This is one of those times I directly solicit the feedback of you dear readers when I make an globally-insignificant yet important-for-me choice.

For a long time, this site has always been “Greatplay.net”, located at… no surprise… www.greatplay.net. As I say in my about section:

Much to my occasional frustration, the name of this blog is “Greatplay.net”. The biggest pro and biggest con to this name are the same — it doesn’t really mean anything. It was chosen way back in 2003, actually (I was 12 at the time), and it was intentionally designed to be (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I could mold the site as I grew.

I’ve heard some people that discovered my site much later than they otherwise would because the name of the site didn’t communicate what it was about well and sounded unprofessional. At least one person suggested I move my blog over to peterhurford.com. Also, I think it’s very likely I’ll want to blog about utilitarianism, philanthropy, ethics, philosophy, atheism, and myself, and very little else for a really long time, so I could try a name that communicates that kind of topic.

Other people have been in trouble for blogging under their real names. For example, when “Scott Alexander” created his new blog, I have no idea if I’d be one of those people. As he says, “I am going by Scott S Alexander, which is almost but not quite my real name. If you know my real name, please don’t use it on here. After years of trying the opposite policy, I’m switching to acting all clever and not having every detail of my life accessible to anyone who tries to search for me on the Internet.”

So, basically, there are three choices:

1.) Keep Greatplay.net and blaze on!
2.) Switch to PeterHurford.com, but keep everything else the same!
3.) Switch, but come up with a different name.

For #3, I’m considering “A Shallow Pond”, “The Everyday Utilitarian”, “Everyday Utilitarianism”, “Commonsense Utilitarianism”, “A Utiful Mind”, and “A Utilful World”.

Please help me solve this existential crisis in the comments.

(Updated 22 Apr with new name options.)

For those interested in my summer plans, I’m proud to announce that I’ll first be at the Denison Organizational Studies Program which will involve travel to New York and San Francisco to work on projects with several companies.

Then, I’ll be spending eight weeks interning at Giving What We Can, an Oxford University-based non-profit dedicated to finding the most cost-effective opportunities to eliminate extreme poverty and encouraging people to donate to those opportunities to make them happen. I’ll be there 16 June to 11 Aug. If you’re England based, it would be a good time to meet up, because I feel like I’ll be in a particular mood to meet those online internet strangers my childhood always warned me about. Just don’t react surprised if I reject your offer of free candy in your van.

It’s hard to communicate how excited I am about this opportunity. It was difficult to consider another summer that would take me away from my family and friends at home, but I’m really excited to see what awaits me in these two great programs. Ever since I joined Giving What We Can, I’ve considered them a very promising opportunity to make a difference.

It may be with a bit of irony that the stipend they’re paying me to work for them is worth about the sum total amount of money I’ve donated to them, but I think it could be really interesting and transformative to meet the people behind the movement I care so much about.

And I shouldn’t count out the Organizational Studies Program — even though it isn’t based around “Making The World A Better Place”^TM, it is based around “Understanding How The Real World Works”^TM, so it should be really important for letting me know if the corporate world is good for me. Luckily, I’ll also be really close to the headquarters for 80000 Hours, so I’ll hopefully spend this summer getting a lot of formal and experiential career advice.

Follow up to: Resolutions Update – March Edition

On 2 Jan, I outlined my New Years Resolutions for this year. I also made sure to publicly commit to these resolutions, since public commitment is a powerful tool to build habits. But it wouldn’t work if I announced it once and then never talked about it again. Additionally, as time goes on, I learn more about how things are going and decide to update my resolutions. Therefore, I’m aiming to provide monthly updates on my progress. Here’s the one for April, following the one from March.

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Den Con just finished last Saturday and went spectacularly with 120 attendees. I’m having a bit too much work right now that has piled up from Den Con and feeling a bit of burn out and thus will take more time than usual to complete it. Therefore, the title says it all — Greatplay.net will be off until Wed 27 Mar.

I like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and want to watch it. But there are several problems: (1) I don’t want to commit the time to watch 176 episodes; (2) I’ve seen about a third of DS9 already but not in any particular order, so watching would be annoying as I encounter repeat episodes; and (3) quite a few episodes aren’t really all that good. Thus I wanted to focus on the good stuff — the war with the Dominion.

So I’ve put together this 35 episode watch list that has all the episodes that involve the Dominion. Watching it requires basic familiarity with the show, its characters, and general premise, because it skips a lot of exposition to get right to the war. Additionally, some aspects of the show will be jumpy (people are harmed and then suddenly fine, people are pregnant and suddenly not, people are suddenly in romantic relationships, etc.) because many episodes are being skipped. But if you’re fine with all of that and just want to watch the Dominion War unfold, feel free to follow along with me with this watch list:

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