Accept temporary ignorance, not permanent impotence

• Don’t ask fat people for diet advice
• Don’t ask panhandlers for family advice
• Don’t ask panhandlers for grooming advice
• Don’t ask panhandlers for farking anything. They done farked up. They should be the ones asking you how to shoot straight and fly right.
• Don’t ask dark-skinned people who aren’t also dermatologists for sunblock advice (and, no, this isn’t a 1990s stand up comedy joke (“black guys be like…”).
  • Here’s the deal: because I occasionally offer good kanji advice, ethnic Japanese people also unironically ask me for sunblock advice. Not kidding. This happened just recently. A girl with porcelain-white, practically translucent skin insisted that I help her choose sunblock.
  • She also asked me to help her with some Korean. I don’t know Korean.
  • Here’s the funny thing: my skin isn’t a decoration; it’s a living, adaptive UV radiation shield. So there is almost nothing I know less about in this world than sunblock for the simple reason that my ancestors gave me an awesome mutation that means I will never ever need it. Now, if you want to know how much and what kind of Vitamin D you should take to supplement your diet, then I’m your man, son!).
• Ask the right questions of the right people
• Don’t ask rich people for money. Ask them for wisdom.
• Don’t ask lawyers about how to fix cars.
• Don’t ask car mechanics how to save on your taxes.
• Don’t ask your goofball loser friends who’ve only ever been overseas on little tour packages (if at all), how to open a brokerage account in Hong Kong. They don’t farking know! But they’re gonna whine to you about how “hard” it is and make it so your life sucks too. But it’ll be your fault for asking them; it was never their job to know! Don’t make it their job! THeir job is being your goofball friends you screw around with. Are they millionaires?…(…crickets…)…Then don’t talk money with them!
• Don’t be surprised if the free advice you get sucks balls. Advice is like food. When it comes to your diet, you pay either pay the farmer or you pay the doctor. Either way, you pay. You always pay.
• Nothing is free. Everything costs some combination of time, money and/or energy. The more of one you pay, the less of the other two you need to use.
• Be religious if you want. It’s fine to have definitive spiritual beliefs, but you’d best be agnostic about reality. Don’t know the answers. Just know the questions. If you don’t know how something can be done, the correct answer is NEVER: “it can’t be done”. NEVER.
• The correct answer is: “I don’t know how it can be done, but I’m gonna find out who does, and if no one knows, then I’m gonna make up a brand new way of doing it”
• Nothing is impossible, it’s just outside of your expertise. Your expertise can and will change.
  • Even if something remains outside a person’s expertise for their entire life, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t or isn’t possible, merely that their expertise and/or that of their wider social network, was lacking.
  • This is what the phrase “knowledge is power”. Knowing how to do stuff, knowing how to find out how to do stuff, knowing who knows stuff, knowing how to get to someone who knows stuff, such knowledge will make everything possible for you.
• Human powered flight was never impossible. It was just outside our expertise.
• Japanese is not impossible. It’s just outside your expertise for now.
• Teleportation isn’t impossible. Faster-than-light space travel isn’t impossible. We just don’t know how…yet.

Too many people do this shiitake and it pisses me off no end.

Don’t be a farking idiot.

When you’re scrolling through Instagram, and you hit up some Instathot’s page perhaps hoping for some gratuitous revealage, and instead it’s pictures of the food she pretends to eat, do you put the picture of the food on your eyeballs?

No. Why? Because that is a misuse of your organs.

Don’t eat with your eyeballs (except metaphorically). Don’t shiitake out of your mouth. Use the right organs for the right function. People are like organs in that each has a function. Ask the right questions of the right people and everybody wins. If you put rice in your mouth, you feel fine. But if you put rice in your ear, shiitake goes wrong. Only ask people to help you with what they’re good at or good for.

Ask the right questions of the right people.
Never ask the wrong questions of the wrong people.
Never ask someone a question they are unqualified to answer. Because they will give an answer. And it will be the (a) wrong answer.

And another thing!

Never ask if something “can” be done. Always assume it is possible. Ask HOW it would be done. If your interlocutor goes “IMPOSSIBURU!” then he is a bleeding ignoramus. Ignore his ignorant a$$ and go ask someone else. And if you can’t find anyone else, then keep looking. And if you still find nothing, then start doing some experiments on your own. Don’t give up like a little b##ch.

Example:

1. 1. How do you learn Japanese?
   2. Couldn’t find jack shizzle online (except for Chris Houser and Mary Sisk-Noguchi’s stuff).
   3. Japanese people struggle with learning English. They say English is hard to learn (nothing is hard). Hmmm…how do people learn English?
   4. Oh, this is awesome. I bet this would work on Japanese. Let’s try it.
   5. ???
   6. AJATT.

End of rant.