i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves
like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan.
All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.”
And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.”
And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess.
that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone
“I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware.
But building things with hardware, especially if you’re teaching yourself, is something that’s really difficult to do.
It has a high likelihood of failure and moreover, it has a high likelihood of making you feel stupid.
And that was my biggest fear at the time. So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100% of the time.
With my setup, it would be nearly impossible to fail. And that was that instead of trying to succeed, I was going to try to build things that would fail.
And even though I didn’t realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart.
Because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety.
And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play.”
Don0303 