Nova Daily - 21 June 2025: A fly on the wall
Hi!
If there's one quality that I'd love to have but don't, it's to create a click with just anyone, almost out of thin air. I'd love to be able to do walk into a room alone and leave with 20 new friends. But I'm quite shy and introverted, so connecting with people doesn't come that easy for me.
I've found that there is a positive side to keeping mostly to myself. I sometimes get to play a role that's very fun to do:
A fly on the wall
Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.
- Leonardo da Vinci
There's a lot of stuff that you can learn from just keeping your mouth shut and listening to what happens around you. If you check any online media source like YouTube comments, X beefs, or Nova Daily entries, you'll see that some people just flood too many words out of their keyboards. Let them at it.
When I'm travelling by public transport, I usually like to be left alone completely. I often signal this to the people around me: after habitually checking for possible danger, I take a seat and present the front of "You leave me alone." I look out the window with an uninterested snout, sometimes with sunglasses on. I often wear earphones because I like to listen to audiobooks when I'm travelling.
Sometimes I just have my earphones in without any sound coming from them. I nod along with the pace of music that doesn't exist. This gives me a good cover to shamelessly eavesdrop on other people's conversations.
In my most recent train ride (today), two girls in front of me were planning out their vacation while sitting there. Which country, what dates, and who would be coming along. Part of the conversation was them determining which guys were annoying and wouldn't be invited to come along. The most talkative of the two also volunteered to the entire compartment that she has a very low tolerance level for alcohol and has to puke very quickly when she's on the booze.
I'd almost be pondering whether to pay them a visit, but the chance of stepping into what probably looks like reverse-eaten pizza isn't too appealing. So I think I'll skip this one.
Blitz game: when you're too eager to not draw
I'm not at home, so I'm not able to do my rapid games as I may have liked. But I am able to play a few games here and there. In one game, my opponent did something I can relate to very well. I often have the issue that I want to keep the game going. My will to win is often much stronger than my objective judgement of the situation at hand. My opponent in this game refused to go for the draw and got themselves checkmated instead.
This game gave me an idea. It's just a hypothesis and I have no evidence for it, but I'd like to coin it here anyway:
When you're in fight-or-flight mode, you only respond to the most immediate threat. If you're outrunning checks under time-pressure, you're very tempted to only run away from the piece that delivered the most recent check. This is what my opponent did in the game: they tried to outrun the rook checks and allowed knight checks, then wanted to outrun the knight checks and got themselves ensnared in a mating net.
