Would love to read any of the scientific papers that McCarthy supposedly edited diligently, should anyone happen to know of some. Very curious to see what they read like.

First thing that came to mind when I read this was the quote attributed to Haruki Murakami "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Turns out this is a quote from a character in one of Murakami's novels, but sentiment stands. Kind of gets to the essence of what "creativity" may be.

Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again!

Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).