysis, and it's very striking how the brain registers "presence", a sense that can clearly be erroneously activated under certain conditions. Would like to try electromagnetic temporal lobe stimulation some time to see if it can be mechanically switched on.

I think you did ask that question yes!

I would like to think that once you have discovered it's possible to have and express the kinds of complex thoughts your previous default state of being was constitutively incapable of holding together, you'd never forget the lesson. Unfortunately I don't think that's true: people do forget.

Bit like drugs in fact. Smoking weed in my youth enabled me to experience a state of signficantly reduced anxiety, proving that what I had taken to be my ground state of being need not necessarily be accepted and endured as such.

It's yes because the point of education at that level is to be brought up against the limits of what you can do, and then try to develop in such a way that you can surpass them. Discover what it feels like to think and articulate a complex thought.

Which is depressing (especially since, if you press hard on it, it reveals a certain sponginess, sign-sponginess you might say). What are students from the middle of the pack to do? Not use something that writes better (and makes cleverer points) than they do? The answer is yes, actually.