I can’t figure out any good way to put a smiley emoticon inside parentheses. There are five choices, all of which are bad:

• Do the straightforward thing of just writing it (which puts two parentheses next to each other in a row, and makes it unclear where the smiley face ends and the parenthesis proper begins :)).¹
• Do that, but put the period inside the parentheses. (Which requires restructuring your sentences, and ends up looking ugly anyway, like some deformed double-mouth emoticon :).)
• Put a space between the emoticon and the close parenthesis (which does look more visually distinct, but there’s no other situation where you put a space before the close parenthesis :) ).
• Only put a single close parenthesis (possibly the worst option because you can’t tell if the parenthesis is part of the punctuation or part of the emoticon :).
• Add some text after the smiley so it’s not at the end of the parenthetical (but maybe you have nothing left to say so the text is superfluous :) haha wouldn’t it be crazy if I wrote some extra stuff here?).

There’s a secret sixth option of “don’t use emoticons inside parentheses” but, like, what if I really want to? (emoticons are important sometimes :) )

Notes

I published a post every day of November as part of the Inkhaven program, in which we are required to publish a post every day of November. Some of my readers knew that; others were confused about why I suddenly started posting so much.

If you’re an email subscriber, you didn’t see every post because I only sent out the good ones—I didn’t want to bombard you with emails if you were accustomed to my typical once-per-week-or-three-months posting schedule. If you want to see the bad posts, they’re all on https://mdickens.me/.

Inkhaven had 40 other residents; you can see their posts on the website, and daily highlights at the Inkhaven Spotlight.

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I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming since high school, with just enough success to say that my efforts haven’t been a complete waste of time. I have a lucid dream once every few months, which isn’t great. But I still do reality checks multiple times per day.

The simplest way to lucid dream is to follow two steps:

1. Get into the habit of writing down your dreams as soon as you wake up, so you get better at remembering them.
2. Start doing regular reality checks.

(But this is also the least reliable method, hence why I haven’t had much success.)

A reality check is when you examine some aspect of the world to see if it looks unusual. An example of a reality check is to read some text, and then read it again. Many people find that in dreams, they have difficulty reading; or the words shift around and appear to say something different the second time.

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A silly argument:

The goal of this activity/institution is to achieve X. It doesn’t really achieve X, but it does achieve Y, which is even better!

If achieving Y is more important, why on earth would you go about that by trying and failing to achieve X? You should directly focus on Y instead.

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Not that I’m remotely as funny as George Carlin, or that this list is funny at all. But he had many complaints and grievances, and today I would also like to complain about some stuff.

This post contains spoilers for a lot of things. I won’t hide spoilers, but I will say the name of the thing before giving the spoiler.

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This meme got me thinking:

That feeling when you’re smart enough to know how awkward you are, but not smart enough to know how not to be awkward

The reason it works that way is because not being awkward is NP-hard, and I can prove it.

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In the spirit of You Can Just Do Things, here are some things I Just Do. Some of them are weird; others are normal, but frequently overlooked.

Edited 2025-12-03 to add a ninth thing.

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I played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so. I picked up the game again recently and I was immediately better at the game than my 14-year old self. I don’t have any direct way to prove this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

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Nearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape. That is not a good shape for typing or gaming or frankly anything else.

image source

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A few years ago, there was some publicity around a Navy fighter pilot who claimed to have seen an unidentified object that couldn’t possibly be explained except as an alien phenomenon. Many people considered this to be indisputable proof of aliens. “The pilot is an expert, there’s no way he could have been wrong.”

I am much more willing to believe that someone can make a mistake, regardless of how good they are at the thing in question.

Sure, fighter pilots have excellent vision, and sure, they’re better than I am at identifying objects in the sky. But they’re still fallible. There is no level of fighter-pilot skill that would make me believe aliens visited earth based solely on one person’s testimony.

For any scientific theory, no matter how well-established, you can always find at least one expert with a PhD who studies the topic for a living and disagrees with the consensus. So either almost all experts are wrong, or that one expert is wrong. Either way, experts can make mistakes.