Hey all,

My favourite video essayist, Lindsay Ellis, only posts on Nebula now, so that was the final incentive to get me to sign up.

Now that I'm in I'm finding the breadth of content a bit overwhelming.

Taste wise, I really like Lindsay Ellis/Jenny Nicholson type videos that are funny media analysis. I've never seen Jet Lag (it seems big on Tildes).

I'm pretty averse to all the war and conflict stuff on the splash page. Similarly, I don't really like food channels because it just makes me frustrated and hungry.

Apart from that, I guess the main thing is I don't know what I don't know! Do you have favourite creators you'd recommend?

Hello book club readers!

This month we are reading a classic, the Metamorphosis by Kafka. How is it going? Have you started?

I'm finishing up some other books but will start soon. I've never read this one and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Something I'm wondering about: since COVID, I just don't seem to get colds anymore.

Before COVID, I recall that I very regularly had some kind of minor cold – it felt like it was about 50% of the time, realistically let's say maybe 20%? But of course that's just my recollection.

I then caught the original strain of COVID in March 2020, and suffered fairly badly from it for 3 weeks – definitely the worst illness of my life, though I was very lucky not to need to go into hospital. Since then I've had 3 doses of the COVID vaccine, and had COVID at least twice more, both times very mildly.

Since then though, I've noticed that I almost never have any sort of cold any more. I think my partner and I had some kind of brief minor flu back in September, but I've not had anything since, and I remember thinking that it had been a long time since I'd had anything like that.

For reference, I don't wear a mask nowadays, or otherwise do anything much different to my life before COVID.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why this might be?

Uneducated theories on my part:

1. Somehow having COVID made me less likely to catch colds
2. Somehow having the COVID vaccine made me less likely to catch colds
3. During COVID I got used to holding my breath around people coughing, and that's surprisingly effective towards not catching colds
4. I'm now mostly around people less likely to pass on colds for some reason

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially those who have some actual knowledge about this topic!

I have a bare bones prototype of a game made in twine and I will be honest it needs a lot of work.

The story and main architecture of the game is already planned and I am happy with it. It is the story hooks and pathing that I am looking to improve and for that I would like to give out a early Alpha build for volunteers to critique and provide any dead ends, errors and story beats they find engaging.

Please feel free to send a message if you would like to participate. Thank you for your time.

Edit: Thank you for your interest in the game the final build should be ready for volunteers in one week. I will send links to you directly at that time. Thank you again for your interest this is much better than I hoped for.

I've had a thought bouncing in my head today and I want to give it some air and let you folks at it to see where it takes on water.

The theory is that there's a contradiction, or misalignment maybe, between how most people feel about the philosophical concept of free will and how time travel and time loops are portrayed in media. Here's the premises I've landed on to arrive at that:

(1) The vast majority of people believe in some form of free will. (Fairly non contentious, I hope. A lot of resources back this up.)

(2) For free will to exist, if a person is repeatedly prompted to make some sort of decision under the exact same circumstances (time, place, people, etc) there must be a non-zero amount of times that they will arrive at a decision different from their initial one. For example... lets suppose you walk into the room and ask me what I want for dinner. I chew on some options for a moment then decide "chicken and rice". Then my memory is wiped and we repeat this over and over. After a few repeats of this I end up settling on a steak burrito instead. This is the only way free will could work imo because the opposite result, if given the same input you always arrive at the same output, is no different than determinism. Plus it implies, much like the time loop/travel media show, that from the start of the day we can know exactly where we will end up at the end if nothing is changed- which leaves no wiggle room for free will.

(3) The people in time travel / time loop media who are not your faithful protagonist or otherwise aware of the time based shenanigans going on always do the exact same thing every time (at least, in the ones I've seen). It's only the ones who are aware of how events have already unfolded who can make new decisions, everyone and everything else plays out the same.

Thus, virtually all media portray time travel/loops in a way that doesn't jive with how the vast majority of people perceive free will.

So, what do you think- Do you agree with the conclusion? Do you disagree on the definition of free will? Should I have gone with my alternate title? (12 Deterministic Monkeys starring Bruce Free Willis)

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