nagaram

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/31913884

Meditation Sitting positions

I'm a large guy 6 ft 1 in and 280 LBS.

I struggle to sit criss cross for an hour because my legs get tired and my thunder thighs sorta push me off kilter and I wanna lean back.

So I've been sitting on my shins instead and this is way better for maintaining posture but I have just barely 20 minutes before my legs fall asleep and then it hurts once I get up to journal.

I don't want to use a chair or a pillow because I travel a lot and there's no guarantee I'll have those with me.

Any position suggestions? Maybe I'll look into a pillow or mat.

I'm a large guy 6 ft 1 in and 280 LBS.

I struggle to sit criss cross for an hour because my legs get tired and my thunder thighs sorta push me off kilter and I wanna lean back.

So I've been sitting on my shins instead and this is way better for maintaining posture but I have just barely 20 minutes before my legs fall asleep and then it hurts once I get up to journal.

I don't want to use a chair or a pillow because I travel a lot and there's no guarantee I'll have those with me.

Any position suggestions? Maybe I'll look into a pillow or mat.

Context: During the second Punic War, Hannibal kinda just vibed on the Italian peninsula for 5 years making alliances that weren't very stable and not doing anything except cause chaos.

Eventually he decides to march on Rome in 211 BC making camp about 3 miles away from the roman walls.

There was a cavalry skirmish and serious panic from much of Rome as Hannibal had just delivered some crushing blows to Roman morale during his adventurers in Italy.

However, the march on Rome was mostly a bluff. Hannibal was well equipped and skilled at field combat between armies but had almost no siege capabilities.

So his plan was to march on Rome before their annual army raising ceremonies. Except, he got there the day a 10,000 man army was sworn in.

The romans, however, are stupid and were ready to field an army against Hannibal, but a heavy storm was viewed as a bad omen/auspice by both sides. So they rescheduled for the next day, but it stormed again.

At this point Hannibal made some excuses and decided to leave.

Interestingly. The field he camped in was auctioned off while he was there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_March_on_Rome

I was away on business so my normal space wasn't there and the hotel room wasn't doing it for me.

This was in Mazarick Park in Fayetteville NC.

I thought it was quite nice. Not home but reminded me enough of it that I cried a little.

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/30668562

I'm fascinated by rituals. Especially rituals that have physical outcomes.

Praying, spells, sigils, etc anything to affect a metaphysical conception of probability or god.

This is how I understand most magic rituals to promise to help affect change. Say I want to become a successful author.

Nearly every magic or religious system (which I don't distinguish as different) promises that you can affect the probability of success so long as you devote yourself to your practice. Do the right rituals. AND, importantly, physically work towards that goal.

No system promises that you can simply wish to be a good author without you having to actually write. No, all serious systems promise that so long as you work on your writing and stay devoted to your system, then there is a chance that the cosmic controller of probability (god) will favor you.

Now this I think is a wonderful strategy for protecting the ego in that you now have two things to blame before you have to blame yourself.

"I must have performed the rituals wrong and displeased god"

"The gods don't want me to be an author yet"

"I'm a terrible author"

Now, I think there's an argument for both why this is good and bad.

Maybe you genuinely are deserving of whatever outcome you desire and it simply is out of your control that this didn't happen. Maybe you finally finish your magnum opus and your house burns down or your files were stored on an AWS US East server and you missed the submission deadline.

That I think is a moment where the ability to stoicly accept what happened and move on is good.

On the flip side there is the problem where god and ritual are shielding yourself from introspection. Maybe your AI generated in universe spin off of Sherlock Homes: Watson invents Anime series just genuinely isn't good. But it takes several rejections from publishers and a mountain of bad reviews on your self published amazon page to think "Maybe I've done the ritual wrong."

You're missing the problem because the layers of cope are too powerful. You have too many other thoughts before you even have to consider this probably is your fault.

To me, I think the bad ending is avoidable by simply constantly self reflecting. Being aware of myself and being aware of the sorta mental traps I can fall into.

Dogmatic religions I think lead to the bad ending here because its expected of X, Y, Z conditions are met then god will bless you. And then when you've tried nothing and you're all out of ideas, the world is impossible to survive and becomes scary.

You can also certainly get the good ending without a religion per se, but I'm really proposing the Milk Jug experiment in a different way. Does it matter if praying to the milk jug actually does anything if it makes me feel better ?

I'm fascinated by rituals. Especially rituals that have physical outcomes.

Praying, spells, sigils, etc anything to affect a metaphysical conception of probability or god.

This is how I understand most magic rituals to promise to help affect change. Say I want to become a successful author.

