Gwern Branwen

And then, you know, I find out that my cat's catnip immune, right?

I now kind of...

fell into this rabbit hole on the question of, well, like, why are some cats catnip immune?

Is this a common thing?

How does it differ in other countries?

What alternative catnip drugs are there out there?

And it turned out to be quite a few.

And, you know, I was kind of...

wondering how can I possibly predict which drug my cat would respond to and why are they reacting in these different ways?

Just a kind of wonderful rabbit hole of new questions and topics that I can master and get answers to or create new ones just from having this observation about my cat and exhaust my interest until I find the next rabbit hole that I can dig and dive into.

That would probably be my very old work on the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I was very fond of when I was younger.

I put a ludicrous amount of work into just like reading everything ever written about Evangelion in English and trying to understand its development and why it is the way it is.

I never really got a solid answer on that before I just like burned out on it.

I actually do understand it now by sheer chance many years later.

But at this point, I no longer care enough to write about it or try to redo it or finish it.

In the end, I think it all just wound up being basically like a complete waste.

I haven't used it or any of it in my other essays much at all.

That was really one deep rabbit hole that I almost got to the end of, but I couldn't quite clinch it.

Yeah, you can really only explore like two or three rabbit holes simultaneously.

Otherwise, you aren't putting like real effort.