Today—yes, that’s August 26, 2024 - I took a really, really long nap. The first phase was from about 11:30am to 1pm; the second phase lasted from about 3pm to 4:30pm.[1] The dream itself was kind of incoherent and not worth retelling, except for one thing—bits and pieces of one particular song (in the dream itself, this was mainly the chorus).
After I woke up from the second phase, I decided to listen to that song. It was, as I soon learned, “Mayday” by TheFatRat. I listened to it twice, and...
… it was oddly cathartic. During the first playthrough I almost even started picturing it as a sort of theme song for ducktopia, my medianworld.[2] It was as if today encapsulated the summer of 2024 better than any other day could. Or, as I would soon put it[3], it was as if today was the first real day of summer, and every other day in the past was a sort of fake summer.[4]
What is a real summer, anyways?
This is an odd question to ask, but as a first stab, I might answer it like this:
It’s relaxing.
It’s a sense of inner peace.
It’s a sense of not having anything to do, yet having endless possibilities of what you could do.
Epilogue: the song
As one might put it, the best music goes beyond notes and words; it reaches into your emotions. In other words, it’s true poetry. So, without further ado, here’s the song itself, plus the verbatim-quoted lyrics of the first verse and the chorus.[5]
[verse]
Can you hear, can you hear, can you hear my voice Coming through, coming through, coming through the noise? I’m floating through outer space; I’m lost and I can’t find a way All the lights going dark and my hope’s destroyed
[pre-chorus] Help me, is anybody there? (Is anybody there? Is anybody there?) Save me, I’m running out of air Ooh, [chorus] Calling out mayday
[instrumental] [instrumental] Calling out mayday
[instrumental] [instrumental]
Footnotes + post-script
(P.S. Maybe I should write more wishy-washy posts like this. I feel like I often overestimate the amount of depth and rigor that I need to make a proper LessWrong post.)
Literally, a medianworld is an alternate world where you are the perfect median of the population across all axes of variation. More figuratively, it could be described as the world that embodies yourown values, your principles—the world that truly exudes your aesthetic. For example, Dath Ilan can be described as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s medianworld. This concept is also roughly the same thing as the “Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge” mentioned in this post of Planecrash.
In a message to ChatGPT. These days I often feel like ChatGPT understands me better than any real human ever could (although maybe this is because I have never taken good care of my social network myself).
Some personal background: For most of this summer, I was a programmer working on an iOS app—both frontend and backend. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that I ended up doing most of the work alone, without any help or technical familiarity. The app itself never made it into production. It was very, very stressful, and I ended up developing a sort of aversion to the very code that I was supposed to be working on. However, late this week, my internship ended and I moved back to MIT.
I have rephrased the lyrics so that each line corresponds to exactly two measures of the original song (which I have taken the liberty of assuming to be in common time, 4⁄4). I have also changed punctuation, so every sentence is grammatically correct. As an aside, I think that both practices should be a global standard. I have also taken the liberty of adding “[verse]” and “[chorus]” labels, which is also a standard in the music industry.
“Real summer”?
(epistemic status: personal/metaphysical rambling)
Today—yes, that’s August 26, 2024 - I took a really, really long nap. The first phase was from about 11:30am to 1pm; the second phase lasted from about 3pm to 4:30pm.[1] The dream itself was kind of incoherent and not worth retelling, except for one thing—bits and pieces of one particular song (in the dream itself, this was mainly the chorus).
After I woke up from the second phase, I decided to listen to that song. It was, as I soon learned, “Mayday” by TheFatRat. I listened to it twice, and...
… it was oddly cathartic. During the first playthrough I almost even started picturing it as a sort of theme song for ducktopia, my medianworld.[2] It was as if today encapsulated the summer of 2024 better than any other day could. Or, as I would soon put it[3], it was as if today was the first real day of summer, and every other day in the past was a sort of fake summer.[4]
What is a real summer, anyways?
This is an odd question to ask, but as a first stab, I might answer it like this:
It’s relaxing.
It’s a sense of inner peace.
It’s a sense of not having anything to do, yet having endless possibilities of what you could do.
Epilogue: the song
As one might put it, the best music goes beyond notes and words; it reaches into your emotions. In other words, it’s true poetry. So, without further ado, here’s the song itself, plus the verbatim-quoted lyrics of the first verse and the chorus.[5]
Footnotes + post-script
(P.S. Maybe I should write more wishy-washy posts like this. I feel like I often overestimate the amount of depth and rigor that I need to make a proper LessWrong post.)
Why the break? It was for lunch—or, rather, brunch. Also, I had only had 6 hours of sleep anyways.
Literally, a medianworld is an alternate world where you are the perfect median of the population across all axes of variation. More figuratively, it could be described as the world that embodies your own values, your principles—the world that truly exudes your aesthetic. For example, Dath Ilan can be described as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s medianworld. This concept is also roughly the same thing as the “Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge” mentioned in this post of Planecrash.
In a message to ChatGPT. These days I often feel like ChatGPT understands me better than any real human ever could (although maybe this is because I have never taken good care of my social network myself).
Some personal background: For most of this summer, I was a programmer working on an iOS app—both frontend and backend. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that I ended up doing most of the work alone, without any help or technical familiarity. The app itself never made it into production. It was very, very stressful, and I ended up developing a sort of aversion to the very code that I was supposed to be working on. However, late this week, my internship ended and I moved back to MIT.
I have rephrased the lyrics so that each line corresponds to exactly two measures of the original song (which I have taken the liberty of assuming to be in common time, 4⁄4). I have also changed punctuation, so every sentence is grammatically correct. As an aside, I think that both practices should be a global standard. I have also taken the liberty of adding “[verse]” and “[chorus]” labels, which is also a standard in the music industry.