Nearly every magic or religious system (which I don't distinguish as different) promises that you can affect the probability of success so long as you devote yourself to your practice. Do the right rituals. AND, importantly, physically work towards that goal.

No system promises that you can simply wish to be a good author without you having to actually write. No, all serious systems promise that so long as you work on your writing and stay devoted to your system, then there is a chance that the cosmic controller of probability (god) will favor you.

Now this I think is a wonderful strategy for protecting the ego in that you now have two things to blame before you have to blame yourself.

"I must have performed the rituals wrong and displeased god"

"The gods don't want me to be an author yet"

"I'm a terrible author"

Now, I think there's an argument for both why this is good and bad.

Maybe you genuinely are deserving of whatever outcome you desire and it simply is out of your control that this didn't happen. Maybe you finally finish your magnum opus and your house burns down or your files were stored on an AWS US East server and you missed the submission deadline.

That I think is a moment where the ability to stoicly accept what happened and move on is good.

On the flip side there is the problem where god and ritual are shielding yourself from introspection. Maybe your AI generated in universe spin off of Sherlock Homes: Watson invents Anime series just genuinely isn't good. But it takes several rejections from publishers and a mountain of bad reviews on your self published amazon page to think "Maybe I've done the ritual wrong."

You're missing the problem because the layers of cope are too powerful. You have too many other thoughts before you even have to consider this probably is your fault.

To me, I think the bad ending is avoidable by simply constantly self reflecting. Being aware of myself and being aware of the sorta mental traps I can fall into.

Dogmatic religions I think lead to the bad ending here because its expected of X, Y, Z conditions are met then god will bless you. And then when you've tried nothing and you're all out of ideas, the world is impossible to survive and becomes scary.

You can also certainly get the good ending without a religion per se, but I'm really proposing the Milk Jug experiment in a different way. Does it matter if praying to the milk jug actually does anything if it makes me feel better ?

So I have a a mini rack.

I have about 1.5 U of rack space and a model for a 4 bay 3.5 inch BOD

HOWEVER, no idea how best to connect them to a computer.

I'm thinking right now just plugging them into a Think center m715 with a powered USB hub.

I'm also thinking get a Raspberry Pi 5 and a nvme to sata hat, but I'm not aware of a way to power those 4 drives other than extra internal power supply. It would be convenient to just use like a wall wart or USB 2 power.

Thoughts? Best practices?

I've started reading Rene Descartes and I'm intrigued by his idea of "god".

Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.

This perfection is god.

God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn't need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.

And to me that's an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.

As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they're in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.

What is your god or gods like?

I greatly recommend Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" if you have a lot of time, mild history literacy, and an interest in the Renaissance even passing. She talks a lot about Nick the practical statesmen who just didn't want to see Florence get repeatedly invaded, conquered, and looted.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135916.html

I've been looking at moving all my services to my 10 inch mini rack and I found Lenovo Tiny P320 computers with P600 GPUs in them. According to a reddit post from a while back these are 1060 equivalent and should be able to handle multiple 1080p 60fps streams.

My current Jellyfin server is in my Epyc 7302p server with a 4060 which I'm pretty sure is over kill for my use case.

Anyone else ever make a downgrade like this? Did it work out alright? For $100 for a P320 I'm sure I won't regert the purchase but I need to be talked into wasting money.

I've been reading a lot of esoteric belief systems and normal philosophy books trying to build my own religious practice.

To me the things that are important are

1. System of morals and values.

2. Rites and rituals that must be performed

3. Community engagement.

The first two are pretty obvious, but the community engagement is tricky for me in that its the most important and I have no intentions of spreading my religion.

To me its just a fun psychological game after all.

So to me, engagement means having something to relate to people or do with people.

In my case nature walks and meditation are important rituals to be dome regularly. So inviting people to come along or going to meditation classes creates a community engagement.

Is there anything else a religion needs outside of these things?

My rack is finished for now (because I'm out of money).

Last time I posted I had some jank cables going through the rack and now we're using patch panels with color coordinated cables!

But as is tradition, I'm thinking about upgrades and I'm looking at that 1U filler panel. A mini PC with a 5060ti 16gb or maybe a 5070 12gb would be pretty sick to move my AI slop generating into my tiny rack.

I'm also thinking about the PI cluster at the top. Currently that's running a Kubernetes cluster that I'm trying to learn on. They're all PI4 4GB, so I was going to start replacing them with PI5 8/16GB. Would those be better price/performance for mostly coding tasks? Or maybe a discord bot for shitposting.

Thoughts? MiniPC recs? Wanna bully me for using AI? Please do!