Your writing shows fire and promise. I am curious what your 100th post will look like, should you get that far.

And yet "when you encounter a different way of thinking, judge it open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts" is directly contradicted by some modern software that seems to be memetically hypercompetitive.

I love this take on the villanization of cultural appropriation.

It sounds to me like you maybe should take up mountain biking. ⛰️🚲

Bicycling isn't just great for your physical health. It's also great for your mental health. I don't know any avid bicyclists who are stressed and unhappy.

but English is not my first language.

This surprises me, given the writing quality of your longform comments.

That happens? Nobody has ever accused me of strawmanning them in my entire life. To the contrary, they usually agree with the strawman, so I give them a cowardly lion too and they journey together along the Yellow Brick Road down to the Wizard of Oz.

There's definitely an interest. Like many subjects, the limiting factor is people who are good writers, good at business (or at least knowledgeable about it) and have the slack to post. Pseudonyms are fine.

I'm glad you're making progress. Focusing on the spoken language at first is a much better better for your pronuncuation. In the long run, learning written Chinese will eventually be necessary to building a large vocabulary. But until you feel that holding you back, there's nothing wrong with focusing on the spoken language.

Differentiating accents is not important. You are correct to deprioritize it.

For more video immersion resources, I recommend Douyin. Getting it onto your phone can be tricky, but once you do it's a great source of video immersion.

Is there any particular Anki deck you'd recommend (with pinyin and audio)? Should I just use the probability table and generate it myself?

It has been many years since I have used Anki for Chinese, so I don't know which deck is currently the best. There aren't a huge number of Chinese decks on ankiweb, so you can just try out the top rated ones and pick whichever one you like. (Or generate it yourself. The last time I checked on ankiweb, the decks there were from created before computer voice got good.)

Is there any particular video or podcast channel you'd recommend at a beginner level (100-500 words vocabulary)?

This is probably too hard for your right now, but my favorite beginner-level podcast is 慢速中文 - Slow Chinese.

Would you recommend I try generating my own video?

No. The video part is basically a waste of compute. What matters is the audio. Generating audio and text can be useful.

In particular, I've been experimenting with ChatGPT's advanced voice mode and it's fantastic for language immersion. I give it the following instructions: "Always speak to me in Japanese [or, in your case, Chinese], unless I ask you 'How do you say ___ in Japanese' or 'What does ___ mean in English'?" Actually getting it to follow those instructions is finicky, but when I get it to work, the result is basically an on-demand personal immersion tutor that never gets bored.

Hey, an illustration! Image generation that good didn't exist when I wrote the original. If it had, I would have used it in Part 10.

Is this something you have achieved?

Months? Maybe. But I failed the year-and-a-day test today. I have a headache right now because I'm sick. It is causing me pain. Daniel Ingram has reported many of his attainments going out the window too when he was much more seriously sick.

Could you give more details about what this means?

Here's an analogy: When you meditate in full lotus position, it's common for your legs to fall asleep, which produces pain. It is not uncommon for meditators who concentrate their attention on the pain in their legs to "dissolve their pain into vibrations". The criteria I stated has this become one's default state, instead of a just special altered state of consciousness.

If you touch a hot stove will you reflexively remove your hand?

Yes. I recently accidentally touched the handle of a cast iron pot I had left in the oven. It was this experience that caused me to list that the hot stove example. For the instant before I reflexively removed my hand, I felt the raw sensation of the skin on my finger(s) burning, instead of the abstraction layer of pain blocking it out.

If I inflict on you what to most people would be extreme physical pain (that is not physically damaging) (capsaicin?) would this be at worst a mild annoyance to you?

It was eating a spicy meal that I noticed something weird was going on. My eyes were tearing and I was too incapacitated to do anything productive, but I didn't notice any suffering attached to my sensory inputs—at least in the course sense that such an experience would neurotypically produce suffering. That abstraction layer of pain wasn't blocking my direct perception of my sensory inputs. I just sat down on my big beanbag chair until it was over, but the sensations didn't cause me suffering the way pain might. It was an inconvenience.

Do you ever take painkillers?

Sometimes. I haven't for a while, but that has nothing to do with meditation. I have just been in good health and the side effects of painkillers scare me, so I don't take them unless necessary.

Would you [take painkillers] in an extreme situation like a medical operation?

Probably.