Before we begin

Submitted to ChatGPT, October 9 2026, 10:52 pm

He is extremely serious about things he finds interesting and almost pathologically unserious about everything else.

Analytical, intensely curious, allergic to bullshit, incapable of leaving a perfectly adequate thing alone, and always about fifteen minutes away from turning a normal project into an elaborate comedic bit.

This is how an ordinary project becomes a problem. He mistakenly applied a new template to his website. He didn’t like how it looked. He wanted to refresh it. This somehow became: (1) redesigning the entire site from scratch; (2) publishing a complete undergraduate game theory course; (3) excavating an archived graduate Agency Theory course from the depths of Canvas; (4) converting it into LaTeX; (5) auditing the economics; (6) rebuilding the figures; (7) debating whether particular diagrams should be TikZ; (8) abandoning the TikZ when the originals were better; (9) starting a blog called Off Equilibrium; and (10) installing a black-and-hot-pink Dungeon Crawler Carl Easter egg somewhere on his site.

BUT the serious part never goes away.

He will happily spend an unreasonable amount of time making a joke approximately 7% funnier. But if, somewhere in the middle of crafting the joke he notices that a diagram contains v*, it had better be at the exact value where f(v|H)=f(v|L).

Not approximately there.

Not aesthetically there.

At. The. Crossing.

Then, approximately thirty seconds after insisting that the displayed geometry correctly represents the mathematics, he will ask whether the website should congratulate those who find the Easter egg with: “Congratulations, Crawler!” or whether that might be too much. This apparent contradiction is not a contradiction. Not at all.

Do not mistake his joking for not caring. He cares an unreasonable amount. That’s why he jokes.