Tiled With Pentagons

(If you're reading this right as it's been posted, or precisely some whole number of years afterwards, take a deep breath before you start reading. Hold it for as long as you can. If you finish reading before you must breathe, make a wish, and it will come true (Epistemic status: lol.).)   Why must a counterfactual be breathed into being? The link between air and human volition by way of breath, speech, and the soul is well-attested; Latin roots have inextricably linked the breath to the soul and the soul to one's hopes.  "While there's breath there's hope", as Latin would have it, and even  the world "aspiration" is quite literally to "breathe for" something.  But I think that the link goes deeper than that. Today is 11/11, for one, which is where our first case study starts. The custom of holding your breath at 11:11pm on any given day to make a wish is one of those strange bits of folk ritual that seem to have come from nowhere, righ...

Bet you forgot about this! Am I doing Inkhaven proper? As ever, no. Will I likely end up around Lighthaven a few times anyway? I am no longer in the same state, so no. Am I doing a kitbashed budget Inkhaven again? Yes, and this time, I am going to make a point of both using no LLM infill from the start and of trying to get a friend to do it with me. The story is the same as ever: starting today, for the next 30 days I'm going to write something of at least 500 words, just to keep in shape. The topics will be anything and everything I feel like writing about, and the quality will be comparable to my past Budget Inkhavens as best I can manage. Once a week, I'll post a digest to LessWrong, and at the end, I'll finish up with a postmortem. Have I come all that far since I started writing again? Only one way to find out.