Biology and meaning in life, long-term memory and senses, more chess, Common Core, The Giver, Intersellar, ancient stone tablets

Truth vs. Useful Illusion, Naturalistic Pantheism, Is biological life necessary in order to have meaning in life? (and how that question seems important and at the same time doesn't seem to make any sense), the social rule of reciprocity, Availability Heuristic, examples of when motion/movement slows down decay - or when it doesn't, how stimulating multiple senses at once affects long-term memory development! (this is my favorite thought this week), how what people like to focus on determines (to an extent) the role they want to play in the world, the importance of theoretical work (the "what could be"), wishing I could read minds, how strange it seems to be hyperaware of my influences, video games as visual and interactive storytelling, how tomorrow is Game 9 of the World Chess Championship and I'm reading The Tao of Chess (because I need to learn basic strategy principles before I watch Grand Masters duke it out - and I like connecting my interests), how a lot of people only look at the surface of things or take everything at face-value without doing research and WHY? (probably because it takes effort), Nietzsche and his both admiration of and battle against Nihilism (I respect his perspective), Common Core Standards and whether or not they adhere to child development studies, the adoption of Singapore Math in US schools, the rare moments in life when you take the time to acknowledge an opportunity that will improve your well-being and actually take it, the limitations of metaphors in their ability to create exact comparisons but still loving how they help you look at the world in a different way, the metallic taste of blood and how I wish there were more soap products available that wouldn't make my hands bleed, how humanizing machines goes a little too far sometimes but knowing there's a philosophy out there that says machines are a part of us and that we're all a part of everything, how speeding up a process increases room for error, how editing other people's writing is sometimes a masochistic activity (and other times just painful), how I need to practice more Danish, Do people prefer listening mostly to music with vocals that are similar to their own tone of voice? (or the tone of voice of someone they are close to?), how frustrating it is for people to care more about appearances than everything else going on inside you (but knowing that the people who really matter are the ones that care about all of you), how there's no mercy in upper leg massages - but they're still necessary, how The Giver series has an on-going theme of "physical boundaries or borders" in each of the books so far and I'm still wondering what that's all about, Interstellar's dualism in presenting opposing ideas between taking care of Earth and space exploration (the situation "Earth is dying" required that the latter was emphasized), how as I write these kinds of statuses I can actually determine if I'm being more pessimistic or optimistic today - and shift my thinking accordingly (it's a neat exercise, you should try it), yes - there's a reason I write in this way on a social site that's better for smaller snippets of thought/experience or images, how organizing information plays a role in learning and how this format probably isn't the best way to lay out my thoughts to others, but it works - for me (and all those ancient peoples who used to write on stone tablets).